The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday proposed sweeping emissions cuts for new cars and trucks through 2032, a move it says could mean two out of every three new vehicles automakers sell will be electric within a decade. From a report: The proposal, if finalized, represents the most aggressive U.S. vehicle emissions reduction plan to date, requiring 13% annual average pollution cuts and a 56% reduction in projected fleet average emissions over 2026 requirements. The EPA is also proposing new stricter emissions standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks through 2032.

The EPA projects the 2027-2032 model year rules would cut more than 9 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055 - equivalent to more than twice total U.S. CO2 emissions last year. Automakers and environmentalists say the administration is moving quickly in order to finalize new rules by early 2024 to make it much harder for a future Congress or president to reverse them. Then President Donald Trump rolled back tough emissions limits through 2025 set under Barack Obama but the Biden administration reversed the rollback. The agency estimates net benefits through 2055 from the proposal range from $850 billion to $1.6 trillion. By 2032 the proposal would cost about $1,200 per vehicle per manufacturer, but save an owner more than $9,000 on average on fuel, maintenance, and repair costs over an eight-year period.

An anonymous reader shares a report: About a year ago, Google announced its Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS) service, a service that helps developers defend against supply chain security attacks by regularly scanning and analyzing some of the world's most popular software libraries for vulnerabilities. Today, Google is launching Assured OSS into general availability with support for well over a thousand Java and Python packages -- and while Google didn't initially disclose pricing when it first announced the service, the company has now revealed that it will be available for free.

Software development has long depended on third-party libraries (which are often maintained by only a single developer), but it wasn't until the industry got hit with a number of high-profile exploits that everyone (including the White House) perked up and started taking software supply chain security seriously. Now, you can't attend an open source conference without hearing about Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), artifact registries and similar topics. It's no surprise then that Google, which has long been at the forefront of releasing open-source products, launched a service like Assured OSS.

Google promises that it will constantly keep these libraries up to date (without creating forks) and continuously scan for known vulnerabilities, do fuzz tests to discover new ones and then fix these issues and contribute these fixes back upstream. The company notes that when it first launched the service with around 250 Java libraries, it was responsible for discovering 48% of the new CVEs for these libraries and subsequently addressing them.

In the never-ending battle against online impersonation scams, the professional social media platform LinkedIn announced today a set of new verification features that enable users to authenticate aspects of their identities and job histories. From a report: Crucially, users will now have a few different options to verify their identity and current jobs on LinkedIn. That way, if someone tries to make a copycat LinkedIn account, there can be clear differences between the imposter account and the verified profile. LinkedIn facilitates verification in three ways that are all free to individual users. The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn. The social media platform has recently been piloting this work email verification feature with a small group of companies.

The second option is to verify your identity on LinkedIn through the airport security service Clear. The authentication company will take your United States phone number and government-issued ID and use the information to verify your name. You have to weigh whether you want to trust a third party like Clear with your personal data, but the option might be particularly appealing if you already use the company for travel verification and they have your data on file anyway. The third verification feature allows users to confirm their name and current employer through the Microsoft Entra Verified ID credential, a workplace identification platform Microsoft launched last year. This option will have a slower rollout, and it will be available at the end of the month to employees at a few dozen pilot companies that are already enrolled in Entra.

The company behind the Raspberry Pi line of computers has raised fresh investment from Sony's semiconductor unit, in a deal aimed at advancing its efforts in artificial intelligence. From a report: Sony Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, invested an undisclosed amount in Raspberry Pi Ltd, the trading company of Raspberry Pi, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The extent of the funding was not revealed, but Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi's co-founder and CEO, said that the firm raised the cash at the same $500 million valuation it was worth in a 2021 funding round, when it brought in $45 million.

Upton established Raspberry Pi in 2012 with the aim of making computing more accessible to young people. Raspberry Pi's tiny single-board computers are the size of a credit card and have been used to build everything from high-altitude balloons to small radio-controlled submarines. Raspberry Pi's customers were mainly hobbyists and teachers in the early days. The company has since become a more active player in the enterprise -- in a typical year, roughly 70% of its sales now come from commercial customers embedding its products into factories or consumer devices, Upton told CNBC.

