Europe has more natural gas than it knows what to do with. So much, in fact, that spot prices briefly went negative earlier this week. From a report: For months, officials have warned of an energy crisis this winter as Russia -- once the region's biggest supplier of natural gas -- slashed supplies in retaliation for sanctions Europe imposed over its invasion of Ukraine. Now, EU gas storage facilities are close to full, tankers carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) are lining up at ports, unable to unload their cargoes, and prices are tumbling. The price of benchmark European natural gas futures has dropped 20% since last Thursday, and by more than 70% since hitting a record high in late August. On Monday, Dutch gas spot prices for delivery within an hour -- which reflect real time European market conditions -- dipped below 0 Euro, according to data from the Intercontinental Exchange.

Prices turned negative because of an "oversupplied grid," Tomas Marzec-Manser, head of gas analytics at the Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), told CNN Business. It is a hugely surprising turn of events for Europe, where households and businesses have been clobbered by eye-watering rises in the price of one of its most important energy sources over the past year. Massimo Di Odoardo, vice president of gas and LNG research at Wood Mackenzie, says unseasonably mild weather is largely responsible for the dramatic change in fortune. "In countries like Italy, Spain, France, we're seeing temperatures and [gas] consumption closer to August and early September [levels]," he told CNN Business. "Even in countries in the Nordics, the UK and Germany, consumption is way below the average for this time of the year," he added.

Thomson Reuters, a multinational media conglomerate, left an open database with sensitive customer and corporate data, including third-party server passwords in plaintext format. Attackers could use the details for a supply-chain attack. Cybernews: The Cybernews research team found that Thomson Reuters left at least three of its databases accessible for anyone to look at. One of the open instances, the 3TB public-facing ElasticSearch database, contains a trove of sensitive, up-to-date information from across the company's platforms. The company recognized the issue and fixed it immediately. Thomson Reuters provides customers with products such as the business-to-business media tool Reuters Connect, legal research service and database Westlaw, the tax automation system ONESOURCE, online research suite of editorial and source materials Checkpoint, and other tools. The size of the open database the team discovered corresponds with the company using ElasticSearch, a data storage favored by enterprises dealing with extensive, constantly updated volumes of data.

Google's parent company Alphabet released its Q3 2022 earnings yesterday and "they show a 27 percent drop in profits compared to last year, with weaker-than-expected earnings and revenue," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Revenue was up 6 percent year over year to $69.1 billion, a sharp growth decline from 2021 Q3, which saw 41 percent growth. Profits were at $13.9 billion, down from $18.9 billion in Q3 2021. As usual, Alphabet earnings are mostly about Google ad revenue and click-through rates, with the company citing reduced spending from the "insurance, loan, mortgage, and crypto subcategories" in particular. Worries about the economy and inflation are causing many Google customers to cut their ad budgets.

Alphabet doesn't break down the non-ads business in much detail, but the two biggest money losers on Alphabet's reports are the "Other Bets" section and Google Cloud. Other Bets lost $1.6 billion, more than the $1.29 billion loss a year ago. "Other Bets" is the "non-Google" part of Alphabet and includes long-term R&D projects like Waymo self-driving cars and the "Wing" drone delivery project. Google says the only significant revenue generators for Other Bets are the "health technology" projects -- that would be Verily and/or Calico -- and "Internet services," aka Google Fiber.

The other big loser is Google Cloud, which lost $699 million this quarter, up from $644 million in Q3 2021. "Google Cloud" on the earnings report combines the Amazon Web Services-fighting infrastructure business and Google Workspace's suite of productivity apps like Gmail and Google Docs. Workspace definitely earns money by showing ads to its 3 billion users, charging for user storage, and charging businesses for Gmail accounts with custom domains. The infrastructure business -- Google Cloud Platform -- is growing, but it's still struggling as the No. 3 cloud provider behind Amazon and Microsoft. Google is taking a "longer-term path to profitability" with Cloud Platform.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be releasing new hardware to encourage more developers to start using and supporting the Arm version of Windows. Dubbed "Project Volterra," all we knew about it at the time was that it would use an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and NVMe-based storage, that it would support at least two monitors, and that it would have a decent number of ports. Today, Microsoft is putting Volterra out into the world, complete with a snappy new name: the Windows Dev Kit 2023. From a report: The Dev Kit 2023 will use a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 -- essentially the same chip as the Microsoft SQ3 in the new 5G version of the Surface Pro 9 -- plus 512GB of storage and a whopping 32GB of RAM for the surprisingly low price of $599.

