Microsoft officials said the company's Azure Sphere microcontroller (MCU) and associated cloud security service will be generally available in February 2020. From a report: Microsoft also introduced new branding today for the ThreadX RTOS technology it acquired when it bought Express Logic in April 2019. Going forward, this product will be known as Azure RTOS. ThreadX is one of the most-deployed real-time operating systems in the world. Today, Microsoft said that Renesesas, a major microcontroller manufacturer, announced that Azure RTOS will be be broadly available across its products, including the Synergy and RA MCU families. Microsoft has been working for at least a couple of years to secure low-cost Internet-connected devices. Microsoft Research's "Project Sopris" was all about creating a highly secure microcontroller. That project morphed into Azure Sphere, which Microsoft announced in April 2018. The first Azure Sphere chip was the MediaTek MT3620, which included an onboard security subsystem MIcrosoft christened "Pluton." The Azure Sphere OS included a Microsoft-developed custom Linux kernel, plus secured application containers.

Gartner research has announced 10 "strategic technology trends that will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next 5 to 10 years." And the trends include "hyperautomation" -- applying advanced technologies like AI and machine learning to tasks "that once required humans," combining robotic process automation with intelligent business management software to provide "real-time, continuous intelligence about the organization...with a goal of increasingly AI-driven decision making."

They also predict "autonomous things," including drones, appliances, robots, and even ships, sometimes working in collaborative swarms, that "exploit AI to perform tasks usually done by humans." Trend #6 is "the empowered edge," where IoT devices become the foundation for "smart spaces" that move services and applications closer to where they're actually used, creating a world of smart buildings and city spaces. Plus, they're also predicting a movement from centralized public clouds to distributed public clouds which allow data centers to be located anywhere. ("This solves both technical issues like latency and also regulatory challenges like data sovereignty.")

Trend #10 looks at the possibility of AI-enhanced security solutions -- and AI-powered security threats -- as well as the need to provide security for our new AI-powered systems. But they also envision a trend that "replaces technology-literate people with people-literate technology" providing sophisticated "multiexperiences" though "multisensory and multitouchpoint interfaces like wearables and advanced computer sensors." They even predict "fully-scalable" blockchain by 2023, while also predicting its impact on the economy will be felt through integrations with "complementary technologies" like AI and IoT. ("For example, a car would be able to negotiate insurance prices directly with the insurance company based on data gathered by its sensors.")

Trend #3 is "Democratization of technology" (or "citizen access"), a prediction which includes "AI-driven development" of data science models for automated testing. And interestingly, trend #5 is transparency and traceability: The evolution of technology is creating a trust crisis. As consumers become more aware of how their data is being collected and used, organizations are also recognizing the increasing liability of storing and gathering the data. Additionally, AI and ML are increasingly used to make decisions in place of humans, evolving the trust crisis and driving the need for ideas like explainable AI and AI governance.

This trend requires a focus on six key elements of trust: Ethics, integrity, openness, accountability, competence and consistency.
Trend #4 even predicts humans will merge with technology. "[W]hat if scientists could augment the brain to increase memory storage, or implant a chip to decode neural patterns? What if exoskeletons became a standard uniform for autoworkers, enabling them to lift superhuman weights? What if doctors could implant sensors to track how drugs travel inside a body...?"

"First the first time, hundreds of watts of power were wirelessly transmitted hundreds of meters [video], with an integrated system that ensured the safety of operators and bystanders," writes an anonymous Slashdot reader -- sharing a new press release from the U.S. Naval Research Lab. "This could be the first step towards drones that never have to land..."

According to the Navy, the power transmitted came from "an electrical outlet in the building": On one end of the of the testing facility -- one of the largest test facilities for model ships in the world -- the receiver was converting the laser energy to DC power, which an inverter was turning into AC power to run lights, several laptops, and a coffeemaker that the organizers were using to make coffee for the attendees, or 'laser lattes'...

At NRL, Paul Jaffe, an electronics engineer with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has been conducting space-based solar energy research for more than a decade... According to Jaffe, power beaming could also make possible the transmission of power from solar-energy-collecting satellites in space to the ground, wherever it's needed... Imagine using it to send power to locations that are remote, hard to reach or lack infrastructure, he suggested.

Today the Ocean Cleanup unveiled its new "Interceptor" solar-powered robot to collect waste plastic from rivers before it can enter the ocean, Fast Company reports: The system was designed by the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, which spent the past four years secretly developing and testing the technology while it continued to work on its main project -- a device that can capture plastic trash once it's already in the ocean. The nonprofit unveiled the Interceptor at an event in Rotterdam today.

