Taylor
Swift donates $100,000 to family of woman killed at Kansas City Chiefs
parade shooting
date: 2024-02-16, from: San Jose Mercury News
Lopez-Galvan, a beloved DJ in Kansas City, was celebrating the
Chiefs’ victory with her husband, son and daughter, when she was fatally
shot. Twenty-two others, including children at the parade, were
injured.
Is
this Rivian’s more affordable R2 electric SUV spotted in the wild?
date: 2024-02-16, from: Electrek Feed
As we get closer to the official debut of
Rivian’s more
affordable R2, we are finally getting a better idea of what to expect.
After teasing the model for the first time yesterday, Rivian’s R2 was
reportedly spotted filming in downtown LA shortly after.
Lenovo
Yoga Book 9i 2024 now available (13″ dual-screen OLED laptop with Intel
Meteor Lake)
date: 2024-02-16, from: Liliputing
The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i is a dual-screen laptop with two 13.3 inch, 2880
x 1800 pixel OLED touchscreen displays, including one in the space where
you’d find a keyboard on a more traditional laptop. The multi-function
computer features a 360-degree hinge allowing you to use it as a
tablet, and the Yoga Book 9i also comes […]
La
NASA recibe al ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de Uruguay para la
firma de los Acuerdos de Artemis
date: 2024-02-16, from: NASA breaking news
En una ceremonia celebrada el jueves 15 de febrero en la sede de la
NASA en Washington, Uruguay se convirtió en el trigésimo sexto país en
firmar los Acuerdos de Artemis. El administrador de la NASA, Bill
Nelson, participó en la ceremonia de firma por parte de la agencia, y el
ministro de Relaciones Exteriores, […]
Family
sues man whose daughter, ex-girlfriend drowned in Blackhawk pool on the
day 4-year-old was supposed to meet him
date: 2024-02-16, from: San Jose Mercury News
The suit targets Charu Goyal, the father of 4-year-old Mayala Chavez
and ex-boyfriend of Llaneth Chavez, who drowned in a pool in Goyal’s
backyard on the day Mayala was to meet her dad for the first time.
Microsoft, the owner of Xbox, announced on Thursday that it’s bringing
several previously Xbox exclusive games to rival consoles. More could be
coming. Playstation and Nintendo have historically used games that can
only be played on their gaming consoles to help drive console sales. So
what’s behind the shift in strategy for Xbox? Also on the show: closer
examinations of wholesale prices and the Biden administration’s latest
attempt at student loan cancellation.
Martians
Wanted: NASA Opens Call for Simulated Yearlong Mars Mission
date: 2024-02-16, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is seeking applicants to participate in its next simulated
one-year Mars surface mission to help inform the agency’s plans for
human exploration of the Red Planet. The second of three planned
ground-based missions called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance
Exploration Analog) is scheduled to kick off in spring 2025. Each CHAPEA
mission involves a […]
Historic
Wayfarers Chapel Has Closed To The Public Citing ‘Accelerated Land
Movement’
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The LAist
The striking glass and wood structure opened in 1951 and was designed
by Lloyd Wright. Church officials say they are “extremely devastated” by
the decision.
Rows of tables took over California Institute of the Arts’ Main
Gallery on Tuesday, Feb. 13, with students from the programs in
Experimental Animation and Character Animation weaving around them,
eager to showcase their work to studios for Portfolio Day.
COC
Names Lexy Angulo, Colin Yeaman Athletes of the Week
date: 2024-02-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
College of the Canyons student-athletes Lexy Angulo (softball) and
Colin Yeaman (baseball) have been named the COC Athletic Department’s
Women’s & Men’s Student-Athletes of the Week for the period running
Feb. 5-
Man
who plowed into California crowd found guilty of hit-and-run
date: 2024-02-16, from: San Jose Mercury News
Dashcam video from a passing car showed Christopher Solis’ tuck
appear to swerve around another car and then out of view, followed by a
volley of screams as the pickup veered onto the sidewalk filled with
pedestrians.
In the dawn of the Space Age, a group of scientists and engineers
from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) had their eye on a new
frontier: the uncharted expanse of space. Project Vanguard, initiated in
1955, aimed to launch the first American satellite into Earth orbit as
part of the International Geophysical Year (July 1957 […]
Atmospheric
Science Branch Chief Dr. Charles Gatebe
date: 2024-02-16, from: NASA breaking news
“I was born and raised in Kenya and come from a very humble
background. I’m one of nine kids and the third born, meaning that I
started responsibilities very early because we had to help our mother.
Almost every two to three years, she had a baby, so you can imagine she
was a very, […]
This
legacy automaker says it just turned a profit on EVs
date: 2024-02-16, from: Electrek Feed
Jeep and Chrysler owner Stellantis – hardly a hero in our EV adoption
story – says that it is finally turning a profit on EVs. But that’s in
no part due to US sales, since the company doesn’t sell any EVs in the
country – but that is changing with a lineup on its way this year.
Shobhana Gupta is a physician scientist and currently serves as the
Open Innovation and Community Applications manager with Earth Science
Division’s Applied Sciences Program at NASA Headquarters. Shobhana
manages crowdsourcing activities including prize competitions to invite
talents and experiences outside of the NASA community for the discovery
and development of applications of Earth observations for
decision-making. She […]
Teams
Add Iconic NASA ‘Worm’ Logo to Artemis II Rocket, Spacecraft
date: 2024-02-16, from: NASA breaking news
Art and science merge as teams add the NASA “worm” logo on the SLS
(Space Launch System) solid rocket boosters and the Orion spacecraft’s
crew module adapter at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the
agency’s Artemis II mission. The iconic logo was introduced in 1975 by
the firm of Danne & Blackburn as […]
Police:
Dispute over Xbox console causes man to stab friend with samurai
sword
date: 2024-02-16, from: San Jose Mercury News
Police said the victim was screaming when he walked out of the
apartment. According to court documents, one neighbor heard the
commotion and saw the victim covered in blood.
IonQ
opens first US quantum factory amid VC cash crunch
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Who knows where they’ll get the funds for $1B investment plan, though
Quantum technology outfit IonQ has cut the ribbon on its Seattle
manufacturing facility, claimed as the first factory for quantum systems
on US soil. The move comes shortly after a report claimed that investors
have halved the venture capital funding going to quantum companies.…
Alexei
Navalny has died in prison, according to Russian authorities
date: 2024-02-16, from: Associated Press, World News
Alexei
Navalny, the fiercest foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who
crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin
protests, died in prison Friday, Russian authorities said.
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end
world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to
application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little
further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
First-party application states
Every application whether it’s a to-do list or a shopping cart or some
radically complex app will have some state. State isn’t uniform and
typically exists at a variety of different levels. We’ll start at the
top and drill down…
Global state
Data stores and feature gating that typically happens at the application
level.
Stores - different locations for storing data
Application store - Redux, Vuex, Mobx, Signals
Browser store - localStorage, sessionStorage, cookies, IndexedDB
Data - different types of global data
Access control data - authentication tokens, paid/unpaid, geolocated,
age, verified, member, etc.
User data - name, icon, etc
Collections - e.g. list of posts
Session data
… etc
Page/Component state
Vince Speelman’s wonderful
Nine
States of Design do a great job summing up all the states that a
page or component might exist in.
Nothing - An empty element
Loading - A fetch is happening
None - No items returned
One - A single item comes back
Some - A few items comes back
Too Many - Too many items, need pagination (or similar)
Incorrect - An error occurred
Correct - A success happened
Done - The operation finished
Vince’s list is perfect to me and keeps being relevant after all these
years, I would add two items.
Custom states - Any bespoke or custom states relevant to your
application
Realtime multi-player event mesages- Picture the state and event message
in a chat app or realtime stock ticker. Stored at the component level or
thrown into global state.
In my experience both the page and each component will contain some
mixture of these states as well as being reactive to global state
changes.
Element state
Individual elements can (and will) have their own states. At this layer,
features of HTML, CSS, and ARIA start to reveal themselves.
The user of the application and their device, peripherals, and browser
have a lot of say in how the final application renders. This is by
design and
built
into the foundations of the web.
Finally, a user’s browser choice and preferred plugins determines a lot
about how they experience (or would prefer to experience) your UI and
your application can be responsive to some of those preferences.
JavaScript disabled = yes, I actually know people who do this.
Sleeping tabs
Permissions
Camera = true, false
Microphone = true, false
Geolocation = allowed, not allowed, only while using the app
Notifications = true, false
File access = true, false
Plugins
Ad blockers - UBlock, Safari ITP, Ghostery, … etc
Custom plugins/Boosts
User states
Thus far we’ve talked about technology, now let’s consider the actual
human being at the other end of the transaction. A user’s physical or
mental state impact their cognitive or literal bandwidth to enjoy your
experience.
Third-party script injections are the biggest contributor to performance
degradation on a UI. Some services even take over the user experience of
an application. This is often out of your control.
Analytics/tracking services
User session recording services
A/B test injections
Instructional overlays
Accessibility overlays
Third-party authentication (OAuth) services
Captcha/verification services
You haven’t truly lived life until one of these unchecked services takes
down an application.
There’s more to UI than just state…
I’m sure I’ve forgotten whole categories of state. I haven’t even gotten
into the hundreds of CSS properties and the thousands of values and
their potential conflicts. I didn’t talk about the intricacies of
styling form controls or building dropdowns with the required ARIA
property combinations. I didn’t touch on
the
decision matrix required to put an image on the page. Nor does this
get into setting all the
proper tags in the headin the right order.
Nor does this discuss
microformats for SEO or all the
code you need to properly setup a UI to send analtyics data.
Pirando
homicide investigation open following Nededog acquittal
date: 2024-02-16, from: Guam Daily Post
Police have opened a homicide investigation into the death of Edwin
Pirando following the acquittal of Jamie John Nededog, who was charged
with murder in connection to Pirando’s death.
GPD:
Missing person, traffic fatality from 2020 may be connected
date: 2024-02-16, from: Guam Daily Post
The Guam Police Department is seeking the community’s assistance in
an auto-pedestrian fatality and a missing person investigation which may
be linked.
The recent six-year district-level accreditation of the Guam
Department of Education doesn’t mean improvements cease, in fact, the
accreditation team found as many strengths as areas where improvements
are needed in its assessment of the public school system.
Following last month’s petition from the Guam Power Authority, the
Guam Waterworks Authority also has petitioned the Consolidated
Commission on Utilities to approve its plan to adjust salaries in order
to “incentivize and retain top-performing employees and reduce turnover
rates.”
Judge:
Moore allowed to get basic necessities while on house arrest
date: 2024-02-16, from: Guam Daily Post
Nicholas Moore will be allowed to buy groceries and put gas in his
car despite being on house arrest pending trials for cases in which he
is charged with aggravated assault and murder.
Families
of US Volunteers Killed in Ukraine Address Congress
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
Families of a number of American veterans killed or wounded in
Ukraine met with US Congress members in late January to appeal to
lawmakers to continue providing assistance to Ukraine. Katerina Lisunova
and Irina Shynkarenko have the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera and
edit: Oleksii Osyka
Fair
Use Week Webinar: Fair Use in Text Data Mining and Artificial
Intelligence
date: 2024-02-16, from: Authors Union blogs
Computational research techniques such as text and data mining (TDM)
hold tremendous opportunities for researchers across the disciplines
ranging from mining scientific articles to create better systematic
reviews, or curated chemical property datasets to building a corpus of
films to understand how concepts of gender, race, and identity are
shared over time. Unfortunately, legal uncertainty, […]
Cambridge
brainiacs propose AI apocalypse kill switches
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Better visibility and performance caps would be good for regulation too
In our quest to limit the destructive potential of artificial
intelligence, a new paper out of the University of Cambridge has
suggested baking in remote kill switches and lockouts, like those
developed to stop the unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons, into the
hardware that powers it.…
What to
Expect From Solar and Battery Storage This Year
date: 2024-02-16, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Rush hour commutes in the
Midwest could be snarled by snow today • The whole of England and Wales
is under a weather warning for heavy rain and floods • February
temperatures in parts of the Atlantic Ocean are nearing highs normally
seen in July.
THE TOP FIVE
Solar and battery storage expected to set records in 2024 for new
electricity generating capacity
The vast majority – 81% – of new utility-scale
electricity generating capacity expected to come online this year will
be in the form of solar and battery storage, according to the U.S.
Energy Information Administration (EIA). The agency’s latest
Preliminary
Monthly Electric Generator Inventory shows projects with 62.8
gigawatts (GW) of new capacity are in the pipeline, a 55% increase over
the 40.4 GW added last year. More than half of that will be solar, and
about a quarter will be battery storage. “We expect U.S. battery storage
capacity to nearly double in 2024,” the report said. Electrek
also
noted
that “2024 will see the least new natural gas capacity added in 25
years.”
The Republican-controlled House
voted
yesterday to pass a bill reversing President Biden’s pause on approvals
of liquified natural gas (LNG) exports. The vote was 224-200, with nine
democrats voting in favor. While the bill is unlikely to get the green
light in the Senate, its passage “could embolden House Republicans to
include language easing the pause in future government funding
legislation,” Bloombergsaid.
This particular bill would end the Department of Energy’s (DoE) power to
approve exports, handing it instead to the independent Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission. Biden paused approval of new export terminals
recently until the DoE can study their environmental impact, earning
praise from activists who
claim
LNG may be worse for the climate than coal, but scorn from many
Republicans who say the move compromises energy security.
Major climate investor group loses key asset managers
The world’s largest group aimed at leveraging investor
power to pressure corporations to prioritize climate change lost some of
its biggest members this week. JPMorgan Asset Management and State
Street Global Advisors (SSGA)
said
yesterday they are leaving the
Climate
Action 100+ (CA100) group, and BlackRock Inc. said it will no longer
be affiliated. CA100 partners with more than 700 investors – which
collectively manage about $70 trillion in assets – to pressure oil
giants, shipping firms, airlines, and other big companies “that are
critical to the net-zero emissions transition.” It initially focused on
encouraging companies to make climate disclosures but recently decided
to go further and start pushing them to actively reduce their greenhouse
gas emissions. It seems this was a step too far. The departures remove
nearly $14 trillion in assets from the climate group, and follow intense
political pressure from Republicans targeting ESG investing. “I wouldn’t
be surprised if we see more defections,” Lance Dial, a Boston-based
partner at law firm K&L Gates LLP,
toldBloomberg.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
New York state pension fund divests from fossil fuel firms
In more news from the financial world, America’s
third-largest state pension fund is scaling back its investment in some
oil and gas companies. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, which
holds about $260 billion in assets, will
divest
about $27 million from seven firms including Exxon Mobil Corp. following
a review of the companies’ preparedness to shift to a low-carbon
economy. The move is “a compromise measure” between the fund and
environmentalists who want to see full divestment, Reuterssaid.
“The decision could deal another blow to Exxon’s reputation,”
reportedInside Climate News, but the fund will still maintain $500
million worth of Exxon shares.
U.N. might create expert group to study solar geoengineering
Switzerland wants the United Nations to create a group
of experts dedicated to studying solar geoengineering,
according
toClimate Home News. The panel would “examine risks and
opportunities” of solar radiation management (SRM) techniques, which are
“hypothetical technologies that could, in theory, counteract temperature
rise by reflecting more sunlight away from the Earth’s surface,” as
Carbon Briefexplained.
Reactions from scientists are mixed, with some suggesting more research
is warranted, but others concerned about “the risks of opening a
Pandora’s box.” Governments will vote on the proposal next week.
THE KICKER
The Royal Family’s first-ever electric vehicle, King Charles III’s 2018
Jaguar I-Pace, is
up
for auction and could go for up to
$88,000.
The king once called the car “silent but deadly.”
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is teeming with
color and activity. It features a relatively close star-forming region
known as IRAS 16562-3959, which lies within the Milky Way about 5,900
light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Observations from
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 make up this image. Its detailed nuance of
color […]
Know
Someone Who Needs Help Online? Dozens Of LA County Libraries Offer Free,
Onsite Digital Support
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The LAist
Hundreds of tech support workers are now stationed at 43 county
libraries to help reach people who don’t have easy access to computers
or the internet.
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission banned robocalls that
use voices generated by artificial intelligence. This comes after New
Hampshire voters received phone calls during that state’s primary, which
used AI to imitate President Joe Biden and discourage people from
heading to the polls. Today, we hear how generative AI is being used to
manipulate and what consumers can do to protect themselves. Also: a
disappointing snapshot of the manufacturing economy.
Forgetting
the history of Unix is coding us into a corner
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
The lessons of yesteryear’s OS are getting lost in translation
FOSDEM 2024 There are vital lessons to be learned from
the history of Unix, but they’re being forgotten. This is leading to
truly vast amounts of wasted effort.…
From the BBC World Service: Aviation was responsible for 2% of
global carbon emissions last year, according to the International Energy
Agency, and the industry is under pressure to develop greener engines.
But the boss of Airbus, one of the world’s biggest airplane makers,
doesn’t think progress is speedy enough. Plus, political drama and a tax
investigation ahead of India’s elections and an exploration of dynamic
pricing.
Cutting
kids off from the dark web – the solution can only ever be social
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Expert weighs in after Brianna Ghey murder amid worrying rates of child
cybercrime
The murder of 16-year-old schoolgirl Brianna Ghey has kickstarted a
debate around limiting children’s access to the dark web in the UK, with
experts highlighting the difficulty in achieving this.…
This is the 25th edition of People and Blogs, the series where
I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today
we have Peter Rukavina and his blog, ruk.ca
I don’t remember how I stumbled on Peter’s blog to be honest with you.
It might have been on Hacker News or maybe someone sent it to me. I
remember loving its very personal nature. His blog is the type of
personal blog I enjoy the most: just an endless stream of content
spanning across an array of topics. Also, he has quite the history on
that site considering the oldest post is from 1999 but the archive
contains also content from the early to mid 90s as well as some pieces
of digital media from the 60s! That’s an eternity in the digital world.
To follow this series
subscribe
to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every
Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the
interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the
RSS feed.
Let's start from the basics: can you introduce
yourself?
I am an inveterately curious person, with a lifelong passion for words
(writing them, reading them, typesetting them, binding them together).
In the mid-1980s, after an aborted attempt at college, where I never
found my mojo, I set off on a career as a coder and a graphic designer.
I apprenticed in the composing room of a daily newsletter. I designed
posters for a modern dance company. I learned to design books. I created
database systems for apartment buildings, for a palæontologist, and for
a tire store.
When the web came along in the 1990s, I embraced it, and was part of the
very early efforts in organizing and displaying government information
to the public, along the way becoming interested in open source software
and open data, and becoming an advocate for both. Professionally, I
settled into a position maintaining the infrastructure of
Almanac.com, the website of The
Old Farmer’s Almanac, a platform that gave me great latitude to
explore whatever the web frontier of the moment was, working with a
venerable publication to help it chart its course beyond print.
About a decade ago, while continuing digital work, I started to become
interested in letterpress printing—an embrace of print in its purest
form. I run a small letterpress shop, Queen Square Press, based in a
church basement, and let my creativity take me where it leads me,
producing posters, broadsides, cards, and ephemera, mostly to scratch my
own itches.
This year, after thinking about it for a long time, I decided to step
away from digital work altogether. It was a hard decision: I’d been
working with a great team, on interesting projects, for more than 25
years. I was well-paid, in control of my own schedule. I had no
complaints. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to try
something else. What? I don’t know.
This decision to transition can, in part, be explained by my being four
years a widower, being the father of a 23 year old autistic trans woman,
and, recently, burgeoning stepfather to a delightful 12 year old, and
partner to her mother, a fascinating, creative, woman who challenges and
delights me every day. All of this change swirling around me has opened
me up and allowed me to relax into new possibilities.
What's the story behind your blog?
In 1999 I found myself writing an “about” page for my tiny web business,
then called Digital Island. I watched myself falling into familiar
“about page” tropes — “Digital Island is a leading provider of
innovative solutions for… blah blah blah…” — and thought, inspired by
early bloggers who were emerging around the time, perhaps I’d, instead,
create a place to write about myself, my interests, my work, my life. I
wrote a tiny CMS in PHP, and made
my first
post in May 1999, a simple announcement that I was changing my
company name.
I started off slowly, making only 13 posts the first year, but gradually
developed an approach, and a style, and a notion of “the kinds of things
I blog about” (travel, personal projects, my family, local businesses,
my eccentricities), to the point, almost 25 years later, where it’s
become interwoven into my emotional life, a way of organizing my
thoughts about things, of explaining things to myself by way of
explaining them to my readership.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to
blogging?
I generally write in real time: an idea occurs to me, and the idea takes
on a life of its own, gets “called to be written about,” and I try to
carve out the time to do so right away. I don’t find the process of
writing onerous; generally words flow out of me, and while I will go
back and edit the words, finessing the meaning, correcting errors, what
emerges is generally fairly close to what I wrote down in the first
place.
I write a lot of posts via email, a capability that has allowed me to
take my writing out of “sitting in front of a laptop” and, really,
anywhere I’m struck. Writing on a tiny iPhone SE isn’t the best
and most natural environment (though voice-to-text helps), but the
benefit of being able to “strike while the iron is hot” outweighs the
fussiness of the tool. These days perhaps half of what I write is on the
phone.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe
the physical space influences your creativity?
My blogging flourishes, as does my life, when I’m on the road. I love
writing about my travels, of seeing new things, meeting new people. And
so “away” is the ideal creative environment. That said, as I’ve been
remaking my days, stepping away from an office with a desk and a chair,
what “away” means can be as close as the public library or coffee shop
up the street.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your
tech stack?
After running my home-brew PHP blogging engine for many years, I
eventually migrated to using Drupal, and have been using Drupal ever
since. This was partly for professional reasons —
Almanac.com is a Drupal site, so I’ve
wanted to “eat my own dogfood” on my personal site — and partly because
I found Drupal a nice balance of canned and extendable.
My ability to blog-by-email is enabled by
Postmark, which fires a web hook
upon receiving email to a dedicated email address; the web hook fires
some custom code on my server that uses the Drupal API to create a new
post.
The site is hosted on an AWS EC2 instance, running MySQL and Apache.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would
you do anything differently?
As I’m stepping away from coding professionally, I find myself at a
crossroads: I’ve always believed deeply in owning and managing as much
of my own technology stack as possible (I only migrated away from
running my own mail server in recent memory), and I like the flexibility
of “I’ll just code up a Drupal module to do that.”
But I’m trying to spend less time at the keyboard, and things
that fascinated me at one point I now find technical drudgery, to the
point where I might go looking for a home for my writing that I don’t
need to care and feed so frequently, a place where I can just focus on
writing.
But rewinding back to the beginning, no, I don’t think I’d do anything
differently. I’ve loved my blog, and writing, for a long time; it’s part
of me.
Financial question since the web is obsessed with money: how
much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost or does it
generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising
personal blogs?
In the early days of Google Adsense
I ran ads
on the blog, and because the web was smaller, and I had a deep
archive with good organic SEO, I made good money doing so.
But I gradually became uncomfortable with my own words, often deeply
personal words, being surrounded by ads for who-knows-what, and so
eventually turned off the ads entirely, and I’ve been ad-free (and
analytics, and tracking free) ever since. I feel confident in this
decision.
I generally read other blogs with an RSS reader (currently
Readwise Reader, which I love;
formerly FreshRSS and,
like everyone else, Google Reader before that), I almost never see
advertising on blogs, so it’s opaque to me.
