“In an open-air warehouse in California’s Central Valley, 40-foot-tall racks hold hundreds of trays filled with a white powder that turns crusty as it absorbs carbon dioxide from the sky,” reports the New York Times.

“The start-up that built the facility, Heirloom Carbon Technologies, calls it the first commercial plant in the United States to use direct air capture, which involves vacuuming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.”

Another plant is operating in Iceland, and some scientists say the technique could be crucial for fighting climate change. Heirloom will take the carbon dioxide it pulls from the air and have the gas sealed permanently in concrete, where it can’t heat the planet. To earn revenue, the company is selling carbon removal credits to companies paying a premium to offset their own emissions. Microsoft has already signed a deal with Heirloom to remove 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The company’s first facility in Tracy, California, which opens Thursday, is fairly small. The plant can absorb a maximum of 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to the exhaust from about 200 cars. But Heirloom hopes to expand quickly. “We want to get to millions of tons per year,” said Shashank Samala, the company’s chief executive. “That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over.”

Heirloom’s technology hinges on a simple bit of chemistry: Limestone, one of the most abundant rocks on the planet, forms when calcium oxide binds with carbon dioxide. In nature, that process takes years. Heirloom speeds it up. At the California plant, workers heat limestone to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit in a kiln powered by renewable electricity. Carbon dioxide is released from the limestone and pumped into a storage tank. The leftover calcium oxide, which looks like flour, is then doused with water and spread onto large trays, which are carried by robots onto tower-high racks and exposed to open air. Over three days, the white powder absorbs carbon dioxide and turns into limestone again. Then it’s back to the kiln and the cycle repeats. “That’s the beauty of this, it’s just rocks on trays,” Mr. Samala, who co-founded Heirloom in 2020, said.

The hard part, he added, was years of tweaking variables like particle size, tray spacing and moisture to speed up absorption… In future projects, Heirloom also plans to pump carbon dioxide into underground storage wells, burying it.
The company received funding from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, according to Bloomberg, which adds that Heirloom’s technology will later “be deployed at a major hub in Louisiana the government expects will remove 1 million tons of CO2 a year by the end of the decade.”

The New York Times notes there was also federal funding, something that’s been fueling the ambitions of hundreds of carbon-capture startups. “The science is clear,” says America’s Energy Secretary. “Cutting back carbon emissions through renewable energy alone won’t stop the damage from climate change. Direct air capture technology is a game-changing tool that gives us a shot at removing the carbon pollution that has been building in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.”

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Source: Slashdot – America’s First Commercial Carbon-Sucking Facility Opens in California

Greek economist/politician Yanis Varoufakis “was briefly Greek finance minister in 2015,” remembers the Conversation. Now his new book asks the question, “What killed capitalism,” with the title’s first word providing an answer.
“Techno-feudalism.”

Varoufakis argues that we no longer live in a capitalist society… “Today, capitalist relations remain intact, but techno-feudalist relations have begun to overtake them,” writes Varoufakis. Traditional capitalists, he proposes, have become “vassal capitalists”. They are subordinate and dependent on a new breed of “lords” — the Big Tech companies — who generate enormous wealth via new digital platforms. A new form of algorithmic capital has evolved — what Varoufakis calls “cloud capital” — and it has displaced “capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits”.

Markets have been “replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets”. The moment you enter amazon.com “you exit capitalism” and enter something that resembles a “feudal fief”: a digital world belonging to one man and his algorithm, which determines what products you will see and what products you won’t see. If you are a seller, the platform will determine how you can sell and which customers you can approach. The terms in which you interact, share information and trade are dictated by an “algo” that “works for [Jeff Bezos’] bottom line”…

Access to the “digital fief” comes at the cost of exorbitant rents. Varoufakis notes that many third-party developers on the Apple store, for example, pay 30% “on all their revenues”, while Amazon charges its sellers “35% of revenues”. This, he argues, is like a medieval feudal lord sending round the sheriff to collect a large chunk of his serfs’ produce because he owns the estate and everything within it.
There is “no disinterested invisible hand of the market” here. The Big Tech platforms are exempted from free-market competition.

And in the meantime, users are unknowingly training their algorithms for them — so “In this interaction, we are all high-tech ‘cloud serfs’… [T]he ‘cloud capital’ we are generating for them all the time increases their capacity to generate yet more wealth, and thus increases their power — something we have only begun to realise.”
Approximately 80% of the income of traditional capitalist conglomerates go to salaries and wages, according to Varoufakis, while Big Tech’s workers, in contrast, collect “less than 1% of their firms’ revenues”… For Varoufakis, we are not just living through a tech revolution, but a tech-driven economic revolution. He challenges us to come to terms with just what has happened to our economies — and our societies — in the era of Big Tech and Big Finance.

Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Is Capitalism Dead? Yanis Varoufakis Argues Capitalists are Now Vassals to ‘Techno-Feudalists’

Images and information from social media (and other online sources) are being used by AI to create “create convincing and personalized scam calls, texts and emails,” writes the Palm Beach Post, citing a warning from Florida’s consumer watchdog agency.

