The amount of water stored in half of the largest lakes and reservoirs around the world is declining due to human activity and climate change, according to new research. From a report: While lake water storage can naturally fluctuate in response to local precipitation, direct human activities, such as damming and water consumption, are increasingly affecting precious water resources, according to a study published Thursday in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Researchers combined global satellite measurements with climate and hydrologic models to detect trends in lake water storage for nearly 2,000 of the world's largest lakes and reservoirs from 1992 to 2020. The findings revealed "widespread decline," according to the study. About 53% of the water bodies studied were found to have experienced significant water losses over the last 28 years at a rate of roughly 22 gigatonnes, or 1 billion metric tons, per year, according to the study. The declining water storage could affect a quarter of the world's population, Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist who conducted the research with the University of Colorado Boulder, told ABC News. "This trend is likely to continue if we do nothing about climate change or do not restrict human water consumption," Yao said.

Google mistakenly released a test version of its Personal Safety app that includes a new feature called "Dashcam" on select Android devices. As the name suggests, it allows users to record video and audio while driving in the event of an accident or unexpected situation, with automatic recording triggered when connecting to a specific Bluetooth device and videos automatically deleted after three days unless saved. 9to5Google reports: Once available, the feature can be launched through a new "Dashcam" shortcut in the "Be prepared" section of the home page. Here, you can begin recording manually or view your recent videos. While Dashcam is recording, your phone is still fully usable, including for navigating with Google Maps. Alternatively, you can save power by locking your screen, and the recording will continue. More importantly, Google has built this feature to work without you needing to think much about it. When setting up, you can choose to have recordings begin automatically when you connect to a particular Bluetooth device (e.g., your car stereo or infotainment system) and end when you disconnect.

To conserve storage space, your recordings are automatically deleted after three days unless you save them. Additionally, the app says that the videos themselves are compressed, averaging "30 MB per minute," with a maximum recording length of 24 hours. Overall, this feature seems to be impressively well thought out and looks essentially ready to launch. Using a smartphone as a dashcam also makes quite a bit of sense, as your phone probably has a better camera than some cheaper dashcams would offer. It's unclear if this feature will be available on other phones with Google's Personal Safety or exclusive to Pixel phones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Countless smartphones seized in arrests and searches by police forces across the United States are being auctioned online without first having the data on them erased, a practice that can lead to crime victims being re-victimized, a new study found (PDF). In response, the largest online marketplace for items seized in U.S. law enforcement investigations says it now ensures that all phones sold through its platform will be data-wiped prior to auction.

Researchers at the University of Maryland last year purchased 228 smartphones sold "as-is" from PropertyRoom.com, which bills itself as the largest auction house for police departments in the United States. Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns. Phones may end up in police custody for any number of reasons -- such as its owner was involved in identity theft -- and in these cases the phone itself was used as a tool to commit the crime. "We initially expected that police would never auction these phones, as they would enable the buyer to recommit the same crimes as the previous owner," the researchers explained in a paper released this month. "Unfortunately, that expectation has proven false in practice."

Beyond what you would expect from unwiped second hand phones -- every text message, picture, email, browser history, location history, etc. -- the 61 phones they were able to access also contained significant amounts of data pertaining to crime -- including victims' data -- the researchers found. [...] Also, the researchers found that many of the phones clearly had personal information on them regarding previous or intended targets of crime: A dozen of the phones had photographs of government-issued IDs. Three of those were on phones that apparently belonged to sex workers; their phones contained communications with clients. "We informed [PropertyRoom] of our research in October 2022, and they responded that they would review our findings internally," said Dave Levin, an assistant professor of computer science at University of Maryland. "They stopped selling them for a while, but then it slowly came back, and then we made sure we won every auction. And all of the ones we got from that were indeed wiped, except there were four devices that had external SD [storage] cards in them that weren't wiped."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: StorCentric, the holding company for the Drobo and Retrospect brands, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late June 2022. Now, AppleInsider reports that, based on an email sent by StorCentric, the bankruptcy shifted from reorganization-minded Chapter 11 to liquidation-focused Chapter 7 in late April.

