The Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects Americans' monthly electricity bills to average $173 between June through August, compared to $168 last summer. "The slight bump in costs comes from consumers cranking up their air conditioning more to cope with a warmer season than last year," writes The Verge's Justine Calma. "Bills would have jumped higher, if not for lower residential electricity prices helping to balance out some of the increased energy use from air conditioning." From the report: Some regions are likely to be harder hit by the weather than others. Because of heat and humidity along the Gulf Coast, residents in Southern states typically use the most electricity in the summer to cool their homes. The Pacific Coast, meanwhile, faces the biggest potential percentage increase in retail electricity prices in the nation -- a 7 percent jump since last year. Wholesale electricity costs there have risen since 2022, in part because of a heat and drought-induced shortfall in hydroelectricity generation. Households along the Pacific could see their electricity bills go up an average of $11 per month this summer, according to the EIA.

To be sure, the EIA says that weather is "the main source of uncertainty" in its forecasts for folks' utility bills. If this summer winds up being hotter than expected, households could wind up paying even more. Residential electricity use typically peaks in the summer for most of the US because of air conditioning. Extreme heat can even trigger power outages if demand suddenly rises too sharply. California, the Southwest, the Midwest, Texas, and New England are at "elevated risk" of electricity supply shortages during any extreme weather this summer, according to an assessment (PDF) by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

A critical vulnerability in the PHP programming language (CVE-2024-4577) has been exploited by ransomware criminals, leading to the infection of up to 1,800 servers primarily in China with the TellYouThePass ransomware. This vulnerability, which affects PHP when run in CGI mode, allows attackers to execute malicious code on web servers. Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports: As of Thursday, Internet scans performed by security firm Censys had detected 1,000 servers infected by a ransomware strain known as TellYouThePass, down from 1,800 detected on Monday. The servers, primarily located in China, no longer display their usual content; instead, many list the site's file directory, which shows all files have been given a .locked extension, indicating they have been encrypted. An accompanying ransom note demands roughly $6,500 in exchange for the decryption key. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-4577 and carrying a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, stems from errors in the way PHP converts Unicode characters into ASCII. A feature built into Windows known as Best Fit allows attackers to use a technique known as argument injection to convert user-supplied input into characters that pass malicious commands to the main PHP application. Exploits allow attackers to bypass CVE-2012-1823, a critical code execution vulnerability patched in PHP in 2012.

CVE-2024-4577 affects PHP only when it runs in a mode known as CGI, in which a web server parses HTTP requests and passes them to a PHP script for processing. Even when PHP isn't set to CGI mode, however, the vulnerability may still be exploitable when PHP executables such as php.exe and php-cgi.exe are in directories that are accessible by the web server. This configuration is extremely rare, with the exception of the XAMPP platform, which uses it by default. An additional requirement appears to be that the Windows locale -- used to personalize the OS to the local language of the user -- must be set to either Chinese or Japanese. The critical vulnerability was published on June 6, along with a security patch. Within 24 hours, threat actors were exploiting it to install TellYouThePass, researchers from security firm Imperva reported Monday. The exploits executed code that used the mshta.exe Windows binary to run an HTML application file hosted on an attacker-controlled server. Use of the binary indicated an approach known as living off the land, in which attackers use native OS functionalities and tools in an attempt to blend in with normal, non-malicious activity.

In a post published Friday, Censys researchers said that the exploitation by the TellYouThePass gang started on June 7 and mirrored past incidents that opportunistically mass scan the Internet for vulnerable systems following a high-profile vulnerability and indiscriminately targeting any accessible server. The vast majority of the infected servers have IP addresses geolocated to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan, likely stemming from the fact that Chinese and Japanese locales are the only ones confirmed to be vulnerable, Censys researchers said in an email. Since then, the number of infected sites -- detected by observing the public-facing HTTP response serving an open directory listing showing the server's filesystem, along with the distinctive file-naming convention of the ransom note -- has fluctuated from a low of 670 on June 8 to a high of 1,800 on Monday. Censys researchers said in an email that they're not entirely sure what's causing the changing numbers.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If you devoured the Childhood of Famous Americans book series as a kid and are ready for a longer read, Bill Gates has a book for you.