It costs me about $50/month to host my blog on AWS; I’ve got a
long-festering to-do list item to optimize and lower this, but it has
yet to rise to the top of the list.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth
checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing
next?
This was the 25th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed
this interview with Peter. Make sure to follow
his blog (RSS) and get in touch
with him if you have any questions.
Awesome supporters
You can support this series on
Ko-Fi and all supporters
will be listed here as well as on the
official site of the
newsletter.
NASA
extinguishes experiment about setting things on fire in space
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Saffire concludes after eight years of flaming good times
NASA has concluded its Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment (Saffire) with
a test onboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft after it departed
from the International Space Station (ISS).…
John
Boston | McD’s, Cow Rustlin’ and the Upside to Re-Electing Gascón
date: 2024-02-16, from: The Signal
Hard to believe, but up until the late 1970s, we had two sheriff’s
deputies here in Santa Clarita who worked — full-time and then some — on
the livestock rustling beat. Prior to 1965, most of the crimes
investigated on their detail were for cattle thievery. As the Santa
Clarita Valley became more yuppie-fied, cow […]
My name is Liam Miller and I am a Boy Scout in the Saugus-based Troop
228. From kindergarten through sixth grade, I attended Golden Oak
Community School in Canyon Country, along with my brother who is still
enrolled at the school. During my time there, I’ve noticed there has
never been a crossing guard keeping […]
A special unit of the Israeli Defense Force, specializing in
hostage-rescue missions, burst into a second-floor apartment in the
center of the border town of Rafah, in southern Gaza on Sunday. It was
1:49 a.m. Israel time, when this secret counter-terrorism unit
successfully secured the freedom of two Israeli men, Fernando Marman,
61, and Louis […]
Christopher
Lucero | An Endorsement of Emotive Appeal
date: 2024-02-16, from: The Signal
The Signal editorial board again moved to support one district attorney
candidate out of emotive appeal, but failed to cite the sources for all
the assessments it lays at the feet of incumbent George Gascón. That
makes their position impossible to research or to refute. How very
crafty. They even got David Hegg to sneak […]
Championship
parades likely to change in wake of shooting at Chiefs Super Bowl
celebration
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>BOSTON — With back-to-back Super Bowl victories for the hometown Chiefs, Kansas City football fans gathered for another championship parade and a second celebratory pep rally in a row. </p>
Maui
Invitational returning to Lahaina Civic Center following deadly fire in
2023
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>LAHAINA, Maui — The Maui Invitational is returning to the Lahaina Civic Center for the first time since wildfires devastated the area and killed 101 people. </p>
Judge
sets a March 25 trial for Trump’s criminal hush-money case
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>NEW YORK — Two presidential campaigns ago, Donald Trump faced a brewing sex scandal that threatened to derail his bid for the White House.</p>
<p>A 56-year-old Ka‘u man once charged as being an accomplice to the 2009 shooting death of a 21-year-old rodeo champion was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the murder.</p>
DA
denies improper relationship with special Trump prosecutor
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>A case charging former President Donald Trump and his allies with trying to subvert the 2020 election results in Georgia took a detour Thursday into the details of the prosecutors’ romantic and financial lives — their sleeping arrangements, vacations and private bank accounts — in an unusual and highly contentious hearing.</p>
Red
flags, missed clues: How accused US diplomat-turned-Cuban spy avoided
scrutiny for decades
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>MIAMI — Manuel Rocha was well known in Miami’s elite circles for an aristocratic, almost regal, bearing that seemed fitting for an Ivy League-educated career U.S. diplomat who held top posts in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and the White House. “Ambassador Rocha,” as he preferred to be called, demanded and got respect.</p>
<p>Hawaii is a special place, and it’s the people who make it a compassionate community. We show aloha for our family, friends, neighbors and even complete strangers. All of us at one time or another, have benefited from the care of others.</p>
<p>Since the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, gun safety advocates, national news outlets and public officials from city councils to the White House have repeated the claim that gun violence has overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death for school-aged children in the United States. But according to CDC data, this is only true for Black children. Even then, gun violence is more prevalent among at-risk teenagers in certain historically segregated neighborhoods.</p>
A
legal showdown on the border between the US and Texas: What to Know
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The Biden administration is suing the state of Texas over a new state law that would empower state and local police officers to arrest migrants who cross from Mexico without authorization.</p>
Trial
over lavish NRA spending nears jury, Wayne LaPierre’s lawyer calls it a
political witch hunt
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — A state’s lawyer said in closing arguments Thursday at a civil trial claiming former National Rifle Association executives wildly misspent millions of dollars on private flights, vacations and other lavish perks that the gun rights group and its ex-CEO were caught “with their hands in the cookie jar.”</p>
California
tried to ban plastic grocery bags. It didn’t work
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Almost a decade ago, California became the first state in the United States to ban single-use plastic bags in an effort to tackle an intractable plastic waste problem.</p>
Russia’s
antisatellite technology poses no immediate threat, White House
says
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — A White House spokesperson said Thursday that antisatellite technology being developed by Russia had not been deployed and posed “no immediate threat to anyone’s safety.”</p>
FBI
informant charged with lying about Joe and Hunter Biden’s ties to
Ukrainian energy company
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — An FBI informant has been charged with lying to authorities about a multimillion-dollar bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a Ukrainian energy company, a claim that is central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.</p>
Japan
slips into a recession and loses its spot as the world’s third-largest
economy
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s economy is now the world’s fourth-largest after it contracted in the last quarter of 2023 and fell behind Germany.</p>
Shooting
at Kansas City Super Bowl rally probably stemmed from argument, police
say
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Authorities in Kansas City, Missouri, said Thursday that a shooting that tore through the city’s Super Bowl celebration, killing one person and wounding nearly two dozen others, appeared to have stemmed from an argument between several people.</p>
Teenagers
shine at World Aquatics Championships as China’s Pan, American Curzan
take golds
date: 2024-02-16, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>DOHA, Qatar (AP) — China’s Pan Zhanle backed up his world record in the relays with a victory all his own Thursday, while American Claire Curzan became the first swimmer to claim two individual gold medals on a starring night for teenagers at the World Aquatics Championships. </p>
We began our New Zealand adventure in Auckland, staying at the Hilton
Auckland, sitting right on the wharf where, of all things, Princess
Cruises’ ships dock. (The ship, when docked, was less than half of a
football field from the balcony of our room. In the morning, surprise
roommates!) Both the North and the South Islands are […]
Dell
staff not alone in being squeezed to reduce remote work
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
3 in 5 workers getting strict orders to return to office and something
is going to give
If some of you think management started to tighten the screws on return
to office this year then you aren’t alone – three in five workers say
they are feeling the squeeze too.…
Offen
zugängliche Patientendaten trotz ISO 27001-Zertifizierung
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: Chaos Computer Club
Updates
Der Schutz personenbezogener Daten ist uns wichtig. Deshalb haben wir
mal wieder ein Unternehmen freundlich auf ein massives Datenleck
hingewiesen – ungeachtet der möglichen juristischen Konsequenzen durch
den Hacker-Paragraphen.
Dave’s
not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like,
arrived
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Ganja believe it? The customer couldn’t when their box went up in smoke
On CallThe Register understands that by
Friday afternoon readers may reasonably contemplate a drink or two. So
to give you something to talk about should you visit a pub in search of
such libations we therefore present a fresh instalment of On Call, the
column in which you share your stories of tech support jobs that left
you a little worse for wear.…
date: 2024-02-16, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition.
Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the
Classifieds.
Apple
makes it official: No Home Screen web apps in European Union
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
iBiz expresses regret for the impact of its entirely avoidable decision
Apple confirmed on Thursday it will not support Home Screen web apps –
commonly referred to as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) – on iOS devices in
European Union member states under its forthcoming iOS 17.4 release.…
Reading Time: 35minutes HELLO AGAIN
CONGRATULATIONS ON NOT BEING DEAD! (Presuming, of course, that you do in
fact consider continued existence to be a general positive – I’m
currently ambivalent) It’s a lovely day here in London and I would quite
like to spend at least some of it not staring into the digital abyss –
so you’re…
Paul
Giamatti Blows Us All Sideways with a Peek at Himself
date: 2024-02-16, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Award fetes
the Academy Award nominated actor with Valentine’s Day celebration of
his work.
India
seeks Artificial Wisdom and plans city-scale digital twin
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Calls for collaborators willing to play buzzword bingo on project – 5G,
IoT, AI, AR/VR, blockhain, Web3, and plenty more besides
India’s government has created a project it hopes will result in
creation of a city-scale digital twin to help the nation improve future
urban planning.…
Russia
Highly Unlikely to Put Nuclear Warhead in Space, Analysts Say
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
washington — The space-based weapon U.S. intelligence believes Russia
may be developing is more likely a nuclear-powered device to blind, jam
or fry the electronics inside satellites than an explosive nuclear
warhead to shoot them down, analysts said on Thursday.
The intelligence came to light on Wednesday after Representative Mike
Turner, Republican chair of the U.S. House of Representatives
intelligence committee, issued an unusual statement warning of a
“serious national security threat.”
A source briefed on the matter told Reuters that Washington had new
intelligence related to Russian nuclear capabilities and attempts to
develop a space-based weapon, but added that the new Russian
capabilities did not pose an urgent threat to the United States. U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed this view on Thursday, saying
“this is not an active capability.”
Analysts tracking Russia’s space programs say the space threat is
probably not a nuclear warhead but rather a high-powered device
requiring nuclear energy to carry out an array of attacks against
satellites.
These might include signal-jammers, weapons that can blind image
sensors, or – a more dire possibility – electromagnetic pulses (EMPs)
that could fry all satellites’ electronics within a certain orbital
region.
“That Russia is developing a system powered by a nuclear source …
that has electronic warfare capabilities once in orbit is more likely
than the theory that Russia is developing a weapon that carries a
nuclear explosive warhead,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of
the Arms Control Association advocacy group.
A 2023 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report said Russia is
developing an array of weapons designed to target individual satellites
and may also be developing “higher-power systems that extend the threat
to the structures of all satellites.”
The Kremlin on Thursday dismissed a warning by the United States
about Moscow’s new nuclear capabilities in space, calling it a
“malicious fabrication.”
The nuclear threat
Non-nuclear anti-satellite weapons have existed for years.
Russia in 2021 followed the United States, China and India by testing
a destructive anti-satellite missile on one of its old satellites,
blasting it to thousands of pieces that remain in Earth’s orbit.
Exploding a nuclear weapon in space would be another matter
entirely.
Brian Weeden, an analyst at the Secure World Foundation, said Russia
would undermine its credibility if it detonated a nuclear weapon in
space, a possibility with profound implications for both military and
commercial satellites.
“The Russians have spent 40 years in the U.N. bashing America about
wanting to weaponize space, and place weapons in space and pledging that
they would never do it,” Weeden said.
“If they do [detonate a nuclear device in space], they’d lose
everything. All the countries that are supporting them on Ukraine and
getting around sanctions, boom,” he added.
James Acton, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace think tank, said for Russia to put a nuclear weapon
in orbit would be a “blatant violation of the Outer Space Treaty.”
The 1967 treaty, to which the United States and Russia are parties,
bars signatories from placing “in orbit around the earth any objects
carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass
destruction.”
Violating the treaty, Acton said, would further undercut efforts to
revive U.S.-Russian arms control after Russia’s 2023 decision to suspend
participation in the New START treaty, which caps the number of
strategic nuclear warheads each can deploy.
Analysts said anti-satellite weapons could cripple military and
commercial communications, undermining the armed forces’ ability to
operate as well as global positioning systems (GPS) that everyone from
Uber drivers to food delivery services use.
“The Russians think we’re blind if we don’t have access to our
satellites and it’s probably true,” said a former U.S. intelligence
official. “Our ability to rely on satellites is a major advantage in a
potential confrontation but also a major vulnerability.”
US
Sees No ‘Imminent’ War by North Korea Despite Dangerous Activities
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
The State Department — The United States does not see signs of an
“imminent” war by North Korea despite “incredibly dangerous” activities
in recent months and its refusal to engage in diplomatic talks with the
U.S., a top U.S. official told reporters Thursday.
Jung Pak, the State Department’s senior official in charge of North
Korea affairs, said U.S. officials “are always watchful for any kind of
activity” by Pyongyang and will continue to work with Japan and South
Korea to bolster extended deterrence, aiming to shape North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un’s “calculus” regarding the initiation of direct
military action.
“Fundamentally, I don’t think Kim’s posture has changed. We don’t see
any signals of any direct action, military action,” Pak said.
“I don’t see an imminent or direct attack at this point,” she
said.
Earlier this week, North Korea carried out its fifth cruise missile
launch of the year, which came just days ahead of a joint U.S.-Japan
missile defense training exercise scheduled for next week.
In Tokyo, a Japanese official issued a cautionary statement regarding
North Korea’s escalating capabilities.
“By launching missiles from various platforms such as submarines and
vehicle-mounted launch pads, we believe North Korea is making it
difficult to identify and detect signs [of its activities] to strengthen
its surprise attack capabilities,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa
Hayashi told a Thursday press conference.
Last month, Pyongyang said it test-fired a solid-fuel
intermediate-range missile, equipped with a hypersonic warhead, into
waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
State Department official Pak said the U.S. estimated there were 69
ballistic missile tests by North Korea in 2022, and 30 ballistic missile
tests last year.
India
won’t become a semiconductor superpower anytime soon, says think
tank
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
$10 billion subsidies predicted to deliver just five modest fabs by 2029
India’s drive to become a semiconductor superpower is likely to result
in the creation of just five chip fabs by the year 2029, and the most
sophisticated output from those facilities will be chips built on a 28nm
process, according to US think tank the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation (ITIF).…
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick
Charge is available now
on Apple
Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and
our RSS feed for Overcast
and other podcast players.
West Ranch
girls’ basketball advances to CIF semis
date: 2024-02-16, from: The Signal
The historic run isn’t over yet in Stevenson Ranch. Another strong
defensive performance powered West Ranch girls’ basketball to victory as
the Wildcats beat the Immaculate Heart Pandas, 51-36, in the CIF
Division 4A quarterfinal matchup at L.A. City College. West Ranch led
by just two at halftime but an 8-0 run in the third […]
Trinity Knights boys’ basketball had its CIF playoff run end in the
quarterfinals on Tuesday. The top-seeded El Segundo Eagles took down
the Knights, 66-52, in the CIF Division 5AA quarterfinals. The Eagles
(22-9) had more height and length with some solid outside shooters,
giving the Knights (23-8) a tough assignment on defense. El Segundo […]
Hart Indians girls’ soccer saw its tremendous season end on Wednesday.
The Indians were dropped from the CIF Division 1 quarterfinals at home
by the Roosevelt Mustangs in a game that quickly got away from Hart.
Roosevelt won the match, 4-1, despite not scoring until midway through
the second half. The scoring frenzy snowballed against […]
Trump-Biden
NATO Spat Reflects Divide on America’s Role Worldwide
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
President Donald Trump revisited on Thursday his remarks that if
elected, he would not defend NATO members who don’t meet defense
spending targets — more evidence of how two American presidents and
their constituents are divided over America’s role in the world. White
House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
date: 2024-02-16, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) canceled tomorrow’s votes and
sent the House of Representatives into recess until February 28. Before
recessing, Johnson refused to take up the national security supplemental
bill the Senate passed early Tuesday morning, providing aid for Ukraine,
Israel, and Taiwan and humanitarian aid for Gaza. Johnson said the House
must “work its own will” rather than vote on the bill at hand because
the measure did not include border security measures.
@Jessica
Smith’s blog (date: 2024-02-16, from: Jessica Smith’s blog)
I wish there was a federated, ActivityPub-based LiveJournal. I know
there’s stuff like
write.as
but it’s not really what I’m envisioning. What I basically want is a
blog, where I can make occasional friends-only posts
(not private or password-protected posts), and take
advantage of ActivityPub for authenticating my friends. A
Dreamwidth-like distinction between true “friends” and more distant
“subscribers” wouldn’t go amiss, either. And “access list” posting, if
you only want certain subsets of your friends to see.
Maybe this is something for which one could look to
Bonfire?
I mean, its ideas about “Circles” are pretty similar to what I’m
thinking of. It’s still a bit more “social media” and less
“journal/blog” than I’m thinking, but I guess this blog is already like
that anyway… 😅 Maybe I should make an account on their test instance
and play around.
CSUN
baseball looks to utilize last season’s momentum to chase 2024 Big West
crown
date: 2024-02-16, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
As the weather warms up and CSUN winter sports come to an end,
America’s favorite pastime returns to the Valley. On Friday, Feb. 16,
CSUN baseball takes on visiting Utah…
UCLA Health experts will be hosting a Demystifying Cancer event on
Thursday, April 18, from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Santa Clarita
Performing Arts Center at College of the Canyons. The discussion will
demystify and debunk misconceptions regarding the meaning of a cancer
diagnosis, as well as notify attendees of any “world-class treatment […]
US
Confirms Russia Pursuing ‘Space-Based’ Anti-Satellite System
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The new national security threat that sent some in
Washington into a tizzy and sparked calls urging Americans not to panic,
is a new Russian anti-satellite capability, the White House confirmed
Thursday, again emphasizing there is no immediate threat to life or
limb.
White House National Security spokesperson John Kirby declined to go
into details about the emerging Russian capability but said that U.S.
intelligence agencies have been tracking Russia’s pursuit of such
systems for a while, and that Washington has been reaching out to allies
on next steps.
“This is not an active capability that’s been deployed,” Kirby told
reporters. “And though Russia’s pursuit of this particular capability is
troubling, there is no immediate threat to anyone’s safety.”
“We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human
beings or cause physical destruction here on Earth,” he added.
The explanation, and the effort to reassure the public, came just
more than 24 hours after a leading U.S. lawmaker took to social media,
demanding U.S. President Joe Biden declassify intelligence so the
American public and U.S. allies could formulate a response.
Republican Representative Mike Turner, chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, issued a statement Wednesday warning of “a
serious national security threat.”
“I am requesting that President Biden declassify all information
relating to this threat so that Congress, the Administration, and our
allies can openly discuss the actions necessary to respond,” Turner
added.
But both the White House and Pentagon on Thursday downplayed the need
for that type of urgency, while conceding the Russian advancement is
cause for concern.
“We’re taking this potential threat very, very seriously,” Kirby
said, adding that U.S. intelligence agencies have been aware of Moscow’s
pursuit of what he described as a “space-based” anti-satellite
capability for “many, many months, if not a few years.”
“But only in recent weeks now has the intelligence community been
able to assess with a higher sense of confidence exactly how Russia
continues to pursue it,” he said.
U.S. defense officials, likewise, emphasized the emerging Russian
capability does not come as a surprise.
“We are tracking what this is,” said Pentagon press secretary Major
General Pat Ryder.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “is part of the national security
team that’s been briefing the president,” Ryder told reporters, adding
that there is still a gap between Russia’s ambitions in space and what
it is currently capable of doing.
“It’s not an immediate threat. It’s not an active capability. It has
not been deployed,” he said.
For its part, Russia on Thursday dismissed the U.S. allegations about
an anti-satellite capability as a “malicious fabrication.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accused Washington of engaging in
a ruse to get U.S. lawmakers to spend more funds.
“It is obvious that the White House is trying, by hook or by crook,
to encourage Congress to vote on a bill to allocate money, this is
obvious,” Peskov told reporters in Moscow.
Despite some consternation among some White House officials and
members of Congress about the way the public was alerted to the threat,
there is general agreement in the U.S. that the danger is real.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative
Jim Himes, said Wednesday the threat is “a significant one.” And the
leading Democrat and top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee
noted they have been tracking developments “rigorously,” describing the
matter as serious.
Some arms control experts warn that the ramifications of a new
Russian anti-satellite capability could be far-reaching.
“This would affect the global economy, the society writ large,” said
Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association.
“China would be deeply concerned. India would be extremely concerned
— countries that Russia has better relationships with than they do with
us,” Kimball told VOA. “So, I think there would be stinging rebuke. That
might be enough to encourage Russia to back down.”
U.S. intelligence agencies have been warning for years that Russia
and China have been pursuing “a full range of anti-satellite weapons,”
noting that the development and use of such systems “could degrade U.S.
intelligence gathering abilities.”
One of the most recent declassified U.S. intelligence assessments
warned that Moscow continues to “field new anti-satellite weapons to
disrupt and degrade U.S. and allied space capabilities.”
Russia “is developing, testing, and fielding an array of
nondestructive and destructive counterspace weapons — including jamming
and cyberspace capabilities, directed energy weapons, on-orbit
capabilities, and ground-based ASAT [anti-satellite] capabilities,” the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in its 2023
Worldwide Threat Assessment report.
But U.S. officials appear to acknowledge that the new Russian
capability takes those ambitions a step further.
The NSC’s Kirby, while briefing reporters at the White House, said
the capability the Kremlin is pursuing “would be a violation of the
Outer Space Treaty to which more than 130 countries have signed up,
including Russia.”
That treaty, which entered into force in 1967, prohibits nations from
placing into space “any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other
kinds of weapons of mass destruction,” and further bans the installation
of such weapons on celestial bodies.
For now, Kirby says the White House intends to keep most of the
information classified, while working with allies on how to respond.
He said the U.S. has also reached out to Moscow, though there have
yet to be any real conversations on Russia’s attempts to achieve the new
space-based anti-satellite capability.
As for the U.S. lawmaker who ignited the initial clamor, he said
after being briefed by top White House, Pentagon and intelligence
officials late Thursday that he is satisfied, for now, with the U.S.
approach.
“We all came away with a very strong impression that the
administration is taking this very seriously and that the administration
has a plan in place,” Turner said. “We look forward to supporting them
as they go to implement it.”
Still, top U.S. officials warned of a possible fallout from Turner’s
decision to take his concerns public, saying that intelligence agency
sources and methods may have been compromised.
“We’re asking ourselves that very question right now,” said Kirby.
“We’re working our way through that analysis right now with the
intelligence community.”
Some information in the report came from Reuters.
VOA’s Katherine Gypson and Anita Powell contributed to this
report.
It’s ridiculous for the CEO of Xbox to argue that iOS should have
similar rules and policies to Windows, when Xbox — another platform from
the same company — has rules that are, if anything, more
restrictive and exclusive than iOS.
Top
White House Asia Aide Moves to State Department as US-China Challenges
Heat Up
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
washington — The Biden administration is now focusing on implementing
its goals for the Indo-Pacific, said analysts, as a White House
strategist who initiated policies for the region moves to the State
Department.
Kurt Campbell, who served as Indo-Pacific coordinator for the White
House National Security Council, initiated strategies that moved allies
and partners to cooperate on challenges across the region, from
counterbalancing China’s rise to offsetting North Korea’s threats. He is
going to a new position at the State Department.
He takes on the role of the deputy secretary of state, a position
vacant since July when Wendy Sherman retired. The Senate confirmed
Campbell on February 6 after President Joe Biden nominated him for the
position in November.
Campbell’s position as the Indo-Pacific coordinator will be left
unfilled, the Financial Times reported on February 6. Experts said that
if the Biden administration did not fill the Indo-Pacific position, it
would be a signal that Washington was now focusing on implementing the
strategies Campbell set in place.
“Important initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific strategy and the Camp
David summit are among the results of the decision by the incoming Biden
administration to create a brand-new position of Indo-Pacific
coordinator,” said Daniel Russel, who served as the assistant secretary
of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs during the Obama
administration.
