Nvidia is ready to fully transition to open-source Linux GPU kernel drivers, starting with the R555 series and planning a complete shift with the R560 series. The open-source kernel modules will only be available for select newer GPUs, while older architectures like Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta must continue using proprietary drivers. TechSpot reports: According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels. The company has also added new features like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform to its open-source kernels. [...] For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods is switching from proprietary to open-source. However, users will have the ability to manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform.

Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, meaning people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers. For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends continuing to use the proprietary driver for full compatibility. "Nvidia has moved most of its proprietary functions into a proprietary, closed-source firmware blob," adds Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "The parts of Nvidia's GPUs that interact with the broader Linux system are open, but the user-space drivers and firmware are none of your or the OSS community's business."

In 2018, Google replaced its URL shortener service, goo.gl, with Firebase Dynamic Links, citing "the changes we've seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time." Although it stopped accepting new URLs to shorten, it continued to serve existing URLs that used their service. That's about to change on August 25th, 2025, when Google will turn off the service portion of Google URL Shortener.

"Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025," says Google in a blog post today. "Starting August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page for a percentage of existing links notifying your users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25th, 2025 prior to navigating to the original target page. Over time the percentage of links that will show the interstitial page will increase until the shutdown date." All links will return a 404 response after the shutdown date.

The energy giant Shell has quietly backed away from a pledge to rapidly increase its use of "advanced recycling," a practice oil and petrochemical producers have promoted as a solution to the plastics pollution crisis. From a report: "Advanced" or "chemical" recycling involves breaking down plastic polymers into tiny molecules that can be made into synthetic fuels or new plastics. The most common form, pyrolysis, does so using heat. Shell has invested in pyrolysis since 2019, touting it as a way to slash waste. That year, the company used oil made via pyrolysis in one of its Louisiana chemical plants for the first time. And it began publicizing a new goal for the technology: "Our ambition is to use 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year in our global chemicals plants by 2025."

But recently, the company rolled back that promise with little fanfare: "[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible," it said in its 2023 sustainability report, published in March. Reached for comment, a Shell spokesperson, Curtis Smith, said: "Our ambition, regardless of regulation, is to increase circularity and move away from a linear economy to one where products and materials are reused, repurposed and recycled."

Longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a report from the Sacramento Bee: California's power grid handled a nearly three week long record-setting heat wave with few issues. The heat wave was the hottest 20-day period on record around Sacramento and set an all-time temperature record of 124 degrees in Palm Springs. Emergency alerts and calls for voluntary conservation were avoided this time around. Officials credit years of investment in renewable energy, especially battery storage that store solar power for use when the sun stops shining.

CAISO last issued calls for voluntary conservation two years ago, during a 2022 bout of extreme heat. Since then, roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California's electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. California is now home to the most grid batteries in the world outside of China, [said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator (CAISO)].

"Batteries performed very well in this event, they were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid," he added. "That made a big, big difference." [...] Apart from battery storage, Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California as well as noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri. The Commerce Department said GlobalWafers' Texas plant is a significant milestone for the US as it's the country's first facility for manufacturing 300mm wafers, the kind that are used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more geared towards defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure. Plans to build the Texas wafer plant were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars that were originally earmarked for acquiring German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition which didn't go as hoped due to resistance from German regulators.

The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant. In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.

Major changes are coming to the ACT college admissions exam in the spring, the CEO of ACT announced Monday. From a report: The exam will be evolving to "meet the challenges students and educators face" -- and that will include shortening the core test and making the science section optional, chief executive Janet Godwin said in a post on the non-profit's website. The changes will begin with national online tests in spring 2025 and be rolled out for school-day testing in spring 2026, Godwin said in the post. The decision to alter the ACT follows changes made to the SAT earlier this year by the College Board, the non-profit organization that develops and administers that test. The SAT was shortened by a third and went fully digital.