The writing for Drobo was on the wall, or at least on its website. Text at the top of the homepage notes that, as of January 27, 2023, Drobo products and support for them are no longer available. "Drobo support has transitioned to a self-service model," the site reads. "We thank you for being a Drobo customer and entrusting us with your data." Drobo began in 2005 as Data Robotics and launched into the tech consciousness with the original Drobo, a "storage robot." The marquee feature was being able to hot-swap drives of nearly any size without migrating data.

Marines and sailors who were exposed to toxic water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., are much more likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease than their counterparts who were stationed elsewhere, according to a study published Monday. From a report: Troops stationed at Camp Lejeune for even just a few months during the years 1975-85 are 70% more likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease than troops who were at Camp Pendleton, Calif., according to findings from researchers who accounted for other factors in making their determination. Their report was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Department of Veterans Affairs-funded study was led by Dr. Samuel Goldman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School and a staff physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.

The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have acknowledged for years that troops based at Camp Lejeune and other North Carolina facilities from the early 1950s until the mid-1980s were exposed to a number of harmful chemicals in the drinking water, including the solvents benzene and trichloroethylene, which are linked to Parkinson's. Water processed for the base was contaminated by improper chemical-disposal procedures from an off-base dry cleaner, leaky underground storage tanks, industrial spills and other problems for decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A million veterans and family members have been potentially affected, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the latest blast of the HDD vs SSD culture wars, a Pure Storage exec is predicting that no more hard disk drives will be sold after 2028 because of electricity costs and availability, as well as NAND $/TB declines. Shawn Rosemarin, VP R&D within the Customer Engineering unit at Pure, told B&F: "The ultimate trigger here is power. It's just fundamentally coming down to the cost of electricity." Not the declining cost of SSDs and Pure's DFMs dropping below the cost of disks, although that plays a part. In his view: "Hard drive technology is 67 years old. We need to herald this technology that went from five megabytes the size of this room to where we are today. And even the latest HAMR technology, putting a laser on the top of the head in order to heat up the platters, is pretty remarkable ... But we're at the end of that era."

HDD vendors sing a different tune, of course. Back in 2021, HDD vendor Seagate said the SSD most certainly would not kill disk drives. There's a VAST vs Infinidat angle to it as well, with the former also stating disk drive IO limitations would cripple the use of larger disk drives in petabyte-scale data stores, with Infidat blasting back that it "must be joking." Gartner has had a look in too, claiming that enterprise SSDs will hit 35 percent of HDD/SSD exabytes shipped by 2026 - though that would make Rosemarin's 2028 cutoff unlikely. Pure recently stated SSDs would kill HDDs in a crossover event that would happen "soon." Rosemarin, meanwhile, continued his argument: "Our CEO in many recent events has quoted that 3 percent of the world's power is in datacenters. Roughly a third of that is storage. Almost all of that is spinning disk.

So if I can eliminate the spinning disk, and I can move to flash, and I can in essence reduce the power consumption by 80 or 90 percent while moving density by orders of magnitude in an environment where NAND pricing continues to fall, it's all becoming evident that hard drives go away." Are high electricity prices set to continue? "I think the UK's power has gone up almost 5x recently. And here's the thing ... when they go up, they very seldom if ever come down ... I've been asked many times do I think the cost of electricity will drop over time. And, frankly, while I wish it would and I do think there are technologies like nuclear that could help us over time. I think it'll take us several years to get there. We're already seeing countries putting quotas on electricity, and this is a really important one -- we've already seen major hyperscalers such as one last summer who tried to enter Ireland [and] was told you can't come here, we don't have enough power for you. The next logical step from that is OK, so now if you're a company and I start to say, well, we only have so much power, so I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts per X amount of employees, or I'm gonna give you X amount of kilowatts for X amount of revenue that you contribute to the GDP of the country or whatever metric is acceptable."