"I'm excited to announce my new book, Source Code, which will be published next February," Gates wrote Tuesday in a GatesNotes blog post. "It's a memoir about my early years, from childhood through my decision to leave college and start Microsoft with Paul Allen. I write about the relationships, lessons, and experiences that laid the foundation for everything in my life that followed." GeekWire explains the timing of the book release is notable: January 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the Popular Electronics magazine issue that featured the early Altair 8800 personal computer, which inspired Gates and Allen to start the company.

Proceeds from book sales will be donated to the nonprofit United Way Worldwide, in recognition of Gates' late mother Mary's longtime work as a volunteer and board member with the organization.
"Hey, this thing is happening without us," Allen famously said to Bill Gates (who had just turned 19).

When Gates finished reading the Popular Electronics article, "he realized that Allen was right," according to one biographer. "For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business."

"Rust is the fastest-growing programming language, with its developer community doubling in size over the past two years," writes The New Stack, "yet JavaScript remains the most popular language with 25.2 million active developers, according to the results of a recent survey." The 26th edition of SlashData's Developer Nation survey showed that the Rust community doubled its number of users over the past two years — from two million in the first quarter of 2022 to four million in the first quarter of 2024 — and by 33% in the last 12 months alone. The SlashData report covers the first quarter of 2024. "Rust has developed a passionate community that advocates for it as a memory-safe language which can provide great performance, but cybersecurity concerns may lead to an even greater increase," the report said. "The USA and its international partners have made the case in the last six months for adopting memory-safe languages...."

"JavaScript's dominant position is unlikely to change anytime soon, with its developer population increasing by 4M developers over the last 12 months, with a growth rate in line with the global developer population growth," the report said. The strength of the JavaScript community is fueled by the widespread use of the language across all types of development projects, with at least 25% of developers in every project type using it, the report said. "Even in development areas not commonly associated with the language, such as on-device coding for IoT projects, JavaScript still sees considerable adoption," SlashData said.

Also, coming in strong, Python has overtaken Java as the second most popular language, driven by the interest in machine learning and AI. The battle between Python and Java shows Python with 18.2 million developers in Q1 2024 compared to Java's 17.7 million. This comes about after Python added more than 2.1 million net new developers to its community over the last 12 months, compared to Java which only increased by 1.2 million developers... Following behind Java there is a six-million-developer gap to the next largest community, which is C++ with 11.4 million developers, closely trailed by C# with 10.2 million and PHP with 9.8 million. Languages with the smallest communities include Objective-C with 2.7 million developers, Ruby with 2.5 million, and Lua with 1.8 million. Meanwhile, the Go language saw its developer population grow by 10% over the last year. It had previously outpaced the global developer population growth, growing by 5Y% over the past two years, from three million in Q1 2022 to 4.7 million in Q1 2024.
"TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht has a few different takeaways. He notes that with the exceptions of Rust, Go and JavaScript, the other major programming languages all grew slower than the total developer population, which SlashData says increased 39% over the last two years alone."

"The TIOBE Index sets out to reflect the relative popularity of computer languages," writes i-Programmer, "so it comes as something of a surprise to see two languages dating from the 1950's in this month's Top 20. Having broken into the the Top 20 in April 2021 Fortran has continued to rise and has now risen to it's highest ever position at #10... The headline for this month's report by Paul Jansen on the TIOBE index is:

Fortran in the top 10, what is going on?

Jansen's explanation points to the fact that there are more than 1,000 hits on Amazon for "Fortran Programming" while languages such as Kotlin and Rust, barely hit 300 books for the same search query. He also explains that Fortran is still evolving with the new ISO Fortran 2023 definition published less than half a year ago....