We don't know exactly how fast the 8cx Gen 3 will be (Qualcomm says "up to 85 percent faster" CPU performance than the 8cx Gen 2, which would put it somewhere below but within spitting distance of modern Core i5 laptop CPU). But 512GB of storage and 32GB of memory should make the Dev Kit 2023 useful as a development and testing environment. Microsoft says the box can connect to up to three monitors simultaneously using its two USB-C ports and mini DisplayPort and that up to two of those displays can be 4K screens running at 60 Hz. Three USB-A ports, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.1 round out the connectivity options.

Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that's designed to boost your computer's performance. The Verge reports: Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft's PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows. Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There's even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now.

The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there's also a full cleanup scan available or a scan to find large files on your drives. The process management feature is a more simplified version of the Task Manager so you can quickly kill processes that might be eating up RAM. Hitting the main "boost" button will clear temporary files and free up memory, which could be useful on older PCs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann filed a $100 million lawsuit against world champion Magnus Carlsen and others for alleged defamatory statements claiming that Niemann cheated in competition. The suit claims that the defendants, including Chess.com, inflicted "devastating damages" against Niemann by "egregiously defaming him" and "unlawfully colluding" to bar him from the professional chess world. "My lawsuit speaks for itself," Niemann said Thursday in a Twitter post.

Niemann, 19, has admitted to cheating on two occasions, once when he was 12 years old and a second time when he was 16. But he denied claims that he cheated in an over-the-board match against Magnus Carlsen this year. Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup in September after losing to Niemann, and eventually came forward with concerns that Niemann had cheated in the match in which he defeated Carlsen. The suit claims that Carlsen's comments were a retaliatory attempt to keep Niemann from damaging his reputation. Chess.com subsequently banned Niemann after reporting that an internal investigation revealed evidence of more cheating than Niemann's public statements had expressed.

The report from Chess.com did not find evidence of cheating in Niemann's over-the-board matches, including the match against Carlsen, though the website notes that its cheating detection is primarily used for online matches. The report does, however, allege that Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online chess games, including several prize money events. It also shows that Niemann's Chess.com "Strength Score" sits in the range of over a dozen anonymous grandmasters who have admitted to cheating. The report also notes that Niemann is by far the fastest-rising player by yearly gain in classical over-the-board chess. The lawsuit is available in full here (PDF).

Intel is being taken to court in Massachusetts over its proposals to build a distribution and logistics warehouse on the site of its defunct R&D offices and chip factory that closed in 2013. The Register reports: At the heart of this showdown are claims by townsfolk that Intel has not revealed to the surrounding community what exactly it intends to build, and that the land is supposed to be used for industry and manufacturing yet it appears a huge commercial warehouse will be built instead. The x86 giant has spent years trying to figure out what to do the campus -- whether to salvage it for production or research, or to sell it to a developer. It came close to securing a buyer earlier this year.

The site in question is at 75 Reed Road in Hudson, Massachusetts, which holds a special place in computer history. It was the home of Digital Equipment Corporation's R&D and chip manufacturing before Intel took over the land and facility following a patent battle with DEC in 1997. Intel continued R&D at the site and kept it producing chips until it threw the towel in, leaving the location open to options. Ultimately, the site was up for sale with Intel planning to demolish the 40-year-old main buildings while offloading the land. However, the chipmaker, perhaps in response to a revitalization of American semiconductor manufacturing funded by CHIPS Act government subsidies, decided it wants to remake the property into a distribution and logistics and storage facility -- something that might sound innocuous but has the nearby community up in arms.

