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Denmark said on Tuesday that it could reach its 2030 climate target of reducing emissions by 70%, one of the world's most ambitious, without compromising its generous welfare benefits. Reuters reports: Last year, parties across the aisle passed a law committing Denmark to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70% from 1990 levels, or around 20 million tons of CO2 equivalent, within 10 years. In a climate plan published on Tuesday, the government estimated that the annual cost of implementing the...

Last year at its Accelerate 2019 event in Orlando, Lenovo teased "the world's first foldable PC." They didn't unveil the name, price tag, or ship date -- just that it would be part of Lenovo's flagship ThinkPad X1 line and that it would arrive in 2020. Today, the company formally unveiled the device it's calling the ThinkPad X1 Fold, which is available for preorder now, starting at $2,499. The Verge reports: The idea is that you can use the Fold like a large tablet when it's fully unfolded (o...

Amsterdam and Helsinki this week launched AI registries to detail how each city government uses algorithms to deliver services, some of the first major cities in the world to do so. From a report: An AI Register for each city was introduced in beta today as part of the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit, organized in part by the European Commission and the city of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam registry currently features a handful of algorithms, but it will be extended to include all algorithm...

JoshuaZ writes: Recent research into the Sparc fusion reactor design make it seem likely to work. Unlike some other fusion reactor designs, Sparc uses high-temperature superconductors which are capable of much stronger magnetic fields in a more closely-confined location. Sparc will be much smaller than large-scale international project ITER, which after multiple delays is now not scheduled to even start fusion reactions by 2035 at the earliest. The Sparc researchers hope that their reactor de...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: With today's news that French shipping giant CMA CGM has been hit by a ransomware attack, this now means that all of the four biggest maritime shipping companies in the world have been hit by cyber-attacks in the past four years, since 2017. Previous incidents included: 1.) APM-Maersk -- taken down for weeks by the NotPetya ransomware/wiper in 2017. 2.) Mediterranean Shipping Company -- hit in April 2020 by an unnamed malware strain that brought...

After five years and an investment of around $2.5 billion, Uber's effort to build a self-driving car has produced this: a car that can't drive more than half a mile without encountering a problem [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: "The car doesn't drive well" and "struggles with simple routes and simple maneuvers," said a manager in the unit, in a 1,500-word email sent three weeks ago to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, warning of the issues. The self-dr...

The Starlink satellite internet network that SpaceX is developing has been used in the field by Washington state emergency responders in recent weeks, the first early application of the company's service to be disclosed. CNBC reports: Washington's state military, which includes its emergency response division, began employing Starlink user terminals in early August to bring internet service to areas devastated by wildfires. User terminals are the small devices on the ground that connect to th...

The Xen Project has ported its hypervisor to the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4. The Register reports: The idea to do an official port bubbled up from the Xen community and then reached the desk of George Dunlap, chairman of the Xen Project's Advisory Board. Dunlap mentioned the idea to an acquaintance who works at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was told that around 40 percent of Pis are sold to business users rather than hobbyists. With more than 30 million Arm-based Pis sold as of December 2019, a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Cloudflare is launching a privacy-friendly rival to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free toolkit that's used by website administrators across the globe to help them track the behavior of the people visiting those sites -- how they find them, what they do there, the devices they're using, and so on. However, the service -- the most popular of its kind -- also helps Google track websites' visitors, so it can better profile them for adver...

Anthony Boadle, reporting for Reuters: [...] In April and May, so many Manaus residents were dying from COVID-19 that its hospitals collapsed and cemeteries could not dig graves fast enough. The city never imposed a full lockdown. Non-essential businesses were closed but many simply ignored social distancing guidelines. Then in June, deaths unexpectedly plummeted. Public health experts wondered whether so many residents had caught the virus that it had run out of new people to infect. Researc...

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: For many years, the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report has been the gold standard in terms of providing a yearly overview of all the major events and trends in the cyber-security and threat intelligence landscape. While Microsoft unceremoniously retired the old SIR reports back in 2018, the OS maker appears to have realized its mistake, and has brought it back today, rebranded as the new Microsoft Digital Defense Report. Just like the previous SIR repor...

Apple is trying to delay a legal fight over allegedly stolen blood-oxygen monitoring technology in its latest watch so it can gain a more dominant share of the smartwatch market, medical-sensor maker Masimo said in a court filing late Monday. From a report: Blood-oxygen monitoring is a key feature of the latest Apple Watch Series 6 announced on Sept. 15. Masimo and its spinoff Cercacor Laboratories had sued in January, accusing Apple of promising a working relationship only to steal secret in...

The Trump administration's campaign against TikTok gets all the headlines, but the U.S. move last week to place restrictions on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), China's top chipmaker, could end up making a greater difference. From a report: Semiconductor analysts say SMIC represented China's strongest bid to build a domestic chip industry and bolster its tech independence. Sanctions that cut off its access to advanced manufacturing and testing equipment from the U.S. co...

One of the more worrying aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US is its effect on undergraduate enrollments. From a report: Over the summer there were indications, through student loan data and Census surveys, that students were either dropping out or not enrolling in previous numbers. For some students, particularly those from low-income and minority families, the financial and logistical challenges posed by the pandemic were too much to overcome. Now we have an early glimpse of actual en...

On the eve of the first presidential debate, the Biden campaign is pressing Facebook to remove posts by President Trump -- and slamming the social media company as "the nation's foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process." From a report: By publicly escalating the conflict, the campaign is pressing Facebook to enforce its policies against misinformation more aggressively. "Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression," campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote to ...