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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Kuwait has launched a sweeping crackdown on cryptocurrency mining, blaming the activity for worsening a power crisis that has led to rolling blackouts across the country as temperatures soar and air conditioning demand surges. The Ministry of Interior announced last week that it had begun a "wide-ranging" security operation targeting homes suspected of hosting crypto mining rigs, which officials described as illegal.

"These mining operations represent an unlawful misuse of electrical power … and may lead to outages impacting residential, commercial, and service areas, posing a direct risk to public safety," the ministry said.

The government's campaign has focused on the Al-Wafrah region in southern Kuwait. The Ministry of Electricity reported that around 100 homes were being used for mining, with some consuming up to 20 times the electricity of a typical household. Following the raids, energy consumption in Al-Wafrah dropped by 55 percent, according to a government statement.

Electricity in Kuwait is heavily subsidized and among the cheapest in the world, making the country an attractive destination for crypto miners seeking to maximize profits.

Kuwait's power grid is under strain from multiple sources, including rapid population growth, urban expansion, rising temperatures, and deferred maintenance at power plants. Electricity is heavily subsidized and among the cheapest in the world, making the country an attractive destination for crypto miners seeking to maximize profits.

However, officials warn that the unchecked power consumption from mining rigs is pushing the grid beyond capacity, exacerbating the risk of blackouts as summer heat intensifies.

While cryptocurrency trading has been banned in Kuwait since 2023, mining has existed in a legal gray area, with no specific legislation until recent government action.

[...] Despite the government's assertion that mining is a "major" factor in the power crisis, a source at the electricity ministry told Reuters it is not the only cause. Researchers at the University of Cambridge estimated that Kuwait accounted for just 0.05 percent of global bitcoin mining in 2022. Still, Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of Digiconomist, told Reuters, "It only takes a very small share of the total bitcoin mining network to have significant impact on the relatively small total electricity consumption of Kuwait."

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Gaaark writes:

For years, some astronomers have believed there might be an extra planet in our solar system that may be so distant and dim that even the best telescopes have missed it. A new study looks into decades-old infrared maps of the sky where they noticed a slow moving, very faint speck in two different maps taken 24 years apart.

[...] Far beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy leftovers from the Solar System's early days. Several of those objects, including the dwarf planet Sedna, follow orbits that cluster in one sector of space instead of being spread evenly around the Sun. Computer simulations in 2016 showed that a hidden planet five-to-10 times Earth's mass could shepherd those orbits into the observed pattern. Other explanations exist, but none fit the data as neatly.

[...] Two dots separated by two decades do not make an orbit. [...] A handful of detections spread over months would trace a curved path, proving the object orbits the Sun and revealing how massive and distant it really is.

Even if this candidate fades on closer inspection, the search is poised to speed up. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, due to begin full operations in Chile later this year, will photograph the whole southern sky every few nights and is expected to discover tens of thousands of new Kuiper Belt objects. If Planet Nine (with apologies to Pluto) lurks out there, Rubin's nightly movies of the heavens should either pin it down or finally rule it out.

https://www.zmescience.com/space/astronomers-just-found-a-faint-speck-that-might-be-the-missing-ninth-planet/

Submitter writes: "I'd name the planet Vulcan. Any other ideas?"

Journal Reference: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17288

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Washington will soon become the eighth state in the country to pass Right to Repair legislation. While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the “right to repair” movement — making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own — continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at giant companies trying to monopolize repair.

Technically Washington state is poised to pass two new right to repair bills.

The Right to Repair bill for wheelchairs and mobility devices (SB 5680) also passed both chambers with unanimous votes. Getting both bills passed required a lot of hard work from activists across consumer rights, disability, and environmental sectors:

Ohio could potentially be the ninth state to pass such a law, again showcasing how the issue has broad, bipartisan support. Thanks in part due to the monopolistic behavior of agricultural giants like John Deere.

One problem, as noted recently, is that none of the states that have passed such laws have bothered to enforce them. Companies in most states haven’t really been asked to do anything different. In some states, like New York, the bills were watered down after passage to be far less useful.

That’s going to need to change for the reform movement to have real-world impact; but with states facing unprecedented legal threats across the board during Trump 2.0, it’s not hard to think that meaningful consumer protection — and picking bold new fights with corporate giants — will be among the first things on the cutting room floor for cash-strapped states.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The best proofs are works of art. They’re not just rigorous; they’re elegant, creative and beautiful. This makes them feel like a distinctly human activity — our way of making sense of the world, of sharpening our minds, of testing the limits of thought itself.