Ford said Tuesday it will spend $1.34 billion (C$1.8B) to turn its 70-year-old Oakville facility in Canada into an assembly plant for its next-generation of electric vehicles. TechCrunch reports: The campus, which first opened in 1953, will be renamed Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex. The company said Tuesday it will begin modernizing the 487-acre site in the second quarter of 2024. The upgrade includes completely retooling the facility that currently produces the internal combustion engine-powered Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus to own that only produces EVs. This is the first time that Ford has completely retooled an existing plant for EVs in North America.

Ford also plans to add a 407,000-square-foot battery plant that will use cells and arrays from its BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Workers will assemble the components into battery packs and then install them into EVs produced at the plant. "I'm most excited for the world to see the incredible next-generation electric and fully digitally connected vehicles produced in Oakville," CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users don't like it when Microsoft changes long-used and familiar functions in its OS, so altering something that's been the same for 28 years is always going to bring controversy. Nevertheless, it seems that the Redmond firm is planning on changing the Print Screen button into a key that opens the Windows 11 Snipping Tool. The Print Screen button has performed the same function in the Windows operating system since Windows 95: taking a screenshot of the current screen and copying it to the clipboard, usually so it can be edited in another program. But Windows Latest discovered that Microsoft is changing the default function of the Print Screen key in Windows 11. In the Windows 11 Beta preview builds 22621.1546 and 22624.1546, hitting the key will open the Windows Snipping Tool, Windows' built-in screenshotting tool that's currently accessed by pressing the Windows logo Key + Shift + S.

The French Competition Authority is likely to move forward soon with an antitrust investigation into Apple over complaints tied to 2021 changes to its app tracking policies, Axios reported, citing sources. From the report: A formal investigation would mark the first major government move taken globally against Apple related to privacy rule changes that upended the digital advertising world. French regulators are favoring issuing a formal "Statement of Objections" to parties involved in the matter in coming weeks, sources told Axios.

That step would signal to groups that issued initial complaints about Apple's actions and Apple that the authority found evidence of illegal anticompetitive behavior in its initial review of the complaints it received. The 2020 complaint argues that Apple's app tracking changes did not adequately adhere to European Union privacy rules and that Apple failed to hold itself to the same ad targeting standards that it forced on its competitors because it targeted iOS users with ads from app tracking data. The complaint was filed jointly by four French advertising trade groups -- IAB France, Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), SRI and UDECAM.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox has a reputation of being something of a resource hog, even among modern browsers. But it might not be entirely earned, because it looks like a CPU bug affecting Firefox users on Windows was actually the fault of Windows Defender. The latest update to the ubiquitous security tool addresses the issue, and should result in measurably lower CPU usage for the Windows version of Firefox. According to Mozilla senior software engineer Yannis Juglaret, the culprit was MsMpEng.exe, which you might recognize from your Task Manager. It handles the Real-Time protection feature that monitors web activity for malicious threats.

The bug was causing Firefox to call on the service much more frequently than comparable browsers like Chrome or Edge, resulting in notable CPU spikes. Said CPU spikes could reduce performance in other applications or affect a laptop's battery life. The issue was first reported on Mozilla's bug tracker system way back in 2018 and quickly assigned to the MsMpEng service, but some more recent and diligent documentation on the part of Juglaret resulted in more swift action from Microsoft's developers.

An anonymous reader shares a report:Weather apps are not all the same. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. On an average day, you're probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases -- which usually take place during severe weather events -- are what stick in a person's mind. "Eighty percent of the year, a weather app is going to work fine," Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston's Space City Weather, told me. "But it's that 20 percent where people get burned that's a problem."

No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. "My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast," Lanza told me. "That's how ingrained these services have become in most peoples' lives." The basic issue with weather apps, he argues, is that many of them remove a crucial component of a good, reliable forecast: a human interpreter who can relay caveats about models or offer a range of outcomes instead of a definitive forecast. [...] What people seem to be looking for in a weather app is something they can justify blindly trusting and letting into their lives -- after all, it's often the first thing you check when you roll over in bed in the morning. According to the 56,400 ratings of Carrot in Apple's App Store, its die-hard fans find the app entertaining and even endearing. "Love my psychotic, yet surprisingly accurate weather app," one five-star review reads. Although many people need reliable forecasting, true loyalty comes from a weather app that makes people feel good when they open it.

