The European Commission proposed rules on Thursday to govern patents increasingly in demand for technologies used in smart devices such as drones, connected cars and mobile phones, to try to reduce litigation. From a report: The Commission said the system for what are known as standard-essential patents (SEPs), was fragmented, lacked transparency, led to lengthy disputes and that self-regulation had not worked. SEPs protect technology such as for 5G, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth that is needed by equipment producers to comply with international standards.

Apple has revealed App Store metrics in Europe in response to the European Digital Services Act. From the legal compliance post: iOS App Store: 101 million
iPadOS App Store: 23 million
macOS App Store: 6 million
tvOS App Store: 1 million
watchOS App Store: under 1 million
Apple Books: under 1 million
Podcasts paid subscriptions: under 1 million

A draft law that aims to criminalize and prosecute those who "create conditions for online piracy" has been approved by Bulgaria's Council of Ministers. The proposed amendments are Bulgaria's response to heavy criticism from the United States, most publicly via the USTR's Special 301 Reports. It's hoped that prison sentences of up to six years will send a deterrent message. TorrentFreak reports: Last week the Council of Ministers approved draft amendments to the Criminal Code that aim to protect authors, rightsholders, and state revenue. "Crimes against intellectual property should be perceived as acts with a high degree of public danger, not only considering the rights and interests of the individual author, which they affect, but also considering the financial losses for the holders of these rights, which also affects the revenues in the state budget," the explanatory notes read.

The stated aim of the bill is to solve identified weaknesses by upgrading substantive law to counter computer-related crimes against intellectual property. The text references those who "build or maintain" an information system or provide a service to the information society for the purpose of committing crimes. The notes offer further clarification. "The bill aims to prosecute those who create conditions for online piracy -- for example, by building and maintaining torrent tracker sites, web platforms, chat groups in online communication applications for the online exchange of pirated content, and any other activities that may fall within the definition of 'information society service' within the meaning of the Electronic Commerce Act (pdf) and which are carried out with the specified criminal purpose."

The Bulgarian government notes that the amendments are part of its response to criticism in the USTR's Special 301 Report. [When countries are placed on the USTR's 'Watch List' for failing to combat piracy, most can expect years of pressure punctuated by annual Special 301 Reports declaring more needs to be done. Bulgaria was on the Watch List in 2015 when the USTR reported "incremental progress" in the country's ability to tackle intellectual property infringement, albeit nowhere near enough to counter unsatisfactory prosecution rates. In 2018 the United States softened its position toward Bulgaria, removing it from the Watch List on the basis that the government would probably deliver.] The fact that Bulgaria has been absent from the 'Watch List' for the last five years is down to "specific commitments" made by the authorities, with progress being monitored closely by the United States in respect of Bulgaria's future status. The draft approved by the Council of Ministers last week envisions sentences of up to six years imprisonment and a fine of up to $5,600. According to the draft, there is no intent to prosecute individual users who simply consume pirated content.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission will require 19 large online platforms and search engines to comply with new online content regulations starting on August 25, European officials said. The EC specified which companies must comply with the rules for the first time, announcing today that it "adopted the first designation decisions under the Digital Services Act." Five of the 19 platforms are run by Google, specifically YouTube, Google Search, the Google Play app and digital media store, Google Maps, and Google Shopping. Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are on the list, as are Amazon's online store, Apple's App Store, Microsoft's Bing search engine, TikTok, Twitter, and Wikipedia. These platforms were designated because they each reported having over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17. The other listed platforms are Alibaba AliExpress, Booking.com, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and German online retailer Zalando.

Companies have four months to comply with the full set of new obligations and could face fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue. One new rule is a ban on advertisements that target users based on sensitive data such as ethnic origin, political opinions, or sexual orientation. There are new content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. For example, "targeted advertising based on profiling towards children is no longer permitted," the EC said. Companies will have to provide their first annual risk assessment on August 25, and their risk mitigation plans will be subject to independent audits and oversight by the European Commission. "Platforms will have to identify, analyze and mitigate a wide array of systemic risks ranging from how illegal content and disinformation can be amplified on their services, to the impact on the freedom of expression and media freedom," the EC said. "Similarly, specific risks around gender-based violence online and the protection of minors online and their mental health must be assessed and mitigated." The new requirements for the 19 platforms include:
- Users will get clear information on why they are recommended certain information and will have the right to opt-out from recommendation systems based on profiling;
- Users will be able to report illegal content easily and platforms have to process such reports diligently; - Platforms need to label all ads and inform users on who is promoting them;
- Platforms need to provide an easily understandable, plain-language summary of their terms and conditions, in the languages of the Member States where they operate.

