News Source Slashdot:Hardware

Manufacturer Bricks Smart Vacuum After Engineer Blocks It From Collecting Data
A curious engineer discovered that his iLife A11 smart vacuum was remotely "killed" after he blocked it from sending data to the manufacturer's servers. By reverse-engineering it with custom hardware and Python scripts, he managed to revive the device to run fully offline. Tom's Hardware reports: An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer -- something he hadn't consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device. He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again. [...] So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn't communicate with the manufacturer's servers. Since he blocked the appliance's data collection capabilities, its maker decided to just kill it altogether. "Someone -- or something -- had remotely issued a kill command," says Harishankar. "Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of 'compliance,' the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner." In the end, the owner was able to run his vacuum fully locally without manufacturer control after all the tweaks he made. This helped him retake control of his data and make use of his $300 software-bricked smart device on his own terms. As for the rest of us who don't have the technical knowledge and time to follow his accomplishments, his advice is to "Never use your primary WiFi network for IoT devices" and to "Treat them as strangers in your home."

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China Achieves Thorium-Uranium Conversion Within Molten Salt Reactor
Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: South China Morning Post, citing Chinese state media, reported that an experimental reactor developed in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for an almost endless supply of nuclear energy. It is the first time in the world that scientists have been able to acquire experimental data on thorium operations from inside a molten salt reactor according to a report by Science and Technology Daily. Thorium is much more abundant and accessible than uranium and has enormous energy potential. One mine tailings site in Inner Mongolia is estimated to hold enough of the element to power China entirely for more than 1,000 years. At the heart of the breakthrough is a process known as in-core thorium-to-uranium conversion that transforms naturally occurring thorium-232 into uranium-233 -- a fissile isotope capable of sustaining nuclear chain reactions within the reactor itself. Thorium (Th-232) is not itself fissile and so is not directly usable in a thermal neutron reactor. Thorium fuels therefore need a fissile material as a 'driver' so that a chain reaction (and thus supply of surplus neutrons) can be maintained. The only fissile driver options are U-233, U-235 or Pu-239. (None of these are easy to supply.) In the 1960s, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) designed and built a demonstration MSR using U-233, derived externally from thorium as the main fissile driver.

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The World's Tallest Chip Defies the Limits of Computing: Goodbye To Moore's Law?
Longtime Slashdot reader dbialac shares a report from EL PAIS: For decades, the progress of electronics has followed a simple rule: smaller is better. Since the 1960s, each new generation of chips has packed more transistors into less space, fulfilling the famous Moore's Law. Formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, this law predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit approximately doubles each year. But this race to the minuscule is reaching its physical limits. Now, an international team of scientists is proposing a solution as obvious as it is revolutionary: if we can't keep reducing the size of chips, let's build them up. Xiaohang Li, a researcher at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, and his team have designed a chip with 41 vertical layers of semiconductors and insulating materials, approximately ten times higher than any previously manufactured chip. The work, recently published in the journal Nature Electronics, not only represents a technical milestone but also opens the door to a new generation of flexible, efficient, and sustainable electronic devices. "Having six or more layers of transistors stacked vertically allows us to increase circuit density without making the devices smaller laterally," Li explains. "With six layers, we can integrate 600% more logic functions in the same area than with a single layer, achieving higher performance and lower power consumption."

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Australians To Get At Least Three Hours a Day of Free Solar Power - Even If They Don't Have Solar Panels
Australia's new "solar sharer" program will give households in NSW, south-east Queensland, and South Australia at least three hours of free solar power each day starting in 2026 -- even for those without rooftop panels. Other areas will potentially follow in 2027. The Guardian reports: The government said Australians could schedule appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers and air conditioners and charge electric vehicles and household batteries during this time. The solar sharer scheme would be implemented through a change to the default market offer that sets the maximum price retailers can charge customers for electricity in parts of the country. The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the program would ensure "every last ray of sunshine was powering our homes" instead of some solar energy being wasted. Australians have installed more than 4m solar systems and there is regularly cheap excess generation in the middle of the day. Part of the rationale for the program is that it could shift demand for electricity from peak times -- particularly early in the evening -- to when it is sunniest. This could help minimize peak electricity prices and reduce the need for network upgrades and intervention to ensure the power grid was stable.

