A U.S. district court "has dismissed Google's case against SerpApi over that company's scraping of search results to train AI models," reports Computerworld. Google had claimed that it was protecting copyright holders — and that SerpApi's actions breached America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): [Google] made two claims: first, that no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title, and second that no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, or component protected by the Act. SerpApi claimed that the URLs and other links that were being served by Google did not in themselves entail copyright and the judge agreed. In her judgment, she said that there was no indication that the copyright holders had authorized Google to take action against SerpApi. The case is not completely over as the judge has given Google 21 days to amend its complaint to demonstrate that it was acting on behalf of the copyright owners. SerpApi's CEO reacted to the court's ruling as "a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We're pleased that the court rejected Google's attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet's founding principle — open access to usable information — is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data. SerpApi will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses that rely on access to public search information." Some analysis from Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber: I've come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google's search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I've come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It's all just scraping publicly accessible web pages. This December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind. In fact, Masnick wrote, Google "built its entire business on scraping the web without asking permission first. And now it wants to use one of the most abused provisions in copyright law to stop others from doing something functionally similar to what made Google a tech giant in the first place." Now Google is even getting heckled about the decision on social media. "If Google wants to refile the suit within the allowed 21 days, it has to admit that site owners have copyright protection of their work and THAT would open the door to them suing Google for scraping their content for AI Overviews."

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270,000 people have been displaced by wildfires in France and Spain, reports the Guardian. A wildfire even forced evacuations in Scotland. And wildfires "have now scorched four million acres of land in the U.S.," reports NPR, as tens of millions of people in North America "are continuing to endure hazardous smoke from out of control wildfires burning across Canada and the Western U.S." At America's National Interagency Fire Center, NPR's wildfire correspondent says all of America's firefighting resources have now been deployed across the country. "So if we get another big fire, we're in trouble... International aid could be harder to come by if the situation in Southern Europe gets worse and firefighters are going to be needed there." Meanwhile Toronto was blanketed this week "with eye-watering, cough-inducing soot," writes a climate-change reporter for the Toronto Star newspaper, "briefly giving us the worst air quality in the world." But looking to the future after a wildfire that's 50% larger than any in Ontario's history (315,000 hectares or 778,331 acres), he had this to say about the eye-watering smoke. "It will be back." The article's headline warned of "Our smoke-filled future" and how Canada "must prepare for bigger wildfires, every summer — forever." Even if global carbon emissions were cut dramatically, so long as any greenhouse gases are being put into the atmosphere, climate scientists say the world will continue to get hotter. And as the temperature rises, the forests dry out and the wildfires will get bigger, stronger and more frequent. "It's not going to get better. It's going to get worse," said Edward Struzik, a fellow with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen's University and the author of Dark Days at Noon: the Future of Fire . "These fires aren't going away. Toronto is going to get smoke every summer...." The best solution would have been to dramatically cut emissions years ago. The harsh scientific reality is there's nothing we can do to stop wildfire smoke from blanketing cities for a few days every summer — and it's going to continue for decades to come. We're all going to need to buy air purifiers and masks and get used to it.... "The idea that we can thin our way through the boreal forest boggles the mind," [says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, an independent non-profit research organization]. "There aren't enough people in Canada to do that." The boreal forest in Canada is an enormous and largely roadless expanse bigger than the entire European Union. In comparison, America's much smaller forests are criss-crossed by roads, making firefighter access much quicker and easier. And the nature of the forests is fundamentally different as well, said Hausfather, who wrote an article summarizing research on the subject. "Western U.S. forests have evolved for frequent low-level fires that burn out the undergrowth — usually every five to 30 years," he said. "Historically, before fire suppression, fires would burn through, and they wouldn't actually kill the trees. They'd just kill smaller trees and clear out the brush." "The boreal forest is a fundamentally different beast," he said. "It's an ecosystem designed to burn." With smaller, more densely packed trees, the boreal is wetter and colder and doesn't burn anywhere near as often — every 100 to 200 years on average, Hausfather said. But when fire does erupt, it's often much more intense, burning up into the canopy and levelling everything in its path... Clearing out the dead wood on the ground wouldn't prevent, or even slow, the canopy fires that sweep the boreal, said Hausfather.