“Now that those and other initiatives have been launched and that
interagency coordination on Indo-Pacific policy has matured, the
administration’s challenge is in implementation and the need for a
‘coordinator’ in the White House has diminished,” Russel said Tuesday
via email. He is the vice president for International Security and
Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Biden appointed Campbell as the White House Indo-Pacific coordinator
in January 2021. Creation of the position came amid China’s increasing
assertiveness in the region.
Campbell was instrumental in bringing together South Korea and Japan
for a summit with the U.S. at Camp David in August. The two moved beyond
their historical animosity and agreed to work together against China’s
regional aggression and North Korea’s missile launches.
Campbell led the inaugural meeting of the Nuclear Consultative Group
held in July in Seoul to strengthen the bilateral alliance and reassure
South Korea of U.S. nuclear deterrence in the region.
He also revamped the informal transregional agreement known as the
QUAD among Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. in March 2021 and played
a key role in creating a trilateral security partnership among
Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., or AUKUS, in September 2021. China
views both as security ties threatening its rise to dominance in the
region.
Patrick Cronin, the Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson
Institute, said via email on Tuesday that Campbell’s “central role over
the past three years in defining strategies to compete [with], cooperate
[with], and confront China marks a clear path for engaging allies and
partners, dealing with China, and helping the U.S. negotiate from
strength.”
Cronin continued, “His absence as Indo-Pacific coordinator will be
significantly mitigated by his presence at the State [Department] and
the outstanding team he has left at the White House to help carry out a
vision he helped to mold.”
But concerns remain about the unfilled position for a region fraught
with rising threats from North Korea and coercive moves by China,
according to some analysts.
Dennis Wilder, senior director for East Asia at the White House’s
National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, said
via email, “The Biden administration should reconsider its decision not
to keep the position at a time when there is so much uncertainty about
North Korea and China’s intentions.”
North Korea’s state media KCNA said on Thursday that the country
tested new surface-to-sea missiles under the supervision of leader Kim
Jong Un the day before. It was the regime’s fifth cruise missile test
this year as Pyongyang threatens to take more aggressive moves against
South Korea.
China continues to antagonize its neighbors in South China Sea with
maritime maneuvers to assert its claim of sovereignty over disputed
territories.
Aside from security issues, Wilder, currently a senior fellow for the
Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown
University, said, “A major priority left undone in the Biden
Indo-Pacific strategy is trade policy.”
Wilder said via email on Wednesday, “The IPEF [Indo-Pacific
Framework] attempt to deal with this issue is stalled by congressional
resistance because of concerns over the labor, human rights and climate
change policies of partner nations. The administration must find a way
to balance the robust security alliances and partnerships with an
equally effective set of regional economic policies.”
The IPEF includes four pillars: trade; supply chains; clean energy,
decarbonization and infrastructure; and tax and anti-corruption. Biden
launched the IPEF in Tokyo in May 2022 to set up sustainable common
standards among countries in the region. The IPEF partners including
South Korea and Japan account for 40% of the global economy.
China, not an IPEF member, perceives it as an ineffective effort to
reduce its economic influence. He Weiwen, a senior fellow at the Center
for China and Globalization, told the official Global Times in 2023,
“The IPEF is neither a trade agreement nor an economic community. It’s
just a framework, meaning that it will have no real efficacy.”
Russia
Developing ‘Anti-Satellite Capability,’ White House Confirms
date: 2024-02-16, from: VOA News USA
Russia is developing an anti-satellite weapon, the White House
confirmed Thursday, after a lawmaker sounded an alarm over what he
described as a serious national security threat. While White House
officials say it could land Moscow in violation of a treaty banning
weapons of mass destruction in space. They said it is not an urgent
threat, and urged Americans not to panic, as lawmakers met behind closed
doors to discuss the issue. Anita Powell reports from Washington.
Quest
Diagnostics pays $5M after mixing patient medical data with hazardous
waste
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Will cough up less than two days of annual profit in settlement – and
California calls this a win
Quest Diagnostics has agreed to pay almost $5 million to settle
allegations it illegally dumped protected health information – and
hazardous waste – at its facilities across California.…
Santa Clarita City Council members unanimously approved a staff
recommendation to assume the design of a bridge for Vista Canyon, a
mixed-use transit-friendly development on the east side of town. During
the discussion Tuesday before the City Council, City Manager Ken
Striplin, who’s been with the city since 1996, acknowledged he couldn’t
recall a precedent […]
Cameron Smyth
| A Journey Through the Silver Screen
date: 2024-02-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Dating back to the early 20th century, Santa Clarita has stood as a
favored filming destination with silent movie productions seeking the
region’s scenic backdrop for their films. The vast expanses of rugged
mountains, sprawling ranches and iconic canyons provided filmmakers with
a versatile canvas for their storytelling. Stars such as Charlie
Chaplin, Harry Carey and William S. Hart were among the first to be
featured in films that showcased Santa Clarita’s captivating scenery
Rat
Poison Bill Ramps Up Restrictions, Allows Public Enforcement
date: 2024-02-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
A bill introduced in the California Legislature would further
restrict the use of rat poison and allow members of the public to sue
over illegal use and sale of rodenticides in the state
X
accused of taking money from terrorists by selling checkmarks to US
enemies
date: 2024-02-16, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Premium punters in the illustrious company of Hezbollah, Iranian
militias, sanctioned Russian banks
Elon Musk’s X has been accused of flouting US sanctions by providing
verified accounts to individuals and entities affiliated with Hezbollah,
Iran, Russia, Houthi rebels, and other personae non gratae.…
Cota Gets
500th Career Win in Extra Innings Walk-Off
date: 2024-02-16, from: SCV New (TV Station)
College of the Canyons Baseball battled with visiting Cosumnes River
College for the better part of 12 innings before Frankie Malagon
delivered a pinch hit, RBI-sacrifice fly that put the Cougars ahead 2-1
and gave head coach Chris Cota his 500th career win
College of the Canyons Men’s Golf played its way to victory at the
first Western State Conference tournament of the season hosted by
Ventura College at River Ridge Golf Course.
date: 2024-02-16, from: John Naughton’s online diary
Rory Rory Cellan-Jones has been one of my favourite journalists ever
since I was the Observer’s TV critic in the 1980s and 1990s. On
Wednesday afternoon he was in Cambridge at his alma mater Jesus College,
and when we were …
Continue
reading →
Endorsements
for the March 5, 2024, Presidential Primary Election
date: 2024-02-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Here are the ’Santa Barbara Independent’s picks for U.S. president and
24th Congressional District, State Assembly and Senate, and Santa
Barbara County Board of Supervisors.
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The CSUN art department hosted the Faculty Art Gallery on Feb. 1 at
the Art and Design Center. The main gallery was filled with artwork from
different backgrounds created by…
AI. It’s the talk of the town (or at least this year, that is). I’ve
been in dozens of conversations about AI in recent days. The likelihood
that the next big feature or product I build involves AI seems to be
going up. No idea where it’s all headed – and reserve the right to
change my mind – but a dozen conversations leaves me with a dozen or so
disparate thoughts about this new frontier of technology.
Can you spot the difference between these two images?
I mean, if I had $7 trillion dollars and access to free energy I could
probably do some neat things too.
Is non-deterministic search really what we want?
In a world where our social fabric is being torn by “alternative facts”
and online bubbles, do we want to yield finding answers over to a
machine known for making things up and is often wrong? Do your customers
want this?
People creating projects in the AI space look like they’re having fun. I
cynically wonder if it’s fun because there’s freedom in low expectations
when
you yield result quality to the outputs of a black box. O to be a
novel new technology!
When AI autocompletes code I’m familiar with but don’t have loaded in my
brain RAM, I love it. When AI writes boilerplate-laden tests for me and
I can get back to the more fun building part but with more test
coverage, I love it. When AI enables me to maintain flow, it’s magical.
But when I’m fighting the machine, guessing which mystery word combo
unlocks the functionality I want… Ughck.
Am I bad at prompt engineering? Is that why I don’t “get it”? I can
never quite craft the right query to match what I see in my imagination.
Am I asking the wrong questions or getting the wrong answers? Am I
creating too high of a standard? Weird I’d even consider putting the
blame on myself.
A friend of mine told me how he used ChatGPT to answer questions in
realtime during a job interview. As a hiring manager, I’d be appalled.
As a friend, I thought “Do what you gotta do.”
I think he got the job.
AI seems genuinely helpful for automating tedious tasks. For example,
image background removal. That was painstaking and I don’t think anyone
misses that part of their job anymore.
Another –and quite possibly my favorite– example of task automation is a
story from Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse.
In
a video by Wired, Josh Beveridge, the Head of Character Animation
explains how they used machine learning to automate some of the linework
to help the characters could come to life. It’s important to note this
was artist informed and artist corrected…
All of that technology was in the service of allowing artists more
freedom to do things by hand and it all became part of this hand-crafted
feel.
Eliminating tedious work seems worthwhile. Humans getting to do more of
the fun stuff. That famous “augmented work” everyone talks about.
But what is considered tedious? Email? Writing documentation? Blogging?
Design? Making music? Hiring? Working with junior developers? How come
management never comes up in these conversations? Oof.
Alex Riviere recently wrote
“Why
I find LLMs Frustrating” where he highlights the duality of LLMs;
how it’s bullshitting can be harmful but also useful for
self-expression. Alex is finding success in tools like
Brainstory to help craft a
narrative and “format things in a way others will understand.”
As someone who hates being misunderstood and often smashes a dozen
disparate ideas together (e.g., this post), I could benefit from a tool
like that. As a tool for busy brains where the brain “goes faster than
my fingers can write”, AI seems useful.
Attempting to
predict
the traffic jam, I worry automating accessibility would give way to
a libertarian mindset where accessible technology is an individual’s
concern, not an everybody responsibility and what externalities we do
have in making accessible websites will go away. We already see this
with overlay companies. Rather than fix issues at the source, we put the
onus on the disabled person to figure out how to use a
dongle
so they can buy underwear on the internet. That’s inequity.
At the same time, I want people to have tools to be able to fix their
issues. People should be able to increase their own access if the
designers and developers did a bad job.
“Hey Siri, I’m red-green colorblind, can you automatically fix every
website for me” “Hey Siri, label this form because someone did a
bad job” “Hey Siri, describe this chart”
I often think about my dyslexic daughter. My hope for her is that she
learns to love learning because the US education system built on
standardized tests and long form reading and writing is not conducive to
how her brain naturally functions. Why shouldn’t she be able to use AI
to summarize and expand text to level that playing field?
As a parent, this is tough to navigate. There’s a line, a tipping point,
between tailored learning (using ChatGPT to help with an essay) and not
learning anything at all (having ChatGPT write the essay). Does learning
require a certain amount of struggle? What’s the long term impact of
copy-pasting non-deterministic generated text?
Maybe we need a new fairy
tale about a
kid who lets a witch’s robot do all their chores and then the kid gets
eaten up by the witch.
About AI making you more productive… here’s my grand conclusion after
years of productivity chasing: Productivity is for you, not them.
If applying productivity hacks to your job benefits you, then do it. If
you are more productive and don’t see monetary or “timeback” rewards or
(more insidiously) you need to be more productive to keep your current
job… we need to pause and take a macro perspective.
From 1970 to 2018, the share of aggregate income going to middle-class
households fell from 62% to 43%. Over the same period, the share held by
upper-income households increased from 29% to 48%.
Weird, huh? Money magically rolls uphill. Consider not contributing to
this gap. But if you need to feel productive, I want you to
have it.
The nuance I’m weaving is this…
AI as a tool to empower humans is admirable, but it doesn’t fix broken
systems. If anything it exacerbates any inequalities built into existing
systems. We should be careful about what we build and where we deploy
any technology, lest we cause actual harm or build new high tech
for-profit prisons around ourselves.
Join hosts Carl and Terry Kanowsky for a very special evening with
Pisoni Family Vineyards at Salt Creek Grille on Tuesday, March 5 at 6
p.m. The wine tasting is a special fundraiser to benefit the Boys and
Girls Club of Santa Clarita Valley
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
The room buzzes with excitement and anticipation as guests enter
CSUN’s West Gallery on a rainy Thursday, Feb. 2, for the reception of
the “Latinx Roots, American Sacrifices” exhibition. The…
Apple
Vision Pro units returned as folks just can’t see themselves using
it
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Headaches, eyestrain, lack of killer apps cited as some seek refunds
The 14-day return-for-full-refund-no-questions-asked deadline for early
adopters of Apple’s Vision Pro “spatial computing” headset is
approaching, and some buyers are openly sharing their decision to return
the $3,499 device.…
ChamberFest
2024 brings students and musicians together
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
CSUN Chamberfest was held from Feb. 1 to Feb. 3 at the Shigemi
Matsumoto Recital Hall. This event was headed by Lorenz Gamma, the
director of the chamber music program…
NASA
Welcomes Uruguay Foreign Minister for Artemis Accords Signing
date: 2024-02-15, from: NASA breaking news
During a ceremony at NASA Headquarters in Washington Thursday,
Uruguay became the 36th country to sign the Artemis Accords. NASA
Administrator Bill Nelson participated in the signing ceremony for the
agency, and Omar Paganini, foreign minister, signed the Artemis Accords
on behalf of Uruguay. The accords establish a practical set of
principles to guide space […]
FBI
Informant Charged With Lying About the Bidens’ Ties to Ukrainian Energy
Company
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
washington — An FBI informant has been charged with lying to his
handler about ties between President Joe Biden, his son Hunter and a
Ukrainian energy company.
Alexander Smirnov falsely told FBI agents in June 2020 that
executives associated with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid
Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each in 2015 or 2016, prosecutors said
Thursday.
Smirnov told the FBI that a Burisma executive had claimed to have
hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of
problems,” prosecutors said.
The allegations became a flashpoint in Congress last summer as
Republicans demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the
allegations as they pursued investigations of Biden and his family. They
acknowledged at the time that it was unclear if the allegations were
true.
Prosecutors say that though Smirnov claimed to have had contact with
Burisma executives near the end of the Obama administration, it actually
took place after Obama and Biden had left office, when Biden would have
had no ability to influence U.S. policy.
“In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary
business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery
allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of
the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias
against Public Official 1 and his candidacy,” the indictment said.
He repeated some of the false claims when he was interviewed by FBI
agents in September 2023 and changed his story about others and
“promoted a new false narrative after he said he met with Russian
officials,” prosecutors said.
Smirnov, 43, was indicted on charges of making a false statement and
creating a false and fictitious record. No attorney was immediately
listed for him in court records. He was expected to make his first court
appearance in Las Vegas, where he was arrested Wednesday after arriving
from overseas, prosecutors said.
If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
The charges were filed by Justice Department special counsel David
Wiess, who has separately charged Hunter Biden with firearm and tax
violations.
US
Will ‘Respect’ Indonesian Vote Results, White House Says
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
white house — The White House said Thursday that it would accept the
results of Indonesia’s presidential election in which Prabowo Subianto,
a former army general who for more than a decade was banned from
entering the United States because of allegations linked to human rights
abuses, has claimed victory.
“We’ll make our congratulations known at the appropriate time. I
couldn’t give you a date certain or time certain for that because I
understand that the results are still coming in,” John Kirby, national
security communications adviser, said to VOA during a White House
briefing. “We will respect the vote and the voice of the Indonesian
people.”
Preliminary counts from several survey institutions showed that
Prabowo, who like most Indonesians goes by his first name, outperformed
rivals Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, securing more than 50% of
votes — the threshold to avoid a runoff election.
The official tally from the General Election Commission is set to be
released next month. But Prabowo has claimed that he’s won, telling
thousands of his supporters in the capital, Jakarta, that this was “the
victory of all Indonesians.”
In 2020, the Trump administration dropped the de facto ban on
Prabowo’s entry into the United States that was imposed over accusations
of human rights abuses, including the abduction and torture of
pro-democracy activists during the 1998 ouster of his then-
father-in-law, President Suharto, and involvement with military crimes
in East Timor.
Prabowo denies the allegations and has never been formally
charged.
Pressed by VOA on whether the Biden administration was comfortable
with Prabowo’s track record, Kirby underscored that human rights have
been “the very foundation” of Biden’s foreign policy.
“There’s not a conversation he has anywhere in the world with foreign
leaders where he’s not raising issues and concerns about human rights
and civil rights,” he said. “That’s not going to change.”
Prabowo has promised to continue the widely popular policies of
outgoing President Joko Widodo. Jokowi, as he is often called, governed
with an “economy-first” modernization agenda that has brought rapid
gross domestic product growth, ushering Indonesia, the world’s fourth
most populous country, into the ranks of middle-income countries.
Jokowi defeated Prabowo in previous elections, but this year signaled
support for his former rival through his eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming
Raka, 36, who ran with Prabowo as vice president.
Gibran was able to join Prabowo’s ticket only after the country’s
constitutional court created an exception to a rule that candidates must
be at least 40 years old. That fueled criticism that Jokowi was trying
to create a political dynasty in the world’s third-largest
democracy.
Those concerns will largely be overlooked by Washington, considering
Indonesia’s pivotal role in the U.S. geopolitical contest for influence
with China and international efforts to mitigate climate change.
Indonesia is the biggest exporter of coal and claims the world’s biggest
reserves of nickel, a key component of electric car batteries.
“If the results show a Prabowo victory next month, then I would
expect the U.S. to treat Minister Prabowo the same way that it treated
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after he was elected in 2014,
waiving any remaining restrictions on engagement with him,” Aaron
Connelly, research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic
Studies, told VOA.
Biden welcomed Modi for a glitzy state visit at the White House last
year. The president’s embrace of the autocratic-leaning Hindu
nationalist, whose government has overseen a crackdown on press freedom
and opposition leaders, has been criticized by lawmakers and activists
who say the administration is prioritizing geopolitical expediency over
human rights.
Just as with India, which Washington sees as a counterweight to
China, the United States is keen to foster closer ties with Indonesia,
home to the largest Muslim population in the world and an important
voice of the Global South.
For months, Jakarta and Washington have been discussing a potential
minerals partnership aimed at facilitating nickel trade. Indonesia’s
nickel mining and refining industry has been largely dependent on
investment from Chinese companies and besieged by environmental
concerns, hence limiting its access to the U.S. market.
I have been away visiting my parents in Delhi, India. I went not only
to check in on their health, but also to get a chance to celebrate their
sixty years together, along with my siblings. It was a short, packed
trip. I got to spend time not only with my parents and my siblings,
…
LineageOS
21 released (Custom ROM based on Android 14)
date: 2024-02-15, from: Liliputing
The first developer preview build of Android 15 is expected to drop
soon, but the next major version of Android isn’t expected to hit stable
channels until this fall. Meanwhile, device makers are just starting to
ship phones with Android 14, which was released a few months ago. And
the independent developers behind LineageOS have […]
Chevy
Blazer EV sales are still halted as GM looks to get back on track
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
Those looking to get their hands on GM’s highly anticipated Chevy Blazer
EV may have to wait even longer. Sales of the new
Chevy Blazer
EV are still paused as GM looks to overcome software glitches
setting the automaker back.
MAGA
Republicans Have a 920-Page Plan to Make Climate Change Worse. Here’s
What It Says.
date: 2024-02-15, from: Heatmap News
When former President Donald Trump exited the Oval Office in January
2021, he left behind a record of environmental rollbacks
unrivaled
in modern U.S. history. Over his 1,461 days as commander-in-chief,
Trump replaced, eliminated, or otherwise dismantled
more
than 100 environmental rules —
at
least — from repealing the Clean Air Act to allowing coal plants to
dump toxic wastewater into lakes and rivers to declaring open season on
endangered gray wolves.
President Joe Biden then rolled back most of the rollbacks, largely
before their full impacts could be felt, which is why
some
experts say the most significant climate consequence of Trump’s
presidency was actually the loss of four years that could have moved the
green transition forward.
Had all Trump’s policies gone into effect, the nonpartisan Rhodium Group
estimated at the end of 2020, they would have added an additional 1.8
gigatons of CO2-equivalent to the atmosphere by 2035 —
more
than the annual energy emissions of Germany, Britain, and Canada
combined. But even though we never felt the full brunt of them, the
medical journal The Lancet estimated that the policies
undertaken during his presidency were responsible for
22,000
deaths in 2019 alone due to sharp increases in things like asthma,
heart disease, and lung cancer.
Now Trump is once again the presumed Republican nominee and currently
leads Biden in
general
election polls. Were he to win, he has a ready roadmap for building
on his dubious environmental legacy:
Project
2025, a 920-page document developed by the right wing think tank The
Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 isn’t just a climate plan, or course — it’s a comprehensive
proposal, covering everything from immigration to abortion, education,
pornography,
and
child
labor. Though billed as a “presidential transition project,” its
wishlist includes numerous actions that would require Republican control
of both chambers of Congress (admittedly
possible,
though currently looking like a
longshot)
to enact. Undaunted, the document sets its sights on the Inflation
Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark climate legislation, which — since the
U.S. is the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter — is
all
but necessary to keep the planet off the path to
1.5
degrees Celcius.
Here is how, precisely, Project 2025 aims to gut the IRA, shrink
environmental protections, and slow forward momentum on climate change.
It will turn ‘climate’ into a meaningless culture war
“‘Cheap grace’ aptly describes the Left’s love affair with
environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies
environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable.
It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize
liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of
environmental virtue … They would stand human affairs on their head,
regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be
sacrificed to the god of nature.”
Republicans have cannily turned “climate” into
another
culture war buzzword. As with
Critical
Race Theory before it, this rhetoric strategy divorces the climate
movement from what it actually is — a disparate and diverse
constellation of ideas for how to move forward in the face of the
reality of human-driven global warming — and flattens it into a
boogeyman that voters can easily dismiss. Rather than allow for honest
debate over the
upsides
and drawbacks of LNG or of preserving ecosystems versus
quickly
building out renewables, the effect is to shut down any and all
conversation before it can even start.
Project 2025 both outlines and embodies this strategy. In the foreword,
Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts bafflingly characterizes
climate as a “pseudo-religion”; elsewhere in the document, “climate
extremism” is often lumped alongside “abortion, gender radicalism … and
other woke ideas.”
For good measure, the Project 2025 playbook also uses religious
metaphors to code any concern about the environment as being
morally wrong
or
even evil. Republicans have already picked up on this cue: “We
should not be bending the knee to this new religion … We are flogging
ourselves and losing our modern way of life bowing to this new god of
climate,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
argued
during a Republican presidential debate last year.
It will use science to create weapons of war — and basically nothing
else
“The National Labs have been too focused on climate change and
renewable technologies. American science dominance is critical to U.S.
national security and economic strength.”
As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration
channeled
$1.5 billion to the Department of Energy’s national laboratories for
“innovative research in clean technologies” and “advancing U.S. energy
security.” This has been essential for
“de-risking”
the otherwise prohibitively expensive technological advancements
necessary
for reaching net zero.
Project 2025, naturally, wants none of that: “The three National Labs
run by DOE’s [National Nuclear Security Administration] should continue
to focus on national security issues,” Bernard McNamee, the former
commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Trump,
writes in the document’s chapter on revamping the department.
Additionally, the “ill-advised attempt to expand the National Science
Foundation’s mission from supporting university research to supporting
an all-encompassing technology transition” (a mischaracterization)
should be reconsidered, and “there should be a review to measure,
prioritize, and consolidate DOE programs based on a range of beneficial
factors, including degree of relationship to national security.” (While
addressing the nation’s climate goals
is
an NSF priority, it is not done at the expense of supporting
university research. Also, the current director of the NSF is a Trump
appointee).
