The Epic Games Store has been down for several hours as people flood the service to snap up GTA V for free. "We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store," Epic acknowledges in a tweet. "We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We'll provide an update as soon as we can." ExtremeTech reports: The surge in traffic for the Epic Game Store has apparently been intense enough that it has actually created issues for related Epic services like Epic Battle Breakers and Fortnite. If you can't get on the EGS to pick up your copy of the game, don't worry -- it's going to be free through May 21. It isn't clear which edition of the game Epic is giving away, however, because nobody can log in to check. Rumors ran wild on this point, with some implying Epic would give away the "latest premium edition with additional content." At the very least, the rumor is that this represents the complete title, not just a front-end for accessing either the single-player campaign or GTA Online. Epic is having something of a banner week. "First, Tim Sweeney's company wowed the internet with the new PS5 demo built on Unreal Engine 5," reports ExtremeTech. "Now the EGS has broken down under the weight of Grand Theft Auto, which puts Epic news front-and-center before PC gamers who might not have cared about the console announcement." Also worth mentioning is the company on Wednesday launched Epic Online Services, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest contract manufacturer of silicon chips, is set to announce plans to build an advanced chip factory in Arizona (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) as U.S. concerns grow about dependence on Asia for the critical technology. The plans come as the Trump administration has sought to jump-start development of new chip factories in the U.S. due to rising fears about the U.S.'s heavy reliance on Taiwan, China and South Korea to produce microelectronics and other key technologies. TSMC is expected to announce the plans as soon as Friday after making the decision at a board meeting on Tuesday in Taiwan, according to people familiar with the matter. The factory could be producing chips by the end of 2023 at the earliest, they said, adding that both the State and Commerce Departments are involved in the plans. TSMC's new plant would make chips branded as having 5-nanometer transistors, the tiniest, fastest and most power-efficient ones manufactured today, according to a person familiar with the plans. TSMC just started rolling out 5-nanometer chips for customers to test at a factory in Taiwan in recent months. It is unclear how much TSMC has budgeted or if it would get financial incentives from the U.S. to build. A factory capable of making the most advanced chips would almost certainly cost more than $10 billion, according to industry executives.

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The Senate has voted to reauthorize the USA Freedom Act without adding an amendment that would have restricted warrantless collection of internet search and web browsing data. It did however adopt an amendment to expand oversight. The Verge reports: The USA Freedom Reauthorization Act restores government powers that expired in March with Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The [Act] lets law enforcement collect "tangible things" related to national security investigations without a warrant, requiring only approval from a secret court that has reportedly rubber-stamped many requests. It passed the House of Representatives earlier this year, but it stalled in the Senate during the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Today, senators approved it with 80 votes for and 16 votes against, according to The Hill. The House of Representatives will need to approve the amended version of the bill before sending it to the president's desk. The USA Freedom Act was designed to reform the Patriot Act and limit large-scale phone record collection, following leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. But surveillance critics wanted to extend its limits in the reauthorized version. Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) successfully passed an amendment that would expand the role of independent advisers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Conversely, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT) failed by one vote to pass a rule prohibiting warrantless surveillance of internet search and browsing records. Wyden ultimately voted against the reauthorization.

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Sony touted on Thursday the world's first image sensors with built-in artificial intelligence, promising to make data-gathering tasks much faster and more secure. Calling it the first of its kind, Sony said the technology would give "intelligent vision" to cameras for retail and industrial applications. From a report: The new sensors are akin to tiny self-contained computers, incorporating a logic processor and memory. They're capable of image recognition without generating any images, allowing them to do AI tasks like identifying, analyzing or counting objects without offloading any information to a separate chip. Sony said the method provides increased privacy while also making it possible to do near-instant analysis and object tracking. Sony joins tech giants like Huawei and Google that have been building dedicated AI silicon to help accelerate everything from image processing to machine learning.

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MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company's new Ampere A100 GPU architecture for machine learning and HPC markets today. Jensen claims the 54B transistor A100 is the biggest, most powerful GPU NVIDIA has ever made, and it's also the largest chip ever produced on 7nm semiconductor process. There are a total of 6,912 FP32 CUDA cores, 432 Tensor cores, and 108 SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) in the A100, paired to 40GB of HBM2e memory with maximum memory bandwidth of 1.6TB/sec. FP32 compute comes in at a staggering 19.5 TLFLOPs, compared to 16.4 TFLOPs for NVIDIA's previous gen Tesla V100. In addition, its Tensor Cores employ FP32 precision that allows for a 20x uplift in AI performance gen-over-gen. When it comes to FP64 performance, these Tensor Cores also provide a 2.5x performance boost, versus its predecessor, Volta. Additional features include Multi-Instance GPU, aka MIG, which allows an A100 GPU to be sliced up into up to seven discrete instances, so it can be provisioned for multiple discrete specialized workloads. Mulitple A100 GPUs will also make their way into NVIDIA's third-generation DGX AI supercomputer that packs a whopping 5 PFLOPs of AI performance. According to NVIDIA, its Ampere-based A100 GPU and DGX AI systems are already in full production and shipping to customers now. Gamers are of course looking forward to what the company has in store with Ampere for the enthusiast PC market, as expectations for its rumored GeForce RTX 30 family are incredibly high.

