An anonymous reader shares a report: For those of us who came of age in the early days of personal computing, the names "Intel 486" and "Windows XP" evoke a nostalgic whirlwind of memories. The 486 was the hot new CPU of the early 90s, while Windows XP became a household name and Microsoft's most popular OS over a decade later. But did you ever imagine these two icons of different eras could be merged into an unholy union? Well, start brushing off those vintage 486 rigs, because a modder has actually made it happen. Going by the name Dietmar on the MSFN forums, he has somehow managed to get Microsoft's beloved Windows XP running on the ancient 486 architecture.

It's worth mentioning that these two were never meant to coexist. The first 486 chips hit the market way back in 1989, while Windows XP landed over a decade later in 2001. The 486 represented a major breakthrough when Intel unveiled it in 1989. Packing over a million transistors, it remained Intel's primary x86 chip until the arrival of the Pentium in 1993. Such was the processor's longevity that Intel continued manufacturing it for embedded systems until 2007. Still, 486 systems were simply too underpowered to run XP, which needed at least a Pentium-class processor from the 586 generation - or any compatible chip that ran at 233MHz or higher. Meanwhile, the i486 could only do 133MHz. It also needed at least 64MB of RAM and at least 1.5GB of storage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 69 of the past 75 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson continues to track California's renewables performance – and it's still exciting. In an update today on Twitter (X), Jacobson reports that California has now exceeded 100% of energy demand with renewables over a record 45 days straight, and 69 out of 75. [...]

Jacobson predicted on April 4 that California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035. California passed a law that commits to achieving 100% net zero electricity by 2045. Will it beat that goal by a decade? We hope so. It's going to be exciting to watch. Further reading: California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days

HP announced today that it will resurrect the "Omni" branding it first coined for its business-oriented laptops introduced in 1993. The vintage branding will now be used for the company's new consumer-facing laptops, with HP retiring the Spectre and Dragonfly brands in the process. Furthermore, computers under consumer PC series names like Pavilion will also no longer be released. "Instead, every consumer computer from HP will be called either an OmniBook for laptops, an OmniDesk for desktops, or an OmniStudio for AIOs," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The computers will also have a modifier, ranging from 3 up to 5, 7, X, or Ultra to denote computers that are entry-level all the way up to advanced. For instance, an HP OmniBook Ultra would represent HP's highest-grade consumer laptop. "For example, an HP OmniBook 3 will appeal to customers who prioritize entertainment and personal use, while the OmniBook X will be designed for those with higher creative and technical demands," Stacy Wolff, SVP of design and sustainability at HP, said via a press announcement today. [...] So far, HP has announced one new Omni computer, the OmniBook X. It has a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 16GB or 32GB of MPDDR5x-8448 memory, up to 2TB of storage, and a 14-inch, 2240x1400 IPS display. HP is pointing to the Latin translation of omni, meaning "all" (or everything), as the rationale behind the naming update. The new name should give shoppers confidence that the computers will provide all the things that they need.

HP is also getting rid of some of its commercial series names, like Pro. From now on, new, lower-end commercial laptops will be ProBooks. There will also be ProDesktop desktops and ProStudio AIOs. These computers will have either a 2 modifier for entry-level designs or a 4 modifier for ones with a little more power. For example, an HP ProDesk 2 is less powerful than an HP ProDesk 4. Anything more powerful will be considered either an EliteBook (laptops), EliteDesk (desktops), or EliteStudio (AIOs). For the Elite computers, the modifiers go from 6 to 8, X, and then Ultra. A Dragonfly laptop today would fall into the Ultra category. HP did less overhauling of its commercial lineup because it "recognized a need to preserve the brand equity and familiarity with our current sub-brands," Wolff said, adding that HP "acknowledged the creation of additional product names like Dragonfly made those products stand out, rather than be seen as part of a holistic portfolio." [...]

As you might now expect of any tech rebranding, marketing push, or product release these days, HP is also announcing a new emblem that will appear on its computers, as well as other products or services, that substantially incorporate AI. The two laptops announced today carry the logo. According to Wolff, on computers, the logo means that the systems have an integrated NPU "at 40+ trillions of operations per second." They also come with a chatbot based on ChatGPT 4, an HP spokesperson told me.

