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upstart writes:

Microsoft software reselling dispute heads back to UK court:

Microsoft's tussle with UK-based reseller ValueLicensing over the sale of secondhand licenses returns to the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal this week, with the Windows behemoth now claiming that selling pre-owned Office and Windows software is unlawful.

ValueLicensing's representatives say this week's trial - due to start tomorrow - will "address whether the entire pre-owned license market was lawful – with Microsoft arguing that it was not lawful to resell pre-owned Office and Windows software at all."

This stems from a May 2025 agreement that the scope of copyright issues now central to Microsoft's defense needs to be determined.

The case has the potential to blow a hole in the European reselling market. According to ValueLicensing, "if Microsoft's argument is correct, it would mean that the entire resale market in Europe should not exist."

The ValueLicensing case has rumbled on for years, beginning with allegations that Microsoft stifled the supply of pre-owned licenses by offering attractive subscription deals to public and private sector organizations in return for the surrender of perpetual licenses. ValueLicensing (and companies like it) operated a business model based on organizations selling their perpetual licenses and resellers selling them on to customers at a discount.

ValueLicensing alleged that Microsoft added clauses to customer contracts aimed at restricting the resale of perpetual licenses. In return for accepting those contracts, customers were given a discount.

Judging by the case so far [PDF], it appears that this practice was a policy at Microsoft.

According to ValueLicensing, Microsoft's allegedly anti-competitive antics and attempts to eliminate the secondhand software license market have cost it £270 million in lost profits.

Microsoft's argument [PDF] is that it owns the copyright to the non-program bits of Office – the graphical user interface, for example – to which rules around software reselling (the European Software Directive) do not apply.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley noted the timing of the copyright claim. "It's a remarkable coincidence that their defense against ValueLicensing has changed so dramatically from being a defense of 'we didn't do it' to a defense of 'the market should never have existed,'" he said.

Microsoft's contention is not without precedent. The Tom Kabinet judgment drew a line between the secondary market for software programs and e-books. Reselling a software program isn't a problem, while reselling something like an e-book is. Microsoft's argument for its software appears to be similar.

The tech giant is facing other actions before the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal. Alexander Wolfson has brought a similar claim against Microsoft, potentially worth billions, regarding the purchase of certain licenses for specific products. Dr Maria Luisa Stasi has brought another regarding the cost of running Microsoft software on platforms like AWS and GCP compared to Azure.

The Register asked Microsoft to comment and will update the article should the company respond.

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upstart writes:

Multiple undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea, hampering internet performance:

Microsoft was forced to reroute Azure traffic on Saturday, September 6, after two major submarine cable systems were severed in the Red Sea, triggering latency spikes and degraded performance for cloud users across South Asia and the Gulf. The company confirmed the disruption via Azure system status messages just before 06:00 UTC, saying customers whose traffic normally passes through the Middle East "may experience service disruptions."

Those reroutes currently remain in effect, with Microsoft noting that they expect "higher latency on some traffic" into September 7 as regional carriers continue to triage routes. Cloud operations outside the affected path remain unaffected, but workloads relying on Asia-Europe connectivity may still feel the impact.

The damage occurred on the SEA-ME-WE-4 and IMEWE cable systems, both of which run through the high-risk corridor near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The location and systems were first flagged by NetBlocks, which attributed the disruption to a "series of subsea cable outages" causing Internet slowdowns in Pakistan, India, and parts of the Gulf. Microsoft has not named the specific cables involved.

From a technical perspective, these aren't just any cables: They're two of the main long-haul systems connecting Asia to Europe, carrying traffic not only for consumer Internet but also hyperscalers like Google and Meta. Losing just one of these critical pathways can overload alternate routes, spike latency, and increase packet loss across various cloud-dependent applications, such as multiplayer gaming and large file downloads.

