After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years.

As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS says that its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), used one of Iron Mountain’s Denver data centers to store the channel’s data. However, OSS is being unresponsive, and Nine PBS says Iron Mountain has refused to release its data.

The data in question includes the station’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis’ history, The Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 files, The Denver Post reported in July. The lawsuit claims that “most” of the data is “unique and irreplaceable,” according to the Post.

Last month, a judge blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data.

In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data, Current reported today. The judge also said that Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can help retrieve the data within 30 days and without sharing or corrupting data belonging to other OSS clients.

Nine PBS is already communicating with a former OSS employee “who is willing to help,” the report said. If complications arise, such as from the data being encrypted, another hearing will be scheduled. Nine PBS and Iron Mountain must provide updates by September 14.

Tech workers at The New York Times began to organize in 2018. The campaign to form a union originated in a conversation between two workers, Kathy Zhang and Goran Svorcan-Merola, and proceeded underground through 2019 and into 2020, moving cautiously from one person to the next. In the summer of 2020, however, amid the uprising following the police murder of George Floyd, the Times solicited and published an op-ed by Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the deployment of the National Guard to suppress protestors in New York. A number of Black journalists risked their employment by speaking out publicly in protest. In solidarity, hundreds of employees from across many departments of the Times walked off the job.

The motion and solidarity generated by that action gave tech workers the momentum to go public with our union drive. We reached a majority of support in tech departments by the spring of 2021. It is difficult to imagine that we would have reached this stage in the absence of the walkout. It was an early lesson in the importance of both methodical, committed organizing and a willingness to shift course in moments of upsurge, without guarantees, a lesson only imperfectly remembered when we struck in 2024.

Despite Times management’s fierce anti-union campaign, we won union recognition in spring 2022, with a landslide 82 percent vote in favor. The more than 700 engineers, designers, data scientists and analysts, product managers, and project managers who make up our union include everyone who works on the Times’s website and mobile apps, digital products widely understood to be essential to the Times’s unique financial success among news companies.

In striking, we discovered the intransigence of management and new strength of our own. We reclaimed our values from our employer, and we learned how our power as workers is made: When we take action, we build capacity for action.

This year, the battle for song of the summer has been eclipsed by a much more complicated – some would even say disturbing – debate. That’s because we find ourselves asking not “What’s the song of the summer?” but rather “Is the song of the summer even real?”

Among the top contenders for the title is Fenix Flexin’s Rubberz, a single released in June that has ascended to No 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 and racked up more than 35m Spotify streams. It’s not the sort of fare Fenix usually cooks up. The artist is known for his trap music as part of the rap duo Shoreline Mafia, but Rubberz is a mildly noirish, 80s-inspired synth-pop track featuring a voice nothing like his. The song has drawn comparisons to Morrissey, but it more closely resembles Men at Work’s Down Under, or a Weird Al Yankovic parody of Men at Work. It’s pretty awful. But more importantly, it has an uncanny quality to it. It sounds off.

Almost immediately after it came out, skeptics accused Fenix of employing artificial intelligence to create the track, if not entirely at least partly. He and the song’s credited producer, Purps on the Beat, initially denied it, with Fenix insisting that he’d just used Auto-Tune and a phoney British accent. The kerfuffle culminated this month when indie DJ-producer Medasin posted a video that he said proved that Rubberz had been made using the free generative music tool Treblo.

Medasin then captured himself giving Treblo prompts to pump out his own track. Its sound and lyrics were eerily close to those of Rubberz. Fenix rejected Medasin’s claims, posting what he said were clips of the song’s stems, or its fundamental components, but then Medasin posted a rebuttal of him demonstrating how AI songs, too, can be broken down into stems. A few days later, Fenix finally admitted to using AI to make Rubberz, writing: “never said I didn’t use AI, i said it had nun to do w recording process.”

The appeal of Roku is that, whatever you happen to want to watch, there will almost certainly be a live channel for it. Just want to watch Little House on the Prairie? There’s a channel for it. Just want to watch Duck Dynasty? There’s a channel for that too. Purely want to watch nothing but local news from Wisconsin? Guess what: there’s a channel for that too.

But despite this wealth, a section of the population was still to see its needs fulfilled. What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up.

It was reported last week that Roku launched the Fairground AI Creator TV channel, the first free, all-AI streaming channel that pulls content from roughly 100 AI creators around the world. Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it “bottom-of-the-barrel slop”.

In truth, you will not watch Fairground AI Creator TV, and that’s sort of the point. This is television with vanishingly low production costs. Compare an hour of this cheap slop with, say, the tens of millions of dollars it takes to produce an episode of Stranger Things, and you’ll soon understand why executives might find the prospect irresistible. In this landscape you don’t need breakout hits, just enough stoned and curious students at 3am to turn a profit.

That said, I have actually just spent a few hours watching Fairground AI Creator TV, more out of self-hatred than anything else, and it would appear that the early reviews are right. On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Had this been attempted in 2023, we would have had a 24/7 feed of mutant Will Smith choking down handfuls of writhing spaghetti, and everyone would have vomited themselves dry. Generally speaking, what Fairground has to offer is much better.

However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn’t so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you’d see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.

The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.

Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.

“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”

Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.”

Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 issue below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.”

Solid-state cooling is a real research field that could eliminate the refrigerants used in air conditioning. But the current prototypes are not more efficient than your existing AC.

The leading approach is elastocaloric cooling, where shape-memory alloys (NiTi) heat up when stressed and cool when released. The best elastocaloric system so far has a COP of 1.27 (moves 1.27 units of heat per unit of electricity). Conventional AC has a COP of 3+. Solid-state is roughly one-third as efficient today.

The real advantage is environmental: current AC refrigerants like R410A have 2,000x the warming potential of CO2. Solid-state systems use zero refrigerant. They also have fewer mechanical components (though not zero - elastocaloric systems have mechanical actuators, and material fatigue under millions of stress cycles is a key bottleneck).

MIT Technology Review's June 2026 assessment: room-scale prototypes are 2-3 years away, and even optimistic projections suggest a small market share (maybe 5%) rather than replacing vapor compression. As one researcher put it: 'Why are the solid-state coolers not as efficient as typical thermodynamic cycles?' - that question remains open.

Read more:
technologyreview.com/2026/06/1…
nature.com/articles/s41467-024…

#science #climate #technology

For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working.

An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025.

Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself.

However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.

Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent "crisis meetings", working on weekends, and "super cut-throat" performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go.

"You go in on Saturday or Sunday just to catch up or make sure things aren't broken," the person said.