MojoKid writes: Gamer-targeted smartphones are beginning to pop up more often now, with devices like the Razer Phone 2, Xiaomi Black Shark, and the ASUS ROG Phone making waves in the market with performance enthusiasts. The latest release from ASUS, the ROG Phone II sports a specially binned chip from Qualcomm called the Snapdragon 855+. The higher performance SoC sports an octa-core CPU clocked at 2.96GHz, paired with an overclocked Adreno 640 GPU that can boost its performance up to 15 percent above spec. A generous 12GB of RAM, 1TB of storage and a 120Hz 6.59 FHD display trim out the rest of the ASUS ROG Phone II's specs. In addition, an enhanced on-board cooling system features a 3D vapor chamber, heat spreaders, and cooling pads that efficiently dissipate heat from inside the phone to the outside. It is designed to be above spec for the Snapdragon 855 chipset and necessary to keep 855+ stable during long gaming sessions. In benchmark testing, there's no question these system upgrades put up significantly better numbers than the average high-end Android phone on the market these days, such that the phone is about 10% faster than devices like Samsung's Galaxy Note 10 or the OnePlus 7 Pro. The ASUS ROG Phone II will be available later this month but pricing is still being determined.

Irreparably damaged your phone in a freak accident? Not to worry -- Google's got your back. From a report: The search giant today announced that subscribers to Google One, a subscription service that offers expanded cloud storage, can now take advantage of a whole-phone backup solution for Android that automatically copies videos, multimedia messages (MMS), and uncompressed photos to Google's datacenters. But wait, you might say, doesn't Google already offer a free backup solution for Android? That's true, but it only covers content, select data (apps, call history, contacts, and calendar), and settings. (Only Pixel phones get native SMS backup.) And while Google's eponymous Google Photos service backs up photos and videos for free, it by default resizes pics to 16MP (original-quality photos count against your Google Account storage). Google One doesn't touch photos before uploading them, and it throws in the aforementioned text messages backup at no extra charge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice-based technology in its U.S. drive-throughs. The fast-food chain hopes the AI technology will make the ordering process more efficient. McDonald's is implementing the technology with the help of start-up Apprente, which it acquired this week. The move comes amid concern about workers whose jobs may become obsolete as a result of automation and new technologies. McDonald's plans to expand its newly formed McD Tech team by hiring more engineers and data scientists. The report notes that the company recently "invested in technology that could automatically alter individual drive-through menu panels, depending on factors such as the weather, for example automatically suggesting McFlurry ice cream on hot days or telling customers which items were already proving popular at that particular restaurant that day."

omfglearntoplay shares a report from CNN: Eight years after Japan's worst nuclear disaster, the government is not sure what to do with the contaminated water that remains -- but its environment minister says dumping it into the ocean might be the only choice. To cool fuel cores at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant, operator Tokyo Electric has pumped in tens of thousands of tons of water over the years, according to Japanese national broadcaster NHK. Once used and contaminated, the water is put into storage. Now, storage space is running out. And during a televised press conference Tuesday, Japan's environment minister Yoshiaki Harada said he believed the only solution was to "release it into the ocean and dilute it." "There are no other options," he said. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga emphasized that a decision has not yet been made. "There is no fact that the method of disposal of contaminated water has been decided," he said. "The government would like to make a decision after making thorough discussion."

Qbertino writes: The VW ID.3 (VW German Minisite and Configurator) is a compact car with a design loosely based on the very successful VW Golf line. The base model costs less than $33,000 with ranges of 330, 420, and 550 kilometers (or 205, 261 and 340 miles). Along with the car comes a new corporate identity with a newly designed logo reminiscent of the dawn of VW, signaling VW's transition into the electric era it announced with fanfare a while back. VW also isn't too shabby about giving credit where credit is due. "Without Elon Musk my job would be considerably harder," VW Chief Strategist Michael Jost was quoted as saying a few days ago. The base model of the ID.3 will only charge up to 50kW, but owners who want to charge faster (up to 100kW) can pay extra for that ability. "100kW charging will come standard on the midrange 58kWh version, while even faster 125kW charging will be available on the top-tier ID.3," reports The Verge. "The company is also offering an eight year / 160,000 kilometer warranty on the ID.3's battery pack."

