An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels.

The investment in Fujifilm's Kanagawa Factory, Odawara site will make it "the largest investment Fujifilm has made to date in dedicated LTO tape facilities." The project will run from fiscal years 2026 through 2028 to fund manufacturing expansion and additional personnel, primarily to produce the latest-generation "FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium10" tape. [...]

According to Fujifilm, "major cloud service and data center operators" have been expanding their use of magnetic tape because it can store large data volumes at relatively low cost. Tape backups can be easily disconnected and stored in a drawer, a vault, or a separate facility. Fujifilm highlights the ability to air-gap tape cartridges as a last defense for user data: "Given the sophistication of cyberattacks, magnetic tape is attracting increasing attention as a means of protecting data from threats such as ransomware."

According to The Information, Apple is developing a $1,000 HomeView Ultra smart home hub with a 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a motorized arm that can follow users around a room and autonomously respond to its surroundings. It's also said to be experimenting with more ambitious home robots, including a wheeled robot that follows people, a smart home drone and a machine capable of folding laundry. Notebookcheck reports: According to the report, HomeView Ultra will feature a larger 9-inch touchscreen mounted on a robotic arm. This arm can automatically turn the screen toward the user. With a camera and several sensors, this smart home hub is said to be "fully aware" of its surroundings and capable of acting autonomously. This autonomy ranges from turning on the lights when someone enters the room to shooing a cat away when it jumps onto a table. These sensors are also intended to prevent the arm from hitting nearby objects with the display.

Apple is reportedly currently planning to announce this smart home hub in 2027 for around $1,000, but according to The Information, its launch could be delayed until 2028. The reason is allegedly the software, which has not yet been finalized, while the hardware is said to be ready for market already.

Toyota's EV sales have jumped 127% through September, reports Electrek: Including Lexus, Toyota sold 309,766 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) globally through the first nine months of 2026, up 127.4% from the same period last year. Except for January (+87.5%), Toyota's EV sales have more than doubled every month this year compared with 2025...

While its EVs are catching on, Toyota Motor's global sales fell for the third straight month in September. Toyota sold 860,107 vehicles in September, down 2.2% from the previous year. The company said that although overall demand remained steady, sales in China fell, leading to lower overall sales than last year. Through September, Toyota sold 7.51 million vehicles globally, down 3.4%. In China, Toyota's sales plunged nearly 20%, marking its eighth consecutive month with lower sales. Toyota said the overall market in China "remained weak due in part to rising gasoline prices, while the market for gasoline vehicles and hybrid vehicles was particularly affected," resulting in lower sales. In the first nine months of 2026, Toyota sold just over 1.05 million vehicles in China, 18.9% fewer than in the same period last year... After the US, China is Toyota's second-largest market.

Slashdot reader ElectricVs shares this report from American Buildout, a new site covering "the intersection of data centers, energy and power, finance, and Main Street." Dozens of unexplained drones flew over and near U.S. nuclear facilities between February 2024 and March 2026, according to records the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made public this week. In all, facility operators filed 67 reports of drones over or near 28 sites in 17 states. They include the Three Mile Island site near Middletown, Pennsylvania., where Constellation Energy plans to restart Unit 1 as the Crane Clean Energy Center. In one incident, about five drones flew roughly 100 feet above the [970-megawatt] reactor building at River Bend Station in Louisiana.

The story was first reported by the publication The Liberation Times. The NRC published the documents on its website in response to the publication's freedom of information request... Every entry carries the status "Closed Unresolved."
"Most of the incidents happened after dark," the article points out, "and none of the records identifies a drone operator. About half of the incidents, 33 of 67, occurred in an eight-week window between Dec. 3, 2024, and Jan. 24, 2025." (Virginia's Surry Power Station experienced five different incidents in December of 2024, including one involving "at least eight drones in two waves.") 100 miles west of Chicago, "drone activity" continued for more than two hours at the Byron Nuclear Station, where two separate drones were reported. In Waterford, Connecticut, "security observed four drones flying back and forth..."