The Trump administration was memorably
hostile
toward science, and there are no signs he’ll change his heart during
a second term; he’s
already
vowed to revive “Schedule F,” which reclassifies many government
researchers and scientists as at-will employees, making them easier to
“clean out” if they
“frustrate
his policies.”
Still, it does appear that the Heritage Foundation sees some
usefulness for scientists: “The next administration should fund the
design, development, and deployment of new nuclear warheads, including
the production of plutonium pits in quantity,” Project 2025 says.
It will abdicate responsibility for the global effects of U.S. emissions
“The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate
policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate
Strategy 2022–2030 ); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and
directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; and narrowly
limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts.”
The United States is the single greatest historical contributor to
climate change, but Project 2025 has little sympathy for nations that
might be suffering as a result. “The [Biden] administration has
incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative,”
Max Primorac, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, complains in the
document. “It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated
to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported
the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for
‘climate reparations.’”
Notably, Biden has not promised climate reparations — despite
Trump and other Republicans’ frequent
claims
to the contrary. And while climate change is “a top driver of
humanitarian need and human suffering, particularly for the poorest
countries,” according to
the
United Nations, the former president
slashed
$200 million from environmental initiatives in his 2019 budget,
including investments to help nations move away from heavy
carbon-emitting industries.
It will eliminate any program or office with a whiff of climate
“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred
businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and
undermining energy reliability.”
Among the programs and offices Project 2025 wants to eliminate (or at
least substantially reduce) funding for are: the Climate Hub Office; the
Clean Energy Corps, the Office of Domestic Climate Policy; the Office of
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy; the Grid Deployment Office; the
Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon; the Conservation
Reserve Program; the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations; the Office
of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights; “the activities of
EPA advisory bodies”; the Office of State and Community Energy Programs;
ARPA-E; the DOE
Loan
Program Office; the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management;
“grant programs for things like energy storage and the testing of
grid-enhancing technologies”; “carbon capture utilization and storage
programs”; the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program; the Bureau of Energy
Resources; the Office of Emergency Management; the National Flood
Insurance Program; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (more on that below).
It will push to end green subsidies
“Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure
Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, which established
new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in
subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special
interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by
these programs.”
Project 2025 opposes green subsidies across the board. It’s especially
twitchy about programs aimed at helping “the private sector deploy and
market clean energy and decarbonizing resources” — because, supposedly,
the “government should not be picking winners and losers.”
Still, while it’s uncertain how much damage a Republican president could
do to the Inflation Reduction Act without the help of a
conservative-controlled Congress, Project 2025 makes clear there are
lots of places conservatives can chip away, including going after
“subsidies of electric vehicles,” “subsidies for transit expansion,” and
subsidies renewables like wind and solar. Additionally, the Office of
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy “is a conduit for taxpayer
dollars to fund progressive policies, including decarbonizing the
economy and renewable resources.” That won’t do: “Eliminate EERE,” it
says, or otherwise defund it.
It will go after environmental, social, and governance-related anything
“While individual investors may prefer to invest in ‘green’
companies, ‘woke’ companies, or companies with greater board diversity,
and may even be willing to sacrifice some financial gains to do so, the
question relevant to [the Department of Labor] is whether, and under
what conditions, fiduciaries should be permitted to follow this path as
well.”
If we’re being honest, though, isn’t the whole “ESG is evil” thing
kind
of last year?
It will make it harder to protect scenic and culturally significant
places
“The new Administration’s review will permit a fresh look at past
monument decrees and new ones by President Biden. Furthermore, the new
Administration must vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes
to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of
national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
President Trump was responsible for
the
most significant reduction in protected land in U.S. history. When
he took office, Biden
reinstated
the protections — mainly in Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand
Staircase-Escalante. Project 2025 prioritizes rolling back the rollback
of the rollback, but making it stick by taking the case to the
conservative-controlled Supreme Court.
The former acting Bureau of Land Management director under Trump,
William Perry Pendley, writes in the section on reforming the Department
of the Interior that Biden is “abusing National Environmental Policy Act
processes, the Antiquities Act, and bureaucratic procedures to advance a
radical climate agenda,” and directs an incoming Republican president to
“seek repeal of the Antiquities Act.” Republicans and Democrats alike
have used the Antiquities Act over the decades to protect scenic and
culturally significant places,
including
the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Olympic National Parks. Any Supreme Court
ruling could effectively curb the ability of future presidents to
protect scenic and culturally important parts of the country.
It will break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
“NOAA consists of six main offices … Together, these form a colossal
operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change
alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Thomas F. Gilman, writing on reforms for the Department of Commerce,
gets right to the point: “Break up NOAA.” The agency’s “emphasis on
prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of
planning for the unplannable,” he claims, adding, that “its current
organization corrupts its useful functions.”
In practice, that would mean the National Weather Service should “fully
commercialize its forecasting operations,” since “Americans rely on
weather forecasts and warnings provided by … private companies such as
AccuWeather,” Gilman writes. It’s a notable shoutout: Barry Lee Myers,
the former CEO of AccuWeather, was
briefly
a Trump nominee to, uh, run NOAA.
Gilman has ideas for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research,
too, writing that it “provides theoretical science” and is “the source
of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism,” and should therefore be
“disbanded.” Data from the National Hurricane Center is further ordered
to be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any
one side in the climate debate.”
Echoing the Trump administration’s hostility toward the sciences, he
goes on to allege that “scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to
obstructionism … if political appointees are not wholly in sync with
administration policy” — never mind that disagreement is one of the most
essential parts of scientific research and progress.
But don’t worry: Project 2025 also calls for an elevation of …
“the Office of Space Commerce.” Phew.
Here are a few other ways Project 2025 aims to attack climate progress:
It will take liquified natural gas export terminal approvals away from
the DOE
Project 2025 dictates that “Congress should reform the Natural Gas Act”
to “eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals
of liquefied natural gas exports.” Currently, the DOE must decide if it
is in the “public interest” to allow LNG exports to non-free trade
agreement countries — the only part of the permitting process that could
even potentially consider the export terminal’s impacts on
frontline
communities or their effect on
climate
change more largely
It will make it easier to approve new pipelines …
How? By narrowing the Natural Gas Act to only consider “whether there is
a need for the natural gas” and the “impacts of the actual pipeline
itself, not indirect upstream and downstream effects.”
… and sell fossil fuel leases. Lots of fossil fuel leases.
The next Republican president should “immediately” reopen the Arctic to
drilling, expand the controversial
Willow
drilling project, max out offshore oil and natural gas lease sales,
and restart coal leasing in Wyoming and Montana, the authors write.
It will make it harder to keep big polluters in check
Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former Environmental Protection Agency chief
of staff,
details
almost gleefully how the agency’s regulatory powers will be dismantled,
from preventing downwind states from “over-controlling”
their
upwind neighbors to loosening car emission standards and beyond.
It will revoke the California Clean Air Act waiver (…again)
Since 1968, California has been allowed to set stricter vehicle emission
limits than the federal government thanks to a Clean Air Act waiver;
other states are welcome but not required to opt in. As president, Trump
revoked California’s right to include greenhouse gases in its emissions
considerations and barred other states from adopting its criteria. That
seems like it’s back on the table — and could be
headed
to a consequential decision in the Supreme Court.
It will reduce fuel economy requirements
Project 2025 proposes a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon, far
below current benchmarks of 49 miles per gallon by 2026 and 58 miles per
gallon by 2032.
It will kill wild horses
There is no question that the management of wild horses and burros is a
big problem for the Western United States. But Project 2025 waves off
strategies like “expanded adoptions” and “more effective use of
fertility controls” as “not enough,” writing that “Congress must enact
laws permitting the BLM to dispose humanely of these animals.”
It will halt the reintroduction of grizzlies in Washington state
Project 2025 aims not only to gut the Endangered Species Act, but also
to “direct the Fish and Wildlife Service to end its abuse of Section 10(
j) of the ESA,” which is being used to
reintroduce
grizzly bears in Washington state and wolves in Colorado.
It will oppose ‘eyesore windmills’ and ‘self-driving robots’
Project 2025 says that “the Department of Energy should end the Biden
Administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America’s
energy independence, oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense,
and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own
choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and
eventually out of the driver’s seat altogether in favor of self-driving
robots.” But as far as roadmaps go, that doesn’t look much like a way
forward — it looks like holding back the inevitable. If that’s the case,
then self-driving robots start to look good.
US
Investigators Visit Homes of 2 Palestinian-American Teens Killed in West
Bank
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
JERUSALEM — The families of two Palestinian-American teenagers killed
in separate but eerily similar incidents in the West Bank say
investigators from the U.S. Embassy have visited their homes to look
into the shootings.
The launch of U.S. probes into the killings of Mohammad Khdour and
Tawfic Abdel Jabbar reflects what appears to be a lack of confidence in
the Israeli justice system to properly investigate the cases. Rights
groups have long said that Israeli investigations into killings of
Palestinians rarely lead to prosecutions, and the State Department has
previously called for an “expeditious and thorough” Israeli
investigation into Abdel Jabbar’s killing.
Both shootings occurred as the Biden administration signals a desire
to crack down on settler violence in the volatile territory.
Khdour, who was born in Hollywood, Florida, was shot Saturday while
driving with a cousin on a hillside in Biddu, the town just outside of
Jerusalem where Khdour had lived since the age of 2, relatives said. He
was born in Hollywood, Florida.
Seeking some fresh air after studying, Khdour joined the cousin on a
drive to the forested hillside where villagers often barbecue, his
brother Hamed Khdour said.
In videos and photos taken before the shooting and seen by The
Associated Press, the boys joked around, taking photos of each other for
social media and eating chocolate-covered waffles.
The boys were returning to the village, Hamed said, when they heard
gunfire. At least one shot came through the car window, hitting Mohammad
squarely in the head.
Hamed said his cousin told the family that the shots came from a
white Mitsubishi with an Israeli license plate parked on a road below
the hill, a vehicle that villagers said they had seen before. Hamed said
the car was across the security fence separating Biddu from Israeli
territory. The cousin then managed to escape and run back to the
village.
A video taken directly after the incident and seen by The Associated
Press showed a group of men pulling a body out of the car, littered with
shattered glass and stained with blood. Hamed said Mohammad was
pronounced dead at a Ramallah hospital late Saturday night.
Ahmad Khdour, Mohammad’s father, said he did not know if Israel had
begun investigating the case and had heard nothing from Israeli
officials.
The Israeli military referred questions to the Shin Bet internal
security service, which did not respond to requests for comment.
But U.S. Embassy officials visited the home and the scene of the
shooting Thursday, taking pictures of the car Khdour was driving and the
scene around it, Mohammad’s father said. He said the officials told the
family they are preparing a report on the incident.
The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs wrote on X, formerly Twitter,
that it was “devastated” by the killing and called for “a quick,
thorough, and transparent investigation, including full
accountability.”
Mohammad Khdour lived in Biddu with his mother and four brothers. He
hoped to go back to the United States to study law once he finished his
final year of high school, Hamed said.
“Mohammad was a simple kid, like any other kid. He had dreams. He
loved cars,” said Hamed. “He never fought with anyone. Everyone liked
him.”
The shooting came nearly a month after the killing of Tawfic Abdel
Jabbar, also a 17-year-old Palestinian-American shot while driving down
a dirt road close to his village in the northern West Bank.
The sole passenger in the vehicle said the shooting was unprovoked,
describing fire hitting the back of the vehicle before it overturned
several times. The incident prompted an expression of concern from the
White House and an uncommonly quick pledge from the Israeli police to
investigate.
But Israeli police have not released any new findings in the
case.
A video shared with the AP by Abdel Jabbar’s father raised new
questions of the police’s original theory, which never mentioned that
the teen had been shot while driving.
Instead, the police said that a civilian, an off-duty police officer
and a soldier had targeted people “purportedly engaged in rock-throwing
activities” along a main West Bank thoroughfare.
The video, which the father said was taken moments after the
shooting, shows two Israeli soldiers standing about 20 meters (66 feet)
from the vehicle, guns cocked — indicating that soldiers were in the
vicinity that day.
Abdel Jabbar’s father said that Israeli investigators took the
vehicle into custody for under a week before returning it.
Since October 7, 395 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank
by Israeli fire, according to Palestinian health officials. Most have
been killed in clashes during near nightly Israeli army raids aimed at
suspected militants.
Solar
+ battery storage will make up 81% of new US electric generating
capacity in 2024
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
The US Energy Information
Administration (EIA) reports today that 62.8 gigawatts (GW) of new
utility-scale electric generating capacity is coming online in 2024 –
here’s how it breaks down.
date: 2024-02-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Here we are, another atmospheric river winter and over 200 horses are
still trapped, standing and forced to lay down in a urine- and
manure-saturated mud pond at Rancho Jonata in Buellton.
Even
the ‘drill, baby, drill’ guys realize electric is the way to go!
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
Swedish equipment brand Sandvik announced a new battery electric surface
drill rig in a bid to create more efficient, cost-effective drilling
operations. And, yes – the irony here is delicious!
Apple
intentionally kills web applications for EU users in iOS 17.4 onward to
spite its EU users
date: 2024-02-15, from: OS News
With the second beta of iOS 17.4, Apple disabled much of the
functionality of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in the European Union.
There was some speculation that it could be a temporary change or a bug
related to some of the updates to the app ecosystem in Europe, but Apple
has confirmed that PWAs were intentionally removed and won’t be
returning. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors When users in the European Union
install iOS 17.4, all functionality regarding progressive web apps will
be removed from iOS. This means that when you pin a PWA on your iOS home
screen, instead of it opening ‘like an application’, so without any
browser chrome but with additional other odds and ends to make it feel
more like a native application, it’ll just open inside the full browser
instead. It’s typical Apple behaviour – vindictive and petty. Their
stated reasoning – it was too hard and too much work to implement this
for engines other than WebKit – is a bunch of utter nonsense, since
Apple had no issues with developing like 600 new APIs and a whole bunch
of new complex frameworks and administrative layers just to support
their malicious DMA compliance to ensure they wouldn’t lose a single
cent of protection money when a developer wants to distribute an
application outside of the App Store. PWAs were the only way you could
get an application-like experience on your iPhone from something not
controlled, owned, and monetised by Apple, so it had to go to force
developers to choose either of Apple’s new, maliciously DMA compliant
monetised distribution options in the EU. Every time this company does
anything, it’s just… Slimy, scummy, sleazy, and anti-user.
Recently, I began a new project – developing a MIPS emulator for
Windows. Although Windows NT is commonly associated with x86-based
architectures (and more recently ARM64), historically some lesser-known
editions were released for other chipsets. MIPS, a RISC architecture,
briefly featured on Windows NT 3.51/4.0 alongside the DEC Alpha and
PowerPC before being discontinued with the release of Windows 2000.
Having been predominantly x86-focused until now, I have no prior
experience with MIPS – or RISC architectures in general. As with the
Win16 emulator, my plan is not to achieve 100% compatibility with
complex software. Instead, I aim to emulate enough core functionality to
successfully run some of the built-in Windows games and utilities. I
would like to achieve this in the most universal way possible, relying
on minimal hardcoded “fixes” and hooks. ↫ x86matthew A very impressive
project, and a fun one, to boot. Do note that the series of articles is
split up, and you can move to the next one in the series at the bottom
of each article.
Private US
Spaceflight Company’s Moonshot Underway
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
Can the United States make a return to the surface of the moon? NASA
and a private U.S. spaceflight company hope so. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi
brings us The Week in Space.
Anxious
About US Funding Delay, Pacific Island Nations Warn About China
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
washington — Leaders of strategic U.S.-allied Pacific Island nations
have become increasingly anxious about the U.S. congressional budget
impasse that has delayed approval of vital new funding packages and have
warned that China is actively seeking to shift their allegiances,
including over Taiwan.
The Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau
agreed to new 20-year funding programs with the United States last year
under which Washington provides economic assistance while gaining
exclusive military access to strategic swaths of the Pacific that China
covets.
But despite bipartisan support for the new programs, known as
Compacts of Free Association, or COFAs, Congress has yet to approve the
funding months later, even though the additional amount currently needed
is a relatively small $2.3 billion.
Republican James Risch, ranking member on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, led a 24-senator bipartisan group in sponsoring an
amendment to include COFA funding in a contentious supplemental budget,
but it was not included in a bill that the Senate agreed upon and sent
to the House.
Congressional aides say they are still working to find other ways of
approving the funding, including by possibly adding it to emergency
spending bills in March, but say there is no guarantee of success,
despite the urgency.
US border issue
The supplemental budget has been held up in Congress by Republican
insistence that any package of international military and humanitarian
assistance must also include measures to address security at the U.S.
border with Mexico.
In the meantime, the presidents of the three COFA states have written
repeatedly to congressional leaders stressing the need to approve the
legislation, according to copies of the letter seen by Reuters.
In a joint letter to Senate leaders, dated February 6, they said the
legislation was needed to “strengthen our associations and enable them
to endure.”
It warned that the delay had “generated uncertainty among our
peoples” and had “resulted in undesirable opportunities for economic
exploitation by competitive political actors in the Pacific.”
“We … cannot overstate the importance to all of our nations of final
approval by the U.S. Congress,” they wrote.
A February 9 letter from Palau’s president, Surangel Whipps, was
explicit in warning that delay played into the hands of China and
politicians in Palau who wanted to accept Chinese economic inducements
to shift the island nation’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to
Beijing.
Letters dated Febraruy 12 and 13 from Marshall Islands President
Hilda Heine carried similar warnings.
Copies of the letters from the individual leaders were made available
to Reuters, but their recipients were not disclosed.
“There have been ‘carrot and stick’ efforts from the PRC to shift our
alliance — including discontinuing support for Taiwan,” Heine wrote,
referring to the People’s Republic of China. “Further delay … threatens
to undermine confidence in the U.S. and to encourage some to agree to
PRC enticements.”
The letters stressed the strategic importance of the COFA states,
noting that they cover an expanse of the Pacific larger than the 48
contiguous United States and that Palau has hosted U.S. missiles and
early warning radars and the Marshall Islands the main U.S.
intercontinental ballistic missile testing range.
The Biden administration has repeatedly urged Congress to approve the
COFA funding and has stressed that China is waiting to take
advantage.
“We reiterate our call on Congress to pass Compacts-related
legislation as soon as possible,” a State Department spokesperson said
when asked about the delays.
Feds
dismantle Russian GRU botnet built on 1,000-plus home, small biz
routers
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Beijing, now Moscow.… Who else is hiding in broadband gateways?
The US government today said it disrupted a botnet that Russia’s GRU
military intelligence unit used for phishing expeditions, spying,
credential harvesting, and data theft against American and foreign
governments and other strategic targets.…
Elizabeth Lopatto: That’s one reason why Slack, the workplace chat
app that formally launched 10 years ago today, is so unusual. Slack was
the rare piece of enterprise software that spread through word of mouth,
because it was actually, you know, good. […] Slack was not the only
text-based communications software. Besides Skype chat and […]
Jeff Johnson: macOS is periodically scanning FileMerge for malware on
launch, which causes very slow app launches. I don’t know what the exact
period is between scans, but rebooting the Mac seems to reset the
cache[…]. I’ve noticed the same syspolicyd malware scanning and
consequent slow launches with some other apps such as Xcode itself,
[…]
Art Lasovsky: To improve this, we can add NSApplicationDelegate to
our app and set the activation policy to .prohibited in the
applicationWillFinishLaunching(:) method. Then, in the
applicationDidFinishLaunching(:) method, we can set the activation
policy to .accessory(or .regular if we want the dock icon to be
visible).This way, the app will launch without stealing focus.[…]We
override […]
Wade Tregaskis: As you can see, Sonoma brought with it a penchant for
tinting things a gross light pink colour, including the rectangular
extents of images that are otherwise invisible because they’re
transparent.[…]In theory you can also disable this from the Quartz Debug
app itself, it’s just hidden – in the Tools menu, not the […]
Joe Rosensteel (Mastodon): Apple News+’s problems start with Apple
News as an app. The page layout is both cramped, and light on all the
relevant details. Headlines get awkwardly cropped, and the first
impression of the app is always the front page of a newspaper where an
editorial team has selected relevant stories for a […]
Pluralistic:
How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller”
(15 Feb 2024)
date: 2024-02-15, from: Cory Doctorow’s blog
Today’s links How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book”
became a “bestseller”: A convincer to prolong the bezzle. Hey look at
this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading How a billionaire’s mediocre
pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller” (permalink) I was on a book
tour the day my editor called me and told me, “From now on, your middle
name is ‘Cory.’” “That’s weird. Why?” “Because from now on, your first
name is ‘New York Times Bestselling Author.’” That was how I found out
I’d hit the NYT list for the first time. It was a huge moment – just as
it has been each subsequent time it’s happened. First, because of how it
warmed my little ego, but second, and more importantly, because of how
it affected my book and all the books afterwards. Once your book is a
Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to
fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a
bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign
rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid
on your book. Movie studios come calling. It’s a huge deal. My books
became Times bestsellers the old-fashioned way: people bought and read
them and told their friends, who bought and read them. Booksellers who
enjoyed them wrote “shelf-talkers” – short reviews – and displayed them
alongside the book. That “From now on your first name is ‘New York Times
Bestselling Author’ gag is a tradition. When Wil Wheaton’s memoir Still
Just A Geek hit the Times list, I texted the joke to him and he texted
back to say John Scalzi had already sent him the same joke (and of
course, Scalzi and I have the same editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden):
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/still-just-a-geek-wil-wheaton But
not everyone earns that first name the same way. Some people cheat.
Famously, the Church of Scientology was caught buying truckloads of L
Ron Hubbard books (published by Scientology’s own publishing arm) from
booksellers, returning them to their warehouse, then shipping them back
to the booksellers when they re-ordered the sold out titles. The tip-off
came when booksellers opened cases of books and found that they already
bore the store’s own price-stickers:
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062890-story.html The reason
Scientology was willing to go to such great lengths wasn’t merely that
readers used”NYT Bestseller” to choose which books to buy. Far more
important was the signal that this sent to the entire book trade, from
reviewers to librarians to booksellers, who made important decisions
about how many copies of the books to stock, whether to display them
spine or face out, and whether to return unsold stock or leave it on the
shelf. Publishers go to great lengths to send these messages to the
trade: sending out fancy advance review copies in elaborate packaging,
taking out ads in the trade magazines, featuring titles in their
catalogs and sending their sales-force out to impress the publisher’s
enthusiasm on their accounts. Even the advance can be a way to signal
the trade: when a publisher announces that it just acquired a book for
an eyebrow-raising sum, it’s not trumpeting the size of its capital
reserves – it’s telling the trade that this book is a Big Deal that they
should pay attention to. (Of all the signals, this one may be the
weakest, even if it’s the most expensive for publishers to send. Take
the $1.25m advance that Rupert Murdoch’s Harpercollins paid to Sarah
Palin for her unreadable memoir, Going Rogue. As with so many of the
outsized sums Murdoch’s press and papers pay to right wing politicians,
the figure didn’t represent a bet on the commercial prospects of the
book – which tanked – but rather, a legal way to launder massive cash
transfers from the far-right billionaire to a generation of politicians
who now owe him some rather expensive favors.) All of which brings me to
the New York Times bestselling book Read Write Own by the billionaire VC
New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Dixon. Dixon is a partner at
A16Z, the venture capitalists who pumped billions into failed, scammy,
cryptocurrency companies that tricked normies into converting their
perfectly cromulent “fiat” money into shitcoins, allowing the investors
to turn a massive profit and exit before the companies collapsed or
imploded. Read Write Own (subtitle: “Building the Next Era of the
Internet”) is a monumentally unconvincing hymn to the blockchain. As
Molly White writes in her scathing review, the book is full of
undisclosed conflicts of interest, with Dixon touting companies he has a
direct personal stake in:
https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/
But this book’s defects go beyond this kind of sleazy pump-and-dump
behavior. It’s also just bad. The arguments it makes for the blockchain
as a way of escaping the problems of an enshittified, monopolized
internet are bad arguments. White dissects each of these arguments very
skillfully, and I urge you to read her review for a full list, but I’ll
reproduce one here to give you a taste: After three chapters in which
Dixon provides a (rather revisionistd) history of the web to date,
explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things
one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left
with “Part Four: Here and Now”, then the final “Part Five: What’s Next”.