Further, Intel doesn't have to use the redeveloped site for its own purposes at all: it can, and probably will, market the facility to a future tenant. And it can breeze through planning law requirements without having to reveal the full scope of traffic, pollution, and other impacts due to its status as a "logistics" facility. And that is what really has the locals enraged. Crucially, the site is adjacent to two retirement villages with 286 units and a childcare center. As a former R&D and manufacturing facility, neighboring communities understood the scope of traffic and resource impacts of such a factory. [...] The even bigger problem is that this represents another example of a large tech company wheedling its way through local restrictions to build community-damning facilities, said Michael Pill, the lawyer representing both retirement condo facilities and the childcare center in their legal challenge [PDF] to Intel. "What Intel has done here is something deeply unpleasant that grows out of its desire to dump the property without any thought to the community where they were once an important pillar of manufacturing," Pill told The Register. "There is a pattern of development in which big companies come sailing into towns, saying they'll build million-plus square foot facilities with hundreds of loading docks and all the planning is done on spec."

In response to the lawsuit, Intel's lawyers said in a filing that the proposed changes are subject to approval by the town: "Because the proposed redevelopment is a permitted use in the zoning district, the project will require site plan review from the town of Hudson planning board."

Meet Crimson Storage, the world's largest single-phase battery, which is now live in the California desert. Electrek reports: Crimson Storage is also the second-largest energy storage project currently in operation of any configuration. The 350 megawatt (MW)/1400 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery storage project, which sits on on 2,000 acres west of Blythe in Riverside County, broke ground in 2021. Canadian Solar oversaw construction and provided the battery energy storage systems, and Axium Infrastructure and solar and storage developer Recurrent Energy will be Crimson Storage's long-term owners.

Residential homes are usually served by a single-phase power supply, and this project, on average, is expected to store and dispatch enough electricity to power more than 47,000 homes each year. Crimson Storage holds two long-term contracts with local utilities: a 200 MW/800 MWh 14-year and 10-month contract with Southern California Edison, and a 150 MW/ 600MWh 15-year contract with Pacific Gas and Electric.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more. The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years. The new site pulls them together behind a search engine with the ability to perform detailed searches by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and many other options.

Discmaster is the work of a group of anonymous history-loving programmers who approached Scott to host it for them. Scott says that Discmaster is "99.999 percent" the work of that anonymous group, right down to the vintage gray theme that is compatible with web browsers for older machines. Scott says he slapped a name on it and volunteered to host it on his site. And while Scott is an employee of the Internet Archive, he says that Discmaster is "100 percent unaffiliated" with that organization.

One of the highlights of Discmaster is that it has already done a lot of file format conversion on the back end, making the vintage files more accessible. For example, you can search for vintage music files -- such as MIDI or even digitized Amiga sounds -- and listen to them directly in your browser without any extra tools necessary. The same thing goes for early-90s low-resolution video files, images in obscure formats, and various types of documents. "It's got all the conversion to enable you to preview things immediately," says Scott. "So there's no additional external installation. That, to me, is the fundamental power of what we're dealing with here." "The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database," Scott told Ars Technica. "People are enabled to do deep dives into more history, reference their findings, and encourage others to look in the same place."

"[Discmaster] is probably, to me, one of the most important computer history research project opportunities that we've had in 10 years," says Scott. "It's not done. They've analyzed 7,000 and some-odd CD-ROMs. And they're about to do another 8,000."

South Korea's two largest domestic internet companies, Naver and Kakao, have experienced significant service interruptions after the datacenter that hosts much of their infrastructure was shut down by a Sunday fire. The Register reports: The datacenter in question is operated by SK C&C, one of the many arms of South Korean conglomerate SK. SK C&C offers a range of cloud and tech infrastructure services, bills itself as a "total digital transformation partner" and operates three datacenters, in which it happily houses client systems. The one in Pangyo, just south of South Korea's capital Seoul, was built in 2014, covers 66,942 square meters, and boasts what SK C&C describes as "Latest/eco-friendly technology". And it caught fire on the weekend. The company has not said what cause the facility to catch fire, nor the extent of the blaze.

But many services from Kakao and Naver were unavailable for many hours at a time, starting from Saturday afternoon. Impact of the outages was wide. The tweet below is an example of one business's reaction. Kakao has acknowledged the outage in a blog post that apologizes for the service interruption and slow restoration, and admits that disaster recovery efforts were delayed. The company has created an Emergency Response Committee and three sub-committees -- one to probe the cause of the incident, another to develop disaster countermeasures, and a third to arrange compensation for stakeholders. Naver's announcement admits that "some functions such as search, news, shopping, cafe, blog, open talk, and smart store center had errors." The company says all services have now been restored.