The article notes a 2024 paper from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission citing a 2019 analysis that "concluded U.S. plants had no risk-significant vulnerabilities that adversaries could exploit with commercially available drones to cause radiological sabotage, or theft or diversion of special nuclear material."

Boom Supersonic's plans to launch its Overture passenger jet by 2029 are facing growing doubts as the company pivots toward manufacturing natural gas turbines for AI data centers. Ars Technica reports: One of the company's first customers, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, has expressed doubts about Boom's original plan to deliver the first Overture supersonic airliner in 2029. Kirby's latest frank assessment came during an interview with the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast that appeared on October 28, 2026. "'29 is their official timeline," Kirby told podcast host Monica Langley. "It's not going to happen in '29 -- it's going to take longer."

[...] Much of Boom's recent focus has been on developing natural gas turbines to power AI data centers as an additional revenue stream. On October 22, the company unveiled another factory in Centennial, Colorado, dedicated to producing a 42-megawatt natural gas turbine called Superpower for data centers. [...] Boom described its new Superpower factory as making turbine parts while still undergoing construction. It aims to deliver the first gas turbines to AI data center customers in mid-2027 while ramping up annual production to 25 turbines in 2028 and 50 turbines by 2029.

[...] Still, Boom has characterized the development of a gas turbine for data centers as being synergistic with its design of the Symphony engine for the Overture airliner. During the October announcement, it also described having completed a prototype turbine core, called Sprint Core, that is intended to eventually power both the Superpower gas turbine and Symphony engine for the airliner. That turbine core is set to undergo testing at the Colorado Air & Space Port, with Boom planning to fire the turbine for the first time before Thanksgiving. That would be a concrete development milestone, but the company still has much to do in proving it can get both its AI data center and supersonic airliner ventures off the ground.

In an opinion piece for 404 Media, Matthew Gault argues that Apple has entered its "slop era," abandoning its reputation for innovative hardware in favor of recycled ideas and questionable design choices. Here's an excerpt: My ears perked up when I heard Apple's new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it's releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it's borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected.

The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven post-Tim Cook world. John Ternus is the new CEO -- a 25 year veteran of the company with a track record of pushing harebrained hardware schemes like the much reviled Touch Bar and lawsuit inducing butterfly keyboard.

With Ternus at the helm, I feel there's a good chance Apple's best days are behind it, that it will have to make do with less, that it's declasse. Apple, blindsided by AI and relying on crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks, is downwardly mobile. It's in its slop era. The company that once asked consumers to "Think Different" is now releasing hardware that's just like everything else on the market.

"Looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants to own all the computing resources and rent out terminals to the world as a way of propping up his business plan, now that debt-ridden AI companies are teetering on the edge," writes ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure. Tom's Hardware reports: In an interview over beers with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint, Altman said that local inference, and, by extension, people having DRAM in computers at home, is "quite terrible." When discussing local inference on home computers with open-source models, Altman discussed the assumption that people will be able to run local AI on their own computers, the ones they may already own or want to build.

Then he explained why that's a bad idea (at the 29-minute mark): "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Altman said. "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

While OpenAI does have some open-source models, its primary business is in closed-source models that run in data centers, so he's really defending the company's business model. OpenAI isn't exactly threatened by some laptops and gaming rigs just yet, but local AI could mean people one day paying less for subscriptions to models like GPT-6 Luna if they have the power to run them at home. Altman's talk suggests that the company would prefer that more RAM go to OpenAI's data centers rather than home computers, which also sparks enthusiast fears of not being able to own your own hardware or software, but rather rent an agent and a computer in the cloud.

Apple has unveiled its first touchscreen MacBook Pro, reversing a position the company held for more than 15 years that touchscreens were poorly suited for laptops. 9to5Mac reports: The new machine features a light-up Apple logo, tandem OLED, and touch input on the display. It runs on the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, like the existing MacBook Pro models without OLED touch displays. John Ternus, who is rocking a new profile picture with the new Mac, shared the first look at the new machine on X. Pricing for the new laptop starts at $2899 for the 14-inch model. The 16-inch version starts at $3399. Pre-orders are available starting today with deliveries starting November 6.

