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Brian Silvestro reports via Motor1.com: New Jersey announced a new rule set on Wednesday laying out plans to transition sales of light-duty vehicles in the state to 100-percent zero-emission by 2035. According to a statement released by the office of governor Phil Murphy, the law, titled the Advanced Clean Cars II rule, will come into effect starting in 2027, where manufacturers must ensure that zero-emissions vehicles represent 42 percent of sales in the state. That percentage will climb with each year until 2035, when it reaches 100 percent. Currently, EVs represent roughly 12 percent of all new vehicle sales, according to the governor's office. The new law will also put more stringent standards in place for traditional ICE-powered vehicles, with the goal of improving air quality in New Jersey communities and high-traffic corridors. While the announcement does not directly mention investment into charging infrastructure, the governor's office points out its continued dedication to providing adequate charging locations across the state, claiming it has helped fund the installment of 2,980 charging stations with 5,271 ports at 680 locations. New Jersey is the ninth state to enact a ban on future ICE car sales, joining California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.

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Lenovo has filed a lawsuit against Asus, claiming that the company's laptops infringe on four of their patents. "Lenovo is seeking damages and for Asus to stop selling Zenbook laptops and other allegedly infringing products in the U.S.," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The lawsuit [PDF] centers on four patents. The first, entitled "Methods and apparatus for transmitting in resource blocks" was issued in 2021 and relates to minimizing the delay experienced during an uplink package transmission by reducing the number of steps for a wireless device to upload data. Lenovo's lawsuit, which uses Asus' Zenbook Pro 14 OLED (UX6404) as an example of an allegedly infringing product, also claims Asus is selling laptops that violate the wireless wake-on-LAN power management patent issued to Lenovo in 2010. Another patent Lenovo is suing over was issued in 2010 and entitled "Touchpad diagonal scrolling." It allows users to "initiate a diagonal scroll at any location on a touchpad by using two fingers," the lawsuit says. Finally, Lenovo is upset about Asus' purported infringing of its "Dual shaft hinge with angle timing shaft mechanism" patent rewarded in 2014. Lenovo describes it as a hinge block enabling 2-in-1 laptops to go from clamshell mode to tablet mode. For this accused patent infringement, Lenovo's lawsuit points to Asus' Zenbook Flip 14 UX461, which Asus advertises as having a 360-degree "ErgoLift" hinge that "lifts and tilts the keyboard into the perfect typing position when the display is rotated into laptop mode." As noted by The Register today, in a letter to the ITC dated November 15 [PDF], Lenovo said it wants Asus to "cease and desist from marketing, advertising, distributing, offering for sale, selling, or otherwise transferring, including the movement or shipment of inventory" products that infringe upon the four patents in question. In a further dig, Lenovo added that a limited exclusion order wouldn't harm US consumers or competition, due to Asus' smaller market share. According to the IDC, Asus represented about 7.1 percent of the PC market (which includes laptops and desktops) in Q3 2023. Lenovo led at 23.5 percent.

