Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet, a familiar name to Slashdot readers for over 23 years, has undergone a radical transformation: Freenet 2023, or "Locutus". While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer, allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others. The new Freenet is implemented in Rust and designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user.
"Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web," explains the announcement...

And in the comments below, Ian points out that "When the new Freenet is up and running, I think it will be the first system of any kind that could host something like Wikipedia, not just the data but the wiki CMS system it's built on. An editable wikipedia, entirely decentralized and very scalable...

"We've already had interest from everyone from video game developers who want to build a decentralized MMORPG, to political advocacy groups across the political spectrum. Plenty of people value freedom."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.

Meta's new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its "in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads," Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post... But the MTIA chip is seemingly a long ways away: it's not set to come out until 2025, TechCrunch reports.
Meta has been working on "a massive project to upgrade its AI infrastructure in the past year," Reuters reports, "after executives realized it lacked the hardware and software to support demand from product teams building AI-powered features."

As a result, the company scrapped plans for a large-scale rollout of an in-house inference chip and started work on a more ambitious chip capable of performing training and inference, Reuters reported...

Meta said it has an AI-powered system to help its engineers create computer code, similar to tools offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
TechCrunch calls these announcements "an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft."

Meta's VP of Infrastructure told TechCrunch "This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale." Over the past decade or so, Meta has spent billions of dollars recruiting top data scientists and building new kinds of AI, including AI that now powers the discovery engines, moderation filters and ad recommenders found throughout its apps and services. But the company has struggled to turn many of its more ambitious AI research innovations into products, particularly on the generative AI front. Until 2022, Meta largely ran its AI workloads using a combination of CPUs — which tend to be less efficient for those sorts of tasks than GPUs — and a custom chip designed for accelerating AI algorithms...

The MTIA is an ASIC, a kind of chip that combines different circuits on one board, allowing it to be programmed to carry out one or many tasks in parallel... Custom AI chips are increasingly the name of the game among the Big Tech players. Google created a processor, the TPU (short for "tensor processing unit"), to train large generative AI systems like PaLM-2 and Imagen. Amazon offers proprietary chips to AWS customers both for training (Trainium) and inferencing (Inferentia). And Microsoft, reportedly, is working with AMD to develop an in-house AI chip called Athena.

Meta says that it created the first generation of the MTIA — MTIA v1 — in 2020, built on a 7-nanometer process. It can scale beyond its internal 128 MB of memory to up to 128 GB, and in a Meta-designed benchmark test — which, of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt — Meta claims that the MTIA handled "low-complexity" and "medium-complexity" AI models more efficiently than a GPU. Work remains to be done in the memory and networking areas of the chip, Meta says, which present bottlenecks as the size of AI models grow, requiring workloads to be split up across several chips. (Not coincidentally, Meta recently acquired an Oslo-based team building AI networking tech at British chip unicorn Graphcore.) And for now, the MTIA's focus is strictly on inference — not training — for "recommendation workloads" across Meta's app family...

If there's a common thread in today's hardware announcements, it's that Meta's attempting desperately to pick up the pace where it concerns AI, specifically generative AI... In part, Meta's feeling increasing pressure from investors concerned that the company's not moving fast enough to capture the (potentially large) market for generative AI. It has no answer — yet — to chatbots like Bard, Bing Chat or ChatGPT. Nor has it made much progress on image generation, another key segment that's seen explosive growth.

If the predictions are right, the total addressable market for generative AI software could be $150 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts that it'll raise GDP by 7%. Even a small slice of that could erase the billions Meta's lost in investments in "metaverse" technologies like augmented reality headsets, meetings software and VR playgrounds like Horizon Worlds.

LinkedIn, the networking platform used by millions of employees and companies, said on Monday it will pare down its operations in China, capping a multiyear pullback that exemplified the challenges of running a foreign business in China. From a report: The company, owned by Microsoft, said it will lay off 716 employees worldwide, including teams dedicated to engineering and marketing in China, because of slumping demand. It did not say how many of those layoffs will be in China. LinkedIn will also shut its China job posting app, a bare-bones version of its international service, by August. Users of the app, called InCareer, could only search for jobs and not post or share articles the way they can on LinkedIn.