South Korea's antitrust regulator has fined Alphabet's Google 42.1 billion won ($31.88 million) for blocking the release of mobile video games on a competitor's platform. From a report: The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday that Google bolstered its market dominance, and hurt local app market One Store's revenue and value as a platform, by requiring video game makers to exclusively release their titles on Google Play in exchange for providing in-app exposure between June 2016 and April 2018.

Google said it will review the final decision by the KFTC to evaluate the next course of action. "Google makes substantial investments in the success of developers, and we respectfully disagree with the KFTC's conclusions", a spokesperson said. The KFTC said the move against the U.S. technology giant is part of efforts by the government to ensure fair markets.

The federal government is taking what could be the first steps toward requiring safer, more transparent AI systems as a Commerce Department agency invited public comment to help shape specific policy recommendations. From a report: The move is far short of the comprehensive AI legislation critics have advocated. But with the frenzy over generative AI continuing to grow, the Biden administration is trying to get a head start on a government response to the fast-moving industry. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking the public to weigh in on what role the federal government can play to ensure AI algorithms are acting as claimed and not causing harm.

"We really believe in the promise of AI," Assistant Commerce Secretary Alan Davidson, who runs NTIA, tells Axios. "We do believe it needs to be implanted safely and we're concerned that's not happening right now." Davidson said that the government could take a range of actions to shape AI that don't require new legislation -- including mandating audits as part of its procurement standards or offering prizes or bounties to those who find bias within algorithms. "We need to start the hard work of actually putting in place processes that are going to make people feel like the (AI) tools are doing what they say they are going to do, that models are behaving," Davidson said.

China plans to require a security review of generative AI services before they're allowed to operate, casting uncertainty over ChatGPT-like bots unveiled by the country's largest tech companies including Baidu. From a report: Providers of services must ensure content is accurate and respects intellectual property, and neither discriminates nor endangers security, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in draft guidelines published for public feedback. AI operators must also clearly label AI-generated content, the country's internet overseer said in a statement posted on its website.

The CAC's requirements add to Beijing's growing attempts to regulate the explosive growth of generative AI since OpenAI's ChatGPT fired up the industry in November. Companies from Alibaba Group to SenseTime and Baidu all aim to build the definitive next-generation AI platform for the world's largest internet market. That mirrors a growing wave of development abroad with Alphabet's Google and Microsoft among the many tech companies exploring generative AI, which can create original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts. China's made no secret of its wish to elevate AI at a time the country is locked in a conflict with the US over technology from chips to EVs. But it remains uncertain how the government intends to both galvanize and police the emergent field.

schwit1 shares a report from Inverse: On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called "space weather." Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth's surface. They didn't last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet's magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun. The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites -- including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it -- made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth's magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they'd delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

Ascend Elements opened a recycling plant in Covington, Georgia in late March that it says is the largest electric-vehicle battery recycling facility in North America. "It can process 30,000 metric tons of input each year, breaking down old batteries and prepping the most valuable materials inside to be processed and turned into new batteries," reports Canary Media. "That capacity equates to breaking down the battery packs from 70,000 electric vehicles annually, said Ascend CEO Mike O'Kronley." From the report: Recycling can deliver new battery materials without the expense and environmental impact of new mining. It is extremely hard to develop new mines in the U.S., but the federal government is lavishing funds on new battery recycling plants. The revamped EV tax credits also call for increasing shares of domestically sourced batteries and battery materials. Those market and policy shifts made recycling sufficiently desirable that Ascend is paying other companies for their old batteries. At the moment, those deals are mostly with EV or battery makers that have high volumes to get rid of.