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Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Nvidia is facing legal action in the U.S. for theft of trade secrets from a German automotive company, which alleges its ex-employee made an epic blunder of showing something he shouldn't have when minimizing a Powerpoint slide at a joint Microsoft Teams meeting both companies were attending. The automotive firm, Valeo Schalter und Sensoren, claims the flashing of its source code for the assisted parking app on the call is evidence to support its accusations that the ex-staffer stole the IP before leaving to join Nvidia. The two tech companies were both on the call as they were each suppliers on contract for a parking and driving assistance project with a major automotive OEM that was not named in the suit. Under the terms of the contract with the OEM, the suit states, engineers from both Valeo and Nvidia had to schedule collaboration meetings so that "Nvidia employees could ask Valeo employees questions about Valeo's ultrasonic hardware and data associated with the hardware." The complaint [PDF], filed by Valeo in the US District Court for Northern California, goes on to allege misappropriation of trade secrets by Nvidia, through which the company claims the GPU-maker attempted to take a shortcut into the automotive marketplace by using its stolen software. Nvidia is a relative newcomer to the automotive market, introducing its Nvidia Drive platform at the CES trade show in 2015. Valeo says that it only discovered the theft during a conference call on March 8, 2022 between its engineers and those of Nvidia to collaborate on work for an automotive OEM, a customer of both companies. Valeo develops automotive hardware such as cameras and sensors, in addition to software to processes the data from the hardware. The court filing states that Valeo previously provided the OEM in question with both hardware and software for its autonomous vehicle technology, but in this instance, it asked Valeo to provide ultrasonic hardware only. For the software side, the OEM instead chose Nvidia. One of the Nvidia engineers on the call, named as Mohammad Moniruzzaman, was a former employee of Valeo, and during the call, made using Microsoft's Teams software, he shared his screen in order to give a presentation containing questions for the Valeo participants. Yet also visible on his screen after the presentation finished - or so the complaint alleges - was a window of source code, which the Valeo participants recognized as belonging to their company. According to the filing, one of the Valeo engineers succeeded in capturing a screenshot as evidence. According to Valeo, the source code file names that were allegedly visible in the screenshot were identical to those used in its source code, and it also claims the source code appeared to be identical to proprietary code maintained in Valeo's repositories. The company says in the suit that it then conducted a comprehensive internal forensic IT audit, and alleges it discovered that Moniruzzaman had copied four repositories containing the code for Valeo's parking and driving assistance software, prior to leaving the company in May 2021. [...] The claim is that Valeo's source code and documentation has been used in the development of Nvidia's software, and this provided the GPU giant and its engineers with a shortcut in the development of its parking assistance code, saving Nvidia perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs. According to the court filing, Nvidia said it removed Moniruzzaman's additions to its code. However, those additions underwent "a peer review process of 10-30 iterations of feedback loops" before the code was fully merged into Nvidia's database. Valeo contends that this process of extensive edits by others means it is not realistic that Nvidia could have fully remove Moniruzzaman's contributions. Valeo claims it has suffered competitive harm as a result of Nvidia's action and as a result is seeking damages, to be determined at trial, as well as an injunction prohibiting Nvidia or its employees from using or disclosing Valeo's trade secrets. A date for jury trial has yet to be announced.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Sam Altman may have been asked to leave OpenAI, but his involvement in crypto project Tools for Humanity, which is building Worldcoin, remains uninterrupted, a source close to the project told TechCrunch. Altman has "consistent and valuable" engagement with Tools for Humanity and "that is not expected to change," the source said. The source added that Altman is still chairman and co-founder of the project, confirming that the information on the project's website is up to date. News of Altman's ouster sent the Worldcoin token, WLD, plummeting to a low of $1.84 on Saturday, but the token recovered over the weekend and is currently trading on par with previous levels at $2.40, per CoinMarketCap data. Worldcoin raised $115 million in May in a Series C round led by Blockchain Capital. As of March, Altman was on the project's board, but was not involved in day-to-day operations. "Proof of personhood is becoming increasingly important in the rapidly advancing age of AI," The Worldcoin Foundation told TechCrunch late on Monday. The team supporting Worldcoin is still focused on the project's mission, "building a more human internet and a more accessible global economy through World ID, a privacy-enhancing way to verify humanness and uniqueness online," the company said.

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OpenAI's "ChatGPT with voice" feature announced in September is now rolling out to all free users on mobile. Engadget reports: When the company first introduced voice chats, it admitted that the capability to create "realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech" presents new risks. It could, for instance, allow bad actors to impersonate public figures or anybody they want. As a result, it decided that ChatGPT's voice feature will focus on conversations. It's powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate "human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech." OpenAI worked with voice actors to create the capability and offers five different voices to choose from.

