 |
|
|
|||||
A federal judge on Thursday cleared the way for a New York offshore wind project to resume construction, a victory for the developer who said a Trump administration order to pause it would likely kill the project in a matter of days. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled construction on the Empire Wind project could go forward while he considers the merits of the governments order to suspend the project. He faulted the government for not responding to key points in Empire Winds court filings, including the contention that the administration violated proper procedure. Norwegian company Equinor owns Empire Wind. Spokesperson David Schoetz said they welcome the court’s decision and will continue to work in collaboration with authorities. Its the second developer to prevail in court against the administration this week. The Trump administration froze five big offshore wind projects on the East Coast days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Trump has targeted offshore wind from his first days back in the White House, most recently calling wind farms losers that lose money, destroy the landscape and kill birds. Developers and states sued seeking to block the order. Large, ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of plans to shift to renewable energy in East Coast states that have limited land for onshore wind turbines or solar arrays. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul applauded the court decision, telling reporters the projects had been stopped under the bogus pretense of national security. When I heard this I said one thing: Im the governor of New York, if there is a national security threat off the coast of New York, you need to tell me what it is. I want a briefing right now. Well, lo and behold, they had no answer, she said. On Monday, a judge ruled that the Danish energy company Orsted could resume its project to serve Rhode Island and Connecticut. Senior Judge Royce Lamberth said the government did not sufficiently explain the need for a complete stop to construction. That wind farm, called Revolution Wind, is nearly complete. Its expected to meet roughly 20% of the electricity needs in Rhode Island, the smallest state, and about 5% of Connecticuts electricity needs. Orsted is also suing over the pause of its Sunrise Wind project for New York, with a hearing still to be set. Dominion Energy Virginia, which is developing Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, plans to ask a judge Friday to block the administrations order so it can resume construction, too. Trump has also dismissed offshore wind developments as ugly, but the Empire project is about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) offshore and the Sunrise project is about 30 miles (48 kilometers) offshore. The fifth paused project is Vineyard Wind, under construction in Massachusetts. Vineyard Wind LLC, a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, joined the rest of the developers in challenging the administration on Thursday. They filed a complaint in District Court in Boston. Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast New Jersey, said the administration was right to stop construction on national security grounds. He urged officials to immediately appeal the adverse rulings and seek to halt all work pending appellate review. Opponents of offshore wind projects are particularly vocal and well-organized in New Jersey. Empire Wind is 60% complete and designed to power more than 500,000 homes. Equinor said the project was in jeopardy due to the limited availability of specialized vessels, as well as heavy financial losses. During a hearing Wednesday, Judge Nichols said the governments main security concern seemed to be over operation of the wind turbines, not construction, although the government pushed back on that contention. In presenting the governments case, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. was skeptical of the perfect storm of horrible events that Empire Wind said would derail their entire project if construction didnt resume. He disagreed with the contention that the governments main concern was over operation. I dont see how you can make this distinction, Woodward said. He likened it to a nuclear project being built that presented a national security risk. The government would oppose it being built, and it turning on. Molly Morris, Equinors senior vice president overseeing Empire Wind, said in an interview that the company wants to build this project and deliver a major, essential new source of power for New York. ___ The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Michael Phillis and Jennifer McDermott, Associated Press Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.
Category:
E-Commerce
Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary. The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France’s Mistral AI. Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web. Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia. The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs, the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details. While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it. I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because its human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. “I wouldnt really want to use an AI thats trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI, Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform. Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that youre putting on us.” The Wikimedia Foundation last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models. The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links. Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers. The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use. But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa. It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to draw data from Wikipedia, said Iskander, who’s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan. The bulk of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals. They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies, Wales said. They’re saying, “You know what, actually you cant just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way. Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors. While AI isnt good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources. We dont have that yet but thats the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future. Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said. You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he said. It could respond by saying “heres the answer to your question from this article and heres the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think well move in that direction as well. Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment. However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side. People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didnt need algorithms to be mean to each other, he said. But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility. Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site Wokepedia and accused it of being biased in favor of the left. Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged manipulation efforts in Wikipedias editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it. A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with propaganda and urged people to stop donating to the site. Wales said he doesn’t consider Grokipedia a real threat to Wikipedia because it’s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on. Large language models arent good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia, he said. It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is. He stressed that he wasn’t singling out criticism of Grokipedia. Its just the way large language models work. Wales say he’s known Musk for years but they haven’t been in touch since Grokipedia launched. I should probably ping him, Wales said. What would he say? ’Hows your family?’ Im a nice person, I dont really want to pick a fight with anybody. Kelvin Chan, AP business writer AP writer Mogomotsi Magome contributed to this report
Category:
E-Commerce
If you are Verizon customer, like me, you’ve probably been scrambling to make phone calls, send texts, and get online since Wednesday, due to a massive, nationwide service outage. (I am writing this from my local food co-op outside Boston, where I am using the internet in their cafe.) The mobile giant says the issue has now been resolved, however, some customers are saying they’re still without service. Some 1.5 million users reported the prolonged outage on Downdetector, which still had some 893 reports (as of around 2:30 p.m. ET). That’s over 24 hours after customers first started losing service around noon ET on Wednesday, with iPhone users reporting an SOS icon, as Fast Company reported. This live map on Downdetector reports continued outages in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas, and Houston (as of this writing at around 3 p.m. ET). To its credit (literally), Verizon has said it will contact customers and provide them with a $20 credit for the inconvenience. Posting on X, the mobile company wrote on Thursday: “Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app.” How can I get the $20 Verizon credit for the outage? According to the post, customers will receive a text message when the credit is available. However, the credit will not be automatically applied to customers’ accounts, and customers must redeem it through the myVerizon app. Additionally, the credit can also be redeemed by contacting Verizon customer service through phone, chat, or online, according to reporting from Engadget. “On average, this covers multiple days of service. Business customers will be contacted directly about their credits,” the company explained. “This credit isnt meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But its a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.” Still having trouble connecting? Verizon suggests the following: “please restart your device (power down and power back on). This is the fastest way to reconnect your phone to the network.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||