Ford's upcoming $28,350 Fathom electric truck will include a built-in inverter capable of supplying up to 10 kW of AC power to a home, bringing bidirectional charging to a significantly cheaper EV. Owners will still need additional Ford home hardware for features like outage backup and peak-rate energy management, but the company expects the necessary equipment to cost substantially less than its previous-generation system. CNET reports: The upcoming Fathom will be based on what Ford calls its Universal EV Platform, designed with the aid of its 2023 acquisition, startup Auto Motive Power, with bidirectional power on the plate from the start. The hardware required to invert the battery's DC energy to an estimated 10 kW of AC home power will be built into the truck, so it won't require a separate wall-mounted inverter box. Ford says the Fathom's system will meet all applicable UL 1741 requirements and IEEE 1547 standards to ensure the vehicle is safely connected to the grid. As for the actual hardware you plug into your car, all signs point to the Fathom using the NACS plug type pioneered by Tesla and now widely adopted by new EVs in North America. In terms of the communication standard -- the one that governs how AC power is routed from the slim wall box to the car's onboard charger -- that'll be via SAE J3068, a software protocol developed for high-power, heavy-duty AC charging.

[...] However, while Fathom's Universal EV Platform eliminates the need for a wall inverter box, it doesn't completely bypass the need for additional hardware to make your home ready to accept bidirectional power. Say you wanted to take advantage of the Home Power Management feature to draw energy into the Fathom's battery when power is cheapest, and then use that energy to offset peak-hour usage when power is most expensive. You'll have to install at least the Ford Home Power Station in your home, at an additional cost. The automaker hasn't specified pricing, but says that it's working to reduce costs and expects this component alone to cost half as much as the first-generation Ford Home Energy system, which debuted at around $1,300. That could put the new system at roughly $650.

Longtime Slashdot reader fadethepolice writes: Anduril, arguing that its manufacturing capabilities are directly applicable to laptop manufacturing, is starting a project for a fully 100% U.S.-sourced laptop. The computer will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. I did not see any information about the OS, but I'm assuming that, given the type of processor, this will be Linux-based? "Other companies might design their computers in the U.S., Anduril makes them here,â the Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said in a YouTube video. "We're making parts out of metals that the U.S. knows how to extract, knows how to refine, knows how to process, and knows how to mill at scale at a reasonable price; and that goes for the entire laptop. The same thing goes for the battery technology."

The project, called BlueChip, "will take a phased approach, beginning with expanding domestic sourcing and manufacturing, progressing toward eliminating reliance on foreign suppliers, and ultimately establishing an end-to-end American supply chain." The first device is expected in April 2027.

A press release with additional information is available here.

Apple has acknowledged an inner-display defect affecting a small number of its new $1,999 iPhone Duo foldables after customers reported hearing a crunch while unfolding the device before cracks, lines and other display failures appeared along the crease. Apple is replacing affected phones and investigating the problem.

iFixit believes a failing hinge component may be pressing into and cracking the display rather than the panel itself being defective. Bloomberg reports: Reports of the problem first surfaced on Reddit and other social media sites. Bloomberg News has since independently verified the issue with more than half a dozen customers, who provided photos showing damage to their devices or evidence of their support conversations with Apple. Apple acknowledged the issue in a statement, saying it was "aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units."

"If users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement," the Cupertino, California-based company said. Most Duos aren't affected by the problem, and the units that are impacted exhibit the defect quickly, Apple said.

Apple has unveiled a redesigned iPad Mini with a larger 8.5-inch OLED display, an A20 Pro chip, twice the peak brightness and slimmer bezels while maintaining roughly the same footprint. It starts at $699 ($200 more than its predecessor) and will be available November 6. The Verge reports: Despite having a slightly bigger display than the 8.3-inch screen on its predecessor, Apple says the device maintains the same small footprint thanks to bezels that are 24 percent slimmer. The iPad Mini is 5.4mm thick as well, making it thinner and lighter than the previous generation, according to Apple. It also comes with an IP67 rating for protection against water and dust.