Science is being removed from the ACT's core sections, leaving English, reading and math as the portions that will result in a college-reportable composite score ranging from 1 to 36, Godwin wrote. The science section, like the ACT's writing section already was, will be optional. "This means students can choose to take the ACT, the ACT plus science, the ACT plus writing, or the ACT plus science and writing," Godwin wrote. "With this flexibility, students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible way."

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat. From a report: The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly. It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves. The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a pate-like paste.

Britain's new Labour government has said it will explore how to effectively regulate AI models, but stopped short of proposing any specific laws. From a report: King Charles set out newly-elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer's legislative agenda in a speech on Wednesday to open the new session of parliament. It included more than 35 new bills covering everything from housing to cyber security measures. The government said it would seek to establish the appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop "the most powerful artificial intelligence models."

A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators pressed the leaders of AT&T and data storage company Snowflake on Tuesday for more information about the scope of a recent breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal records on "nearly all" of the phone giant's customers. From a report: "There is no reason to believe that AT&T's sensitive data will not also be auctioned and fall into the hands of criminals and foreign intelligence agencies," Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leaders of the Judiciary Committee's privacy subpanel, wrote Tuesday in a letter to AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey.

The duo also sent a missive to Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy that said the theft of AT&T subscriber information "appears to be connected with an ongoing series of breaches" of the company's clients, including Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, and Santander Bank. "Disturbingly, the Ticketmaster and AT&T breaches appears [sic] to have been easily preventable," they wrote to Ramaswamy. Blumenthal and Hawley have asked the corporate leaders to answer a series of questions about the lapses by July 29.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Puerto Rico filed suit against fossil fuel companies this week, alleging that the oil and gas giants have misled the public about climate change and delayed a transition to clean energy. The suit seeks $1 billion in damages to help Puerto Rico defend itself against climate disasters. In a complaint (PDF) filed in San Juan yesterday, Puerto Rico's Department of Justice says that the companies violated trade law by promoting fossil fuels without adequately warning about the dangers. The defendants include ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and other energy companies.

In the complaint, Puerto Rico says it expects to pay billions of dollars in the future to cope with catastrophes made worse by climate change -- including storms like Hurricane Maria, which killed thousands of people in 2017 and triggered monthslong power outages. The suit asks defendants to contribute to a fund that would be used to mitigate the consequences of climate change and pay for measures to strengthen Puerto Rico's infrastructure against future climate-related calamities. After Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, thirty-seven municipalities in Puerto Rico and the capital city of San Juan filed suit against fossil fuel companies, "seeking to hold them accountable for the devastation," notes The Verge.

Last week, Portland's Multnomah County filed a lawsuit against several fossil fuel companies, blaming their emissions for the 2021 heat dome that resulted in the deaths of 69 people.

According to lobby group ChargeUK, there were 930,000 electric car chargers in the UK at the end of June, with the majority residing in homes and at businesses. Only about 65,000 public chargers are available. The Guardian reports: The ChargeUK analysis showed that a new public charger was installed every 25 minutes in the spring quarter as companies raced to keep up with demand. Companies installed 5,100 public chargers during the second quarter of 2024, according to the data company Zapmap. [...] There are 1.1 million electric vehicles on UK roads, including 167,000 cars sold in the first half of this year, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders lobby group. That is a 9% increase compared with the previous year, although the share of electric sales only increased marginally to 16.6%, as relatively higher upfront prices and rising interest rates deterred some buyers.

ChargeUK's analysis, which was carried out by the thinktank New AutoMotive, suggested that the private sector was confident it could meet a target set by the previous Conservative government of 300,000 public charge points by 2030. "In little more than a decade, the UK's charging sector has grown to become a major player in the green economy, providing the infrastructure that more than a million EV drivers rely on today and scaling fast to deliver the charging needed through to 2030 and beyond," said Vicky Read, the chief executive of ChargeUK.

Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: Google tried to derail a Microsoft antitrust settlement over anticompetitive software licensing in the European Union by offering a $500 million alternative deal to the group of cloud providers behind the EU complaint, Bloomberg reported. According to Bloomberg, Google's offer to the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) required that the group maintain its EU antitrust complaint. It came "just days" before CISPE settled with Microsoft, and it was apparently not compelling enough to stop CISPE from inking a deal with the software giant that TechCrunch noted forced CISPE to accept several compromises.

Bloomberg uncovered Google's attempted counteroffer after reviewing confidential documents and speaking to "people familiar with the matter." Apparently, Google sought to sway CISPE with a package worth nearly $500 million for more than five years of software licenses and about $15 million in cash. But CISPE did not take the bait, announcing last week that an agreement was reached with Microsoft, seemingly frustrating Google. CISPE initially raised its complaint in 2022, alleging that Microsoft was "irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments" by spiking costs to run Microsoft's software on rival cloud services. In February, CISPE said that "any remedies and resolution must apply across the sector and to be accessible to all cloud customers in Europe." They also promised that "any agreements will be made public."

But the settlement reached last week excluded major rivals, including Amazon, which is a CISPE member, and Google, which is not. And despite CISPE's promise, the terms of the deal were not published, apart from a CISPE blog roughly outlining central features that it claimed resolved the group's concerns over Microsoft's allegedly anticompetitive behaviors. What is clear is that CISPE agreed to drop their complaint by taking the deal, but no one knows exactly how much Microsoft paid in a "lump sum" to cover CISPE legal fees for three years, TechCrunch noted. However, "two people with direct knowledge of the matter" told Reuters that Microsoft offered about $22 million.

In a post on X today, Andrej Karpathy announced that he is "starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs." Karpathy taught deep learning for computer vision at Stanford University, left to co-found OpenAI in 2015 and then moved on to direct artificial intelligence for Tesla Autopilot until 2022. He then migrated back to OpenAI to lead a small team related to ChatGPT. CoinTelegraph reports: Eureka is creating virtual teaching assistants powered by generative AI to bring top courses to vastly more students without sacrificing the personalized interactions typical of in-person learning. The startup's ultimate goal is to bring elite educators and coursework to students throughout the world, regardless of barriers such as geography and language. [...] Eureka's first product will be an undergraduate AI course called LLM101n. The course will guide students through the process of training an AI similar to the AI Teaching Assistant. Materials will be available online but will also include digital and physical cohorts, allowing students to progress through the course in small groups. "The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them," Karpathy explained.

"If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted)."

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian had stark words for competing airlines that depend on selling low-priced tickets to stay alive. From a report: "You cannot, if you are on the lower end of the industry's food chain, continue to post losses, particularly given the health of the demand set we've seen over these last couple of years," Bastian said as Delta reported disappointing second-quarter financials and warned things could get even worse.

Airlines that can't break even "will not be given the opportunity to continue to run business models they have," he added. Bastian's comments came in response to a question about the potential for structural changes within the industry as many airlines struggle to remain profitable. [...] A big contributor to the lower profits was lower airfares and extra capacity, especially in economy class,

AI companies are generally secretive about their sources of training data, but an investigation by Proof News found some of the wealthiest AI companies in the world have used material from thousands of YouTube videos to train AI. Companies did so despite YouTube's rules against harvesting materials from the platform without permission. From a report: Our investigation found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce. The dataset, called YouTube Subtitles, contains video transcripts from educational and online learning channels like Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Proof News also found material from YouTube megastars, including MrBeast (289 million subscribers, two videos taken for training), Marques Brownlee (19 million subscribers, seven videos taken), Jacksepticeye (nearly 31 million subscribers, 377 videos taken), and PewDiePie (111 million subscribers, 337 videos taken). Some of the material used to train AI also promoted conspiracies such as the "flat-earth theory." Further reading: YouTube Says OpenAI Training Sora With Its Videos Would Break Rules.

The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. From a report: The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity's actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.

The length of the Earth's day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet's oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world's oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate -- or fatter -- slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further.