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Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's predictions, with revenue growing 206% year over year. However, Nvidia shares are down after the company called for a negative impact in the next quarter due to export restrictions affecting sales in China and other countries. CNBC reports: Nvidia's revenue grew 206% year over year during the quarter ending Oct. 29, according to a statement. Net income, at $9.24 billion, or $3.71 per share, was up from $680 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company's data center revenue totaled $14.51 billion, up 279% and more than the StreetAccount consensus of $12.97 billion. Half of the data center revenue came from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, and the other from consumer internet entities and large companies, Nvidia said. Healthy uptake came from clouds that specialize in renting out GPUs to clients, Kress said on the call. The gaming segment contributed $2.86 billion, up 81% and higher than the $2.68 billion StreetAccount consensus. With respect to guidance, Nvidia called for $20 billion in revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter. That implies nearly 231% revenue growth. [...] Nvidia faces obstacles, including competition from AMD and lower revenue because of export restrictions that can limit sales of its GPUs in China. But ahead of Tuesday report, some analysts were nevertheless optimistic.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Miscreants are actively exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities to wrangle routers and video recorders into a hostile botnet used in distributed denial-of-service attacks, researchers from networking firm Akamai said Thursday. Both of the vulnerabilities, which were previously unknown to their manufacturers and to the security research community at large, allow for the remote execution of malicious code when the affected devices use default administrative credentials, according to an Akamai post. Unknown attackers have been exploiting the zero-days to compromise the devices so they can be infected with Mirai, a potent piece of open source software that makes routers, cameras, and other types of Internet of Things devices part of a botnet that's capable of waging DDoSes of previously unimaginable sizes. Akamai researchers said one of the zero-days under attack resides in one or more models of network video recorders. The other zero-day resides in an "outlet-based wireless LAN router built for hotels and residential applications." The router is sold by a Japan-based manufacturer, which "produces multiple switches and routers." The router feature being exploited is "a very common one," and the researchers can't rule out the possibility it's being exploited in multiple router models sold by the manufacturer. Akamai said it has reported the vulnerabilities to both manufacturers, and that one of them has provided assurances security patches will be released next month. Akamai said it wasn't identifying the specific devices or the manufacturers until fixes are in place to prevent the zero-days from being more widely exploited. The Akamai post provides a host of file hashes and IP and domain addresses being used in the attacks. Owners of network video cameras and routers can use this information to see if devices on their networks have been targeted. [...] In an email, Akamai researcher Larry Cashdollar wrote: "The devices don't typically allow code execution through the management interface. This is why getting RCE through command injection is needed. Because the attacker needs to authenticate first they have to know some login credentials that will work. If the devices are using easy guessable logins like admin:password or admin:password1 those could be at risk too if someone expands the list of credentials to try." He said that both manufacturers have been notified, but only one of them has so far committed to releasing a patch, which is expected next month. The status of a fix from the second manufacturer is currently unknown. Cashdollar said an incomplete Internet scan showed there are at least 7,000 vulnerable devices. The actual number of affected devices may be higher.

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Bard, Google's AI chatbot, has steadily been getting more useful after a lackluster introduction. Now the bot's YouTube integration is getting a handy upgrade so it can analyze individual videos to surface specific information for you -- like key points or recipe ingredients -- without ever pressing play. From a report: That's potentially a hugely useful tool, but could spell more worry about generative AI for creators. To try it out, I turned Bard on a YouTube video I regularly reference for spiritual guidance: America's Test Kitchen's recipe for an Espresso Martini. Seriously, it's really good. I often find myself in my kitchen with half the ingredients in a cocktail shaker trying to remember how much Benedictine I'm supposed to add, then re-watching the video to find out. But with Bard on the case, all I have to do is type a few prompts and viola -- I have the full list of ingredients and some step-by-step instructions.

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OLED monitors risk burn-in, especially with static images. Newer models combat this using improved materials, algorithms, efficiencies, features, and heat management. However, long-term data is minimal as quality selection is recent. An unexpected quirk applies to ultrawides: playing 16:9 content creates brighter center areas versus darker sides, quickening OLED degradation. In an extreme test by RTINGS, Samsung ultrawides developed heavy differential wear in just 700 hours. ArsTechnica adds: Even OLED monitors that have already been released can see their capabilities change in a way that could impact burn-in risk. For example, the Odyssey G8 monitor got a firmware update in August that removed the ability to use the Peak Brightness setting in SDR mode. While this is just one specific mode that, again, some users might not use, it's worth noting how this could change the amount of wear an OLED monitor could see. RTINGS' review said that after the firmware update, the monitor's max luminance "when displaying a bright highlight in an SDR scene" went from 331 nits to 230 nits. Samsung hasn't confirmed the reasons for this change, but such changes highlight how OLED monitor burn-in risk can change from use to use and from update to update, across different products.