Platforms will be required to "analyze their specific risks, and put in place mitigation measures -- for instance, to address the spread of disinformation and inauthentic use of their service," the EC said. They will also "have to redesign their systems to ensure a high level of privacy, security, and safety to minors."

Alexander De Croo (the prime minister of Belgium), Mark Rutte (the prime minister of the Netherlands), Xavier Bettel (the prime minister of Luxembourg), Emmanuel Macron (the president of France), Olaf Scholz (the chancellor of Germany), Leo Varadkar (the prime minister of Ireland), Jonas Gahr Store (the prime minister of Norway), Rishi Sunak (the prime minister of the United Kingdom), and Mette Frederiksen (the prime minister of Denmark), writing at Politico: We need offshore wind turbines -- and we need a lot of them. We need them to reach our climate goals, and to rid ourselves of Russian gas, ensuring a more secure and independent Europe. Held for the first time last year, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands came together for the inaugural North Sea Summit in the Danish harbor town of Esbjerg, setting historic goals for offshore wind with the Esbjerg Declaration. It paved the way for making the North Seas a green power plant for Europe, as well as a major contributor to climate neutrality and strengthening energy security.

This Monday, nine countries will meet for the next North Sea Summit -- this time in the Belgian town of Ostend -- where France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway and the United Kingdom will also put their political weight behind developing green energy in the North Seas, including the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish and Celtic Seas. Together, we will combine and coordinate our ambitions for deploying offshore wind and developing an offshore electricity grid, putting Europe on the path toward a green economy fueled by offshore green power plants. Collectively, our target for offshore wind in the North Seas is now 120 gigawatts by 2030, and a minimum of 300 gigawatts by 2050 -- larger than any of the co-signatories' existing generation capacity at a national level. And to deliver on this ambition, we are committing to building an entire electricity system in the North Seas based on renewable energy by developing cooperation projects.

This is a massive undertaking and a true example of the green transition in the making. It also requires huge investments in infrastructure, both offshore and on land. It presents us with a political and environmental dilemma as well: We are facing a climate crisis at the same time some of our ecosystems are in decline, and offshore wind is an integral part of both climate action and safeguarding our energy security. Thus, time is of the essence, and we must follow up on the progress already made on reining in the burden of bureaucracy for renewable projects.

Microsoft will stop forcing customers of its popular Office software to also have its Teams video conferencing and messaging app automatically installed on their devices, in a move designed to prevent an official antitrust probe by EU regulators. From a report: The US tech giant has made the concession to avoid a formal investigation, said two people with direct knowledge of the decision, following a 2020 complaint by rival Slack which claimed Microsoft's practice of bundling the two services together was anti-competitive. These people said that, in future, when companies buy Office they can do it with or without Teams if they wished, but the mechanism on how to do this remains unclear. The people stressed talks are still ongoing and a deal is not certain. The move is part of an effort by Microsoft to try to avoid what would be its first antitrust probe in more than a decade, having sought to avoid legal battles with the European Commission that have proved bruising in the past.

CNN reports on this year's "State of the Climate" report from the World Meteorological Organization (the UN agency promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science a d climatology).

The report "analyzes a series of global climate indicators — including levels of planet-heating pollution, sea level rise and ocean heat — to understand how the planet is responding to climate change and the impact it is having on people and nature."

CNN's conclusion? "The world just failed its annual health checkup."= - Oceans reached record high temperatures, with nearly 60% experiencing at least one marine heatwave.

- Global sea levels climbed to the highest on record due to melting glaciers and warming oceans, which expand as they heat up.

- Antarctica's sea ice dropped to 1.92 million square kilometers in February 2022, at the time the lowest level on record (the record was broken again this year).

- The European Alps saw a record year for glacier melt, with Switzerland particularly badly affected, losing 6% of its glacier volume between 2021 and 2022.

- Levels of planet warming pollution, including methane and carbon dioxide, reached record highs in 2021, the latest year for which there is global data...


