News gathered 2024-04-18
(date: 2024-04-18 08:50:37)
23 Apr 2024
date: 2024-04-24, from: Miguel de Icaza’s blog
Embeddable Game Engine
Many years ago, when working at Xamarin, where
we were building cross-platform libraries for mobile developers, we
wanted to offer both 2D and 3D gaming capabilities for our users in the
form of adding 2D or 3D content to their mobile applications.
For 2D, we contributed and developed assorted Cocos2D-inspired libraries.
For 3D, the situation was more complex. We funded a few over the years, and we contributed to others over the years, but nothing panned out (the history of this is worth a dedicated post).
Around 2013, we looked around, and there were two contenders at the time, one was an embeddable engine with many cute features but not great UI support called Urho, and the other one was a Godot, which had a great IDE, but did not support being embedded.
I reached out to Juan at the time to discuss whether Godot could be turned into such engine. While I tend to take copious notes of all my meetings, those notes sadly were gone as part of the Microsoft acquisition, but from what I can remember Juan told me, "Godot is not what you are looking for" in two dimensions, there were no immediate plans to turn it into an embeddable library, and it was not as advanced as Urho, so he recommended that I go with Urho.
We invested heavily in binding Urho and created UrhoSharp that would go into becoming a great 3D library for our C# users and worked not only on every desktop and mobile platform, but we did a ton of work to make it great for AR and VR headsets. Sadly, Microsoft’s management left UrhoSharp to die.
Then, the maintainer of Urho stepped down, and Godot became one of the most popular open-source projects in the world.
Last year, @Faolan-Rad contributed a patch to Godot to turn it into a library that could be embedded into applications. I used this library to build SwiftGodotKit and have been very happy with it ever since - allowing people to embed Godot content into their application.
However, the patch had severe limitations; it could only ever run one Godot game as an embedded system and could not do much more. The folks at Smirk Software wanted to take this further. They wanted to host independent Godot scenes in their app and have more control over those so they could sprinkle Godot content at their heart’s content on their mobile app (demo)
They funded some initial work to do this and hired Gergely Kis’s company to do this work.
Gergely demoed this work at GodotCon last year. I came back very excited from GodotCon and I decided to turn my prototype Godot on iPad into a complete product.
One of the features that I needed was the ability to embed chunks of Godot in discrete components in my iPad UI, so we worked with Gergely to productize and polish this patch for general consumption.
Now, there is a
complete patch
under review to allow people to embed arbitrary Godot scenes into
their apps. For SwiftUI users, this means that you can embed a Godot
scene into a View and display and control it at will.
Hopefully, the team will accept this change into Godot, and once this is done, I will update SwiftGodotKit to get these new capabilities to Swift users (bindings for other platforms and languages are left as an exercise to the reader).
It only took a decade after talking to Juan, but I am back firmly in Godot land.
https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2024/Apr-23.html
911 goes MIA across multiple US states, cause unclear
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Some say various cell services were out, others still say landlines were affected. What just happened?
Widespread 911 outages in the US appear to have mostly been resolved, but that doesn’t mean the cause is clear.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/911_outage/
Most workers now entitled to unpaid time for pregnancy care
date: 2024-04-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
This week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finalized regulations to ensure that most employees around the country are entitled to unpaid time off and other accommodations for a range of pregnancy-related medical needs, from nausea and gestational diabetes to abortion care. We’ll learn more. Also on today’s show: a drumbeat of “higher for longer” from Fed officials, the Biden administration’s show of support for American steel, and gaming furniture that’s all grown up.
Tesla launches website to convince shareholders to vote for Elon’s $55 billion payday
date: 2024-04-18, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla has launched a new website aimed at convincing shareholders to vote for reinstating Elon Musk’s $55 billion compensation plan.
AirPlay Now Available in 60+ IHG Hotels in North America
date: 2024-04-18, from: TidBITS blog
If you stay in one of the 60+ appropriately equipped hotels on your next trip, you may be able to use AirPlay from your iPhone or iPad to share content with the big-screen TV in your room.
https://tidbits.com/2024/04/18/airplay-now-available-in-60-ihg-hotels-in-north-america/
Pac-12 finances: Washington attempts to restructure stadium debt as Big Ten move looms
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Huskies need to lower debt service payments to potentially free up cash for operations as they enter the B1G as a half-share member.
Larry Magid: Fixing a slow internet connection
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Problems can take a while to sort out and require a few phone calls
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/18/larry-magid-fixing-a-slow-internet-connection/
GM Unveils $7,300 Vehicle-To-Home Bundle For Ultium EVs
date: 2024-04-18, from: Inside EVs News
The V2H bundle from GM Energy includes all the necessary equipment to allow you to power your home with your Ultium EV.
https://insideevs.com/news/716625/gm-vehicle-to-home-bundle/
TSMC expects customers to pay more for chips fabbed overseas
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’ll be pricier, but there are geopolitical benefits, says CEO
TSMC boss C C Wei says customers who want to fabricate in the chip giant’s non-Taiwan facilities will need share the cost by paying more.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/tsmc_overseas_costs/
Climate Change Research
date: 2024-04-18, from: NASA breaking news
Science in Space: April 2024 Everyone on Earth is touched by the effects of climate change, such as hotter temperatures, shifts in rain patterns, and sea level rise. Collecting climate data helps communities better plan for these changes and build more resilience to them. The International Space Station, one of dozens of NASA missions contributing […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/iss-research/climate-change-research/
What Does 100cc Get You? Here’s The Difference Between Kawasaki Z500 And Z400 Engines
date: 2024-04-18, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
New year, new displacement. I think that’s how the saying goes, right?
https://www.rideapart.com/news/716338/kawasaki-500cc-parallel-twin-engine/
Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier
date: 2024-04-18, from: Quanta Magazine
Researchers have shown how to find the simplest description of a data set faster than by simply checking every possibility.The post Cryptography Tricks Make a Hard Problem a Little Easier first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/cryptography-tricks-make-a-hard-problem-a-little-easier-20240418/
Netflix Doc ‘What Jennifer Did’ Uses AI Images to Create False Historical Record
date: 2024-04-18, from: 404 Media Group
Documentary filmmakers were publishing guidelines on how to ethically use generative AI right as Netflix’s true crime doc was adding fake images to the historical record.
EV prices are down 18% over the past year as drastic price cuts take effect
date: 2024-04-18, from: Electrek Feed
Electric vehicle prices are down 18% so far this month compared to April 2023. With most automakers launching aggressive discounts, many EVs are on fire sale right now. Some are even being offered for five-figure discounts.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/18/ev-prices-down-18-last-year-drastic-price-cuts/
NASA will send astronauts to patch up leaky ISS telescope
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Thermal shield damage is screwing with daytime observations of X-ray bursts
NASA is sending astronauts out to fix an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station (ISS) after the instrument developed a “light leak.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/nasa_nicer_repair_spacewalk/
California’s fast food prices rose 7% before new $20 wage, No. 1 jump in US
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
California full-service restaurants raised prices by 3.3% in six months. That ranked third-highest nationally.
Who owns businesses and rentals in California? A lawmaker wants the public to know
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
A SoCal lawmaker wants to require business owners and landlords to disclose their identities under legislation aimed at cracking down on opaque ownership structures that have enabled some companies to skirt state laws without facing consequences.
Tesla Just Laid Off 10% Of Its Workforce. Now Elon Musk Wants More Money
date: 2024-04-18, from: Inside EVs News
Plus, Rivian lays off more of its workforce and Mexico stops giving Chinese EV makers incentives.
https://insideevs.com/news/716519/tesla-musk-56-billion-criticalmaterials/
185K people’s sensitive data in the pits after ransomware raid on Cherry Health
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Extent of information seized will be a concern for those affected
Ransomware strikes at yet another US healthcare organization led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to just shy of 185,000 people.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/ransomware_cherry_health/
Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids
date: 2024-04-18, from: NASA breaking news
Like boulders, rocks, and pebbles scattered across a landscape, asteroids come in a wide range of sizes. Cataloging asteroids in space is tricky because they are faint and they don’t stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits around the Sun. Astronomers recently used a trove of archived images taken by NASA’s Hubble […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-goes-hunting-for-small-main-belt-asteroids/
Volkswagen’s Upcoming Cheap EVs In China Will Use Xpeng Tech
date: 2024-04-18, from: Inside EVs News
Four entry-level EVs will debut in 2026 using Xpeng’s electronic architecture to slash costs by up to 40%.
https://insideevs.com/news/716562/vw-xpeng-electrical-architecture-evs-china/
Move over, fentanyl? Stimulant overdose deaths are rising fast
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Deadly, addictive fentanyl has certainly earned the spotlight when it comes to overdose deaths — but carnage from stimulants like methamphetamine and cocaine is rising at a much faster clip.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/18/move-over-fentanyl-stimulant-overdose-deaths-are-rising-fast/
25 years after Columbine, trauma shadows survivors of school shooting
date: 2024-04-18, from: VOA News USA
Denver, Colo. — Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run.
Twenty-five years later, and with Mendo now a mother herself, the trauma from that horrific day remains close on her heels.
It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city she had visited a lot while working in the casino industry. Then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed in Uvalde, Texas.
Mendo had been filling out her daughter’s pre-kindergarten application when news of the elementary school shooting broke. She read a few lines of a news story about Uvalde, then put her head down and cried.
“It felt like nothing changed,” she recalls thinking.
In the quarter-century since two gunmen at Columbine shot and killed 12 fellow students and a teacher in suburban Denver — an attack that played out on live television and ushered in the modern era of school shootings — the traumas of that day have continued to shadow Mendo and others who were there.
Some needed years to view themselves as Columbine survivors since they were not physically wounded. Yet things like fireworks could still trigger disturbing memories. The aftershocks — often unacknowledged in the years before mental health struggles were more widely recognized — led to some survivors suffering insomnia, dropping out of school, or disengaging from their spouses or families.
Survivors and other members of the community plan to attend a candlelight vigil on the steps of the state’s capitol Friday night, the eve of the shooting’s anniversary.
April is particularly hard for Mendo, 39, whose “brain turns to mashed potatoes” each year. She shows up at dentist appointments early, misplaces her keys, forgets to close the refrigerator door.
She leans on therapy and the understanding of an expanding group of shooting survivors she has met through The Rebels Project, a support group founded by other Columbine survivors following a 2012 shooting when a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in the nearby suburb of Aurora. Mendo started seeing a therapist after her child’s first birthday, at the urging of fellow survivor moms.
After she broke down over Uvalde, Mendo, a single parent, said she talked to her mom, took a walk to get some fresh air, then finished her daughter’s pre-kindergarten application.
“Was I afraid of her going into the public school system? Absolutely,” Mendo said of her daughter. “I wanted her to have as normal of a life as possible.”
Researchers who’ve studied the long-term effects of gun violence in schools have quantified protracted struggles among survivors, including long-term academic effects like absenteeism and reduced college enrollment, and lower earnings later in life.
“Just counting lives lost is kind of an incorrect way to capture the full cost of these tragedies,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy.
Mass killings have recurred with numbing frequency in the years since Columbine, with almost 600 attacks in which four or more people have died, not including the perpetrator, since 2006, according to data compiled by The Associated Press.
More than 80% of the 3,045 victims in those attacks were killed by a firearm.
Nationwide hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to school shootings that are often not mass-casualty events but still traumatic, Rossin-Slater said. The impacts can last a lifetime, she added, resulting in “kind of a persistent, reduced potential” for survivors.
Those who were present at Columbine say the years since have given them time to learn more about what happened to them and how to cope with it.
Heather Martin, now 42, was a Columbine senior in 1999. In college, she began crying during a fire drill, realizing later that a fire alarm had gone off for three hours when she and 60 other students hid in a barricaded office during the high school shooting. She couldn’t return to that class and was marked absent each time, and says she failed it after refusing to write a final paper on school violence, despite telling her professor of her experience at Columbine.
It took 10 years for her to see herself as a survivor, after she was invited back with the rest of the class of 1999 for an anniversary event. She saw fellow classmates having similar struggles and almost immediately decided to go back to college to become a teacher.
Martin, a co-founder of The Rebels Project, named after Columbine’s mascot, said 25 years has given her time to struggle and figure out how to work out of those struggles.
“I just know myself so well now and know how I respond to things and what might activate me and how I can bounce back and be OK. And most importantly I think I can recognize when I am not OK and when I do need to seek help,” she said.
Kiki Leyba, a first-year teacher at Columbine in 1999, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder soon after the shooting. He felt a strong sense of commitment to return to the school, where he threw himself into his work. But he continued to have panic attacks.
To help him cope, he had sleeping pills and some Xanax for anxiety, Leyba said. One therapist recommended chamomile tea.
Things got harder for him after the 2002 graduation of Mendo’s class, the last cohort of students who lived through the shooting since they had been through so much together.
By 2005, after years of not taking care of himself and suffering from lack of sleep, Leyba said he would often check out from family life, sleeping in on the weekends and turning into a “blob on the couch.” Finally, his wife Kallie enrolled him in a one-week trauma treatment program, arranging for him to take the time off from work without telling him.
“Thankfully that really gave me a kind of a foothold … to do the work to climb out of that,” said Leyba, who said breathing exercises, journaling, meditation and anti-depressants have helped him.