The other legacy language that is on the rise in the TIOBE index is COBOL. We noticed it re-enter the Top 20 in January 2024 and, having dropped out in the interim, it is there again this month.
More details from TechRepublic: Along with Fortran holding on to its spot in the rankings, there were a few small changes in the top 10. Go gained 0.61 percentage points year over year, rising from tenth place in May 2023 to eighth this year. C++ rose slightly in popularity year over year, from fourth place to third, while Java (-3.53%) and Visual Basic (-1.8) fell.
Here's how TIOBE ranked the 10 most popular programming languages in May:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. Go
9. SQL
10. Fortran

On the rival PYPL ranking of programming language popularity, Fortran does not appear anywhere in the top 29.

A note on its page explains that "Worldwide, Python is the most popular language, Rust grew the most in the last 5 years (2.1%) and Java lost the most (-4.0%)." Here's how it ranks the 10 most popular programming languages for May:

1. Python (28.98% share)
2. Java (15.97% share)
3. JavaScript (8.79%)
4. C# (6.78% share)
5. R (4.76% share)
6. PHP (4.55% share)
7. TypeScript (3.03% share)
8. Swift (2.76% share)
9. Rust (2.6% share)

"China's navy has apparently tested out a hypersonic rail gun," reports Futurism, describing it as "basically a device that uses a series of electromagnets to accelerate a projectile to incredible speeds."

But "during a demonstration of its power, things didn't go quite as planned." As the South China Morning Post reports, the rail gun test lobbed a precision-guided projectile — or smart bomb — nine miles into the stratosphere. But because it apparently didn't go up as high as it was supposed to, the test was ultimately declared unsuccessful. This conclusion came after an analysis led by Naval Engineering University professor Lu Junyong, whose team found with the help of AI that even though the winged smart bomb exceeded Mach 5 speeds, it didn't perform as well as it could have. This occurred, as Lu's team found, because the projectile was spinning too fast during its ascent, resulting in an "undesirable tilt."
But what's more interesting is the project itself. "Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China's other proposed super-powered rail gun, which is intended to send astronauts on a Boeing 737-size ship into space.... which for the record did not make it all the way to space..." Chinese officials, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the hypersonic rail gun technology's potential to revolutionize civilian travel by creating even faster railways and consumer space launches, too.
Japan and France also have railgun projects, according to a recent article from Defense One. "Yet the nation that has demonstrated the most continuing interest is China," with records of railgun work dating back as far as 2011: The Chinese team claimed that their railgun can fire a projectile 100 to 200 kilometers at Mach 6. Perhaps most importantly, it uses up to 100,000 AI-enabled sensors to identify and fix any problems before critical failure, and can slowly improve itself over time. This, they said, had enabled them to test-fire 120 rounds in a row without failure, which, if true, suggests that they solved a longstanding problem that reportedly bedeviled U.S. researchers. However, the team still has a ways to go before mounting an operational railgun on a ship; according to one Chinese article, the projectiles fired were only 25mm caliber, well below the size of even lightweight naval artillery.

As with many other Chinese defense technology programs, much remains opaque about the program...

While railguns tend to get the headlines, this lab has made advances in a wide range of electric and electromagnetic applications for the PLA Navy's warships. For example, the lab's research on electromagnetic launch technology has also been applied to the development of electromagnetic catapults for the PLAN's growing aircraft carrier fleet...

While it remains to be seen whether the Chinese navy can develop a full-scale railgun, produce it at scale, and integrate it onto its warships, it is obvious that it has made steady advances in recent years on a technology of immense military significance that the US has abandoned.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Tangential for sharing the news.

necro81 writes: Robert Dennard was working at IBM in the 1960s when he invented a way to store one bit using a single transistor and capacitor. The technology became dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which when implemented using the emerging technology of silicon integrated circuits, helped catapult computing by leaps and bounds. The first commercial DRAM chips in the late 1960s held just 1024 bits; today's DDR5 modules hold hundreds of billions.