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America's garbage trucks can do more than just collect trash, reports Newsweek. They may also help identify code violations using AI. Officials in Cape Coral, Florida, recently considered equipping sanitation trucks with AI-powered cameras that would photograph properties as crews complete their normal collection routes. The system would have been designed to identify potential issues such as overgrown lawns, peeling paint, and illegal dumping, and to flag violations so the city staff can review them later before taking enforcement action... However, in a statement on July 13, Cape Coral officials said it would not be moving forward with the camera technology, citing cost issues and insufficient benefits. "Claims suggesting that this technology would automatically identify, cite or fine residents are inaccurate," the statement also noted... Cape Coral officials say that a camera system in the future would assist — not replace — human code enforcement officers, and employees will review any AI-generated alerts before violations are issued. "Even if such a system were to be considered in the future, any potential code violations would require review and verification by a Code Compliance Officer before any enforcement action could be taken," the organization wrote. But Cape Coral, Florida "is not the first city to explore the technology," the article notes. AI imaging systems developed by City Detect have already been deployed in several municipalities. According to the company's published case studies, Stockton, California, used the platform to analyze nearly 40,000 parcels, capturing almost 200,000 images while identifying thousands of potential code issues. Cathedral City, California, has also used the technology to assist code enforcement, while Dallas approved funding for a similar program pending final implementation. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

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Dr Suzanne Bell helps astronauts perform in a high-stress environment. To do that, she wakes up at 5am – without an alarm

• Tell us: what impact have GLP-1s had on your relationships?

Dr Suzanne Bell, an organizational psychologist, leads the Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center.

What’s your morning routine?

From the site tech-news site XDA Developers: The consumer tech economy needs more DRAM manufacturers, and it needs them more urgently than perhaps at any point in its history. Anyone keeping track of the pricing trends will know that memory prices have climbed into the stratosphere on the back of AI infrastructure's relentless demand, and every consumer device that depends on RAM has traveled from inflated to unaffordable, quarter after quarter, with almost no relief in sight. Which is exactly why a story out of Shenzhen is worth paying attention to, even in its current rumor phase. According to the details circulated by various semiconductor analysts on X, the Chinese government, DRAM maker SwaySure and Chinese tech giant Huawei have partnered to set up a 12-inch memory production plant. If the reports hold up, it could change memory economics for years to come, but not necessarily in the way you'd hope... SwaySure itself is a known player. The company was registered in Shenzhen in March 2022, is reportedly backed by municipal government, and appears alongside Huawei on the US Commerce Department's Entity List, suggesting Washington has realized the connection between the two entities. Although, that's also where the story becomes a little less straightforward. None of these claims have been independently confirmed, and many of the technical details circulating online trace back to a single X account. Huawei has previously denied operating the wider network of state-backed fabs that analysts have reported. Even the widely quoted figure of 140,000 wafers per month isn't new, and public records indicate SwaySure's production line is already operational. What gives the report weight, then, is the fact that Huawei has spent years building this kind of domestic semiconductor ecosystem through partners that appear to operate independently. The rationale that analysts on X keep revisiting has little to do with consumer memory. Huawei's Ascend AI accelerators require high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and US export controls have all but cut Chinese entities from procuring HBM from Samsung or SK Hynix... Owning the supply outright solves a problem that purchasing power can't, which is why the DRAM push is read as a bid to secure captive HBM for Huawei's own silicon rather than to flood the market with cheaply manufactured DDR5... The catch, however, is the fact that most of this new and rejuvenated capacity is expected to be absorbed by China's own domestic demand, rather than to relieve the global shortage... This development does not seem to be an isolated incident, given the state of DRAM economics. CXMT, China's largest manufacturer of DRAM, is already running close to 265,000 wafer starts per month as of now as per analyst estimates, and is projected to hit 350,000 by the end of the year, bringing it within the touching distance of Micron's estimated 385,000.... [T]he oligopoly seems to be facing the first credible challenge to its capacity discipline in decades, and it seems to be coming from a country building fabs much faster than the competition could hope to match. Now, whether it tangibly impacts the consumer market economics in the time to come may be a story in its own right in a few years, but for now, for what it's worth, it's a new direction, and much of it feeds optimism.

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