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.

Data storage giant Western Digital has confirmed that hackers exfiltrated data from its systems during a "network security incident" last week. From a report: The California-based company said in a statement on Monday that an unauthorized third party gained access to "a number" of its internal systems on March 26. Western Digital hasn't confirmed the nature of the incident or revealed how it was compromised, but its statement suggests the incident may be linked to ransomware. [...] Western Digital notes that the incident "has caused and may continue to cause disruption" to the company's business operations.

PINE64 has an update about their Star64 single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor: it will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99: Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features:


- Quad core 64bit RISC-V
- HDMI video output
- 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates
- i2c touch panel connector
- dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
- dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth
- 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports
- PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART).
- The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots.


The board will be available in two different RAM configurations — with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th.
Liliputing offers this summary: The Star64 is a single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor, support for up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage (as well as a microSD card reader). Developed by the folks at Pine64, it's designed to be an affordable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V architecture. Pine64 first announced it was working on the Star64 last summer...
Meanwhile, PINE64's Linux tablets, the PineTab2 and PineTab-V, will launch one week later on Tuesday, April 11th.

Other highlights from this month's community update: there's now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale for their Linux-based "PineNote" e-ink tablets. ("Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too.")

And the update also includes photos of one user's cool 3D-printed replacement cases for their PinePhone featuring Tux the penguin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Authorities in Germany this week seized Internet servers that powered FlyHosting, a dark web offering that catered to cybercriminals operating DDoS-for-hire services, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. FlyHosting first advertised on cybercrime forums in November 2022, saying it was a Germany-based hosting firm that was open for business to anyone looking for a reliable place to host malware, botnet controllers, or DDoS-for-hire infrastructure. A statement released today by the German Federal Criminal Police Office says they served eight search warrants on March 30, and identified five individuals aged 16-24 suspected of operating "an internet service" since mid-2021. The German authorities did not name the suspects or the Internet service in question.

"Previously unknown perpetrators used the Internet service provided by the suspects in particular for so-called 'DDoS attacks', i.e. the simultaneous sending of a large number of data packets via the Internet for the purpose of disrupting other data processing systems," the statement reads. The German authorities said that as a result of the DDoS attacks facilitated by the defendants, the websites of various companies as well as those of the Hesse police have been overloaded in several cases since mid-2021, "so that they could only be operated to a limited extent or no longer at times." The statement says police seized mobile phones, laptops, tablets, storage media and handwritten notes from the unnamed defendants, and confiscated servers operated by the suspects in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Like electronics or photonics, magnonics is an engineering subfield that aims to advance information technologies when it comes to speed, device architecture, and energy consumption. A magnon corresponds to the specific amount of energy required to change the magnetization of a material via a collective excitation called a spin wave. Because they interact with magnetic fields, magnons can be used to encode and transport data without electron flows, which involve energy loss through heating (known as Joule heating) of the conductor used. As Dirk Grundler, head of the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics (LMGN) in the School of Engineering explains, energy losses are an increasingly serious barrier to electronics as data speeds and storage demands soar. "With the advent of AI, the use of computing technology has increased so much that energy consumption threatens its development," Grundler says. "A major issue is traditional computing architecture, which separates processors and memory. The signal conversions involved in moving data between different components slow down computation and waste energy."

This inefficiency, known as the memory wall or Von Neumann bottleneck, has had researchers searching for new computing architectures that can better support the demands of big data. And now, Grundler believes his lab might have stumbled on such a "holy grail". While doing other experiments on a commercial wafer of the ferrimagnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) with nanomagnetic strips on its surface, LMGN Ph.D. student Korbinian Baumgaertl was inspired to develop precisely engineered YIG-nanomagnet devices. With the Center of MicroNanoTechnology's support, Baumgaertl was able to excite spin waves in the YIG at specific gigahertz frequencies using radiofrequency signals, and -- crucially -- to reverse the magnetization of the surface nanomagnets. "The two possible orientations of these nanomagnets represent magnetic states 0 and 1, which allows digital information to be encoded and stored," Grundler explains.