Dr. Robert H. Dennard passed away last month at age 91. (alternate link)

In the 1970s he helped guide technology roadmaps for the ever-shrinking feature size of lithography, enabling the early years of Moore's Law. He wrote a seminal paper in 1974 relating feature size and power consumption that is now referred to as Dennard Scaling. His technological contributions earned him numerous awards, and accolades from the National Academy of Engineering, IEEE, and the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government. The Sovereign Tech Fund notes that the FFmpeg project is receiving 157,580 euros for 2024 and 2025.

An announcement on the FFmpeg.org project site notes: "The FFmpeg community is excited to announce that Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has become its first governmental sponsor. Their support will help sustain the [maintenance] of the FFmpeg project, a critical open-source software multimedia component essential to bringing audio and video to billions around the world everyday."

Last month, researchers from the University of Washington started conducting an experiment on a decommissioned naval ship in Alameda to test if spraying salt water into the air could brighten clouds and cool the planet. However, their project was forced to stop this month after the city got word of what was going on. SFGate reports: According to a city press release, scientists were ordered to halt the experiment because it violated Alameda's lease with the USS Hornet, the aircraft carrier from which researchers were spraying saltwater into the air using "a machine resembling a snowmaker." The news was first reported by the Alameda Post. "City staff are working with a team of biological and hazardous materials consultants to independently evaluate the health and environmental safety of this particular experiment," the press release states. Specifically, chemicals present in the experiment's aerosol spray are being evaluated to study whether or not they pose any threats to humans, animals or the environment. So far, there isn't any evidence that they do, the city stated.

The prospect of a city-conducted review was not unexpected, the University of Washington said in a statement shared with SFGATE. "In fact, the CAARE (Coastal Aerosol Research and Engagement) facility is designed to help regulators, community members and others engage with the research closely, and we consider the current interactions with the city to be an integral part of that process," the statement reads. "We are happy to support their review and it has been a highly constructive process so far." The marine cloud brightening (MCB) technique involves spraying fine particles of sea salt into the atmosphere from ships or specialized machines. These sea salt particles are chosen because they are a natural source of cloud-forming aerosols and can increase the number of cloud droplets, making the clouds more reflective. The particles sprayed are extremely small, about 1/1000th the width of a human hair, ensuring they remain suspended in the air and interact with cloud droplets effectively.

By reflecting more sunlight, these brightened clouds can reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface, leading to localized cooling. If implemented on a large scale, this cooling effect could potentially offset some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

You can learn more about the experiment here.

Google announced on Tuesday that it will be exiting One Market Plaza, a prominent office complex in San Francisco that it had been occupying since 2018. The company's lease for the 300,000-square-foot-office will expire next April. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Many of Google's employees are already working outside of the giant waterfront office, in light of the company's flexible approach to office attendance. As one of the city's largest office properties and a prominent feature on its skyline, the 1.6-million-square-foot One Market Plaza complex features two high-rise towers and a 11-story office annex building known as the Landmark." Ryan Lamont, a spokesperson for Google, said the company will be moving out of One Market's Spear Tower, but will continue to occupy the smaller Landmark building. He declined to comment on how long Google plans to remain in the latter." As we've said before, we're focused on investing in real estate efficiently to meet the current and future needs of our hybrid workforce," Lamont said in an email to the Chronicle. "We remain committed to our long-term presence in San Francisco."

Real estate market participants who spoke with the Chronicle indicated that Google plans to consolidate much of its operations from One Market to nearby 345 Spear St., where the company leases about 400,000 square feet. These individuals said that Google will likely renew its lease at that property once it expires next year.

"Without San Francisco, Star Wars wouldn't exist," says David Reat, the culture studies director of the architecture department at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde.

SFGate reports: Lucas was born and raised in Modesto, where his father expected him to run the family stationery store once he turned 18, but Lucas instead left for Los Angeles, where he studied film production at the University of Southern California, before moving to San Francisco. Despite all that these cities had to offer, Lucas constantly found himself conflicted over his feelings toward them. "The battle of living in the country versus living in the city is huge with Lucas," says Reat, who notes that this theme runs throughout the likes of "THX 1138," "American Graffiti" and the "Star Wars" series. "He sees cities as the givers and takers of things. He's fascinated by cities. He doesn't actually want to live in one. He now lives in a ranch near one. He wants to orbit them. He's a paradox."