Google has launched the Pixel 7a for $499, featuring a 6.1-inch OLED display at 90Hz, Tensor G2 chip with 8GB RAM, and 64MP main camera. The Pixel 7a nearly matches the flagship Pixel 7 on specs but starts at a lower price. GSMArena.com reports: Yes, the 7a marks several firsts for the Pixel a series. For starters, its 6.1" OLED display now runs at 90Hz, the same refresh rate as the Pixel 7 (though that one has a slightly larger 6.3" display). The resolution is FHD+ and you get Gorilla Glass 3 protection. Speaking of protection, the phone is rated IP67 for dust and water resistance. It has a metal frame and a plastic back -- Google notes that it used recycled aluminum, glass and plastic to build the phone. For example, the visor is 100% recycled aluminum. Available colors are Charcoal, Sea and Snow.

Another major upgrade is the switch to the Tensor G2 chipset, which is now paired with 8GB of LPDDR RAM (up from 6GB on the 6a) and 128GB UFS 3.1 storage. This is the same configuration as the Pixel 7, so the a-phone will be just as fast at the various computational tasks. Also, note that Google is promising 5 years of security updates. Among them is the Super Res Zoom (up to 8x), which is enabled by the new 64MP camera (up from 12MP). The ultra wide camera has a 13MP sensor and a f/2.2 lens that is blessed with Dual Pixel autofocus. The front-facing camera was also bumped up to 13MP with a fixed-focus lens (f/2.2). The rear camera can record 5K video at up to 60fps, the front one tops out at 4K at 30fps.

The Pixel 7a supports sub-6GHz and mmWave flavors of 5G, though only models for select regions will have mmWave enabled. This is a dual-SIM device with one physical nano-SIM and one eSIM. The 7a is powered by a 4,385mAh battery that supports up to 18W wired charging and for the first time on an a-phone wireless charging is available too -- also at 18W. Note that the port on the bottom is USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, but the retail box comes only with a USB C-to-C cable with USB 2.0 wiring (and you have to supply your own charger). You can order the Pixel 7a via the Google Store.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug -- SNIPR001 -- is currently in clinical trials. The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream.

The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15-20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections. The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance. After testing the ability of these eight engineered phages to kill the E. coli panel alone and in combination, they decided that a group of four of them was the most effective, naming the mixture SNIPR001. But four engineered phages do not make a drug; the team confirmed that SNIPR001 remains stable for five months in storage and that it does not affect any other gut bacteria.

Friday Bill Gates visited Kemmerer, Wyoming (population: 2,656) — where a coal plant was shutting down after 50 years. But Gates was there "to celebrate the latest step in a project that's been more than 15 years in the making: designing and building a next-generation nuclear power plant..."

The new plant will employ "between 200 and 250 people," Gates writes in a blog post, "and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs — such as operating a turbine and maintaining connections to the power grid — without much retraining." It's called the Natrium plant, and it was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. When it opens (potentially in 2030), it will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors.

All of this matters because the world needs to make a big bet on nuclear. As I wrote in my book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , we need nuclear power if we're going to meet the world's growing need for energy while also eliminating carbon emissions. None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean...

Another thing that sets TerraPower apart is its digital design process. Using supercomputers, they've digitally tested the Natrium design countless times, simulating every imaginable disaster, and it keeps holding up. TerraPower's sophisticated work has drawn interest from around the globe, including an agreement to collaborate on nuclear power technology in Japan and investments from the South Korean conglomerate SK and the multinational steel company ArcelorMittal...

I'm excited about this project because of what it means for the future. It's the kind of effort that will help America maintain its energy independence. And it will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. The people of Kemmerer are at the forefront of the equitable transition to a clean, safe energy future, and it's great to be partnering with them.
Gates writes that for safety the plant uses liquid sodium (instead of water) to absorb excess heat, and it even has an energy storage system "to control how much electricity it produces at any given time..."

"I'm convinced that the facility will be a win for the local economy, America's energy independence, and the fight against climate change.

Slashdot reader indominabledemon shared this article from TechSpot: Games today use highly-detailed textures that can quickly fill the frame buffer on many graphics cards, leading to stuttering and game crashes in recent AAA titles for many gamers... [T]he most promising development in this direction so far comes from Nvidia — neural texture compression could reduce system requirements for future AAA titles, at least when it comes to VRAM and storage.... In a research paper published this week, the company details a new algorithm for texture compression that is supposedly better than both traditional block compression (BC) methods as well as other advanced compression techniques such as AVIF and JPEG-XL.