The scientists made their discovery using a conventional vector network analyzer, which sent a spin wave through the YIG-nanomagnet device. Nanomagnet reversal happened only when the spin wave hit a certain amplitude, and could then be used to write and read data. "We can now show that the same waves we use for data processing can be used to switch the magnetic nanostructures so that we also have nonvolatile magnetic storage within the very same system," Grundler explains, adding that "nonvolatile" refers to the stable storage of data over long time periods without additional energy consumption. It's this ability to process and store data in the same place that gives the technique its potential to change the current computing architecture paradigm by putting an end to the energy-inefficient separation of processors and memory storage, and achieving what is known as in-memory computation. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Google Drive is enforcing a new file limit for the total number of files you can store on an account. 9to5Google reports: Some Google Drive users have recently noticed a message on their accounts which says that the account has reached its "creation limit" and won't accept any new files until existing ones are deleted. The issue was first highlighted by Ars Technica, and appears to be enforced for both free accounts as well as those subscribed to Google Workspace and Google One.

The issue was flagged by users on Reddit as well as Google's Issue Tracker and appears to have been put in place around mid-February. The file limit in place puts a hard ceiling on the total number of files stored in Google Drive at five million items. This limit ignores file size and type, and is a simple count of the number of files in your online storage bucket. This also includes items stored in the trash (which is automatically emptied every 30 days). When that limit is reached (or if the account has already exceeded it), Google Drive shows the following message: "This account has exceeded the creation limit of 5 million items. To create more items, move items to the trash and delete them forever."

One user reports having seven million items in their account prior to the limit being enforced, with their account no longer able to add any new files. Effectively, that user and anyone else in the same situation are locked out of their accounts, with the files stored now in a "read-only" mode. Google appears to have confirmed the limit to some users via support, but has yet to speak out publicly about it.

The UK government will defy scientific doubts to place a massive bet on technology to capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns, to enable an expansion of oil and gas in the North Sea. From a report: Grant Shapps, the energy and net zero secretary, on Thursday unveiled the "powering up Britain" strategy, with carbon capture and storage (CCS) at its heart, during a visit to a nuclear fusion development facility in Oxford. Shapps said the continued production of oil and gas in the North Sea was still necessary, and that the UK had a geological advantage in being able to store most of the carbon likely to be produced in Europe for the next 250 years in the large caverns underneath the North Sea. "Unless you can explain how we can transition [to net zero] without oil and gas, we need oil and gas," he said. "I am very keen that we fill those cavities with storing carbon. I think there are huge opportunities for us to do that."

Shapps pointed to the $24.7bn the government is planning to spend over 20 years on developing CCS, which he said would generate new jobs and make the UK a world leader in the technology. Among the 1,000 pages of proposals to be published on Thursday will be boosts for offshore wind, hydrogen, heat pumps and electric vehicles. A green finance strategy, to be set out by the chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, will be aimed at mobilising private-sector money for investments in green industry, and there will be a consultation on carbon border taxes, aimed at penalising the import of high-carbon goods from overseas. But the plans contain no new government spending, and campaigners said they missed out key elements, such as a comprehensive programme of home insulation and a full lifting of the ban on new onshore wind turbines in England.

quonset writes: In what has to be one of the most inconceivable confluences ever, the Norwegian company Nammo says it is unable to expand its production of artillery shells to support Ukraine because of "cat videos" on TikTok. To placate European scrutiny, TikTok is opening two data centers in Europe to house European user data locally. One of those data centers is in the Hamar region of Norway. Because of this expansion, there is no excess capacity for the factory to ramp up production of artillery shells.

"The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok's new data centre using up electricity in the local area," reports the Guardian. "Elvia, the local energy provider, confirmed to the Financial Times that the electricity network had no spare capacity after allocating it to the data center on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional capacity would take time to become available." "We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," Morten Brandtzaeg told the Financial Times.