Traditional airlines worldwide are rapidly eliminating long-standing perks from their basic fares, blurring the line between full-service and budget carriers, according to industry analysis of 90 major airlines.

Air Canada's decision to ban standard carry-on luggage for its lowest-fare passengers from January 3 marks the latest rollback, joining United Airlines, Finnair, and others. Most legacy carriers, including British Airways, Air France, and Lufthansa, have already stripped checked baggage and seat selection from basic fares, signaling an industry-wide shift toward budget airline practices.

Facial recognition technology is poised to replace traditional passports globally, marking the biggest shift in travel documentation since World War 1. Airports across Finland, Canada, Netherlands, UAE, UK, Italy, US, and India are testing passport-free systems, with Singapore already implementing the technology for its residents and departing visitors.

The systems typically store passport data digitally on smartphones, using face recognition cameras at airports to match travelers against stored photos. Singapore officials report over 1.5 million people have used their system, while Finnish trials showed identity checks taking just eight seconds.

Modern LED headlights are significantly brighter and more glaring than traditional halogen bulbs, creating dangerous driving conditions, lighting experts report. The newer lights produce an intense, concentrated beam that is bluer and more disorienting, particularly affecting older drivers. "Headlights are getting brighter, smaller and bluer. All three of those things increase a particular kind of glare. It's called discomfort glare," said Daniel Stern, chief editor of Driving Vision News.

Researchers used Canada's national synchrotron light source facility "to analyze a new type of lithium-ion battery material — called a single-crystal electrode — that's been charging and discharging non-stop in a Halifax lab for more than six years," reports Tech Xplore.

The results? The battery material "lasted more than 20,000 cycles before it hit the 80% capacity cutoff," which they say is equivalent to driving 8 million kms (nearly 5 million miles). That's more than eight times the life of a regular lithium-ion battery that lasted 2,400 cycles before reaching the 80% cutoff — and "When the researchers looked at the single crystal electrode battery, they saw next to no evidence of this mechanical stress." (One says the material "looked very much like a brand-new cell." Toby Bond [a senior scientist at the CLS, who conducted the research for his Ph.D.] attributes the near absence of degradation in the new style battery to the difference in the shape and behavior of the particles that make up the battery electrodes... The single crystal is, as its name implies, one big crystal: it's more like an ice cube. "If you have a snowball in one hand, and an ice cube in the other, it's a lot easier to crush the snowball," says Bond. "The ice cube is much more resistant to mechanical stress and strain." While researchers have for some time known that this new battery type resists the micro cracking that lithium-ion batteries are so susceptible to, this is the first time anyone has studied a cell that's been cycled for so long...

Bond says what's most exciting about the research is that it suggests we may be near the point where the battery is no longer the limiting component in an EV — as it may outlast the other parts of the car. The new batteries are already being produced commercially, says Bond, and their use should ramp up significantly within the next couple of years. "I think work like this just helps underscore how reliable they are, and it should help companies that are manufacturing and using these batteries to plan for the long term."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

"SpaceX has launched 20 of its Starlink satellites up into Earth's orbit, enabling direct-to-cellphone connectivity for subscribers anywhere on the planet," reports the tech blog New Atlas. That completes the constellation's first orbital shell, following a launch of an initial batch of six satellites for testing back in January. The satellites were launched with a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on December 5 at 10 PM EST; they were then deployed in low Earth orbit. SpaceX founder Elon Musk noted on X that the effort will "enable unmodified cellphones to have internet connectivity in remote areas." He added a caveat for the first orbital shell — "Bandwidth per beam is only ~10 Mb, but future constellations will be much more capable...."

