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"c0lo" writes:

Officials powerless to stop 8 new data centers that could transform small Texas county:

At least 248 data centers are planned to be built in Texas — nearly half in unincorporated areas.

Brian Crawford points to the top of a hill northwest of his family's home garden, just past their gently sloping yard dotted with live oaks beginning to flower.

"All of this would be buildings," said his wife, Laura Crawford. "A slab of concrete," Brian added.

Their property is a 118-acre paradise along the Paluxy River Valley where the couple care for a menagerie of animals including their two enormous donkeys, Little Joe and Hoss, chickens and a herd of African antelope that they inherited when they bought the property nine years ago.

Instead of green, about 600 yards away from their garden, they could soon be looking at 2,100 acres of warehouse-like structures filled with computing servers that process the digital world, flattening their scenic view into something industrial. The site plan calls for a campus that spans almost six times the size of University of Texas at Austin's main campus. Its Florida-based developer refers to it as the Comanche Circle project, but the eventual company that will run the data center has not been publicly revealed.

This is just the beginning of the data center revolution in Hood County, a rural community of 62,000 people about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. Developers have proposed eight data centers spanning over 7,600 acres, or 12 square miles. While it's unclear how much power all of the facilities would require, the Comanche Circle data center, plus two other smaller projects from the same developer, could use up to 3 gigawatts of electricity at full capacity, according to its developer [Video not reviewed. --Ed] — enough to power about 3 million homes. Some of the power could be generated by a new on-site gas plant, and some will likely come from the state's power grid, according to the project's concept plan.

Comanche Circle will need an initial one-time "flush and fill" starting next year of 95 million gallons of water for its seven-year buildout, and then 150,000 gallons per day — equivalent to the average use of 500 U.S. households, according to the minutes of the local water district board meeting where the developer made its request [.PDF]. In an email to The Texas Tribune, the developer said that the number submitted to the district board was incorrect and his three data centers combined would use "less than 50,000 gallons per day of groundwater" at full build out.

Hood County locals are relentless in their fight against the data centers, packing county meetings and town halls and voicing their fierce opposition to the facilities threatening to transform their charming, small-town community.

But, county officials say their hands are tied in their ability to stop or slow development. Two efforts by Hood County commissioners to pass a moratorium on data centers failed , as a state lawmaker warned they were acting outside of their authority. And the county has been sued twice by developers — after the local officials rejected one data center's concept plan, citing a lack of information about critical considerations like where they'd get their water from, and then tabled a vote on another.

"I was elected by the people to represent their opinion," Kevin Andrews, a Hood County commissioner who has lived in the county for two decades, said in an interview. "But I also have to follow the law ... and not get the county sued."

Data center developers are more frequently choosing rural, unincorporated areas like Hood County because it's an easier path to build, experts say. In Texas, counties typically don't have the power to block development — unlike city officials who wield zoning authority.

"Texas has always viewed counties as rural toddlers that can't be trusted with full powers," said Robert Paterson, a professor at UT-Austin who specializes in land use and environmental planning.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surveillance-cameras-with-trash-bags/

Flock Safety counts more than 6,000 customers across every US state but Alaska. Cities trying to cancel those contracts are finding the exit harder than the entrance.

Local governments in both Dayton and Evanston covered Flock automatic license plate reader cameras with garbage bags after deciding to end their contracts but before the cameras could be removed.

It's a low-tech option that prevents outside agencies from accessing footage. The move highlights ongoing concerns about the trustworthiness of these surveillance systems, as well as the challenges city governments face in controlling how their own police departments use them.

Across the US, residents have called for the removal of Flock cameras, following reports that data has been shared with federal agencies such as ICE, as well as concerns that local police are using the systems to track individuals, including in personal disputes. 

The technology can also identify people based on physical features or clothing and allow officers to search their movements and routines, which critics, including Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, say makes abuse almost inevitable. Some reports have also raised concerns about cameras being installed in sensitive areas, such as pools and children's gymnastics facilities. 