Microsoft engineers have rerouted traffic via alternative, longer paths while monitoring network telemetry. Repair ships for undersea cables are scarce, however, and the Red Sea remains a geopolitically sensitive area, making any physical repairs an inevitably slow process. Such repairs can take weeks because repair crews must precisely locate themselves above the damaged cable.

This isn't the first time that the Red Sea has caused headaches. In February 2024, multiple submarine cables, including AE-1, SEACOM, and EIG, were damaged by an unknown cause. Due to the sensitivity of the location, cable operators are currently unable to give a timeline for full repairs, but it was reported in July 2024 that repairs were completed on the AAE-1 cable. In January 2025, the same cable suffered a shunt fault off the coast of Qatar, which was resolved two weeks later.

As of now, Azure remains operational, but enterprises reliant on cross-region connectivity between Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East should brace for slower connections in the meantime.

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looorg writes:

Since there is apparently nothing these days that can't be improved by some AI. The Amazon fueled AI-company Fable Studio wants to re-create the chopped 43 minutes of Orson Welles movie "The Magnificent Ambersons". The recreation will be done from set images and other sources. The original was re-cut after RKO thought the movie was too long and that the ending was not happy enough. A new ending was created.

But it won't have any commercial re-release and is purely a noncommercial academic project, due to rights and ownership. Also it might not be Welles more famous work so there might not be anything more then a minor cult following and not any kind of commercial success. So they do it cause they can and "AI" something something.

https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/lost-ending-orson-welles-magnificent-ambersons-ai-remake-1235148945/

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upstart writes:

A spectacular glacial demise, 40 years in the making:

Nearly 40 years after breaking away from the Filchner – Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the A23a iceberg is finally beginning to melt and merge into the ocean for good. A23a ranks among the oldest and largest icebergs ever recorded and remains the biggest block of frozen freshwater on the planet.

Nicknamed the "megaberg," A23a weighed roughly one trillion tons earlier this year. Although it has since lost more than half its original mass, the iceberg still measures about 1,770 square kilometers in area and spans 60 kilometers at its widest point. Researchers have tracked its decline using satellite imagery from the European Copernicus observatory.

Recent data shows that A23a has begun to fragment into "smaller" pieces, some as large as 400 square kilometers. These chunks are further breaking apart into even smaller icebergs, many of which still pose navigational hazards for ships at sea.

According to Andrew Meijers, a physical oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey, the changes underway in A23a can be described as nothing short of "dramatic." The megaberg is essentially nearing the end of its life, "rotting" from beneath as it drifts into waters that are simply too warm to sustain it. Constant melting is now unavoidable.

The process will continue in the weeks ahead, Meijers said, until A23a is no longer clearly identifiable. The iceberg originally calved from Antarctica's massive ice shelf in 1986, before "grounding" in the Weddell Sea, where it remained stuck on the seafloor for more than 30 years.

It finally broke free in 2020, carried by Antarctic currents into the South Atlantic Ocean. In March 2025, A23a briefly posed a threat to penguin and seal colonies after becoming stranded in shallow waters off South Georgia Island, though it moved on a couple of months later.

Together with parts of the Arctic ice pack, Antarctica's icebergs contain some of the planet's largest reserves of frozen freshwater. But they are melting slowly and inexorably, with profound consequences for human activity and natural habitats worldwide.

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looorg writes:

https://carbuzz.com/mazda-6-stroke-hydrogen-combustion-engine/

This time, though, Mazda has outdone itself. The company just obtained a patent for a six stroke engine. What does it do with the extra strokes, you're wondering? It separates the hydrogen and carbon in gasoline so it can burn just the hydrogen, thus taking the carbon out of the system. Easy, right? No, not easy. And it gets even wilder from there.

It works like this: The engine makes hydrogen from gasoline using its own heat and a catalyst. It then burns that hydrogen and stores the carbon to be removed later. The result is that you can burn gasoline with zero CO2, at least most of the time.

The patent is called "fuel reforming system for vehicle," which does almost nothing to describe the magic going on here. Mazda's engineers describe it as a way to recover carbon, improve thermal efficiency, and give you a car that runs carbon-neutral.