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HP CEO Enrique Lores is betting a sprinkle of AI dust can regenerate the flagging PC market -- and with shipments still in decline across the industry, he can't afford to tease Wall Street. From a report: The world's second largest seller of desktop computing hardware has reported a 15 percent year-on-year decline in revenue to $53.7 billion for fiscal 2023 ended 31 October. Profit before tax was $2.93 billion versus $4.32 billion in the prior year. [...] Orders picked up in recent months. Analyst data indicates the rate of decline is slowing after resellers began clearing inventory they'd amassed in the latter stage of the pandemic, when the frenzied buying patterns seen in prior years vanished. For Q4, HP reported revenue of $13.8 billion, down 6.5 percent year-on-year. Personal Systems was down 8 percent to $9.4 billion and Printing was down 3 percent to $4.4 billion. Profit before tax was $852 million, better than the $647 million brought in a year earlier, helped by a reduction in structural costs. HP expects business PC refresh cycles to kick in next year, with more corporate customers shifting their estate to Windows 11 -- yet it is the advent of the AI PC that Lores thinks signal better times.

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Version:next-20231122 (linux-next) Released:2023-11-22

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The richest one percent of the global population are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world's poorest two-thirds, or five billion people, according to an analysis published Sunday by the nonprofit Oxfam International. [...] Among the key findings of this study are that the richest one percent globally -- 77 million people -- were responsible for 16 percent of global emissions related to their consumption. That is the same share as the bottom 66 percent of the global population by income, or 5.11 billion people. The income threshold for being among the global top one percent was adjusted by country using purchasing power parity -- for example in the United States the threshold would be $140,000, whereas the Kenyan equivalent would be about $40,000. Within country analyses also painted very stark pictures. For example, in France, the richest one percent emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50 percent in 10 years. Excluding the carbon associated with his investments, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of Louis Vuitton and richest man in France, has a footprint 1,270 times greater than that of the average Frenchman. The key message, according to Lawson, was that policy actions must be progressive. These measures could include, for example, a tax on flying more than ten times a year, or a tax on non-green investments that is much higher than the tax on green investments. While the current report focused on carbon linked only to individual consumption, "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies," the report found. Nor are the wealthy invested in polluting industries at a similar ratio to any given investor -- billionaires are twice as likely to be invested in polluting industries than the average for the Standard & Poor 500, previous Oxfam research has shown.

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FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today outlined a new proposal that would ban cable and satellite companies from charging subscribers early termination fees. Deadline reports: Some subscribers who sign contracts with cable and satellite operators face paying early termination fees if they want out of the agreement before the expiration date. The companies put such fees in place to reduce churn. The FCC proposal also would target requirements that subscribers pay for the entire billing cycle when they end their service before that date. The proposal would require that the video providers grant a pro-rated credit for the remaining days in a billing cycle. The proposal applies only to cable and satellite providers, not streaming services. The FCC will vote at its Dec. 13 meeting whether to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking for public comment. Rosenworcel said in a statement: "No one wants to pay junk fees for something they don't want or can't use. When companies charge customers early termination fees, it limits their freedom to choose the service they want. In an increasingly competitive media market, we should make it easier for Americans to use their purchasing power to promote innovation and expand competition within the industry."

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Laura Snapes reports via The Guardian: Spotify is to phase out its service in Uruguay after the passing of a new music copyright bill requiring "fair and equitable remuneration" for authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters. In October, the country's parliament voted on a budget bill that included two new articles: per article 284, social networks and the internet are to be added "as formats for which, if a song is reproduced, the performer is entitled to financial remuneration" -- namely if a link to a song is shared online. Article 285 will put into copyright law the "right to a fair and equitable remuneration" for all "agreements entered into by authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters with respect to their faculty of public communication and making available to the public of phonograms and audiovisual recordings." In response, Spotify said in a statement on November 20 that without changes to the 2023 Rendicion de Cuentas law, the streaming platform "will, unfortunately, begin to phase out its service in Uruguay effective January 1, 2024" and cease trading in the market in February 2024. The Swedish company seeks confirmation on whether additional costs to be paid to musicians are the responsibility of rights holders or the streaming platforms, arguing that the latter means that it would be required "to pay twice for the same music," Music Business Worldwide reports. The statement continued: "Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers that own the rights for music, and represent and pay artists and songwriters. Any additional payments would make our business untenable." The platform claimed that it had contributed to a 20% growth in Uruguay's music industry in 2022. That year, the South American nation was the 53rd largest market for music.