When Lucas moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s, there were a number of huge building projects taking place across the city that piqued the burgeoning filmmaker's interest, most notably the construction of BART and a new terminal at San Francisco airport. "Infrastructure really fascinated Lucas. They were these big huge alienating spaces," says Reat. "I think Lucas was driving around San Francisco, looking at them, and seeing that they looked alien." There's a reason why Lucas was particularly interested in the architecture in San Francisco: "He's on record as saying he wanted to be an architect," says Reat. "He has referred to himself as a frustrated architect." Lucas' interest provoked him and his creative team to put extra care and thought into each of the "Star Wars" buildings, vehicles, houses, villages, cities, worlds and galaxies, especially when it came to what they symbolized and represented.

"The architecture in the films play a key role for younger viewers," says Reat, explaining that it helps to indicate who is good and who is evil. When it comes to the Death Star there are "no women, no plants, no signs of life, and it's basically the Nazis in space," continues Reat. "Lucas doesn't like modernism. He always uses it for bad things, a bit like every James Bond baddie." Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the light side of the Force are seen living in "exaggerated domesticity" as they sit around drinking blue milk, surrounded by creatures. "There's a care and a weirdness to their architecture, plus it's loaded with color," says Reat, who adds that these choices help to make those characters more appealing and relatable....

The San Francisco International Airport also played a key role in the making of "Phantom Menace." A tour of its maintenance bay gave the film's creative designers a jolt of inspiration when they were creating Anakin's podracer and other vehicles.
The article also adds that the inspiration for the Theed Royal Palace on Naboo in The Phantom Menace was "the Marin County Civic Center, where Lucas once served jury duty."

An anonymous reader shared this report from SFGate: Late last year, tales of tech workers paying $700 a month for tiny "bed pods" in downtown San Francisco went viral. The story provided a perfect distillation of SF's wild (and wildly expensive) housing market — and inspired schadenfreude when the city deemed the situation illegal. But the provocative living situation wasn't an anomaly, according to a city official.

"We've definitely seen an uptick of these 'pod'-type complaints," Kelly Wong, a planner with San Francisco's code enforcement and zoning and compliance team, told SFGATE... Wong stressed that it's not that San Francisco is inherently against bed pod-type arrangements, but that the city is responsible for making sure these spaces are safe and legally zoned.

So Brownstone Shared Housing is still renting one bed pod location — but not accepting new tenants — after citations for failing to get proper permits and having a lock on the front door that required a key to exit.

And SFGate also spoke to Alex Akel, general manager of Olive Rooms, which opened up a co-living and co-working space in SoMa earlier this year (and also faced "a flurry of complaints.") "Unfortunately, we had complaints from neighbors because of foot traffic and noise, and since then we cut the number of people to fit the ordinance by the city," Akel wrote. Olive Rooms describes its space as targeted at "tech founders from Central Asia, giving them opportunities to get involved in the current AI boom." Akel added that its residents are "bringing new energy to SF," but that the program "will not accept new residents before we clarify the status with the city."

In April, the city also received a complaint about a group called Let's Be Buds, which rents out 14 pods in a loft on Divisadero Street that start at $575 per month for an upper bunk.

While this recent burst of complaints is new, bed pods in San Francisco have been catching flak for years... a company called PodShare, which rents — you guessed it — bed pods, squared itself away with the city and has operated in SF since 2019.
Brownstone's CEO told SFGate "A lot of people want to be here for AI, or for school, or different opportunities." He argues that "it's literally impossible without a product like ours," and that their residents had said the option "positively changed the trajectory of their lives."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. wind power slipped last year for the first time in a quarter-century due to weaker-than-normal Midwest breezes, underscoring the challenge of integrating volatile renewable energy sources into the grid. Power produced by turbines slipped 2% in 2023, even after developers added 6.2 gigawatts of new capacity, according to a government report Tuesday. The capacity factor for the country's wind fleet -- how much energy it's actually generating versus its maximum possible output -- declined to an eight-year low of 33.5%. Most of that decline was driven by the central US, a region densely dotted with turbines.