When LinkedIn started a Chinese-language version of its website in 2014, it charted a path that its peers, including Facebook and Google, had shied away from. It partnered with local firms and began censoring the content of millions of Chinese customers in accordance with Beijing's strict laws. Several U.S. journalists and activists said their profiles had been blocked because of "prohibited content." The company said at the time that while it opposed government censorship, its absence in the country could deprive Chinese professionals of the chance to make professional connections.

Analyst Jean-Louis Gassee, writing at Monday Note about Intel's habit of requesting investors that they wait for the company to catch up to the competition: Concurrently, the company's revenue for its new IFS foundry business decreased by 24% to an insignificant $118M, with a $140M operating loss gingerly explained as "increased spending to support strategic growth." Other Intel businesses such as Networking (NEX) products and Mobileye -- yet another Autonomous Driving Technology -- add nothing promising to the company's picture. This doesn't prevent [Intel CEO Pat] Gelsinger from once again intoning the Just You Wait refrain. This time, the promise is to "regain transistor performance and power performance leadership by 2025."

Is it credible?

We all agree that the US tech industry would be better served by Intel providing a better alternative to TSMC's and Samsung's advanced foundries. Indeed, We The Taxpayers are funding efforts to stimulate our country's semiconductor sector at the tune of $52B. I won't comment other than to reminisce about a difficult late 80s conversation with an industry CEO when, as an Apple exec, I naively opposed an attempt to combat the loss of semiconductor memory business to foreign competitors by subsidizing something tentatively called US Memories. But, in this really complicated 2023 world, what choices do we actually have?

For years I've watched Intel's repeated mistakes, the misplaced self-regard, the ineffective leadership changes for this Silicon Valley icon, for the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, only to be disappointed time and again as the company failed to shake the Wintel yoke -- while Microsoft successfully diversified. I fervently hope Pat Gelsinger succeeds. His achievement would resonate deeply, it would bring to mind another historic turnaround: Steve Jobs' 1997 return to the Apple he had "left" in 1985.

This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software are simplified. DENT unites silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals to enable the transition to disaggregated networks."

Or, as the Linux Foundation, the operating system provides "a flexible and customizable platform for network administrators to manage their networks." DENT provides access to open source-based switches at a lower cost and with more flexibility compared to proprietary switches with locked ecosystems. Network wiring closets in many facilities--including retail stores, warehousing, remote locations, enterprises, and small and mid-sized businesses--are often small, requiring a compact solution for network management. Additionally, staff expertise may be limited, and branch-office switches from leading suppliers can require costly contracts. DENT can be easily deployed on white-box hardware in small spaces, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for network management. As a result, DENT deployment can significantly enhance network management in a wide range of environments, providing greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability...

DentOS enables Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology to connect and manage thousands of devices like cameras, sensors, entry and exit gates, and access points on the network edge.

In a strange twist to the long history of the Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox has announced the donation of the lab's Silicon Valley headquarters and related assets to SRI International, another well-established tech research center. From a report: Opened in 1970, PARC was a pioneering developer of technologies like the graphic user interface, laser printing and Ethernet networking. PARC has recently been doing work in areas like artificial intelligence, the internet of things, clean tech and 3-D printing.

Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has now rolled out to Android users. TechCrunch reports: The app, which promises a future of decentralized social networking and choose-your-own algorithms, initially launched to iOS users in late February and remains in a closed beta. The exclusivity is driving demand for the newer social network to some extent, but so is having Dorsey's name attached. Bluesky aims to give users algorithmic choice, letting them eventually choose from a marketplace of algorithms that let them control what they see on their own feed, instead of having it controlled by some central authority.

At launch, however, Bluesky remains a pared-down version of Twitter without many of the features that make the social network what it is today, including basic tools for tracking likes or bookmarks, editing tweets, quote-tweeting, DM's, using hashtags and more. It's also building in decentralization with its own protocol -- the AT Protocol -- instead of contributing to the existing work around ActivityPub, the protocol powering the open source Twitter alternative Mastodon and a range of other decentralized apps in the wider "Fediverse" -- the name for these interconnected servers running open software used for web publishing. That puts Bluesky on the outside of where a lot of the current activity is taking place around decentralized social networking. You can download Bluesky on the Google Play Store here.

