An anonymous reader shares a report: Germany's foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%-90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, two German newspapers reported on Wednesday.

According to a joint report by publications Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, Germany's spying agency BND had indications that the institute had conducted gain-of-function experiments, whereby viruses are modified to become more transmissible to humans for research purposes.

It also had indications that numerous violations of safety regulations had occurred at the lab, the papers said. The spy agency assessment's was based on an unspecified intelligence operation code-named "Saaremaa" as well as on publicly-available data. It had been commissioned by the office of Germany's chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, but never published, the report said.

Mozilla has warned that the U.S. Department of Justice's proposed remedies in its antitrust case against Google would harm independent browsers and reduce competition in the browser market. The DOJ and several state attorneys general last week filed revised proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google search case that would prohibit all search payments to browser developers, a move Mozilla says would disproportionately impact smaller players.

"These proposed remedies prohibiting search payments to small and independent browsers miss the bigger picture -- and the people who will suffer most are everyday internet users," said Mark Surman, President of Mozilla. Unlike Apple and Microsoft, which generate revenue from hardware and operating systems, Mozilla relies primarily on search revenue to fund browser development. Mozilla argues that cutting these payments would not solve search dominance but would instead strengthen the position of tech giants.

Mozilla also warned that the proposal threatens its ability to maintain Gecko, one of only three major browser engines alongside Google's Chromium and Apple's WebKit. "If we lose our ability to maintain Gecko, it's game over for an open, independent web," Surman said, noting that even Microsoft abandoned its browser engine in 2019. "If Mozilla is unable to sustain our browser engine, it would severely impact browser engine competition and mean the death of the open web as we know it -- essentially, creating a web where dominant players like Google and Apple, have even more control, not less."

Firefox serves 27 million monthly active users in the U.S. and nearly 205 million globally.

Britain's competition watchdog has concluded that Apple and Google are stifling competition in the UK mobile browser market, following an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The inquiry found Apple's iOS policies particularly restrictive, requiring all browsers to use its WebKit engine while giving Safari preferential access to features.

Apple's practice of pre-installing Safari as the default browser also reduces awareness of alternatives, despite allowing users to change defaults. Google faces similar criticism for pre-installing Chrome on most Android devices, though investigators noted both companies have recently taken steps to facilitate browser switching. The probe identified Apple's revenue-sharing arrangement with Google -- which pays a significant share of search revenue to be the default iPhone search engine -- as "significantly reducing their financial incentives to compete."

Google says its new open-source AI model, Gemma 3, achieves nearly the same performance as DeepSeek AI's R1 while using just one Nvidia H100 GPU, compared to an estimated 32 for R1. ZDNet reports: Using "Elo" scores, a common measurement system used to rank chess and athletes, Google claims Gemma 3 comes within 98% of the score of DeepSeek's R1, 1338 versus 1363 for R1. That means R1 is superior to Gemma 3. However, based on Google's estimate, the search giant claims that it would take 32 of Nvidia's mainstream "H100" GPU chips to achieve R1's score, whereas Gemma 3 uses only one H100 GPU.

Google's balance of compute and Elo score is a "sweet spot," the company claims. In a blog post, Google bills the new program as "the most capable model you can run on a single GPU or TPU," referring to the company's custom AI chip, the "tensor processing unit." "Gemma 3 delivers state-of-the-art performance for its size, outperforming Llama-405B, DeepSeek-V3, and o3-mini in preliminary human preference evaluations on LMArena's leaderboard," the blog post relates, referring to the Elo scores. "This helps you to create engaging user experiences that can fit on a single GPU or TPU host."

Google's model also tops Meta's Llama 3's Elo score, which it estimates would require 16 GPUs. (Note that the numbers of H100 chips used by the competition are Google's estimate; DeepSeek AI has only disclosed an example of using 1,814 of Nvidia's less-powerful H800 GPUs to server answers with R1.) More detailed information is provided in a developer blog post on HuggingFace, where the Gemma 3 repository is offered.