The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of
blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real
problems. This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages
long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends
his few pages excoriating the “casino” projects that he says have given
crypto a bad rap, prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making “ethical
entrepreneurs … afraid to build products” in the United States. As White
says, this is just not a good book. It doesn’t contain anything to
excite people who are already blockchain-poisoned crypto cultists – and
it also lacks anything that will convince normies who never let Matt
Damon or Spike Lee convince them to trade dollars for magic beans. It’s
one of those books that manages to be both paper and a paperweight. And
yet…it’s a New York Times Bestseller. How did this come to pass? Here’s
a hint: remember how the Scientologists got L Ron Hubbard 20 consecutive
#1 Bestsellers? As Jordan Pearson writes for Motherboard, Read Write Own
earned its place on the Times list because of a series of massive bulk
orders from firms linked to A16Z and Dixon, which ordered between dozens
and thousands of copies and gave them away to employees or just randos
on Twitter:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7emkx/chris-dixon-a16z-read-write-own-nyt-bestseller
The Times recognizes this in a backhanded way, by marking Read Write Own
on the list with a “dagger” (†) that indicates the shenanigans (the same
dagger appeared alongside the listing for Donald Trump Jr’s Triggered
after the RNC spent a metric scientologyload of money – $100k – buying
up cases of it):
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html
There’s a case for the Times not automatically ignoring bulk orders.
Since 2020, I’ve run Kickstarters where I’ve pre-sold my books on behalf
of my publisher, working with bookstores like Book Soup and wholesalers
like Porchlight Books to backers when they go on sale. I signed and
personalized 500+ books at Vroman’s yesterday for backers who
pre-ordered my next novel, The Bezzle:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53531243480/ But there’s a world
of difference between pre-orders that hundreds or thousands of readers
place that are aggregated into a single bulk order, and books that are
bought by CEOs to give away to people who may not have any interest in
them. For the book trade – librarians, reviewers, booksellers – the
former indicates broad interest that justifies their attention. The
latter just tells you that a handful of deep-pocketed manipulators want
you to think there’s broad interest. I’m certain that Dixon – like me –
feels a bit of pride at having “earned” a new first name. But Dixon –
like me – gets something far more tangible than a bit of egoboo out of
making the Times list. For me, a place on the Times list is a way to get
booksellers and librarians excited about sharing my book with readers.
For Dixon, the stakes are much higher. Remember that cryptocurrency is a
faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: “convince normies that
shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then
trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars
that they worked hard to earn.” In other words, crypto is a bezzle,
defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as “The magic interval when a
confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the
victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” So long as
shitcoins haven’t fallen to zero, the bag-holders who’ve traded their
“fiat” for funny money can live in the bezzle, convinced that their
“investments” will recover and turn a profit. More importantly, keeping
the bezzle alive preserves the possibility of luring in more normies who
can infuse the system with fresh dollars to use as convincers that keep
the bag-holders to keep holding that bag, rather than bailing and
precipitating the zeroing out of the whole scam. The relatively small
sums that Dixon and his affiliated plutocrats spent to flood your
podcasts with ads for this pointless 300-page Ponzi ad are a bargain, as
are the sums they spent buying up cases of the book to give away or just
stash in a storeroom. If only a few hundred retirees are convinced to
convert their savings to crypto, the resulting flush of cash will make
the line go up, allowing whales like Dixon and A16Z to cash out, or make
more leveraged bets, or both. Crypto is a system with very few good
trades, but spending chump change to earn a spot on the Times list
(dagger or no) is a no-brainer. After all, the kinds of people who buy
crypto are, famously, the kinds of people who think books are stupid (“I
would never read a book” -S Bankman-Fried):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/sam-bankman-fried-reading-effective-altruism/
There’s precious little likelihood that anyone will be convinced to go
long on crypto thanks to the words in this book. But the Times list has
enough prestige to lure more suckers into the casino: “I’m not going to
read this thing, but if it’s on the list, that means other people must
have read it and think it’s convincing.” We are living through a golden
age of scams, and crypto, which has elevated caveat emptor to a moral
virtue (“not your wallet, not your coins”), is a scammer’s paradise.
Stein’s Law tells us that “anything that can’t go on forever will
eventually stop,” but the purpose of a bezzle isn’t to keep the scam
going forever – just until the scammer can cash out and blow town. The
longer the bezzle goes on for, the richer the scammer gets. Not for
nothing, my next novel – which comes out on Feb 20 – is called The
Bezzle. It stars Marty Hench, my hard-driving, two-fisted, high-tech
forensic accountant, who finds himself unwinding a whole menagerie of
scams, from a hamburger-based Ponzi scheme to rampant music royalty
theft to a vast prison-tech scam that uses prisoners as the ultimate
captive audience: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
Patrick Nielsen Hayden – the same editor who gave me my new first name –
once told me that “publishing is the act of connecting a text with an
audience.” Everything else a publisher does – editing, printing,
warehousing, distributing – can be separated from publishing. The one
thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a
warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences. Seen
in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of
advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists
in part of convincing people to try out a new idea:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/ This may be the
golden age of scams, but it’s the dark age of publishing. Consolidation
in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince
booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation
in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the
largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books
looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for
that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The
rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one
semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers
directly. I wrote nine books during lockdown (I write as displacement
activity for anxiety) which has given me a chance to see publishing in
the way that few authors can: through a sequence of rapid engagements
with the system as a whole, as I publish between one and three books per
year for multiple, consecutive years. From that vantage point, I can
tell you that it’s grim and getting grimmer. The slots that books that
connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by
the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your
Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to
the top of the list.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
I don’t know what to do about this, but I have one piece of advice: if
you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them
face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads.
Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their
tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved
(and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to go get ready for my book tour. I’m coming to LA,
San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland,
Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City,
Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu (details soon!).
If you want to get a taste of The Bezzle, here’s an excerpt:
https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/
And here’s the audiobook, read by New York Times Bestselling Author Wil
Wheaton:
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459_-_The_Bezzle_Read_By_Wil_Wheaton.mp3
Hey look at this (permalink) Coming Soon to Disneyland: Union
Representation for 1,700 Disneyland Characters and Parades Cast Members
https://www.actorsequity.org/news/PR/MagicUnited/ Hip Hip Hooray For
Hipster Antitrust
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/hip-hip-hooray-hipster-antitrust
Georgia Senate Passes Bill Criminalizing Bail Funds
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/2/headlines/georgia_senate_passes_bill_criminalizing_bail_funds
(h/t Priscilla Grim) This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Best
practices for economic collapse: Long Now talk
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
#10yrsago San Francisco police beat up and detain Good Samaritans who
call 911 and perform first aid on accident victim
https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/good-samaritan-backfire-9f53ef6a1c10
#10yrsago Dems appoints RIAA’s man in Congress to House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/02/12/another-friend-recording-industry-joins-house-subcommittee-courts-intellectual-property-internet/
#10yrsago Senator Rand Paul sues US government over NSA spying
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/us-senator-sues-president-obama-to-stop-nsa-metadata-dragnet/
#5yrsago Who can forget those scenes in Count Zero where they all stand
around eating soup?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/02/14/who-can-forget-those-scenes-in-count-zero-where-they-all-stand-around-eating-soup/
#5yrsago Bossfight: Allstate Insurance enters the Right to Repair fight,
loans its lobbyists to fight Apple
https://www.vice.com/en/article/nex3dz/insurance-giant-allstate-buys-icracked-phone-repair-company-joins-right-to-repair-movement
#5yrsago Installing a root certificate should be MUCH scarier
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/powerful-permissions-wimpy-warnings
#5yrsago Ex-NSA whistleblower says she and other US ex-spooks targeted
Americans on behalf of UAE
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spying-raven/
#5yrsago LA Times demands that reporters sign away rights to books,
movies and other works they create while working at the paper
https://latguild.com/news/2019/2/12/press-release-los-angeles-times-guild-pushes-back-against-managements-proposed-intellectual-property-policy
#5yrsago Even without explicit collusion, pricing algorithms converge on
price-fixing strategies
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/artificial-intelligence-algorithmic-pricing-and-collusion
#5yrsago Most adults are incapable of understanding most online terms of
service https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3313837
#5yrsago How Epson’s patent trolling is killing the EU market for
replacement ink
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/patently-unfair-epson-takedowns-continue/
#5yrsago The Final Version of the EU’s Copyright Directive Is the Worst
One Yet
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/final-version-eus-copyright-directive-worst-one-yet
#5yrsago Beyond GIGO: how “predictive policing” launders racism,
corruption and bias to make them seem empirical
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3333423 #1yrago
Nathan J. Robinson’s “Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25
Conservative Arguments”
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo Colophon
(permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother
short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench
noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN
2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the
prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little
Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING
ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: What kind of bubble is AI?
https://craphound.com/news/2024/01/21/what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Upcoming appearances: The Bezzle at Weller Book Works (Salt Lake City),
Feb 21
https://www.wellerbookworks.com/event/store-cory-doctorow-feb-21-630-pm
The Bezzle at Third Place Books (Seattle), Feb 26
https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow Tucson Festival of
Books, Mar 9/10 https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?id=676
Enshittification: How the Internet Went Bad and How to Get it Back
(virtual), Mar 26 https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3781006 The Bezzle
at Anderson’s Books (Chicago), Apr 17
https://www.andersonsbookshop.com/event/cory-doctorow-1 Canadian Centre
for Policy Alternatives (Winnipeg), May 2
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-tickets-798820071337?aff=oddtdtcreator
Media Ecology Association keynote, Jun 6-9 (Amherst, NY)
https://media-ecology.org/convention American Association of Law
Libraries keynote, Jul 21 (Chicago)
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/ Recent
appearances: Big Story Podcast
https://thebigstorypodcast.ca/2024/02/13/a-story-about-how-anyone-yes-even-you-can-get-scammed/
Why Taylor Left Tiktok (Today, Explained)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/62R2sJ6cEUOitIDPBdmwpy Online Platform
Decay (Tim Ventura) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83SULjan-JM Latest
books: “The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate
emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023
(http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies
(https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
“The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big
Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org).
Signed copies at Book Soup
(https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). “Red Team Blues”: “A
grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how
the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK):
https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get
Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for
creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022
https://chokepointcapitalism.com “Attack Surface”: The third Little
Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington
Post called it “a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy
about the limits of revolution and resistance.” Order signed,
personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
“How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”: an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
“Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A_Little_Brother%26_Homeland.html
“Poesy the Monster Slayer” a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about
prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and
Shovels: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC,
Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted
from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This
work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you
like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory
Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are
not included in this license; they are included either under a
limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate
license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads,
tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads,
tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list
Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no
ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale,
unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):
https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted,
third-party surveillance and advertising):
https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic “When life
gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla
Feb. 15:
Wicked Chicken Hosts Fundraiser for Carousel Ranch
date: 2024-02-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Wicked Chicken Restaurant on Golden Valley Road in Santa Clarita
will host an all day fundraiser to benefit Carousel Ranch’s “Carousel
Wishes & Valentine Kisses” campaign on Thursday, Feb.
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 and IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook are both on
sale for deep discounts at the moment. Both devices are 2-in-1 ChromeOS
tablets that ship with detachable keyboards, and both models on sale
feature Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processors, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of
storage. But the Duet 3 is […]
Princess
Cruises Delays Sun Princess Maiden Voyage
date: 2024-02-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Princess Cruises. headquartered in Valencia, has taken delivery of
the Sun Princess from Fincantieri shipyards in Trieste, Italy. The Sun
Prinncess is an entirely new ship platform designed by Fincantieri
exclusively for the Princess brand.
I thought ChatGPT could
make
a movie for me, so I sketched one out. “I’d like a video showing a
middle-aged man skiing down an intermediate slope, looking excellent and
confident. It’s sunny and there are bumps on the hill, and a few other
skiers on the side of the slope with expressions of astonishment that
such an old person can be such a snazzy skier.” Instead of making the
video for me, it wrote a
creative
plan for me. That wasn’t what I had in mind! 😄
South
Korea’s new EV policy targets BYD, Tesla Model Y while favoring Hyundai
and Kia
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
South Korea’s government looks to give domestic automakers
Hyundai and Kia a
break with its new EV policy. The new EV subsidy policy is in response
to price cuts on
Tesla’s Model Y
and BYD’s models, which use lower-cost LFP batteries.
Pentagon
launches nuke-spotting satellites amid Russian space bomb rumors
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Dungeons and Dragons, high-waisted jeans, Cold War sabre rattling – the
’80s are back, baby
Updated Last night’s launch of six Pentagon
missile-detection satellites was well timed as fears mount that Russia
is considering putting nuclear weapons into space.…
European
Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end
encryption
date: 2024-02-15, from: OS News
The European Court of Human Rights yesterday banned a general
weakening of secure end-to-end encryption. The judgement argues that
encryption helps citizens and companies to protect themselves against
hacking, theft of identity and personal data, fraud and the unauthorised
disclosure of confidential information. Backdoors could also be
exploited by criminal networks and would seriously jeopardise the
security of all users’ electronic communications. There are other
solutions for monitoring encrypted communications without generally
weakening the protection of all users, the Court held. The judgement
cites using vulnerabilities in the target’s software or sending an
implant to targeted devices as examples. ↫ EU Reporter Excellent ruling,
and it throws up another roadblock to weakening end-to-end encryption in
the EU, after the European Parliament also took a stance against such
weakening.
Scout
Motors breaks ground on US facility where it will build its all-electric
off-road trucks
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
Born again truck brand Scout Motors hit a significant milestone this
morning, breaking ground in Blythewood, South Carolina, the site of its
future US hub for electric truck production. We’re still a ways away
from the public debut of
Scout’s flagship model.
Still, there’s a lot to be excited about, and the brand’s heritage is
already garnering a loyal fanbase in full support of its all-electric
transition.
Reverse
engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new
ISA
date: 2024-02-15, from: OS News
Around 1977, Intel released a floppy disc controller (FDC) chip
called the 8271. This controller isn’t particularly well known. It was
mainly used in business computers and storage solutions, but its one
breakthrough into the consumer space was with the BBC Micro, a
UK-centric computer released in 1981. There are very few easily
discovered details about this chip online, aside from the useful
datasheet. This, combined with increasing observations of strange
behavior, make the chip a bit of an enigma. My interest in the chip was
piqued when I accidentally triggered a wild test mode that managed to
corrupt one of my floppy discs even though the write protect tab was
present! You can read about that here. Can we reverse engineer a
detailed understanding of how it works? What wonders will we find? ↫
Chris Evans This thing is wild.
At 1:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024, Intuitive Machines’
Nova-C lunar lander, named Odysseus, lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9
rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As part of NASA’s
Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and Artemis
campaign, Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission will carry NASA
science to the Moon […]
We’re on approach towards an alpha version of the new COSMIC desktop
environment for Pop!_OS and other distros. Meanwhile, COSMIC testing has
expanded to more users around the office. This month, we’re providing
updates to the checklist we published in January on remaining tasks for
releasing the alpha. ↫ System76’s official blog COSMIC is feeling very
close now, and this update has a ton of new things and improvements in
it, and COSMIC being new, it’s a lot of stuff that’s table stakes.
There’s a screenshot utility now, you can tab various windows together,
kind of like Haiku can, the design for the on-screen display
notifications has been finalised, there’s new animations, and so much
more. I’m very excited to try this out.
date: 2024-02-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I went skiing again today, second time in two weeks. Feeling pretty
good. And I learned something I’d like to share. A different way of
looking at skiing. Here’s the story…
First thing in the morning the snow was hard and while they had done a
good job of grooming, you do a lot of sliding when you edge when the
snow is so hard. Much more than in the powder you get in the Rockies. So
I’m always totally thinking about staying in control and it’s stressful.
In this mode I ask myself why I’m doing this if it’s so unpleasant.
But as the snow softened during the day, and my body warmed up, and my
brain remembered more about this strange thing that I used to do so
well, I started going faster, not worrying as much, and then started
going faster, and I started feeling like wow I’m doing this well, and
then boom, for an instant I completely lost control and was tilted one
way, but had to land the other way, and without any conscious thought
and absolutely no time to worry, my brain and body did exactly what you
have to do to make this look and feel super elegant, almost as if I must
have planned it this way.
I kept skiing a bit after that and then stopped and breathed the cold
air, and looked at another ski area far in the distance (Hunter?) and
realized something – skiing is falling. You go to a mountain top, pull
down your goggles, get to the top of some steepness, and you jump. The
question is – do you look and feel beautiful while doing it, or are you
scared and trying to stay in control. But that’s the thing, falling is
all about letting it go and trusting your mind and body will know what
to do when you fall one way, and also when you fall another.
NASA
Joins Group to Advance Wildfire Coordination, Capabilities
date: 2024-02-15, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is now an associate member of the National Wildfire Coordinating
Group, giving the agency new opportunities to collaborate with federal
agencies and other partners to better understand wildland fires and
leverage technology and innovation to prevent and manage them for the
benefit of humanity. The interagency group provides national leadership
to enable interoperable wildland […]
Trump-Biden
Spat on NATO Highlights Divide on America’s Role in the World
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
White House — With former President Donald Trump doubling down on
remarks that, if elected, he would not defend NATO members who don’t
meet defense spending targets, and a foreign military funding package
stalled in Congress, a stark divide is emerging on how two American
presidents and their constituents view America’s role in the world.
Biden, who has made strengthening coalitions against adversaries the
central tenet of his foreign policy, advocates for more international
cooperation overall. Trump, the likely Republican presidential nominee,
is again pushing for his brand of “America First” isolationism that
created anxiety among allies and partners during his time in office.
At issue is how Washington would meet the collective defense
principle under Article 5 of NATO’s charter, which requires members to
assist one another in the event of an outside attack. In a campaign
speech last week, Trump boasted that as president, he once warned a NATO
leader he would allow Russia to do whatever it wants to member countries
of the alliance that are “delinquent” in allocating 2% of their gross
domestic product to military spending.
The remarks have sparked anxiety among NATO allies as they support
Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion two years ago but are being
dismissed by Trump allies as mere campaign rhetoric.
However, in another campaign event Wednesday evening, Trump retold
the story, saying, “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going
to protect. OK?”
Trump has long complained that Washington is saddled with an unfair
share of the 31-member alliance’s burden. In the months leading up to
his election in 2016, he repeatedly questioned NATO’s purpose and
efficacy, calling it “obsolete.”
Pushing for House passage of a $95 billion security aid package for
Ukraine, Israel and Indo-Pacific allies, Biden on Tuesday denounced
Trump’s NATO-bashing comments as “shameful,” “dangerous and shocking”
and “un-American.”
He slammed his predecessor’s “transactional” approach, pointing out
that Article 5 has been invoked only once, in the wake of the September
11, 2001, attacks against America, allowing allies to assist in the U.S.
military campaign in Afghanistan.
Trump is “bowing down to a Russian dictator,” Biden said, vowing his
administration would not walk away from its “sacred commitment” to the
alliance.
In defense of Trump’s comments, Jason Miller, senior adviser to the
Trump campaign, said that Trump “got our allies to increase their NATO
spending by demanding they pay up, but Joe Biden went back to letting
them take advantage of the American taxpayer.”
“When you don’t pay your defense spending you can’t be surprised that
you get more war,” Miller said in a statement to VOA.
The White House argues it is Biden who deserves credit for increasing
the number of NATO allies that meet their 2% defense threshold, from
nine members to 18, since he became president.
“You’ve got NATO countries stepping up now with implementable plans
for the defense and deterrence of the east and the south in a way that
you never did before,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said
during a White House briefing Wednesday. “And you have unity among the
NATO alliance in a way that has really been pretty unprecedented in
modern memory.”
Opposition from Trump loyalists
The $95 billion funding package for allies passed the Senate on
Tuesday but now faces steep opposition from Trump loyalists in the House
of Representatives, including Speaker Mike Johnson.
More than half of Republican senators — including some of the party’s
most committed foreign policy hawks — voted against the measure.
One of them, Senator Lindsay Graham, said that Trump is “dead set
against” the bill. He signaled support for Trump’s idea that the U.S.
should make such funding packages “a loan, not a gift.”
Trump allies have also floated ideas to force NATO members to pay.
Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and former chief of staff of
the White House National Security Council under Trump, suggested a
“tiered alliance” in which members that failed to meet the 2% target on
defense would no longer be covered by Article 5 protections.
Such signals from Trump and his allies have gone beyond isolationism
in shaking the confidence of European allies, said Kristine Berzina,
managing director of Geostrategy North at the German Marshall Fund
research group. They contradict “the essence of deterrence,” and invite
hostilities.
“Trump is trying to win points through bravado. And American bravado
on the international stage has been incredibly powerful for America’s
friends,” she told VOA. “This is kind of the inverse of bravado. This is
a, ‘Well, maybe won’t show up at all.’”
American voters
Until Trump, supporting allies and partners has never been a
controversial element of foreign policy, which in itself is not
traditionally a key issue in U.S. elections. However, with Trump’s
NATO-bashing, the broader issue of America’s role in the world is set to
become another divide among voters.
Just 50% of Republicans believe the U.S. benefits from transatlantic
alliances, compared to 80% of Democrats and 63% of independents,
according to an October poll by the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs.
The issue is “highly politicized” by Trump to “gin up his base,” said
Clifford Young, president of public affairs at Ipsos, a polling research
firm. For Trump, “it’s about breaking the rules and shaking things up,”
Young told VOA. “His base is very much in favor of that in a general
sense, not necessarily specifically.”
Among Republicans, 40% of those who identify as Trump supporters
support military aid for Ukraine, while 59% of non-Trump Republicans
favor it, close to the 63% level among the overall public.
Arguments over NATO and support for Ukraine are set to heat up as the
administration hosts an alliance summit in July in Washington, less than
a week before the Republican National Convention, where Trump is likely
to be officially nominated as the party’s presidential candidate.
The NATO summit is meant to celebrate the group’s 75th birthday and
showcase that the “alliance is bigger, stronger and more united than it
has ever been,” Sullivan said at a press conference in NATO’s
headquarters in Brussels earlier this month.
That message is on track to clash with Trump’s “America First.”
“Much more than any other campaign season, we’re going to see foreign
policy and security play an outsized role,” GMF’s Berzina said. “Trump
is breaking Republican orthodoxy entirely, not only with his
isolationism, but with his pandering to autocrats.”
The question is, Berzina added, how many centrist Republicans and
Democrats would vote to say that Trump’s message is not in line with
what America is.