"You know you're a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge," says Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research tells the BBC — holding up a tiny vial with a light film at the bottom: But this DNA is special. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. "That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds," says Zielinski.

Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies. Scientists have already encoded films, books and computer operating systems into DNA. Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series Biohackers.

The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). But many experts argue it offers an incredibly compact, durable and long-lasting form of storage that could replace the many forms of unreliable digital media available, which regularly become defunct and require huge amounts of energy to store. Meanwhile, some researchers are exploring other ways we could store data effectively forever, such as etching information onto incredibly durable glass beads, a modern take on cave drawings.
Even before the issue of the energy required to power (and cool) data centers, Zielinski points out that data stored on hard drives "lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect." And yet we've already been able to recover DNA from million-year-old wooly mammoths...

Olgica Milenkovic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, acknowledges that DNA can be damaged by things like humidity, acids, and radiation — "But if it's kept cold and dry, it's good for hundreds of years." And if it's stored in an ice vault, "it can last forever, pretty much." (And unlike floppy disks — DNA-formatted data will never become obsolete.)

It's not the only option. Peter Kazansky, a professor in optoelectronics at the University of Southampton, has created an optical storage technology that etches nano-structures onto glass disks. But Latchesar Ionkov, a computer scientist working on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, believes we're just decades away from being able to store the estimated 33 zettabytes of data that humans will have produced by 2025 in a space the size of a ping-pong ball.

Pine64 has announced a new "sub $10 Linux capable single board computer" called the Ox64.

Liliputing says the tiny SBC "looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi Pico. But while Raspberry Pi's tiny board is powered by an RP2040 microcontroller, the Ox64 has a dual-core RISC-V processor, 64MB of embedded RAM, and support for up to 128Mb of flash storage plus a microSD card for additional storage." It's expected to support RTOS and Linux and blurs the lines between a microcontroller and a (very low power) single-board PC. It's expected to go on sale in November with prices starting at $6 for an RTOS-ready version of the board and $8 for a Linux-compatible model.

As spotted by CNX Software earlier this month, the board is designed to be a small, inexpensive single-board computer with a RISC-V processor that's aimed at developers.
Pine64's October update also reveals that their Star64 and QuartzPro64 single-board computers "now boot Linux (and run it well too already!)"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: On June 8, 2020, an individual claiming to be billionaire film producer and philanthropist Sidney Kimmel contacted brokerage Charles Schwab by phone and stated that he had uploaded a wire disbursement form using the service's secure email service. The only problem was the call apparently came from prison. Still, the caller made reference to a transfer verification inquiry earlier that day by his wife -- a role said to have been played by a female co-conspirator. The individual allegedly posing as Kimmel had contacted a Schwab customer service representative three days earlier -- on June 5, 2020 -- about opening a checking account, and was told that a form of identification and a utility bill would be required. On June 6, a co-conspirator is alleged to have provided a picture of Kimmel's driver's license and a Los Angeles Water and Power utility bill. According to court documents [PDF] filed by the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Georgia, the uploaded documents consisted of a request for funds to be wired to an external bank and a forged letter of authorization -- both of which appeared to be signed by Kimmel.

On June 9, satisfied that Kimmel had been adequately authenticated, the brokerage sent $11 million from Kimmel's Schwab account to a Zions Bank account for Money Metal Exchange, LLC, an Eagle, Idaho-based seller of gold coins and other precious metals. The real Kimmel had no knowledge of the transaction, which resulted in the purchase of 6,106 American Eagle gold coins. The individual who orchestrated the fraudulent purchase of the coins is alleged to have hired a private security firm on June 13, 2020 to transport the coins from Boise, Idaho to Atlanta, Georgia on a chartered plane. An associate of the fraudster allegedly took possession of the coins three days later. All the while the alleged mastermind, Arthur Lee Cofield Jr, was incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Butts County, Georgia, according to the government. Cofield is serving a 14-year sentence for armed robbery and is also under indictment in Fulton County, Georgia for attempted murder.