Wind is a key component of the effort to cut carbon emissions, but the data highlights the downside of relying on intermittent energy sources tied to the effects of global weather. Last year's low wind speeds came during El Nino, a warming of the equatorial Pacific that tends to weaken trade winds. La Nina, the Pacific cooling pattern that dominated in 2022 and is poised to return later this year, usually has the opposite effect. The U.S. Energy Information Administration shared the findings in a report published earlier today.

Jules Roscoe reports via 404 Media: Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has "ruwiki" in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws. The new articles exclude mentions of "foreign agents," the Russian government's designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. [...]

Wikimedia RU, the Russian-language chapter of the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, was forced to shut down in late 2023 amid political pressure due to the Ukraine war. Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now runs Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with "reliability and neutrality." Medeyko first announced the project to copy and censor the 1.9 million Russian-language Wikipedia articles in June. The goal, he said at the time, was to edit them so that the information would be "trustworthy" as a source for all Russian users. Independent outlet Bumaga reported in August that around 110 articles about the war in Ukraine were missing in full, while others were severely edited. Ruviki also excludes articles about reports of torture in prisons and scandals of Russian government representatives. [...]

Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was "straight out of a 1984 novel." Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell's 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel's main propaganda outlet concerned with governing "truth" in the country.

"South Korea is considering prohibiting the use of iPhones and smart wearable devices inside military buildings," reports the Defense Post, "due to increasing security concerns."

But the blog Apple Insider argues the move "has less to do with security and more to do with a poorly crafted mobile device management suite coupled with nationalism..." A report on Tuesday morning claims that the ban is on all devices capable of voice recording and do not allow third-party apps to lock this down — with iPhone specifically named... According to sources familiar with the matter cited by Tuesday's report, the iPhone is explicitly banned. Android-based devices, like Samsung's, are exempt from the ban...

The issue appears to be that the South Korean National Defense Mobile Security mobile device management app doesn't seem to be able to block the use of the microphone. This particular MDM was rolled out in 2013, with use enforced across all military members in 2021.

The report talks about user complaints about the software, and inconsistent limitations depending on make, model, and operating system. A military official speaking to the publication says that deficiencies on Android would be addressed in a software update. Discussions are apparently underway to extend the total ban downwards to the entire military. The Army is said to have tried the ban as well...

Seven in 10 South Korean military members are Samsung users. So, the ban appears to be mostly symbolic.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Kitkoan for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others. [...] Under the proposed rule, Customer Identification Programs (CIPs) operated by IaaS providers must collect information from both existing and prospective customers, i.e. those at the application stage of opening an account. The bare minimum includes the following data: a customer's name, address, the means and source of payment for each customer's account, email addresses and telephone numbers, and IP addresses used for access or administration of the account.

What qualifies as an IaaS is surprisingly broad: "Any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or "trial" offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of "managed" products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and "unmanaged" products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer."

And it doesn't stop there. The term IaaS includes all 'virtualized' products and services where the computing resources of a physical machine are shared, such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). It even covers 'baremetal' servers allocated to a single person. The definition also extends to any service where the consumer does not manage or control the underlying hardware but contracts with a third party for access. "This definition would capture services such as content delivery networks, proxy services, and domain name resolution services," the proposal reads. The proposed rule, National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities, will stop accepting comments from interested parties on April 30, 2024.

Samantha Cole reports via 404 Media: A Japan-based online art platform is banning kink content for users based in the US and UK, as laws in these countries continue to tighten around sites that allow erotic content. Pixiv is an image gallery site where artists primarily share illustrations, manga, and novels. The site announced on April 22 that starting April 25, users whose account region is set to the US or UK will be subject to Pixiv's new terms of use, "Restrictions for Healthy Expression in Specific Countries and Regions."