Southwest Airlines has fixed a technical issue that delayed hundreds of flights across the country. In a statement, Southwest Airlines spokesperson Dan Landson says the company resumed operations after working through "data connection issues resulting from a firewall failure." From a report: The airline started having issues at around 10:30AM ET, with data from FlightAware suggesting that over 1,700 Southwest flights have been delayed so far. The Federal Aviation Administration paused departures at the request of Southwest Airlines around this time and later unpaused flights at 11:10AM ET. "Early this morning, a vendor-supplied firewall went down and connection to some operational data was unexpectedly lost," Landson says. "Southwest Teams worked quickly to minimize flight disruptions."

The Free Software Foundation certifies products that meet their standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. And they put out a new "Respects Your Freedom" certification on Thursday for ThinkPenguin's free software gigabit mini VPN router, the TPE-R1400.

From the FSF's announcement: This is ThinkPenguin's first device to receive RYF certification in 2023, adding to their vast catalogue of certified devices from previous years. As with previous routers from ThinkPenguin, the Free Software Gigabit Mini VPN Router ships with an FSF-endorsed fully free embedded GNU/Linux distribution called libreCMC. It also comes with a custom flavor of the U-Boot boot loader, assembled by Robert Call, the maintainer of libreCMC and a former FSF intern.

The router enables users to run their network connection through a VPN service, helping to simplify the process of keeping their communications secure and private. While ThinkPenguin offers a VPN service, users are not required to purchase a subscription to their service in order to use the router, and the device comes with detailed instructions on how to use the router with a wide variety of VPN providers.

"We're pleased to see ThinkPenguin continue with their commitment to bringing out devices that put software freedom as their first priority under the RYF program. The release of this router shows that ThinkPenguin is committed to the privacy and freedom of their users," said the FSF's executive director, Zoë Kooyman....

"The latest version of ThinkPenguin's VPN router lets its users take advantage of gigabit per second Internet connections while protecting their rights and privacy," said FSF's copyright and licensing associate, Craig Topham.

A group of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers plans to compile a proposal next month urging the government to ban social networking services such as TikTok if they are used for disinformation campaigns, an LDP lawmaker said on Monday. From a report: Many U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to ban the popular Chinese-owned social media app, alleging the app could be used for data collection, content censorship and harm to children's mental health. "If it's verified that an app has been intentionally used by a certain party of a certain country for their influence operations with malice ..., promptly halting the service should be considered," Norihiro Nakayama told Reuters in an interview. "Making it clear that operations can be halted will help keep app operators in check as it means TikTok's 17 million users (in Japan), for example, will lose their access. It will also lead to sense of security for users," Nakayama said. Nakayama, a senior member of a ruling party lawmakers' group looking into ways to enhance Japan's economic security, said that proposal will not be targeting at any particular platform.

"With the recent attention on ChatGPT and OpenAI's release of their APIs, many developers have developed clients for modern platforms to talk to this super smart AI chatbot," writes maker/retro coding enthusiast yeokm1 . "However I'm pretty sure almost nobody has written one for a vintage platform like MS-DOS."

They share a blog post with all the details — including footage of their client ultimately running on a vintage IBM PC from 1984 (with a black and orange monitor and those big, boxy keys). "3.5 years ago, I wrote a Slack client to run on Windows 3.1," the blog post explains. "I thought to try something different this time and develop for an even older platform as a challenge."

One challenge was just finding a networking API for DOS. But everything came together, with the ChatGPT-for-DOS app written using Visual Studio Code text editor (testing on a virtual machine running DOS 6.22), parsing the JSON output from OpenAI's Chat Completion API. "And before you ask, I did not use ChatGPT for help to code this app in any way," the blog post concludes. But after the app was working, he used it to ask ChatGPT how one would build such an app — and ChatGPT erroneously suggested breezily that he just try accessing OpenAI's Python API from the DOS command line.

"What is the AI smoking...?"

Dozens of the world's largest natural history museums revealed on Thursday a survey of everything in their collections. The global inventory is made up of 1.1 billion objects that range from dinosaur skulls to pollen grains to mosquitoes. The New York Times reports: The survey's organizers, who described the effort in the journal Science, said they hoped the survey would help museums join forces to answer pressing questions, such as how quickly species are becoming extinct and how climate change is altering the natural world. "It gives us intelligence now to start thinking about things that museums can do together that we wouldn't have conceived of before," said Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington and one of the leaders of the project. "It's the argument for networking the global museum."