Like Mendo and Martin, he has traveled around the country to work with survivors of shootings.
“That worst day has transformed into something I can offer to others,” said Leyba, who is in Washington, D.C. this week meeting with officials about gun violence and promoting a new film about his trauma journey.
Mendo still lives in the area, and her 5-year-old daughter attends school near Columbine. When her daughter’s school locked down last year as police swarmed the neighborhood during a hostage situation, Mendo recalled worrying things like: What if my child is in danger? What if there is another school shooting like Columbine?
When Mendo picked up her daughter, she seemed a little scared, and she hugged her mom a little tighter. Mendo breathed deeply to stay calm, a technique she had learned in therapy, and put on a brave face.
“If I was putting down some fear, she would pick it up,” she said. “I didn’t want that for her.”
See 25 Astonishing Images From the World Press Photo Contest
date: 2024-04-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The winning photographs capture moving moments in the midst of tumultuous global events
Admin alert: Copilot app lands on Windows Server 2022
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI assistant turned up via an Edge update. It was an accident. This time…
Microsoft’s Copilot obsession has continued with the AI assistant unexpectedly arriving on Windows Server 2022 this week, in a situation the software giant is calling an “incorrect install.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/copilot_on_windows_server_2022/
Bill Frisell’s Bay Area run brings in some old friends and a world premiere
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Guitar great’s April 18-21 stand marks his third mini-residency at Freight & Salvage in recent years.
7 incredible Bay Area things to do this weekend, April 19-21
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
We have some great ideas for your Bay Area weekend, from great movies to a swanky new Indian eatery with a hall carved entirely from one huge piece of wood. (The food’s good, too!)
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/18/7-incredible-bay-area-things-to-do-this-weekend-april-19-21/
Oakland police kill homicide suspect after coming to aid of Sacramento police
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Details about the homicide that Sacramento police were investigating weren’t known immediately.
Gamers Are Renting Their Idle GPUs to Generate AI Porn
date: 2024-04-18, from: 404 Media Group
Salad, a company that pays gamers in Fortnite skins for their idle PCs, also generates AI porn.
https://www.404media.co/gamers-are-renting-their-idle-gpus-to-generate-ai-porn/
After 15 years, has Walnut Creek landed on a $77 million vision for Heather Farm Park’s aquatic center that everyone actually likes?
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
The approved $77 million plan for Heather Farm Park is the culmination of 15 years of planning.
Redwood City moves to close Broadway to vehicles permanently
date: 2024-04-18, from: San Jose Mercury News
Redwood City is one of several cities on the Peninsula that established pedestrian malls and parklets in downtown areas, a trend that began during the COVID-19 pandemic when indoor dining was restricted.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/18/redwood-city-moves-to-close-broadway-to-vehicles-permanently/
XPeng CEO shares NGP self-driving footage in Germany, teasing full roll out coming to EU
date: 2024-04-18, from: Electrek Feed
According to a recent post from XPeng chairman and CEO He Xiaopeng, the automaker’s self-driving ADAS navigation-guided pilot (NGP) is being tested on German roads and showing “great promise,” leading the way for an XNGP rollout throughout Europe.
Micron scores $6.1B CHIPS Act cash for New York and Idaho fabs
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Memorymaker to park mega plant in Syracuse, says senator
Memory chipmaker Micron looks set to be the next recipient of US government subsidy cash with $6.1 billion heading its way to help fund new-build semiconductor plants.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/micron_scores_61b_chips_act/
Acer’s new Chromebook Plus 514 is a $400 Chromebook with Intel Core i3-N305
date: 2024-04-18, from: Liliputing
Acer launched its first Chromebook Plus-branded laptops last fall, with a 14 inch model powered by AMD Mendocino processor options and a 15 inch version featuring 12th-gen or 13th-gen Intel Core processors. Now the company is expanding its Chromebook Plus family with a new 14 inch model powered by an Intel Core i3-N305 octa-core processor. […]
The post Acer’s new Chromebook Plus 514 is a $400 Chromebook with Intel Core i3-N305 appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/acers-new-chromebook-plus-514-is-a-400-chromebook-with-intel-core-i3-n305/
VinFast Delivered Almost 10,000 EVs Globally In Q1 2024
date: 2024-04-18, from: Inside EVs News
The first batch of VinFast VF 9 is set to arrive in the U.S. this month.
https://insideevs.com/news/716492/vinfast-electric-car-deliveries-2024q1/
Vespa World Days Is A Global Gathering Of Passionate Vespisti
date: 2024-04-18, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
More than 8,000 enthusiasts from all over the world will flock to Pontedera from April 18 to 21, 2024.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715542/2024-vespa-world-days-details/
The DOE Has a Plan to Speed Up New Grid Connections
date: 2024-04-18, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Parts of Dubai remain waterlogged after this week’s epic rainfall • A volcanic eruption in Indonesia produced a 1.6-mile ash column • Severe thunderstorms are headed for the Midwest and Southern Plains.
THE TOP FIVE
- DOE unveils roadmap to speed up clean energy grid connections
The Department of Energy yesterday unveiled its plans to help solve a problem plaguing the clean energy sector: the backlog of grid connections. According to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, nearly 12,000 solar, wind, and storage projects are ready and waiting to be connected to the grid. “The high volume of projects and inadequate existing procedures for interconnection has led to uncertainties, delays, inequities, and added costs for developers, consumers, utilities, and their regulators,” the DOE said in its announcement. The new “Transmission Interconnection Roadmap” aims to speed up connection times by providing more transparency on data for existing projects, creating fast-track options for interconnection, and adopting requirements and standards for generation interconnection, among other initiatives. The Biden administration has a goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035.
- Study: Rising temperatures will cost global economy $38 trillion a
year
A new study published in the journal Nature concludes that global incomes will be at least 20% lower over the next 26 years due to climate change compared to what The Associated Press called “a fictional world that’s not warming.” These income losses will amount to $38 trillion per year by 2049, and that’s regardless of how much we limit emissions going forward, or whether per capita income increases – in other words, this financial toll is already baked in and could grow dramatically depending on how much or little we cut emissions now. The researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research also said the losses will be six times more expensive than it would be to cut emissions and limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. “Protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so,” said Leonie Wenz, who led the study. Lower-latitude areas and countries least responsible for man-made climate change will be hit the hardest, but everyone will be affected.
- U.S. expected to restore tariffs on imported solar tech
For two years, the solar panel technologies imported into the U.S. from China and other countries have been exempt from tariffs, but that policy will soon be reversed, according to Reuters. Two sources familiar with the Biden administration’s plans say the change comes at the request of Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean company investing billions in manufacturing in the U.S., and several other U.S. solar manufacturers. There’s no clear timeline for when the tariffs will be reinstated. The report propelled shares of America’s biggest solar manufacturer, First Solar. Bloomberg noted that the existing exemption applies to imported two-sided solar panels, resulting in those panels being installed all over the place, including on rooftops “where the attribute offers no benefit.”
First
Solar shares, up as of pre-market trading on Thursday
morning.
CNBC
- Research links West Africa heat wave to burning of fossil fuels
An intense heat wave that hit West Africa and the Sahel recently “would have been impossible without human-caused climate change,” according to analysis from climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution. Temperatures soared above 113 degrees Fahrenheit in late March and early April, at one point reaching 119 degrees in Mali. At least 102 heat-related deaths were recorded in the first four days of April. The researchers analyzed weather data and climate models and concluded that such extremes wouldn’t have occurred without increased global temperatures from burning fossil fuels. “Events like these will become much more common, and even more dangerous, unless the world moves away from fossil fuels and countries rapidly reduce emissions to net zero,” the report said. “If global warming reaches 2°C, as is expected to occur in the 2040s or 2050s unless emissions are rapidly halted, similar events will occur 10 times more frequently.”
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- Bezos Earth Fund to award $100 million for AI climate change
solutions
Jeff Bezos wants ideas for how the power of artificial intelligence can be harnessed to help address climate change and nature loss, and he’s willing to throw some money at the best ones. His Bezos Earth Fund announced this week its “AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge,” which will award $100 million in grants to help support proposals from “practitioners, researchers, and innovators in universities, NGOs, private companies, and organizations.” It’s starting with projects that focus on “sustainable proteins, biodiversity conservation, and power grid optimization” plus one “wild card” category. Up to 30 seed grants will be awarded. Applications open in May and the recipients will be unveiled in September.
THE KICKER
Researchers say installing reflective materials called “retroflectors” on roads and buildings could reduce surface temperatures in cities by up to 20 degrees Celsius.
https://heatmap.news/economy/doe-grid-roadmap-clean-energy
America Isn’t Running Out of Power
date: 2024-04-18, from: Distilled Earth blog
We have the solutions to meet growing demand from AI, electrification, and clean energy manufacturing
https://www.distilled.earth/p/america-isnt-running-out-of-power
Google laying off staff again and moving some roles to ‘hubs,’ freeing up cash for AI investments
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Restructure of finance teams will see some leave, and other roles created in Mexico City, Bangalore, and US cities
Google is again firing the redundancy cannon for the second time this year, with a restructure being pushed through and teams in the finance and real estate units of the business understood to be impacted.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/google_laying_off_staff_again/
EU tells Meta it can’t paywall privacy
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Platforms should not confront users with ‘binary choice’ over personal data use
The EU’s Data Protection Board (EDPB) has told large online platforms they should not offer users a binary choice between paying for a service and consenting to their personal data being used to provide targeted advertising.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/eu_meta_subscription_privacy/
Reflections on Baltimore’s bridge collapse from the workers who built it
date: 2024-04-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was built in the ’70s, it was a chance for workers to prove themselves on a massive construction project. Following its collapse, those workers look back on what many considered to be a monument to their work — and what happens when that monument is gone. Also: foreign aid could be bundled with a forced sale of TikTok, and European Union leaders agree to tighten sanctions on Iran.
Announcing the Neon Serverless Driver on JSR
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: Deno blog
Neon, a performant, edge-compatible, serverless Postgres driver, arrives on JSR.
https://deno.com/blog/neon-on-jsr
Scrabble Introduces a Less Competitive Version of the Classic Word Game
date: 2024-04-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Scrabble Together, now available in Europe, is the first major update to the game in more than 75 years
The Three-Row Toyota Highlander Is Going Electric: Report
date: 2024-04-18, from: Inside EVs News
There’s also a bZ3x electric crossover in the pipeline for launch in 2026.
https://insideevs.com/news/716570/toyota-highlander-ev-headed-to-the-us/
Dice Master 2000 allows visually impaired gamers to keep playing
date: 2024-04-18, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
YouTuber Hiro made this project as a birthday present for a friend who is visually impaired. It rolls dice for him and announces the result.
The post Dice Master 2000 allows visually impaired gamers to keep playing appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/dice-master-2000-allows-visually-impaired-gamers-to-keep-playing/
SIROTA’S SIGNALS: The Dem States Embracing GOP Anti-Tax Zealotry
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Lever News
Plus, the obscure court circuit trying to repeal the 20th century, how your utility bill funds climate denial, the real reason conservatives oppose student debt relief.
https://www.levernews.com/sirotas-signals-the-dem-states-embracing-gop-anti-tax-zealotry/
TikTok under EU scrutiny — again
date: 2024-04-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The European Commission has given TikTok 24 hours to provide more information on its new app, which pays users to watch videos, as officials raise concerns about potential harms. Then, we’ll hear more about the European Union’s efforts to sanction Iran following its attack on Israel. And later on the show: Why is the Pacific Island of Palau’s tourism sector struggling to recover from the pandemic?
