The Download: Locking up carbon with corn, and the path to greener steel

In recent weeks, a crew of staffers from a company called Charm Industrial have been working on the edge of Kansas corn fields, moving rolled bales of stalks, leaves, husks, and tassels up to a semi-trailer. Inside, a contraption called a pyrolyzer uses high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to break down the plant […]

Inside Charm Industrial’s big bet on corn stalks for carbon removal

Reinhardt says that Charm will only take half the agriculture material on any given field, and he notes that putting the resulting biochar and ash into the fields will improve soil health. He adds that competing uses of corn remains depend on the region, but that much of it isn’t sold or plowed under, leaving […]

How Charm Industrial hopes to use crops to cut steel emissions

The iron and steel industry produces about 4 billion tons of carbon emissions each year, accounting for around 10% of all energy-related climate pollution, according to a 2020 report by the International Energy Agency. Those figures have risen sharply this century, driven by rapid economic growth in China and elsewhere. The hefty emissions and increasingly […]

Critical Zoom vulnerabilities fixed last week required no user interaction

reader comments 4 with 4 posters participating Share this story Google’s Project Zero vulnerability research team detailed critical vulnerabilities Zoom patched last week making that made it possible for hackers to execute zero-click attacks that remotely ran malicious code on devices running the messaging software. Tracked as CVE-2022-22786 and CVE-2022-22784, the vulnerabilities made it possible […]

Small business over the worst impacts of the pandemic, increasing IT spend

Peter Griffin, Editor. 26 May 2022, 7:51 am Most Kiwi small and medium-sized businesses are out of the “survival mode” that got them through the lockdowns and disruption of the pandemic and are now dialling up spending on cloud, cybersecurity, and laptops/PCs, according to analyst group IDC. A survey of over 1,000 SMBs across New […]

The Download: Google’s AI cuteness overload, and America’s fight for gun control

Another month, another flood of weird, wonderful and cute images generated by an artificial intelligence. In April, OpenAI showed off its new picture-making neural network, DALL-E 2, which could produce remarkable high-res images of almost anything it was asked to.  Now, just a few weeks later, Google Brain has revealed its own image-making AI, called […]

The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images

It’s no secret that large models, such as DALL-E 2 and Imagen, trained on vast numbers of documents and images taken from the web, absorb the worst aspects of that data as well as the best. OpenAI and Google explicitly acknowledge this.    Scroll down the Imagen website—past the dragon fruit wearing a karate belt and […]

ITP News in brief (on a Wednesday) 25th May

Victoria MacLennan. 25 May 2022, 11:17 pm It was my birthday on Monday and one of my rules in life is to never work on my birthday, so the ITP News in brief is coming to you on a Wednesday instead. Check out this awesome panel on Cyber Security Capability TechWeek22 was last week and […]

“Tough to forge” digital driver’s license… is easy to forge

reader comments 54 with 45 posters participating Share this story In late 2019, the government of New South Wales in Australia rolled out digital driver’s licenses. The new licenses allowed people to use their iPhone or Android device to show proof of identity and age during roadside police checks or at bars, stores, hotels, and […]