The day after the coins were purchased, prison staff are said to have searched Cofield's cell and recovered a blue Samsung cellphone hidden under his arm. The prison forensic unit apparently determined that Cofield had been using an account on free voice and messaging service TextNow and matched the phone number with calls made to Money Metals Exchange. On December 8, 2020, a federal grand jury indicted Cofield and two co-conspirators for conspiracy to commit bank fraud and money laundering. Cofield's attorney, Steven Sadow, subsequently sought to suppress the cellphone evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, arguing that the warrantless search of the device by prison officials was unrelated to the legitimate function of prison security and maintenance. The government said otherwise, insisting that Cofield does not have standing to contest the search, having no "legitimate expectation of privacy in the contents of a contraband cell phone." The judge overseeing the case sided with the government [PDF] and certified the case to proceed to trial.

General Motors is creating a new energy business to sell batteries, charging equipment, solar panels, and software to residential and commercial customers in a broad-based effort to create a range of accessories that can help sell its lineup of electric vehicles. The Verge reports: The new division, GM Energy, is also a direct shot at Tesla as a major player in renewable energy generation and storage. GM has said it intends to eventually overtake Elon Musk's company in vehicles sales -- and now it wants to challenge it on the energy front as well. Travis Hester, GM's chief EV officer, said the company is making a serious grab for a piece of what is potentially a $120-150 billion market for energy generation and storage products. The aim is to make GM's brand synonymous with not just electric vehicles, but a whole host of products and services in orbit around EVs and their rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

GM Energy will be comprised of three units: Ultium Home, Ultium Commercial, and Ultium Charge 360, which is the company's EV charging program. The division will sell a range of products to residential and commercial customers, including bi-directional charging equipment, vehicle-to- home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) equipment, stationary storage, solar products, software applications, cloud management tools, microgrid solutions, and hydrogen fuel cells. GM Energy will also be in the virtual power plant business. Many EVs with high-capacity batteries are being marketed for their ability to serve as backup power in the event of a blackout. (Hester notes that the Chevy Silverado EV, with its 200kWh battery pack, can power an average sized home for 21 days.) EVs can also feed power back into the grid during times of peak demand. GM Energy will be the entity that sells that power back to the utilities during times of high-energy consumption.

For solar energy, GM is teaming up with San Jose-based SunPower to sell solar panels and home energy storage products to residential customers. SunPower and other partners will supply the solar panels and perform the installations, with GM developing the complimentary software. Over time, as GM's battery factories come online and production of its Ultium-branded battery systems ramps up, the company intends on swapping in its own battery cells and storage units, Hester said. The automaker is also planning on manufacturing its own line of backup power generators using its Hydrotec-branded hydrogen fuel cells. (Ultium is the name of GM's electric vehicle battery and powertrain technology. Last year, the company said the Ultium Charge 360 network would be the name given to GM's own vehicle apps and software with a variety of third-party charging services, such as Blink, ChargePoint, EVgo, Flo, Greenlots, and SemaConnect.) "But much like its approach to EVs, the dates for the launch of these new products are still a ways off in the future," adds The Verge. "GM is still testing its V2H service in partnership with PG&E with a small sample of residential customers in California, and plans on expanding it to more homes in early 2023. And its solar products won't be available until 2024."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is clawing its way back into wearable relevance. Today the company took the wraps off what is officially its first self-branded smartwatch: the Pixel Watch. Google started revamping its wearable platform, Wear OS, in partnership with Samsung. While Wear OS 3, the new version of Google's wearable platform, technically launched with the Galaxy Watch 4 last year, this is the first time we'll be seeing an unskinned version on a real device. First up: prices. Google is asking a lot here, with the Wi-Fi model going for $349 and the LTE version clocking in at $399. The Galaxy Watch 4, which has a better SoC, and the Apple Watch SE, which has a way, way better SoC, both start at $250. Google is creating an uphill battle for itself with this pricing.