The ocean's plastic trash problem often starts in rivers: Every year, as much as 2.4 million metric tons of plastic flows from rivers to the sea, the nonprofit estimates. Most of that trash comes from rivers in Asia, in cities where recycling infrastructure is often inadequate. Around 1% of the world's rivers, or 1,000 rivers in total, are responsible for the majority of the trash entering the ocean...

The new technology is designed to anchor to a riverbed, out of the path of passing boats. Like the system that the nonprofit designed for the ocean, which uses a large barrier that blocks part of the river to collect plastic as it floats by, the Interceptor has a floating barrier that directs trash into the system. The device is positioned where the greatest amount of plastic flows, and another device can be placed farther down the river to catch trash that might escape the first Interceptor. A conveyor belt pulls the trash out of the water, and an autonomous system distributes it into dumpsters on a separate barge, sending an alert to local operators when the system is full and ready to be taken to a recycler. The system runs on solar power. In a typical day, it might extract as much as 50,000 kilograms of trash; depending on the currents, tides, and how much plastic is in a given river, The Ocean Cleanup estimates it could theoretically collect as much as 100,000 kilograms [220,462 pounds]...

Since it runs autonomously, it needs little human interaction and also doesn't require humans to sort through potentially dangerous debris collected from the water. It's designed to be mass-produced. The nonprofit aims to deploy it into all of the most polluting rivers in the next five years... "We project that we can remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040, and to truly rid the world's oceans of plastic we must do two things: cleanup legacy plastic and stop it from entering the ocean," they wrote in a press release. "Both are necessary to achieve this mission..."

"Whereas the fossil fuel industry employs about 900,000 people in the U.S., green economy jobs -- those associated with non-oil energy -- number about 9.5 million," writes long-time Slashdot reader DavidHumus, citing a new study by two researchers at University College London.

On Ars Technica the study's authors shared their analysis of America's emerging green economy: According to new data, by 2016 it was generating more than $1.3 trillion in annual revenue and employed approximately 9.5 million people -- making it the largest green market in the world. It has been growing rapidly, too -- between 2013 and 2016, both the industry's value and employment figures grew by 20%... Our study estimates that revenue in the global green economy was $7.87 trillion in 2016. At $1.3 trillion, the U.S. made up 16.5% of the global market -- the largest in the world.

Our analysis also suggests that in the U.S., nearly ten times more people were employed in the green economy and its supply chains (9.5 million) than employed directly in the fossil fuel industry (roughly 1 million) -- that is, miners, electricity grid workers, infrastructure manufacturers, and construction workers. This wide gap comes despite the U.S. fossil fuel industry receiving huge subsidies, estimated at $649 billion in 2015 alone.

The New Hampshire State House rejected the Digital Fair Repair Act earlier this week in part thanks to a representative who seems to think that cell phones are literally garbage that no one should bother repairing. From a report: The bill would have forced manufacturers such as Apple to share repair manuals and parts with independent repair stores. House members didn't kill the bill, but sent it back to committee for a year of interim study, citing security concerns and, in the words of Rep. John Potucek (R-Derry) the ubiquity, cheapness, and -- in his opinion -- disposability of new smart phones. "In the near future, cellphones are throwaways," Potucek said, according to New Hampshire Business Review. "Everyone will just get a new one."

That is, of course, the problem that right to repair is trying to solve. The new iPhone 11 costs between $699 and $1,349. And it can be hard to find one at the moment. Google's Pixel 4 costs between $799 and $999. Manufacturers seal smartphones to make it difficult to replace the battery and do basic repairs. Often, getting repairs through the company is so expensive that people simply purchase a new phone. Apple's repair monopoly is so dominant that it's the center of an investigation by the United States House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform." That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.

Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.

Reddit users have discovered that the Pixel 4's 90Hz refresh rate drops to 60Hz when the display brightness falls below 75 percent. This means that you're only getting the full 90Hz display rate when the brightness level is high. The Verge reports: It's not clear why Google has chosen the 75 percent mark, but droidlife has discovered you can head into the developer settings and force the 90Hz setting to always be enabled regardless of brightness levels. This will likely impact the battery life, which is something you'll want to consider before forcing the 90Hz display to always-on. Other 90Hz OLED Android phones like the OnePlus 7T keep the display running at its max 90Hz all of the time, but Google has stated it will automatically switch the display refresh rate on the Pixel 4 "for some content." Google issued a statement explaining its decision to limit the refresh rate, adding that it will issue an update in the coming weeks that will allow 90Hz in more brightness conditions.

