An anonymous reader shares a report: China's giant solar parks aren't just changing the power mix -- they may be changing the ground beneath them. Fresh field data point to cooler soils, extra moisture, and pockets of greening, though lasting ecological shifts will hinge on design and long-term care.

[...] A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators -- everything from soil chemistry to microbial life -- and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier. The reasons track with physics: shade cools the surface and slows evaporation, letting scarce soil moisture linger longer; field experiments in western China report measurable soil-moisture gains beneath shaded arrays.

Simple shade from panel rows can create a gentler microclimate at ground level, cutting wind stress and helping fragile seedlings establish. In other desert locations like Gansu and the Gobi, year-round field data tell a similar story. Soil temperatures beneath arrays tend to be cooler during the day and a bit warmer at night than surrounding ground, with humidity patterns shifting in tandem -- conditions that can make harsh surfaces more habitable when paired with basic land care. Even small shifts like these can help re-establish vegetation -- if combined with erosion control and water management. These aren't wildflowers blooming overnight, but they are signs that utility-scale solar can double as a modest micro-restorer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) -- a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels' corridors of power. "We are getting hundreds per day about it," said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: MEPs voted on Wednesday by 355 in favor to 247 against to reserve names such as "steak", "burger" and "sausage" exclusively for products derived from meat, a longstanding demand of farm unions. In order to come into effect, the idea would have to be approved by a majority of the EU's 27 member states, which is far from certain. The vote is a victory for the French centre-right MEP Celine Imart, who drafted the amendment to legislation intended to strengthen the position of farmers in the food supply chain.

Imart, who is also a cereals farmer in north-west France, said: "A steak, an escalope or a sausage are products from our livestock, not laboratory art nor plant products. There is a need for transparency and clarity for the consumer and recognition for the work of our farmers." She argues the proposal is in line with EU rules that already ban the use of terms such as "milk" and "yoghurt" for non-dairy products.

The European parliament rejected a ban on meaty names for plant-based products in 2020, but the 2024 elections shifted the parliament to the right, bringing in more lawmakers who seek close ties with farmers. Opposition was led by Green MEPs, who decried what they saw as a populist move to rename plant-based foods. "Veggie burgers, seitan schnitzel and tofu sausage do not confuse consumers, only rightwing politicians," Thomas Waitz, an Austrian Green MEP, said after the vote. "This tactic is a diversion and a pathetic smokescreen. No farmer will earn more money or secure their future with this ban."

"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast," writes Cory Doctorow. Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

He succinctly explains "this moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening" using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. "And become a giant pile of shit."

So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)... These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too... [M]erchants' dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts...

[Amazon] uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to cream off its merchants' bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a "service" in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.

All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods.... Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the "Amazon tax" on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot... [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it's key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon...

If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Doctorow knows what we need to do:

• Ban predatory pricing — "selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again)."

• Impose structural separation, "so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform."

• Curb junk fees, "which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in."

• End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants "to raise their prices everywhere else, too.

• Unionise drivers and warehouse workers.

• Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are.

These are policy solutions. (Because "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly," Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, "Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care."

In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — "the enshitternet" — calling it "a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love.

"The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers mspohr and fjo3 for sharing the article.

Pew Research: Public awareness of legal sports betting has grown in recent years -- and so has the perception that it is a bad thing for society and sports, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society. That's up from 34% in 2022. And 40% of adults now say it's a bad thing for sports, up from 33%.

Despite these increasingly critical views of legal sports betting, many Americans continue to say it has neither a bad nor good impact on society and on sports. Fewer than one-in-five see positive impacts. Meanwhile, the share of Americans who have bet money on sports in the past year has not changed much since 2022.

Today, 22% of adults say they've personally bet money on sports in the past year. That's a slight uptick from 19% three years ago. This figure includes betting in any of three ways:
1. With friends or family, such as in a private betting pool, fantasy league or casual bet
2. Online with a betting app, sportsbook or casino
3. In person at a casino, racetrack or betting kiosk Further reading: Filipinos Are Addicted to Online Gambling. So Is Their Government.

James Marriott, writing in a column: The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. "To engage with the written word," the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, "means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning."

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports "shocking and dispiriting" falls in children's reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, "books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures."

[...] What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience's attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google said hackers are sending extortion emails to an unspecified number of executives, claiming to have stolen sensitive data from their Oracle business applications. In a statement, Google said a group claiming affiliation with the ransomware gang cl0p, opens new tab was sending emails to "executives at numerous organizations claiming to have stolen sensitive data from their Oracle E-Business Suite." Google cautioned that it "does not currently have sufficient evidence to definitively assess the veracity of these claims."

F-Droid has warned that Google's upcoming developer verification program will kill the free and open source app repository. Google announced plans several weeks ago to force all Android app developers to register their apps and identity with the company. Apps not validated by Google will not be installable on certified Android devices.

F-Droid says it cannot require developers to register with Google or take over app identifiers to register for them. The site operators say doing so would effectively take over distribution rights from app authors. Google plans to begin testing the verification scheme in the coming weeks and may charge registration fees. Unverified apps will start being blocked next year in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand before expanding globally in 2027. F-Droid is calling on US and EU regulators to intervene.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Linuxiac: In a somewhat unexpected move, Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative aimed at developing a modern, standalone web browser engine.

It's a project launched by GitHub's co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling. It's written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn't sit on top of Chromium or WebKit. Instead, it's building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today's web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).

The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation.
The article adds that Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy, a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.

The BBC reports that a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that the human species "began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study." It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.

The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.

The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK's Natural History Museum. "From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?" said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. "But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we're actually very excited."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

"Researchers have modified a standard glue gun to 3D print a bone-like material directly onto fractures," reports LiveScience, "paving the way for its use in operating rooms." The device, which has so far been tested in rabbits, would be particularly useful for fixing irregularly shaped fractures during surgery, the researchers say.

"To my knowledge, there are virtually no previous examples of applying the technology directly as a bone substitute," study co-author Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineer at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, told Live Science in an email. "This makes the approach quite unique and sets it apart from conventional methods...." "Further studies in larger animal models are needed before the technology can be used on humans," the article points out.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

"Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought," writes Futurism: As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn't scale linearly. For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.

"These findings highlight both the structural inefficiency of current video diffusion pipelines and the urgent need for efficiency-oriented design," the researchers concluded in their paper... Fortunately, there are ways to slim down those demands, including intelligent caching, the reusing of existing AI generations, and "pruning," meaning the sifting out of inefficient examples from training datasets.
The Hugging Face researchers gave their paper a cheeky title. "Video Killed the Energy Budget: Characterizing the Latency and Power Regimes of Open Text-to-Video Mode."