Unable to get the power it needs to feed its growing datacenter footprint, Amazon plans to transition some of its Oregon datacenters over to natural gas fuel cells. The Register reports: First reported by local media, Amazon's initial plan would involve installing just shy of 75 megawatts of fuel cell capacity across three datacenters with the option to expand that to four additional sites in the future. Fuel cells extract electricity from a fuel like natural gas or hydrogen without the need for combustion. With hydrogen, the only byproducts of this reaction are electricity and water vapor, bu[...]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone, where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage. Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly trickling out to the masses, and, as Esper's senior technical editor Mishaal Rahm[...]
Last year's Super Bowl broadcast was "crypto-happy" as 100 million Americans saw at least three commercials promoting cryptocurrency. This year things will be different. According to the Associated Press, there will be no cryptocurrency advertisements aired during this year's game. From the report: Last year's Super Bowl was dubbed the "Crypto Bowl" because four cryptocurrency companies -- FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and eToro -- ran splashy commercials. It was part of a larger effort by crypto companies to break into the mainstream with sports sponsorships. But in November, FTX filed for bankru[...]
A researcher from the Netherlands has gone viral for allegedly predicting the earthquake which struck Turkey and Syria, just three days before two massive quakes affected the region on Monday, February 6. From a report: On Friday, February 3, Frank Hoogerbeets posted on Twitter, "Sooner or later there will be a ~M 7.5 earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon)." The post was accompanied by a map highlighting the area Hoogerbeets expected to be affected by seismic activity. Hoogerbeets works for a research institute called the SSGEOS. The institute's purpose is "mo[...]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Julius "Zeekill" Kivimaki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimaki had been in hiding since October 2022, when he failed to show up in court and Finland issued an international warrant for his arrest. [...] According to the French news site actu.fr, Kivimaki was arrested around 7 a.m. on Feb. 3, after author[...]
Pakistan has unblocked Wikipedia in the South Asian market, three days after the online encyclopedia was censored in the nation over noncompliance with removing what the local regulator deemed as "sacrilegious" content. From a report: Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, directed the unblocking order, calling the censorship on Wikipedia "not a suitable measure to restrict access to some objectionable contents / sacrilegious matter on it." "The unintended consequences of this blanket ban, therefore, outweigh its benefits," Sharif added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Getty Images has filed a lawsuit in the US against Stability AI, creators of open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, escalating its legal battle against the firm. From a report: The stock photography company is accusing Stability AI of "brazen infringement of Getty Images' intellectual property on a staggering scale." It claims that Stability AI copied more than 12 million images from its database "without permission ... or compensation ... as part of its efforts to build a competing business," and that the startup has infringed on both the company's copyright and trademark protections.[...]
Starting pretty soon, some tickets at AMC locations are going to be getting cheaper and more expensive depending on where you sit as the movie theater chain introduces a new tiered pricing scheme called Sightline. From a report: Today, AMC announced its plans to roll out Sightline at AMC, a new pricing structure that will split auditorium seats into three differently priced tiers in theaters across the country beginning this Friday. In a statement about the new program, Eliot Hamlisch, AMC's chief marketing officer, described Sightline as an effort to get consumers thinking about buying movie [...]
Google is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard. From a report: Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the project in a blog post today, describing the tool as an "experimental conversational AI service" that will answer users' queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of "trusted testers" today, says Pichai, before becoming "more widely available to the public in the coming weeks." It's not clear exactly what capabilities Bard will have, but it seems the chatbot will be just as free ranging as OpenAI's ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask [...]
Microsoft wants everyone to know that it isn't looking to invade their privacy while looking through their Windows PCs to find out-of-date versions of Office software. From a report: In its KB5021751 update last month, Microsoft included a plan to scan Windows systems to smoke out those Office versions that are no longer supported or nearing the end of support. Those include Office 2007 (which saw support end in 2017) and Office 2010 (in 2020) and the 2013 build (this coming April). The company stressed that it would run only one time and would not install anything on the user's Windows system[...]