Here's the full statement: "We designed Smooth Display so that users could enjoy the benefits of 90Hz for improved UI interactions and content consumption, while also preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical by lowering back down to 60Hz. In some conditions or situations, however, we set the refresh rate to 60Hz. Some of these situations include: when the user turns on battery saver, certain content such as video (as it's largely shot at 24 or 30fps), and even various brightness or ambient conditions. We constantly assess whether these parameters lead to the best overall user experience. We have previously planned updates that we'll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90hz in more brightness conditions."

As for whether or not 90Hz has a serious impact on battery life, YouTube Tech Reviewer Matthew Moniz reports only a marginal difference.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft's contracts with European Union institutions do not fully protect data in line with EU law, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) said in initial findings published on Monday. The EDPS, the EU's data watchdog, opened an investigation in April to assess whether contracts between Microsoft and EU institutions such as the European Commission fully complied with the bloc's data protection rules. "Though the investigation is still ongoing, preliminary results reveal serious concerns over compliance of the relevant contractual terms with data protection rules and the role of Microsoft as a processor for EU institutions using its products and services," the EDPS says in a statement. "We are committed to helping our customers comply with GDPR, Regulation 2018/1725 and other applicable laws," a Microsoft spokesman said. "We are in discussions with our customers in the EU institutions and will soon announce contractual changes that will address concerns such as those raised by the EDPS."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Information: There are a lot of ways companies can rack up high bills for using cloud services, sometimes unexpectedly. One particularly stiff expense is the cost of shifting data from one cloud provider's servers to another provider, or to a company's own data center. The Information has learned just how much some companies have had to pay for these "data transfer" costs, as they're called. The chart above shows how much 10 of the top customers of Amazon Web Services -- the dominant cloud provider -- paid for data transfer services in 2017 and 2018. The chart, which is based on internal AWS sales figures obtained by The Information, show that data transfer charges for one customer, Apple, approached $50 million in 2017. That represented about 6.5% of Apple's total AWS bill of $775 million for that year, the sales figures show. Seven of the 10 companies saw increases of at least 50% in their AWS data transfer bills last year compared to the year before. The reason for the high bills could "stem from growth in the number of users on a company's web service, longer-than-average usage sessions and the addition of data-intensive features such as video," the report says.

mpol writes: Phoronix published an interview with former Purism CTO Zlatan Todoric who left Purism in September 2018. The story hints quite strongly at chaotic situations over at Purism. He started at the company in 2015, when it was a small outfit, and steered it into the bigger company that it is now. To him the smartphone development for the Librem 5 was a mistake and way too early. He has high hopes for the Pinephone, who according to him are doing things right. The first "Aspen" batch of the Purism Librem 5 are supposed to be shipping, though seemingly only people related to Purism are showing off their devices.

Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologized for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices. The Register reports: The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room. Facial recognition tech will let customers into their room and then a bedside robot will assist with other requirements. However several weeks ago a security researcher revealed on Twitter that he had warned HIS Group in July about the bed-bots being easily accessible, noting they sported "unsigned code" allowing a user to tap an NFC tag to the back of robot's head and allow access via the streaming app of their choice.

Having heard nothing, the researcher made the hack public on October 13. The vulnerability allows guests to gain access to cameras and microphones in the robot remotely so they could watch and listen to anyone in the room in the future. The hotel is one of a chain of 10 in Japan which use a variety of robots instead of meat-based staff. So far the reference is only to Tapia robots at one hotel, although it is not clear if the rest of the chain uses different devices. The HIS Group tweeted: "We apologize for any uneasiness caused," according to the Tokyo Reporter. The paper was told that the company had decided the risks of unauthorized access were low, however, the robots have now been updated.

A British engineering and manufacturing firm called Geomiq has put out a call for people interested in being the face of a new "state-of-the-art humanoid" it's developing with an unnamed company. The lucky winner with the "kind and friendly" face that the company is looking for will receive $130,000. CNET reports: "The company is searching for a 'kind and friendly' face to be the literal face of the robot once it goes into production," Geomiq says in a blog post about the project. "This will entail the selected person's face being reproduced on potentially thousands of versions of the robots worldwide." The robot line has been in the works for five years, Geomiq says, and will result in a companion for seniors.