America's Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed an antitrust suit against Amazon in September. This week Amazon responded in court about its usage of Signal's "disappearing messages" feature.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares GeekWire's report: At a company known for putting its most important ideas and strategies into comprehensive six-page memos, quick messages between executives aren't the place for meaningful business discussions. That's one of the points made by Amazon in its response Monday to the Federal Trade Commission's allegations about executives' use of the Signal encrypted communications app, known for its "disappearing messages" feature. "For these individuals, just like other short-form messaging, Signal was not a means to send 'structured, narrative text'; it was a way to get someone's attention or have quick exchanges on sensitive topics like public relations or human resources," the company says as part of its response, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Of course, for regulators investigating the company's business practices, these offhanded private comments between Amazon executives could be more revealing than carefully crafted memos meant for wider internal distribution. But in its filing this week, Amazon says there is no evidence that relevant messages have been lost, or that Signal was used to conceal communications that would have been responsive to the FTC's discovery requests. The company says "the equally logical explanation — made more compelling by the available evidence — is that such messages never existed."

In an April 25 motion, the FTC argued that the absence of Signal messages from Amazon discussing substantive business issues relevant to the case was a strong indication that such messages had disappeared. "Amazon executives deleted many Signal messages during Plaintiffs' pre-Complaint investigation, and Amazon did not instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages until over fifteen months after Amazon knew that Plaintiffs' investigation was underway," the FTC wrote in its motion. "It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon's actions and inactions...."

Amazon's filing quotes the company's founder, Jeff Bezos, saying in a deposition in the case that "[t]o discuss anything in text messaging or Signal messaging or anything like that of any substance would be akin to business malpractice. It's just too short of a messaging format...." The company's filing traces the initial use of Signal by executives back to the suspected hacking of Bezos' phone in 2018, which prompted the Amazon founder to seek ways to send messages more securely.

Western Digital has unveiled new 6TB external hard drives -- "the first new capacity point for this hard drive drive form factor in about seven years," reports Tom's Hardware. "There is a catch, though: the HDD is slow and will unlikely fit into any mobile PCs, so it looks like it will exclusively serve portable and specialized storage products." From the report: Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external storage devices and is not available separately. All of these drives (excluding the already very thick G-Drive ArmorATD) are thicker than their 5 TB predecessors, which may suggest that in a bid to increase the HDD's capacity, the manufacturer simply installed another platter and made the whole drive thicker instead of developing new platters with a higher areal density.

While this is a legitimate way to expand the capacity of a hard drive, it is necessary to note that 5TB 2.5-inch HDDs already feature a 15-mm z-height, which is the highest standard z-height for 2.5-inch form-factor storage devices. As a result, these 6TB 2.5-inch drives will unlikely fit into any desktop PC. When it comes to specifications of the latest My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive ArmorATD external HDDs, Western Digital only discloses that they offer up to 130 MB/s read speed (just like their predecessors), feature a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (up to 5 GT/s) interface using either a modern USB Type-C or Micro USB Type-B connector and do not require an external power adapter.

Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which controls interstate energy infrastructure, approved a rule Monday that should boost new transmission infrastructure and make it easier to connect renewable energy projects. (More coverage here, here, and here.)

Some 11,000 projects totaling 2,600 GW of capacity are in planning, waiting to break ground, or connect to the grid. But they're stymied by the need for costly upgrades, or simply waiting for review. The frustrations are many. Each proposed project undergoes a lengthy grid-impact study and assessed the cost of necessary upgrades. Each project is considered in isolation, regardless of whether similar projects are happening nearby that could share the upgrade costs or auger different improvements. The planning process tends to be reactive -- examining only the applications in front of them -- rather than considering trends over the coming years. It's a first-come, first-served queue: if one project is ready to break ground, it must wait behind another project that's still securing funding or permitting.