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/tiktok-under-eu-scrutiny-again
Novelty flip phone strips out almost every feature possible to be as boring as possible
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Only good for calls and texts pretty much, and that’s no mistake
Those who find modern smartphones too distracting from real life might be interested in the Boring Phone (no relation to the smartphone of the same name), a novelty flip phone based on HMD’s Nokia 2660 Flip.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/novelty_flip_phone_strips_out/
New Metzeler Roadtec 02 Tires Are Finally Ready To Hit The Road
date: 2024-04-18, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
Metzeler boldly claims that the new Roadtec 02 offers the versatility of “two tires in one.”
https://www.rideapart.com/news/716041/metzeler-roadtec-02-tires-launched/
COSMIC continues march towards alpha release
date: 2024-04-18, from: OS News
COSMIC, System76’s Rust-based desktop that’s going to replace GNOME in Pop!_OS, is nearing its alpha release, and the Linux OEM has published another blog post detailing the latest progress it’s made. First and foremost, theming support has been further refined by adding support for theming GTK applications (both GTK3 and 4) and flatpak applications. If the user has enabled global themes, these themes will be applied automatically whenever selecting a theme to apply. Support for custom icon packs has also been added. COSMIC now also has an application store, much like GNOME Software and KDE’s Discover, which also takes care of updating installed applications. You can now also drag windows from anywhere inside the window by holding down the super key, which is both a nice addition in general as well as a usability feature. The Settings application has also seen work, and gets a new keyboard settings panel, as well as various other smaller additions. COSMIC also now implements on-screen display toasts for things like changing volume and brightness, and plugging in power. System76 isn’t the only one working on COSMIC – community members have implemented things like window snapping, touchpad gestures, thumbnail previews in the dock, and more. The community is also working on things like an emoi picker, and a fan control graphical user interface. There’s a lot more in the blog post, so be sure to give it a read. I’m genuinely excited for COSMIC to hit the shelves, because I’m dying to try it out.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139347/cosmic-continues-march-towards-alpha-release/
Thomas Oatway | Questions Asked and Answered
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
Paul McGuire wrote (March 16), and I commented as follows: McGuire: “I grow weary of the inaccurate or simply untrue opinions taking up space on The Signal’s opinion page and emanating from Team (Gary) Horton/(Lois) Eisenberg/(Thomas) Oatway, etc. Can you please just publish the results of them answering the following ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions? NO […]
The post Thomas Oatway | Questions Asked and Answered appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/thomas-oatway-questions-asked-and-answered/
Arthur Saginian | A Rational Column Until …
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
Joshua Heath finally submitted a rational, clear-headed column (Jan. 30) that did not read like a “romantic poem” as he alludes to when describing how Democrats are now trying to woo voters. His delivery had me all the way down to the last sentence, and that is where he went through the guard rails. In […]
The post Arthur Saginian | A Rational Column Until … appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/arthur-saginian-a-rational-column-until/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Creating structure with generative AI.
https://www.zachseward.com/creating-structure-with-generative-ai/
Top tea tips!
date: 2024-04-18, from: Liam Proven blog
comments
https://lproven.dreamwidth.org/309757.html
Prolific phishing-made-easy emporium LabHost knocked offline in cyber-cop op
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Police mimic Spotify Wrapped videos to let crims know they’re being hunted
Feature Cops have brought down a dark-web souk that provided cyber criminals with convincing copies of trusted brands’ websites for use in phishing campaigns.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/police_lab_host/
Debian spices up APT package manager with a dash of color, squishes ancient bug
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
2.9 gives a taste of what’s to come
Major updates to Debian’s Advanced Packaging Tool don’t come along very often, but APT 2.9 is here with a significant facelift.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/apt_3_debian/
Broadcom says “many” VMware perpetual licenses got support extensions
date: 2024-04-18, from: OS News
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan this week publicized some concessions aimed at helping customers and partners ease into VMware’s recent business model changes. Tan reiterated that the controversial changes, like the end of perpetual licensing, aren’t going away. But amid questioning from antitrust officials in the European Union (EU), Tan announced that the company has already given support extensions for some VMware perpetual license holders. ↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica I’m linking to the Ars Technica writeup here, because the original blog post from Broadcom’s CEO is effectively unreadable to me, as steeped in corpospeak as it is. The basic gist is that the storm of criticism that’s been hovering around Broadcom ever since the changes it announced to VMware’s licensing strategy isn’t going away, and even attracted the attention of the European Union. As such, Broadcom is giving existing perpetual VMware license holders some breathing room, but not much, and their plans will be executed as-is regardless. I doubt Broadcom and VMware are big and crucial enough for the full might of the EU to come down on them, so I don’t think we’ll see any sudden turnarounds like we did with Apple and Facebook, for instance, but at least some cracks are clearly starting to show. If the aforementioned storm keeps up, pressure from customers might actually force more concessions out of Broadcom.
AI PCs are here but a killer application for biz users? Nope
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Resist the pressure to jump on the bandwagon just yet warns, warns Forrester
Forrester Research says that although 50 models of AI PCs are already on sale today there remains “no killer app” that would make any of them an essential tool for business users.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/analysts_2024_ai_pcs/
Laurene Weste | Saddle Up for Cowboy Festival Weekend
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
The excitement is growing – not only for this weekend’s Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival – but also for a triumphant return to historic William S. Hart Park in Old Town Newhall. Hart Park is brimming with iconic Western heritage, making it the ideal spot for this beloved, hometown festival. As the anticipation builds, it’s time […]
The post Laurene Weste | Saddle Up for Cowboy Festival Weekend appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/laurene-weste-saddle-up-for-cowboy-festival-weekend/
The Party’s Over
date: 2024-04-18, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Friends, Last Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting former president Trump.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-partys-over
Spring-Clean Your Mind
date: 2024-04-18, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Embrace the process of decluttering your mind.
The post Spring-Clean Your Mind appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/18/spring-clean-your-mind/
Valkey publishes release candidate and attracts new backer
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Open source Redis alternative gathers momentum
Valkey, the value-key database pitched as an open source alternative to Redis, has acquired new backers and announced its first release candidate.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/valkey_publishes_release_candidate/
gifboy - Create tiny GIF animations in Lua and share them using data URLs
date: 2024-04-18, from: Tilde.news
Classifieds – April 18, 2024
date: 2024-04-18, 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.
The post Classifieds – April 18, 2024 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/classifieds-april-18-2024/
Upgraded Tesla Model 3 Performance Packs Adaptive Suspension, Over 500 HP: Website Leak
date: 2024-04-18, from: Inside EVs News
The source code on Tesla UK’s website spilled the beans ahead of schedule.
https://insideevs.com/news/716542/2024-tesla-model-3-performance-specs-leak/
Today in SCV History (April 18)
date: 2024-04-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1945 – Actors Harry and Olive Carey sell Saugus ranch after 29 years; now Tesoro del Valle. [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-april-18/
Cisco creates architecture to improve security and sell you new switches
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hypershield detects bad behavior and automagically reconfigures networks to snuff out threats
Cisco has developed a product called Hypershield that it thinks represents a new way to do network security.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/cisco_hypershield/
DEI needs to stay in medical schools
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
It’s essential for progress that the medical field does not remove inclusion efforts.
The post DEI needs to stay in medical schools appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/dei-needs-to-stay-in-medical-schools/
Jazz groups excite at Carson Soundstage
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Instrumentalists and vocal groups showcased different sides of jazz Monday night.
The post Jazz groups excite at Carson Soundstage appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/jazz-groups-excite-carson-soundstage/
Students deserve recreational space
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Tennis and pickleball court removal will make outdoor space less accessible at USC.
The post Students deserve recreational space appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/students-deserve-recreational-space/
I find joy in judging CDs
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
What started out as picking a random J-pop CD has now become an ever-growing collection.
The post I find joy in judging CDs appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/i-find-joy-in-judging-cds/
We’re not just girls; we’re so much more
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The “just a girl” trend is antithetical to feminism: We must respect ourselves.
The post We’re not just girls; we’re so much more appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/were-not-just-girls-were-so-much-more/
Woes persist for men’s tennis in UCLA matchup
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Trojans struggled to find consistency against their crosstown rivals Tuesday.
The post Woes persist for men’s tennis in UCLA matchup appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/woes-persist-for-mens-tennis-in-ucla-matchup/
Campus health reflects on year
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Data from the Student Well-being Index Survey will help judge new health resources.
The post Campus health reflects on year appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/chief-campus-health-officer-reflects-on-year/
Friends reflect on Cecil Murray’s legacy
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
University leaders remember the late reverend’s impact on USC students and staff.
The post Friends reflect on Cecil Murray’s legacy appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/cecil-murray-dies-at-94/
Rising Ballers: America’s next great hope
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Manchester City found its latest starlet in … Pennsylvania?
The post Rising Ballers: America’s next great hope appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/18/rising-ballers-americas-next-great-hope/
Europe gives TikTok 24 hours to explain ‘addictive and toxic’ new app
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Commissioner Thierry Breton likens click-to-earn version to cigarettes
The European Commission on Wednesday gave TikTok 24 hours to explain the risk assessment procedures it used before launching a version of the made-in-China app that rewards users for using it in certain ways.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/tiktok_lite_eu_info_demand/
Singapore infosec boss warns China/West tech split will be bad for interoperability
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
When you decide not to trust a big chunk of the supply chain, tech (and trade) get harder
One of the biggest challenges Singapore faces is the potential for a split between tech stacks developed and used by China and the West, according to the island nation’s Cyber Security Administration (CSA) chief executive David Koh.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/blackhat_koh_splinternet/
Mars helicopter sends final message, but will keep collecting data
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
One last software update installed safely, reconfigured it as ‘stationary testbed’
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter concluded its mission on Tuesday, sending a final signal in its role as a companion to the Perseverance Rover.…
Find Your Voice
date: 2024-04-18, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
AHA!’s Sing It Out program uses music to help teens unleash their power.
The post Find Your Voice appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/17/531551/
April 17, 2024
date: 2024-04-18, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Yesterday on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, Miles Taylor wrote: “After 2016, I helped lead the US gov[ernmen]t response to Russia’s election interference. In 2024, foreign interference will be worse. Tech[nology is] more powerful. Adversaries more brazen. American public more susceptible. Political leaders across party lines MUST UNITE against this.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-17-2024
USC has been foolishly consistent on campus free expression
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The University’s decision to bar the valedictorian from speaking echoes its stifling of John Strauss’ free speech.
The post USC has been foolishly consistent on campus free expression appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/usc-has-been-foolishly-consistent-on-campus-free-expression/
Multiple people detained following suspected Canyon Country shooting
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
Multiple people were detained following a suspected shooting in Canyon Country on Wednesday night, according to the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station. “The deputies are detaining some people right now, but no one’s been arrested,” said Watch Sgt. Jerome Gage. “So they’re still investigating to see if those people were involved.” Authorities were first notified […]
The post Multiple people detained following suspected Canyon Country shooting appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/multiple-people-detained-following-suspected-canyon-country-shooting/
Taiwanese film studio snaps up Chinese surveillance camera specialist Dahua
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Stymied by sanctions, it had to go … but where?
Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer Zhejiang Dahua Technology, which has found itself on the USA’s entity list of banned orgs, has fully sold off its stateside subsidiary for $15 million to Taiwan’s Central Motion Picture Corporation, according to the firm’s annual report released on Monday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/taiwanese_company_buys_dahua/
CSUN baseball sweeps doubleheader against Dirtbags
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
After a disappointing blowout loss at home to California Baptist last week, CSUN (20-14, 8-4 Big West) bounced back with a vengeance, securing a dominating series win by sweeping a…
https://sundial.csun.edu/180843/sports/csun-baseball-sweeps-doubleheader-against-dirtbags/
Brahmas prepare for the future
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
The Pierce College men’s volleyball team is at the end of their season and ready to wrap things up and prepare for the next. Though
The post Brahmas prepare for the future appeared first on .
Learning the mindfulness of meditation
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
A circle of people, of many different ages and backgrounds, filled the conference room in SSB 48271 as they sought to learn ways of relieving
The post Learning the mindfulness of meditation appeared first on .
By the community, for the community
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
One handmade blanket, assembled hygiene kit, donated pint of blood and planted tree at a time, volunteers gathered at Pierce College on Sunday and supported those
The post By the community, for the community appeared first on .
Canyon boys’ volleyball beats Castaic on senior night
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
Canyon Cowboys boys’ volleyball came out flying on senior night. The Cowboys beat the Castaic Coyotes in four sets, winning their final regular-season home game and, thanks to some help in the standings, clinched a playoff spot. Canyon won the Foothill League match, 25-12, 14-25, 25-16, 25-21. The Cowboys (18-8, 6-5) were ready for senior […]
The post <strong>Canyon boys’ volleyball beats Castaic on senior night </strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/canyon-boys-volleyball-beats-castaic-on-senior-night/
Aftershocks ring in wake of USC valedictorian speech decision
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Several statements, local and national headlines, and tens of thousands of petition signatures later, a picture of general anger and frustration emerges.
The post Aftershocks ring in wake of USC valedictorian speech decision appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/aftershocks-ring-in-wake-of-usc-valedictorian-speech-decision/
Security agencies warn election officials to brace for attacks on US presidential race
date: 2024-04-18, from: VOA News USA
washington — U.S. intelligence and security agencies are trying to prepare election officials for a wave of new attacks aiming to destroy voter confidence in November’s presidential election, just as a series of reports warn some familiar adversaries are starting to ramp up their efforts.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the FBI, issued a new warning on Wednesday that “the usual suspects” — Russia, China and Iran — are looking for ways to stoke tensions and divide American voters.
All three countries, the guidance said, are “leveraging influence operations exploiting perceived sociopolitical divisions to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions.”
The new guidance warned that the three countries are using fake online accounts and various proxies, including state-sponsored media organizations, to spread disinformation and sow doubt.
It also cautioned that Russia, China and Iran are using real people, including social media influencers, “to wittingly or unwittingly promote their narratives.”
“The elections process is the golden thread of American democracy, which is why our foreign adversaries deliberately target our elections infrastructure with their influence operations,” CISA senior adviser Cait Conley said in a statement to reporters. “CISA is committed to doing its part to ensure these [state and local] officials — and the American public — don’t have to fight this battle alone.”
Agency warns of new tactics
The latest guidance, posted on CISA’s website, warns that in addition to resorting to familiar tactics, Russia, China and Iran are likely to employ new tricks to try to confuse U.S. voters and erode confidence in the election process.
One such technique is voice cloning — using a fake recording of a public official or figure to try to cause confusion. The agencies cited an example from last year’s election in the Slovak Republic, when a fake recording of a key party leader purported to show him discussing how to rig the vote.
The guidance also warned that Iran could try to employ “hack and leak” cyberattacks in the U.S., using lessons learned from similar operations against Israel in recent months.
And it said Russia and China have separately sought to spark alarm among voters by spreading fake documents alleging to show evidence of security incidents impacting physical buildings or computer systems.
China denied the allegations.
“China has always adhered to noninterference in other countries’ internal affairs,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in an email to VOA.