But proofs are also inherently rational. And so it was only natural that when researchers started developing artificial intelligence in the mid-1950s, they hoped to automate theorem proving: to design computer programs capable of generating proofs of their own. They had some success. One of the earliest AI programs could output proofs of dozens of statements in mathematical logic. Other programs followed, coming up with ways to prove statements in geometry, calculus and other areas.

[...] They have not, as yet, built systems that can generate the proofs from start to finish, but that may be changing. In 2024, Google DeepMind announced that they had developed an AI system that scored a silver medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a prestigious proof-based exam for high school students. OpenAI’s more generalized “large language model,” ChatGPT, has made significant headway on reproducing proofs and solving challenging problems, as have smaller-scale bespoke systems. “It’s stunning how much they’re improving,” said Andrew Granville, a mathematician at the University of Montreal who until recently doubted claims that this technology might soon have a real impact on theorem proving. “They absolutely blow apart where I thought the limitations were. The cat’s out of the bag.”

Researchers predict they’ll be able to start outsourcing more tedious sections of proofs to AI within the next few years. They’re mixed on whether AI will ever be able to prove their most important conjectures entirely: Some are willing to entertain the notion, while others think there are insurmountable technological barriers. But it’s no longer entirely out of the question that the more creative aspects of the mathematical enterprise might one day be automated.

Andrew Granville worries that outsourcing more rigorous aspects of mathematics to AI could adversely affect researchers’ ability to think. “I feel that my own understanding is not from the bigger picture,” he said. “It’s from getting your hands dirty.”

Even so, most mathematicians at the moment “have their heads buried firmly in the sand,” Granville said. They’re ignoring the latest developments, preferring to spend their time and energy on their usual jobs.

[...] He and a relatively small group of other mathematicians are now starting to examine what an AI-powered mathematical future might look like, and how it will change what they value. In such a future, instead of spending most of their time proving theorems, mathematicians will play the role of critic, translator, conductor, experimentalist. Mathematics might draw closer to laboratory sciences, or even to the arts and humanities.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US Department of Justice has confirmed its intention to pursue a breakup of Google's advertising technology business, escalating the stakes in a high-profile antitrust battle. The DOJ is seeking a court order to force Google to divest key parts of its ad tech operations, including its ad exchange and publisher ad server, as part of efforts to restore competition in the digital advertising market.

This confirmation came during a hearing where US District Judge Leonie Brinkema set a trial date for September 22 to determine the appropriate remedies following last month's ruling that Google illegally monopolized critical segments of online advertising technology.

The judge's earlier decision found that Google unlawfully maintained monopoly power by tying its publisher ad server – software that helps websites manage and sell ad space – with its ad exchange, where advertisers bid for that space.

Judge Brinkema emphasized that this conduct harmed publishers, competitors, and consumers by restricting competition and locking publishers into Google's ecosystem. However, the court did not find Google to hold a monopoly over advertiser-facing tools, narrowing the scope of the ruling.

The DOJ's proposed remedy is a phased approach beginning with Google providing real-time access to bidding data from its ad exchange to rival publisher ad servers. Ultimately, the government wants Google to sell off its ad exchange and publisher ad server businesses, a process DOJ attorney Julia Tarver Wood acknowledged could take several years. "Leaving Google with 90 percent of publishers dependent on them is, frankly, too dangerous," Wood said.

Google vehemently opposes the breakup plan, arguing that the DOJ's demands exceed the court's findings and lack a legal basis. Karen Dunn, Google's lead attorney, described the forced divestiture as "very likely completely impossible" and warned it would cause "serious complications," including the loss of important privacy and security protections.

quietus writes:

"We have now sunk to a depth in which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." (George Orwell).

Few people remember this, but back in 2003 there was a bit of an uproar in the IT community when Intel dared introduce a unique, retrievable, ID, the PSN number, in its new Pentium III CPU.

It is kinda hard to believe, but that little privacy backlash was strong enough to force Intel to withdraw the feature, starting with Tualatin-based Pentium IIIs. That withdrawal lasted until 2015, when it was (silently) introduced again, as the Protected Processor Identification Number (PPIN), with Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture.