Two years in development, the dryly-named Improvements to Generator Interconnection Procedures and Agreements directs utility operators to plan infrastructure improvements with a 20-yr forecast of new energy sources and increased demand. Rather than examining each project in isolation, similar projects will be clustered and examined together. Instead of a First-Come, First-Served serial process, operators will instead examine First-Ready, allowing shovel-ready projects to jump the queue. The expectation is that these new rules will speed up and streamline the process of developing and connecting new energy projects through more holistic planning, penalties for delays, sensible cost-sharing for upgrades, and justification for long-term investments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Efforts to build a global quantum internet have received a boost from two developments in quantum information storage that could one day make it possible to communicate securely across hundreds or thousands of kilometers. The internet as it exists today involves sending strings of digital bits, or 0s and 1s, in the form of electrical or optical signals, to transmit information. A quantum internet, which could be used to send unhackable communications or link up quantum computers, would use quantum bits instead. These rely on a quantum property called entanglement, a phenomenon in which particles can be linked and measuring one particle instantly influences the state of another, no matter how far apart they are. Sending these entangled quantum bits, or qubits, over very long distances, requires a quantum repeater, a piece of hardware that can store the entangled state in memory and reproduce it to transmit it further down the line. These would have to be placed at various points on a long-distance network to ensure a signal gets from A to B without being degraded.

Quantum repeaters don't yet exist, but two groups of researchers have now demonstrated long-lasting entanglement memory in quantum networks over tens of kilometers, which are the key characteristics needed for such a device. Can Knaut at Harvard University and his colleagues set up a quantum network consisting of two nodes separated by a loop of optical fibre that spans 35 kilometers across the city of Boston. Each node contains both a communication qubit, used to transmit information, and a memory qubit, which can store the quantum state for up to a second. "Our experiment really put us in a position where we're really close to working on a quantum repeater demonstration," says Knaut. To set up the link, Knaut and his team entangled their first node, which contains a type of diamond with an atom-sized hole in it, with a photon that they sent to their second node, which contains a similar diamond. When the photon arrives at the second diamond, it becomes entangled with both nodes. The diamonds are able to store this state for a second. A fully functioning quantum repeater using similar technology could be demonstrated in the next couple of years, says Knaut, which would enable quantum networks connecting cities or countries.

In separate work, Xiao-Hui Bao at the University of Science and Technology of China and his colleagues entangled three nodes together, each separated by around 10 kilometers in the city of Hefei. Bao and his team's nodes use supercooled clouds of hundreds of millions of rubidium atoms to generate entangled photons, which they then sent across the three nodes. The central of the three nodes is able to coordinate these photons to link the atom clouds, which act as a form of memory. The key advance for Bao and his team's network is to match the frequency of the photons meeting at the central node, which will be crucial for quantum repeaters connecting different nodes. While the storage time was less than Knaut's team, at 100 microseconds, it is still long enough to perform useful operations on the transmitted information.

Intel unveiled Thunderbolt Share on Wednesday with which it promises to streamline screen and file sharing between two PCs. Tom's Hardware: Thunderbolt Share will allow PC owners to connect their two computers with a wired connection that leverages Thunderbolt's speed (40Gbps or higher), low latency, and built-in security. It allows PC-to-PC access that shares the screen, keyboard, mouse, and storage. The software also enables folder synchronization or easy drag-and-drop file transfer between the computers. [...]

Thunderbolt Share also provides uncompressed screen sharing between two PCs in the original resolution of the source computer. It also claims low latency for a smooth, responsive experience that includes the screen, keyboard, and mouse with full HD screen mirroring at up to 60 frames per second (fps). Higher resolutions could result in fewer frames per second, but Ziller said it would still be a "great experience."

Researchers believe they've discovered a new material structure that can improve the energy storage of capacitors. The structure allows for storage while improving the efficiency of ultrafast charging and discharging. The new find needs optimization but has the potential to help power electric vehicles. * An anonymous reader shared this report from Popular Mechanics: In a study published in Science, lead author Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, demonstrates a novel heterostructure that curbs energy loss, enabling capacitors to store more energy and charge rapidly without sacrificing durability... Within capacitors, ferroelectric materials offer high maximum polarization. That's useful for ultra-fast charging and discharging, but it can limit the effectiveness of energy storage or the "relaxation time" of a conductor. "This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems," the study authors write.

Bae makes the change — one he unearthed while working on something completely different — by sandwiching 2D and 3D materials in atomically thin layers, using chemical and nonchemical bonds between each layer. He says a thin 3D core inserts between two outer 2D layers to produce a stack that's only 30 nanometers thick, about 1/10th that of an average virus particle... The sandwich structure isn't quite fully conductive or nonconductive.