“Speculating or accusing China of using social media to interfere in the U.S. politics is completely groundless and malicious,” Liu added.
VOA also contacted representatives for the Russian and Iranian governments, who have yet to respond.
For now, CISA, ODNI and the FBI are advising U.S. election officials that they can try to mitigate the impact of election meddling attempts by creating trusted portals for information, such as official U.S. government websites, and by proactively debunking false information.
But the challenge is likely to grow.
Russia already interfering, says Microsoft
Tech giant Microsoft warned on Wednesday it is seeing signs that Russia, at least, is already ramping up its election interference efforts.
“The usual Russian election influence actors kicked into gear over the last 45 days,” according to a report by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
The Russian effort so far, the report said, “employs a mix of themes from 2020 with a renewed focus on undermining U.S. support for Ukraine.”
Microsoft further warned that Russia, China and Iran have “leveraged some form of generative AI [artificial intelligence] to create content since last summer.”
“We anticipate that election influence campaigns will include fakes — some will be deep, most shallow — and the simplest manipulations, not the most complex employment of AI, will likely be the pieces of content that have the most impact,” the report added.
At the same time, there is concern about domestic extremists impacting the presidential election.
“There is a serious risk of extremist violence,” the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a report issued Wednesday.
“While the risk of far-right election-related violence is greater, the possibility of far-left extremist violence cannot be dismissed,” it said, pointing to the possibility of attacks on pre-election political events or gatherings, on polling places during Election Day, and against election offices in the days following the election.
Such warnings are consistent with those issued by U.S. officials in recent months.
“Some DVEs [domestic violent extremists], particularly those motivated by conspiracy theories and anti-government or partisan grievances, may seek to disrupt electoral processes,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned in a threat assessment issued this past September.
“Violence or threats could be directed at government officials, voters, and elections‑related personnel and infrastructure, including polling places, ballot drop box locations, voter registration sites, campaign events, political party offices and vote-counting sites,” it said.
Software glitch saw Aussie casino give away millions in cash
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Nobody cared enough to check why audits were out of whack
A software glitch at Star Casino in Sydney, Australia, saw it inadvertently give away millions in cash without realizing it – for weeks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/software_glitch_casino_cash_giveaway/
United States to reimpose oil sanctions on Venezuela
date: 2024-04-18, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/united-states-to-reimpose-oil-sanctions-on-venezuela-/7574838.html
HPE sues China’s Inspur Group over server patents
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Middle Kingdom biz accused of IP theft and changing names to evade sanctions
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has filed a lawsuit against Inspur Group, China’s largest server maker, for allegedly violating five of its server technology patents.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/18/hpe_inspur_lawsuit/
US prepared to ‘take further steps’ as it warns China against enabling Russia
date: 2024-04-18, from: VOA News USA
state department — The United States warned China on Wednesday against helping Russia in its war on Ukraine and said it is “prepared to take further steps as necessary.” In Italy, foreign ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations gathered to reaffirm their support for Ukraine’s defense.
“We believe that the PRC is supporting Russia’s war effort and is doing so by helping ramp up its defense production,” State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters during a briefing in Washington.
“Specifically,” he said, “the PRC is providing Russia with significant quantities of machine tools, microelectronics, optics, UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones] and cruise missile technology, and nitrocellulose, which Russia uses to make propellants for weapons.”
Patel said the United States believes these materials “are filling critical gaps in Russia’s defense production cycle” and helping to revitalize Russia’s defense industrial base.
“China’s support is actively enabling Russia’s war in Ukraine, and it poses a significant threat to European security,” he added. “We’ve sanctioned relevant firms in the PRC and are prepared to take further steps as necessary.”
Blinken, G7 leaders talk
In Capri, Italy, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is holding talks this week with foreign ministers from the other G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom — as well as representatives from the European Union. Topics include Ukraine support, the Middle East crisis, Haitian instability and global partnerships.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Wednesday said the G7 ministers would discuss how to get more air defense to Ukraine as Kyiv faces increasing pressure from Russia.
“We and our partners around the world must now be just as resolute in our defense against Russian terror from the air,” Baerbock said in a statement.
Blinken will later visit China, where he is expected to bring up Washington’s concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base.
On the margins of the G7 meeting Wednesday, Blinken and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani signed a memorandum of understanding to counter the manipulation of information by other countries.
Blinken said the two nations are collaborating on “all of the most critical issues,” including aiding Ukraine in defending itself against Russian aggression, addressing challenges in the Middle East and sharing approaches to challenges posed by China.
Beijing rejected what Chinese officials described as Washington’s “smear.”
“China regulates the export of dual-use articles in accordance with laws and regulations. Relevant countries should not smear or attack the normal relations between China and Russia and should not harm the legitimate rights and interests of China and Chinese companies,” Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said during a briefing.
China continues supporting Russia
After Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Beijing last week, Chinese officials said China would “continue to support Russia in pursuing development and revitalization under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin.”
They said the two nations “have committed themselves to lasting friendship” and a deepened comprehensive strategic partnership.
Russian missile kills at least 17
In Washington, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. The two discussed the U.S. Commerce Department’s work with partners to coordinate export controls and restrict sales of advanced technologies to Russia.
Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said G7 finance leaders have been working toward a plan to unlock the value of frozen Russian sovereign assets to aid Ukraine in the near term. But he noted the talks are still a work in progress.
In Ukraine, officials said earlier Wednesday that a Russian missile attack hit the northern city of Chernihiv, killing at least 17 people and injuring 61 others.
Denise Brown, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, condemned the latest wave of strikes. She also emphasized that under international humanitarian law, civilians and hospitals must be protected.
In Chernihiv, aid workers provided on-the-ground support to those affected by the strikes, including psychosocial and legal assistance. Their efforts complement the work of first responders and rescue services.
Some information for this report came from Reuters.
SCV Sheriff’s Foundation awards Hart district students for PSAs
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
Three teams of students from the William S. Hart Union High School District were awarded by the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station Foundation for their public service announcements explaining the dangers of electric transportation. The awards were handed out on Tuesday afternoon at the SCV Sheriff’s Station. Capt. Justin Diez explained why this theme was […]
The post <strong>SCV Sheriff’s Foundation awards Hart district students for PSAs</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/scv-sheriffs-foundation-awards-hart-district-students-for-psas/
Metrolink to Hold Public Meetings on AV Line Capacity, Improvements
date: 2024-04-18, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The 76.6-mile-long Antelope Valley Line has the third-highest ridership in Metrolink’s system with an estimated average of 9,000 passengers daily. However, the uneven terrain and single-tracking along the line in some areas forces trains to travel at a slower speed which results in an estimated travel time of approximately one hour between Santa Clarita and Union Station
https://scvnews.com/metrolink-to-hold-public-meetings-on-av-line-capacity-service-improvements/
SCV Water approves elections change
date: 2024-04-18, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency’s governing board Tuesday approved a move intended to create a more even distribution of its elections, according to a spokesman for the agency. Ultimately, six of the district’s nine seats will be on the Nov. 5 ballot: two seats in each of the agency’s three districts. However, one of […]
The post <strong>SCV Water approves elections change</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/scv-water-approves-elections-change/
OSDR hosts Blue Origin Erika Wagner
date: 2024-04-18, from: NASA breaking news
Open Science Data Repository Team Hosts Blue Origin’s Dr Erika Wagner at the Meet the Expert Seminar Series Focused on Flight Integrators Friday, March 29, 2024—The Open Science Data Repository hosted the sixth presentation showcasing flight integrators in the “Meet the Expert” series. This series is targeted for the Open Science Analysis Working Group (AWG) […]
Dnsmasq wins the first BlueHats Prize
date: 2024-04-18, updated: 2024-04-18, from: nlnet feed
https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20240418-BlueHatsPrize1.html
Daily EV Recap: Tesla asks shareholders to move to Texas
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/daily-ev-recap-tesla-asks-shareholders-to-move-to-texas/
Arizona Republicans fend off Democrats’ attempts to repeal 1864 abortion ban
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
phoenix, arizona — Democrats in the Arizona House of Representatives on Wednesday tried repeatedly to repeal an 1864 ban on abortion but failed to get the Republican support they needed against the Civil War-era measure poised to become state law again.
In four votes, the chamber deadlocked 30-30 on a procedural motion that would have allowed a repeal bill to come to the floor, with one Republican joining the 29 Democrats.
One more Republican vote was needed to enable a vote on repealing a law that was written when Arizona was not yet a state and women lacked the right to vote.
Democratic leaders later told reporters they did not anticipate another vote on Wednesday but would try again in future sessions.
“I will continue to call on the legislature to do its job and repeal this law,” Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs said in a statement. “A law from 1864 written by 27 men cannot be allowed to govern the lives of millions of Arizona women.”
Before Hobbs could sign any repeal bill, it would need to pass both chambers of the state legislature.
A similar repeal attempt is taking place in the state Senate, where Republicans hold a 16-14 edge. Two Senate Republicans joined the Democrats on Wednesday and voted to advance the bill, but it needs two more such readings before it can reach the Senate floor.
Opposing abortion rights is seen as sacrosanct to many Republican voters, and crossing party lines on such a touchstone issue would be rare in highly partisan times.
But repealing the 1864 law would still leave in place a law passed by Republicans in 2022 that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. And some Republicans have softened their hard-line stance on abortion, mindful of the same polling that has emboldened Democrats.
Confident that public opinion is on their side in supporting abortion rights, Democrats have sought to elevate the issue since the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion in 2022 and Republican-led states went about setting new severe restrictions.
With or without repealing the 1864 law, Arizona Democrats are also attempting to place a ballot measure before voters in November that would restore abortion rights.
Democrats are hoping the ballot measure energizes their voters in a closely divided state that could swing toward either party, possibly determining the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, the balance of power in the U.S. Senate, and control of both houses of the state legislature.
The old law was revived by a state Supreme Court ruling on April 9, and unless the legislature intervenes it could take effect within 60 days.
It imposes a prison sentence of two to five years for anyone found guilty of inducing an abortion except for a doctor who deems it necessary to save the life of the mother.
Arizona House Democrats sought to repeal the ban a week ago but were thwarted by the narrow Republican majority of 31-29. On Wednesday, Republican Representative Matt Gress joined the Democrats, but one more vote was needed.
Democrat Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, sponsor of the repeal bill, said that Democrats would persist and that she was confident it would eventually receive a vote.
Hugely expanded Section 702 surveillance powers set for US Senate vote
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Opponents warn almost anyone could be asked to share info with Uncle Sam
On Thursday the US Senate is expected to reauthorize the contentious warrantless surveillance powers conferred by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and may even strengthen them with language that, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), “will force a huge range of companies and individuals to spy for the government.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/fisa_section_702/
Metrolink to Hold Public Meetings on Antelope Valley Line Capacity and Service Improvements Project
date: 2024-04-17, from: City of Santa Clarita
The City of Santa Clarita is Working with Metrolink to Enhance the Antelope Valley Line The 76.6-mile-long Antelope Valley Line (AVL) has the third-highest ridership in Metrolink’s system with an estimated average of 9,000 passengers daily. However, the uneven terrain and single-tracking along the line in some areas forces trains to travel at a slower […]
The post Metrolink to Hold Public Meetings on Antelope Valley Line Capacity and Service Improvements Project appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
Brahma Blotter: April 8-14, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
No crimes were reported between April 8-14, 2024. Update: The hit-and-run on March 22, 2024, that occurred in Lot 7 involved two parked vehicles and
The post Brahma Blotter: April 8-14, 2024 appeared first on .
News Briefs – April 17, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
Election Forum: A Student Trustee and Associated Student Election Forum will be held in the ASO Student Engagement Center (LLC 5100) from noon to 1:30
The post News Briefs – April 17, 2024 appeared first on .
A center for student life to enhance the college experience
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
Essentials for a student experience at school include socializing, access to resources and a convenient place to shop for school supplies. All of these can
The post A center for student life to enhance the college experience appeared first on .
Snowmobile, Amazon’s truck-powered migration service, reaches the end of the road
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Demand for bulk storage on wheels turned out to be wan
Amazon Web Services is abandoning its fleet of Snowmobile data haulers, the trucks packed with petabytes of spinning disks designed to get large enterprises into the cloud.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/amazon_snowmobile_delay/
City discusses potential open-space deal
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita City Council held a closed-session discussion April 9 over negotiations for a pair of properties near a project site on the west side of the Santa Clarita Valley that’s been the subject of development talk for more than 20 years. There was no action reported out of the closed-session discussion. The Trails […]
The post <strong>City discusses potential open-space deal</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/city-discusses-potential-open-space-deal/
Bachelor’s degree program discussed at Academic Senate
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
Students, staff and faculty came back from spring break only to find that their community college is now a four-year college—kind of. At the Pierce
The post Bachelor’s degree program discussed at Academic Senate appeared first on .
Board of Trustees highlights students’ involvement, achievements
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
The LACCD Board of Trustees adjourned its April 10 meeting in memory of Martin Ray Linley, a 37-year-old custodian at East Los Angeles College, who
The post Board of Trustees highlights students’ involvement, achievements appeared first on .
Celebrando el teatro y las artes chicanos
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
To read this story in the original English, click here. Traducción por Violet Garcia. — Dos hombres poderosos subieron al escenario recitando un himno muy
The post Celebrando el teatro y las artes chicanos appeared first on .