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LADWP Says It Will Shift Its Largest Gas Power Plant To Hydrogen
Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: The board of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on Tuesday approved a controversial plan to convert part of the city's largest natural gas-fired power plant into one that also can burn hydrogen. In a 3-0 vote, the DWP board signed off on the final environmental impact report for an $800-million modernization of Units 1 and 2 of the Scattergood Generating Station in Playa del Rey. The power plant dates to the late 1950s and both units are legally required to be shut down by the end of 2029. In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available. The hydrogen burned at Scattergood is supposed to be green, meaning it is produced by splitting water molecules through a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen does not emit planet-warming carbon dioxide when it is burned, unlike natural gas. [...] Although burning hydrogen does not produce CO2, the high-temperature combustion process can emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx, a key component of smog. [...] [T]he approved plan contains no specifics about where the hydrogen will come from or how it will get to the site. "The green hydrogen that would supply the proposed project has not yet been identified," the environmental report says. Industry experts and officials said the project will help drive the necessary hydrogen production. "Burning hydrogen produced by 'excess' solar or wind power is a means of energy storage," adds Slashdot reader Bruce66423. "The hard question is whether it's the best solution to the storage problem given that other solutions appear to be emerging that would require less infrastructure investment (think pipes to move the hydrogen to the plant and tanks to store it for later use)."

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Ukraine First To Demo Open Source Security Platform To Help Secure Power Grid
concertina226 shares a report from The Register: [A massive power outage in April left tens of millions across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France without electricity for hours due to cascading grid failures, exposing how fragile and interconnected Europe's energy infrastructure is. The incident, though not a cyberattack, reignited concerns about the vulnerability of aging, fragmented, and insecure operational technology systems that could be easily exploited in future cyber or ransomware attacks.] This headache is one the European Commission is focused on. It is funding several projects looking at making electric grids more resilient, such as the eFort framework being developed by cybersecurity researchers at the independent non-profit Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). TNO's SOARCA tool is the first ever open source security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform designed to protect power plants by automating the orchestration of the response to physical attacks, as well as cyberattacks, on substations and the network, and the first country to demo it will be the Ukraine this year. At the moment, SOAR systems only exist for dedicated IT environments. The researchers' design includes a SOAR system in each layer of the power station: the substation, the control room, the enterprise layer, the cloud, or the security operations centre (SOC), so that the SOC and the control room work together to detect anomalies in the network, whether it's an attacker exploiting a vulnerability, a malicious device being plugged into a substation, or a physical attack like a missile hitting a substation. The idea is to be able to isolate potential problems and prevent lateral movement from one device to another or privilege escalation, so an attacker cannot go through the network to the central IT management system of the electricity grid. [...] The SOARCA tool is underpinned by CACAO Playbooks, an open source specification developed by the OASIS Open standards body and its members (which include lots of tech giants and US government agencies) to create standardized predefined, automated workflows that can detect intrusions and changes made by malicious actors, and then carry out a series of steps to protect the network and mitigate the attack. Experts largely agree the problem facing critical infrastructure is only worsening as years pass, and the more random Windows implementations that are added into the network, the wider the attack surface is. [...] TNO's Wolthuis said the energy industry is likely to be pushed soon to take action by regulators, particularly once the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), which lays out rules requiring cybersecurity risk assessments in the electricity sector, is formalized.

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AMD Will Continue Game Optimization Support For Older Radeon GPU's After All
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: After a turbulent weekend of updates and clarifications, AMD has published an entire web page to assuage user backlash and reaffirm its commitment to continued support for its RDNA 1 and RDNA 2-based drives, following a spate of confusion surrounding its recent decision to put Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 series cards in "maintenance mode." This comes after AMD had to deny that the RX 7900 cards were losing USB-C power supply moving forward, even though the drive changelog said something quite different. Just last week, AMD released a new driver update for its graphics cards, and it went anything but smoothly. First, the wrong drivers were uploaded, and even after that was corrected, several glaring errors in the release notes required clarification. AMD was forced to correct claims about its RX 7900 cards, but at the time clarified that, indeed, RX 5000 and 6000 graphics cards were entering "Maintenance Mode," despite some RX 6000 cards being only around four years old. Now, though, AMD has either rolled back that decision or someone higher up the food chain has made a new call, as game optimizations are back on the menu for RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 GPUs. "We've heard your feedback and want to clear up the confusion around the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.10.2 driver release," AMD said in a statement. "Your Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs will continue to receive: Game support for new releases, Stability and game optimizations, and Security and bug fixes," AMD said.