The new algorithm is simply called neural texture compression (NTC), and as the name suggests it uses a neural network designed specifically for material textures. To make this fast enough for practical use, Nvidia researchers built several small neural networks optimized for each material... [T]extures compressed with NTC preserve a lot more detail while also being significantly smaller than even these same textures compressed with BC techniques to a quarter of the original resolution... Researchers explain the idea behind their approach is to compress all these maps along with their mipmap chain into a single file, and then have them be decompressed in real time with the same random access as traditional block texture compression...

However, NTC does have some limitations that may limit its appeal. First, as with any lossy compression, it can introduce visual degradation at low bitrates. Researchers observed mild blurring, the removal of fine details, color banding, color shifts, and features leaking between texture channels. Furthermore, game artists won't be able to optimize textures in all the same ways they do today, for instance, by lowering the resolution of certain texture maps for less important objects or NPCs. Nvidia says all maps need to be the same size before compression, which is bound to complicate workflows. This sounds even worse when you consider that the benefits of NTC don't apply at larger camera distances.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantages of NTC have to do with texture filtering. As we've seen with technologies like DLSS, there is potential for image flickering and other visual artifacts when using textures compressed through NTC. And while games can utilize anisotropic filtering to improve the appearance of textures in the distance at a minimal performance cost, the same isn't possible with Nvidia's NTC at this point.

An anonymous reader shares a report: We recently covered a study by Secure Data Recovery, an HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery company, of 2,007 defective hard disk drives it received. It found the average time before failure among those drives to be 2 years and 10 months. That seemed like a short life span, but considering the limited sample size and analysis in Secure Data Recovery's report, there was room for skepticism. Today, Backblaze, a backup and cloud storage company with a reputation for detailed HDD and SSD failure analysis, followed up Secure Data Recovery's report with its own research using a much larger data set. Among the 17,155 failed HDDs Backblaze examined, the average age at which the drives failed was 2 years and 6 months.

Backblaze arrived at this age by examining all of its failed drives and their respective power-on hours. The company recorded each drive's failure date, model, serial number, capacity, failure, and SMART raw value. The 17,155 drives examined include 72 different models and does not include failed boot drives, drives that had no SMART raw attribute data, or drives with out-of-bounds data. If Backblaze only looked at drives that it didn't use in its data centers anymore, there would be 3,379 drives across 35 models, and the average age of failure would be a bit longer at 2 years and 7 months. Backblaze said its results thus far "are consistent" with Secure Data Recovery's March findings. This is despite Backblaze currently using HDDs that are older than 2 years and 7 months.

Cloud storage giant Dropbox today joined the fray of tech companies announcing layoffs. From a report: The company today announced that it would be laying off 16% of its staff, equivalent to about 500 employees, due to slowing growth, and -- in the words of CEO Drew Houston -- because "the AI era of computing has finally arrived." These appear to be the first layoffs the company has made since January 2021, when it laid off 315 employees in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Seagate has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty in a settlement with U.S. authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to China's Huawei in violation of U.S. export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. Seagate sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with U.S. technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a U.S. trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of U.S. goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

Seagate shipped 7.4 million drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei's sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said. The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital and Toshiba were the other two, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The hackers who breached data storage giant Western Digital claim to have stolen around 10 terabytes of data from the company, including reams of customer information. The extortionists are pushing the company to negotiate a ransom -- of "minimum 8 figures" -- in exchange for not publishing the stolen data. On April 3, Western Digital disclosed "a network security incident" saying hackers had exfiltrated data after hacking into "a number of the Company's systems." At the time, Western Digital provided few details about exactly what data the hackers stole, saying in a statement that the hackers "obtained certain data from its systems and [Western Digital] is working to understand the nature and scope of that data."