Celebrating Chicano theater and arts
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
Para leer el artículo en español, haga clic aquí. Two renowned men stood on stage reciting an anthem well-known in the Chicano movement. One man
The post Celebrating Chicano theater and arts appeared first on .
Calling Out Absentee Landlords of State Street
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Will owners agree to tax themselves to save Santa Barbara’s downtown?
The post Calling Out Absentee Landlords of State Street appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/17/calling-out-absentee-landlords-of-state-street/
NASA’s TESS Returns to Science Operations
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has returned to work after science observations were suspended on April 8, when the spacecraft entered into safe mode. All instruments are powered on and, following the successful download of previously collected science data stored in the mission’s recorder, are now making new science observations. Analysis of what triggered […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/tess/nasas-tess-temporarily-pauses-science-observations/
US to restore tariffs on solar panels from China – Reuters
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
The Biden administration is expected to restore US tariffs on imported solar panels from China and other countries, according to a Reuters exclusive.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/us-to-restore-tariffs-on-solar-panels-from-china-reuters/
Linus Torvalds really prefers tabs
date: 2024-04-17, from: OS News
Linus Torvalds really doesn’t like spaces – as in, tabs vs. spaces – and got a little annoyed that a commit removed a hidden tab because it “apparently showed breakage in some third-party kernel config parsing tool”. So, Torvalds decided to add some hidden tabs to trigger breakages like this, and is threatening to add more hidden tabs if necessary. It wasn’t clear what tool it was, but let’s make sure it gets fixed. Because if you can’t parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files. In fact, let’s make such breakage more obvious than some esoteric ftrace record size option. If you can’t parse tabs, you can’t have page sizes. ↫ Linus Torvalds I’m not a programmer so I’m not going to wade into this debate – I have a personal Mastodon account to state it’s obviously tabs – but I did note that it seems like, at least in this commit message, Torvalds uses a double space after a period. Which is objectively the worst thing, right before Fahrenheit.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139334/linus-torvalds-really-prefers-tabs/
American RFE/RL reporter marks 6 months jailed in Russia
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
washington — An American journalist jailed in Russia will mark six months behind bars on Thursday over charges that press freedom groups have condemned as bogus and politically motivated.
Alsu Kurmasheva, an editor at the Tatar-Bashkir Service of VOA’s sister outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was arrested on October 18, 2023, and has been held in pretrial detention since then.
The dual U.S.-Russian national stands accused of failing to register as a “foreign agent” and spreading what Moscow views as false information about the Russian military.
Kurmasheva and her employer reject the charges against her, which carry a combined sentence of 15 years in prison.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy told VOA in an emailed statement that cases of all U.S. citizens detained in Russia have her full attention.
“Six months in, we remain deeply concerned by Alsu’s continued detention,” Tracy said. “We have been outspoken in condemning the Kremlin’s continued attempts to silence, intimidate and punish journalists, civil society voices and ordinary Russians who speak out against the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.”
International press freedom groups have widely called for Kurmasheva’s immediate release.
“The six-month anniversary of Alsu’s detention is important because she shouldn’t have been jailed even for a single day. It’s an absolutely unjust, absurd case with fabricated charges,” said Gulnoza Said, Europe and Central Asia program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ.
“Alsu should be freed from jail immediately and be able to travel back to Prague and see her family,” she told VOA from New York.
Russia’s embassy in Washington did not reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.
Emergency visit
Based in Prague, Kurmasheva traveled to Russia in May 2023 for a family emergency. Her passports were confiscated when she tried to leave the country in June, and she was waiting for them to be returned when she was arrested about four months later.
Earlier in April, Kurmasheva’s pretrial detention was again extended, this time until June.
“It’s not a legal process, it’s a political ploy, and Alsu and her family are unjustifiably paying a terrible price. Russia must end this sham and immediately release Alsu without condition,” RFE/RL President Stephen Capus said in a statement about the latest extension.
The Russian government labeled RFE/RL as an “undesirable organization” in February.
At her recent court hearing, Kurmasheva told reporters she was “not very well physically” and that she was receiving “minimal” medical care. The living conditions in the prison “are very bad,” she said, adding that a hole in the floor of her cell functions as the toilet.
That description has press freedom advocates concerned.
“The living conditions are quite bad, and we’re worried about the deterioration of her health,” said Jeanne Cavelier, the Paris-based head of the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at Reporters Without Borders, or RSF.
To date, the Russian government has denied the U.S. Embassy’s requests for consular access to Kurmasheva.
“We are deeply concerned about Alsu Kurmasheva’s detention in Russia,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. “The charges against Ms. Kurmasheva are another sign of the weakness of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime.”
RFE/RL’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, has also advocated for Kurmasheva’s immediate release.
“Alsu’s time in detention is unlike anything anyone could imagine,” USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett told VOA in an emailed statement. “Russia’s delaying and obfuscating shows this is purely a political stunt to advance the Kremlin’s agenda. She is being treated like a bargaining chip as opposed to a human being.”
First to be targeted
Kurmasheva is the first person to be targeted by Russia for not self-registering as a foreign agent, according to press freedom experts. Her arrest has had a chilling effect on other journalists in Russia who fear they could be targeted next.
“Russian laws, and Russian repressive legislation more specifically, is broad by nature. It’s conceptualized as something intentionally broad and vague,” said Karol Luczka, who leads the International Press Institute’s work on Eastern Europe. He cited Russia’s foreign agent law as an example.
“Most anyone these days in Russia can be considered a foreign agent because of any past activity. So, it’s very significant that they weaponize this legislation, because it shows that even when they have no real charges against anyone, they will always be able to find something,” said Luczka, who is based in Vienna.
For months, press freedom groups have called on the State Department to declare Kurmasheva wrongfully detained, which would open up additional resources to help secure her release.
Earlier this month, Roger Carstens, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, told VOA that U.S. officials were still deciding whether to declare Kurmasheva wrongfully detained.
“We’ve been looking at her case very closely. It’s not yet been decided that she’s wrongfully detained,” Carstens said. “But it’s something that we’re still sussing out.”
“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful,” a State Department spokesperson said in response to a detailed list of questions, in a statement identical to ones previously sent to VOA.
“When making assessments, the department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks into the totality of the circumstances for each case individually,” the statement said.
Kurmasheva is one of two American journalists jailed in Russia. The second, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, has been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department.
That determination came less than two weeks after Russian authorities arrested Gershkovich and accused him of espionage in late March 2023. Like Kurmasheva, the 32-year-old is still being held in pretrial detention.
Gershkovich, his employer and the U.S. government deny the charges against him. The reporter marked one year behind bars last month.
In November 2023, Washington made a prisoner swap offer to the Russian government to secure the release of Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, another U.S. citizen jailed in Russia and declared wrongfully detained. Moscow rejected that offer.
Carstens told reporters earlier this month that the U.S. government was putting together a new offer.
“We are working exceedingly hard and creatively to cobble together that offer,” he said.
Kurmasheva and Gershkovich count themselves among 22 journalists jailed in Russia, according to CPJ data from the end of 2023.
Russia ranks fourth in the world in terms of journalist jailings, but it has the most jailed foreign journalists. Of the 22 journalists imprisoned in Russia, 12 are foreign nationals. Beyond Kurmasheva and Gershkovich, Moscow has jailed 10 Ukrainian reporters, according to the CPJ.
Pressure stepped up
Tracy said Moscow’s repression has only intensified since the Russian army invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“Authorities have shuttered dozens of outlets using fines and repressive legislation, censored thousands of websites and continue to persecute journalists,” she said.
“This trend is deeply concerning, and the U.S. will continue to call for respect for Russians’ fundamental freedoms — including freedom of speech — that are guaranteed in Russia’s own constitution.”
One of the main factors that unites the cases of Gershkovich and Kurmasheva is that trials won’t be what ultimately gets them free, according to Said.
“There is no way for their lawyers to prove their innocence through court, because courts are not independent in Russia. Political solutions and diplomatic solutions are the only way to get them free,” she said.
“That’s why it’s important that the U.S. uses all it has to put pressure on the Russian authorities and to get them free,” she said.
Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
https://www.voanews.com/a/american-rfe-rl-reporter-marks-6-months-jailed-in-russia/7574384.html
LXQt 2.0.0 released, completes move to Qt 6
date: 2024-04-17, from: OS News
LXQt, the lightweight Qt desktop environment, has released a major new version, which brings with it a whole slew of very important changes and upgrades, with two main focal point. First and foremost, the desktop environment is now using Qt 6 across the board, meaning the transition from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is now complete. To support themes and the LXQt File Dialog for Qt5-based apps you can install libqtxdg-3.12.0, lxqt-qtplugin-1.4.1, and libfm-qt-1.4.0 alongside the new Qt 6 variants for backwards compatibility. One exception here is QTerminal, whose Qt 6 port ran into some issues, so a separate Qt 6 release will come later. The second major upgrade that’s still in progress is support for Wayland. LXQt 2.0.0 brings Wayland support for PCManFM-Qt, LXQt Runner, and LXQt Desktop Notifications, and for LXQt 2.1.0 they plan to make everything else available under Wayland as well. This means that more popular desktop environment like Cinnamon and Xfce are starting to feel a little out of step when it comes to Wayland. One of the major user-facing new features is a new default menu for the panel which supports favourites, a new and improved search feature, and more.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139332/lxqt-2-0-0-released-completes-move-to-qt-6/
Uncle Sam earmarks $54M of CHIPS funding for small-biz semiconductor boffinry
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Up to 24 outfits to bag taxpayer cash for projects ‘developing a viable product or service’ for US chip industry
Small businesses wishing they could get their hands on some of those billions of dollars in semiconductor funding being doled out as part of America’s CHIPS Act are in luck, as the White House has set aside $54 million for tiny firms with big ideas.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/chips_act_smb_money/
Rivian (RIVN) is cutting another 1% of jobs as the EV maker works toward profitability
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Rivian (RIVN) is cutting more jobs as the EV maker aims to improve profitability. This is the second round of layoffs this year, but it’s only 1% of the workforce this time.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/rivian-rivn-cutting-another-1-jobs/
A Santa Barbara Celebration of Women and Their Life Journeys
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Photographer Ashleigh Taylor will show 50 portraits of women over 50 this Saturday in what she calls a “celebration of women and their life journeys” at the Pura Luna Apothecary.
The post A Santa Barbara Celebration of Women and Their Life Journeys appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/17/a-santa-barbara-celebration-of-women-and-their-life-journeys/
NASA chief warns of Chinese military presence in space
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — China is bolstering its space capabilities and is using its civilian program to mask its military objectives, the head of the U.S. space agency said Wednesday, warning that Washington must remain vigilant.
“China has made extraordinary strides especially in the last 10 years, but they are very, very secretive,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson told lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“We believe that a lot of their so-called civilian space program is a military program. And I think, in effect, we are in a race,” Nelson said.
He said he hoped Beijing would “come to its senses and understand that civilian space is for peaceful uses,” but added: “We have not seen that demonstrated by China.”
Nelson’s comment came as he testified before the House Appropriations Committee on NASA’s budget for fiscal 2025.
He said the United States should land on the moon again before China does, as both nations pursue lunar missions, but he expressed concern that were Beijing to arrive first, it could say: “‘OK, this is our territory, you stay out.’”
The United States is planning to put astronauts back on the moon in 2026 with its Artemis 3 mission. China says it hopes to send humans to the moon by 2030.
Nelson said he was confident the United States would not lose its “global edge” in space exploration.
“But you got to be realistic,” he said. “China has really thrown a lot of money at it and they’ve got a lot of room in their budget to grow. I think that we just better not let down our guard.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/nasa-chief-warns-of-chinese-military-presence-in-space/7574338.html
Lucid Air Sapphire first drive: An all-electric work of art that’s almost too f’ing fast… almost
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
FINALLY YA’LL! Nearly two years after its initial announcement, we drove the 1,234 horsepower Lucid Air Sapphire in all its tri-motor glory. Spoiler alert! It did not disappoint. This EV is a masterclass in power and efficiency, setting the bar for a new breed of vehicles that are as fast as they are luxurious. Peep the full video review at the bottom.
Psst, hey. It’s the NSA. You want some AI security advice?