Scientists had created smaller inventory databases before. But the new effort, which included 73 museums in 28 countries, was unparalleled, experts said. The survey revealed important gaps in the world's collections. Relatively few objects come from the regions around the earth's poles, which are especially vulnerable to the impact of global warming, for example. Insects, the most diverse group of animal species, were also underrepresented.

"The analysis is at a global scale that no one else has managed," said Emily Meineke, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the survey. Dr. Meineke said that this survey of large institutions also laid the groundwork for surveys of smaller ones, which might hold even more surprises. "Once these methods are applied down the line to smaller collections, the results are likely to give us a truer picture of biodiversity globally," she said.

In the 1970s, Bob Metcalfe helped develop the primary technology that lets you send email or connect with a printer over an office network. From a report: In June 1972, Bob Metcalfe, a 26-year-old engineer fresh out of graduate school, joined a new research lab in Palo Alto, Calif., as it set out to build something that few people could even imagine: a personal computer. After another engineer gave up the job, Dr. Metcalfe was asked to build a technology that could connect the desktop machines across an office and send information between them. The result was Ethernet, a computer networking technology that would one day become an industry standard. For decades, it has connected PCs to servers, printers and the internet in corporate offices and homes across the globe.

For his work on Ethernet, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced on Wednesday that Dr. Metcalfe, 76, would receive this year's Turing Award. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. When Dr. Metcalfe arrived at the Palo Alto Research Center -- a division of Xerox nicknamed PARC -- the first thing he did was connect the lab to the Arpanet, the wide-area network that later morphed into the modern internet. The Arpanet transmitted information among about 20 academic and corporate labs across the country. But as PARC researchers designed their personal computer, called the Alto, they realized they needed a network technology that could connect personal computers and other devices within an office, not over long distances. Further reading: Ethernet Creator Makes the Inventors Hall of Fame (2007).

The Reg has seen two recent incidents of Russian developers being blocked from public development of FOSS code. One was a refusal on the Linux kernel mailing list, the other a more general block on Github. In the last week, these events have both caused active, and sometimes heated, discussions in FOSS developer communities. From the report: The GitHub account of developer Alexander Amelkin has been blocked, and his repositories marked as "archived" â" including ipmitool, whose README describes it as "a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface." Unable to comment on Github itself, Amelkin described what happened on the project's older Soureforge page.

Amelkin works for Russian chipbuilder Yadro, which we described as working on RISC-V chips back in 2021. Microsoft is just obeying US law in this: according to the War and Sanctions database of the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the NACP, Yadro is a sanctioned company. However, on LinkedIn, Amelkin disputes his employer's involvement. Over on Hacker News, commentators seem to be generally in favor of the move, although the discussion on LWN is more measured, pointing out both that there is little threat from server-management tools like this, but that Microsoft probably has no choice.

Amelkin is not alone. Over on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, a contribution from Sergey Semin has been refused with the terse notice: "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization. Please withhold networking contributions until further notice." Semin is a developer at chipmaker Baikal Electronics, a company whose website has been suspended for a year now, as we noted a year ago in a story that also mentions Yadro. We were reporting on Baikal's efforts to develop its own CPUs nearly a decade ago, mere months after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And once again, there is spirited debate over the move on the Orange Site.

Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people, withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it has not filled and cancel some projects, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent. From a report: The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes to become more efficient this year. Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off -- or plans to lay-off -- roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year. Facebook's parent firm said it expects the latest "restructuring" efforts to start in April, and the process to impact business groups in May. Zuckerberg said that the company will also cancel "lower priority projects," adding that it "underestimated the indirect costs" associated with these initiatives.

Fulfilment of initial promise made for the technology remains elusive. From a report: The Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) has offered a tantalising prospect to people who want to learn but don't like to leave the house: join us 'virtually, for a postgraduate course in the metaverse.' Students signing up to WU's professional master of sustainability, entrepreneurship and technology programme can complete the entire part-time course -- attending lectures, meeting their classmates for a coffee and so on -- by just logging in via a laptop. The course -- developed in partnership with Tomorrow University of Applied Sciences, an edtech start-up based in Berlin -- is one of many examples where business schools have embraced the metaverse, 3D technology, virtual reality headsets and avatars to extend the reach of management and leadership training.