One of the hackers spoke with TechCrunch and provided more details, with the goal of verifying their claims. The hacker shared a file that was digitally signed with Western Digital's code-signing certificate, showing they could now digitally sign files to impersonate Western Digital. Two security researchers also looked at the file and agreed it is signed with the company's certificate. The hackers also shared phone numbers allegedly belonging to several company executives. TechCrunch called the numbers. Most of the calls rang but went to automated voicemail messages. Two of the phone numbers had voicemail greetings that mentioned the names of the executives that the hackers claimed were associated with the numbers. The two phone numbers are not public.

Screenshots shared by the hacker show a folder from a Box account apparently belonging to Western Digital, an internal email, files stored in a PrivateArk instance (a cybersecurity product), and a screenshot of a group call where one of the participants is identified as Western Digital's chief information security officer. They also said they were able to steal data from the company's SAP Backoffice, a backend interface that helps companies manage e-commerce data. The hacker said that their goal when they hacked Western Digital was to make money, though they decided against using ransomware to encrypt the company's files. [...] If Western Digital doesn't get back to them, the hacker said, they are ready to start publishing the stolen data on the website of the ransomware gang Alphv. The hacker said they are not directly affiliated with Alphv but "I know them to be professional." Western Digital said they're declining to comment or answer questions about the hacker's claims.

The European Commission on Wednesday said U.S. chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $61 billion takeover of cloud computing company VMware could restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components. From a report: The Commission said it had informed Broadcom of its objection that the deal could restrict competition in the global markets for the supply of so-called fibre channel host bus adapters (FC HBAs) and storage adapters, by limiting access for competitors' hardware to VMware's software.

Tesla will open a factory in Shanghai to produce its Megapack large-scale batteries, cementing another foothold for the U.S. company in China even as political and economic tensions between Washington and Beijing swirl. The Washington Post reports: Tesla said in a brief tweet on Sunday that its "Megafactory" in Shanghai will be capable of producing 10,000 Megapacks annually, an output equivalent to its other Megafactory in Lathrop, Calif., about 70 miles east of San Francisco. The company, which disbanded its public relations department, did not provide further details. Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, said in a tweet that the factory in Shanghai would "supplement" the production in California.

The Chinese factory will be built in Lingang, a suburban area of Shanghai where Tesla's vehicle factory is also located, according to Chinese media. Lu Yu, an official in Lingang, told local media that production could start as soon as the second quarter of 2024. The investment in China by Tesla comes after the coronavirus pandemic brought some supply chains to a halt as factories in China shut down amid strict "zero covid" protocols. With those setbacks still fresh in many executives' minds -- and amid concerns over alleged human rights violations and chilly relations between Washington and Beijing -- China has struggled to attract foreign investment since the pandemic.

The Megapacks differ from most of Tesla's consumer-focused offerings, like the electric vehicles it is widely known for, in that they are more a piece of energy infrastructure than a consumer product. The batteries are intended to store energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar, allowing energy to be drawn even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Batteries like the Megapack are not yet widely implemented in the United States and purchases of the technology have mostly been kept under wraps. But the Megapack has been bought for Apple's renewable energy storage project in California, according to the Verge, and for a storage project outside Houston, Bloomberg first reported. A Megapack, Tesla says, "stores energy for the grid reliably and safely, eliminating the need for gas peaker plants and helping to avoid outages." Each pack can store enough energy to power 3,600 homes for an hour, Tesla says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Z-Library appears to be shrugging off a criminal investigation as if nothing ever happened. The site continues to develop its shadow library and, following a successful fundraiser, now plans to expand its services to the physical book market. Z-Library envisions a book 'sharing' market, where its millions of users can pick up paperbacks at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe. [...] With more than 12 million books in its archive, Z-Library advertised itself as the largest repository of pirated books on the Internet. This success was briefly interrupted late last year when the U.S. Government seized the site's main domain names. The enforcement action also led to the arrest of two alleged Russian operators of the site, who now find themselves at the center of a criminal investigation. A crackdown of this magnitude usually marks the end of a pirate site, but Z-Library appears to be going in the opposite direction. The site has made a full comeback with a more 'censorship-resistant' setup and recently collected tens of thousands of dollars in donations.