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
You can trust us, we’re the good guys
The NSA has released guidance to help organizations protect their AI systems and better defend the defense industry.…
Fire: Valencia apartment fire out on arrival
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
A reported apartment fire in Valencia on Wednesday afternoon that called for a Los Angeles County Fire Department response was out on arrival, according to department officials. The fire was reported at the 24700 block of Magic Mountain Parkway at approximately 1:44 p.m. on Wednesday, according to Geovanni Sanchez, a spokesman for the Fire Department. […]
The post <strong>Fire: Valencia apartment fire out on arrival</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/fire-valencia-apartment-fire-out-on-arrival/
June 1: Team Dragon Eyes to Host Fifth Annual Dragonboat Festival Race
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Team Dragon Eyes, affectionately known as TDE, is gearing up to host its highly anticipated Fifth Annual Dragonboat Festival race on Saturday, June 1 at Castaic Lake, Lower Lagoon.
https://scvnews.com/june-1-team-dragon-eyes-to-host-5th-annual-dragonboat-festival-race/
Audi teases sporty new e-tron GT with Porsche Taycan Turbo power
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
The new Audi e-tron GT is gearing up for its debut as prototypes begin hitting the streets for testing. Audi’s refreshed e-tron GT is expected to pull upgrades from the new Porsche Taycan Turbo. The new electric sports car will likely feature a bigger battery, more range, and performance.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/audi-teases-new-e-tron-gt-porsche-taycan-turbo-power/
America may end up with paid-for 5G fast lanes under net neutrality anyway
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Damn you, network virtualization
A law professor is warning a proposed reintroduction net neutrality in the US will allow cellular networks to create “fast lanes” for some applications, and that this undermines the entire net neutrality principle.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/net_neutrality_traffic/
Mercedes-Benz Electric Car Sales Weakened In Q1 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
Nonetheless, almost a fifth of new cars were rechargeable, while all-electric cars represent one-tenth.
https://insideevs.com/news/716457/mercedes-electric-car-sales-2024q1/
MIDICSV: Convert MIDI File to and from CSV (2004)
date: 2024-04-17, from: Tilde.news
http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/midicsv
Incoming Freshman Welcomed at Admitted Matadors Day
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Welcoming all new Matadors to CSUN! Admitted Matadors Day was the place to be for all incoming freshmen for the Fall 2024-25 school season. It was a full day filled…
Fire Devastates Copenhagen’s Historic Stock Exchange
date: 2024-04-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Its signature 184-foot spire collapsed, but rescuers salvaged some of the valuable artworks inside
Party at the Pit Stop, City Paves Way for 20th Annual Bike to Work Challenge
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
This year marks the 20th year that the city of Santa Clarita has been hosting the annual Bike to Work Challenge. The community is invited to celebrate by riding a bike to work the week of May 13, and stopping by a pit stop on Thursday, May 16.
https://scvnews.com/party-at-the-pit-stop-city-paves-way-for-20th-annual-bike-to-work-chllenge/
2023 was a record year for wind power growth – in numbers
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
The global wind industry installed 117 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in 2023, making it the best year ever for new wind energy – here’s what happened and where.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/2023-was-a-record-year-for-wind-power-growth-in-numbers/
ASML ships another high NA EUV lithography machine to mystery client
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The cutting-edge chipmaking tool for a secret customer
Dutch semiconductor toolmaker ASML has shipped its second-ever high numerical aperture (NA) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine to an undisclosed customer.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/asml_ships_another_high_na/
PARTY AT A PIT STOP: CITY PAVES THE WAY FOR 20TH ANNUAL BIKE TO WORK CHALLENGE
date: 2024-04-17, from: City of Santa Clarita
Local Businesses Invited to Join the No-Pollute Commute During the Week of May 13 This year marks the 20th year that the City of Santa Clarita has been hosting the annual Bike to Work Challenge. The community is invited to celebrate by riding a bike to work the week of May 13, and stopping by […]
The post PARTY AT A PIT STOP: CITY PAVES THE WAY FOR 20TH ANNUAL BIKE TO WORK CHALLENGE appeared first on City of Santa Clarita.
Tesla spent $200,000 to advertise on Elon Musk’s X so far
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla confirmed that it spent $200,000 to advertise on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, so far.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/tesla-spent-advertise-elon-musk-x-so-far/
The Olympic Torch Relay Began in Nazi Germany
date: 2024-04-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
After a torch-lighting ceremony this week, the Olympic flame began its long journey from Olympia to Paris
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/olympic-torch-relay-paris-games-2024-180984172/
Beyond Gaza
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. … I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.”
The post Beyond Gaza appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/04/17/beyond-gaza/
What Could Liquid Biopsy Do for Oncology in the UK and What Is Needed to Realise Its Potential?
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: RAND blog
Liquid biopsy has the potential to provide better and quicker testing for cancer, helping to improve diagnosis and treatment and improving cancer outcomes overall. As potential useful tests emerge, now is the time to consider what is needed to put them into everyday practice across the NHS.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/04/what-could-liquid-biopsy-do-for-oncology-in-the-uk.html
Kremlin’s Sandworm blamed for cyberattacks on US, European water utilities
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Water tank overflowed during one system malfunction, says Mandiant
The Russian military’s notorious Sandworm crew was likely behind cyberattacks on US and European water plants that, in at least one case, caused a tank to overflow.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/russia_sandworm_cyberattacks_water/
Goleta Council Agrees to Begin Potential Habitat Changes at Sandpiper Golf
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Changes include designation for red-legged frogs and piping of Devereux Creek under the fairways.
The post Goleta Council Agrees to Begin Potential Habitat Changes at Sandpiper Golf appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Astronomers Discover a ‘Sleeping Giant’ Black Hole in Our Galaxy—the Second-Closest Known to Earth
date: 2024-04-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Called Gaia BH3, the dormant black hole is 33 times more massive than the sun, making it the largest recorded stellar black hole in the Milky Way
Santa Barbara Restaurants and Relief Agencies Rally ’Round Superstar Chef José Andrés
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The founder of World Central Kitchen brings his message of disaster aid through food to the Arlington Theatre on April 21.
The post Santa Barbara Restaurants and Relief Agencies Rally ’Round Superstar Chef José Andrés appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Gas Prices Surge in Santa Barbara, Reaching $5.17 Per Gallon Countywide
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
As gas prices hit new heights on the south coast, Californians grapple with the consequences of a limited supply chain, signaling potential challenges ahead.
The post Gas Prices Surge in Santa Barbara, Reaching $5.17 Per Gallon Countywide appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Santa Barbara Fair & Expo Presents “Double Thrill Double Fun” for TWO EXTENDED Weekends Spectacular Inaugural Year Thursday, April 25th to Sunday, April 28th + Friday, May 3rd to Sunday, May 5th, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
(Santa Barbara, CA 04/17/2024) Santa Barbara Fair & Expo proudly introduces its first-ever two extended weekend extravaganza, themed “Double Thrill
The post Santa Barbara Fair & Expo Presents “Double Thrill Double Fun” for TWO EXTENDED Weekends Spectacular Inaugural Year Thursday, April 25th to Sunday, April 28th + Friday, May 3rd to Sunday, May 5th, 2024 appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Google Raises Privacy Bar with Its Crowdsourced Tracking Service
date: 2024-04-17, from: TidBITS blog
Google’s new Find My Device network works nearly identically to Apple’s Find My network with a few exceptions: Google’s design offers more anti-stalking and privacy features than Apple.
https://tidbits.com/2024/04/17/google-raises-privacy-bar-with-its-crowdsourced-tracking-service/
Online Financial Workshops with County DCBA
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Ready to take control of your financial future? Join the Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs Center for Financial Empowerment for the next installment in the Lunch & Learn Financial Capability Month webinar series, “Understanding Credit
https://scvnews.com/online-financial-workshops-with-county-dcba/
The US now has an actual plan to connect clean energy to the grid
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
The US Department of Energy has just released its first-ever roadmap to speed up the connection of more clean energy to the grid.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/us-clean-energy-grid/
Tesla Tested ‘Crab Walk’ Tech For The Cybertruck, But Found It Useless
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
The GMC Hummer EV can turn all four wheels to “Crab Walk.” Tesla passed on that for the Cybertruck.
https://insideevs.com/news/716491/tesla-cybertruck-crab-walk-hummer/
Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas is dead, long live the … new commercial Atlas
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
If the plan was to make this all-electric droid look mildly terrifying, mission accomplished
Video Atlas, the humanoid robot that’s been a centerpiece of Boston Dynamics’ robot lineup for nearly a decade, has been retired. In its place is, well, Atlas - an all-electric version designed for commercial use. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/boston_dynamics_atlas_is_dead/
The Marshall Star for April 17, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
The Full Experience: NASA, Marshall, and Arkansas Celebrate Total Solar Eclipse By Celine Smith More than 100,000 people from across the world gathered April 8 in Russellville, Arkansas, to witness an astronomical syzygy – the alignment of the Sun, Moon, and Earth – creating a solar eclipse with totality lasting 4 minutes and 12 seconds. […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-april-17-2024/
Red Cross Honors Extraordinary Volunteers During National Volunteer Month
date: 2024-04-17, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SANTA BARBARA, APRIL 17, 2024 — During National Volunteer Month, the American Red Cross Pacific Coast Chapter is celebrating community heroes
The post Red Cross Honors Extraordinary Volunteers During National Volunteer Month appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
🤔💭 Writing about what you don’t know
date: 2024-04-17, from: Interesting, a blog on writing
“What do we do to learn something new? We look it up!” —Elmo
https://inneresting.substack.com/p/writing-about-what-you-dont-know
AltStore PAL is the first “Apple-approved” third-party app store for iOS (in Europe-only)
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liliputing
After years of blocking third-party app stores from iPhones and iPads, Apple has changed its rules regarding installation of apps from sources other than its own App Store… at least in Europe. The changes come in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Acts, and Apple’s not particularly happy about them. But now that the […]
The post AltStore PAL is the first “Apple-approved” third-party app store for iOS (in Europe-only) appeared first on Liliputing.
May 4: SCV Concert Band Presents ‘Starry Night’ at CTG
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Valley Concert Band will perform a “Starry Might” concert at 7 p.m. on Saturday May 4. The concert, under the direction of Tim Durand, will be held at the Canyon Theatre Guild, 24242 Main St., Newhall, CA
https://scvnews.com/may-4-scv-concert-band-presents-starry-night-at-ctg/
You Can Get Up To $10,500 Off When Buying A New BMW EV
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
Leasing a new EV from BMW can bring even more savings.
https://insideevs.com/news/716440/bmw-ev-incentives-2024-us/
In the Congo: Applying Research to Issues of Poverty and Servitude
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: RAND blog
The Democratic Republic of the Congo faces a series of seemingly intractable issues that have left much of its population in poverty and servitude to multinational mining interests. International engagement and research could help.
You Can Win Your Own Custom Race Suit In REV’IT!’s Design Contest
date: 2024-04-17, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
A dream come true for any moto enthusiast.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/716039/revit-tailortech-design-and-win-contest/
Remote Hero?
date: 2024-04-17, from: Status-Q blog
I know some of my readers will have seen this on John’s blog, but for others… A wonderful thing has happened. There is a new and marvellous recording of one of my all-time favourite tracks, Mark Knopfler’s Going Home, the theme music from the also-wonderful movie Local Hero. As if that weren’t enough, it includes Continue Reading
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/04/17/12010/
Are we in a cost of technology crisis? Our vultures think so
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Won’t somebody please think of the shareholders
Kettle The price of everything is going up because corporations gotta corp and produce record profits year after year. That means you and I are expected to cough up more.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/cost_of_technology_crisis/
Toyota plots an all-electric Highlander SUV, will the Tundra and Tacoma be next?
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
After a slow start, Toyota is looking to shake things up with its next round of electric cars. Toyota’s second best-selling SUV in the US, the Toyota Highlander, is going fully electric. It could be followed by other familiar names like the Tacoma and Tundra.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/toyota-plots-electric-highlander-potential-tundra-tacoma-evs/
CHP Continues Organized Retail Crime Crackdown, Recovers $4.2M in Goods
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
After a record-setting 2023 combatting organized retail crime, the California Highway Patrol continues to aggressively disrupt and dismantle illegal operations throughout California.
https://scvnews.com/chp-continues-organized-retail-crime-crackdown-recovers-4-2m-in-goods/
Biden on campaign trail, Trump at criminal trial
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is in a New York courtroom this week for jury selection in a case about his allegedly falsifying business records. Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent President Joe Biden is on the campaign trail talking about the candidates’ competing visions of economic fairness. VOA’s Scott Stearns has our story.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-on-campaign-trail-trump-at-criminal-trial/7574087.html
April 22: Celebrate Earth Day at California State Parks
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Celebrate Earth Day on Monday, April 22 with California State Parks at any of the 280 unique park units across the state. State Parks has numerous Earth Day-themed events planned. They include in-person activities such as guided walks and hikes, workdays and a bioblitz, as well as virtual programming with a live dive broadcast exploring the hidden world of the ocean
https://scvnews.com/april-22-celebrate-earth-day-at-california-state-parks/
Volla Tablet is a Google-free Android tablet that also supports Ubuntu Touch (crowdfunding)
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liliputing
The Volla Tablet is a 12.3 inch tablet with a 2560 x 1600 pixel display, a MediaTek Helio G99 processor, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and support for optional accessories including a backlit keyboard cover and a digital pen. But what really makes it stand out from most tablets is the software: Volla will offer […]
The post Volla Tablet is a Google-free Android tablet that also supports Ubuntu Touch (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
Future Roku TVs may inject tailored ads into anything and everything when you pause
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Muted the audio? That’s an advert. Paused a video? That’s an advert
Updated Will Roku TVs of the future throw up targeted ads on the screen whenever you pause a video? We hope not but……
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/roku_tv_ad_patent/
US Senate dismisses articles of impeachment against homeland security secretary
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The Senate on Wednesday dismissed all impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, ending the House Republican push to remove the Cabinet secretary from office over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The two votes ended the trial before arguments began. Senators voted separately to dismiss the two articles of impeachment, arguing that they were unconstitutional.
The votes were 51-48 and 51-49, both along party lines.
The first article charged Mayorkas with “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.” The second article charged Mayorkas with a “breach of trust” for saying the border was secure. The Senate then adjourned the impeachment trial.