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Connor Jones reports via The Register: The government of Canada has confirmed its data was accessed after two of its third-party service providers were attacked. The third parties both provided relocation services for public sector workers and the government is currently analyzing a "significant volume of data" which could date back to 1999. No formal conclusions have yet been made about the number of workers impacted due to the large-scale task of analyzing the relevant data. However, the servers impacted by the breach held data related to current and former Canadian government staff, members of the Canadian armed forces, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police workers -- aka Mounties. "At this time, given the significant volume of data being assessed, we cannot yet identify specific individuals impacted; however, preliminary information indicates that breached information could belong to anyone who has used relocation services as early as 1999 and may include any personal and financial information that employees provided to the companies," a government statement read. Those who think they may be affected are advised to update any login details that may be similar to those used to access BGRS or Sirva's systems. Enabling MFA across all accounts that are used for online transactions is also advised, as is the manual monitoring of personal accounts for any potential malicious activity. Work is currently being carried out to identify and address any vulnerabilities that may have led to the incident, according to the statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Matteo Franceschetti, the CEO of Eight Sleep, which makes the $2,295 smart mattress topper "The Pod" tweeted: "Breaking news: The OpenAI drama is real. We checked our data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27 percent increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this. Source: @eightsleep data." Franceschetti's tweet reminds us that The Pod is essentially a mattress with both a privacy policy and a terms of service, and that the data Eight Sleep collects about its users can and is used to further its business goals. It's also a reminder that many apps, smart devices, and apps for smart devices collect a huge amount of user data that they can then directly monetize or deploy for marketing or Twitter virality purposes whenever they feel like it. The Pod does "intelligent cooling and heating for any bed," and learns and adjusts the temperature of the bed based on your sleep habits, tracks your sleep and vital signs while you sleep, and gives you a "Sleep Fitness Score" based on your quality, routine, and time of sleep. As someone who often does not sleep well, The Pod is a compelling product that I cannot currently afford. Quickly, to get it out of the way: Eight Sleep's data does not and cannot actually show that "San Francisco" had a spike in low-quality sleep. What it shows is that people in San Francisco who have purchased a $2,295 smart mattress topper and have not successfully opted out of Eight Sleep's analytics -- a group that surely overindexes on tech workers -- slept less Sunday night. The top of Eight Sleep's terms of service states "At Eight Sleep we pledge to respect your privacy and to keep your data safe. We only collect data that helps us improve our products and services." Both Eight Sleep's privacy policy and terms of service then go on to note that the company collects a huge amount of data that can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including marketing, retargeting, and scientific studies. It can also, apparently, be used by the CEO for commenting on the day's tech news. Specifically, the company notes that "data about your sleep activity is transferred from your Device to our servers" every time the Pod's app syncs with the Pod. Certain features on the device also require location data "including GPS signals, device sensors, Wi-Fi access points, and cell tower IDs." This data is then used to give users personalized sleep recommendations, but they are also "used in research to understand and improve the Eight Device and Eight Service," "to enforce the Eight Terms of Service," and, critically, "de-identified data that does not identify you may be used to inform the health and scientific community about trends; for marketing and promotional use; or for sale to interested audiences." The terms of service add that it "may share or sell" this data.

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According to Polish news channel TVN24, a secret cryptomining rig was found under the floors of a Polish court, stealing thousands of Polish Zlotys worth of energy per month (the equivalent of roughly $250 per 1,000 Zlotys). "It's currently unknown how long the rig was running because the illegal operation went undetected, partly because the computers used were connected to the Internet through their own modems rather than through the court's network," reports Ars Technica. From the report: While no one has been charged yet with any crimes, the court seemingly has suspects. Within two weeks of finding the rig, the court terminated a contract with a company responsible for IT maintenance in the building, TVN24 reported. Before the contract ended, the company fired two employees that it said were responsible for maintenance in the parts of the building where the cryptomine was hidden. Poland's top law enforcement officials, the Internal Security Agency, have been called in to investigate. The Warsaw District Prosecutor's Office has hired IT experts to help determine exactly how much electricity was stolen from Poland's Supreme Administrative Court in Warsaw, TVN24 reported. The Supreme Administrative Court is the last resort for sensitive business and tax disputes, but no records seem to have been compromised. Judge Sylwester Marciniak -- the chairman of the Judicial Information Department of the Supreme Administrative Court -- told TVN24 that the discovery of the cryptomine "did not result in any threat to the security of data stored" in the court.

