| A Huge $2 Billion 'Solar + Storage' Project in California Powers Up Aug 10th 2025, 15:34 by EditorDavid One of America's largest solar + battery storage projects "is now fully online in Mojave, California," reports Electrek: Arevon Energy's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project combines 758 megawatts (MWdc) of solar with 300 MW/1,200 megawatt hours of battery storage. Eland 1 reached commercial operation in December 2024, and Eland 2 recently commenced full operation. The two combined comprise 1.36 million solar panels and 172 lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP). Combined, the Eland 1 & 2 projects will be able to power more than 266,000 homes annually, and overall, can provide 7% of the total electricity requirements for the city of Los Angeles. "Arevon's Eland Solar-plus-Storage Project alone will ... push the city's clean energy share above 60%, a major milestone in LA's transition to being powered by 100% clean energy by 2035," said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Eland 1 & 2 created around 1,000 jobs to construct the project, and it's expected to disburse more than $36 million in local government payments throughout its lifetime. The article points out that Arevon Energy "has more than 4,500 MW of solar and battery storage projects operating across 17 states — and more than 6 GW of new projects in its pipeline."   Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Rust's Annual Tech Report: Trusted Publishing for Packages and a C++/Rust Interop Strategy Aug 10th 2025, 14:34 by EditorDavid Thursday saw the release of Rust 1.89.0 But this week the Rust Foundation also released its second comprehensive annual technology report. A Rust Foundation announcement shares some highlights: - Trusted Publishing [GitHub Actions authentication using cryptographically signed tokens] fully launched on crates.io, enhancing supply chain security and streamlining workflows for maintainers. - Major progress on crate signing infrastructure using The Update Framework (TUF), including three full repository implementations and stakeholder consensus. - Integration of the Ferrocene Language Specification (FLS) into the Rust Project, marking a critical step toward a formal Rust language specification [and "laying the groundwork for broader safety certification and formal tooling."] - 75% reduction in CI infrastructure costs while maintaining contributor workflow stability. ["All Rust repositories are now managed through Infrastructure-as-Code, improving maintainability and security."] - Expansion of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, with multiple international meetings and advances on coding guidelines aligned with safety standards like MISRA. ["The consortium is developing practical coding guidelines, aligned tooling, and reference materials to support regulated industries — including automotive, aerospace, and medical devices — adopting Rust."] - Direct engagement with ISO C++ standards bodies and collaborative Rust-C++ exploration... The Foundation finalized its strategic roadmap, participated in ISO WG21 meetings, and initiated cross-language tooling and documentation planning. These efforts aim to unlock Rust adoption across legacy C++ environments without sacrificing safety. The Rust Foundation also acknowledges continued funding from OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega Project and "generous infrastructure donations from organizations like AWS, GitHub, and Mullvad VPN" to the Foundation's Security Initiative, which enabled advances like including GitHub Secret Scanning and automated incident response to "Trusted Publishing" and the integration of vulnerability-surfacing capabilities into crates.io. There was another announcement this week. In November AWS and the Rust Foundation crowdsourced "an effort to verify the Rust standard library" — and it's now resulted in a new formal verification tool called "Efficient SMT-based Context-Bounded Model Checker" (or ESBMCESBMC) This winning contribution adds ESBMC — a state-of-the-art bounded model checker — to the suite of tools used to analyze and verify Rust's standard library. By integrating through Goto-Transcoder, they enabled ESBMC to operate seamlessly in the Rust verification workflow, significantly expanding the scope and flexibility of verification efforts... This achievement builds on years of ongoing collaboration across the Rust and formal verification communities... The collaboration has since expanded. In addition to verifying the Rust standard library, the team is exploring the use of formal methods to validate automated C-to-Rust translations, with support from AWS. This direction, highlighted by AWS Senior Principal Scientist Baris Coskun and celebrated by the ESBMC team in a recent LinkedIn post, represents an exciting new frontier for Rust safety and verification tooling. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Microsoft Sued Over Plans to Discontinue Windows 10 Support Aug 10th 2025, 11:34 by EditorDavid xA California man sued Microsoft Thursday over its plan to stop supporting Windows 10 on October 14th, reports Courthouse News Though Windows 11 was launched nearly four years ago, many of its billion or so worldwide users are clinging to the decade-old Windows 10... According to StatCounter, nearly 43% of Windows users still use the old version on their desktop computers.... "With only three months until support ends for Windows 10, it is likely that many millions of users will not buy new devices or pay for extended support," Klein writes in his complaint. "These users — some of whom are businesses storing sensitive consumer data — will be at a heightened risk of a cyberattack or other data security incident, a reality of which Microsoft is well aware...." According to one market analyst writing in 2023, Microsoft's shift away from Windows 10 will lead millions of customers to buy new devices and thrown out their old ones, consigning as many as 240 million PCs to the landfill.... Klein is asking a judge to order Microsoft to continue supporting Windows 10 without additional charge, until the number of devices running the older operating system falls bellow 10% of total Windows users. He says nothing about any money he seeking for himself, though it does ask for attorneys' fees. Microsoft did not respond to an email requesting a comment. The complaint also requests an order requiring Microsoft's advertising "to disclose clearly and prominently the approximate end-of-support date for the Windows operating system purchased with the device at the time of purchase" or at least "disclose that support is only guaranteed for a certain delineated period of time without additional cost, and to disclose the potential consequences of such end-of-support for device security and functionality." Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | AOL Finally Discontinues Its Dial-Up Internet Access - After 34 Years Aug 10th 2025, 07:34 by EditorDavid AOL (now a Yahoo subsidiary) just announced its dial-up internet service will be discontinued at the end of September. "The change also means the retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the familiar screech of a modem handshake," remembers Slashdot reader BrianFagioli (noting that dial-up Internet "was once the gateway to the web for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity.") AOL's dial-up service "has been publicly available for 34 years," writes Tom's Hardware. But AppleInsider notes the move comes more than 40 years after AOL started "as a very early Apple service." AOL itself started back in 1983 under the name Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600 console. After failing, it became Quantum Computer Services in 1985, eventually launching AppleLink in 1988 to connect Macintosh computers together... With the launch of PC Link for IBM-compatible PCs in 1988 and parting from Apple in October 1989, the company rebranded itself as America Online, or AOL... Even at its height, dial-up connections could get up to 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions, while modern connections are measured in megabits and gigabits. Most of the service was also what's considered a "walled garden," with features that were only available through AOL itself and that it wasn't the actual, untamed Internet. In the 1990s AOL "was how millions of people were introduced to the Internet," the article remembers, adding that "Even after the AOL Time Warner acquisition and the 2015 acquisition by Verizon, AOL was still a popular service. Astoundingly, it counted about two million dial-up subscribers at the time." In the 2021 acquisition of assets from Verizon by Apollo Global Management, AOL was said to have 1.5 million people paying for services. However, this was more for technical support and software, rather than for actual Internet access. A CNBC report at the time reports that the dial-up user count was "in the low thousands".... While it dies off, not with a bang but a whimper, AOL's dial-up is still remembered as one of the most transformative services in the Internet age. "This change does not impact the numerous other valued products and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of their plans," a Yahoo spokesperson told PC Magazine this week. "There is also no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts." AOL's disastrous 2001 merger with Time Warner and ongoing inability to deliver broadband to its customers... left it on a path to decline that acquiring such widely read sites as Engadget [2005] and TechCrunch [2010] did not stem. By 2014, the number of dial-up AOL customers had collapsed to 2.34 million. A year later, Verizon bought the company for $4.4 billion in an internet-content play that turned out to be as doomed as the Time Warner transaction. In 2021, Verizon unloaded both AOL and Yahoo, which it had separately purchased in 2017, to the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management.... The demise of AOL's dial-up service does not mean the extinction of the oldest form of consumer online access. Estimates from the Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey show 163,401 Americans connected to the internet via dial-up that year. That was by far the smallest segment of the internet-using population, dwarfed by 100,166,949 subscribing to such forms of broadband as "cable, fiber optic, or DSL"; 8,628,648 using satellite; 3,318,901 using "Internet access without a subscription" (which suggests Wi-Fi from coffee shops or public libraries); and 1,445,135 via "other service." The remaining AOL dial-up subscribers will need to find some sort of replacement, which in rural areas may be limited to fixed wireless or SpaceX's considerably more expensive Starlink. Or they may wind up joining the ranks of Americans with no internet access: 6,866,059, in those 2023 estimates. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | |
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