This semiconducting material, then, allows the energy storage, with a density up to 19 times higher than commercially available ferroelectric capacitors, while still achieving 90 percent efficiency — also better than what's currently available.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: The co-author of SQL, the standardized query language for relational databases, has come out in support of the NoSQL database movement that seeks to escape the tabular confines of the RDBMS. Speaking to The Register as SQL marks its 50th birthday, Donald Chamberlin, who first proposed the language with IBM colleague Raymond Boyce in a 1974 paper [PDF], explains that NoSQL databases and their query languages could help perform the tasks relational systems were never designed for. "The world doesn't stay the same thing, especially in computer science," he says. "It's a very fast, evolving, industry. New requirements are coming along and technology has to change to meet them, I think that's what's happening. The NoSQL movement is motivated by new kinds of applications, particularly web applications, that need massive scalability and high performance. Relational databases were developed in an earlier generation when scalability and performance weren't quite as important. To get the scalability and performance that you need for modern apps, many systems are relaxing some of the constraints of the relational data model."

[...] A long-time IBMer, Chamberlin is now semi-retired, but finds time to fulfill a role as a technical advisor for NoSQL company Couchbase. In the role, he has become an advocate for a new query language designed to overcome the "impedance mismatch" between data structures in the application language and a database, he says. UC San Diego professor Yannis Papakonstantinou has proposed SQL++ to solve this problem, with a view to addressing impedance mismatch between heavily object-based JavaScript, the core language for web development and the assumed relational approach embedded in SQL. Like C++, SQL++ is designed as a compatible extension of an earlier language, SQL, but is touted as better able to handle the JSON file format inherent in JavaScript. Couchbase and AWS have adopted the language, although the cloud giant calls it PartiQL.
At the end of the interview, Chamblin adds that "I don't think SQL is going to go away. A large part of the world's business data is encoded in SQL, and data is very sticky. Once you've got your database, you're going to leave it there. Also, relational systems do a very good job of what they were designed to do...

"[I]f you're a startup company that wants to sell shoes on the web or something, you're going to need a database, and one of those SQL implementations will do the job for free. I think relational databases and the SQL language will be with us for a long time."

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The "world's largest" plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday. "Mammoth" is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021... Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking up the carbon permanently... The whole operation will be powered by Iceland's abundant, clean geothermal energy....

Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world's largest such plant. It has a modular design with space for 72 "collector containers" — the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air — which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily. There are currently 12 of these in place with more due to be added over the next few months. Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That's equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year...

All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency [7,000x more]... Jan Wurzbacher, the company's co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks' plan to scale up to 1 million tons of carbon removal a year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050. Plans include potential DAC plants in Kenya and the United States.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: The last floppy disk was manufactured in 2011. Despite no new supplies being available for over a decade, there are still people, and organizations, who rely on floppy disks. Each has their own story as to why they rely on what is essentially 1970s technology.
From the BBC: Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs Floppydisk.com, which offers disks for about US$1 (£0.80) each, though some higher capacity versions cost up to US$10 (£8) per disk, he says. Persky has customers all over the world and you could split them roughly 50-50 into hobbyists and enthusiasts like Espen Kraft on one side, and industrial users on the other. This latter category encompasses people who use computers at work that require floppy disks to function. They are, essentially, locked in to a format that the rest of the world has largely forgotten.

"I sell thousands of floppy disks to the airline industry, still," says Persky. He declines to elaborate. "Companies are not happy about when I talk about them." But it is well-known that some Boeing 747s, for example, use floppy disks to load critical software updates into their navigation and avionics computers. While these older aircraft might not be so common in Europe or the US these days, you might find one in the developing world, for instance, Persky hints. There are also pieces of factory equipment, government systems — or even animatronic figures — that still rely on floppy disks.

And in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless the staff in charge pick up a floppy disk and slip it into the computer that controls the railway's Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "The computer has to be told what it's supposed to do every day," explains a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA). "Without a hard drive, there is nowhere to install software on a permanent basis."

This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds — it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading.
The article also includes this quote from a cybersecurity expert at Pen Test Partners. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk. That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker..."

"Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren't just on their way to yet another record high this year," reports the Washington Post.

"They're rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations." Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year...

For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth's climate. "Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it's increasing faster and faster," said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed. The spike is "not surprising," said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at Scripps Institution, "because we're also burning more fossil fuel than ever...."

El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added. And for CO2 concentrations to fall back below 400 parts per million, it would take more than two centuries even if emissions dropped close to zero by the end of this century, she added.
This year's reading "is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA."