Republicans had argued for a full impeachment trial against Mayorkas.
“For the sake of the Senate’s integrity and to protect impeachment for those rare cases we truly need it, senators should dismiss today’s charges,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said as he opened Wednesday’s session.
The House narrowly voted in February to impeach Mayorkas for his handling of the border, arguing in the two articles that he “willfully and systematically” refused to enforce immigration laws. House impeachment managers delivered the charges to the Senate on Tuesday, standing in the well of the Senate and reading them aloud to a captive audience of senators.
The outright dismissal of House Republicans’ prosecution of Mayorkas, with no chance to argue the case, was an embarrassing defeat for House Republicans and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, who made the impeachment a priority. And it is likely to resonate politically for both Republicans and Democrats in a presidential election year when border security has been a top issue.
Republicans argue that President Joe Biden has been weak on the border as arrests for illegal crossings skyrocketed to more than 2 million people during the past two years, though they have fallen from a record of 250,000 in December amid heightened enforcement in Mexico. Democrats say that instead of impeaching Mayorkas, Republicans should have accepted a bipartisan Senate compromise aimed at reducing the number of migrants who come into the U.S. illegally.
Once the senators were sworn in on Wednesday, the chamber turned into the court of impeachment, with Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington presiding. Murray is the president pro tempore of the Senate, or the most senior member of the majority party who sits in for the vice president. Senators approached the front of the Senate in groups of four to sign an oath book that is stored in the National Archives.
Schumer then called for the votes to dismiss the trial after Republicans rejected a proposed agreement for Senate debate time and several votes on GOP objections. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called for a delay in the proceedings while Republican senators huddled on the floor to discuss how to proceed and called for several votes to delay the final outcome. All the votes were along party lines.
While most Republicans opposed quick dismissal, some hinted they could vote with Democrats.
Mayorkas, who was in New York on Wednesday to launch a campaign for children’s online safety, reiterated that he’s focused on the work of his department.
“The Senate is going to do what the Senate considers to be appropriate as that proceeds,” he said. “I am here in New York City on Wednesday morning fighting online sexual exploitation and abuse. I’m focused on our mission.”
The two articles argued that Mayorkas not only refused to enforce existing law but also breached the public trust by lying to Congress and saying the border was secure. The House vote was the first time in nearly 150 years that a Cabinet secretary had been impeached.
Microsoft finds Russian influence operations targeting US election have begun
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft said on Wednesday that Russian online campaigns to influence the upcoming U.S. presidential election kicked into gear over the past 45 days, but at a slower pace than in past elections.
Russia-linked accounts are disseminating divisive content aimed at U.S. audiences, including criticizing American support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, researchers at the tech giant said in a report.
The Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment, but the Kremlin said last month it would not meddle in the November U.S. election. It also dismissed U.S. allegations that it orchestrated campaigns to sway the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections.
While the Russian activity Microsoft observed is not as intense as around the previous elections, it could increase in the coming months, the researchers said.
“Messaging regarding Ukraine — via traditional media and social media — picked up steam over the last two months with a mix of covert and overt campaigns from at least 70 Russia-affiliated activity sets we track,” Microsoft said.
The most prolific of such Russian campaigns is linked to Russia’s Presidential Administration, they added. Another one is aimed at posting disinformation online in various languages, with posts typically starting with an apparent whistleblower or citizen journalist posting content on a video channel. That content is then covered by a network of websites that include DC Weekly, Miami Chronical and The Intel Drop.
“Ultimately, after the narrative has circulated online for a series of days or weeks, U.S. audiences repeat and repost this disinformation, likely unaware of its original source,” Microsoft said.
A “notable uptick” has been seen in hacking by a Russian group Microsoft calls Star Blizzard, or Cold River, which is focused on targeting western think tanks, the company said.
“Star Blizzard’s current focus on U.S. political figures and policy circles may be the first in a series of hacking campaigns meant to drive Kremlin outcomes headed into November.”
Malicious use of artificial intelligence by foreign rivals targeting the U.S. election is a key concern cited by American political observers, but Microsoft said it found that simpler digital forgeries were more common than deepfakes. Audio manipulations have a bigger impact than video, it added.
“Rarely have nation-states’ employments of generative AI-enabled content achieved much reach across social media, and in only a few cases have we seen any genuine audience deception from such content,” the researchers said.
“The simplest manipulations, not the most complex employment of AI, will likely be the pieces of content that have the most impact.”
Save $300 on Juiced’s new JetCurrent Pro e-bike, Jackery power stations up to 42% off, and more
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Headlining today’s green deals is a special pre-order discount on Juiced Bikes’ new JetCurrent Pro Foldable e-bike for $2,499. It is joined by Jackery’s Earth Day sale that is taking up to 42% off the company’s power stations, bundles, and accessories starting from $100, as well as a one-day sale on the WORX 12A TURBINE 600 CFM Electric Leaf Blower at $55. Plus, you’ll also find all of the other day’s best Green Deals below.
Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/juiceds-new-jetcurrent-pro-e-bike-jackery-power-stations-and-more/
NASA’s Near Space Network Enables PACE Climate Mission to ‘Phone Home’
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
The PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission has delivered its first operational data back to researchers, a feat made possible in part by innovative, data-storing technology from NASA’s Near Space Network, which introduced two key enhancements for PACE and other upcoming science missions. As a satellite orbits in space, its systems generate critical data […]
Hibernating Bumblebee Queens Can Survive Underwater for Up to a Week, Study Finds
date: 2024-04-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Researchers discovered the insects’ unexpected superpower during an accidental laboratory snafu
Graphics offload revisited
date: 2024-04-17, from: Gtk Developer blog
We first introduced support for dmabufs and graphics offload last fall, and it is included in GTK 4.14. Since then, some improvements have happened, so it is time for an update. Improvements down the stack The GStreamer 1.24 release has improved support for explicit modifiers, and the GStreamer media backend in GTK has been updated … Continue reading “Graphics offload revisited”
https://blog.gtk.org/2024/04/17/graphics-offload-revisited/
NASA Photographer Honored for Thrilling Inverted In-Flight Image
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
Riding in the back seat of a car can be boring. Riding in the back of a NASA aircraft is exhilarating, especially for photographers capturing NASA’s story. Jim Ross, photo lead at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, was awarded first place for an image he took while flying upside down in a […]
Watch A Tesla Model 3 And Porsche Taycan Drive Down Flooded Streets In Dubai
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
Most vehicles ground to a halt during the flooding that completely paralyzed Dubai, but some EV owners just drove through the flood.
https://insideevs.com/news/716493/dubai-flood-ev-videostesla-porsche/
NASA confirms nuclear-powered Dragonfly drone is going to Titan
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Whew! Relief for boffins as rotorcraft slated to arrive at Saturn moon in 2034
NASA has finally confirmed its Dragonfly rotorcraft mission will be heading to Titan, one of Saturn’s Moons, meaning the team behind the project can finalize its design and get to work building the spacecraft.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/nasa_confirms_dragonfly_mission/
Heineken and HMD’s Boring Phone is a retro-style flip phone with speed dial, Snake, and not much else
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liliputing
The Boring Phone is a modern cellphone that’s designed to do less than most. You can use it to make calls and maybe send text messages if you remember how to do T9 texting. But this 4G flip phone doesn’t support mobile data and doesn’t run apps or games (except for Snake). It’s designed to offer […]
The post Heineken and HMD’s Boring Phone is a retro-style flip phone with speed dial, Snake, and not much else appeared first on Liliputing.
We Can’t Drill These Holes Fast Enough
date: 2024-04-17, from: Heatmap News
The federal government is really excited about geothermal: A Department of Energy report published in March said that geothermal can “become a key contributor to secure, domestic, decarbonized power generation for the U.S.” — particularly the kind of clean, always available power that grids love.
Big companies are really excited about geothermal: A group comprised of Google, Microsoft, and Nucor, the steel company, together put out a request in March for power projects that could generate clean power 24 hours a day, including “next-generation geothermal” (i.e. projects that don’t require finding hot water or steam underground, but instead use drilling to apply fluid to already hot rocks).
But are the nation’s regulators — especially those who oversee public lands in the vast American West and Great Basin, where some of the nation’s hottest and shallowest rocks are located — excited about geothermal?
The answer matters tremendously. The Bureau of Land Management approves leasing for geothermal projects on some 245 million acres of land. This also means that geothermal projects often have to run the full gamut of federal environmental review at each stage of development. Over the decade or so that a geothermal project can take from start to finish, there may be as many six reviews mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, according to the Institute for Progress, a technology policy think tank.
This week, the BLM alleviated part of that burden, saying Monday that it would apply two existing “categorical exclusions” – i.e. permissions to skip environmental review for certain actions — to geothermal exploration projects. This authority to adopt other agencies’ categorical exclusions (in this case from the Forest Service and the Navy) was included in the 2022 debt limit deal.
And yet, all the industry advocates I talked to expressed measured enthusiasm at best. “I think this is a very good step in the right direction,” Aidan Mackenzie, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me. On top of saving companies time, it also saves the government time. Creating a new categorical exclusion “requires notice and comment, which is more challenging for an agency,” Mackenzie said. “Adopting an existing categorical exclusion is a much easier process.”
This move comes as a bipartisan effort to clear away bureaucratic barriers for geothermal companies to operate on public lands appears to be cresting in Congress. Last month, four senators — two Democrats and two Republicans — co-sponsored a bill, the Geothermal Energy Optimization Act that would establish a categorical exclusion for all exploration activities, modeled on the existing one for oil and gas that’s been in place since 2005.
Two prominent geothermal startups, Eavor and Fervo, both welcomed the
BLM’s decision while pushing gently but insistently for the full
legislative solution.
Jeanine Vany, Eavor’s executive vice president of corporate affairs,
told me the BLM’s action would “move the needle slightly in the right
direction,” but that a legislative solution — specifically the GEO Act —
would be “much more comprehensive and would be longer
lasting.”
In an emailed statement, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer said
essentially the same thing, calling the BLM’s move “a commonsense
approach to enabling development.”
“While the actions here cover only a small portion of activities in the geophysical exploration process,” he wrote, ”we are optimistic that both agency and legislative updates in the future that encompass some routine development and drilling activities will continue to unlock the potential of this important 24/7 carbon-free energy resource.”
One of the authors of the GEO Act, New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, also emailed to say that “BLM is right to scale up geothermal production,” but that now, “Congress should pass my GEO Act to take us a step further in fully harnessing the power of geothermal.”
At the same time, the BLM is working to carve out its own exclusions specific to the work it does on geothermal permitting. A BLM spokesperson told me the agency is “currently working on two categorical exclusions related to geothermal permitting,” one for exploration and another for “resource confirmation,” the process of drilling to show more definitively that the necessary hot rocks or (hot fluids) are there and can be drilled for heat.
Still, “there’s a strong case for Congress, especially, to do more,” Mackenzie said. The GEO Act, he explained, would “derisk” the exploration process for geothermal. “Right now, there’s a big cost to messing it up,” he said. “If you have to do a full [Environmental Assessment], it takes or year or two — you might get sued. If you finally do the exploration and the resource isn’t what you think it would be, you have to go back and wait years to try again.”
Shortening the timeline for geothermal will be key to achieving what the industry, energy buyers, and the federal government all seem to want for next-generation projects, in terms of both cost and production. The Department of Energy has said that it wants to see costs fall by some 90% by the middle of the next decade, and that the sector could grow 20-fold by 2050, to 90 gigawatts of capacity, which would be slightly greater than the capacity of hydropower today.
https://heatmap.news/politics/geothermal-exploration-exclusion
NASA to Hoist Its Sail: Solar Sail Mission Gets Ready for Launch
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
A NASA mission testing a new way of navigating our solar system is ready to hoist its sail into space – not to catch the wind, but the propulsive power of sunlight. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System is targeting launch on Tuesday, April 23 (Wednesday, April 24 in New Zealand) aboard a Rocket Lab Electron […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-to-hoist-its-sail-solar-sail-mission-gets-ready-for-launch/
Microsoft installs Copilot “AI” app on Windows Servers by accident, it claims
date: 2024-04-17, from: OS News
Do you administer Windows Server machines, and were you surprised to find a Windows Copilot application on your servers, that neither you nor your users installed? Well, it turns out that Microsoft installed this application alongside an update to the Edge browser – but the company claims this is in error, and the application will be removed in a future update. Updates to Edge browser version 123.0.2420.65, released on March 28, 2024 and later, might incorrectly install a new package (MSIX) called ‘Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows’ on Windows devices. Resulting from this, the Microsoft Copilot app might appear in the Installed apps in Settings menu. It is important to note that the Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows does not execute any code or process, and does not acquire, analyze, or transmit device or environment data in any capacity. ↫ Windows 11 known issues and notifications The company claims this was an enablement package to prepare some Windows devices for the arrival of Copilot, and that it was unintentionally installed on devices. While it doesn’t mean Copilot was actually installed on your PC or server, it’s still a chilling reminder of who really controls your PC or server.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Kari Lake downplays 1864 abortion law, says Arizonans can travel ‘3 hours’ for procedure.