The restrictions include several kinds of content that are illegal in the US, including sexualized depictions of minors and bestiality, as well as non-consensual depictions and deepfakes. But it also includes "content that appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of community standards where you are located or where such content may be accessed or distributed, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, or otherwise violates any applicable obscenity laws, rules or regulations." This is an invocation of the Miller test, which determines non-constitutionally protected obscenity. "I'd never say this a few years ago, but it's my personal fear that the next step is most major internet hosting services implementing these policies on an infrastructure level," said an artist who goes by kradeelav. "My colleagues are certainly planning for it by specifically looking for kink-friendly hosts, to actually making homebrew servers themselves in worst-case scenarios."

The co-founder of Silicon Valley-based software testing startup HeadSpin was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison and a $1 million fine, reports SFGate — for defrauding investors. Lachwani pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and a count of securities fraud in April 2023, after federal prosecutors accused him of, for years, lying to investors about HeadSpin's finances to raise more money. HeadSpin, founded in 2015, grew to a $1.1 billion valuation by 2020 with over $115 million in funding from investors including Google Ventures and Iconiq Capital... He had personally altered invoices, lied to the company accountant and sent slide decks with fraudulent information to investors, [according to the government's 2021 criminal complaint]...

Breyer, per the New York Times, rejected Lachwani's lawyer's argument that because HeadSpin investors didn't end up losing money, he should receive a light sentence. The judge, who often oversees tech industry cases, reportedly said: "If you win, there are no serious consequences — that simply can't be the law." Still, the sentencing was far lighter than it could have been. The government's prosecuting attorneys had asked for a five-year prison term.
The New York Times reported in December that HeadSpin's financial statements had "often arrived months late, if at all, investors said in legal declarations," while the company's financial department "consisted of one external accountant who worked mostly from home using QuickBooks." And the comnpany also had no human resources department or organizational chart... After Manish Lachwani founded the Silicon Valley software start-up HeadSpin in 2015, he inflated the company's revenue numbers by nearly fourfold and falsely claimed that firms including Apple and American Express were customers. He showed a profit where there were losses. He used HeadSpin's cash to make risky trades on tech stocks. And he created fake invoices to cover it all up.

What was especially breathtaking was how easily Mr. Lachwani, now 48, pulled all that off... [HeadSpin] had no chief financial officer, had no human resources department and was never audited. Mr. Lachwani used that lack of oversight to paint a rosier picture of HeadSpin's growth. Even though its main investors knew the start-up's financials were not accurate, according to Mr. Lachwani's lawyers, they chose to invest anyway, eventually propelling HeadSpin to a $1.1 billion valuation in 2020. When the investors pushed Mr. Lachwani to add a chief financial officer and share more details about the company's finances, he simply brushed them off. These details emerged this month in filings in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after Mr. Lachwani had pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud in April...

The absence of controls at HeadSpin is part of an increasingly noticeable pattern at Silicon Valley start-ups that have run into trouble. Over the past decade, investors in tech start-ups were so eager to back hot companies that many often overlooked reckless behavior and gave up key controls like board seats, all in the service of fast growth and disruption. Then when founders took the ethos of "fake it till you make it" too far, their investors were often unaware or helpless...

Now, amid a start-up shakeout, more frauds have started coming to light. The founder of the college aid company Frank has been charged, the internet connectivity start-up Cloudbrink has been sued, and the social media app IRL has been investigated and sued. Last month, Mike Rothenberg, a Silicon Valley investor, was found guilty on 21 counts of fraud and money laundering. On Monday, Trevor Milton, founder of the electric vehicle company Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison for lying about Nikola's technological capabilities.
The Times points out that similarly, FTX only had a three-person board "with barely any influence over the company, tracked its finances on QuickBooks and used a small, little-known accounting firm." And that Theranos had no financial audits for six years.