So, only a good ten years ago we believed in privacy. Now we still do, perhaps, but somehow the industry moved the needle to obligatory consent -- without opt-out possibility -- with any and all privacy violations that can be dreamt up in Big (and Not So Big) Tech boardrooms.

Something similar is happening with software, argues Bert Hubert in a piece on IEEE Spectrum. Where once on-premise software and hardware was the rule, trying to get a request for on-prem hardware signed off nowadays is a bit like asking for a coal-fired electricity generator. Things simply *have* to be in the Magically Secure Cloud, and software needs to be developed agile, with frameworks.

The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, he claims: apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries. Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it.

Let me briefly go over the terrible state of software security, and then spend some time on why it is so bad. I also mention some regulatory and legislative things going on that we might use to make software quality a priority again. Finally, I talk about an actual useful piece of software I wrote as a proof of concept that one can still make minimal and simple yet modern software.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Cerabyte recently conducted an experiment that seemed more like a culinary exercise than a technology showcase. The German storage startup plunged a sliver of its archival glass storage into a kettle of boiling salt water, then roasted it in a pizza oven.

Despite enduring temperatures of 100°C in the kettle and 250°C in the oven, the storage medium emerged unscathed, with its data fully intact. This experiment – along with a similar live demonstration at the Open Compute Project Summit in Dublin – was not just a spectacle. It was Cerabyte's way of proving a bold claim: its storage media can withstand conditions that would destroy conventional data storage.

Founded in 2022, Cerabyte is on a mission to upend the world of digital archiving. The company's technology relies on an ultra-thin ceramic layer – just 50 to 100 atoms thick – applied to a glass substrate.

Using femtosecond lasers, data is etched into the ceramic in nanoscale holes. Each 9 cm² chip can store up to 1 GB of information per side, written at a rate of two million bits per laser pulse. Cerabyte claims the result is a medium as durable as ancient hieroglyphs, with a projected lifespan of 5,000 years or more.

The durability of glass is well known. Its resistance to aging, fire, water, radiation, and even electromagnetic pulses makes it a natural candidate for "cold storage." Cerabyte's tests – including boiling the media in salt water for days (long enough to corrode the kettle itself) and baking it at high heat – were designed to underscore this resilience.

While the company has not disclosed how the ceramic layer or its bond to the glass would fare under physical shock, the media's resistance to environmental hazards is clear.

Cerabyte's ambitions extend beyond durability. The startup aims to reduce the cost of archival storage to less than $1 per terabyte by 2030 – a target that could transform the economics of long-term data retention.

[...] Unlike other archival methods – magnetic tape, hard drives, or even optical discs, all of which degrade over decades – Cerabyte's ceramic-on-glass approach promises to eliminate the need for regular data migration or energy-hungry maintenance.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and voluntarily. The Carpenter decision pointed out this simply wasn’t true: cell tower location data is demanded from all cell phones in the tower coverage area and location data (along with identifying info about the device itself) was taken, rather than volunteered.

This has led to a number of interesting decisions, including a couple of state-level court decisions regarding mass collections of cell tower location data. Cell tower dumps generate records of all cell phones in certain areas during certain times, the same way geofence warrants work, but using more accurate cell site location info (CSLI).

Now, even with a warrant, courts are finding cell tower dumps to be unconstitutional. In 2022, the top court in Massachusetts said these warrants may still be constitutional, but only if law enforcement followed a stringent set of requirements. Earlier this year, a magistrate judge in Mississippi came down on cell tower dumps even more forcefully, declaring that if geofence warrants (those seeking Google location data) were unconstitutional, then it just made sense warrants seeking more accurate data with a similarly-sized dragnet also violated the Fourth Amendment.

Those rulings are limited to those states (and, in the case of the magistrate judge, likely just limited to his jurisdiction). But now there’s something at a much higher level, which is definitely headed to a showdown at the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court as soon as the DOJ gets around to appealing this ruling. Here’s Matthew Gault, reporting on this decision for 404Media.

The government tried to argue that if the warrant was unconstitutional, it didn’t matter because this really wasn’t a search under the Fourth Amendment. It hinted the Third Party Doctrine applied instead. The court disagrees, citing the expert for the defense, who pointed out not only was the data not voluntarily handed over to cell service providers, but even the de-duplicated list of responding devices turned this into an extremely broad search.