Aside from an OLED display, the new iPad Mini features an upgraded A20 Pro chip. This enables support for some of Apple's new Siri AI features, including the ability to tweak the expressiveness and pace of the assistant's voice. Apple says the upgraded iPad Mini also comes with two times the peak brightness than the previous generation. iPad Mini's 12MP front-facing camera is now on the long edge of the device, making it easier for video calls in landscape orientation.

BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April.

The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports: Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes...

In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read.
"Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."

"Across California, at least 26 resolutions, moratoriums, or bans on data center development have been passed or proposed since June," reports the Associated Press, citing a count by the non-governmental organization Food & Water Watch: California currently ranks third among U.S. states in overall data center density, according to independent trackers like the US Data Center Map, with the state home to 366 of such facilities that are either fully operational, under construction, or moving through the planning process. Local elected officials are proposing data center moratoriums to slow that momentum — if not stop it in its tracks. In the first half of October alone, Oakland's city council unanimously approved a 45-day moratorium on new approvals, making it the first city in Alameda County and the fourth in the Bay Area to adopt such a measure. San Francisco approved a similar moratorium this month, while the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors postponed a vote to permanently ban large-scale data centers, often called hyperscale facilities, on unincorporated land after receiving an overwhelming volume of public feedback. In Santa Clara, city officials considered a moratorium vote, and are moving forward with new rules to govern data center development, including more stringent water and air pollution regulations. Alhambra residents will vote on a moratorium measure in the November election....

The escalating pushback underscores a widening gap between state-level regulation and municipal action. While Gov. Gavin Newsom last month signed into law seven new measures that focus primarily on disclosure requirements, environmental impact studies, and grid protection, grassroots groups and city councils are moving fast to halt construction entirely. "I have a hard time remembering something that caught fire the way the opposition to data centers has," said Nicole Ghio, California Director at Food & Water Watch. "Local municipalities have been able to respond quicker to the grassroots wave of opposition of people saying, 'Hold on, let's press pause. Let's actually figure out what we're doing before we commit to this huge change....'"

As cities continue to draft temporary freezes and outright bans, the tension between local community control and global technological dominance remains unresolved. State transparency laws may have opened the books on data center growth, but local opponents are making it clear that seeing the plans isn't the same as approving them.
The story was originally published by CalMatters, the nonprofit news organization covering California's politics.

Google is funding one of the nation's largest "virtual power plants," paying homes and businesses indirectly to reduce electricity consumption during periods of peak demand so more grid capacity can be available for data centers. Under its expanded deal with Voltus, the program could provide up to 1,070 megawatts in the Mid-Atlantic PJM grid -- roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. The New York Times reports: That electricity won't come from new power plants. Instead, Voltus will sign up homes and businesses and give them financial incentives to curb their usage when local power demand is high or the grid is strained. Many of these reductions could occur automatically, such as through smart thermostats that dial back air-conditioning during peak summer hours or batteries that can provide temporary on-site power.

Each of these tweaks frees up only a small amount of power on its own. But by aggregating them across thousands of businesses and homes, Voltus says it can reliably provide lots of extra capacity when it's most needed, and do so within a few years. While tech companies will likely ultimately need to build traditional power plants if they want to keep building large data centers, this approach could be a faster, cheaper and less-polluting option in the interim. "We really see virtual power plants as a critical short-term solution," said Ellen Zuckerman, head of energy market development for North and South America at Google. "It's a way to invest in our communities, really double down on our clean energy ambition, but also meet capacity at speed and scale."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We haven't heard many details about Microsoft's upcoming "Project Helix" gaming hardware since the company announced it in March as a device that will "play your Xbox and PC games." In a new wide-ranging profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, though, Fortune alludes to a dual release strategy for upcoming Microsoft gaming hardware, with "a next-generation handheld device" planned by the end of next year and a 2028 holiday season console release that could cost between $1,200 and $1,800.