Microsoft
warns Dev Drive daredevils to back up or beware after latest build
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Rolling back will cause data loss, Windows Insiders told
Microsoft released a fresh Windows 11 build to the Canary and Dev
Channels of the Windows Insider Program with a warning for developers -
back up or risk losing data because a known issue with rolling back and
Dev Drive is still there.…
Leaked
Emails Show Hugo Awards Self-Censoring to Appease China
date: 2024-02-15, from: 404 Media Group
“…if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that
may be an issue in China…that needs to be highlighted so that
we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot,” one email
said.
Ford
moves to more affordable EVs as it welcomes partners to take on low-cost
Chinese rivals
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
Ford is open to partnering with the competition on affordable EVS to get
a leg up on Chinese EV makers. Jim Farley,
Ford’s CEO, said if you
cannot compete with the Chinese, “then 20% to 30%” of your revenue is at
risk.
The Browser Company has been busy with its Arc Web browser, adding
features to speed up searching, organize tab clutter, and more. Also new
is an Arc Search app for the iPhone.
Out
with the old, in with the new as 100 Starlink satellites take
atmospheric exit
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
SpaceX doing some spring cleaning to deal with aging models before they
fail
SpaceX is set to deorbit about 100 of its older Starlink broadband
satellites after identifying an issue that could cause them to
malfunction and become unresponsive to ground control.…
Schools
Let AI Spy on Kids with Hopes of Preventing Suicide. But at What
Cost?
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: RAND blog
As school districts use their budgets to deploy AI-based tools for
suicide risk detection, it is important to recognize the known problems.
More regulation is needed on the federal, state, and local levels, to
ensure safeguards are in place to protect students so that this software
does not end up doing more harm than good.
‘What
Was She Supposed to Report?:’ Police Report Shows How a High School
Deepfake Nightmare Unfolded
date: 2024-02-15, from: 404 Media Group
An in-depth police report obtained by 404 Media shows how a school,
and then the police, investigated a wave of AI-powered “nudify” apps in
a high school.
Police:
Shooting After Super Bowl Parade Seemed to Stem From Dispute Among
Several People
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
KANSAS CITY, Missouri — The mass shooting that unfolded amid throngs
of people at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl celebration appeared to
stem from a dispute between several people, authorities said
Thursday.
Police Chief Stacey Graves said that the 22 people injured in the
shooting ranged between the ages of 8 and 47 years old, half of whom
were under the age of 16. A mother of two was also killed.
Three people were detained — including two juveniles — and firearms
were recovered during the mayhem, police said. But investigators are
calling for witnesses, people with cellphone footage and victims of the
violence to call a dedicated hotline.
“We are working to determine the involvement of others. And it should
be noted we have recovered several firearms. This incident is still a
very active investigation,” Graves said at a news conference.
The shooting outside Union Station occurred despite the presence of
more than 800 police officers who were in the building and nearby,
including on top of nearby structures, said Mayor Quinton Lucas, who
attended with his wife and mother and ran for safety when the shots rang
out. But he doesn’t expect to cancel the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day
parade.
“We have parades all the time. I don’t think they’ll end. Certainly
we recognized the public safety challenges and issues that relate to
them,” Lucas said.
Throngs had lined the parade route before the shooting, with fans
climbing trees and street poles or standing on rooftops for a better
view. Players rolled through the crowd on double-decker buses, as DJs
and drummers heralded their arrival.
It’s unclear exactly how many people attended the Chief’s Super Bowl
parade. When the Kansas City Royals won the World Series in 2015, an
estimated 800,000 people had flocked to that victory parade, shattering
expectations in a city with a population of about 470,000 and a
metropolitan area of about 2 million.
Witnesses described confusion as gunshots began, sounding to some
like fireworks.
Some people didn’t run at first but others immediately scrambled for
cover. The rally music initially continued playing despite the havoc.
And then, within moments of the shooting stopping, some people were
walking as if nothing happened.
Gene Hamilton, 61, of Wichita, Kansas, said he found it unnerving
that the upbeat rally music continued among the confusion.
“If people are shooting, they should change the music,” he said.
Ashley Coderre, a 36-year-old from Overland Park, Kansas, said she
heard two or three shots after walking out of a Panera near Crown
Center, a couple blocks from Union Station. She said people were running
and yelling.
Then suddenly she said people were walking around like nothing had
happened: “We were so confused.”
It is the latest sports celebration in the U.S. to be marred by gun
violence, following a shooting that wounded several people last year in
Denver after the Nuggets’ NBA championship and gunfire last year at a
parking lot near the Texas Rangers’ World Series championship
parade.
Social media users posted shocking video of police running through
Wednesday’s crowded scene as people scrambled for cover and fled. One
video showed someone apparently performing chest compressions on a
victim as another person, seemingly writhing in pain, lay on the ground
nearby. People screamed in the background.
Another video showed two people chase and tackle a person, holding
them down until two police officers arrived. In an interview Thursday
with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trey Filter of Wichita, Kansas, said
he saw someone being chased and took action.
“I couldn’t see much. I heard, ‘Get ’em!’ I saw a flash next to me.
And I remember I jumped and remember thinking, ‘I hope this is the fool
they were talking about,’” he said. “They started yelling that, ‘There’s
a gun! There’s a gun!’”
Filter said he and another man kept the person pinned down until
officers arrived. “I remember the officers pulling my feet off of him
and at that point I was just looking for my wife and kids,” he
said.
It was not immediately clear if the person he held down was involved
in the shooting, but Filter’s wife, Casey, saw a gun nearby and picked
it up.
The woman killed in the shooting was identified by radio station
KKFI-FM as Lisa Lopez-Galvan, host of “Taste of Tejano.”
Lopez-Galvan, whose DJ name was “Lisa G,” was an extrovert and
devoted mother from a prominent Latino family in the area, said Rosa
Izurieta and Martha Ramirez, two childhood friends who worked with her
at a staffing company.
“She’s the type of person who would jump in front of a bullet for
anybody — that would be Lisa,” Izurieta said.
Kansas City has long struggled with gun violence, and in 2020 it was
among nine cities targeted by the U.S. Justice Department in an effort
to crack down on violent crime. In 2023, the city matched a record with
182 homicides, most of which involved guns.
Lucas has joined with mayors across the country in calling for new
laws to reduce gun violence, including mandating universal background
checks.
“We did everything to make this event as safe as possible,” Lucas, a
Democrat, said in an interview on KMBC-TV Thursday. “But as long as we
have fools who will commit these types of acts, as long as we have their
access to firearms with this level of capacity, then we may see
incidents like this one.”
The parade and rally were the third in five years after Chiefs’ Super
Bowl wins. Lucas said it may be time to reconsider how to handle the
next one if they win again, perhaps holding a “vastly smaller event” at
Arrowhead Stadium, with fans going through metal detectors.
Lisa Money of Kansas City was trying to gather some confetti near the
end of the parade when she heard somebody yell, “Down, down, everybody
down!” At first she thought it might be a joke, until she saw the SWAT
team jumping over the fence.
“I can’t believe it really happened,” Money said. “Who in their right
mind would do something like this?”
University Health spokesperson Leslie Carto said two of the eight
gunshot victims brought to the hospital are still in critical condition.
One is in stable condition. The other five have been discharged. The
hospital also treated four people from the rally who had nongunshot
injuries. Three of those patients were discharged, Carto said.
Stephanie Meyer, chief nursing officer for Children’s Mercy Kansas
City, said it was treating 12 patients from the rally, including 11
children between the ages of 6 and 15, many of whom suffered gunshot
wounds. All were expected to recover, she said.
When asked about the condition of the children, Meyer responded:
“Fear. The one word I would use to describe what we saw and how they
came to us was fear.”
St. Luke’s Hospital spokesperson Emily Hohenberg said one gunshot
victim at the hospital remains in critical condition. Four people who
suffered injuries while fleeing the aftermath of the shooting were
treated and released.
US
Justice Department Says It Disrupted Russian Intelligence Hacking
Network
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday it
disrupted a Russian intelligence hacking network.
“For the second time in two months, we’ve disrupted state-sponsored
hackers from launching cyber-attacks behind the cover of compromised
U.S. routers,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a
statement.
The Justice Department said that a January 2024 court-authorized
operation neutralized the network of hundreds of small office/home
office (SOHO) routers controlled by Russian intelligence and used “to
conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes.”
“In this case, Russian intelligence services turned to criminal
groups to help them target home and office routers, but the Justice
Department disabled their scheme,” Attorney General Merrick Garland
added.
Garland said the Justice Department was accelerating efforts to
disrupt the Russian government’s cyber campaigns against the United
States and its partners, including Ukraine.
US
rooftop solar has grown 10x in 10 years – here’s what drove it
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
In 2022, US small-scale rooftop solar saw a tenfold increase over the
last decade, according to a new report – here’s why and what needs to
happen next.
Doosan Bobcat is moving ahead with plans to hydrogenate (?) the Korean
material handling fleet, announcing its first-ever hydrogen fuel
cell-powered electric forklift, and plans to put 30 of the HFCEV
forklifts in operation this year.
AOOSTAR
GEM10 is a mini PC with Ryzen 7 7840HS, OCuLink, and dual 2.5 GbE LAN
ports
date: 2024-02-15, from: Liliputing
The AOOSTAR GEM10 is a little desktop computer that packs a lot of
features into a compact design. The system has an aluminum body that
measures just 107 x 107 x 60mm (4.2″ x 4.2″ x 2.3″), but inside the case
there’s a 45-watt AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS processor and three M.2 2280 slots
for PCIe 4.0 […]
Broadcom
moves to reassure VMware users as rivals smell an opportunity
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
‘They want a closed shop,’ claims service provider
Broadcom and Google have announced a license portability scheme for biz
customers to run VMware workloads on Google Cloud. Broadcom is also
trying to reassure VMware partners and users that all the changes are
for the best, as rivals circle to scoop up any defectors.…
date: 2024-02-15, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Paul Giamatti, of Santa Ynez Valley-based ‘Sideways’ fame, gets his
SBIFF spotlight, and screenings go deep diving, and into an Australian
psychological walkabout
A Journey Through the Silver Screen By Mayor Cameron Smyth Dating back
to the early 20th century, Santa Clarita has stood as a favored filming
destination with silent movie productions seeking the region’s scenic
backdrop for their films. The vast expanses of rugged mountains,
sprawling ranches and iconic canyons provided filmmakers with a
versatile canvas […]
Stellantis
and Mercedes-Benz raise $4.7 billion to build 4 new gigafactories
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
In a huge push to give European automakers a fighting chance over China
in the EV sector, Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz have raised nearly €4.4
billion to build four new EV gigafactories across the European Union in
the coming years.
Creating a
GPT Assistant That Writes Pipeline Tests
date: 2024-02-15, from: Jonudell blog
Here’s the latest installment in the series on working with LLMS:
Creating a GPT Assistant That Writes Pipeline Tests. Once you get the
hang of writing these tests, it’s mostly boilerplate, so I figured my
team of assistants could help. I recruited Cody, GitHub Copilot, and
Unblocked — with varying degrees of success. Then I …
Continue
reading Creating a GPT Assistant That
Writes Pipeline Tests
Rivian
teases first look at R2 as reservation site goes live, deposits start at
$100
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
Rivian is giving us our first look at the more affordable R2 EV. The
Rivian R2 will be officially revealed in three weeks. Ahead of its
debut, Rivian opened
the R2 website, sharing reservations will start at $100.
Oracle
women fought 7 years for equity, only to win just an extra paycheck or
two
date: 2024-02-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
The discrimination case against Oracle was the first in the industry
to win class-action status, a milestone never achieved in similar fights
against Microsoft and Twitter — and which was taken away from the Oracle
employees in 2022 by a California state judge.
Slimbook
Manjaro is a gaming laptop built for gaming
date: 2024-02-15, from: Liliputing
Linux hasn’t always been a great platform for PC gaming, but over the
past few years it’s become a pretty viable alternative to Windows thanks
to Valve’s Proton software, among other things. Not only does Proton
allow Windows games to run on Linux handhelds like the Steam Deck, but
the open source software can run […]
This
nonprofit is using virtual reality to train Ukrainian journalists to
cover the war safely
date: 2024-02-15, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Before February 2022, Halyna Yakushko was a lifestyle correspondent
for a daily show at Ukrainian broadcaster 1+1. “I was doing reports
about fashion, Eurovision, and celebrities. I had never been in a
conflict zone before,” she says. Yakushko is now a freelancer working
with regional, national and international broadcasters, including Radio
Liberty, BBC Ukraine, and CBC. In early…
Worried
about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give
ChromeOS Flex a try
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Hello, Mr. Frying Pan, meet Mr. Fire
Google has weighed in on the controversy surrounding Microsoft’s plans
to render millions of Windows 10 PCs obsolete in 2025 by urging users to
pop on a copy of ChromeOS Flex instead.…
Lenovo
developed a concept laptop with a transparent display (leaks)
date: 2024-02-15, from: Liliputing
Companies have been showing off transparent OLED display technology for
more than a decade. But 2024 might be the year when it finally breaks
through to the mainstream. LG’s big-screen TV with a transparent display
was one of the most buzzworthy products announced at CES this year. And
now it looks like Lenovo plans to […]
(You probably expected this announcement a while ago …) I’ve just
signed a new two book deal with my publishers, Tor.com publishing in the
USA/Canada and Orbit in the UK/rest of world, and the book I’m talking
about here and…
Turns out, we weren’t very spendy in the first month of the year. In
January, retail sales were down 0.8% — more than many economists
expected. It’s an indicator that consumers are feeling weary of high
prices and becoming more value-oriented. We’ll discuss. Also on the
show: Express, once a mainstay of every mall, could soon file for
bankruptcy. Then, college endowments see big returns thanks to solid
stock market gains.
Zoom
stomps critical privilege escalation bug plus 6 other flaws
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
All desktop and mobile apps vulnerable to at least one of the
vulnerabilities
Video conferencing giant Zoom today opened up about a fresh batch of
security vulnerabilities affecting its products, including a critical
privilege escalation flaw.…
BYD
secures license deal with Ford and GM supplier to use its LFP battery
packs for EVs
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
Leading global EV maker
BYD is making big moves to
stay on top of the market. Its latest deal gives Ford and GM supplier
BorgWarner rights to its BYD Blade battery packs.
NASA
Experiment Sheds Light on Highly Charged Moon Dust
date: 2024-02-15, from: NASA breaking news
Researchers are studying data from a recent suborbital flight test to
better understand lunar regolith, or Moon dust, and its potentially
damaging effects as NASA prepares to send astronauts back to the lunar
surface under the Artemis campaign. The experiment, developed jointly by
NASA and the University of Central Florida, sheds light on how these
[…]
@Miguel de
Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-02-15, from: Miguel de Icaza
Mastondon feed)
Ok, this is my next victim, and I am struggling with how to reorganize
this.
The tab-bar along the top switches modes.
I could either replicate the tabs at the top, and switch the content
inside, or use a 3-pane navigation view (but it does seem a little odd
to have two levels of trees).
Here is one possible option (needs two screenshots to show the effect):
Microsoft
‘retires’ Azure IoT Central in platform rethink
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
After March, devs won’t be able to create new application resources, in
2027 the system will be shut down
Exclusive Out of the blue Microsoft has decided to
retire a key plank of its Azure IoT platform, leaving developers
currently building systems high and dry.…
Current conditions: A storm lurking off the coast
of Australia could soon become a tropical cyclone • Bangkok’s 11 million
workers have been told to stay home today to avoid harmful air pollution
• Washington, D.C., could see up to four inches of snow this weekend
– or
none
at all.
THE TOP FIVE
Americans are buying 675 EVs a day with the help of the IRA
Car sellers sold more than 25,000 tax credit-eligible
electric vehicles between January 1 and February 6, according to new
Treasury data. That’s an average of more than 675 EVs sold at a
government-sponsored discount per day, Heatmap’s Emily
Pontecorvo
calculated.
To put that in perspective, about 1.08 million cars were sold in total
in the month of January, according to Cox Automotive, or about 34,840
per day. So the tax credit-supported EVs were only about 2% of the total
cars sold. But 25,000 discounted EVs is nothing to scoff at considering
that fewer models are eligible now than last year. Also, the Treasury
said it has paid approximately $135 million in advance payments to
dealers for about 19,000 of the EVs sold this year. “So even with fewer
options available, buyers are still taking advantage of the new instant
rebate and finding vehicles that work for them,” Pontecorvo said.
DoE funnels more money into heat pump manufacturing
The Department of Energy (DoE) yesterday
announced
it was making an additional $63 million available to speed up the
adoption of residential heat pumps across the country. This is on top of
the $169 million in federal funding announced in November of last year.
The goal is to boost manufacturing of heat pump systems, but with this
new influx of cash, it seems the DoE also wants to wake Americans up to
the benefits of using a heat pump to heat and cool water. Its
announcement notes that heat pump water heaters can be up to three times
more energy efficient than conventional water heaters. “Basically, the
federal funding is aiming to nix the use of gas in a home wherever
possible,”
wrote
Matt Simon at Wired. Ali Zaidi, assistant to the president and
national climate adviser, told Simon that “we’re really seeing, I think,
a sea change across the country in terms of how people heat and cool
their homes.” Data shows that in 2023,
heat
pumps outsold furnaces for the second year in a row.
Google to help map methane leaks
Google is teaming up with the Environmental Defense
Fund (EDF) to help track methane emissions from space. The MethaneSAT –
a satellite developed specifically to monitor methane emissions – will
launch into orbit next month. Google will use artificial intelligence to
create a map of oil and gas infrastructure locations across the world.
“Once we have that map, then we can overlay methane data,” said Yael
Maguire, head of Google’s Geo Sustainability team. This will offer a
“far better understanding of the types of machinery that contributes
most to methane leaks.”
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that’s far more warming than carbon
dioxide. But it breaks down in the atmosphere more quickly that CO2, so
slashing it is seen as “one of the cheapest, fastest ways to curb global
warming in the short term,”
explainedBloomberg. Fossil fuel operations tend to dramatically
underreport their methane releases, so the hope is that more
transparency about emissions will encourage reduction efforts from
producers, but reductions “can increase costs in the short term and slow
output,” Bloomberg noted.
India eyes IEA membership
India wants to take its relationship with one of the
world’s leading energy authorities to the next level. The country has
applied to become a full member of the International Energy Agency
(IEA), joining 31 other member countries, and ministers are deciding
whether or not to say yes. India is already an “association country,”
but full membership would boost its role in tackling climate change. It
could also help the IEA “strengthen cooperation in Asia to stabilize
energy supplies,” as the region emerges as a key source of new global
energy consumption, The Nikkeireported.
The IEA
noted
that energy demand is expected to grow more in India than in any other
country over the next 30 years. “The world cannot plan for its energy
future without India at the table,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih
Birol.
Researchers unveil lab-grown pink ‘beef rice’
The latest development in the enduring quest to create
a meat substitute that people will actually eat is “beef rice.” Yes, you
read that right. Researchers in South Korea have
grown
rice grains in a lab that contain cow muscle and fat cells. The beef
rice is pink, firm, and high in protein and fat. Unlike some other meat
alternatives, it uses ingredients that are widely available, affordable,
and have a lower carbon footprint per gram of protein than beef, leading
its creators to declare it “a novel food ingredient that can overcome
humanity’s food crisis.” But the proof will be in the (rice) pudding: “A
critical test is around public appetite for these sorts of lab-developed
foods,” Neil Ward, an agri-food and climate specialist and professor at
the University of East Anglia,
told
CNN.
NASA
Artemis Science, First Intuitive Machines Flight Head to Moon
date: 2024-02-15, from: NASA breaking news
A suite of NASA science instruments and technology demonstrations is
on the way to our nearest celestial neighbor for the benefit of
humanity. Through this flight to the Moon, they will provide insights
into the lunar surface environment and test technologies for future
landers and Artemis astronauts. At 1:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, Intuitive
Machines’ […]
If evolution favors the survival of the fittest, where did the impulse
to help others come from? Host Janna Levin speaks with Stephanie
Preston, a neuropsychologist who studies the biology of altruism.
Cybercriminals
are stealing iOS users’ face scans to break into mobile banking
accounts
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-16, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Deepfake-enabled attacks against Android and iPhone users are netting
criminals serious cash
Cybercriminals are targeting iOS users with malware that steals face
scans from the users of Apple devices to break into and pilfer money
from bank accounts – thought to be a world first.…
Lucid
Motors cuts thousands off 2024 Air prices and adds new charging,
maintenance perks
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
With its second all-electric model hitting the market this year,
Lucid Motors
wants to ensure consumers don’t forget about its flagship sedan –
the Air. Having just launched its 2024 Air models a couple of months
ago, slashing prices, Lucid has lowered its MSRPs once again,
incentivizing potential customers with additional charging and
maintenance bonuses as well.
Temporary
power procurement bill draws concern from senators
date: 2024-02-15, from: Guam Daily Post
A bill seeking to facilitate the smooth procurement of temporary
power on Guam drew concerns from lawmakers Thursday, due to broad
waivers of certain procurement requirements contained in the bill.
However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the measure won’t move
forward,…
Editor’s note: this article initially stated that all food purchases
will have a 10% discount if purchased from Jeff’s Pirates Cove. It has
been corrected to say that 10% of all food purchased at Jeff’s Pirates
Cove will be donated…
Police
seek man for questioning in robbery and assault complaint
date: 2024-02-15, from: Guam Daily Post
The Guam Police Department has published a wanted flyer for Joseph
Christopher Mendiola, who is sought for questioning regarding a
complaint of robbery and assault that allegedly occurred in the Tumon
area.
Manenggon
concentration camp site up for national recognition
date: 2024-02-15, from: Guam Daily Post
The site of the Manenggon concentration camp in Yona could gain
national recognition as a historic landmark, and while one nonprofit
group believes the site should be given the distinction, the group’s
members also share concern about the potential impact…
Tax
credits are good, but on-the-spot tax credits are really killing it
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
The new year rolled out a new plan where EV shoppers could get
on-the-spot
tax rebates when purchasing a new electric vehicle, with auto
dealers then handling the paperwork and waiting to get reimbursed by the
government. The US government says it has already paid out $135 million
to auto dealers that signed up for the program so far this year.
Cisco
cuts 5% of workforce amid cautious enterprise spending
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
$800M charge facing network giant as customers work way through existing
inventory
Networking goliath Cisco has finally confirmed talk from earlier in the
week that it is laying off thousands of staff, reflecting the cautious
outlook that management are seeing in customers’ spending projections.…
Since President Joe Biden took office, more than 3.6 million people have
had their federal loans forgiven in full. But what’s that mean for your
tax bill? While you don’t have to worry about federal taxes, state taxes
could be another story. We’ll provide a helpful explainer. Plus,
consumers complain about high prices but spend anyway, and that’s
helping turn shoppers on to off brands.
From the BBC World Service: Japan’s economy unexpectedly shrank
for the second quarter in a row last year, meaning the country has
slipped into recession and lost its spot as the world’s third largest
economy. Meanwhile, the U.K. also fell into recession during the final
three months of last year. Plus, thousands of vehicles shipped by
Volkswagen have been held up at U.S. ports over a Chinese-made
component.
IT
body proposes that AI pros get leashed and licensed to uphold
ethics
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Set up a register and strike them off for bad behavior
Creating a register of licensed AI professionals to uphold ethical
standards and securing whistleblowing channels to call out bad
management are two policies that could prevent a Post Office-style
scandal.…
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-13, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Good
essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes.