According to a new study from the Rocky Mountain Institute, natural gas-fired power plants are on the path to being undercut themselves by renewable power and big batteries. Bloomberg reports: By 2035, it will be more expensive to run 90% of gas plants being proposed in the U.S. than it will be to build new wind and solar farms equipped with storage systems, according to the report. It will happen so quickly that gas plants now on the drawing boards will become uneconomical before their owners finish paying for them, the study said. The development would be a dramatic reversal of fortune for gas plants, which 20 years ago supplied less than 20% of electricity in the U.S. Today that share has jumped to 35% as hydraulic fracturing has made natural gas cheap and plentiful, forcing scores of coal plants to close nationwide.

The authors of the study say they analyzed the costs of construction, fuel and anticipated operations for 68 gigawatts of gas plants proposed across the U.S. They compared those costs to building a combination of solar farms, wind plants and battery systems that, together with conservation efforts, could supply the same amount of electricity and keep the grid stable. As gas plants lose their edge in power markets, the economics of pipelines will suffer, too, RMI said in a separate study Monday. Even lines now in the planning stages could soon be out of the money, the report found.

In an opinion article published last week on Wired, New York City Mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio said as president he would issue a robot tax for corporations displacing humans and would create a federal agency to oversee automation. CNET reports: "The scale of automation in our economy is increasing far faster than most people realize, and its impact on working people in America and across the world, unless corralled, will be devastating," de Blasio wrote. De Blasio would call the new regulator the Federal Automation and Worker Protection Agency, which would safeguard jobs and communities. In addition, his proposed "robot tax" would be imposed on large companies that eliminate jobs as they become more automated. The tax would be equal to five years of payroll taxes for each employee eliminated, according to De Blasio.

"Biohackers took one small but important step toward the science fiction dystopia depicted in William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic," reports The Parallax, in an article shared by a Slashdot reader: The Four Thieves Vinegar biohacking collective has not figured out how to precisely mimic the memory data transfer scenario Gibson conjured, but it has built a device to enable people to store and transfer data wirelessly in their bodies. Using off-the-shelf parts and focused efforts, the biohacking group has designed and built a networked hard drive, coated in a biosafe resin, to be subcutaneously implanted in the human body. It's powered by an external battery that connects to the device via an induction coil, and its storage capacity is limited only by the size of the microSD card it contains. Michael Laufer, who founded Four Thieves Vinegar, calls it the Pegleg.

In the small hours of August 8, in an operating room within the small house, two patients received the second version of the Pegleg implant, which Laufer says is the world's first subcutaneous networked drive... To make Pegleg v2, Laufer and his team removed from the Raspberry Pi both Micro USB connectors (one for power, one for data), the Mini HDMI connector, and the camera connector. They then soldered on a second Wi-Fi chip to enable it to transfer data to another Pegleg and allow other devices to connect to it, as well as an induction coil to enable it to be powered by a wireless battery resting in a contiguous sports armband or pants pocket. They enabled Bluetooth for future functionality, inserted a 512GB microSD card for storage, and updated the firmware. Finally, they coated the hacked device in a biocompatible acrylic resin to prevent it from interacting with the recipient's body and to diffuse the heat it emanates.

At 11:44 a.m. on the same day, Laufer -- an implant newbie who has three small tattoos but no piercings -- took a seat in the surgical room... During the procedure, Laufer passed out for a few seconds and vomited a little bit. But 32 minutes later, he had a functional "Pegleg" implant.

"If you're anything like me, you've got a slew of devices with lithium-based batteries in them," write long-time Slashdot reader weilawei: The conventional wisdom is to cycle them between 20 and 80% for a good compromise between usability and battery life. How then, do you automate the process to avoid over- or undercharging...? Do you remove and store your laptop battery at a medium charge when you run the laptop off an AC adapter?
You can keep checking your battery icon until it hits 80% -- but it seems like there should be an automated solution. The original submission notes TLP Linux Advance Power Management project -- but what solutions are Slashdot's readers using? Leave your best thoughts in the comments.

How can you limit the charging range of your batteries?