The blog post doesn't share age or gender parameters, only asking people who want to license their face to submit a photo via email for the chance at about $130,000. Candidates who make it to the "next phase" will apparently get full details on the project. The secrecy, Geomiq says, is due to a non-disclosure agreement it's signed with the robot's designer and investors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechncia: UK engineer and former Royal Navy officer Trevor Jackson began experimenting with aluminum air batteries at his workshop in the Cornish town of Callington in 2001. At that time, the electrolyte used was extremely caustic and poisonous. After years of experimentation, Jackson devised a new electrolyte -- whose composition is a closely guarded secret -- he says make it possible for his invention to power an electric car for up to 1,500 miles. What happens when it runs out of juice? You replace it with a new one while the old one gets recycled. At the beginning of the electric car era when charging infrastructure was nonexistent, the idea of swapping spent batteries for fully charged new ones was considered feasible. Jackson says such a thing could be the future, with his batteries/fuel cells sold at grocery stores and retail outlets. He says the process of disconnecting the old one and connecting the new one will take about 90 seconds.

[A]n independent evaluation by the UK Trade and Investment agency in 2017 said Jackson's invention was a "very attractive battery" based on "well established'" technology, and that it produced much more energy per kilogram than standard electric vehicle types, according to a report in the Daily Mail. A Tesla Model S can drive up to 370 miles on a single charge. Jackson says if you drove the same car with an aluminum-air cell that weighed the same as the Tesla's lithium-ion battery, it would have a range of 2,700 miles. Aluminum-air cells also take up less space. If that same Tesla were fitted with an aluminum-air fuel cell the same size as its current battery, it could run non-stop for 1,500 miles. The report goes on to say that Jackson just signed a multi-million dollar deal with Austin Electric, which will begin putting thousands of the batteries into electric vehicles next year.

"Austin Electric has three targets for the new batteries -- the three-wheeled tuk-tuks used for transportation in many countries such as Pakistan, electric bicycles with far more range than current models, and a program that will convert front wheel drive cars with internal combustion engines into hybrids by fitting aluminum-air batteries and motors to drive the rear wheels," reports CleanTechnica. "Jackson expects the conversion operation to start next year. He says the cost of each conversion will be [...] about $4,000."

Long-time Slashdot reader ttsiod works for the European Space Agency as an embedded software engineer. He writes: After reading an interesting article from an NVIDIA engineer about how he used a dirt-cheap field-programmable gate array board to code a real-time ray-tracer, I got my hands on the same board -- and "compiled" a dual-core SPARC-compatible CPU inside it... Basically, the same kind of design we fly in the European Space Agency's satellites.

I decided to document the process, since there's not much material of that kind available. I hope it will be an interesting read for my fellow Slashdotters -- showcasing the trials and tribulations faced by those who prefer the Open-Source ways of doing things... Just read it and you'll see what I mean.
This is the same Slashdot reader who in 2016 reverse engineered his Android tablet so he could run a Debian chroot inside it. "Please remember that I am a software developer, not a HW one," his new essay warns.

"I simply enjoy fooling around with technology like this."

From a report: The owner of an electric car will be able to meet household power needs from the vehicle itself based on a technology developed by Nissan, the Japanese auto giant.

It plans to introduce the new 'Leaf' electric cars in the Indian market next year and is on the look-out for local partners for collaboration on the application of its latest 'Vehicle-to-Home' technology (V2H) in the state. The technology allows electric vehicles to not only receive power but also store it and send it back to the source. The 'Leaf' could be an alternative to a home battery system like inverter.

Household power can be supplied from the 'Leaf' lithium-ion battery (40 kWh) of the car by installing a power control system connected to the household's distribution board. The vehicles can also be charged from the household power supply at night (lean usage period).

U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang "is full of it," argues Slate's senior business and economics correspondent, challenging Yang's contention (in a debate Tuesday) that American jobs were being lost to automation: Following the debate, a "fact check" by the AP claimed that Yang was right and Warren wrong. "Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals," it stated. But this was incorrect. No such consensus exists, and if anything, the evidence heavily suggests that trade has been the bigger culprit in recent decades. All of which points to a broader issue: Yang's schtick about techno doom may be well-intentioned, but it is largely premised on BS, and is adding to the widespread confusion about the impact of automation on the economy.