In a new message, posted this week, Z-Library thanks its userbase for their generous contributions, noting that it secured all the necessary funds to ensure continued development. Apparently, this includes support for offline sharing. In addition to offering millions of ebooks, Z-Library says that it's working on a new service that will help users to share physical copies with each other. "Books you have read should not gather dust on your shelf -- instead, they can get a second life in the hands of new readers! This helps to preserve the literary heritage and spread the knowledge and ideas contained in books to more people," they write. "[W]e want to organize 'Z-Points' -- collection and storage points for books that will be the link between those who share their books and those who need them. Book owners who are willing to share them with other users can send books to the nearest Z-Point in their region. And those who need books stored in these points will be able to receive them for their use."

This sounds like a P2P competitor for traditional libraries. Interestingly, however, Z-Library believes that existing libraries are ideally suited to become Z-Points. People can also volunteer to run a Z-Point from their own homes. Running a book lending point will require quite a bit of storage space and organizational effort so fulfillment centers and third-party logistics services are also welcome to join in. The Z-Point idea is still in the planning phase. According to Z-Library, users will be able to send books by mail. These can then be loaned by others and/or sent by mail when requested. This proposal is quite different from the traditional pirate ebook library Z-Library offers now. And loaning a book to someone is generally not seen as copyright infringement either unless it's a copied ebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Like so much in our modern era, Australia's high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag. South Australia's last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state's dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted -- on Twitter, of course -- that it had a solution: It could build the world's biggest battery, and fast. "@Elonmusk, how serious are you about this," replied Australian software billionaire and climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Can you guarantee 100MW in 100 days?" Musk responded: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"

To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia's electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country's post-coal future. "It's really a remarkable story," said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet's X. "Because we're not interconnected, we've had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they've shut down their fossils."

It may be Australia's biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world's population that lives in the so-called sun belt -- which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change. Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there's enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment. Overall, the cost could be a staggering A$320 billion ($215 billion), and the money is starting to flow: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Macquarie Group Ltd., and billionaires Andrew Forrest and Cannon-Brookes have all been involved in headline-grabbing energy deals in recent months. New government support for renewables has also improved investor sentiment, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group, which includes project developers and financiers.

Google is backtracking on its decision to put a file creation cap on Google Drive. From a report: Around two months ago, the company decided to cap all Google Drive users to 5 million files, even if they were paying for extra storage. The company did this in the worst way possible, rolling out the limit as a complete surprise and with no prior communication. Some users logged in to find they were suddenly millions of files over the new limit and unable to upload new files until they deleted enough to get under the limit. Some of these users were businesses that had the sudden file cap bring down their systems, and because Google never communicated that the change was coming, many people initially thought the limitation was a bug.

Apparently, sunshine really is the best disinfectant. The story made the tech news rounds on Friday, and Ars got Google on the record saying that the file cap was not a bug and was actually "a safeguard to prevent misuse of our system in a way that might impact the stability and safety of the system." After the weekend reaction to "Google Drive's Secret File Cap!" Google announced on Twitter Monday night that it was rolling back the limit. [...] Google told us it initially rolled the limitation out to stop what it called "misuse" of Drive, and with the tweet saying Google wants to "explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all," it sounds like we might see more kinds of Drive limitations in the future.

Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps. From a report: Google's Nearby Share has been built into Android for a few years now and allows you to locally transfer files over Wi-Fi, with the initial device-pairing happening over Bluetooth. Nearby share has been kind of tough to use in real life, since most people share files over the Internet. And for personal use, most people only have one Android device, their phone, so there has been nothing to share files with. A ton of Android users have Windows PCs, though, so for many this will be the first time Nearby Share has an actual use. Using the app is easy. Just download it from the Android website and click a few "next" buttons in the installer. You need a 64-bit Windows PC (not ARM, ironically) with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. From there you can easily share by dragging and dropping on Windows or by using the Android "share" button and hitting "Nearby Share." You have the option of signing in to the Windows app or not. If you don't you'll need to manually approve every transaction on both the phone and PC. If you sign in, you can set up auto-accept from yourself, anyone in your contacts, or the probably not advisable "everyone" option.