A "one-of-a-kind" Google Cloud "misconfiguration" resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's account last week, disrupting the financial services provider's more than half a million members. "Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline," reports The Guardian. "Investment account balances would reflect last week's figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible." From the report: The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund's 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google's cloud service as the issue. In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologized to members for the outage, and said it had been "extremely frustrating and disappointing." They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper's cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund's cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies. UniSuper was able to eventually restore services because the fund had backups in place with another provider. "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper's Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription," the pair said. "This is an isolated, 'one-of-a-kind occurrence' that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud's clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

The Pixel 8A is officially here. The 8A gets Google's latest processor, adds a bunch of new AI features, and still starts at $499 in the US. But the very best news is that the 8A adopts the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro's seven years of software support, which is just unheard of in a midrange phone. From a report: The 8A retains the same general shape and size as its predecessor. But its 6.1-inch screen gets a couple of significant updates: the top refresh rate is now 120Hz, up from 90Hz, and the panel gets up to 40 percent brighter, up to 2,000 nits in peak brightness mode. They're important upgrades, especially since the 8A's main competition in the US, the OnePlus 12R, comes with an excellent display.

It comes with the same generative AI photo and video features that made a splash on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, including Best Take, Magic Editor, and Audio Magic Eraser. Circle to Search is also available, and the 8A will be able to run Google's mobile-optimized on-device AI model, Gemini Nano. As on the Pixel 8, it'll be a developer option delivered via feature drop. Other specs are either unchanged or slightly boosted compared to the last generation. There's still 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, though there's now a 256GB option. Camera hardware is unchanged from the 7A, including a stabilized 64-megapixel main sensor. There's an IP67 rating, consistent with the 7A, and battery capacity is a little higher at 4,492mAh compared to 4,385mAh. Wireless charging is available via Qi 1.3 at up to 7.5W -- no Qi2 here.

Apple revealed its refreshed iPad Pro lineup at its "Let Loose" virtual event Tuesday, featuring a slimmer design, OLED displays, and the company's latest M4 chip. The new 13-inch and 11-inch models boast enhanced brightness, color saturation, and contrast, with the 13-inch model measuring just 5.1 millimeters thick, making it Apple's thinnest device ever.

The M4 chip, which powers the new iPad Pros, delivers a 50% faster CPU and improved efficiency compared to the previous-gen M2 chip. Apple has also introduced updated accessories, including a redesigned Magic Keyboard with an aluminum palm rest and function key row, and the Apple Pencil Pro with squeeze gestures, Find My location tracking, and haptic feedback. The switch to OLED technology ensures consistent display quality across both iPad Pro sizes, addressing the previous disparity between the 12.9-inch Mini LED model and the smaller, traditional-screen version.

The base storage for both models is now 256GB, with prices starting at $999 for the 11-inch and $1,299 for the 13-inch. Both are available for preorder today and will be available in stores next week.

Swedish energy company Stockholm Exergi and Microsoft have announced a 10-year deal that will provide the tech giant with more than 3.3 million tons of carbon removal certificates through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. While the value of the deal was not disclosed, it stands as the largest of its kind globally. Carbon Herald reports: Scheduled to commence in 2028 and span a decade, the agreement underscores a pivotal moment in combatting climate change. Anders Egelrud, CEO of Stockholm Exergi, lauded the deal as a "huge step" for the company and its BECCS project, emphasizing its profound implications for climate action. "I believe the agreement will inspire corporations with ambitious climate objectives, and we target to announce more deals with other pioneering companies over the coming months," he said. Recognizing the imperative of permanent carbon removals in limiting global warming to 1.5C or below, the deal aligns with Microsoft's ambitious goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.

"Leveraging existing biomass power plants is a crucial first step to building worldwide carbon removal capacity," Brian Marrs, Microsoft's Senior Director of Energy & Carbon Removal, said, highlighting the importance of sustainable biomass sourcing for BECCS projects, as is the case with Stockholm Exergi. The partners will adhere to stringent quality standards, ensuring transparent reporting and adherence to sustainability criteria. The BECCS facility, once operational, will remove up to 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon reduction. With environmental permits secured and construction set to commence in 2025, Stockholm Exergi plans to reach the final investment decision by the end of the year.