In an older version of the scam, a caller would greet “Grandma” or “Grandpa” before saying, “It’s me — I know I sound funny because I have a cold,” and then make an urgent plea for money to get out of a scrap… Using audio and video clips found online, the con artist can clone the voice of a family member to make the call more compelling…

Listen for clues to a con like incorrect or mispronounced names or unfamiliar terms of endearment. The pressure to act quickly and to keep the call a secret are all timeless hallmarks of a scam, the agency notes. Detailed instructions on how to deliver funds in a form that is hard to recover — wired funds, a gift card or pay app — are also indications of a ripoff in the making.
The consumer watchdog agency suggests this precaution. “Encourage family members to set their social media pages to private.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – AI-Generated Voice Deepfakes are Being Used in Scams

Despite a six-episode Ms. Marvel miniseries on Disney+, audiences aren’t turning out now to see the 16-year-old superhero’s team-up with Captain Marvel on the big screen.
The Marvels earned $47 million in its opening weekend, reports Deadline, “the lowest ever for Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe,” and $110 million worldwide, “which is also a bottom rung for the MCU and below the $140M we were forecasting.”

In regards to U.S. admissions, The Marvels came in per EntTelligence at 3.3M compared to other superhero bombs, The Flash’s 3.9M and Eternals’ 5.5M. By all accounts and by all sources, it’s a disastrous result for a $200 million Marvel Studios movie… Months ago, who would have thought that Universal/Blumhouse’s Five Nights at Freddys two weeks ago in a day-and-date debut on Peacock would post a higher opening at the box office ($80M) than The Marvels…?

The Marvels meltdown isn’t about superhero fatigue. It’s about Disney’s overexposure of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand on Disney+, and those moth holes are beginning to show: Keep what’s meant for the cinema in cinemas, and keep what’s meant for in-homes in the home. Meaning, this whole crossover streaming-into-film master plan isn’t working, nor is it really connected in a jaw-dropping way.. The Marvels — with its crossover streaming series blah-blah — looks like it was built to be seen in homes, not to get audiences off the couch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Despite Lead-in On Disney+, ‘The Marvels’ Bombs at Box Office

SysAid’s system management software has “a vulnerability actively being exploited to deploy Clop ransomware,” according to SiliconAngle:

The warning came from Microsoft Corp.’s Threat Intelligence team, which wrote on X that it had discovered the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in SysAid’s IT support software that’s being exploited by the Lace Tempest ransomware gang.

Lace Tempest first emerged earlier this year from its attacks involving the MOVEit Transfer and GoAnywhere MFT. This group has been characterized by its sophisticated attack methods, often exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to infiltrate organizations’ systems to deploy ransomware and exfiltrate sensitive data…
In a blog post, SysAid said that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-47246, was first discovered on Novembers 2 and is a path traversal vulnerability leading to code execution within the SysAid on-prem software… “Given the scale and impact of the MOVEit breach, which was considered one of the largest in recent history, the potential for the SysAid vulnerability to reach similar levels of disruption is not inconceivable, though several factors would influence this outcome,” Craig Jones, vice president of security operations at managed detection and response provider Ontinue Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “The MOVEit breach, exploited by the Clop ransomware group, impacted over 1,000 organizations and more than 60 million individuals,” Jones explained. “Comparatively, SysAid claims more than 5,000 customers across various industries globally. The potential damage from the SysAid vulnerability would depend on factors such as how widespread the exploitation is, how quickly the patch is applied and the sensitivity of the accessed data.”

SysAid’s blog post confirms the zero-day vulnerability, and says they’ve begun “proactively communicating with our on-premise customers to ensure they could implement a mitigation solution we had identified…”

“We urge all customers with SysAid on-prem server installations to ensure that your SysAid systems are updated to version 23.3.36, which remediates the identified vulnerability, and conduct a comprehensive compromise assessment of your network…”
The attacker uploaded a WAR archive containing a WebShell and other payloads into the webroot of the SysAid Tomcat web service [which] provided the attacker with unauthorized access and control over the affected system.Subsequently, the attacker utilized a PowerShell script, deployed through the WebShell, to execute a malware loader named user.exe on the compromised host, which was used to load the GraceWire trojan…
After this initial access and the deployment of the malware, the attacker utilized a second PowerShell script to erase evidence associated with the attacker’s actions from the disk and the SysAid on-prem server web logs… Given the severity of the threat posed, we strongly recommend taking immediate steps according to your incident response playbook and install any patches as they become available.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A SysAid Vulnerability Is Being Used To Deploy Clop Ransomware, Warns Microsoft

Wednesday nearly half of Australia was left without internet or phone service after the country’s second largest telecommunications company experienced a service outage affecting 10 million people.

But that’s not Optus’s only problem, according to this report from the Guardian:

Optus has lost a bid in the federal court to keep secret a report on the cause of the 2022 cyber-attack — which resulted in the personal information of about 10 million customers being exposed — after a judge rejected the telco’s legal privilege claim. After the hack, the company announced in October last year that it had recruited consultancy firm Deloitte to conduct a forensic assessment of what had led to the cyber-attack.

Since then, the company has also faced an investigation by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, and a class action case in the federal court. As part of the class action case, law firm Slater and Gordon, acting for the applicants, had sought access to the Deloitte report that was never made public…

It came as the embattled CEO faces pressure over the company’s handling of a 14-hour outage on Wednesday, that took phone and internet services offline for 10 million customers, delayed trains, disconnected call centres and hospital phone lines. The company has not announced any independent report into the incident, but it is now subject to two government investigations and a Senate inquiry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Optus Loses Court Bid To Keep Report Into Cause of 2022 Cyber-Attack a Secret