Last year, climate change-fueled extreme weather "affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. In 2022, China had its most extensive and long-lasting drought on record. Droughts also affected East Africa, with more than 20 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia facing acute food insecurity as of January this year. Many western and southern US states experienced significant drought and Europe's punishing heatwave is estimated to have led to 15,000 excess deaths. In Pakistan, record-breaking rainfall left huge swaths of the country underwater, killing more than 1,700 people, with almost 8 million displaced, and causing $30 billion in damages...

Last year is unlikely to be an outlier, as temperatures continue their upwards trajectory. The past eight years were the hottest on record, despite three consecutive years of the La Niña climate phenomenon, which has a global cooling effect. The global average temperature last year climbed to about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the report, as the world continues its march towards breaching 1.5 degrees of warming for the first time. With the predicted arrival later in the year of El Niño, which brings warmer global temperatures, scientists are deeply concerned that 2023 and 2024 will continue to smash climate records. The hottest year on record, 2016, was the result of a strong El Niño and climate change, said Baddour. "It is only a matter of time before that record is broken...."

"The droughts and level of heatwaves that we saw throughout 2022 were quite remarkable," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told CNN. "This is really a wake up call that climate change isn't a future problem, it is a current problem. And we need to adapt as quickly as possible," she added.
Omar Baddour, head of the Climate Monitoring and Policy Division at the WMO, also told CNN that "Communities and countries which have contributed least to climate change suffer disproportionately."

And for more bad news, CNN notes a report from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service found Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, unprecedented marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean sea, and widespread wildfires.

The Washington Post reports on "a relatively young app called Beeper that pulls all your chats into one place." This is significant, the Post argues, because "we're better off if we have the freedom to pick up our digital lives and move on. Tech companies should feel terrified that you'll walk if they disappoint you..." If different people send you messages in Apple's Messages (a.k.a., iMessage), WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Slack, you don't have to check multiple apps to read and reply. Maybe the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone for another company's device and keep your text messages...

Eric Migicovsky, Beeper's co-founder, told me that if you're pulling Apple Messages into Beeper, you need a Mac computer to upload a digital file. All chat apps have different limits on how much history you can access in the app.

There's also a wait list of about 170,000 people for Beeper. (Add yourself to the list here.) The app is free, but Beeper says it will start charging for a version with extra features.
To put this all in context, the Post's reporter remembers the hassle of using a cable to transfer a long history of iPhone messages to a new Google Pixel phone, complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system. "Many of you are happy to live in Apple's world. Great! But if you want the option to leave at some point, try to limit your use of Apple apps when possible..."

They look ahead to next year, when the EU "will require large tech companies to make their products compatible with those of competitors" — though it's not clear how much change that will bring. In the meantime, the existence of a small company like Beeper "gives me hope that we don't have to rely on the kindness of technology giants to make it easier to move to a different phone or computer system... You deserve the option of a no-hassle tech divorce at a moment's notice."

As the European Union gears up to enforce a major reboot of its digital rulebook in a matter of months, a new dedicated research unit is being spun up to support oversight of large platforms under the bloc's flagship Digital Services Act (DSA). From a report: The European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT), which was officially inaugurated in Seville, Spain, today, is expected to play a major role in interrogating the algorithms of mainstream digital services -- such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

ECAT is embedded within the EU's existing Joint Research Centre (JRC), a long-established science facility that conducts research in support of a broad range of EU policymaking, from climate change and crisis management to taxation and health sciences. But while the ECAT is embedded within the JRC -- and temporarily housed in the same austere-looking building (Seville's World Trade Centre), ahead of getting more open-plan bespoke digs in the coming years -- it has a dedicated focus on the DSA, supporting lawmakers to gather evidence to build cases so they can act on any platforms that don't take their obligations seriously. Commission officials describe the function of ECAT being to identify "smoking guns" to drive enforcement of the DSA -- say, for example, an AI-based recommender system that can be shown is serving discriminatory content despite the platform in question claiming to have taken steps to "de-bias" output -- with the unit's researchers being tasked with coming up with hard evidence to help the Commission build cases for breaches of the new digital rulebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union on Tuesday agreed a 43 billion euro ($47 billion) plan for its semiconductor industry in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Asia and start a green industrial revolution. The EU Chips Act, proposed by the European Commission last year and confirmed by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, aims to double the bloc's share of global chip output to 20% by 2030 and follows the U.S. CHIPS for America Act.