The engine only stores small amounts of hydrogen, so it doesn't need complex tanks. If there isn't enough hydrogen ready for use, it can just run the old-fashioned way on gasoline until hydrogen is ready. It could save the internal combustion engine from eventual extinction, but there's just one problem. This is pretty much the most complex solution from Mazda we've ever seen. And that's saying something.

A normal engine works like this: In cycle one (aka the intake stroke), air is pulled in on a piston down stroke, and fuel is added. Cycle two (compression stroke) sees the piston move up, compressing the mix so that the spark plug can ignite it and push it down (the power stroke) through cycle three. Cycle four, the exhaust stroke, pushes out the exhaust gases as the piston moves up. And the process repeats from there.

This engine has those four, with some changes, and two extras. On the first cycle, air is pulled like normal. It can also open an exhaust valve to pull exhaust air in, for simpler EGR.

The next two cycles are standard – compression followed by power. Cycle four is called the re-compression stroke. In this cycle, the exhaust air is pushed out through a different valve. This valve routes the exhaust air through what's called a decomposer.

Mazda's decomposer is like a catalytic converter without expensive metals. Right in front of it is a fuel injector that squirts gasoline into the hot exhaust air.

The hot exhaust and fuel mixture enters the reformer and the carbon – pure carbon, it's not CO2 yet – sticks to the catalyst. Gasoline is a mix of hydrocarbons like octane (C8H18). The reformer separates and stores both.

A carbon recovery unit holds the carbon that comes out of the reaction. It would be emptied or removed when you go in for service. The carbon that comes out can be used in steel or for pigments (and other uses) or simply stored.

Cycle five, the re-expansion cycle, pulls the remaining air back into the cylinder. Then it's pushed out through the exhaust valve in cycle six, which is cycle four in a normal engine.

Mazda's patent includes some variations. Two of them use slightly different methods in the catalyst, and one uses a four-stroke cycle where the fourth is a "scavenging cycle" that has the intake, exhaust, and reformer valves all open at the same time. Think of it like an even more complex two-stroke engine.

The idea is amazing, and certainly interesting. But the implementation is a nightmare, and its actual efficiency is questionable. In other words, it's perfect for Mazda, so perhaps we'll see some sort of production version in the years to come.

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upstart writes:

Chagas disease, which can be deadly, is now considered endemic in the U.S.:

This article was updated Sept. 2, 2025.

Chagas disease, a potentially deadly condition transmitted by an insect known as the "kissing bug," is now endemic in the United States, according to a September report issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The disease is already considered endemic in Latin America, where an estimated 8 million people are infected but most don't know it, the CDC says. Researchers contend that recognizing Chagas disease as endemic here will support more effective education about the condition in medical schools and better prepare physicians to identify it.

Experts estimate about 45,000 people in Los Angeles County are infected — among more than 300,000 in the United States — and fewer than 2% of them know they carry the parasite transmitted by the "kissing bug."

"Most people living with Chagas disease are unaware of their diagnosis, often until it's too late to have effective treatment," says Judith Currier, MD, chief of infectious diseases at UCLA Health.

Also known as the conenose bug, barber bug or vinchuca in Spanish, "kissing bugs" — so named because they bite people on the face — feast on human blood. After they bite, they defecate, which deposits the parasite they carry, known as T. cruzi, onto the skin.

When the bitten person scratches the itchy bite, they inadvertently rub the parasite into the wound, which is how it enters the bloodstream, explains Shaun Yang, PhD, a professor of clinical microbiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Many people with Chagas disease are asymptomatic throughout its acute and chronic phases.

During the acute phase, which lasts about two months, some people experience severe swelling of the eyelid, "which is almost a hallmark of acute Chagas infection," Dr. Yang says. Other acute symptoms may include fever, fatigue, body aches, headache, loss of appetite, diarrhea and vomiting. But because these symptoms are similar to those of other illnesses, most people don't immediately consider the source to be infection with the T. cruzi parasite.