NotSanguine writes:

From Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica:

French gendarmes have been busy policing crypto crimes, but these aren't the usual financial schemes, cons, and HODL! shenanigans one usually reads about. No, these crimes involve abductions, (multiple) severed fingers, and (multiple) people rescued from the trunks of cars—once after being doused with gasoline.

This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. The 14th is a pleasant place—I highly recommend a visit to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau—and not usually the site of snatch-and-grab operations. The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man's son.

According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared "other mutilations" if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s. (According to the BBC, French police used "phone signals" to locate the house.)

[...] And a few weeks before that, attackers went to the home of someone whose son was a "crypto-influencer based in Dubai." At the father's home, the kidnappers "tied up [the father's] wife and daughter and forced him into a car. The man's influencer son received a ransom demand and contacted police. The two women were then quickly freed. The father was only discovered 24 hours later in the boot of a car in Normandy, tied up and showing signs of physical violence, having been sprinkled with petrol."

It's not just France, either. Early this year, three British men kidnapped another British man while all of them were in Spain; the kidnappers demanded 30,000 euros in crypto "or be tortured and killed." The kidnapped man escaped by jumping off a balcony 30 feet high, breaking both ankles.

Or there's the Belgian man who posted online that "his crypto wallet was now worth €1.6 million." His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The openSUSE project is encouraging people who currently run Windows 10 and whose computers are not compatible with Windows 11 to consider a migration to Linux instead of throwing out their old hardware. "The openSUSE Project's Upgrade to Freedom campaign urges people to extend the life of their device rather than becoming e-waste. Since millions of Windows 10 users may believe their devices will become useless and contribute to the waste of fully functional devices, installing a Linux operating systems like openSUSE or another Linux distribution is more reasonable.

A new initiative called End of 10 has launched that shares the purposes and origin of openSUSE's Upgrade to Freedom efforts. As the End of 10 initiative also intends to help people extend the life of devices that would otherwise become e-waste, rather than dilute the messaging and narrative, members of openSUSE marketing have decided to transition the Upgrade to Freedom campaign to joining the End of 10 initiative."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

People who are interested in atomic distributions, particularly ones with immutable filesystems, but have not found one which suits them may find a tutorial on Fedora Magazine valuable. Daniel Mendizabal offers a step-by-step guide to creating a customized, immutable Linux distribution, from initial concept through to producing a bootable ISO. "Mainstream sources like Fedora and Universal Blue offer various atomic desktops with curated configurations and package selections for the average user. But what if you're ready to take control of your desktop and customise it entirely, from packages and configurations to firewall, DNS, and update schedules? Thanks to bootc and the associated tools, building a personalised desktop experience is no longer difficult."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

When it comes to long-term prosperity in the high-tech world, it's all about setting standards. Intel once set the standard with x86, PCIe, and USB and now the vast majority of devices use these technologies in one way or another. Nvidia now enjoys its investments in the CUDA ecosystem and is setting the standard in AI compute in general. To a large degree, Nvidia's efforts made the U.S. industry the leader in AI. However, containing AI hardware in the U.S. will provoke rapid development of competing AI ecosystems that can eventually outperform the one developed in America.

"We are at an inflection point: the United States needs to decide if it is going to continue to lead the global development and deployment of AI or if we are going to retreat and retrench," a remark by Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang (republished by Ray Wang [x.com] reads) to the U.S. lawmakers reads. "America cannot lead by slowing down. If we step back, others will step in. And the global AI ecosystem will fragment — technologically, economically, and ideologically."

[...] The new U.S. export rules for compute GPUs — known as the AI Diffusion Rule [tomshardware.com] — come into effect on May 15. Under the Biden administration's AI Diffusion framework, unrestricted access to high-end AI chips like Nvidia's H100 is reserved for companies in the U.S. and a select group of 18 allied countries classified as 'Tier 1.' Companies in 'Tier 2' nations are subject to an annual limit of approximately 50,000 H100-class GPUs, unless they secure verified end user (VEU) approval. They can still import up to 1,700 units per year without a license, and these do not count toward the national quota. However, countries listed as 'Tier 3' — including China, Russia, and Macau — are essentially blocked from receiving such hardware due to arms embargo restrictions. The Trump administration is now reviewing this tier system to make it more straightforward and enforceable, and is rumored to make limitations for Tier 2 nations even stricter.