The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes
unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge
attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to
improve the quality of code itself, but many exploits are due to logic
fails, and less progress has been made scanning for those. Meanwhile,
great strides could be made by paring down just how much code we expose
to the world. This will increase time to market for products, but
legislation is around the corner that should force vendors to take
security more seriously…
At a hillside cemetery near the central Texas town of Gatesville,
Sergeant Richard Rudd was finally laid to rest, nearly 80 years after he
was killed in action. Attendance at the burial last December was light,
as the late infantryman had few close relatives. The Army Honor Guard
presented Rudd’s grand-niece with a folded flag and spoke the words
repeated at countless military memorials: “On behalf of the president of
the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please
accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s
honorable and faithful service.”
GM
nearly doubles its map of Super Cruise hands-free driving routes in
North America
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
General Motors (GM) has
once again expanded its maps of routes that enable Super Cruise
hands-free driving in North America. The American automaker now operates
the largest hands-free driving network now that it has nearly doubled
the mileage of available routes on the continent.
Supporting
learners with programming tasks through AI-generated Parson’s
Problems
date: 2024-02-15, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
The use of generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) in education is now common
among young people (see data from the UK’s Ofcom regulator). As a
computing educator or researcher, you might wonder what impact
generative AI tools will have on how young people learn programming. In
our latest research seminar, Barbara Ericson and Xinying Hou…
Watch
out: New Jersey bill to require all e-bike riders to register, get
insurance
date: 2024-02-15, from: Electrek Feed
It’s been a rough week for anyone who enjoys the freedom of riding
e-bikes without undue state-applied hassle and burden. The latest news
sure to disappoint electric bike riders and proponents of reduced car
usage comes from the Garden State, where a pending New Jersey bill seeks
to require e-bike riders to register their bikes and carry liability
insurance.
UK Cabinet
Office hits pause on £9M Microsoft deal
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Google Workspace hangout extended indefinitely
The UK’s Cabinet Office has paused its migration away from Google
Workspace to Microsoft 365, after ditching the current contract it
signed with the Redmond headquartered biz last spring.…
Sacramento, capital city of the EV-loving Golden State, is the latest
city proposing to ban new gas stations or upgrading existing stations,
unless of course you’re adding electric vehicle charging.
Russia’s
advances on space-based nuclear weapon alarm the US
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — The United States has informed Congress and its allies in Europe about Russian advances on a new, space-based nuclear weapon designed to threaten America’s extensive satellite network, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.</p>
At
least 8 children among 22 hit by gunfire at end of Chiefs’ Super Bowl
parade; 1 person killed
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Eight children were among 22 people hit by gunfire in a shooting at the end of Wednesday’s parade to celebrate the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl win, authorities said, as terrified fans ran for cover and yet another high-profile public event was marred by gun violence. One person was killed, a mother of two identified by her radio station as a DJ.</p>
<p>Two defendants originally convicted of the attempted murder of a security guard at the Kona Seaside Hotel are free after a jury found them guilty of lesser offenses in a retrial that concluded Wednesday.</p>
Trump’s
bombast on NATO invites Russian aggression
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Given that Donald Trump talks trash about a range of issues, it’s tempting to discount the rant in which he suggested that as president he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who were “delinquent” in their financial obligations.</p>
Some
worry California proposition to tackle homelessness would worsen the
problem
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>OROVILLE, Calif. — Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is urging voters to approve a ballot initiative that he says is needed to tackle the state’s homelessness crisis, a change social providers say would threaten programs that keep people from becoming homeless in the first place.</p>
Two
Big Isle educators among 21 honored for earning national teaching
certification
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>The state Department of Education is celebrating 21 teachers statewide who have earned their National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification — a recognition for meeting the highest standards for teaching.</p>
<p>The Hawaii County Department of Environmental Management has announced the development of an Integrated Wastewater Management Plan aimed at providing a comprehensive strategy for cesspool conversions and sewer infrastructure projects across the region.</p>
I
stopped drinking and built the life I always wanted. Why was I still so
anxious?
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>After a wildly successful drinking career, I finally retired 11 years ago. I’d love to say that it was a considered decision after mature reflections and conversations with loved ones. But no. After yet another solo drinking spree, I woke up fully clothed on the cold hard tiles of my bathroom floor. Mornings like this had led to weeks of sobriety before. But this day, it felt different, and as I vowed never to self-medicate again, I knew I was done for good.</p>
At
least 6 US states are considering tougher penalties for killing police
dogs
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Lawmakers in at least six states, including Hawaii, are considering longer prison sentences or bigger fines for harming or killing police dogs, and the idea has bipartisan support despite questions about how the animals are used and a fraught history.</p>
Hawaiian
Electric keeps profit up, seeks financing as Maui wildfire costs
loom
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Hawaii’s largest electrical utility is maintaining financial stability in the face of still-growing legal claims and recovery expenses from the Aug. 8 Maui wildfire disaster. Hawaiian Electric on Tuesday reported fourth-quarter and full-year net income in 2023 topping figures in 2022, which helped its parent company achieve strong but reduced profit in the same comparable periods.</p>
Israel-Hezbollah
tensions rise after rocket barrage from Lebanon
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah intensified on Wednesday when Israeli towns and an army base came under what appeared to be the fiercest attacks from Lebanon since the confrontation began four months ago.</p>
The
49ers fire defensive coordinator Steve Wilks after their Super Bowl
loss
date: 2024-02-15, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The San Francisco 49ers fired defensive coordinator Steve Wilks on Wednesday, three days after losing the Super Bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs. </p>
<p>Applications for 2024 Wayne “Big Dog” Joseph Scholarship — which will award four Big Island student athletes $1,500 each — are now open online.</p>
<p>The glimmer of hope that Congress might pass a bipartisan border-security bill has been extinguished, at least for now. In killing immigration reforms that their party has long supported — and that are now far less likely to become law — Republicans have demonstrated their lack of interest in governing and their unfortunate fealty to Donald Trump, who would prefer to weaponize the issue on the campaign trail. Despite the failure of this compromise, the bipartisan group that spearheaded the bill shouldn’t give up. Nor can the White House wait for Congress to act. The problems at the border are too pressing — and, for President Joe Biden, too politically damaging to ignore.</p>
Here are key takeaways from the special counsel’s investigation of the
Joe Biden classified documents scandal: Biden could not remember when
he was vice president. He could not remember, within years, when his
son, Beau, died and he referred to the president of Egypt as the
president of Mexico. Last week he told us he […]
I periodically receive emails from Rep. Mike Garcia touting his efforts
to improve the lives of military personnel and veterans as well as
honoring those who serve our country. For example, his Feb. 9 email
includes information about his testimony before the House Armed Services
Committee in support of military pay increases, an obituary of […]
I see that Donald Trump accused Nikki Haley of not taking care of
security at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And repeated it four times. He
also stated that he ran against Barack Obama. And described the heads of
Hungary, North Korea and Russia as “strong and smart.” Trump brags
about “acing” a cognitive […]
At the end of November, I popped up to the Derbyshire Peak District
for a weekend, and posted some photos here. At the time, I mentioned
that I had taken some video footage too, and I finally got around to
editing it into something watchable, at least by those who enjoy amateur
travelogues. 🙂 (Direct
Continue
Reading
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Reg metrics show Enrique Lores is worth a lot of ink
The Reg family would like to extend our condolences to HP CEO
Enrique Lores after his headline financial compensation package for 2023
declined more than 7 percent year-on-year to $19.46 million.…
Cameron
Smyth | A Journey Through the Silver Screen
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Signal
Dating back to the early 20th century, Santa Clarita has stood as a
favored filming destination with silent movie productions seeking the
region’s scenic backdrop for their films. The vast expanses of rugged
mountains, sprawling ranches and iconic canyons provided filmmakers with
a versatile canvas for their storytelling. Stars such as Charlie
Chaplin, Harry Carey […]
Spotted these recently and thought they looked good: AirGradient –
“We design professional, accurate and long-lasting air quality monitors
that are open-source and open-hardware so that you have full control on
how you want to use the monitor.” Meshtastic – long-range, low-power,
low-bandwidth, off-grid, decentralised mesh networks, based on LoRa
radios. Plausible – an alternative
Continue
Reading
Today, online, I saw one unsavoury character described as “so bad
that even Meta blocked him”. In the past, one might have said something
similar of Twitter, but it doesn’t really work now… and not because
Twitter has started being responsible about blocking people!
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition.
Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the
Classifieds.
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
In the midst of even more upsetting news regarding our presidential
candidates, it’s important to remember the administrations they’ll bring
with them in 2025.
Volkswagen
Cars Blocked by US Customs Over Part From China
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
Berlin — German automaker Volkswagen said Wednesday several of its
models had been refused entry into the United States, after it emerged
that a Chinese-made component may have breached labor laws.
“We are working to rectify a delay in delivering certain Volkswagen
Group vehicles from ports to dealers due to a customs issue,” Volkswagen
said in a statement.
The trouble related to a “small electronic component,” which was “in
the process of being replaced,” Volkswagen said.
The part, said to be from “western China,” was found to be in breach
of U.S. anti-forced labor laws, according to the Financial Times, which
reported the news first. The Financial Times said Porsche, Bentley and
Audi models were affected.
According to the report, Volkswagen was not aware of the origin of
the part, having sourced it from a supplier.
The German auto group was made aware of the issue by a supplier and
notified U.S. authorities, per the report.
Volkswagen said it “takes allegations of infringements of human
rights very seriously, both within the company and in the supply
chain.”
“As soon as we received information of allegations regarding one of
our sub-suppliers, we have been investigating the matter,” the group
said.
The United States has banned most imports from Xinjiang, in western
China, unless companies offer verifiable proof that production did not
involve forced labor.
Rights campaigners have for years accused Beijing of a brutal
crackdown against the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang,
including through forced labor and detention camps. Beijing denies the
allegations of abuse.
The issue of forced labor is acutely sensitive for Volkswagen, which
has long been plagued by questions over its factory in the region,
operated by its local partner SAIC.
Earlier on Wednesday, Volkswagen said it was discussing the future of
its activities in China’s troubled Xinjiang province, after the
Handelsblatt daily reported that forced labor may have been used to
build a test track in Turpan, Xinjiang.
VW said it had seen no evidence of human rights violations in
connection with the project but that it would likewise investigate any
new information that came to light.
European
Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Surprising third-act twist as Russian case means more freedom for all
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that laws requiring
crippled encryption and extensive data retention violate the European
Convention on Human Rights – a decision that may derail European data
surveillance legislation known as Chat Control.…
Private
US Moon Lander Launched Half Century After Last Apollo Lunar
Mission
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A moon lander built by Houston-based
aerospace company Intuitive Machines was launched from Florida early
Thursday on a mission to conduct the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more
than a half century and the first by a privately owned spacecraft.
The company’s Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, lifted off shortly
after 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) atop a Falcon 9 rocket flown by Elon Musk’
SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
A live NASA-SpaceX online video feed showed the two-stage, 25-story
rocket roaring off the launch pad and streaking into the dark sky over
Florida’s Atlantic coast, trailed by a fiery yellowish plume of
exhaust.
The launch, previously set for Wednesday morning, was postponed for
24 hours because of irregular temperatures detected in liquid methane
used in the lander’s propulsion system. SpaceX said the issue was later
resolved.
Although considered an Intuitive Machines mission, the IM-1 flight is
carrying six NASA payloads of instruments designed to gather data about
the lunar environment ahead of NASA’s planned return of astronauts to
the moon later this decade.
Thursday’s launch came a month after the lunar lander of another
private firm, Astrobotic Technology, suffered a propulsion system leak
on its way to the moon shortly after being placed in orbit on January 8
by a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket making its debut
flight.
The failure of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, which was also flying
NASA payloads to the moon, marked the third time a private company had
been unable to achieve a “soft landing” on the lunar surface, following
ill-fated efforts by companies from Israel and Japan.
Those mishaps illustrated the risks NASA faces in leaning more
heavily on the commercial sector than it had in the past to realize its
spaceflight goals.
Plans call for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C vehicle, a hexagonal
cylinder with four legs, to reach its destination after about a weeklong
flight on February 22 for a landing at crater Malapert A near the moon’s
south pole.
If successful, the flight would represent the first controlled
descent to the lunar surface by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo
crewed moon mission in 1972, and the first by a private company.
The feat also would mark the first journey to the lunar surface under
NASA’s Artemis moon program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to
Earth’s natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft
there.
IM-1 is the latest test of NASA’s strategy of paying for the use of
spacecraft built and owned by private companies to slash the cost of the
Artemis missions, envisioned as precursors to human exploration of
Mars.
By contrast, during the Apollo era, NASA bought rockets and other
technology from the private sector, but owned and operated them
itself.
NASA announced last month that it was delaying its target date for a
first crewed Artemis moon landing from 2025 to late 2026, while China
has said it was aiming for 2030.
Small landers such as Nova-C are expected to get there first,
carrying instruments to closely survey the lunar landscape, its
resources and potential hazards. Odysseus will focus on space weather
interactions with the moon’s surface, radio astronomy, precision landing
technologies and navigation.
Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission is scheduled to land at the lunar
south pole in 2024, followed by an IM-3 mission later in the year with
several small rovers.
Last month, Japan became the fifth country to place a lander on the
moon, with its space agency JAXA achieving an unusually precise
“pinpoint” touchdown of its SLIM probe last month. Last year, India
became the fourth nation to land on the moon, after Russia failed in an
attempt the same month.
The United States, the former Soviet Union and China are the only
other countries that have carried out successful soft lunar touchdowns.
China scored a world first in 2019 by achieving the first landing on the
far side of the moon.
North
Korea running malware-laden gambling websites as-a-service
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
$5k a month for the site. $3k for tech support. Infection with malware
and funding a despot? Priceless
North Korea’s latest money-making venture is the production and sale of
gambling websites that come pre-infected with malware, according to
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS).…
Barrie
Logan, professor who impacted Pierce community for decades, dies at
83
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student
Paper)
Longtime chemistry professor and former Academic Senate President Barrie
Logan died on Jan. 2. He was 83. Logan leaves behind a transformative
legacy at Pierce
CCS
basketball playoffs 2024: The matchups are set. Here’s what to know
date: 2024-02-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
Archbishop Mitty girls, Archbishop Riordan boys roar into Open
Division pool play after dominant regular seasons. Will anyone challenge
them in the section’s top division?
US
Officials Push Back After Lawmaker Sounds Alarm on Security Threat
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The White House along with other top officials are
seeking to reassure the American public after a key lawmaker sounded
alarms about a “serious national security threat” facing the United
States.
In an unusual move that caught some of his fellow lawmakers by
surprise, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee publicly
called on President Joe Biden to declassify intelligence on the unnamed
threat so that the American public and its allies could formulate a
response.
Republican Representative Mike Turner declined to elaborate. But in
an email Turner reportedly sent to colleagues, shared on social media by
various news outlets, he described the danger as a “foreign military
destabilizing capability.”
Several media outlets, quoting U.S. officials, reported late
Wednesday that the threat involves a new Russian space-based
capability.
But a U.S. official, speaking to VOA on the condition of anonymity
due to the sensitive nature of the intelligence, said that while the
danger is significant, it is not imminent.
“The threat described does not involve an active capability that has
been deployed,” the official said.
The White House also sought to downplay concerns, noting it was
already set to brief lawmakers on some of the details Thursday.
“I’m confident that President Biden, in the decisions that he is
taking, is going to ensure the security of the American people going
forward,” said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
“We believe that we can and will and are protecting the national
security of the United States,” Sullivan told reporters, adding he was
surprised that Turner took his concerns public since they were scheduled
to meet for a classified briefing Thursday.
Sullivan also defended the decision not to make the threat
intelligence public, pointing both to concerns about protecting U.S.
“sources and methods,” and the president’s willingness to declassify
intelligence in the past.
“You definitely are not going to find an unwillingness to do that
when it’s in our national security interests to do so,” he said. “This
administration has gone further and, in more creative, more strategic
ways, dealt with the declassification of intelligence in the national
interest of the United States than any administration in history.”
Some key lawmakers also pushed back.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Jim Himes,
called the threat “a significant one” but “not a cause for panic.”
“As to whether more can be declassified about this issue, that is a
worthwhile discussion,” he added in a statement. “But it is not a
discussion to be had in public.”
The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee likewise sought to
allay concerns.
The committee “has the intelligence in question and has been
rigorously tracking this issue from the start,” Democratic Chairman Mark
Warner and Republican Vice Chairman Marco Rubio said in a statement.
“We continue to take this matter seriously and are discussing an
appropriate response with the administration,” they added. “In the
meantime, we must be cautious about potentially disclosing sources and
methods that may be key to preserving a range of options for U.S.
action.”
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson separately told reporters
multiple times there is “no need for public alarm.”
“I want to assure the American people,” Johnson said. “We just want
to assure everyone steady hands are at the wheel. We’re working on it
and there’s no need for alarm.”
VOA’s Patsy Widakuswara and Katherine Gypson contributed to this
report.
What better way to celebrate love on Valentine’s Day, than to
commemorate the start of a new union with a forever partner? The city
of Santa Clarita helped seven couples do just that, as they tied the
knot in the city’s second annual “The Big I Do.” The lucky couples
included: Michael Leroy Humber and […]
Kahkonen
shines, but Sharks shut out by stingy Winnipeg Jets
date: 2024-02-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
Goalie Kaapo Kahkonen made 39 saves, including 16 in the second
period, but the San Jose Sharks were unable to generate any offense
against the stingy Winnipeg Jets
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick
Charge is available now
on Apple
Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and
our RSS feed for Overcast
and other podcast players.
date: 2024-02-15, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
I am at home for a short break, and Buddy and I have spent the day
taking it easy, a plan I intend to continue for the next several hours.
But rather than posting a picture and taking the night off, I am
reposting one of my favorite pieces ever because of what it says about
love, loss, humanity… and history.
SCV
Human Trafficking Task Force visits hotels on V-Day
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita Valley Human Trafficking Task Force sought to spread
love and care on Valentine’s Day with a gift for local hotels and motels
— information to protect against and raise awareness about victims the
group is trying to help. The task force Wednesday was looking to
support recent laws aimed at trafficking adults […]
‘Scandal-plagued’
data broker tracked visits to ‘600 Planned Parenthood locations’
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Anti-abortion group said to have used that monitoring to push ad
campaign
A pro-life group was able to specifically target visitors to nearly 600
Planned Parenthood facilities in 48 states in America with anti-abortion
ads using location data from a broker called Near Intelligence,
according to US Senator Ron Wyden.…
Castaic
boys’ basketball headed to CIF semis, routs Godinez
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Signal
The first-ever playoff game in Castaic High School’s gym brought
countless memories as the Coyotes ran wild against the visiting Godinez
Fundamental Grizzlies. Castaic punched its ticket to the CIF Division
5AA semifinals as well as the state tournament, after beating Godinez,
93-63, snapping the Grizzlies’ 15-game win streak. The Coyotes (17-14)
played relentless defense […]
Having
impeached Mayorkas, House member heads for the exit
date: 2024-02-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
Shortly after announcing that he would not be running for reelection,
Green told CNN that he had “accomplished” all that he “promised he would
accomplish.”
Cemex
sues State Water Board over permit for Santa Clara River
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Signal
A company looking to build the largest mine in North America just east
of Santa Clarita is suing the State Water Board in its latest attempt to
get a permit needed to use the Santa Clara River in its plans to extract
56 million tons of sand and gravel from Soledad Canyon. The lawsuit
means […]
Slack adds
AI to help users cope with chat overload
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Summarizes threads you just can’t keep up with and beefs up search
After nearly a year of testing, Salesforce-owned Slack has launched some
generative AI features that may help enterprise users search, summarize,
and ask questions about information in their conversations.…
March
6: Fifth Annual Health, Wellness Forum Focuses on AI
date: 2024-02-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce announced the details of
its highly anticipated Fifth Annual Health & Wellness Forum, slated
to take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 8 a.m
Special
Counsel Asks Supreme Court to Let Trump’s 2020 Election Case Go to
Trial
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
washington — Special counsel Jack Smith urged the U.S. Supreme Court
on Wednesday to let former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election
interference case proceed to trial without further delay.
Prosecutors were responding to a Trump team request from earlier in
the week asking for a continued pause in the case as the court considers
whether to take up the question of whether the former president is
immune from prosecution for official acts in the White House. Two lower
courts have overwhelmingly rejected that position, prompting Trump to
ask the high court to intervene.
The case — one of four criminal prosecutions confronting Trump — has
reached a critical juncture, with the Supreme Court’s next step capable
of helping determine whether Trump stands trial this year in Washington
or whether the proceedings are going to be postponed by weeks or months
of additional arguments.
The trial date, already postponed once by Trump’s immunity appeal, is
of paramount importance to both sides. Prosecutors are looking to bring
Trump to trial this year while defense lawyers have been seeking delays
in his criminal cases. If Trump were to be elected with the case
pending, he could presumably use his authority as head of the executive
branch to order the Justice Department to dismiss it or could
potentially seek to pardon himself.
Rapid response
Reflecting their desire to proceed quickly, prosecutors responded to
Trump’s appeal within two days even though the court had given them
until next Tuesday.
Though their filing does not explicitly mention the upcoming November
election or Trump’s status as the front-runner in the race for the
Republican presidential nomination, prosecutors described the case as
having “unique national importance” and said that “delay in the
resolution of these charges threatens to frustrate the public interest
in a speedy and fair verdict.”
“The national interest in resolving those charges without further
delay is compelling,” they wrote.
Smith’s team charged Trump in August with plotting to overturn the
results of the 2020 presidential election, including by participating in
a scheme to disrupt the counting of electoral votes in the run-up to the
January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when his supporters stormed
the building in a violent clash with police.
“The charged crimes strike at the heart of our democracy. A
president’s alleged criminal scheme to overturn an election and thwart
the peaceful transfer of power to his successor should be the last place
to recognize a novel form of absolute immunity from federal criminal
law,” they wrote.
Trump’s lawyers have argued that he is shielded from prosecution for
acts that fell within his official duties as president — a legally
untested argument since no other former president has been
indicted.
The trial judge and then a federal appeals court rejected those
arguments, with a three-judge appeals panel last week saying, “We cannot
accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants
above the law for all time thereafter.”
The proceedings have been effectively frozen by Trump’s immunity
appeal, with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan canceling a March 4 trial
date while the appeals court considered the matter. No new date has been
set.
Further delays possible
Trump’s appeal and request for the Supreme Court to get involved
could cause further delays depending on what the justices decide. In
December, Smith and his team had urged the justices to take up and
decide the immunity issue, even before the appeals court weighed in. But
the court declined.
The Supreme Court’s options include rejecting the emergency appeal,
which would enable Chutkan to restart the trial proceedings in
Washington’s federal court. The court also could extend the delay while
it hears arguments on the immunity issue. In that event, the schedule
the justices set could determine how soon a trial might begin, if indeed
they agree with lower-court rulings that Trump is not immune from
prosecution.
On Wednesday, prosecutors urged the court to reject Trump’s petition
to hear the case, saying that lower-court opinions rejecting immunity
for the former president “underscore how remote the possibility is that
this Court will agree with his unprecedented legal position.”
But if the court does want to decide the matter, Smith said, the
justices should hear arguments in March and issue a final ruling by late
June.
Prosecutors also pushed back against Trump’s argument that allowing
the case to proceed could chill future presidents’ actions for fear they
could be criminally charged once they leave office and open the door to
politically motivated cases against former commanders-in-chief.