Google and Samsung's partnership means the Pixel Watch is running a Samsung Exynos 9110 SoC, with a cheap Cortex M33 co-processor tacked on for low-power watch face updates and 24/7 stat tracking. This SoC is a 10 nm chip with two Cortex A53 cores and an Arm Mali T720 MP1 GPU. If you can't tell from those specs, this is a chip from 2018 that was first used in the original Samsung Galaxy Watch. For whatever reason, Google couldn't get Samsung's new chip from the Galaxy Watch 4, an Exynos W920 (a big upgrade at 5 nm, dual Cortex A55s, and a Mali-G68 MP2 GPU). It's hard to understand why this is so expensive.

The display is a fully circular 1.6-inch OLED with a density of 320 ppi (that should mean around 360 pixels across). The only size available is 41 mm, the cover is Gorilla Glass 5, and the body is stainless steel in silver, black, or gold. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, NFC, GPS, only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n support (Wi-Fi 4), and a 294 mAh battery. For sensors, you get SPO2 blood oxygen, heart rate, and an ECG sensor. It's water-resistant to 5 ATM, which means you're good for submersion, hand washing, and most normal water exposure. Usually 10 ATM is preferred for serious sports swimming, but the Apple Watch is 5 ATM, and Apple does all sorts of swimming promos. Google's black UI background does a good job of hiding exactly how large the display is in relation to the body, but a few screenshots reveal just how big the bezels are around this thing. They are big. Real big. Like, hard-to-imagine-we're-still-doing-this-in-2022 big. Other things to note: the watch bands are proprietary, it'll be able to charge to 50 percent in 30 minutes, will work with any Android phone running version 8.0 and newer, and features Fitbit integration.

"Unlike the Pixel 7, which is expanding to 17 markets, the Pixel Watch is only for sale in eight countries: the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan," adds Ars. "The watch is up for preorder today and ships October 13."

Further reading: Google Unveils Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro Smartphones

Companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, as well as banks, police services and government departments, shred millions of data-storing devices each year, the Financial Times has learnt through interviews with more than 30 people who work in and around the decommissioning industry and via dozens of freedom of information requests. From the report: This is despite a growing chorus of industry insiders who say there is another, better option to safely dispose of data: using computer software to securely wipe the devices before selling them on the secondary market. "From a data security perspective, you do not need to shred," says Felice Alfieri, a European Commission official who co-authored a report about how to make data centres more sustainable and is promoting "data deletion" over device destruction. Underpinning the reluctance to move away from shredding is the fear that data could leak, triggering fury from customers and huge fines from regulators.

Last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Morgan Stanley $35mn for an "astonishing" failure to protect customer data, after the bank's decommissioned servers and hard drives were sold on without being properly wiped by an inexperienced company it had contracted. This was on top of a $60mn fine in 2020 and a $60mn class action settlement reached earlier this year. Some of the hardware containing bank data ended up being auctioned online. While the incident stemmed from a failure to wipe the devices before selling them on, the bank now mandates that every one of its data-storing devices is destroyed -- the vast majority on site. This approach is widespread. One employee at Amazon Web Services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, explained that the company shreds every single data-storing device once it is deemed obsolete, usually after three to five years of use: "If we let one [piece of data] slip through, we lose the trust of our customers." A person with knowledge of Microsoft's data disposal operations says the company shreds everything at its 200-plus Azure data centres.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tech giant Google has today announced the launch of a cloud region in South Africa, its first in the continent, playing catch-up to other top providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which made inroads into the continent a few years ago. Google said it is also building Dedicated Cloud Interconnect sites, which link users' on-premises networks with Google's grid, in Nairobi (Kenya), Lagos (Nigeria) and South Africa (Capetown and Johannesburg), in its quest to provide full-scale cloud capabilities for its customers and partners in Africa.

Google plans to tap its private subsea cable, Equiano, which connects Africa and Europe, to power the sites. Equiano has been under development since 2019 and has so far made four landings -- in Togo, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa. South Africa now joins Google's global network of 35 cloud regions and 106 zones worldwide, and the announcement follows the recent preview launch of regions in Malaysia, Thailand and New Zealand. Google Cloud regions allow users to deploy cloud resources from specific geographic locations, and access several services including cloud storage, compute engine and key management systems.