Not only will Nvidia cease to be able to sell its GPUs to China, which is one of its largest markets, but its Chinese customers will be forced to either use its GPUs in the cloud, or switch to processors developed in China, such as those designed by Huawei or one of the aforementioned companies. While this will slow down development of China's AI sector in the short term, it will give a strong boost for its AI hardware ecosystem in the mid and long-term future.

[...] The U.S. has already seen the consequences of ceding technological leadership, when Huawei gained a dominant foothold in global 5G deployments by offering cheaper and faster-to-deploy infrastructure. This serves as a cautionary example of how losing control over foundational standards can shift both market power and geopolitical influence. Nevertheless, whether the current administration has learnt from similar past mistakes remains to be seen.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An investigation by 404 Media has uncovered a major security breach at TeleMessage, an Israeli company that provides modified versions of encrypted messaging apps – most notably Signal – to US government agencies and private-sector clients for message archiving. The breach, which exposed sensitive communications, has raised urgent concerns about the security of high-level government and organizational messaging.

The issue gained public attention after a Reuters photograph captured Mike Waltz, a former National Security Adviser to Donald Trump, using a Signal-like app during a cabinet meeting. The app, TeleMessage, closely mimics Signal's interface but is designed to retain and archive messages for compliance purposes – unlike the original Signal, which is built for privacy and strict end-to-end encryption.

[...] 404 Media reports that a hacker exploited a vulnerability in TeleMessage's backend system, gaining access to archived messages from some users. Alarmingly, the breach was relatively easy: the hacker claimed it took only 15 to 20 minutes to gain access, using credentials found in intercepted data to enter the backend panel, where they could view usernames, passwords, and message content.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

People trust legal advice generated by ChatGPT more than a lawyer – new study:

People who aren't legal experts are more willing to rely on legal advice provided by ChatGPT than by real lawyers – at least, when they don't know which of the two provided the advice. That's the key finding of our new research, which highlights some important concerns about the way the public increasingly relies on AI-generated content. We also found the public has at least some ability to identify whether the advice came from ChatGPT or a human lawyer.

AI tools like ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are making their way into our everyday life. They promise to provide quick answers, generate ideas, diagnose medical symptoms, and even help with legal questions by providing concrete legal advice.

But LLMs are known to create so-called "hallucinations" – that is, outputs containing inaccurate or nonsensical content. This means there is a real risk associated with people relying on them too much, particularly in high-stakes domains such as law. LLMs tend to present advice confidently, making it difficult for people to distinguish good advice from decisively voiced bad advice.

We ran three experiments on a total of 288 people. In the first two experiments, participants were given legal advice and asked which they would be willing to act on. When people didn't know if the advice had come from a lawyer or an AI, we found they were more willing to rely on the AI-generated advice. This means that if an LLM gives legal advice without disclosing its nature, people may take it as fact and prefer it to expert advice by lawyers – possibly without questioning its accuracy.

Even when participants were told which advice came from a lawyer and which was AI-generated, we found they were willing to follow ChatGPT just as much as the lawyer.

One reason LLMs may be favoured, as we found in our study, is that they use more complex language. On the other hand, real lawyers tended to use simpler language but use more words in their answers.

The third experiment investigated whether participants could distinguish between LLM and lawyer-generated content when the source is not revealed to them. The good news is they can – but not by very much.

In our task, random guessing would have produced a score of 0.5, while perfect discrimination would have produced a score of 1.0. On average, participants scored 0.59, indicating performance that was slightly better than random guessing, but still relatively weak.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston:

On Thursday [May 1, 2025], autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.

  "We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads."

The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck.

Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.

Self-driving technology continued to garner attention after over a decade of hype, especially from auto companies like Tesla, GM and others that have poured billions into the tech. Companies in the market of autonomous trucking or driving, tend to use states like Texas and California as their testing grounds for the technology.

California-based Gatik does short-haul deliveries for Fortune 500 retailers like Walmart. Another California tech firm, Kodiak Robotics, delivers freight daily for customers across the South but with safety drivers. Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, had an autonomous trucking arm but dismantled it in 2023 to focus on its self-driving ride-hailing services.

However, consumers and transportation officials have raised alarms on the safety record of autonomous vehicles. Aurora released its own safety report this year detailing how its technology works.

Unions that represent truck drivers are usually opposed to the driverless technology because of the threat of job loss and concerns over safety.

Original Submission