Setting up the course "provides us with greater reach, making the course more global," explains Barbara Stottinger, dean of WU's executive academy. However, she is quick to add: "Vienna is a great location so coming to campus is still pretty attractive to most of our students." And this is the problem at the heart of why many business schools have been reluctant to enter the metaverse for course tuition: studying in the real world has its advantages. Teaching the interpersonal skills of leadership and networking that are so integral to postgraduate management courses, like the MBA, is better done in person. It also avoids having to fund purchases of the hardware and software necessary for metaverse projects. Meanwhile, the metaverse has been caught in an extreme example of a 'hype cycle.' This is where wild enthusiasm about a new technology turns to widespread rejection, as its reality fails to live up to what is claimed for it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economic Times: Meta, the owner of Facebook andInstagram, is planning a fresh round of layoffs and will cut thousands of employees as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter. The world's largest social networking company is eliminating more jobs, on top of a 13% reduction in November, in a bid to become a more efficient organization. In its earlier round of cuts, Meta slashed 11,000 workers in what was its first-ever major layoff.

The company has also been working to flatten its organization, giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams it deems nonessential, Bloomberg News reported in February, a move that is still being finalized and could affect thousands of staffers. The imminent round of cuts is being driven by financial targets and is separate from the "flattening," said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Meta, which has seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and has shifted focus to a virtual-reality platform called the metaverse, has been asking directors and vice presidents to make lists of employees that can be let go, the people said. This phase of layoffs could be finalized in the next week, according to the people.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried "has been under house arrest at his parents' home on the Stanford campus since December," writes the Washington Post, "making the elite university the unlikely host to one of America's most notorious alleged white-collar criminals.

"Surrounded by student co-ops, fraternity houses and other faculty homes, he's the talk of the neighborhood." Bankman-Fried, the son of two Stanford law professors, was released on a $250 million bond secured by the Craftsman-style house. While awaiting his fraud trial later this year, Bankman-Fried wears an ankle bracelet to track his movements and plays with his new dog, Sandor, according to a Puck News report.... It remains to be seen what consequences Bankman-Fried, who pleaded "not guilty," might face. So far, his ability to be detained at home, instead of held in prison, is an exception to how most federal defendants are treated. The quiet, traffic-light Stanford neighborhood is quite the upgrade from Fox Hill, a notoriously rough prison in the Bahamas where Bankman-Fried was briefly held before being extradited.

If Bankman-Fried violates the terms of his bail agreement, his parents could lose their house, which they've owned since 1991 and is worth over $3.5 million, according to public property records....

The U.S. government has tried to restrict his access to virtual private networks and certain apps where messages disappear, but a final ruling has not been made. The judge presiding over his case asked in a hearing last month, "Why am I being asked to turn him loose in this garden of electronic devices?," highlighting that despite any restrictions the court might place on Bankman-Fried's use of technology, he remains in a home with his parents who also have a plethora of ways to be wired. On Friday, prosecutors proposed limiting Bankman-Fried to a flip-phone or "non-smartphone" that cannot access the internet, and that he be issued a new laptop "with limited functionalities." Prosecutors also want to place strict limits and monitoring tools on his parents' devices.
But meanwhile, among the student population, "There are party fliers with his likeness. He's a punchline in campus comedy sketches. Students ride their bikes by on dates.... When asked whether they could confirm a rumor that a nearby student co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stanford campus police did not respond."

And one freshman/cryptocurrency enthusiast even stole a sign from in front of Bankman-Fried's house, then "paraded it around for selfies at a cryptocurrency networking event. The sign is currently growing mold in his dorm-room closet." Bankman-Fried, who grew up on campus, "certainly fits into what I regard as the kind of culture of Stanford," says Richard White, a retired Stanford history professor — even if the 30-year-old former billionaire left Silicon Valley to attend MIT. White and others characterize Stanford's culture as a place where faculty and students are emboldened to take big risks in conceiving the next hot start-up or breakthrough innovation, often with easy access to capital, the conviction that they're changing the world — and few consequences if things go south.
"Through his spokesman Mark Botnick, Bankman-Fried declined to comment for this article...."