The big deal with this new venture is that unlike previous attempts at providing satellite-to-phone service, you don't need a special handset or even a specific app to get access anywhere in the world. Starlink uses standard LTE/4G protocols that most phones are compatible with, partners with mobile operators like T-Mobile in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada, and has devised a system to make its service work seamlessly with your phone when it's connecting to satellites 340 miles (540 km) above the Earth's surface. The SpaceX division noted it's also worked out latency constraints, ideal altitudes and elevation angles for its satellites, along with several other parameters, to achieve reliable connectivity. Each satellite has an LTE modem on board, and these satellites plug into the massive constellation of 6,799 existing Starlink spacecraft, according to Space.com.

Connecting to that larger constellation happens via laser backhaul, where laser-based optical communication systems transmit data between satellites. This method leverages the advantages of lasers over traditional radio frequency communications, enabling data rates up to 100 times faster, increased bandwidth, and improved security.
The direct-to-cell program was approved last month, the article points out — but it's ready to ramp up. "You'll currently get only text service through the end of 2024; voice and data will become available sometime next year, as will support for IoT devices (such as smart home gadgets). The company hasn't said how much its service will cost. " (They also note there's already competing services from Lynk, "which has satellites in orbit and launched in the island nation of Palau back in 2023, and AST SpaceMobile, which also has commercial satellites in orbit and contracts with the U.S. government, Europe, and Japan.")

Elon Musk's announcement on X.com prompted this interesting exchange:

X.com User: You've stated that purchasing Starlink goes toward funding the journey to Mars, yes?

Elon Musk: Yes.

British members of parliament have voted to legalize assisted dying, approving a contentious proposal that would make the United Kingdom one of a small handful of nations to allow terminally ill people to end their lives. From a report: Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the bill, after an hours-long debate in the chamber and a years-long campaign by high-profile figures that drew on emotional first-hand testimony.

Britain is now set to join a small club of nations to have legalized the process, and one of the largest by population to allow it. The bill must still clear the House of Lords and parliamentary committees, but Friday's vote marked the most important hurdle.

It allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they are capable of making the decision themselves. Two doctors, and then a High Court judge, would need to sign off on the choice. Canada, New Zealand, Spain and most of Australia allow assisted dying in some form, as do several US states including Oregon, Washington and California.

A broad coalition of Canada's major news organizations, including the Toronto Star, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press and CBC, is suing tech giant OpenAI, saying the company is illegally using news articles to train its ChatGPT software. From a report: It's the first time all of a country's major news publishers have come together in litigation against OpenAI. The suit, filed in Ontario's Superior Court of Justice Friday morning, seeks punitive damages, disgorgement of any profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizations' articles, and an injunction barring OpenAI from using any of the news articles in the future.

"Journalism is in the public interest. OpenAI using other companies' journalism for their own commercial gain is not. It's illegal," said a joint statement from the media organizations, which are represented by law firm Lenczner Slaght.

Canada's Competition Bureau is suing Alphabet's Google over alleged anti-competitive conduct in online advertising, the antitrust watchdog said on Thursday. From a report: The Competition Bureau, in a statement, said it had filed an application with the Competition Tribunal seeking an order that, among other things, requires Google to sell two of its ad tech tools. It is also seeking a penalty from Google to promote compliance with Canada's competition laws, the statement said.

Google said the complaint "ignores the intense competition where ad buyers and sellers have plenty of choice and we look forward to making our case in court." [...] "Our advertising technology tools help websites and apps fund their content, and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers," Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads, Google said in a statement.

Neuralink, the brain chip startup founded by Elon Musk, says it has received approval to launch its first clinical trial in Canada for a device designed to give paralysed individuals the ability to use digital devices simply by thinking. Reuters reports: [T]he Canadian study aims to assess the safety and initial functionality of its implant which enables people with quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, to control external devices with their thoughts. Canada's University Health Network hospital said in a separate statement that its Toronto facility had been selected to perform the complex neurosurgical procedure. Neuralink has successfully implanted the device in two patients in the United States. One of the patients has been using it to play video games and learn how to design 3D objects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so.

Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...]

Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."