During the chronic phase of the disease, which can last a lifetime, about 20% of those infected will develop serious heart or digestive problems. Chagas disease can cause an enlarged heart, heart failure or cardiac arrest; an enlarged colon; or an enlarged esophagus.

Left untreated, Chagas disease "kills the heart very slowly," Dr. Yang says.

upstart writes:

But what goes up will also have to come down:

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft has successfully reboosted the International Space Station (ISS), raising the perigee of its orbit by approximately one mile and further eroding the complex's reliance on Russian rocketry.

The reboost kit, located in the trunk of the SpaceX CRS-33 Dragon cargo spacecraft, consists of two Draco engines. The system is isolated from the rest of the spacecraft, and the demonstration was intended to show how the vehicle can maintain the ISS's altitude.

The maneuver lasted five minutes, three seconds, and the initial test burn left the outpost in an orbit of 260.9 x 256.3 miles. Managers plan to use the reboost kit again throughout fall and perform a series of longer burns.

The Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft can also perform limited reboosts, and SpaceX demonstrated in 2024 that the Dragon itself is capable of using its engines to nudge the ISS.

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the end of the European Space Agency's (ESA) ATV program, Roscosmos Progress vehicles have been regularly used to reboost the ISS.

The extra capability could be timely. Rocket and Space Corporation Energia produces the Progress spacecraft. Last week, CEO Igor Maltev reportedly [source in Russian] told employees that they needed to stop "lying to themselves and others about the state of affairs, convincing themselves and others that everything is fine with us."

The decrepit state of the Russian space program isn't a secret. One paying passenger on the country's Soyuz spacecraft told The Register that having to dodge puddles on the floor from a leaking roof while on his way to inspect his vehicle was eye-opening.

SpaceX's demonstration also shows that when the time comes, the company should be capable of producing the opposite of a reboost capability and send the ISS into the atmosphere for controlled disposal.

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upstart writes:

Defrauding search with custom malware, Potato-family exploits:

A new China-aligned cybercrime crew named GhostRedirector has compromised at least 65 Windows servers worldwide - spotted in a June internet scan - using previously undocumented malware to juice gambling sites' rankings in Google search, according to ESET researchers.

The infections began in December, although other related malware samples indicate the group has been active since at least August 2024, the security firm's threat intel team noted.

GhostRedirector uses a variety of custom tools, including two never-seen-before pieces of malware that the researchers dubbed Rungan, which is a passive C++ backdoor, and Gamshen, a malicious Internet Information Services (IIS) trojan that manipulates Google search results for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fraud.

The victim sites then show versions of their web pages to Googlebot that would help certain gambling sites gain rank. For example, they may include fake backlinks to those gambling domains, fooling everyone's favorite search engine into thinking that those sites are highly recommended by others.

While most of the infected servers are in Brazil, Peru, Thailand, Vietnam, and the US, "we believe that GhostRedirector was more interested in targeting victims in South America and South Asia," malware researcher Fernando Tavella said in a Thursday report. Plus, he added, the gang doesn't appear to target a particular sector with victims from this campaign including education, healthcare, insurance, transportation, technology, and retail organizations.

The researchers suspect the criminals gained initial access by exploiting a probable SQL injection bug. They then used PowerShell to download Windows privilege escalation tools, droppers, and the two final payloads, Rungan and Gamshen, all from the same server: 868id[.]com

upstart writes:

The Trump family just became $5 billion richer (on paper) thanks to its latest crypto venture:

The Trumps' new digital currency WLFI began trading on Monday with about $1 billion worth of the tokens changing hands within an hour. Despite the token plunging in price on its first day of trading, the family gained as much as $5 billion in hypothetical wealth following the debut, the Wall Street Journal said in a report.