The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth's axis of rotation -- the north and south poles -- to move. Other work has revealed that humanity's carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

Microsoft's investment into Inflection AI will get a full-blown UK antitrust probe, after the watchdog said it needed to take a closer look at the hiring of former employees from the artificial intelligence startup. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday it was opening the formal phase one merger probe into the partnership, setting a Sept. 11 deadline on whether to escalate it to an in-depth investigation. The agency has been swift to act against big tech's AI startup investments after it found a pattern of large tech firms piling money into start ups.

OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans.

OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopardizing Europe's position in the global digital landscape. The letter reads, in part: NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:
- "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe";
- "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life";
- "A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons."

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.

UPDATE 7/15/24 3:05 p.m. EDT: In a press release published this afternoon, the FBI said they "successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks' phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices." The bureau added that it has completed its search of the subject's residence and vehicle, and "conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses."

Original Story: July 15, 16:45 UTC: Investigators are working to break into the phone of the man who shot at former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday. The Verge: The FBI said in a statement that it had obtained the shooter's phone "for examination." Officials told reporters in a conference call on Sunday, as reported by The New York Times, that agents in Pennsylvania were unable to break into the phone. It's been shipped to the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI hopes to get past the phone's password protection, the Times reported.

Investigators are still looking for insight into the motives of Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who they identified as the gunman. Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, told the Times and other outlets that the agency has access to some of Crooks' text messages, but they haven't shed much light on his beliefs.

On July 12, 1999, the last Morse code message was sent from a Bay Area radio station, marking the end of an era. Every July 12, the Historic KPH Maritime Radio Receiving Station in Point Reyes revives the golden age of maritime radio, with volunteers exchanging Morse code messages worldwide. The Mercury News reports: Friday's "Night of Nights" event, which commemorates the long-gone stations and the skilled radiotelegraph operators who linked ships to shore, starts at 5:01 p.m. -- precisely one minute after the 1999 message ended. Operators will keep working until 11 p.m. "We're carrying on," said historical society president Richard Dillman, 80, who learned Morse code as a boy. "Morse code is not dead."

The event, based at KPH's stations that are now part of the wild and windswept Point Reyes National Seashore, northwest of San Francisco, is not open to the public. But amateur radio operators around the world can participate by sending messages and exchanging greetings. The operating frequencies of the historical society's amateur station, under the call sign K6KPH, are 3550, 7050, 14050, 18097.5 and 21050. Radiogrammed messages arrive from as far away as New Zealand and Europe, rich with memories of rewarding careers or poignant tributes to lost loved ones. "Dear dad, we love you and we miss you so much," said one. The station uses the original historic KPH transmitters, receivers, antennas and other equipment, carefully repaired and restored by the society's experts. [...]

All over the Pacific coast, stations closed. KPH's receiving headquarters -- an Art Deco cube built between 1929 and 1931, its entrance framed by a tunnel of cypress trees -- was acquired by the National Park Service in 1999. Its transmission station is located on a windswept bluff in Bolinas. [Historical society president Richard Dillman] and friend Tom Horsfall resolved to repair, restore and operate KPH as a way to honor the men and women who for 100 years had served ships in the North Pacific and Indian Ocean. "It was a brotherhood," said Dillman. "There was camaraderie -- a love of Morse code and the ability to do a job well." [...] They pitched their ambitious plan to the National Park Service.

"At first, I was skeptical about their proposal," said Don Neubacher, the Seashore's former Superintendent. "But over time, I realized the Maritime Radio Historical Society, led by Richard Dillman, was a gift for the National Park Service." "I was impressed by the overwhelming knowledge of early wireless and ship-to-shore communication," he said, "and their lifelong commitment to saving this critical piece of Point Reyes history." With a dozen society volunteers from all over the Bay Area -- all over the age of 60, self-described "radio squirrels" -- they went to work. They meet on Saturday mornings over coffee and breakfast "services" dubbed "The Church of the Continuous Wave," sometimes ogling over radio schematics. Then, for a few hours, they broadcast news and weather.