With iOS 18.2, Apple will allow you to share the location of a lost AirTag with other people and with more than 15 different airlines. The Verge reports: When using the feature, you can generate a Share Item Location link within the Find My app on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Once you share the link with someone, they can click on it to view an interactive map with the location of your lost item. Apple will update the website automatically when the lost item moves, and it will also display a timestamp when it moved last. Apple will turn off the feature once you find your lost item. You can also manually stop sharing the location of an AirTag at any time, or the link will "automatically expire after seven days." [...]

As part of the rollout, Apple is partnering with over 15 airlines, including Delta, United, Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and more. All of these airlines will be able to "privately and securely" accept links to lost items, as "access to each link will be limited to a small number of people, and recipients will be required to authenticate in order to view the link through either their Apple Account or partner email address." This feature will be available to airlines in the "coming months." Additionally, SITA, a baggage tracing solution, will also implement Share Item Location into its luggage tracker.

Microsoft is introducing a feature to Notepad called Rewrite that will let you use AI to "rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content." The Verge reports: If you're a Windows Insider with early access to the feature, you can try it by highlighting the text you want to adjust in Notepad, right-clicking it, and choosing Rewrite. Notepad will then display a dialogue box where you can decide how they want to change their text -- for example, if it needs to be longer or shorter. Rewrite will then offer three rewritten versions that you can replace your work with.

It's worth noting that you'll have to sign in to your Microsoft account to use Rewrite, as it's "powered by a cloud-based service that requires authentication and authorization." Microsoft is launching this feature in preview on Windows 11 in the US, France, UK, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In July, Microsoft rolled out spellcheck and autocorrect for Notepad.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: The head of a company specializing in cryptocurrency was kidnapped and held for ransom in downtown Toronto during rush hour Wednesday. Police were called about a kidnapping in the area of University Avenue and Richmond Street W. just before 6 p.m., says a spokesperson with the Toronto Police Service. The suspects forced the victim into a vehicle and made a demand for money, the spokesperson said. The man was later located in Centennial Park in Etobicoke uninjured.

CBC Toronto has learned the victim is Dean Skurka, the president and CEO of Toronto-based financial firm WonderFi. He was released after a ransom of $1 million was paid electronically, a source close to the investigation said. Police say the investigation is ongoing and have not released any further details. [...] The alleged kidnapping happened the same day WonderFi released its third quarter earnings results, showing a 153 per cent increase compared to its third quarter in 2023.

The federal government of Canada has ordered TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, citing national security concerns. However, Canadians will still be able to access the app and use it to create content. "The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice," said Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

"We came to the conclusion that these activities that were conducted in Canada by TikTok and their offices would be injurious to national security. I'm not at liberty to go into much detail, but I know Canadians would understand when you're saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that's serious." CBC News reports: Champagne urged Canadians to use TikTok "with eyes wide open." Critics have claimed that TikTok users' data could be obtained by the Chinese government. "Obviously, parents and anyone who wants to use social platform should be mindful of the risk," he said. The decision was made in accordance with the Investment Canada Act, which allows for the review of foreign investments that may harm Canada's national security.

Former CSIS director David Vigneault told CBC News it's "very clear" from the app's design that data gleaned from its users "is available to the government of China" and its large-scale data harvesting goals. "Most people can say, 'Why is it a big deal for a teenager now to have their data [on TikTok]?' Well in five years, in 10 years, that teenager will be a young adult, will be engaged in different activities around the world," he said at the time. "As an individual, I would say that I would absolutely not recommend someone have TikTok."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta will allow U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security to use its artificial intelligence models for military purposes, the company said on Monday, in a shift from its policy that prohibited the use of its technology for such efforts. Meta said that it would make its A.I. models, called Llama, available to federal agencies and that it was working with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen as well as defense-focused tech companies including Palantir and Anduril. The Llama models are "open source," which means the technology can be freely copied and distributed by other developers, companies and governments.