Markos Moulitsas is the poll-watching founder of the political blog Daily Kos. Thursday he wrote that in 2021, future third-party presidential candidate RFK Jr. had sued their web site.

"Things are not going well for him." Back in 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask the identity of a community member who posted a critical story about his dalliance with neo-Nazis at a Berlin rally. I updated the story here, here, here, here, and here.

To briefly summarize, Kennedy wanted us to doxx our community member, and we stridently refused.
The site and the politician then continued fighting for more than three years. "Daily Kos lost the first legal round in court," Moulitsas posted in 2021, "thanks to a judge who is apparently unconcerned with First Amendment ramifications given the chilling effect of her ruling."

But even then, Moulitsas was clear on his rights: Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, [Kennedy] cannot sue Daily Kos — the site itself — for defamation. We are protected by the so-called safe harbor. That's why he's demanding we reveal what we know about "DowneastDem" so they can sue her or him directly.
Moulitsas also stressed that his own 2021 blog post was "reiterating everything that community member wrote, and expanding on it. And so instead of going after a pseudonymous community writer/diarist on this site, maybe Kennedy will drop that pointless lawsuit and go after me... consider this an escalation." (Among other things, the post cited a German-language news account saying Kennedy "sounded the alarm concerning the 5G mobile network and Microsoft founder Bill Gates..." Moulitsas also noted an Irish Times article which confirmed that at the rally Kennedy spoke at, "Noticeable numbers of neo-Nazis, kitted out with historic Reich flags and other extremist accessories, mixed in with the crowd.")

So what happened? Moulitsas posted an update Thursday: Shockingly, Kennedy got a trial court judge in New York to agree with him, and a subpoena was issued to Daily Kos to turn over any information we might have on the account. However, we are based in California, not New York, so once I received the subpoena at home, we had a California court not just quash the subpoena, but essentially signal that if New York didn't do the right thing on appeal, California could very well take care of it.

It's been a while since I updated, and given a favorable court ruling Thursday, it's way past time to catch everyone up.
New York is one of the U.S. states that doesn't have a strict "Dendrite standard" law protecting anonymous speech. But soon the blog founder discovered he had allies: The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York's role as a major news media and distribution center.

After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you'll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn't publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds....

Then, last week, the judge threw out the appeal of that decision because Kennedy's lawyer didn't file in time — and blamed the delay on bad Wi-Fi...

Kennedy tried to dismiss the original case, the one awaiting an appellate decision in New York, claiming it was now moot. His legal team had sued to get the community member's identity, and now that they had it, they argued that there was no reason for the case to continue. We disagreed, arguing that there were important issues to resolve (i.e., Dendrite), and we also wanted lawyer fees for their unconstitutional assault on our First Amendment rights...

On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York's anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits "strategic lawsuits against public participation."
Thursday's blog post concludes with this summation. "Kennedy opened up a can of worms and has spent millions fighting this stupid battle. Despite his losses, we aren't letting him weasel out of this."

Natron Energy, a pioneer in sodium-ion battery technology, has officially commenced mass production of its lithium-free sodium batteries in its Holland, Michigan facility, offering an alternative energy storage solution with benefits such as faster cycling, longer lifespan, and safer usage compared to lithium-ion batteries. New Atlas reports: Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction. Even moving beyond the sodium vs lithium surname comparison, Natron says its sodium-ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials that also include aluminum, iron and manganese. Furthermore, the materials for Natron's sodium-ion chemistry can be procured through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. The same cannot be said for common lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel.

Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage. [...] Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Dropbox said its digital-signature product, Dropbox Sign, was breached by hackers, who accessed user information including emails, user names and phone numbers. The software company said it became aware of the cyberattack on April 24, sought to limit the incident and reported it to law enforcement and regulatory authorities. "We discovered that the threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and user names, in addition to general account settings," Dropbox said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. "For subsets of users, the threat actor also accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords, and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens, and multi-factor authentication."

Dropbox said there is no evidence hackers obtained user accounts or payment information. The company said it appears the attack was limited to Dropbox Sign and no other products were breached. The company didn't disclose how many customers were affected by the hack. The hack is unlikely to have a material impact on the company's finances, Dropbox said in the filing. The shares declined about 2.5% in extended trading after the cyberattack was disclosed and have fallen 20% this year through the close.