The launch was sort of a crypto version of an initial public offering: early investors who bought the token from Trump's venture World Liberty Financial were not able to sell any of it until Monday, when they got to do so with high premiums. The token is now available on major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.

The Trump family and other founders' tokens still remain locked, but now that the digital currency is trading, those token holdings have real-world valuation. The Trump family, including the President, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens, the WSJ reported.

With its current valuation, WLFI is the Trump family's most valuable asset, according to the WSJ, even more so than the property portfolio that the family was originally known for.

But crypto is volatile and prone to crashes, and the value of the tokens can shift at any time.

Monday's news was just the latest in a string of major crypto wins that the President and his family have made headlines for in the past year. Simultaneously, over the past seven months, Trump has overseen deregulatory wins for the cryptocurrency industry that helped install him in office, all the while administration officials cast aside concerns over the ethics and legality of these conflicts of interest.

upstart writes:

Microsoft shows off its latest Analog Optical Computer:

Microsoft researchers in Cambridge have unveiled its latest iteration of an Analog Optical Computer (AOC) and have inevitably incorporated AI into the technology's capabilities.

The AOC harnesses light as a medium for solving complex problems, notably optimization challenges found in the worlds of logistics, finance, and healthcare. It uses different light intensities to perform operations such as addition and multiplication. It's also considerably faster at certain problem-solving activities than traditional computers, we're told.

The prototype is built from commercially available parts, including micro-LEDs, optical lenses, and sensors from smartphone cameras. Since the underlying technology – shunting photons along fiber optic cables – is decades old, much of the hardware does not need to be expensively exotic.

While the aim is for a durable and practical machine that can operate at room temperature, and yet still be 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient when solving certain problems than conventional hardware, it's highly unlikely to be appear on a desktop anytime soon.

Francesca Parmigiani, the Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, said the system is "not a general-purpose computer, but what we believe is that we can find a wide range of applications and real-world problems where the computer can be extremely successful."

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upstart writes:

This Unlikely Chemical Could Be a Powerful Weapon Against Climate Change:

New research provides a framework for carbon capture driven by photochemistry, a potentially cheaper and less energy-intensive alternative to leading technologies.

Year after year, humans pump more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere than nature can remove, fueling global warming. As the need to mitigate climate change becomes increasingly urgent, scientists are developing ways to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere in addition to cutting emissions.

One of the biggest hurdles to scaling current carbon capture technologies is the vast amount of energy they consume, but what if there was an alternative that uses an abundant, cheap power source? A team of researchers at Harvard University recently took a major step toward that goal. Their technique, outlined in a Nature Chemistry study published August 13, harnesses sunlight to efficiently trap CO2.

They're not talking about slapping solar panels on direct air capture systems that run on heat and electricity. This approach is based on specially designed molecules that use light to change their chemical state and reversibly trap CO2.

The methodology the researchers developed is a significant departure from leading direct air capture technologies. These systems tend to rely on chemical solvents or porous sorbents that readily bond to CO2, pulling it out of the air. But the ability to reuse those materials—and harness the carbon for practical use—requires a huge input of energy (usually heat) to release the trapped carbon into a container.

"If you want a practical way to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then release it into a tank where you can use it, you need the solution—or whatever medium you're going to use—to be able to both capture and release. That's the key," co-author Richard Liu, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard, told Gizmodo.

"Our innovation here is that we began thinking about whether you could use light directly to do that," he explained.

To that end, Liu's team synthesized organic molecules called "fluorenyl photobases" that do exactly that. When exposed to sunlight, they rapidly release hydroxide ions that capture CO2 from ambient air by chemically binding to it. In the absence of light, the reaction reverses, releasing the trapped CO2 and reverting the photobase back to its original state.

Through a series of experiments, the researchers determined that the most effective fluorenyl photobase for CO2 capture was PBMeOH. This molecule showed no CO2 capture in the dark but the highest capture rate when exposed to light. What's more, testing showed that a PBMeOH-based carbon capture system is stable and can complete many cycles with minimal loss of efficiency.