Meta's move is an exception to its "acceptable use policy," which forbade the use of the company's A.I. software for "military, warfare, nuclear industries," among other purposes. In a blog post on Monday, Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said the company now backed "responsible and ethical uses" of the technology that supported the United States and "democratic values" in a global race for A.I. supremacy. "Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America -- and of its closest allies too," Mr. Clegg wrote. He added that "widespread adoption of American open source A.I. models serves both economic and security interests." The company said it would also share its technology with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the United States.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Another illegal streaming app has made its way to the App Store -- but it only surfaces pirated films for people in certain regions outside the US, including France, Canada, and the Netherlands. As shown in a post on Threads, the App Store listing for "Univer Note" presents itself as a productivity platform that can "easily help you record every day's events and plan your time." However, if you're a user in certain countries, like France or Canada, opening the app shows a collection of pirated movies, such as Venom: The Last Dance, Joker: Folie a Deux, and Terrifier 3.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As world leaders gathered in Colombia this week, they also watched for news from home, where many of the headlines carried the catastrophic consequences of ecological breakdown. Across the Amazon rainforest and Brazil's enormous wetlands, relentless fires had burned more than 22m hectares (55m acres). In Spain, the death toll in communities devastated by flooding passed 200. In the boreal forests that span Siberia, Scandinavia, Alaska and Canada, countries were recording alarming signs that their carbon sinks were collapsing under a combined weight of drought, tree death and logging. As Canada's wildfire season crept to a close, scientists calculated it was the second worst in two decades -- behind only last year's burn, which released more carbon than some of the world's largest emitting countries.

In global negotiations, climate and nature move along two independent tracks, and for years were broadly treated as distinct challenges. But as negotiations closed at the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali on Saturday, ministers from around the world underscored the crucial importance of nature to limiting damage from global heating, and vice versa -- emphasising that climate and biodiversity could no longer be treated as independent issues if either crisis was to be resolved. Countries agreed a text on links between the climate and nature, but failed to include language on a phase out of fossil fuels.

The UK environment secretary, Steve Reed, said that attending the summit in Colombia had brought home the links between climate and biodiversity. "One of the other things that's really struck me coming here and speaking to the Colombians in particular is how for them the nature crisis and the climate crisis are exactly the same thing. In the UK, perhaps more widely in the global north, we tend to talk a lot about climate and particularly net zero, and much less about nature -- perhaps because we're already more nature-depleted. But those two things connect entirely," he said. The Cop16 president, Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister, has sought to put nature on a level with global efforts to decarbonise the world economy during the summit, warning that slashes to greenhouse gas emissions must be accompanied by the protection and restoration of the natural world if they are to be effective. Her presidency has repeatedly described nature and climate as "two sides of the same coin."

GitHub released its annual "State of the Octoverse" report this week. And while "Systems programming languages, like Rust, are also on the rise... Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Java remain the most widely used languages on GitHub."

In fact, "In 2024, Python overtook JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub." They also report usage of Jupyter Notebooks "skyrocketed" with a 92% jump in usage, which along with Python's rise seems to underscore "the surge in data science and machine learning on GitHub..." We're also seeing increased interest in AI agents and smaller models that require less computational power, reflecting a shift across the industry as more people focus on new use cases for AI... While the United States leads in contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub, we see more absolute activity outside the United States. In 2024, there was a 59% surge in the number of contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub and a 98% increase in the number of projects overall — and many of those contributions came from places like India, Germany, Japan, and Singapore...

Notable growth is occurring in India, which is expected to have the world's largest developer population on GitHub by 2028, as well as across Africa and Latin America... [W]e have seen greater growth outside the United States every year since 2013 — and that trend has sped up over the past few years.
Last year they'd projected India would have the most developers on GitHub #1 by 2027, but now believe it will happen a year later. This year's top 10?