The electric utility non-profit NERC has posted a "Lessons Learned" document detailing a March 5th incident that Environment & Energy News calls "a first-of-its-kind cyberattack on the U.S. grid". While it didn't cause any blackouts -- it was at a "low-impact" control center -- NERC is now warning power utilities to "have as few internet facing devices as possible" and to use more than just a firewall for defense.

puddingebola shared this report from Environment & Energy News: The cyberthreat appears to have been simpler and far less dangerous than the hacks in Ukraine. The March 5 attack hit web portals for firewalls in use at the undisclosed utility. The hacker or hackers may not have even realized that the online interface was linked to parts of the power grid in California, Utah and Wyoming. "So far, I don't see any evidence that this was really targeted," said Reid Wightman, senior vulnerability analyst at industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos Inc. "This was probably just an automated bot that was scanning the internet for vulnerable devices, or some script kiddie," he said, using a term for an unskilled hacker...

In the March episode, a flaw in the victim utility's firewalls allowed "an unauthenticated attacker" to reboot them over and over again, effectively breaking them. The firewalls served as traffic cops for data flowing between generation sites and the utility's control center, so operators lost contact with those parts of the grid each time the devices winked off and on. The glitches persisted for about 10 hours, according to NERC, and the fact that there were issues at multiple sites "raised suspicion." After an initial investigation, the utility decided to ask its firewall manufacturer to review what happened, according to NERC, which led to the discovery of "an external entity" -- a hacker or hackers -- interfering with the devices. NERC stressed that "there was no impact to generation...."

Wightman said the "biggest problem" was the fact that hackers were able to successfully take advantage of a known flaw in the firewall's interface. "The advisory even goes on to say that there were public exploits available for the particular bug involved," he said. "Why didn't somebody say, 'Hey, we have these firewalls and they're exposed to the internet -- we should be patching?'"

Large power utilities are required to check for and apply fixes to sensitive grid software that could offer an entry point for hackers.

Long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills writes: Not just anybody but [lithium-ion battery pioneer] Jeff Dahn [et al.] released a paper detailing cells that "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) and last at least two decades in grid energy storage."
The new lithium-ion battery cell has a next-generation "single crystal" NMC cathode and a new advanced electrolyte, according to the site Electrotek. "We are talking about battery cells that last two to three times longer than Tesla's current battery cells."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A doctor in India has performed a series of five percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures on patients who were 20 miles away from him. The feat was pulled off using a precision vascular robot developed by Corindus. The results of the surgeries, which were successful, have just been published in EClinicalMedicine, a spin-off of medical journal The Lancet. During the remote procedures, Dr. Tejas Patel, Chairman and Chief Interventional Cardiologist of the Apex Heart Institute in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, used Corindus' CorPath GRX robot and a hardwired internet connection, manipulating the robot with a set of joysticks and a video monitor. Corindus has performed several remote test cases in the U.S. since, but Dr. Patel's procedure marked a major milestone in medicine. "Remote procedures have the potential to transform how we deliver care when treating the most time-sensitive illnesses such as heart attack and stroke," says Mark Toland, President and Chief Executive Officer of Corindus Vascular Robotics. "The success of this study paves the way for large-scale, long-distance telerobotic platforms across the globe, and its publication in Lancet's EClinicalMedicine demonstrates the transformative nature of telerobotics. While remote robotic procedures are still in the early stages of development, it is clear we are on track to expand patients' access to care, while reducing their time to treatment."

With the Huawei Mate 30 launch right around the corner on September 19th, Huawei announced the new flagship chipset that will be powering the phone. AnandTech reports: Huawei is for the first time splitting its [5G] strategy, with two versions of the Kirin 990. These versions will officially be known as the Kirin 990 and the Kirin 990 5G. The (4G) I've put here is simply to add a differentiator to tell them apart. The two Kirin chipsets are, and a standard base level, pretty much the same. Same core configuration, same camera support, same memory, same storage. However, in a few key areas beyond the modem, there are differences, such as NPU performance and core frequencies.

The Kirin 990 5G is a true unified design, supporting Sub-6 GHz 5G networks on both SA and NSA architectures. In order to keep the die size in check, Huawei is using TSMC's latest 7+ manufacturing process with EUV, which helps enable a smaller die size for the sorts of devices this chip will be going into. As mentioned, one of the key elements to the Kirin 990 5G is its use of TSMC's 7FF+ with EUV, which enables the chip to have a small(er) die size. We are told the chip is over 100mm2, which is up from 74.13 mm2 on the Kirin 980 (TSMC 7nm) and 96.72 mm2 on the Kirin 970 (TSMC 10nm), possibly making it Huawei's largest smartphone SoC to date. This is compared to the Kirin 990 4G version, which is around ~90 mm2, but is built on the same 7nm process as the Kirin 980, making it a little bigger. Transistor counts for the two chips put the 990 5G at 10.3 billion, while the 990 4G is ~8 billion. XDA Developers has a spec sheet comparing the Kirin 980 against the Kirin 990 and 990 5G.