"Paying for these spent batteries keeps them from going into the landfill," O'Kronley told Canary Media. "It's better to get paid for it rather than throw them away." Ascend also accepts used consumer electronics from battery-collection programs, such as Call2Recycle. That's not to say there are enough old batteries coming in to fill the factory. Currently, 80 to 90 percent of what's going into Ascend's Covington facility is scrap materials from battery factories, including SK Battery America's plant in Commerce, Georgia.

That relationship influenced Ascend's choice of location: Covington sits in the emerging "Battery Belt," a swath of new battery factories and electric-vehicle plants opening up across the Midwest and the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky (look for all the blue icons in this White House map of new industrial investments). Fellow battery-recycling startup Redwood Materials also chose South Carolina for a forthcoming $3.5 billion recycling facility. "There will need to be a recycling plant within about an hour's drive of every single one of those [new battery gigafactories]," O'Kronley said. "You don't want to be [long-distance] shipping these very large, heavy EV batteries that are classified as Class 9 hazardous materials." The report notes that the company's second commercial-scale facility in Hopkinsville, Kentucky will "introduce a brand-new technique for efficiently extracting cathode materials from black mass, which Ascend has dubbed 'hydro to cathode.'"

If you want to sneak malware onto people's Android devices via the official Google Play store, it may cost you about $20,000 to do so, Kaspersky suggests. The Register reports: This comes after the Russian infosec outfit studied nine dark-web markets between 2019 and 2023, and found a slew of code and services for sale to infect and hijack the phones and tablets of Google Play users. Before cybercriminals can share their malicious apps from Google's official store, they'll need a Play developer account, and Kaspersky says those sell for between $60 and $200 each. Once someone's bought one of these accounts, they'll be encouraged use something called a loader.

Uploading straight-up spyware to the Play store for people to download and install may attract Google's attention, and cause the app and developer account to be thrown out. A loader will attempt to avoid that: it's software a criminal can hide in their otherwise innocent legit-looking app, installed from the official store, and at some convenient point, the loader will fetch and apply an update for the app that contains malicious code that does stuff like steal data or commit fraud. That update may ask for extra permissions to access the victim's files, and may need to be pulled from an unofficial store with the victim's blessing; it depends on the set up. The app may refuse to work as normal until the loader is allowed to do its thing, convincing marks into opening up their devices to crooks. These tools are more pricey, ranging from $2,000 to $20,000, depending on the complexity and capabilities required.

Would-be crims who don't want to pay thousands for a loader can pay substantially less -- between $50 and $100 -- for a binding service, which hides a malicious APK file in a legitimate application. However, these have lower successful install rates compared to loaders, so even in the criminal underground you get what you pay for. Some other illicit services offered for sale on these forums include virtual private servers ($300), which allow attackers to redirect traffic or control infected devices, and web injectors ($25 to $80) that look out for victims' visiting selected websites on their infected devices and replacing those pages with malicious ones that steal login info or similar. Criminals can pay for obfuscation of their malware, and they may even get a better price if they buy a package deal. "One of the sellers offers obfuscation of 50 files for $440, while the cost of processing only one file by the same provider is about $30," Team Kaspersky says. Additionally, to increase the number of downloads to a malicious app, thus making it more attractive to other mobile users, attackers can buy installs for 10 cents to $1 apiece. Kaspersky's report can be found here.

The Google Assistant continues to suffer at the hands of Google's product shutdowns. The latest products to die are third-party Google Assistant smart displays. From a report: "Google no longer provides software updates for these third-party Smart Displays: Lenovo Smart Display (7", 8" & 10"), JBL Link View and LG Xboom AI ThinQ WK9 Smart Display. This could impact the quality of video calls and meetings," said Google Duo said in a support page. We're pretty sure that announcement applies to every third-party Google Smart Display that has ever launched, so the product line is dead. Google's first-party smart displays, the Google Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max, aren't going anywhere and will now be the only options on the market.

Google Smart Displays put the Google Assistant on a screen and support all the same commands that a Google Assistant speaker like the Google Home or Nest Audio would; just shout "Hey Google," and it will attempt to recognize your command. The screen adds the ability to see a visual accompaniment to your search results, usually either some text, a photo slideshow, a timer, or media or smart home controls. The system is a touchscreen and has a really basic user interface that you can swipe around in without needing to talk to it.