Yang is not pulling his ideas out of thin air. Economists have been debating whether automation or trade is more responsible for the long-term decline of U.S. factory work for a while, and it's possible to find experts on both sides of the issue. After remaining steady for years, the total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs suddenly plummeted in the early 2000s -- from more than 17 million in 2000 to under 14 million in 2007... [But] America hasn't just lost manufacturing workers; as Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes, the number of factories also declined by around 22 percent between 2000 and 2014, which isn't what you'd expect if assembly workers were just being replaced by machines. In a 2017 paper, meanwhile, economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University concluded that the growth of industrial robots in the U.S. since 1990 could only explain between between 360,000 and 670,000 job losses. By comparison, the proof placing blame on trade and China is much stronger. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott of Yale have found evidence that the U.S.'s decision to grant the People's Republic permanent normal trade relations in 2000 led to declines in American jobs...

New technology will change the economy and the way people work. It already is. But those shifts will be more complex than Yang admits and probably won't look like the wave of mass unemployment that he and his like-minded supporters tend to envision... It's not just unrealistic. It's lazy. When you buy the sci-fi notion that technology is simply a disembodied force making humanity obsolete and that there's little that can be done about it, you stop thinking about ideas that will actually prevent workers from being screwed over by the forces of globalization or new tech. By prophesying imaginary problems, you ignore the real ones.

Twitter user Kevin Bradley discovered a Lightning port hidden in the Apple TV 4K's ethernet port. There's a number of theories for why the port exists, but one of the more logical explanations is that it's simply there for Apple to use for debugging. 9to5Mac reports: While earlier Apple TV models had Micro USB and USB-C, the Apple TV 4K dropped all outwardly-facing ports other than Ethernet and HDMI. Under the hood, however, there's a hidden Lightning port, as Bradley discovered. The Lightning port is hidden in the ethernet connector on the Apple TV 4K. Bradley teased on Twitter: "None of us looked THAT closely to the hardware of the AppleTV 4K and the magic locked in the ethernet port until fairly recently."

As for getting the Lightning port itself to work, Steven Barker said in a tweet that this is proving to be "difficult." The Lightning port is stuck at the very back of the ethernet port. Ultimately, it's not really clear what the Lightning port discovery could mean. One thing it could lead towards is the expansion of jailbreak capabilities for the Apple TV 4K, though Bradley cautions: "Just because we know it's lightning doesn't mean anything past that. Just because we find a way in doesn't mean anything will DEFINITELY be released due to what we discover. The barrier for entry might be way too high."

Google's latest flagship smartphones -- the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL -- do not support video recording in 4K at 60 frames per second. This has disappointed -- and puzzled -- many fans especially since other smartphones that are powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 do offer this video recording functionality. (Recent generation of iPhone models also offer this functionality.) Folks over at The Verge asked Rick Osterloh, the hardware chief at Google, where the bottleneck lied. "I don't know," responded the chief.

Volvo Car Group President and CEO Hakan Samuelsson laid out the company's new business strategy that includes introducing a new EV every year through 2025 and slashing the carbon footprint of the lifecycle of every car and SUV it builds by 40%. All of the changes are aimed at Volvo Cars' target to become a climate neutral company by 2040. TechCrunch reports: A critical piece to hitting its target will be making more EVs available. The automaker plans to launch an all-electric car every year over the next five years. By 2025, it wants all-electric vehicles to represent 50% of global sales with the rest compromised by hybrids. As of this year, every new Volvo launched will be electrified, which means it could be a hybrid, plug-in electric (PHEV) or all-electric (BEV) vehicle. To hit this target, every Volvo model will include a Recharge option. This means a plug-in hybrid or all-electric version will be available, according to the company. To further encourage electric driving, every Volvo Recharge plug-in hybrid model will come with free electricity for a year, provided through a refund for the average electricity cost during that period. Volvo also plans to triple its manufacturing capacity and is now quickly ramping up its production globally, Bjorn Annwall, head of global commercial operations at Volvo, said during the press conference. Volvo is aiming for plug-in hybrid cars to make up 20% of total sales in 2020.

Volvo isn't ditching combustion engines completely. But it's distancing itself from them by spinning it out. Volvo Cars and its Chinese parent company Geely Holdings will merge their existing combustion engine operations into a standalone business. The move will "clear the way for Volvo Cars to focus on the development of its all-electric range of premium cars," Samuelsson said. "So we believe we will bring sustainability into our company, not as something to add on, because it's good or something that is expected for us," Samuelsson said. "We bring it into the company because we think it's really good for our business. It will make our company grow faster it will make our company stronger exactly as safety made Volvo stronger."