1. United States
2. India
3. China
4. Brazil
5. United Kingdom
6. Russia
7. Germany
8. Indonesia
9. Japan
10. Canada

Interestingly, the UK's population ranks #21 among countries of the world, while Germany ranks #19, and Canada ranks #36.)

GitHub's announcement argues the rise of non-English, high-population regions "is notable given that it is happening at the same time as the proliferation of generative AI tools, which are increasingly enabling developers to engage with code in their natural language." And they offer one more data point: GitHub's For Good First Issue is a curated list of Digital Public Goods that need contributors, connecting those projects with people who want to address a societal challenge and promote sustainable development...

Significantly, 34% of contributors to the top 10 For Good Issue projects... made their first contribution after signing up for GitHub Copilot.
There's now 518 million projects on GitHub — with a year-over-year growth of 25%...

"It's that time again," writes USA Today, noting that Sunday morning millions of Americans (along with millions more in Canada, Europe, parts of Australia, and Chile) "will set their clocks back an hour, and many will renew their twice-yearly calls to put an end to the practice altogether..." Experts say the time changes are detrimental to health and safety, but agree that the answer isn't permanent DST. "The medical and scientific communities are unified ... that permanent standard time is better for human health," said Erik Herzog, a professor of biology and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis and the former president of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms...

Springing forward an hour in March is harder on us than falling back in November. The shift in spring is associated with an increase in heart attacks, and car accident rates also go up for a few days after, he said. But the answer isn't permanent daylight saving time, according to Herzog, who said that could be even worse for human health than the twice-yearly changes. By looking at studies of people who live at the easternmost edge of time zones (whose experience is closest to standard time) and people who live at the westernmost edge (more like daylight saving time), scientists can tell that health impacts of earlier sunrises and sunsets are much better. Waking up naturally with the sun is far better for our bodies than having to rely on alarm clocks to wake up in the dark, he said.

Herzog said Florida, where [Senator Marco] Rubio has championed the Sunlight Protection Act, is much less impacted by the negative impacts of daylight saving time because it's as far east and south as you can get in the U.S., while people in a state like Minnesota would have much more time in the dark in the morning.
The article also reminds U.S. readers that "No state can adopt permanent daylight saving time unless U.S. Congress passes a law to authorize it first." Nevertheless... Oklahoma became the most recent state to pass a measure authorizing permanent daylight saving time, pending Congressional approval, in April. Nineteen other states have passed laws or resolutions to move toward daylight saving time year-round, if Congress were ever to allow it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures...

Only two states and some territories never have to set their clocks forward or backward... [Hawaii and Arizona, except for the Navajo Nation.]

California signed an agreement with major airlines to increase the use of sustainable aviation fuels, aiming to reach 200 million gallons by 2035 or about 40% of the state's air travel demand. The Hill reports: The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Airlines for America (A4A) -- an industry trade group representing almost a dozen airlines -- pledged to increase the availability of sustainable aviation fuels statewide. Sustainable aviation fuels -- lower-carbon alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuels -- are typically made from nonpetroleum feedstocks, such as biomass or waste. At a San Francisco International Airport ceremony Wednesday, the partners committed (PDF) to using 200 million gallons of such fuels by 2035 -- an amount estimated to meet about 40 percent of travel demand within the state at that point, according to CARB. That quantity also represents a more than tenfold increase from current usage levels of these fuels, the agency added.

Among A4A member airlines are Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Atlas Air Worldwide, Delta Air Lines, FedEx, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and UPS, while Air Canada is an associate member. To achieve the 2035 goals, CARB and A4A said they plan to work together to identify, assess and prioritize necessary policy measures, such as incentivizing relevant investments and streamlining the permitting processes. A Sustainable Aviation Fuel Working Group, which will include government and industry stakeholders, will meet annually to both discuss progress and address barriers toward meeting these goals, the partners added. A public website will display updated information about the availability and use of conventional and sustainable fuels across California, while also providing details about state policies, according to the agreement.