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, The New York Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. From the report: That would represent a quantum leap for the United States -- where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric -- and would exceed President Biden's earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030. It would be the federal government's most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change. The European Union has already enacted vehicle emissions standards that are expected to phase out the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Canada and Britain have proposed standards similar to the European model.

At the same time, the proposed regulation would pose a significant challenge for automakers. Nearly every major car company has already invested heavily in electric vehicles, but few have committed to the levels envisioned by the Biden administration. And many have faced supply chain problems that have held up production. Even manufacturers who are enthusiastic about electric models are unsure whether consumers will buy enough of them to make up the majority of new car sales within a decade. The action from the E.P.A. is likely to hearten climate activists, who are angry over the Biden administration's recent decision to approve an enormous oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska. Some inside the administration argue that speeding up a transition to renewable energy, with most Americans driving electric vehicles, would lessen demand for oil drilled in Alaska or elsewhere.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever researched anything online, you've probably used the Internet Archive (IA). The IA, founded in 1996 by librarian and engineer Brewster Kahle, describes itself as "a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more." Their annals include 37 million books, many of which are old tomes that aren't commercially available. It has classic films, plenty of podcasts and -- via its Wayback Machine -- just about every deleted webpage ever. Four corporate publishers have a big problem with this, so they've sued the Internet Archive. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Hachette Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Wiley have alleged that the IA is committing copyright infringement. Now a federal judge has ruled in the publishers' favor. The IA is appealing the decision.

[...] Not only is this concern-trolling disingenuous, but the ruling itself, grounded in copyright, is a smack against fair use. It brings us one step closer to perpetual copyright -- the idea that individuals should own their work forever. The IA argued that their project was covered by fair use, as the Emergency Library provides texts for educational and scholarly purposes. Even writers objected to the court's ruling. More than 300 writers signed a petition against the lawsuit, including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein and -- get this -- Chuck Wendig. Writers lost nothing from the Emergency Library and gained everything from it. For my part, I've acquired research materials from the IA that I wouldn't have found anywhere else. The archive has scads of primary sources which otherwise might require researchers to fly across the country for access. The Internet Archive is good for literacy. It's good for the public. It's good for readers, writers and anyone who's invested in literary education. It does not harm authors, whose income is no more dented by it than any library programs. Even the Emergency Library's initial opponents have conceded this. The federal court's decision is a victory for corporations and a disaster for everyone else. If this decision isn't reversed, human beings will lose more knowledge than the Library of Alexandra ever contained. If IA's appeal fails, it will be a tragedy of historical proportions.

metrix007 writes: OpenBSD, the OS that earned an exaggerated reputation for security simply by disabling services by default, has released version 7.3. Plenty of new improvements and bug fixes including to the editor, although still no real security features to help lock down a system, no virtual machine support for non-OpenBSD guests and no modern file system.

After a nice spike during the first two years of the pandemic, global PC shipments continued to drop for a fourth consecutive quarter. Analyst firm IDC's latest figure has Q1 down 29% from the same time last year. Canalys paints an even more troubling picture for the industry, with a full 33% drop. From a report: A disappointing 2022 holiday set the stage for the beginning of the year, as vendor inventory has continued to pile up -- a trend that is expected to carry at least into Q3. The plunge has been so consistent that last quarter's figures dipped below those of Q1 2019, putting worldwide shipments below their pre-pandemic level.

[...] The culprits? For starters, a lot of people purchased news systems in 2020 and 2021 as their work settings adapted to a global pandemic. Laptops tend to have a life span of around three to five years. Desktops are even longer, at three to eight. People are likely to be content with their systems for a few years at least. As vendors go, both IDC and Canalys have Apple suffering the largest drop at 40.5 and 45.5%, respectively. That's a staggering figure, likely owing -- at least in part â" to the company coming back down to earth, as the M1 chip managed to buck larger category trends in 2021/2022. That chip marked Apple's biggest PC computing update since the company shifted to Intel decades prior. In spite of what ad copy might suggest, you don't get a generational shift every year.