“That dystopian vision runs contrary to the checks and balances built
into our institutions and the framework of the Constitution,” they
wrote. “Those guardrails ensure that the legal process for determining
criminal liability will not be captive to ‘political forces,’ as
applicant forecasts.”
The Santa Clarita City Council Legislative Committee had a certain “Law
& Order” theme to its agenda Tuesday, with all eight items connected
to criminal justice reforms Sacramento lawmakers are considering during
the current legislative term. The city’s Legislative Committee, composed
of Councilman Jason Gibbs and Mayor Cameron Smyth, meets on an as-needed
basis to discuss […]
Blinken
Heads to Munich Security Conference Amid US Foreign Aid Showdown
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading to Albania and then
to Germany this week for the Munich Security Conference. Among issues he
will likely face in Europe is the stalling of military aid to Ukraine in
the U.S. House and former President Donald Trump’s comments threatening
to abandon some NATO allies if he is reelected. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic
Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.
Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream held a grand opening celebration and ribbon
cutting for the new Stevenson Ranch location on Feb. 8, treating the
first 50 guests to free ice cream for a year. The Stevenson Ranch
Handel’s store is the largest walk-up parlor for the brand, covering
2,800 square feet. It will offer local and […]
Microsoft, in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, is preparing
to roll out replacement certificates that’ll set new Unified Extensible
Firmware Interface (UEFI) Certificate Authorities (CAs) trust anchors in
Secure Boot for the future. Look out for Secure Boot database updates
rolling out in phases to add trust for the new database (DB) and Key
Exchange Key (KEK) certificates. This new DB update is available as an
optional servicing update for all Secure Boot enabled devices from
February 13, 2024. ↫ SochiOgbuanya This update will replace the Windows
8-era certificates, set to expire in 2026, with new ones.
Ukraine
Group Talks Support as Kyiv Says it Sunk Another Russian Warship
date: 2024-02-15, from: VOA News USA
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin hosted a virtual meeting with
allies on Wednesday to discuss support for Ukraine as the two-year
anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion nears. VOA Pentagon
correspondent Carla Babb has the latest.
North
Hollywood woman arrested on suspicion of vandalism
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Signal
A North Hollywood woman was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of vandalism
after allegedly throwing rocks at a vehicle, according to Santa Clarita
Valley Sheriff’s Station officials. Deputies were called to the 26400
block of Bouquet Canyon Road, near Shadow Valley Lane, on Tuesday at
around 11:45 a.m. for a report of a woman throwing rocks […]
The robots.txt file governs a give and take; AI feels to many like
all take and no give. But there’s now so much money in AI, and the
technological state of the art is changing so fast that many site owners
can’t keep up. And the fundamental agreement behind robots.txt, and the
web as a whole — which for so long amounted to “everybody just be cool”
— may not be able to keep up either. ↫ David Pierce for The Verge
Another thing “AI” does not respect.
Quilter’s
AI design service nabs $10M to make circuit board design easier
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Claims what took weeks to do by hand, machine learning can do in hours
On Tuesday AI startup Quilter picked up $10 million in series-A funding
to use a combination of machine learning and high-performance computing
(HPC) to make designing printed circuit boards a less grueling and
manual experience.…
VSBHDA provides SoundBlaster emulation for HDA (and AC97/SBLive). It is
Japheth’s fork of crazii’s SBEMU driver. This one works with an
unmodified HDPMI32i, making it compatible with HX. VSBHDA supports HDA
(Intel’s High Definition Audio), Intel ICH / nForce, VIA VT82C686,
VT8233/35/37, and VIA VT82C686, VT8233/35/37. It emulates SoundBlaster
1.0, 2.0, Pro, Pro2, 16 in 8-bit, 16-bit, mono, stereo, and high-speed
modes.
Version
1.1 is now available from
VSBHDA
on GitHub.
Debug/X is a package of debuggers by Japheth, and includes Debug (like
MS-DOS DEBUG), DebugX (an extended version), and additional variants
like DebugXv, DebugXg, DebugB or DebugR that are useful in certain
cases. Japheth recently released a new Debug/X collection; version 2.02
fixes S command (position display was corrupted in
v2.00-v2.01). You can download the new version at
Debug/X
v2.02 or get the source code from the
Debug/X
GitHub.
Storm-Related
Tax Relief Available for Property Owners
date: 2024-02-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Los Angeles County Assessor Jeff Prang is reminding property owners
that property tax relief is available for those suffering damage from
the recent torrent of storms
JEMM is an “Expanded Memory Manager” (EMM) based on EMM386. Japheth
updated JEMM with a few fixes: + Simulate_IO() no longer calls trap
handler + int 67h, ax=5B01h will return error code A3h if checksum
invalid + QPIEMU: new JLM that partly implements QEMM’s API + JEMMDBG:
removed from binary package. You can find it at the
JEMM
GitHub, or more directly from the
JEMM
5.84 release.
Schiavo
bill seeks to increase transparency on transportation investments
date: 2024-02-15, from: The Signal
News release Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, D-Chatsworth, has announced
the introduction of the Transportation Accountability Act, Assembly Bill
2086, which will create needed transparency and accountability in
California’s transportation investments, paving the way for a more
efficient and equitable transportation system, according to a news
release from the assemblywoman’s office. The Greenlining Institute and
TransForm […]
Moderation
is the Key to Health Eating Habits, According to CSUN Prof
date: 2024-02-15, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Moderation is the key to sustaining healthy eating habits through the
holiday season and into the new year, according to Brittany Allison, an
assistant professor of food science at California State University,
Northridge.
OpenAI
shuts down China, Russia, Iran, N Korea accounts caught doing naughty
things
date: 2024-02-15, updated: 2024-02-15, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
You don’t need us to craft phishing emails or write malware, super-lab
sniffs
OpenAI has shut down five accounts it asserts were used by government
agents to generate phishing emails and malicious software scripts as
well as research ways to evade malware detection.…
Iran
blames sabotage for natural gas pipeline explosion
date: 2024-02-15, from: San Jose Mercury News
In the past, Arab separatists in southwestern Iran have claimed
attacks against oil pipelines. However, attacks elsewhere in Iran
against such infrastructure are rare.
News release WeWil Collaborative, a local organization that seeks to
empower women with professional development, growth, and connections
through workshops and community, is scheduled Feb. 23 to host an online
workshop featuring internationally acclaimed photographer Vivien
Killilea. The workshop, “Mastering Your Business Through Authenticity
and an Open Mind,” draws from Killilea’s experiences across diverse
cultures, […]
We’re equally sad and proud to report that
Rachael
Lammey is moving on in her career to the very lucky team at
67Bricks. Her last day at Crossref is today, Friday 16th February. Which
is too soon for us, but very exciting for her!
It’s hard to overstate Rachael’s impact on Crossref’s growth and success
in her 12 years here. She started as a Product Manager where she
developed that role into a broad and central function, and soon moved
into the newly-formed community team as International Outreach Manager
where she grew important programs such as Sponsors, Ambassadors, a
series of ‘LIVE’ events around the world, and she went on to manage her
own team and establish some of the most important strategic
relationships that Crossref now feels fortunate to have.
Rachael was a significant part of the growth and adoption of new
initiatives such as Crossmark, Similarity Check, the REST API,
preprints, grants, data citation, and ROR. She’s contributed to numerous
organisations such as EASE, ALPSP, SSP, ISMTE, STM, and most recently
co-Chaired the NISO working group on retractions and corrections.
As Head of Strategic Initiatives, and most recently, Director of
Product, Rachael has shown dedication and leadership, supporting and
strengthening not just her own teams but all of us across the
organisation, encouraging us to do better while being one of the easiest
people to work with.
The
‘butterfly
effect’ is the notion that the world is deeply interconnected and
that one small occurrence can influence a much larger complex system.
Rachael embodies that notion, having created positive ripples and
waves—and certainly many connections—in the scholarly record, in our
organisation, and across the community.
Messages from colleagues
Rachael, I was saddened when I first heard the news that you were moving
on to another opportunity. Your professionalism, work ethic, and
positive attitude have been inspirational to work around. I have enjoyed
the opportunities we have had to collaborate. As you move on to a new
experience I wish you success and happiness in your future endeavors.
Your presence will be missed at Crossref! Best Wishes.
– Ryan
I will miss you, Rachael. It has been great working with you for the few
months that I have been at Crossref. I also cannot forget kayaking
together with you and capsizing on the return to the shore, but almost
professionally recovering. We would have made the best team this time
around. I wish you all the best and many wins in your new role.
– Obanda
I feel like the luckiest human to have worked with Rachael over the last
4 years. She’s the perfect mix of smart and funny and knowing how to get
things done. Rachael is a big part of what makes Crossref culture so
special — I’ve never felt so supported in a role as when Rachael was my
manager and for that I am very grateful. I will miss her wit and humor
and her pragmatic approach to work and life!
– Sara
One of my first ‘Crossref LIVE’ events was with Rachael in Brazil in
2016. At the time, my role mostly focused on membership, and we had just
started working more closely with ABEC, a large organisation in Brazil
that sponsored quite a few members. Rachael managed the sponsor program
then and thought this would be a good opportunity to collaborate with a
sponsor on an event, and she asked me to join her. There is so much
planning for these - venues, local partners, presentations, meetings -
and she had all the details in order and made the event such a success.
Rachael was supportive, encouraging, and I learned so much from working
with her. The Brazil trip was such a positive experience that I realised
I wanted to focus more closely on community engagement. Rachael
encouraged me to do so.
She and I went on to partner on more LIVE events together. Our time in
Indonesia was perhaps one of the most memorable for me - as well as our
LIVE event, we had an unexpected tour of Yogyakarta with our Indonesian
hosts, involving a tour of Prambanan Temple (see photo below), batik
fabric shopping, visiting a few universities, and a stop at our hosts’
home. All the while trying not to let the winding car ride and traffic
get the better of us. Our event the next day went perfectly, and I told
her, half-jokingly, that the whole experience renewed my faith in
humanity. Of note, we also drank the only bottle of wine available in
the hotel bar.
Rachael was also my Crossref running buddy, and we spent quite a few
miles together - in Brazil, NH, Maine, Oxford, and Spain. During our
runs, topics ranged from Game of Thrones to Idris Elba to sportsing, but
not so much about work. The next time I find myself in England, we will
run a few more miles together, followed by a pint. Thank you for
everything!
– Susan
Many have pointed out how talented, wise, or skilled you are and I
certainly will not contradict a single word of it but that’s not what
comes to mind first for me. Those traits, while true, pale in comparison
to the person you are. Your positive, bright demeanor and the way
everyone always feels better just being around you. I have dreaded some
meetings from time to time. But whenever I’ve been involved in something
with you, I’ve always left feeling better than when I started (no matter
how grumpy I may have entered). You have been a consistent bright light
in the Crossref constellation and you will truly be missed.
– Jon
Rachael! You are the best at cutting through all the bulls**t to get at
what really needs to happen and why! Your knowledge is broad and deep,
as is your institutional memory for all things Crossref and scholarly
publishing. And your unflappability in pretty much any context is
admirable and inspiring. We’ll miss you big time! Wishing you all the
success at 67Bricks and otherwise.
– Shayn
Hey Rachael - I’m happy to be writing this note of Congratulations!! to
you, particularly because it would be awkward to explain this bit of
verklempt I’m feeling. Our interactions have been limited, but my
impressions of you are of confidence, calm, capability, and
collegiality. Thanks so much for your work with the Billing team. I’m
sorry we are losing you, and am also so glad to know that you are out
there at the forefront of inspiring others elsewhere, not only in the
work you do, but also how you go about it.
– Laura
Hey Rachael, Just a big THANK YOU for helping me out all this time. I’ve
had so many questions, and you’ve always been there to answer them. I
always knew I could count on you. Thanks for those heartening chats when
I needed a boost, and for including me in webinars and recordings - it
really helped me improve. Remember that funny mistake I made on a
recording when I called us “Rochael”? We sure had a good laugh! I’m
gonna miss those times and working with you. Can’t wait to catch up with
you over a drink the next time I’m in town. Wishing you all the very
best and once again, thanks for everything!
– Rosa
I am happy we got to enjoy some delicious vegetarian/vegan meals and
wine together. I guess I should also mention that I enjoyed recruiting,
HR and business fun with you too. Thank you for being such a big part of
Crossref for 12 years! Have fun conquering your new chapter.
Congratulations!
– Michelle
Rachael! You will be missed. I have really enjoyed our chats and work
together. I will miss our wide ranging talks about food, books, and your
descriptions of all the sportsing, which I would admire because I can
barely manage a short run. :-) Thanks so much for being you and let’s
stay in touch! Congratulations on your new endeavor, you’re going to be
great.
– Esha
When Rachel joined Crossref she brought a lot of enthusiasm and interest
in learning about all that we were doing and also about what we could
do. Her ideas and engaging leadership are wonderful for creating
interest and drive to make projects happen. It has been wonderful to
work with her over the 12 years here. I always look forward to seeing
her and hearing what she has been doing outside of Crossref as well as
inside. I will miss her but I know she will be doing great things
wherever she may be.
– Tim
We’ve had a number of opportunities to reminisce, gassing each other up
about how great it has been to work together, so I won’t do too much
more of that here. But we will continue building on all of your
contributions at Crossref and will carry forward your truth-telling and
problem-solving approach to the work we do here. Best of luck with all
the future has to offer, and we will certainly miss having you on the
team.
– Patrick P
Rachael - I will miss you. I’ve really enjoyed working with you, hanging
out while traveling, and getting recommendations on good books to read.
Crossref won’t be the same without you. I think you have worked in the
most different areas of Crossref and on the most projects of anybody,
ever. Your commitment, professionalism and humour helped make Crossref
what it is today. Your sportsing is also very impressive. All the best.
– Ed
Not all heroes wear capes! Rachael defines that saying so much with her
ethic of getting things DONE! I know she loves to get things done but
the speed and quality in which that happens is second-to-none. Rachael
will be massively missed at Crossref and 67Bricks don’t yet know what
they have found. I enjoyed working with Rachael throughout my tenure at
Crossref, she has helped me a huge amount in developing my programming
skills and has always been encouraging throughout, especially with the
’toil-bashing’ which is substantial and overwhelming at times.
On a more personal note, she is a great drinking buddy and always
motivates me to be more active… by making me feel lazy. The number of
hours Rachael would work was crazy, but then I always thought that
anyone who gets up that early to go for runs must be a little crazy! AIl
the best in your future endeavors and don’t be a stranger.
– Paul
When I started at Crossref in March 2015—at the UKSG conference in
Glasgow—Rachael was leading a workshop on text mining, showing off in
full glory her ‘unicorn’ mix of skills from her technical knowledge of
metadata and APIs to her facilitation techniques with a large group of
people, clearly a community whose needs she knew inside out. Later that
evening, Rachael took it upon herself to induct me in the ways of
Crossref. One of the most important things she thought I should know was
that we were all trusted and treated like adults - there was no
micromanagement and I was to feel completely free to challenge the
status quo.
After one of the first ‘LIVE’ events, in Vilnius, I realised that it was
Rachael who had created and embodied that trusted vibe through her own
approach. She has been entrusted with so many programs, projects, teams,
and tricky situations. Almost every launch, release, announcement, or
achievement at Crossref very likely had Rachael’s eye on it at some
stage, certainly the ‘actually-getting-it-done’ stage. Our close working
relationship over the last nine years grew into a great friendship and
I’m not quite sure how I’ll feel when the reality sets in and she’s not
here for a quick chat, always a reality check. Working with Rachael has
been inspiring, exciting, reassuring, and hilarious (that dry ‘Norn
Iron’ humour!). 67Bricks is so fortunate and I can’t wait to watch her
help them go from strength to strength, just like she has done for
Crossref. See you soon, Ranty Rachael, no doubt putting the world to
rights over a bottle of Malbec and many eyerolls 🙄.
– Ginny
Although our time working together only overlapped the short span of two
years, I appreciate how much of a champion you were for ROR and
everything else you did at Crossref! I’m sure you’ll continue to do the
same, among many other great things, in your new journey at 67 Bricks.
You will be missed!
– Adam
Rachael, It has been wonderful working with you!! You are truly a
special person. I always looked forward to when we chatted over slack,
had a call together, or got to spend time together in person. You are
sure to do amazing things on your next adventure. You will truly be
missed!! I hope we can stay in touch! Good luck, Rachael!!! Fondly, Amy.
– Amy
I am happy I got to meet Rachael when I joined Crossref in December
2023. We spoke generally about the Products team at Crossref, the
differences and similarities between the African and British culture and
upcoming projects on automation. You were really patient towards
explaining and providing great information on metadata and research.
Thank you so much for always responding swiftly to my requests
pertaining to Finance issues. I have no doubt that you would be missed
at Crossref and would keep doing great things into the future!!!
Congratulations Rachael.
– Patience
I will greatly miss working with you, Rachael; you have been a stalwart
of reliability and enthusiasm during my time at Crossref and the
organization will not be the same without you. That said, of course, I
wish you all the best of luck and success in your future endeavours!
– Martin
Rachael- Congratulations on this new opportunity, I am thrilled for you!
I am also very sorry that our time at Crossref did not overlap much and
I am grateful for all the chances I had of interacting with you
(including being able to meet you in London recently)- you were always
very helpful and kind to me. I am hopeful that our paths will cross
again in the future. We will definitely miss you here, and I wish you
all the best for all the exciting things ahead.
– Madhura
My third week at Crossref back in 2017 was at the annual meeting in
Singapore, and not getting into the timezone and not sleeping for 4 days
was eased by our visit to a rooftop nightclub on the penultimate night -
just before you headed off to Indonesia for a series of meetings with
members and sponsors. I still don’t know where you get all your energy!
I’m so sorry you’re leaving - I’ll really miss your honesty, your
approach to getting things done, and of course seeing Rosie on our zoom
calls. Looking forward to seeing what’s next for 67 Bricks - exciting
times!
– Amanda B
Rachael, it’s been a pleasure to work with you. You’re always ready to
help and ever full of information. We’ve only just got coordinated on
the perennial challenge of timelines! You took things on and got them
done, as you said. The world of schol comms won’t even know how much it
has to thank you for, probably chiefly for seeing the Retraction Watch
data acquisition through and opening it up for all. I will miss your
honesty and energy, and the opportunity to challenge you again on the
amount of food consumed in one sitting… I don’t think you’ll need luck
in your next place, but I wish you that it is all you want it to be.
– Kora
I’m so glad to have met you in person over these couple of days in
London shortly after I joined Crossref and it’s such a shame we didn’t
have much time to work together more and spend more time (not working)
together. Thanks for the introduction to the Scampi Fries - you’ve
changed my life forever (for the best obviously)!
– Maryna
Thank you for your collaboration and friendship over the past decade!
You will be missed. We’ve worked on a long series of abbreviations,
acronyms, and portmanteaus! Thanks for organizing countless things, from
conference satellites to conference rooms. Your long record as fire
warden was unblemished. 67bricks will benefit from your singular drive
and attention to detail. All the best!
– Joe
Rachael! One thing I admire most in a person is a facility with metaphor
accompanied by the ability to see to the heart of a matter, and hoo boy
do you have those qualities in spades. I remember so clearly your talk
at the Crossref team meeting in Spain in 2023 in which you clarified the
Big Picture for us all in an extremely enlightening way, and then, in a
smaller but equally impressive achievement, casually mentioning in a
Funder Registry meeting that funders should start “stretching and
warming up” for the transition to ROR – boy did I latch on to that
terrific image. I wish you all the best at 67 Bricks.
– Amanda F
Rachael, thank you so much for all the support, patience, honesty, and
determination. I will certainly miss our chats, work-related and
non-work related. I wish you all the best in your new ventures!
– Dominika
Rachael - thank you for your boundless patience, generosity, and sense
of humour. I’m very grateful I got to learn the Crossref ropes (cropes?)
from you. Looking forward to randomly running into you on the Bristol
karaoke circuit in 10 years’ time and performing an epic duet of Dancing
in the Dark together. There’s a joke in there somewhere about you being
the boss.
– Lena
Rachael, Congrats on your new opportunity. You will be greatly missed
here. Through the years we have only been at the same events in person a
handful of times but I will always remember your amazing personality and
sense of humor. I am thankful to have spent some time with you at 2020
PIDapalooza.
– Maria
Thank you, Rachael. Thank you. I know everyone is telling you that
they’re sad to see you go (I am too; we all are). I keep thinking if I
delay telling you that, maybe the day won’t come when you walk out the
Crossref doors. But here it is. Just wanted to you to know that I
appreciate you. I appreciate you pushing us forward. I appreciate you
being an advocate for all things Crossref. We’ll all miss you. Best of
luck at 67bricks!
– Isaac
On one of our first meet ups together, I drove us from the Lynnfield
office to Logan airport in rush hour, and we managed to survive the
Bostonian road rage in one piece. We spent the ride talking through the
intricacies of a sponsoring organization’s agreement. Rachael has been a
safe set of hands and an encyclopedia of institutional memory for
Crossref for 12 years.
Rachael is one of those people who’s as equally competent as she is a
pleasure to work with. She’s an innate leader because people want to get
behind her. She shows her depth of understanding while also inviting
input from everyone in the room. I’ll miss our Zoom calls, our marathon
Friday sessions, and our post-meeting pub visits.
– Lucy
Hello! Here’s to hoping your new workplace appreciates you as much as
you were here – they’re lucky to have you. I only wish we had the chance
to interact more. Many hugs!
– Luis
Rachael, I will really really miss you, professionally and personally
(but you know this already !). I’ll miss all our work, dog, book and
putting the world to rights chats. You’ll be brilliant whatever you do
and wherever you go (67Bricks have no idea how lucky they are !). Just
keep ‘getting stuff done’ and have fun 😀
– Fabienne
You will be sorely missed but can be very proud of what you’ve done
during your time at Crossref, I’m sure you’ll continue to have a big
impact. You’ve always been a pleasure to work with: efficient,
supportive, and always with a sense of fun and enjoyment. That’s
probably one of the things that drew me to Crossref even before we
worked together as colleagues. Thanks for the support and positivity
you’ve brought on many, many occasions and best wishes for the future!
– Martyn
Hey Rachael! I might have not had the chance to meet with you much while
still around but I’ll definitely miss your jokes and the good vibes you
were bringing to each call! Looking forward to taking over your place
for board games when around Bristol ;) Wishing you a great start in the
new place!
– Panos
ThunderCats are on the move. ThunderCats are loose. Says it all, really.
Best of luck in your new endeavours.
– Mike
Crossref won’t be the same without Rachael and we wish her well on her
way to even greater things.
After one of the first ‘LIVE’ events, in Vilnius, I realised that it was Rachael who had created and embodied that trusted vibe through her own approach. She has been entrusted with so many programs, projects, teams, and tricky situations. Almost every launch, release, announcement, or achievement at Crossref very likely had Rachael’s eye on it at some stage, certainly the ‘actually-getting-it-done’ stage. Our close working relationship over the last nine years grew into a great friendship and I’m not quite sure how I’ll feel when the reality sets in and she’s not here for a quick chat, always a reality check. Working with Rachael has been inspiring, exciting, reassuring, and hilarious (that dry ‘Norn Iron’ humour!). 67Bricks is so fortunate and I can’t wait to watch her help them go from strength to strength, just like she has done for Crossref. See you soon, Ranty Rachael, no doubt putting the world to rights over a bottle of Malbec and many eyerolls 🙄.