In the land of patent litigation, all patent trolls want to file in the US Western District of Texas Court. This court is infamous for being sympathetic to patent plaintiffs. That's why patent litigator WSOU Investments, aka Brazos Licensing and Development, went after Dell, EMC, and VMware in this Court. Usually, this would have been the smart move. Not this time. District Judge Alan Albright granted the defendants a directed verdict, and that was the end of the matter. From a report: What happened was this: WSOU, although successful before with their carpet bombing patent lawsuit strategy, failed this time. According to the lead defense counsel and Gibson Dunn partner, Brian A. Rosenthal, "This case got to trial because the plaintiff refused to come to their senses before trial. We obtained a number of serious exclusions of evidence prior to trial, and told them very early on the case had no merit." The judge agreed.

That came as a surprise to those of us who watch patent lawsuits, so you don't have to. As Heather Meeker, the well-known open-source and intellectual property (IP) lawyer, said, "This is surprisingly defendant-friendly from Judge Albright, who has received a lot of criticism for making Waco such a patent plaintiff-friendly docket." Until now, WSOU had been very successful. As a Patent Assertion Entity (PAEs), its only goal is to profit by acquiring patents and then suing companies that might be using the patents' intellectual property (IP) assets. It does this by using its portfolio of technology patents to file numerous individual suits involving different patents against companies. WSOU's main tactic, as Unified Patents put it, "forces operating companies to either settle or fight, on average, eight lawsuits at once."

Most companies faced with the financial burden of struggling with so many lawsuits settle rather than fight. Not this time. For the first time, companies decided to take the issues to court. In this particular set of cases, WSOU claimed in a June 2020 lawsuit that the defendants had infringed on three cloud infrastructure networking patents, and sought $435 million in damages. Rosenthal argued that the patents in question were old and irrelevant to the defendants' interests. The defense team had informed WSOU in October 2020 that there was no proof of direct infringement, but the plaintiff persisted with the case, leading to exclusions of evidence prior to trial. So it was that on the first day of the trial, two of the patents were tossed out on evidentiary rulings, and the plaintiff rested its case on the third day. The defense then requested a directed verdict, which was granted by Albright, resulting in a win for the defendants. In short, even this patent-friendly court could find no evidence at all for WSOU's assertions.

In exchange for installing one of Heata's water-heating server units in your home, the UK networking company will offer you free hot water for a year. Tom's Hardware reports: The unit doesn't replace your existing heating unit, it works alongside it -- providing some, but not all, of your hot water needs. According to the company, the unit will provide "a useful base load" of hot water, and can provide up to 4.8kWh of hot water per day, though the exact amount will depend on usage as well as other factors. Heata is obligated to provide a minimum of 2.5kWh per day. Heata estimates its hosts will save up to 200 pounds per year, based on average household hot water use.

Heata will take care of the installation, which takes under two hours and has been tested with British Gas engineers and checked to ensure it doesn't invalidate cylinder warranties with "a leading cylinder manufacturer." Not everyone will be eligible to join Heata's trial, of course -- Heata's unit is designed for vented domestic hot water cylinders with a diameter of 425 - 450mm, and there will need to be an adequate amount of clearance space around the unit for the installation. The unit will need both electricity and broadband to run. Heata will take care of the electricity via reimbursement: the electricity used to run the unit will be metered (visible to the host), and Heata will credit the host for the electricity used at 10% above the market rate.

It's not quite as clear how the broadband will be taken care of -- in Heata's FAQ on its trial signup page, it says that Heata will need to connect to your broadband to communicate with the units. While the company assures that "most of the time the unit will simply be sending some monitoring information (temperatures/fan speeds etc) back to base)," so you "shouldn't notice any impact," that's still not great from a privacy standpoint. [...] As for the server, you won't be able to access it or use it to mine crypto or whatever you were hoping to do with it. Heata sells its compute services to businesses looking for sustainable alternatives to data centers. The Heata trial lasts for one year, and may be extended, "depending on how things go." Heata says it will take care of removing the installed unit and re-insulating the section of the cylinder that the unit was attached to.