"They only fade about 1% per cycle, so you could imagine only replenishing every 100 cycles," Liu explained.

This work demonstrates a reversible system for carbon capture that relies solely on sunlight as the direct energy input, highlighting photobases as a promising alternative to traditional sorbents.

The results are encouraging, but Liu and his colleagues will need to clear several hurdles before they can turn their framework into real-world technologies. They're already working to address several challenges, such as the engineering aspects of how the system will expose these compounds to light and dark.

While the "best" approach is still unknown, photochemical systems present some key advantages over existing technologies, Liu said. Exploring new ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is more urgent than ever before. "Because we can't get rid of every source in the short term, carbon capture from the atmosphere—and from point sources, especially—is going to be an important part of the solution."

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upstart writes:

What the hell is going on right now?:

Engineers are burning out. Orgs expect their senior engineering staff to be able to review and contribute to "vibe-coded" features that don't work. My personal observation is that the best engineers are highly enthusiastic about helping newer team members contribute and learn.

Instead of their comments being taken to heart, reflected on, and used as learning opportunities, hapless young coders are instead using feedback as simply the next prompt in their "AI" masterpiece. I personally have witnessed and heard first-hand accounts where it was incredibly obvious a junior engineer was (ab)using LLM tools.

In a recent company town-hall, I watched as a team of junior engineers demoed their latest work. I couldn't tell you what exactly it did, or even what it was supposed to do - it didn't seem like they themselves understood. However, at a large enough organization, it's not about what you do, its about what people think you do. Championing their "success", a senior manager goaded them into bragging about their use of "AI" tools to which they responded "This is four thousand lines of code written by Claude". Applause all around.

I was asked to add a small improvement to an existing feature. After reviewing the code, I noticed a junior engineer was the most recent to work on that feature. As I always do, I reached out to let them know what I'd be doing and to see if they had any insight that would be useful to me. Armed with the Github commit URL, I asked for context around their recent change. I can't know for sure, but I'd be willing to put money down that my exact question and the commit were fed directly into an LLM which was then copy and pasted back to me. I'm not sure why, but I felt violated. It felt wrong.

upstart writes:

France fines Google, SHEIN for undercooked cookie policies:

France's data protection authority levied massive fines against Google and SHEIN for dropping cookies on customers without securing their permission, and also whacked Google for showing ads in email service.

The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) announced [source in French] the fines on Wednesday, and explained it found Google broke local laws as its signup process for new accounts, which encouraged users to approve use of cookies tied to advertising services, but didn't inform them that accepting those cookies was a condition for using Google's services.

The CNIL found Google's cookie advice mean locals created 74 million accounts under circumstances that breached French law, and 53 million people therefore saw ads in the "Promotions" and "Social" tabs of their email accounts.

The regulator fined Google LLC € 200 million ($233 million) and levied a €125 million ($145 million) fine against Google Ireland for its role in the mess.

CNIL ordered [source in French] Chinese e-tailer SHEIN to pay €150 million ($175 million) for not properly securing permission before dropping cookies on 12 million people residing in France who visited shein.com.

The regulator found the Chinese site didn't properly explain how it used cookies, opting out of cookies had no effect because even if users clicked "Reject All" Shein sent more cookies anyway, and kept reading those already present.

CNIL's notice points out that in recent years it's found and punished many similar misuses of cookies, suggesting Shein should have understood its obligations.

Shein intends to appeal the decision. Google is reviewing it.

Diplomats are probably also poring over the CNIL's decision, given US president Donald Trump's recent warning that he could impose tariffs on nations which dare to regulate US tech companies.

Trump seems to regard other sovereign nations' digital regulations as illegitimate if they cost American companies money or slow their growth. CNIL argues that Google and Shein harmed local consumers by breaching their privacy.

Another reason for Trump's ire is that he feels regulators don't target Chinese companies. CNIL has proved him wrong on this occasion.