According to The Verge, Sonos has abandoned its plans to release a streaming video player this year. From the report: The news was announced by the company's leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos' next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company's future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table "for now." [...]

Pinewood was designed to offer many of the same streaming video apps as other devices on the market along with deep universal search and content aggregation. But as I reported last month, Sonos also intended for it to double as an HDMI switcher and support passthrough functionality for gaming consoles, 4K Blu-ray players, and more. The box was also set to allow new configurations of surround sound systems using Sonos' many speakers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the EFF: EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans. Mark didn't set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a telecommunications technician for AT&T, most of that in San Francisco. But he always had a strong sense of right and wrong and a commitment to privacy. When the New York Times reported in late 2005 that the NSA was engaging in spying inside the U.S., Mark realized that he had witnessed how it was happening. He also realized that the President was not telling Americans the truth about the program. And, though newly retired, he knew that he had to do something. He showed up at EFF's front door in early 2006 with a simple question: "Do you folks care about privacy?"

We did. And what Mark told us changed everything. Through his work, Mark had learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) had installed a secret, secure room at AT&T's central office in San Francisco, called Room 641A. Mark was assigned to connect circuits carrying Internet data to optical "splitters" that sat just outside of the secret NSA room but were hardwired into it. Those splitters -- as well as similar ones in cities around the U.S. -- made a copy of all data going through those circuits and delivered it into the secret room. Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally. One, Senator Chris Dodd, took the floor of the Senate to acknowledge Mark as the great American hero he was.

Schools across the United States are increasingly using artificial intelligence to monitor students' online activities, raising significant privacy concerns after Vancouver Public Schools inadvertently released nearly 3,500 unredacted, sensitive student documents to reporters.

The surveillance software, developed by companies like Gaggle Safety Management, scans school-issued devices 24/7 for signs of bullying, self-harm, or violence, alerting staff when potential issues are detected. Approximately 1,500 school districts nationwide use Gaggle's technology to track six million students, with Vancouver schools paying $328,036 for three years of service.

While school officials maintain the technology has helped counselors intervene with at-risk students, documents revealed LGBTQ+ students were potentially outed to administrators through the monitoring.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That's enough to power 8.5 million households. According to the U.S. Solar Market Insight 2024 Year in Review report (PDF) released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, solar and storage account for 84% of all new electric generating capacity added to the grid last year.

In addition to historic deployment, surging U.S. solar manufacturing emerged as a landmark economic story in 2024. Domestic solar module production tripled last year, and at full capacity, U.S. factories can now produce enough to meet nearly all demand for solar panels in the U.S. Solar cell manufacturing also resumed in 2024, strengthening the U.S. energy supply chain. [...] Total US solar capacity is expected to reach 739 GW by 2035, but the report forecasts include scenarios showing how policy changes could impact the solar market. [...] The low case forecast shows a 130 GW decline in solar deployment over the next decade compared to the base case, representing nearly $250 billion of lost investment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: There's a power crunch looming as AI and cloud providers ramp up data center construction. But a new report suggests that a solution lies beneath their foundations. Advanced geothermal power could supply nearly two-thirds of new data center demand by 2030, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group. The additions would quadruple the amount of geothermal power capacity in the U.S. -- from 4 gigawatts to about 16 gigawatts -- while costing the same or less than what data center operators pay today. In the western U.S., where geothermal resources are more plentiful, the technology could provide 100% of new data center demand. Phoenix, for example, could add 3.8 gigawatts of data center capacity without building a single new conventional power plant.

Geothermal resources have enormous potential to provide consistent power. Historically, geothermal power plants have been limited to places where Earth's heat seeps close to the surface. But advanced geothermal techniques could unlock 90 gigawatts of clean power in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. [...] Because geothermal power has very low running costs, its price is competitive with data centers' energy costs today, the Rhodium report said. When data centers are sited similarly to how they are today, a process that typically takes into account proximity to fiber optics and major metro areas, geothermal power costs just over $75 per megawatt hour. But when developers account for geothermal potential in their siting, the costs drop significantly, down to around $50 per megawatt hour.