Qualcomm will integrate 5G connectivity into its 6- and 7-series chipsets starting next year alongside its flagship 8-series processors, the company announced at IFA today. From a report: Qualcomm says that these chips will support a full range of 5G technologies, including being able to connect to sub-6Ghz and mmWave spectrums. Today's announcement means that it won't just be flagship phones that will get an integrated 5G modem; it will also come to the kinds of processors that are used in more midrange and budget devices. Starting next year, we should start to see 5G move beyond expensive flagship devices like the OnePlus 7 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Note 10 that made up much of the first wave of 5G device releases.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, D, signed an executive order Tuesday directing state regulators to lay out a plan to reach 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. Utility Dive reports: Eight other states and the District of Columbia have taken legislative or executive action toward 100% clean energy in the past few years. While environmental advocates and state lawmakers were overall pleased with the directive, they said more concrete action would be needed to get the state to those goals, and that some policies seemed to be moving backwards. Specifically, advocates and lawmakers were disappointed by the administration's commitment to building a new natural gas plant. "It's not a bridge fuel. It's a fossil fuel," Senior Policy Advocate and Connecticut Director at Acadia Center Amy McLean Salls told Utility Dive. "And if we're going to be meeting our goals, then we have to be not building new gas infrastructure."

During the forum the administration said it was committed to building its Killingly Energy Center, a 650 MW natural gas-fired plant, expected to begin commercial operation in 2022, which frustrated some in the audience. "Apparently, it's just a bridge energy source we're resigned to depend on until we approach 2040 and our carbon-free goal," Rep. Jonathon Steinberg, D, who serves on the House Energy and Technology Committee, told Utility Dive in an email. "There weren't even promises to scale back residential hookup expansion, saving pipeline capacity for industry use and electric generation, which surprised me a little." Much of the conversation in Connecticut was focused on solar and net metering in the last legislative session.

Samsung has announced a new prototype key-value SSD that is compatible with the first industry standard API for key-value storage devices. "Earlier this year, the Object Drives working group of Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) published version 1.0 of the Key Value Storage API Specification," reports AnandTech. "Samsung has added support for this new API to their ongoing key-value SSD project." From the report: Samsung has been working on key-value SSDs for quite a while, and they have been publicly developing open-source software to support KV SSDs for over a year, including the basic libraries and drivers needed to access KV SSDs as well as a sample benchmarking tool and a Ceph backend. The prototype drives they have previously discussed have been based on their PM983 datacenter NVMe drives with TLC NAND, using custom firmware to enable the key-value interface. Those drives support key lengths from 4 to 255 bytes and value lengths up to 2MB, and it is likely that Samsung's new prototype is based on the same hardware platform and retains similar size limits.

Samsung's Platform Development Kit software for key-value SSDs originally supported their own software API, but now additionally supports the vendor-neutral SNIA standard API. The prototype drives are currently available for companies that are interested in developing software to use KV SSDs. Samsung's KV SSDs probably will not move from prototype status to being mass production products until after the corresponding key-value command set extension to NVMe is finalized, so that KV SSDs can be supported without needing a custom NVMe driver. The SNIA standard API for key-value drives is a high-level transport-agnostic API that can support drives using NVMe, SAS or SATA interfaces, but each of those protocols needs to be extended with key-value support.

"As the promise of autonomous machines lags the underlying technology, the growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce," reports The Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader shares excerpts from the report: Across industries, engineers are building atop work done a generation ago by designers of military drones. Whether it's terrestrial delivery robots, flying delivery drones, office-patrolling security robots, inventory-checking robots in grocery stores or remotely piloted cars and trucks, the machines that were supposed to revolutionize everything by operating autonomously turn out to require, at the very least, humans minding them from afar. Until the techno-utopian dream of full automation comes into effect -- and frankly, there's no guarantee that will ever happen -- there will be plenty of jobs for humans, just not ones their parents would recognize. Whether the humans in charge are in the same city or thousands of miles away, the proliferation of not-yet-autonomous technologies is driving a tiny but rapidly growing workforce.