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The United States is on track to produce more electricity this year from renewable power than from coal for the first time on record, new government projections show, a transformation partly driven by the coronavirus pandemic, with profound implications in the fight against climate change. From a report: It is a milestone that seemed all but unthinkable a decade ago, when coal was so dominant that it provided nearly half the nation's electricity. And it comes despite the Trump administration's three-year push to try to revive the ailing industry by weakening pollution rules on coal-burning power plants. Those efforts, however, failed to halt the powerful economic forces that have led electric utilities to retire hundreds of aging coal plants since 2010 and run their remaining plants less frequently. The cost of building large wind farms has declined more than 40 percent in that time, while solar costs have dropped more than 80 percent. And the price of natural gas, a cleaner-burning alternative to coal, has fallen to historic lows as a result of the fracking boom. Now the coronavirus outbreak is pushing coal producers into their deepest crisis yet. As factories, retailers, restaurants and office buildings have shut down nationwide to slow the spread of the coronavirus, demand for electricity has fallen sharply. And, because coal plants often cost more to operate than gas plants or renewables, many utilities are cutting back on coal power first in response.

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After major companies announce their employees won't need to come in, many are recalculating the cost of living near the office. From a report: With some of the highest rents in the world, the Bay Area has been dealing with an affordability crisis for years. The region saw 5.4 new jobs for every unit of housing built from 2011 to 2017, according to Bloomberg calculations of U.S. census data. The entire state is expensive, with the median price for a house exceeding $600,000, more than double the national level. In Silicon Valley that means most workers have been renting -- and are therefore able to pick up and move. Both Facebook and Google have announced that most people won't need to come in this year, and Twitter has told some workers that if they wish to work from home permanently, they can. Employees are now considering the thousands of dollars they could save living somewhere else -- maybe even permanently. Urban parents of young children suddenly find themselves coveting backyards and playrooms in larger homes that would be affordable on a tech salary pretty much anywhere except the Bay Area. Some employees, expecting years of rolling shelter-in-place orders, are making long-term life decisions now. And they have a lot of housing options, given that the starting salary for a software engineer at Facebook and Google exceeds six figures, according to Glassdoor data. Christy Lake, chief people officer at San Francisco-based Twilio, says several employees have already approached their managers and HR representatives to discuss plans to relocate. The cloud communications company expects more than 20% of its office-based employees will transition to working remotely in the long term. But the trend raises complicated questions. If employees move to a less expensive location, should Twilio adjust their salaries accordingly?

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Google today announced that Chrome will soon start blocking resource-heavy ads. From a report: The company ads that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage because they "drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money." There are three possible thresholds an ad can hit to be blocked: 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage. Google will be experimenting with this change "over the next several months" and will roll it out on Chrome stable "near the end of August."

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France will go ahead with its tax on big digital businesses this year whether there is progress or not towards an international deal on the issue, its finance minister said on Thursday. From a report: France offered in January to suspend until the end of the year installments of its tax on big digital companies' income in France while an international deal to re-write the rules of cross-border taxation was negotiated this year. "Never has a digital tax been more legitimate and more necessary," Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told journalists on a conference call, adding such companies were doing better than most during the coronavirus crisis. Nearly 140 countries are negotiating the first major rewriting of international tax rules in more than a generation, to take better account of the rise of big tech companies that often book profit in low-tax countries.

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Archaeologists say up to 4,000 people may have lived in more than 800 huts perched high on the Tap O' Noth.

Vint Cerf on the great many lessons that the coronavirus crises has taught us about infrastructure writ large: More directly associated with COVID-19 is the need for detecting exposure and tracking contacts to reduce the spread of the disease. Mobiles and the Internet appear to have roles to play for at least some tracking and tracing system designs. The application of machine learning to large medical datasets may help identify the ways in which SARS-COV-2 actually works. It seems that we are finding new syndromes triggered by this virus as research progress is made. We don't know enough and we must learn more. Among the stark lessons we have learned is the fragility of food and medical equipment supply chains, either because of excessive concentration or because transport connections are broken. We are seeing this dramatically in the United States where farmers have been unable to sell to restaurants that are closed or operating at much reduced capacity out of concern for the propagation of the virus. These lessons should teach us to create much more resilient infrastructure in every dimension. We need to refresh national stockpiles of protective equipment, medical devices and vaccines. More generally, we must imagine other potential global catastrophes and put in place plans to mitigate. The time to agree on best practices for emergency response is before the emergency, not during. We must not allow this pandemic or a future one to become our society's Titanic.

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Facebook and some of the world's largest telecom carriers including China Mobile are joining forces to build a giant sub-sea cable to help bring more reliable and faster internet across Africa. From a report: The cost of the project will be just under $1 billion, according to three people familiar with the project, who asking not to be identified as the budget hasn't been made public. The 37,000-kilometer (23,000 miles) long cable -- dubbed 2Africa -- will connect Europe to the Middle East and 16 African countries, according to a statement on Thursday. The undersea cable sector is experiencing a resurgence. During the 1990s dot-com boom, phone companies spent more than $20 billion laying fiber-optic lines under the oceans. Now tech giants, led by Facebook and Alphabet's Google, are behind about 80% of the recent investment in transatlantic cable, driven by demand for fast-data transfers used for streaming movies to social messaging.

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It seems fair if a news org can keep us from reading their articles that we should be able to tell Twitter or Facebook not to show us their links.

New motto: "Nothing focuses the mind like imminent doom."

Starting with Windows 10 2004, Microsoft is changing the minimum hardware requirements for the device. The change affects new, not existing PCs from OEMs only. From a report: According to the documentation, Microsoft isn't making available copies of 32-bit Windows 10 media. For now, Microsoft is still allowing users to buy 32-bit Windows 10 at retail and to continue to get updates for their existing 32-bit Windows implementations. Anyone with a 32-bit PC should be fine for as long as their devices remain usable. "Beginning with Windows 10, version 2004, all new Windows 10 systems will be required to use 64-bit builds and Microsoft will no longer release 32-bit builds for OEM distribution. This does not impact 32-bit customer systems that are manufactured with earlier versions of Windows 10; Microsoft remains committed to providing feature and security updates on these devices, including continued 32-bit media availability in non-OEM channels to support various upgrade installation scenarios," Microsoft wrote.

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