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Winston Cho writes via The Hollywood Reporter: A federal judge has dismissed most of Sarah Silverman's lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of authors' copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence model, marking the second ruling from a court siding with AI firms on novel intellectual property questions presented in the legal battle. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday offered a full-throated denial of one of the authors' core theories that Meta's AI system is itself an infringing derivative work made possible only by information extracted from copyrighted material. "This is nonsensical," he wrote in the order. "There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs' books." Another of Silverman's arguments that every result produced by Meta's AI tools constitutes copyright infringement was dismissed because she didn't offer evidence that any of the outputs "could be understood as recasting, transforming, or adapting the plaintiffs' books." Chhabria gave her lawyers a chance to replead the claim, along with five others that weren't allowed to advance. Notably, Meta didn't move to dismiss the allegation that the copying of books for purposes of training its AI model rises to the level of copyright infringement. In July, Silverman and two authors filed a class action lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission to train AI language models.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI's board of directors is reportedly in talks with Sam Altman, ex-Y Combinator president and an OpenAI co-founder, to return to OpenAI as CEO as soon as this week. That's according to Bloomberg, which in a brief this morning -- citing sources close to the matter -- said that discussions are happening between Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, one current member of the OpenAI board, and Altman -- and possibly other board members as well. Per Bloomberg, the board member (or members) and Altman are discussing a number of possible scenarios that could play out. In one, Altman would return as a director on a transitional board. In another -- or perhaps the same -- former Salesforce Inc. co-CEO Bret Taylor could serve as a director on a new board. (Taylor's name was floated as a potential future OpenAI board member in some reporting over the weekend.) Investors are also in on the talks, Bloomberg reports, with Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital aggressively pushing for Altman's return. The hope is to resolve the management crisis before Thanksgiving, so as to give OpenAI employees less uncertainty around the state of the company -- and stem the broader bleeding. Were Altman to return to OpenAI, he'd presumably renege on his acceptance of Microsoft's offer to head up a new AI research lab at the tech giant with Greg Brockman, OpenAI's former president, who resigned in protest with Altman on Friday. Altman is said to have demanded "significant" managerial and governance changes at OpenAI as a condition of returning, a demand which many OpenAI backers -- including Microsoft -- share. Today's developments follow a memo sent by OpenAI VP of global affairs Anna Makanju late Monday indicating that OpenAI's management had been in "intense discussions" with the board, Altman and interim CEO Emmett Shear, who took over from OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, to attempt to re-unify the company. Shear has reportedly been left in the dark for the most part, indicating to Bloomberg sources that he doesn't plan to stick around if the board can't clearly communicate its reasoning for Altman's abrupt dismissal. Shear previously said in a note to employees Sunday that his first order of business would be to "hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent years, lots of American companies have gotten behind a potential climate solution called carbon capture and storage, and the Biden administration has backed it with billions of dollars in tax incentives and direct investments. The idea is to trap planet-heating carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of factories and power plants and transport it to sites where it is injected underground and stored. But the idea is controversial, in large part because the captured carbon dioxide would be shipped to storage sites via thousands of miles of new pipelines. Communities nationwide are pushing back against these pipeline projects and underground sites, arguing they don't want the pollution running through their land. Now the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to change a rule to allow storing this carbon dioxide pollution under the country's national forests and grasslands. "Authorizing carbon capture and storage on NFS lands would support the Administration's goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below the 2005 levels by 2030," the proposed rule change says. But environmental groups and researchers have concerns. Carbon dioxide pollution will still need to be transported to the forests via industrial pipeline for storage, says June Sekera, a research fellow with Boston University. "To get the CO2 to the injection site in the midst of our national forest, they've got to build huge pipelines," Sekera says. "All this huge industrial infrastructure that's going to go right through." Sekera says building those CO2 pipelines may require clearing a lot of trees.

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