The report assumes that new generating capacity would be "behind the meter," which is what experts call power plants that are hooked up directly to a customer, bypassing the grid. Wait times for new power plants to connect to the grid can stretch on for years. As a result, behind the meter arrangements have become more appealing for data center operators who are scrambling to build new capacity.

Spain's government has approved legislation imposing substantial fines of up to 35 million euros or 7% of global turnover on companies that fail to clearly label AI-generated content. Reuters reports: The bill adopts guidelines from the European Union's landmark AI Act imposing strict transparency obligations on AI systems deemed to be high-risk, Digital Transformation Minister Oscar Lopez told reporters. "AI is a very powerful tool that can be used to improve our lives ... or to spread misinformation and attack democracy," he said. Spain is among the first EU countries to implement the bloc's rules, considered more comprehensive than the United States' system that largely relies on voluntary compliance and a patchwork of state regulations. Lopez added that everyone was susceptible to "deepfake" attacks - a term for videos, photographs or audios that have been edited or generated through AI algorithms but are presented as real. [...]

The bill also bans other practices, such as the use of subliminal techniques - sounds and images that are imperceptible - to manipulate vulnerable groups. Lopez cited chatbots inciting people with addictions to gamble or toys encouraging children to perform dangerous challenges as examples. It would also prevent organizations from classifying people through their biometric data using AI, rating them based on their behavior or personal traits to grant them access to benefits or assess their risk of committing a crime. However, authorities would still be allowed to use real-time biometric surveillance in public spaces for national security reasons.

Southwest Airlines boasts that its passengers' "bags fly free" -- but not for long. From a report: Starting May 28 -- just in time for the busy summer travel season -- only Southwest's most elite Rapid Rewards A-List Preferred members and passengers who book their top-tier Business Select fares will receive two free checked bags. Frequent flyer A-List Members, Southwest-branded credit card holders and other select customers will be allowed one checked bag.

Everyone else will be charged for their first and second checked bags on flights booked on or after May 28, the carrier says. It's a break with Southwest's 54 year history -- one that could undermine customer loyalty to the carrier, according to experts. "This is how you destroy a brand. This is how you destroy customer preference. This is how you destroy loyalty. And this, I think, is going to send Southwest into a financial tailspin," airline industry analyst Henry Harteveldt, of Atmosphere Research Group, told CBS News senior transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave. "Southwest, with these changes, becomes just another airline."

Nearly every country on Earth has dirtier air than doctors recommend breathing, a report has found. From a report: Only seven countries met the World Health Organization's guidelines for tiny toxic particles known as PM2.5 last year, according to analysis from the Swiss air quality technology company IQAir. Australia, New Zealand and Estonia were among the handful of countries with a yearly average of no more than 5ug of PM2.5 per cubic metre, along with Iceland and some small island states.

The most polluted countries were Chad, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India. PM2.5 levels in all five countries were at least 10 times higher than guideline limits in 2024, the report found, stretching as much as 18 times higher than recommended levels in Chad. Doctors say there are no safe levels of PM2.5, which is small enough to slip into the bloodstream and damage organs throughout the body, but have estimated millions of lives could be saved each year by following their guidelines. Dirty air is the second-biggest risk factor for dying after high blood pressure.

A critical root certificate expiring on March 14, 2025 will disable extensions and potentially break DRM-dependent streaming services for Firefox users running outdated browsers. Users must update to at least Firefox 128 or ESR 115.13+ to maintain functionality across Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android platforms.

The expiration additionally compromises security infrastructure, including blocklists for malicious add-ons, SSL certificate revocation lists, and password breach notifications. Even those on legacy operating systems (Windows 7/8/8.1, macOS 10.12â"10.14) must update to minimum ESR 115.13+.