The decision to set up a region in South Africa was informed by the demand for cloud services and the market's potential. Still, the company is looking to launch in more markets within the continent as demand for its products soars. Its early adopters include large enterprise companies, and e-commerce firms like South Africa's TakeAlot and Kenya's Twiga. According to research by AlphaBeta Economics, commissioned by Google Cloud, the South Africa cloud region will contribute over $2.1 billion to South Africa's GDP and support the creation of more than 40,000 jobs by 2030. Google Cloud, Azure by Microsoft and AWS are the three biggest public cloud storage players in the world, according to data from Gartner, but it's unclear why, until now, Google has been absent in Africa. "We are excited to announce the first Google Cloud region in Africa. The new region will allow for the localization of applications and services. It will make it really easier for our customers and partners to quickly deploy solutions for their businesses, whereby they're able to leverage our computer artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities, and data analytics to make smarter business decisions as they go forward," said Google Cloud Africa director, Niral Patel.

"What we're doing here is giving customers and partners a choice on where they'd like to store their data and where they'd like to consume cloud services, especially in the context of data sovereignty. This allows customers to then store the data in the country should they choose to do so... I guess for me the most important element is that it gives customers the element of choice."

united_notions writes: Back in February, Slashdot reported that Google would be phasing out free unlimited storage within Google Apps for Education. Google had a related blog post dressing it up in the exciting language of "empowering institutions" and so forth. Well, now universities all over are waking up to the consequences.

Universities in Korea are scrambling to reduce storage use, or migrating to competitors like Naver, while also collectively petitioning Google on the matter. California State University, Chico has a plan to shoe-horn its storage (and restrict its users) to limbo under Google's new limits. UC San Diego is coughing up for fees but apparently under a "favorable" deal, and still with some limits. The University of Cambridge will impose a 20GB per user limit in December 2022. And so on.

If you're at a university, what is your IT crowd telling you? Have they said anything? If not, you may want to ask.

Magic Leap's second take on augmented reality eyewear is available. "The glasses are still aimed at developers and pros, but they include a number of design upgrades that make them considerably more practical -- and point to where AR might be headed," reports Engadget. From the report: The design is 50 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the original. It should be more comfortable to wear over long periods, then. Magic Leap also promises better visibility for AR in bright light (think a well-lit office) thanks to "dynamic dimming" that makes virtual content appear more solid. Lens optics supposedly deliver higher quality imagery with easier-to-read text, and the company touts a wider field of view (70 degrees diagonal) than comparable wearables.

You can expect decent power that includes a quad-core AMD Zen 2-based processor in the "compute pack," a 12.6MP camera (plus a host of cameras for depth, eye tracking and field-of-view) and 60FPS hand tracking for gestures. You'll only get 3.5 hours of non-stop use, but the 256GB of storage (the most in any dedicated AR device, Magic Leap claims) provides room for more sophisticated apps. The base model of the glasses costs $3,299, with the Enterprise model amounting to about $5,000.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Phys.Org: Trees have long been known to buffer humans from the worst effects of climate change by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now new research shows just how much forests have been bulking up on that excess carbon. The study, recently published in the Journal Nature Communications, finds that elevated carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased wood volume -- or the biomass -- of forests in the United States. Although other factors like climate and pests can somewhat affect a tree's volume, the study found that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country. This suggests that trees are helping to shield Earth's ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth.

Over the last two decades, forests in the United States have sequestered about 700-800 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which, according to the study, accounts for roughly 10% to 11% of the country's total carbon dioxide emissions. While exposure to high levels of carbon dioxide can have ill effects on natural systems and infrastructure, trees have no issue gluttoning themselves on Earth's extra supply of the greenhouse gas. To put it in perspective, if you imagine a tree as just a huge cylinder, the added volume the study finds essentially amounts to an extra tree ring. Although such growth may not be noticeable to the average person, compared to the trees of 30 years ago, modern vegetation is about 20% to 30% bigger than it used to be. If applied to the Coast Redwood forests -- home to some of the largest trees in the world -- even a modest percentage increase means a lot of additional carbon storage in forests. Researchers also found that even older large trees continue adding biomass as they age due to elevated carbon dioxide levels. "Forests are taking carbon out of the atmosphere at a rate of about 13% of our gross emissions," said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University. "While we're putting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're actually taking much of it out just by letting our forests grow."