Companies working with remote-controlled robots know there are risks, and try to mitigate them in a few ways. Some choose only to operate slow-moving machines in simple environments -- as in Postmates's sidewalk delivery -- so that even the worst disaster isn't all that bad. More advanced systems require 'human supervisory control,' where the robot or vehicle's onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn't dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator. For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same. Phantom Auto is betting the shift to remote operation might become an important means of employment for people who used to drive for a living. Other requirements for our remote-controlled future include "a tolerance for working for a lower wage, since remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets," the report adds.

"Another might be a youth spent gaming. When Postmates managers interview potential delivery-robot pilots like Diana Villalobos, they ask whether or not they played videogames in their youth. 'When I was a kid, my parents always said, 'Stop playing videogames!' But it came in handy,' she says."

England is introducing a mandatory electric car charging point for each newly built home. "This means that every brand new home, by law, will have to have a charging port for your electric vehicle -- even if you don't yet own one," reports CleanTechnica. From the report: This would make it easier on both fully electric and plug-in hybrid owners in England who use the government's home charger subsidy, which has funded the installation of almost 100,000 wall boxes, as home chargers are commonly called. In the Forward written by the Secretary of Transport, Rt Hon. Chris Grayling, he states that in the previous year the government set out a "bold and integrated Industrial Strategy" that was designed to create a "high-growth, high productivity green economy across the UK."

It would be an economy ready for the 21st century and a huge part of this is a plan for solving the problem of roadside nitrogen dioxide concentrations. The goal is to cut exposure to air pollutants, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve the UK's energy security. One of these polices states that they will support the development of one of the best electric vehicle infrastructure networks in the world.

After being teased and promoted for four years, Porsche has officially revealed their first electric car called the Taycan. The Verge's Sean O'Kane shares his first impressions of the $150,900 supercar: The fuller picture Porsche painted about the Taycan on Wednesday is one of an electric sports car that will hang with the fastest vehicles on the market, all without sacrificing practicality. It's an EV imbued with characteristics that were forged in the automaker's storied motorsports program, and a vehicle that marks the beginning of a new era in the company's long history. The Taycan feels like a car that can inspire people to switch to electric propulsion in a way that only Tesla has really achieved so far. It's got the kind of verve that the Audi E-Tron, Mercedes-Benz EQC, and Jaguar I-Pace completely lack.

The thing Porsche wants people to focus on more than the 2.6-second 0-60mph time (3.0 seconds for the base Taycan Turbo) is the car's ability to repeat that performance without overheating the battery pack or restricting the power output. That will likely be an advantage the Taycan holds onto for a few years, and for people who care about putting this car through the ringer, it's going to make the price tag a bit more palatable. [...] The Taycan follows in the footsteps of Tesla, which has helped inspire automakers to just design beautiful cars that happen to be electric. It has all the beautiful curves and details one expects from a modern Porsche, with a few -- like the vegan interior option -- that are less typical. One thing that surprised me about the Taycan is the interior: it felt less obnoxious than it looked in the photos Porsche released a few weeks ago. Granted, the optional passenger side screen is a bit much. But the two main screens that come standard on the car are big and clear enough to offer a lot of information at once, and they blend into the car well. The center screen especially feels well-integrated; since it's not surrounded by gauche plastic buttons, you have to hunt for the seams where it disappears into the dashboard.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration announced new rules on Wednesday to roll back requirements for energy-saving light bulbs, a move that could contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The Energy Department's filing in the Federal Register will prevent new efficiency standards from going into effect on Jan. 1 under a law passed in 2007. The changes are likely to be challenged in court. "We will explore all options, including litigation, to stop this completely misguided and unlawful action," said Noah Horowitz, director of the Center for Energy Efficiency Standards at the Natural Resources Defense Council, last week in anticipation of the move. "One part of the new standards would have required the adding of four kinds of incandescent and halogen light bulbs to the energy-efficient group: three-way, the candle-shaped bulbs used in chandeliers; the globe-shaped bulbs found in bathroom lighting; reflector bulbs used in recessed fixtures; and track lighting," the report adds. "A rule that will be published Thursday in the Federal Register will eliminate the requirement for those four categories of bulbs."

"The Department of Energy was also supposed to begin a broader upgrade concerning energy efficiency in pear-shaped bulbs, scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The department is proposing a new rule that would eliminate that requirement, subject to a 60-day comment period."