"We need chips to power digital and green transitions or healthcare systems," Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a tweet. Since the announcement of its chips subsidies plan last year, the EU has already attracted more than 100 billion euros in public and private investments, an EU official said. "The critical piece of the equation which the EU will need to get right, as for the U.S., is how much of the supply chains supporting the industry can be moved to the EU and at what cost," said [Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies]. While the Commission had originally proposed funding only cutting-edge chip plants, EU governments and lawmakers have widened the scope to cover the whole value chain, including older chips and research and design facilities.

In addition to the company's long-rumored mixed reality headset, Apple is expected to launch new MacBooks, as well as a "major" update to the Apple Watch's watchOS software at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. All told, WWDC 2023 could end up being one of Apple's "biggest product launch events ever," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The Verge reports: Let's start with the Macs. Gurman doesn't explicitly say which macOS-powered computers Apple could announce in June, but lists around half a dozen devices it currently plans to release this year or early 2024. There's an all new 15-inch MacBook Air, an updated 13-inch MacBook Air, and new 13-inch and "high-end" MacBook Pros. Meanwhile on the Mac side Apple still needs to replace its last Intel-powered device, the Mac Pro, with an Apple Silicon model, and it also reportedly has plans to refresh its all-in-one 24-inch iMac.

Bloomberg's report notes that "at least some of the new laptops" will make an appearance. The bad news is that none are likely to run Apple's next-generation M3 chips, and will instead ship with M2-era processors. Apple apparently also has a couple of new Mac Studio computers in development, but Bloomberg is less clear on when they could launch.

Over on the software side, which is WWDC's traditional focus, watchOS will reportedly receive a "major" update that includes a revamped interface. Otherwise, we could be in for a relatively quiet show on the operating system front as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS are not expected to receive major updates this year. Gurman does say that work to allow sideloading on iOS to comply with upcoming EU legislation is ongoing.

Germany consists of 16 states, the largest of which is Bavaria (covering about of fifth of Germany by area). Hours after Germany closed its last three nuclear power plants, Bavaria's premier offered to keep one of the three reactors running as a state-controlled power plant (rather than as a federally-controlled plant), according to a report in DW.

It reports that the premier told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that Bavaria was "demanding that the federal government give states the responsibility for the continued operation of nuclear power. Until the [energy] crisis ends and while the transition to renewables has not succeeded, we must use every form of energy until the end of the decade. Bavaria is ready to face up to this responsibility." He also told the newspaper that Germany is "a pioneer in nuclear fusion research and are examining the construction of our own research reactor, in cooperation with other countries. It can't be that a country of engineers like Germany gives up any claim to shaping the future and international competitiveness."

Now Reuters reports that Germany's federal government just issued their answer. No. Germany's Environment Ministry on Sunday rejected a demand from the state of Bavaria to allow it to continue operating nuclear power plants, saying jurisdiction for such facilities lies with the federal government... Environment Minister Steffi Lemke said the authorisation for [the Bavaria-based nuclear plant] had expired and restarting its reactor would require a new license. "It is important to accept the state of the art in science and technology and to respect the decision of the German Bundestag," Lemke said in a statement sent to Reuters.

Finland finally began regular output Sunday from its first new nuclear power plant in more than four decades. Reuters reports that the Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) nuclear reactor is also Europe's first new nuclear plant in 16 years. Construction started in 2005, with the plant due to open four years later — but it was then "plagued by technical issues" which continued to the very end. OL3 first supplied test production to Finland's national power grid in March last year and was expected at the time to begin regular output four months later, but instead suffered a string of breakdowns and outages that took months to fix.
The reactor will be Europe's largest, the article points out: OL3's operator Teollisuuden Voima (TVO), which is owned by Finnish utility Fortum and a consortium of energy and industrial companies, has said the unit is expected to meet around 14% of Finland's electricity demand, reducing the need for imports from Sweden and Norway. The new reactor is expected to produce for at least 60 years, TVO said in a statement on Sunday after completing the transition from testing to regular output. "The production of Olkiluoto 3 stabilises the price of electricity and plays an important role in the Finnish green transition," TVO Chief Executive Jarmo Tanhua said in the statement.
"News of OL3's start-up comes as Germany on Saturday switches off its last three remaining reactors, while Sweden, France, Britain and others plan new developments."