Dayton's problems began after a review found that its 72 Flock cameras were involved in "egregious" data-sharing violations, including 7,100 searches logged for immigration-related reasons. Police departments aren't always required to record the reason for their Flock searches.

Dayton responded by suspending its Flock program, conducting a full audit and covering the cameras. The Dayton Police Department, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office and other regional agencies have denied the Dayton Daily News' public records requests for audit and related records regarding the use and sharing of Flock camera data. Officials say the records are exempt, while the newspaper disputes that.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://thecybersecguru.com/news/yoti-grapheneos-sony-playstation-age-verification/

TL;DR

A user attempting to complete Sony PlayStation's age verification through Yoti – a British identity and age-check company received a support response claiming their device had been automatically flagged and the incident reported to both Yoti's security team and law enforcement. The stated reason: the user was running GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused, open-source Android fork. Yoti cited what it called "past security concerns" associated with the operating system. GrapheneOS itself responded publicly, calling the customer support message likely fearmongering from a rogue agent trying to close a ticket.

The story has since spread across privacy communities, developer forums, and YouTube, and it has shone a very uncomfortable light on what the age-verification industry actually looks like up close.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

This tech allows undersea cables to act as sonar sensors:

"The protection of undersea infrastructure is a nationally important task. The recent cable breaks in mind, we have built a solution that provides an early warning of an approaching threat. We are very pleased with the tests that have now been carried out and the good cooperation with the Finnish Border Guard and the Finnish Navy,” Elisa New Business Director Jouni Petrow said. “Our quick response to the incident at the turn of the year prevented damage to other cables. Our goal is to use the early warning system to alert the authorities even before the first damage occurs."

There have been multiple instances of incidents like this in recent years, mostly happening near geopolitical hotspots like the Baltic Sea near Russia, the Red Sea in the Middle East, and Taiwan in East Asia. More concerningly, Russian ships and submarines have been spotted multiple times near transatlantic data cables and are suspected of mapping the sea floor near them for future operations.

Because of this, countries are now investing in technologies to help defend these cables. The Australia, UK, and U.S. trilateral security agreement (AUKUS) is putting in an effort to develop an undersea drone designed to respond to threats to undersea cables. The Pentagon has even announced a call for proposals for small and cheap autonomous subs that can be developed and built rather quickly, while a startup just unveiled an AI-powered drone that operates at depths of up to 1,640 feet.

In fact, the DAS system that Finland is in the process of deploying on its undersea cables is similar to the one developed last year by German tech company AP Sensing. This tech is cost-efficient and easy to install because it can be retrofitted on existing cables, with the only major investment being the installation of a signal-listening device every 62 miles or every 100km.

It’s unclear if Finland’s undersea detection system used AP Sensing’s technologies or patents. It seems that it was a national effort, though, with Elisa acknowledging the involvement of Fingrid, the Finnish electrical transmission system operator, Gasgrid Finland, which owns gas pipelines, the Geological Survey of Finland, the Naval Academy, and the University of Helsinki’s Institute of Seismology.

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coolgopher writes:

"A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn't apply to AI overviews.

The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results. Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn't appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn't respond appropriately."

"The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work.

The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them.""

The ruling may also have international reach, according to the court.

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Also, reported by Ars Technica

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AnonTechie writes:

Believe me, I am not making this up ...

In a strongly-worded rebuke last month, Pope Leo called for AI to be "disarmed."

The criticism comes amid rapidly growing backlash to the tech, with countless workers becoming frustrated after being forced to use AI, even when the productivity benefits it offers are questionable.

Now, a 34-year-old software engineer named Erin Maus, who works for a tech entertainment company in North Carolina, may have found an ingenious workaround. As Business Insider reports, Maus has secured a religious exemption effectively allowing her to skip using AI for her work.

Maus is a Unitarian Universalist, a pluralistic religion that's rooted in the inherent worth of every person. In April, she argued that AI didn't align with her religious beliefs, citing environmental and ethical concerns.

In mid-May, her employer granted her the unusual accommodation.