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Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data
"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware. "That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to."The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again... [He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data. First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers. Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

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Amazon's Deployment of Rivian's Electric Delivery Vans Expand to Canada
"Amazon has deployed Rivian's electric delivery vans in Canada for the first time," reports CleanTechnica, with 50 now deployed in the Vancouver area. Amazon's director of Global Fleet and Products says there's now over 35,000 electric vans deployed globally — and that they've delivered more than 1.5 billion packages. More from the blog Teslarati:In December 2024, the companies announced they had successfully deployed 20,000 EDVs across the U.S. In the first half of this year, 10,000 additional vans were delivered, and Amazon's fleet had grown to 30,000 EDVs by mid-2025. Amazon's fleet of EDVs continues to grow rapidly and has expanded to over 100 cities in the United States... The EDV is a model that is exclusive to Amazon, but Rivian sells the RCV, or Rivian Commercial Van, openly. It detailed some of the pricing and trim options back in January when it confirmed it had secured orders from various companies, including AT&T.

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Researchers Consider The Advantages of 'Swarm Robotics'
The Wall Street Journal looks at swarm robotics, where no single robot is in charge, robots interact only with nearby robots — and the swarm accomplishes complex tasks through simple interactions. "Researchers say this approach could excel where traditional robots fail, like situations where central control is impractical or impossible due to distance, scale or communication barriers."For instance, a swarm of drones might one day monitor vast areas to detect early-stage wildfires that current monitoring systems sometimes miss... A human operator might set parameters like where to search, but the drones would independently share information like which areas have been searched, adjust search patterns based on wind and other weather data from other drones in the swarm, and converge for more complete coverage of a particular area when one detects smoke.In another potential application, a swarm of robots could make deliveries across wide areas more efficient by alerting each other to changing traffic conditions or redistributing packages among themselves if one breaks down. Robot swarms could also manage agricultural operations in places without reliable internet service. And disaster-response teams see potential for swarms in hurricane and tsunami zones where communication infrastructure has been destroyed. At the microscopic scale, researchers are developing tiny robots that could work together to navigate the human body to deliver medication or clear blockages without surgery... In recent demonstrations, teams of tiny magnetic robots — each about the size of a grain of sand — cleared blockages in artificial blood vessels by forming chains to push through the obstructions. The robots navigate individually through blood vessels to reach a clog, guided by doctors or technicians using magnetic fields to steer them, says researcher J.J. Wie, a professor of organic and nano engineering at Hanyang University in South Korea. When they reach an obstruction, the robots coordinate with each other to team up and break through. Wie's group is developing versions of these robots that biodegrade after use, eliminating the need for surgical removal, and coatings that make the robots compatible with human tissue. And while robots the size of sand grains work for some applications, Wie says that they will need to be shrunk to nano scale to cross biological barriers, such as cell membranes, or bind to specific molecular targets, like surface proteins or receptors on cancer cells. Some researchers are even exploring emergent intelligence — "when simple machines, following only a few local cues, begin to organize and act as if they share a mind...beyond human-designed coordination." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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Race for All-Solid-State EV Batteries Heats Up with New Samsung SDI/BMW/Solid Power Partnership
All-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) "are widely viewed as the 'holy grail' of EV battery tech," writes Electrek, "promising to double driving range, halve charging times, and reduce costs." Toyota hopes to launch its first production EV powered by the batteries in 2027 or 2028, and Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen are also testing the technology. But now Samsung SDI is teaming up with BMW and US-based battery company Solid Power for their own effort at commercializing all-solid-state EV batteries "in what's expected to be a trilateral powerhouse."BMW and Solid Power have been working together to develop the next-gen battery tech since 2022...Under the new agreement signed this week, Samsung will supply all-solid-state battery cells. Samsung will use Solid Power's Sulfide-Based Solid Electrolyte solution, while BMW will develop the battery pack and modules. The strategic alliance aims to take the lead in commercializing all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs). Together, they've created a real-world system for producing ASSB cells, pooling their expertise in batteries, automaking, and materials to bring it closer to mass production. Solid Power's electrolyte solution is designed for stability and maximum conductivity. By teaming up with BMW and Samsung SDI, the company said it aims to bring all-solid-state batteries closer to widespread adoption. "By pooling resources, BMW, Samsung SDI, and Solid Power have a real shot..." argues Electrek.

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Samsung Building Facility With 50,000 Nvidia GPUs To Automate Chip Manufacturing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Korean semiconductor giant Samsung said Thursday that it plans to buy and deploy a cluster of 50,000 Nvidia graphics processing units to improve its chip manufacturing for mobile devices and robots. The 50,000 Nvidia GPUs will be used to create a facility Samsung is calling an "AI Megafactory." Samsung didn't provide details about when the facility would be built. It's the latest splashy partnership for Nvidia, whose chips remain essential for building and deploying advanced artificial intelligence. [...] On Thursday, Nvidia representatives said they will work with Samsung to adapt the Korean company's chipmaking lithography platform to work with Nvidia's GPUs. That process will results in 20 times better performance for Samsung, the Nvidia representatives said. Samsung will also use Nvidia's simulation software called Omniverse. Known for its mobile phones, Samsung also said it would use the Nvidia chips to run its own AI models for its devices. In addition to being a partner and customer, Samsung is also a key supplier for Nvidia. Samsung makes the kind of high-performance memory Nvidia uses in large quantities, alongside its AI chips, called high bandwidth memory. Samsung said it will work with Nvidia to tweak its HBM4 memory for use in AI chips.