"The abundant sun of northern Africa may soon power Europe's homes and businesses," reports the Washington Post, "as European leaders consider connecting massive North African solar projects to undersea power cables to free their continent from Russian energy." The projects would take advantage of the climate quirk that one side of the Mediterranean is far drearier and cloudier than the other, although Europe and North Africa are geographically close. Abundant desert land also makes North African megaprojects far easier than in Europe, where open spaces tend to be agricultural or mountainous. The sudden need for alternative energy following Russia's invasion of Ukraine means that North African solar projects intended to send electricity to Europe are under active discussion, officials and experts say, as European leaders see a straightforward way to secure large amounts of green power. Past proposals have suggested that North African energy projects could meet as much as 15 percent of Europe's electricity demand.

The interest is especially high in Morocco, where undersea electrical cables already cross the 10-mile span to Spain at the Strait of Gibraltar. Moroccan leaders — who never had any fossil fuels to export — see a chance to promote their country as a renewable energy giant. Europe, meanwhile, wants to hit its ambitious climate goals and address its need for non-Russian energy at the same time. The result is a confluence of interests that could lead to a sudden leap forward for Europe's renewable energy uptake.

More broadly, it is a test for the concept of shipping green energy from sunny parts of the world to regions where the sun doesn't shine as brightly.... Europe alone doesn't have "the potential for the scale to create the dimensions of the renewable energy that we need," said European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, speaking alongside Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita.
The article cites estimates from the International Renewable Energy Agency that North Africa's "installable capacity" is 2,792 gigawatts of solar power and 223 gigawatts of wind power. Laura El-Katiri, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in North African renewable energy, writes that could generate more than two and a half times Europe's 2021 electricity output.

"Germany's final three nuclear power plants close their doors on Saturday," reports CNN, "marking the end of the country's nuclear era that has spanned more than six decades...." [D]espite last-minute calls to keep the plants online amid an energy crisis, the German government has been steadfast. "The position of the German government is clear: nuclear power is not green. Nor is it sustainable," Steffi Lemke, Germany's Federal Minister for the Environment and Consumer Protection and a Green Party member, told CNN."We are embarking on a new era of energy production," she said.

The closure of the three plants — Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim — represents the culmination of a plan set in motion more than 20 years ago. But its roots are even older. In the 1970s, a strong anti-nuclear movement in Germany emerged. Disparate groups came together to protest new power plants, concerned about the risks posed by the technology and, for some, the link to nuclear weapons. The movement gave birth to the Green Party, which is now part of the governing coalition...

For critics of Germany's policy, however, it's irrational to turn off a low-carbon source of energy as the impacts of the climate crisis intensify. "We need to keep existing, safe nuclear reactors operating while simultaneously ramping up renewables as fast as possible," Leah Stokes, a professor of climate and energy policy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told CNN. The big risk, she said, is that fossil fuels fill the energy gap left by nuclear. Reductions in Germany's nuclear energy since Fukushima have been primarily offset by increases in coal, according to research published last year.

Germany plans to replace the roughly 6% of electricity generated by the three nuclear plants with renewables, but also gas and coal.... Now Germany must work out what do with the deadly, high-level radioactive waste, which can remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
CNN also notes how other countries approach nuclear power:

• Denmark passed a resolution in the 1980s not to construct nuclear power plants
• Finland began test production from a new nuclear plant last year
• Switzerland voted in 2017 to phase out nuclear power
• France, which gets about 70% of its power from nuclear, is planning six new reactors.
• Italy closed its last reactors in 1990

The Python Software Foundation is "concerned that proposed EU cybersecurity laws will leave open source organizations and individuals unfairly liable for distributing incorrect code," according to the Register. The PSF reviewed the EU's proposed "Cyber Resilience Act" and "Product Liability Act" and reports "issues that put the mission of our organization and the health of the open-source software community at risk."

From the Register's report: "If the proposed law is enforced as currently written, the authors of open-source components might bear legal and financial responsibility for the way their components are applied in someone else's commercial product," the PSF said in a statement shared on Tuesday by executive director Deb Nicholson. "The existing language makes no differentiation between independent authors who have never been paid for the supply of software and corporate tech behemoths selling products in exchange for payments from end-users...."

The PSF argues the EU lawmakers should provide clear exemptions for public software repositories that serve the public good and for organizations and developers hosting packages on public repositories. "We need it to be crystal clear who is on the hook for both the assurances and the accountability that software consumers deserve," the PSF concludes. The PSF is asking anyone who shares its concerns to convey that sentiment to an appropriate EU Member of Parliament by April 26, while amendments focused on protecting open source software are being considered.

Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, told The Register that the free and open source (FOSS) community should think carefully about the scope of the exemptions being sought. "I'm worried that many in FOSS are falling into a trap that for-profit companies have been trying to lay for us on this issue," he said. "While it seems on the surface that a blanket exception for FOSS would be a good thing for FOSS, in fact, this an attempt for companies to get the FOSS community to help them skirt their ordinary product liability. For profit companies that deploy FOSS should have the same obligations for security and certainty for their users as proprietary software companies do."
The article points out that numerous tech organizations are urging clarifications in the proposed regulations, including NLnet Labs and the Eclipse Foundation.

The European parliament is preparing tough new measures over the use of artificial intelligence, including forcing chatbot makers to reveal if they use copyrighted material, as the EU edges towards enacting the world's most restrictive regime on the development of AI. Financial Times: MEPs in Brussels are close to agreeing a set of proposals to form part of Europe's Artificial Intelligence Act, a sweeping set of regulations on the use of AI, according to people familiar with the process. Among the measures likely to be proposed by parliamentarians is for developers of products such as OpenAI's ChatGPT to declare if copyrighted material is being used to train their AI models, a measure designed to allow content creators to demand payment. MEPs also want responsibility for misuse of AI programmes to lie with developers such as OpenAI, rather than smaller businesses using it.

One contentious proposal from MEPs is a ban on the use of facial recognition in public spaces under any circumstances. EU member states, under pressure from their local police forces, are expected to push back against a total ban on biometrics, said people with direct knowledge of the negotiations. Agreement between MEPs, who have been fighting over measures to police artificial intelligence for close to two years, is critical to kick-starting broader negotiations over the AI Act. The proposed law would represent some of the toughest rules on the development of AI and comes in the wake of rising concerns about potential abuses of the technology.

A report released on Wednesday found that wind and solar energy made up a record high 12% of global electricity generation in 2022. Meanwhile EU countries are lagging behind with wind power expansion. From a report: All renewable energy sources, including nuclear power, made up 39% of global electricity last year according to the report by independent energy think tank Ember. The authors predict a phasedown of gas power along with a reduction of coal-fired power, forecasting that fossil fuel generation will decline by 0.3% this year. Electricity is as clean as ever, with the share of solar power rising by 24% and wind by 17% from 2021. Solar and wind energy now makes up over 10% of electricity in more than 60 countries. Ember's annual global electricity review takes data from 78 countries which account for 93% of global electricity demand. The European Union gets 22% of its electricity from wind and solar power. However, EU countries seem to lag behind global wind energy expansion, logging 9% growth from wind power -- below the global average. "The EU started the race to renewables early but, as the world accelerates, it cannot afford complacency," said Sarah Brown, Ember's Europe program lead. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February last year caused concern among EU member states about declining fossil fuel imports. The European Commission put forward a plan to increase renewable energy to 45%, an increase of 5% compared to the previous year.

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.

The company behind ChatGPT will propose measures to resolve data privacy concerns that sparked a temporary Italian ban on the artificial intelligence chatbot, regulators said Thursday. The Associated Press reports: In a video call late Wednesday between the watchdog's commissioners and OpenAI executives including CEO Sam Altman, the company promised to set out measures to address the concerns. Those remedies have not been detailed. The Italian watchdog said it didn't want to hamper AI's development but stressed to OpenAI the importance of complying with the 27-nation EU's stringent privacy rules. The regulators imposed the ban after some users' messages and payment information were exposed to others. They also questioned whether there's a legal basis for OpenAI to collect massive amounts of data used to train ChatGPT's algorithms and raised concerns the system could sometimes generate false information about individuals.

Other regulators in Europe and elsewhere have started paying more attention after Italy's action. Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it's "following up with the Italian regulator to understand the basis for their action and we will coordinate with all EU Data Protection Authorities in relation to this matter." France's data privacy regulator, CNIL, said it's investigating after receiving two complaints about ChatGPT. Canada's privacy commissioner also has opened an investigation into OpenAI after receiving a complaint about the suspected "collection, use and disclosure of personal information without consent." In a blog post this week, the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office warned that "organizations developing or using generative AI should be considering their data protection obligations from the outset" and design systems with data protection as a default. "This isn't optional -- if you're processing personal data, it's the law," the office said.

In an apparent response to the concerns, OpenAI published a blog post Wednesday outlining its approach to AI safety. The company said it works to remove personal information from training data where feasible, fine-tune its models to reject requests for personal information of private individuals, and acts on requests to delete personal information from its systems.