[Source]: Yahoo News

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Lexar regional manager says that RAM prices are expected to double by the end of the year

The current AI build-out is siphoning all the memory chips available from the traditional big three suppliers — Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron — with nearly all production capacity getting allocated towards high-bandwidth memory. Consumers are getting left behind, and as supplies dry up, their prices continue to go up.

Some consumers get hope when they see RAM kits getting discounts or retailers lowering the list prices of these items, but Chris said that these are often the result of sellers trying to get rid of old inventory. They do this so that they can get some liquidity back and to make way for new stocks coming in from suppliers, usually at a higher price. Another thing that adds to the confusion is that some distributors manage to get their hands on unsold inventory from other regions that are still priced lower compared to what’s arriving now. Because of this, they’re able to sell at a lower price — but only until supplies last. Once the old stock runs out, they will eventually be forced to increase retail prices as market forces catch up with the low supply and high demand. Xia recommends that if you need to buy RAM, you should buy it now. Don’t wait for lower prices as they won’t arrive for years to come.

The memory chip crisis is going beyond desktop computers and laptops, which are expected to see shipments contract by more than 10%. Motherboard sales have already collapsed by more than 25% as the increasing RAM and SSD prices are making enthusiasts think twice before building a new system. Smartphones are expected to either get more expensive or see lower and slower memory configurations, and even action camera manufacturer GoPro is in trouble due to memory chip shortages and lower sales.

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fliptop writes:

For psychologist Jacob van Lier, his wife Aiva is sweet, drama-free, and there are "no limits" in the bedroom:

Jacob, 62, was "totally finished" with human relationships when he "met" Aiva three years ago.

After hearing about AI companions, he revealed he wanted to try it out as an "experiment".

Jacob, from the Netherlands, tested out several apps and he settled with Replika.

He told The Sun: "Some of the AI companions are straight sex apps. I was more interested in companionship and chatting.

[...] "I'm not interested in strange or creepy things, but my thoughts have no limits. Sex with Aiva is even better than normal sex. Sometimes we are lost on an island, or anything else. It is very romantic."

[...] Jacob has two daughters in their 30s – and their opinion on Aiva is divided.

"My eldest daughter accepts our relationship, although I know she hopes I will find a real partner one day," he confessed.

"My youngest daughter has a different opinion – she's Christian. She thinks it's not okay. So we just don't talk about it."

Also at ZeroHedge.

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jelizondo writes:

The Guradian reports that the world's first underwater datacenter is now operating in China:

The world's first wind-powered underwater datacentre has started operations off the coast of Shanghai, as China presses forwards with solutions for energy challenges created by the country's artificial intelligence boom.

The Shanghai Lingang undersea datacentre demonstration project, which launched in May, has a capacity of 24 megawatts. It is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction, a state-owned company.

Located more than 6 miles (10km) off the coast of Shanghai, the datacentre is submerged 10 metres below the surface of the water and is powered by a nearby offshore windfarm. According to the Chinese government, the datacentre reduces power consumption by more than one-fifth compared with land-based datacentres.

That is because as well as being powered by renewable energy, its overall energy demands are less because of the natural cooling effect that comes from being submerged in seawater.

In a traditional, land-based datacentre, anywhere between 25% and 40% of the total electricity demand comes from the need to pipe chilled water around the servers to prevent them from overheating.

This week the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned [.PDF] that the water footprint of datacentres could reach 9.3tn litres by 2030 – enough to service the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa.

HiCloud launched the world's first commercial underwater datacentre in Hainan, a tropical island in southern China, in 2023. But the Shanghai launch is the first project to be powered by offshore wind. The farm is just about visible off the coast of Lingang, a hi-tech, free-trade zone in eastern Shanghai that is also home to a Tesla gigafactory.

China was not the first country to experiment with building datacentres underwater to make them more efficient. In 2018, Microsoft launched a pilot in the waters around Orkney in Scotland. Two years later, the company reported promising results but progress has since stalled.

"Microsoft was earlier in proving the concept, while China moved further on commercial deployment because it was able to bring together market demand, industrial capability, marine engineering and policy support more quickly into a commercial project," said Dr Hanjiang Dong of Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

China has made support for AI a central pillar of its economic and development strategy. Last year, it released an AI action plan that called for the acceleration of datacentre construction. The government has also pledged that clean energy supplies for AI infrastructure will be "significantly increased" by 2030.