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Falling Panel Prices Lead To Global Solar Boom, Except For the US
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Financial Times: Solar power developers want to cover an area larger than Washington, DC, with silicon panels and batteries, converting sunlight into electricity that will power air conditioners in sweltering Las Vegas along with millions of other homes and businesses. But earlier this month, bureaucrats in charge of federal lands scrapped collective approval for the Esmeralda 7 projects, in what campaigners fear is part of an attack on renewable energy under President Donald Trump. "We will not approve wind or farmer destroying [sic] Solar," he posted on his Truth Social platform in August. Developers will need to reapply individually, slowing progress. Thousands of miles away on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, it is a different story. China has laid solar panels across an area the size of Chicago high up on the Tibetan Plateau, where the thin air helps more sunlight get through. The Talatan Solar Park is part of China's push to double its solar and wind generation capacity over the coming decade. "Green and low-carbon transition is the trend of our time," President Xi Jinping told delegates at a UN summit in New York last month. China's vast production of solar panels and batteries has also pushed down the prices of renewables hardware for everyone else, meaning it has "become very difficult to make any other choice in some places," according to Heymi Bahar, senior analyst at the International Energy Agency. [...] More broadly, the US's focus on fossil fuels and pullback of support for clean energy further cedes influence over the future global energy system to China. The US is trying to tie its trading partners into fossil fuels, pressing the EU to buy $750 billion of American oil, natural gas, and nuclear technologies during his presidency as part of a trade deal, scuppering an initiative to begin decarbonizing world shipping and pressuring others to reduce their reliance on Chinese technology. But the collapsing cost of solar panels in particular has spoken for itself in many parts of the world. Experts caution that the US's attacks on renewables could cause lasting damage to its competitiveness against China, even if an administration more favorable to renewables were to follow Trump's.

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The World's Secret Electricity Superusers Revealed
An anonymous reader shares a report: The rush to secure electricity has intensified as tech companies look to spend trillions of dollars building data centers. There's an industry that consumes even more power than many tech giants, and it has largely escaped the same scrutiny: suppliers of industrial gases. Everyday items like toothpaste and life-saving treatments like MRIs are among the countless parts of modern life that hinge on access to gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and helium. Producing and transporting these gases to industrial facilities and hospitals is a highly energy-intensive process. Three companies -- Linde, Air Liquide and Air Products and Chemicals -- control 70% of the $120 billion global market for industrial gases. Their initiatives to rein in electricity use or switch to renewables aren't enough to rapidly cut carbon emissions, according to a new report from the campaign group Action Speaks Louder. "The scale of the sector's greenhouse gas emissions and electricity use is staggering," said George Harding-Rolls, the group's head of campaigns and one of the authors of the report. Linde's electricity use in 2024 exceeded that of Alphabet's Google and Samsung Electronics as well as oil giant TotalEnergies, while the power use of Air Liquide and Air Products was comparable to that of Shell and Microsoft. Yet unlike fossil fuel and tech companies, these industrial gas companies are far from household names because their customers are the world's largest chemicals, steel and oil companies rather than average consumers. The industry relies on air-separation units, which use giant compressors to turn air into liquid and then distill it into its many components. These machines are responsible for much of the industry's electricity demand, and their use alone is responsible for 2% of carbon dioxide emissions in China and the US, the world's two largest polluters.

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Nvidia Takes $1 Billion Stake In Nokia
Nvidia is taking a $1 billion stake in Nokia, sending the Finnish telecom giant's shares up 22%. The two companies also struck a partnership to co-develop next-generation 6G and AI-driven networking technology. CNBC reports: The two companies also struck a strategic partnership to work together to develop next-generation 6G cellular technology. Nokia said that it would adapt its 5G and 6G software to run on Nvidia's chips, and will collaborate on networking technology for AI. Nokia said Nvidia would consider incorporating its technology into its future AI infrastructure plans. Nokia, a Finnish company, is best known for its early cellphones, but in recent years, it has primarily been a supplier of 5G cellular equipment to telecom providers.

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