The US's largest pension fund has classified more than $3 billion of holdings in oil drillers, coal miners, and other major greenhouse gas producers as climate-friendly investments, according to a new analysis of public records. From a report: Stakes in Saudi Aramco, Chevron Corp. and Chinese coal company Inner Mongolia Dian Tou Energy are among the holdings that California Public Employees' Retirement System labeled as "climate solutions." The findings are part of a report from California Common Good, a coalition of environmental advocates and public sector unions. The group, which has called for Calpers to divest from major oil and gas companies, is staging protests Tuesday at Chevron's San Francisco Bay Area refinery and in the burn zone of the Eaton fire near Los Angeles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The pollution of the planet by microplastics is significantly cutting food supplies by damaging the ability of plants to photosynthesize, according to a new assessment. The analysis estimates that between 4% and 14% of the world's staple crops of wheat, rice and maize is being lost due to the pervasive particles. It could get even worse, the scientists said, as more microplastics pour into the environment. About 700 million people were affected by hunger in 2022. The researchers estimated that microplastic pollution could increase the number at risk of starvation by another 400 million in the next two decades, calling that an "alarming scenario" for global food security. [...]

The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combined more than 3,000 observations of the impact of microplastics on plants, taken from 157 studies. Previous research has indicated that microplastics can damage plants in multiple ways. The polluting particles can block sunlight reaching leaves and damage the soils on which the plants depend. When taken up by plants, microplastics can block nutrient and water channels, induce unstable molecules that harm cells and release toxic chemicals, which can reduce the level of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll. The researchers estimated that microplastics reduced the photosynthesis of terrestrial plants by about 12% and by about 7% in marine algae, which are at the base of the ocean food web. They then extrapolated this data to calculate the reduction in the growth of wheat, rice and maize and in the production of fish and seafood.

Asia was hardest hit by estimated crop losses, with reductions in all three of between 54 million and 177 million tons a year, about half the global losses. Wheat in Europe was also hit hard as was maize in the United States. Other regions, such as South America and Africa, grow less of these crops but have much less data on microplastic contamination. In the oceans, where microplastics can coat algae, the loss of fish and seafood was estimated at between 1m and 24m tonnes a year, about 7% of the total and enough protein to feed tens of millions of people. Further reading: Are Microplastics Bad For Your Health? More Rigorous Science is Needed

A volunteer group called WikiPortraits is working to address Wikipedia's issue of featuring outdated and unflattering portraits by providing high-quality, openly licensed images. Since 2024, they have covered global festivals, taken thousands of images, and improved representation of underrepresented individuals, though challenges with funding and media credentials remain. 404 Media reports: This portrait problem stems from Wikipedia's mission to provide free reliable information. All media on the site must be openly licensed, so that anyone can use it free of charge. That, in turn, means that most photos of notable people on the site are of notably poor quality. "No professional photographers ever have their photos on Wikipedia, because they want to make money from the photos," said Jay Dixit, a writing professor and amateur Wikipedia photographer. "It's actually the norm that most celebrities have poor photos on Wikipedia, if they have photos at all. It's just some civilian at an airport being like, 'Oh my god, it's Pete Davidson,' click with an iPhone."

Dixit is part of a team of volunteer photographers, called WikiPortraits, that's trying to fix that problem. "It's been in the back of our minds for quite a while now," said Kevin Payravi, one of WikiPortraits' cofounders. "Last year, finally, we decided to make this a reality, and we got a couple of credentials for Sundance 2024 [a major film festival]. We sent a couple photographers there, we set up a portrait studio, and that was our first organized effort here in the U.S. to take good quality photos of people for Wikipedia."

Since last January, WikiPortraits photographers have covered around 10 global festivals and award ceremonies, and taken nearly 5,000 freely-licensed photos of celebrity attendees. And the celebrity attendees are often quite excited about it. [...] WikiPortraits photos are currently used on Wikipedia articles in over 120 languages, and they're viewed up to 80 million times per month from those pages alone. In January, for example, Payravi said that over 1,500 WikiPortraits photos were used on articles that collectively received 140 million views. Many WikiPortraits photos have also been used by a variety of news outlets around the world, including CNN Brasil, Times of Israel, and multiple non-English-language smaller news organizations. "[N]ot being an official news or photo agency means WikiPortraits sometimes faces problems getting media credentials to cover events," notes 404 Media. "Funding poses another main challenge."