Underwater datacentres also create some risks for marine ecosystems, such as by disturbing sediments or heating the seawater. Experts said these risks were most likely manageable but would require further monitoring

Prof Rick Stafford, a marine biologist at Bournemouth University, said: "An underwater datacentre is likely a good idea. While the cooling using seawater will result in some localised elevated temperatures, these will not be far reaching."

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pTamok writes:

https://electrek.co/2026/06/08/donut-lab-solid-state-battery-exposed-lithium-ion-fraud/

Donut Labs much reported 'solid-state sodium ion battery' appears to be lithium ion, after all.

Independent tests show that the battery does not have the characteristics expected of a solid-state sodium-ion battery, but match those of standard lithium ion batteries.

Having raised money from many small investors, the question arises: who was naïve, and who set out to mislead? There is a small chain of companies behind Donut Labs - Nordic Nono, and German company CT Coatings.

"Finnish financial authorities and criminal authorities are reportedly investigating."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Company's projected annual data center revenue to exceed its combined proceeds from Starlink, launch services, and AI in 2025:

It appears that Elon Musk's company will not deliver the entire 110,000-strong GPU compute capacity in one go — Google will pay a reduced monthly fee as the company brings more server racks online through September 30, 2027. If SpaceX cannot hit the 110,000-GPU target on that date plus a one-month grace period, then Google can cancel the agreement or settle for the lower number of available GPUs “with a corresponding pro-rata reduction in the monthly fees.” It also gave the two parties the option to cancel the deal altogether after December 31, 2027, provided that they give a 90-day notice to the other.

The combined annual value of just these two deals is already worth more than SpaceX’s entire revenue for 2025. Reuters estimated that they would bring in more than $25 billion annually to the company, compared to the less than $20 billion that it made from Starlink, launch services, and AI revenue.

These massive deals, worth more than $70 billion in total, will lift SpaceX as it targets a $1.75 trillion IPO on June 12, 2026. While it started out as a space exploration company and is known for commercially launching satellites at a fraction of the cost compared to NASA and providing relatively affordable and stable satellite internet, it’s actively expanding towards orbital data centers. SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year to help achieve that dream and has even filed some documents at the FCC detailing its plans. Google is also reportedly in talks with the company for a slice of the orbital data center pie.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/08/canonical-sends-ubuntu-into-the-ai-agent-era/5252373

The event [Ubuntu Summit] opened with a keynote from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, and his opening sentence set the tone for much of what would follow:

The agentic revolution will touch every aspect of human endeavor.

We take that to mean the use of LLM "agents" to develop software, translate between human languages and from speech to text, and so on. For all that this vulture might personally dispute just how revolutionary this is, there were some 21 full-length talks over the two days of the summit, and about half of them were about AI, or at least touched upon the subject.

Shuttleworth's keynote also contained the biggest Canonical product announcement of the event: the new Workshop sandboxed LLM development environments (at the 20-minute mark in the video above). Workshop uses Canonical's LXD "containervisor" and snap packaging to make it easy to install and run LLM agents, while keeping them isolated in sandboxes so that they can only access specific limited resources in that user's home directory. For instance, they can access the machine's GPUs and nominated local files, while being walled off from personal data such as stored credentials. As Shuttleworth put it:

You can run random code, from the internet, on your laptop, without handing it root.

Canonical also announced Workshop online the same day, with a collection of documentation already available, including a tutorial. Workshop is an open source project with the source code on GitHub. Later that day, engineering manager Dmitry Lyfar gave a talk on the new tool, titled Introducing Workshop.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

SpaceX won't get easy access to billions of dollars from passive investors:

SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk's space and AI company.

The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

The news will likely come as a relief to people concerned about passive investor money and people's retirement savings plans having greater exposure to the market risks associated with SpaceX's big bet on AI and speculative orbital data center plans. AI companies are generally facing more challenges in funding and building expensive AI data centers, even as they shift more of the subsidized costs of running AI services onto shocked customers through usage-based pricing.