A monthslong "Star Wars"-themed festival called Season of the Force is now happening at Disneyland — including John Williams compositions in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land during the park's fireworks. SFGate reports: Before the show starts, a voice rings through the land. "Black Spire Outpost has a long and colorful history of heroes and legends, Jedi and Sith, royalty and resistance," it says. "Those who would rule and those who refuse to bow. Here we celebrate that fiery spirit tonight." Then as the first fireworks fly into the sky, the majestic "Star Wars" music begins...

During the day, the land is overrun with tiny robots. Season of the Force also includes daily appearances from the new BDX Droids, cute little "explorer companions," per Disneyland, designed to assist with "exploration and research." These new audio-animatronics interact with guests, clicking and whirring with a surprising amount of personality.

Sabine Wren from "Ahsoka" is also making appearances in Galaxy's Edge during Season of the Force, and there are specialty food offerings in the land like the Celto Slush (a green, pandan-flavored horchata cold brew coffee drink) and the return of Dewback Chili Noodles (spicy fettuccine with ginger-spiced ground pork, broccolini stems and shredded red cabbage).
For the event, Disneyland's long-running Star Tours ride now includes appearances from the Mandalorian (and Grogu), Ahsoka, and Cassian Andor, according to the article. "Also back this year is Hyperspace Mountain, the seasonal overlay of Space Mountain that puts riders into an intergalactic fight between the Resistance and the First Order."

Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova.

It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S." The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pushed it to the brink multiple times in recent years... The town of Menifee gets to move on from the power plant exhaust that used to join the smog flowing from Los Angeles... And the grid gets a bunch more clean capacity that can, ideally, displace fossil fuels...

Moreover, [the power bank] represents Calpine's grand arrival in the energy storage market, after years operating one of the biggest independent gas power plant fleets in the country alongside Vistra and NRG... Federal analysts predict 2024 will be the biggest-ever year for grid battery installations across the U.S., and they highlighted Calpine's project as one of the single largest projects. The 620 megawatts the company plans to energize this year represent more than 4% of the industry's total expected new additions.

Many of these new grid batteries will be built in California, which needs all the dispatchable power it can get to meet demand when its massive solar fleet stops producing, and to keep pace with the electrification of vehicles and buildings. The Menifee Power Bank, and the other gigawatts worth of storage expected to come online in the state this year, will deliver much-needed reinforcement.
The company says it's planning "a portfolio" of 2,000 megawatts of California battery capacity.

But even this 680-megawatt project consists of 1,096 total battery containers holding 26,304 battery modules (or a total of 3 million cells), "all manufactured by Chinese battery powerhouse BYD, according to Robert Stuart, an electrical project manager with Calpine. That's enough electricity to supply 680,000 homes for four hours before it runs out." What's remarkable is just how quickly the project came together. Construction began last August, and is expected to hit 510 megawatts of fully operational capacity over the course of this summer, even as installation continues on other parts of the plant. Erecting a conventional gas plant of comparable scale would have taken three or four years of construction labor, due to the complexity of the systems and the many different trades required for it, Stuart told Canary Media... That speed and flexibility makes batteries a crucial solution as utilities across the nation grapple with a spike in expected electricity demand unlike anything seen in the last few decades.
The article notes a 2013 Caifornia policy mandating battery storage for its utility companies, which "kicked off a decade-long project to will an energy storage market into existence through methodical policies and regulations, and the knock-on effects of building the nation's foremost solar fleet." Those energy storage policies succeeded in jumpstarting the modern grid battery market: California leads the nation with more than 7 gigawatts of batteries installed as of last year (though Texas is poised to overtake California in battery installations this year, on the back of no particular policy effort but a general openness to building energy projects)... California's interlocking climate regulations effectively rule out new gas construction. The state's energy roadmap instead calls for massive expansion of battery capacity to shift the ample amounts of solar generation into the evening peaks.
"These trends, along with the falling price of batteries and maturing business model for storage, nudged Calpine to get into the battery business, too."