"Photographers must already own a professional-quality camera, and usually have to cover the cost of getting to events and at least part of their lodging. Although WikiPortraits sometimes receives rapid grants from the Wikimedia Foundation and private donors to cover costs, Payravi said he still likes to run a 'tight ship.'"

The US will be "central" to solving the climate crisis despite Donald Trump's withdrawal of government support and cash, the president of the next UN climate summit has said. From a report: Andre Correa do Lago, president-designate of the Cop30 summit for the host country, Brazil, hinted that businesses and other organisations in the US could play a constructive role without the White House. "We have no idea of ignoring the US," he told journalists on a call on Friday. "The US is a key country in this exercise. There is the US government, which will limit its participation [but] the US is a country with such amazing technology, amazing innovation -- this is the US that can contribute. The US is a central country for these discussions and solutions."

Brazil has also vowed to hold an "ethical stocktake" aimed at examining climate justice issues, for poor and vulnerable people, and to give Indigenous people a key role at the talks. Correa do Lago wrote to all UN countries on Monday, setting out Brazil's expectations that all governments will draw up national plans for steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions before the conference starts in Belem, a rainforest city at the mouth of the Amazon, in November.

Red Hat product manager Pau Garcia Quiles (also long-time Slashdot reader paugq) spotted an interesting project on GitHub: Free95, a new lean, Windows-compatible operating system is available from GitHub. In its current form, it can run very basic Win32 GUI and console applications, but its developer promises to keep working on it to reach DirectX and even game compatibility.
"Free95 is your friendly Windows Environment with an added trust of the open source community," according to its README file. (It's licensed under the GPL-3.0 license.) And in answer to the question "Why?" it responds "To remove Windows's bloat, and security problems. Being controlled by a large corporation is unsettling."

"It's still in-development of course," the developer post recently on Reddit, "and I'll appreciate anyone who'd like to contribute." In one comment they claim Free95 is "much more lightweight, simpler and faster than ReactOS." And looking to the future, they add "I might do DirectX stuff and make some games run. Or, what about DOOM?"

Philosophy/ethics professor Troy Jollimore looks at the implications of a world where many students are submitting AI-generated essays. ("Sometimes they will provide quotations, giving page numbers that, as often as not, do not seem to correspond to anything in the actual world...") Ideally if the students write the essays themselves, "some of them start to feel it. They begin to grasp that thinking well, and in an informed manner, really is different from thinking poorly and from a position of ignorance. That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial.

"The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely." One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all. I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It's not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course...

It's other things too... The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn't that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?â) It's also, and especially, the students who look at you mystified. The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don't we instructors understand that today's students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.

Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish — indeed, it sometimes intensifies — when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don't equate education with job training.

What do you mean? they might then ask.

And I say: I'm not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life...

My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself — and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age.... As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It's been a while.

Last week Google urged the U.S. government not to break up the company — but apparently, it didn't work.
In a new filing Friday, America's Justice Department "reiterated its November proposal that Google be forced to sell its Chrome web browser," reports the Washington Post, "to address a federal judge finding the company guilty of being an illegal monopoly in August." The government also kept a proposal that Google be banned from paying other companies to give its search engine preferential placement on their apps and phones. At the same time, the government dropped its demand that Google sell its stakes in AI start-ups after one of the start-ups, Anthropic AI, argued that it needed Google's money to compete in the fast-growing industry.

The government's final proposal "reaffirms that Google must divest the Chrome browser — an important search access point — to provide an opportunity for a new rival to operate a significant gateway to search the internet, free of Google's monopoly control," Justice Department lawyers wrote in the filing... Judge Amit Mehta, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who had ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly, will decide on the final remedies in April.
The article quotes a Google spokesperson's response: that the Justice Department's "sweeping" proposals "continue to go miles beyond the court's decision, and would harm America's consumers, economy and national security."