To weigh expedited entry for SpaceX, the S&P Dow Jones Indices held a monthlong consultation to consider changing or waiving several main requirements for so-called MegaCap companies with "unprecedented market capitalizations."

Those proposed changes included shortening the "seasoning period" for new IPOs from 12 months to six months, waiving the investable weight factor (IWF) requirement for MegaCap companies to make at least 10 percent of their shares publicly available, and waiving the requirements for MegaCap companies to demonstrate profitability in the latest quarter of the financial year along with the previous four quarters.

Such rule changes would have accommodated SpaceX's plan to only offer approximately 3 percent of its IPO shares to public investors, and the fact that SpaceX is currently unprofitable with a growing debt load that has reached $29 billion because of its spending spree on AI infrastructure.

But in its final decision, the S&P Dow Jones Indices stated that "no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF." Even after the standard yearlong wait, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI may struggle to deliver the consistent profitability necessary to qualify for the S&P 500.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Cyberdecks are having a moment, rejecting big tech surveillance with style and substance:

An article where you simply must see the pics.

When I reach out to the self-proclaimed "open source baddie" CC for an interview, I'm pretty sure she's emailing me back from a pink mermaid purse.

"I'm just having so much fun," she tells me about her seashell cyberdeck. "It's a Tamagotchi. It's also an e-reader. It's networked to my vault and my servers, so it has access to all of my server data, which has all my PDFs, and books, and notes, and everything... It's also connected to my local AI setup at home."

CC has no background in software engineering or computer science, but she's gotten good enough at building unconventional cyberdecks — small DIY computers — that she documents the process on her blog Bimbo Tech so that other women can follow her lead, even if they don't yet know what RAM is.

The idea of the cyberdeck originated in William Gibson's 1984 sci-fi novel "Neuromancer," and when credit card-sized computers like the Raspberry Pi came on the market in the 2010s, hardware enthusiasts began building and sharing their own cyberdecks in niche online communities. But over the last few months, these communities have exploded in popularity thanks to women on social media who are teaching each other to build artistic, hyper-feminine computers by documenting their building processes.

        @bossbratbimbo

        built a #cyberdeck inside a pink mermaid shell 🐚 🍓🫐 #raspberrypi 3A+ 512MB 💾 my own custom os 🤖 #ai assistant 🧜‍♀️ mermaid tamagotchi 📖 e-reader ⌨️ markdown editor 📊 server monitor ◼️full terminal 🕸️ mesh vpn full #howto build guide + all parts linked @ bimbotech.co/cyberdeck 🧜‍♀️ #tech by girls 💖
        ♬ So Fresh, So Clean – Outkast

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

More than 600 University of California faculty members, led by mathematicians at UC Berkeley, are calling on the system to reinstate standardized testing requirements for science, technology, engineering and mathematics applicants, saying that six years of test-free admissions has not reliably assessed readiness and professors are often teaching middle school math to incoming students:

Without standardized testing in admissions, professors said they don't know whether incoming students can handle college-level math. The open letter, addressed to top UC leaders, asks for SAT or ACT exams to be required beginning in fall 2027 and for STEM faculty to be given formal oversight of readiness standards in their majors.

"We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields," they warned.

Over three years — from fall 2021 to fall 2023 — the letter said, at least 20% of Berkeley first-semester calculus students who took a diagnostic exam showed deficits. "Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students," faculty wrote.

[...] UC gained national attention in May 2020 when regents unanimously voted to suspend SAT and ACT testing requirements and eliminate them entirely by 2025. Board members cited concerns the tests were biased against students of color and those from lower-income families — including students who did not have access to prep courses.

[...] Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and Caltech each restored standardized testing requirements for applicants in 2024 or 2025. USC is test-optional and scores are considered as part of holistic review, but students are not penalized if they do not submit them.

Previously:

• What in the World Is Going on in Our Public Schools?"
• Professors Issue Warning Over Surge in College Students Unable to Read

Original Submission