That future console price range is based on what has "internally been projected" at the company, according to Fortune. But the price for consumers could come down if "Microsoft decides to subsidize the cost," the outlet says, as many console makers have done in the past. While a $1,200 starting price would be historically high for the game console market, even accounting for inflation, it also reflects a new normal: The slowdown in Moore's Law and AI-driven component shortages mean cutting-edge gaming hardware just isn't as cheap as it used to be. This year, the Steam Machine broke the $1,000 starting price, while the 2-year-old technology in the PlayStation 5 Pro is now going for $900, and the 6-year-old Xbox Series X now starts at $750.

Sony has revived its Walkman lineup with three Android 16-powered high-end music players ranging from $1,900 to $5,900, topped by the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 with 256GB of storage. The Register reports: The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the digitization process. Sony also says it has used "key components made from oxygen-free copper" because that apparently delivers "uncompromising sound quality."

The machines also include "screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment ... providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies." Sony claims even the cabling it's used in the devices "further reduces noise and preserves signal integrity for rich, detailed sound." They're also housed in carefully-milled slabs of copper -- gold-plated in the case of the NW-WM1ZM3 -- because that apparently improves sound, too.

And then Sony's gone and spoiled it all by offering Bluetooth connectivity, a notorious music-mangler, in addition to wired headphone ports. Sony's US site lists all three devices, which run Android 16 and include Wi-Fi so they can access streaming music services. All are USB-chargeable and Sony claims their batteries allow 30-odd hours of music playback.

Microsoft has reportedly abandoned plans to serve as the anchor customer for Britain's largest proposed AI supercomputer after learning that the project's Essex data center might not receive sufficient grid power until the early to mid-2030s. "Its departure leaves Nscale without a publicly announced customer for the site, although the neocloud insists the project is still going ahead," reports The Register. From the report: When the deal was announced in September 2025, the plan was to pack 23,040 Nvidia GB300 GPUs into a 50MW facility, with room to expand to 90MW. Microsoft would use the computing power for its Azure cloud services, with the first chips expected in early 2027. One important detail remained: how to power it.

As The Guardian reported last month, UK Power Networks warned Nscale that the grid capacity needed might not be available until the 2030s. A UK Power Networks spokesperson told The Register it could not discuss individual connections due to obligations under Section 105 of the Utilities Act. "However, in general, many datacenters, whilst they can connect to our distribution network, are awaiting works on the national transmission network which we do not own," the spokesperson said.

Nscale, meanwhile, isn't letting the small matter of losing its biggest customer dampen its enthusiasm. "We remain committed to both the Loughton project and the UK and we are exploring alternative power sources for the site, in addition to other expansion sites in the UK. Our relationship with Microsoft remains strong and long-term, and this unfortunate London-wide grid issue has no impact on our other contracts," Nscale told The Register.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors. The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it's three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago.

Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039. Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers.

The companies' aggressive timeline still depends on X-energy successfully delivering its first power plant at a Dow Chemical plant southeast of Houston, Texas. The site, called Seadrift, has recently been at the center of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas, which accuses the plant of "habitual non-compliance" with water and solid-waste regulations and permits. X-energy has yet to break ground at Seadrift, which will host four Xe-100 reactors to provide the chemical plant with heat and electricity. The company said its construction permit is in the final phases of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review process.

Following its October 13 HomeView launch, Apple is gearing up for its second hardware event of the month. The event is scheduled for October 28 in Los Angeles and carries the tagline "Pro and tell." 9to5Mac reports: Rumors say Apple has a slew of new products to announce at its next event, headlining by its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen and OLED. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, here's what's on the docket:

- New 14-inch and 16-inch touchscreen MacBook Pro models with OLED displays. They will also have a Dynamic Island for the first time and will be "significantly lighter" than the current models. The new MacBook Pro models are expected to be powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.
- A revamped iPad mini with an OLED screen, a "revamped speaker system," and a relocated FaceTime camera
- New iMac and entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro models powered by the M6 chip, which will "look like their current versions."