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upstart writes:

Nvidia's next-gen AI chip could double the price of H20 if China export is approved:

The Nvidia B30A, which the company is developing as its next-generation replacement for the China-market H20 AI chip, is expected to cost double the price of the earlier model. Reuters reports that the H20 currently sells between $10,000 and $12,000, meaning the B30A will likely be priced from $20,000 to $25,000. Despite this massive increase, many Chinese companies, like TikTok owner ByteDance, are keen on getting their hands on Nvidia's latest chips, with some sources saying that these chips are considered great deals.

It's estimated that the B30A will be six times more powerful than the H20, despite being a watered-down version of the full-fat B300 AI chip. Nvidia has reportedly already developed the B30A, but it's still waiting for approval from the U.S. government to proceed with the marketing and sale of the Blackwell-based GPU. In the meantime, many Chinese tech firms are still buying H20 chips despite Beijing's guidance to stop buying them.

U.S. President Donald Trump has previously banned the sales of H20 chips, resulting in a $5.5-billion write-off for Nvidia. However, he reversed course in mid-July 2025, allowing the company to resume deliveries to Chinese customers. But instead of a blanket provision allowing it to sell the H20 to anyone, the U.S. instead started issuing export licenses to Nvidia, allowing it to ship its products.

Because of this, there's currently a massive license backlog at the U.S. Department of Commerce —the worst it has experienced in 30 years — turning the H20 taps into a trickle. The White House is also still ironing out the 15% deal that AMD and Nvidia signed, so that the companies can market their products to China. We've also seen reports that Nvidia is asking its suppliers to wind down H20-related production, with the company only telling Tom's Hardware, "We constantly manage our supply chain to address market conditions."

So, with all these delays, red tape, and rumors, many of Nvidia's Chinese customers are getting apprehensive and want assurance that their H20 orders are delivered. This shows that there is still massive demand for these powerful chips, thus turning it into a massive geopolitical tool to be wielded on the negotiating table by both the East and the West.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Porsche's New Cayenne Will Charge Itself Like No Other EV:

Those who closely follow electric cars will have heard whispers of wireless charging for a while now. And if you're not an EV aficionado, you've probably wondered why it hasn't happened. Well, that's all about to change. Porsche announced on Thursday that it's rolling out wireless charging on the upcoming all-electric Cayenne later this year.

The goal is to put an end to wrangling thick and bulky charging cables. Instead, Porsche is stepping in as the first electric car maker to offer wireless charging that's actually going into production.

Porsche's inductive charging system delivers up to 11kW with around 90% efficiency, which is on par with traditional wired AC charging. But unlike most EV solutions that involve a jungle of wall-mounted boxes, Porsche's setup requires just one unassuming floor plate in your garage or driveway. Given that Porsche says roughly 75% of electric charging happens at home, it's not hard to see the appeal.

This one-box system does away with the wall box and bulky control units, making the process look effortless. Just park your Cayenne Electric over the slab, and you're good to go. The car even lowers itself slightly to align with the plate -- which makes charging as efficient as possible.

Many startups have tried and failed to make wireless charging for EVs happen over the years, said Antuan Goodwin, CNET's senior cars writer. "Challenges that have kept the tech from widespread adoption include: fragile hardware (it will be run over by drivers), alignment issues, energy losses that make it significantly slower than plugging in or excessive/dangerous heat generation from sending high amperage over air."

Porsche thinks it's managed to overcome these roadblocks. The system works via a transmitter coil embedded in the base plate and a corresponding receiver in the vehicle's underbody, sandwiched between the front wheels. It transfers energy using a magnetic field over a gap of a few centimeters, and it has all the safety features you'd expect: motion sensors, object detection and a big red pause button.

The Cayenne Electric, which will be the first to offer this tech, is due for its release later this year. As for the floor plate, it will go on sale in 2026 through Porsche Centres and online. Pricing hasn't been detailed yet, but expect it to land at the premium end.

Original Submission