New effort tackles drug overdose epidemic in US
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
The Biden Administration has launched a new effort to tackle the drug overdose epidemic in the United States, which in 2022 took more than 100,000 lives, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, some critics say there are some gaps in the government’s strategy to save lives.
https://www.voanews.com/a/new-effort-tackles-drug-overdose-epidemic-in-us/7573952.html
It’s Time for a New AirPort
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Joe Rosensteel (Mastodon): Jason didn’t get that speed boost from an Apple-made wireless router, because Apple got out of making those long ago. He didn’t get that speed from a wireless router currently for sale at the Apple Store because the only two options are the Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System, and AmpliFi […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/17/its-time-for-a-new-airport/
macOS 14 Sonoma vs. exFAT
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Mike Wuerthele and Malcolm Owen (via Ric Ford): An issue preventing some external drives from mounting onto a Mac running macOS Sonoma has plagued users for months, and it probably was caused by changes Apple made to drive handling.[…]Unlike the Windows-preferred NTFS or Apple’s APFS, exFAT can be read from and written to by both […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/17/macos-14-sonoma-vs-exfat/
Jpegli
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Google (via Hacker News): To improve on this, we are introducing Jpegli, an advanced JPEG coding library that maintains high backward compatibility while offering enhanced capabilities and a 35% compression ratio improvement at high quality compression settings.[…]When images are compressed or decompressed through Jpegli, more precise and psychovisually effective computations are performed and images will […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/17/jpegli/
Rediscovering CardDAV
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Jan-Piet Men (2020, via Hacker News): I can no longer sync iOS’ Contacts with my macOS Catalina’s Finder (the iOS sync portion of iTunes is now built into the Finder in macOS Catalina); the OS insists I’ve iCloud configured for Contacts which I do not. […] I was spilling my sorrows on Christoph who simply […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/17/rediscovering-carddav/
Lotus Eletre Super SUV Priced From $107,000 In The U.S.
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
Deliveries are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of the year.
https://insideevs.com/news/716408/lotus-eletre-us-pricing/
Husqvarna Trek Heads To Spain For The First Time Ever
date: 2024-04-17, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The event is scheduled for November 18 to 22, 2024.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/715832/2024-husqvarna-trek-goes-to-spain/
Framework lays out plan to improve its firmware and software development cycle
date: 2024-04-17, from: OS News
Only two days ago we were talking about the software and firmware issues at Framework, and today the company’s CEO has announced they’re taking some pretty big steps to address these problems. When building products to last, it’s not enough to design the hardware to be repairable, upgradeable, and customizable. The overall longevity of devices as complex as modern notebooks also depends on how long the software and firmware continues to be useful. That includes compatibility updates to support newer generations hardware modules, fixes for bugs or compatibility issues found by end users, and especially patches for security vulnerabilities. We recognize that we have fallen short of where we need to be on software updates, and we are making the needed investments to resolve this. We now have a dedicated team of engineers at our manufacturing partner and a set of internal stakeholders focused on ongoing software updates for all of our products, going back to our original Framework Laptop with 11th Gen Intel Core. In the past, we were reliant on ad-hoc availability of engineering time from our suppliers (basically borrowing staffing from whichever new product development we had ongoing). This was inconsistent and resulted in slow progress. With a dedicated team, there is no longer resource contention, and we are able deliver shorter turnaround times from discovering issues to resolving them. ↫ Nirav Patel They’ve also shared exactly how the development, testing, and release process new firmware releases will work, from identifying any issues to the final release to consumers, and they’re hiring new employees focused entirely on expediting this process. They also promise to support each device for as long as their upstream silicon vendors will, but they can’t give any guarantees on how long that will be since those upstream vendors aren’t sharing details like that. All in all, I think this is about as good a response as you can get from an OEM, but as they themselves note, they’ll have to show their customers these aren’t just mere words. Assuming it pans out the way Framework is promising here, I think it’s a fair and customer-friendly process.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
We can collaborate with the machines, and maybe that will unlock collaboration between humans.
http://scripting.com/2024/04/16/140810.html
Hyundai Motor has six of the top ten most fuel-efficient EVs in the US
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
If you’re looking to get the most out of your vehicle, Hyundai may be your best choice. In 2024, Hyundai has six of the top ten most fuel-efficient EVs in the US, including the IONIQ 6, IONIQ 5, and Kona Electric.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/hyundai-six-top-ten-most-fuel-efficient-evs-us/
Tesla asks shareholders to reinstate Musk’s voided $56B pay package
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Given the electric car maker’s annus horribilis so far in 2024, does the chief even deserve it?
A Delaware court may have voided Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package in February, but now the board is asking shareholders to reinstate it.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/tesla_reinstate_musk_pay/
Biden calls for quick congressional passage of Ukraine, Israel aid
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/7573909.html
Say hello to the first OneWrt One prototype (Router board from OpenWrt and Banana Pi)
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liliputing
The developers behind OpenWrt have been offering an open source, Linux-based operating system for routers and other embedded devices for two decades. So far the team has primarily focused on making software that can be installed on existing hardware. But earlier this year developer John Crispin announced that the team was considering releasing the first […]
The post Say hello to the first OneWrt One prototype (Router board from OpenWrt and Banana Pi) appeared first on Liliputing.
Technoptimism, TED, and The Road to the Future
date: 2024-04-17, from: Gary Marcus blog
It’s kind of surreal to compare some of the talks at TED yesterday with reality. Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman promised that hallucinations would be cured “soon”, yet my X feed is still filled with examples like these from Princeton Professor Aleksandra Korolova:
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/technoptimism-ted-and-the-road-to
Intel’s neuromorphic ‘owl brain’ swoops into Sandia labs
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hala Point system crams more than a thousand neurochips into a 6U chassis to tackle real-time AI
Intel Labs revealed its largest neuromorphic computer on Wednesday, a 1.15 billion neuron system, which it reckons is roughly analogous to an owl’s brain.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/intel_hala_point_neuromorphic_owl/
The EV Industry Has A Battery Oversupply Problem
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
That sounds bad, but it should result in cheaper batteries for everything from cars to stationary storage.
https://insideevs.com/news/716392/ev-industry-battery-oversuplly/
NASA Announces Winners of Power to Explore Challenge
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
NASA announced the winners on Wednesday of the third annual Power to Explore Challenge, a national writing competition designed to teach K-12 students about the power of radioisotopes for space exploration. The competition asked students to learn about NASA’s Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS), “nuclear batteries” the agency uses to explore some of the most extreme […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-announces-winners-of-power-to-explore-challenge/
Google Maps Is About To Get A Lot Better For EV Charging
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
Attention from the biggest name in navigation should help finding an EV charger suck just a little bit less.
https://insideevs.com/news/716467/google-maps-ai-ev-charging/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-04-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Pretty sure we knew this on January 7. It would be pretty amazing if the president couldn't get the Secretary of Defense on the phone.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/17/trump-jan-6-capitol-riot-national-guard-00152757
This Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14 Snapdragon Edition could be one of the first Snapdragon X Elite laptops (leaks)
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liliputing
The first Windows PCs with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chips are expected to launch this year, and if you trust the official benchmarks released by Qualcomm (and confirmed by a number of independent journalists), Qualcomm has finally achieved its goal of developing chip that offers better performance-per-watt than anything available from Intel or AMD. If […]
The post This Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14 Snapdragon Edition could be one of the first Snapdragon X Elite laptops (leaks) appeared first on Liliputing.
April 16, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-16-2024-2dd
Lucid’s longest-range Air Grand Touring gets faster charging, 516 miles range at a lower price
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
New details on the longest-range electric car in the US, the Lucid Air Grand Touring, have been revealed. Lucid’s new 2024 Air Grand Touring gains faster charging, a heat pump, and 516 miles range (in more conditions). And you get all that for a 12% discount compared to last year’s model.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/lucid-air-grand-touring-gets-516-mi-range-upgrades-price-cut/
US bars 4 former Malawi officials over corruption, State Department says
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States has barred four former officials of the Malawi government from entry because of their involvement in significant corruption, the State Department said on Wednesday.
The officials designated are former solicitor general and secretary of justice Reyneck Matemba, former director of public procurement and disposal of assets John Suzi-Banda, former Malawi Police Service attorney Mwabi Kaluba, and former Inspector General of the Malawi Police Service George Kainja, the department said.
The four were cited by the State Department as having “abused their public positions by accepting bribes and other articles of value” from a private business person in exchange for a government police contract.
“The United States stands with Malawians working towards a more just and prosperous nation by promoting accountability for corrupt officials, including advocating for transparency and integrity in government procurement processes,” department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
Matemba expressed surprise when contacted by Reuters.
“I am still in Malawi and have never traveled outside the country since 2021. I am on bail, therefore I can’t travel because my passport is technically with the police,” Matemba said.
Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera has waged a crackdown on corruption in recent years. In January 2022, he dissolved the country’s entire Cabinet on charges of corruption against three serving ministers.
Later that year, Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau arrested and charged the country’s vice president, Saulos Klaus Chilima, over graft allegations.
The group has been investigating public officers in Malawi over alleged plundering of state resources by influencing awarding of contracts through the country’s public procurement system.
Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, with nearly three-quarters of the population living on less than $2 a day. Though small in size, it features in the top 10 in Africa in terms of population density.
Samsung boosts LPDDR5X to 10.7 Gbps, ups efficiency and capacity for mobile and servers
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Guess what it’s great for? Go on, have a guess… 20 points if you muttered an abbreviation starting with A and ending in I
Samsung has revealed its upgraded LPDDR5X memory modules, which features improved performance, capacity, and efficiency.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/samsung_boosts_lpddr5x_to_107/
Facebook’s AI Told Parents Group It Has a Gifted, Disabled Child
date: 2024-04-17, from: 404 Media Group
Facebook’s chatbot eventually apologized and said it doesn’t have “personal experiences or children.”
https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-told-parents-group-it-has-a-disabled-child/
Tesla Semi has been pushed ‘well beyond expectations’ by a new customer
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla has delivered its Tesla Semi, an electric semi truck, to a new customer for a pilot program that has reportedly pushed the electric vehicle “well beyond expectations.”
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/tesla-semi-pushed-well-beyond-expectations-new-customer/
Richmond police pursuit ends with two-car crash on Highway 4, and a suspect arrested
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
A police dog helped officers find a gun that police said the suspect threw from the car.
Crypto conferences liquidated after biblical flooding in Dubai
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There’s something nice about seeing Web3 fanatics in ankle-deep water
And the Lord looked down upon the crypto bros and He was grieved in His heart. So the Lord said, “I will send down upon thee a flood to wash out thy crypto conference.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/dubai_crypto_conference_flood/
An intro to TSConfig for JavaScript Developers
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: Deno blog
TypeScript, one of the fastest growing languages, helps JavaScript developers improve code quality and productivity. But getting started can be challenging. Here’s an introduction to TSConfig.
https://deno.com/blog/intro-to-tsconfig
KTM Rolls Out Updated Motocross Machines For 2025
date: 2024-04-17, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The KTM 150 SX makes a comeback for the 2025 model-year.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/716038/ktm-updates-2025-sx-sxf-bikes/
How The New Porsche Taycan Became An Efficiency Monster With Crazy, Tiny Tweaks
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
Engineers explain how they managed to get big increases in range for the new Taycan.
https://insideevs.com/news/716351/porsche-taycan-efficiency-range/
NASA Invites Media for Climate Update, New Earth Missions
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
In anticipation of Earth Day, NASA invites media to a briefing at the agency’s headquarters on Friday, April 19, at 11 a.m. EDT. The event will share updates on NASA’s climate science and early data from the agency’s ocean-watching PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission, as well as reveal upcoming Earth airborne missions. The […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-invites-media-for-climate-update-new-earth-missions/
Samsung introduces the world’s first 10.7 Gbps LPDDR5X memory
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liliputing
Samsung has introduced the fastest LPDDR5X memory chip to date, with support for speeds up to 10.7 gigabits per second. The company says its LPDDR5X-10700 memory also brings storage capacity and power efficiency improvements. Mass production is set to begin in the second half of 2024, which means that we could see the first devices […]
The post Samsung introduces the world’s first 10.7 Gbps LPDDR5X memory appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/samsung-introduces-the-worlds-first-10-7-gbps-lpddr5x-memory/
Invitation-only audio social network is the hot new app in Silicon Valley
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
Invitation links have been flying around tech circles the past few days to an exclusive app that’s a combination of voice notes and Twitter, called Airchat.
The Ineffable Importance of Undersea Cable Maintenance
date: 2024-04-17, from: TidBITS blog
This must-read from The Verge weaves background about the undersea fiber optic connections that make the modern Internet possible with the story of what one maintenance ship went through repairing cables in the aftermath of the 2011 undersea earthquake off the coast of Japan.
https://tidbits.com/2024/04/17/the-ineffable-importance-of-undersea-cable-maintenance/
A pivotal moment for the union push in Southern states
date: 2024-04-17, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The United Auto Workers union is trying to organize foreign vehicle factories in the South, and today, workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, begin voting on whether to join the UAW. We’ll hear what’s at stake. Then, we’ll take a look at why TGI Friday’s is faltering while Texas Roadhouse thrives. Plus, a look at how a Detroit deconstruction company provides jobs and promotes sustainability.
Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft
date: 2024-04-17, from: Quanta Magazine
Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.The post Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/hopes-of-big-bang-discoveries-ride-on-a-future-spacecraft-20240417/
Tech Today: Taking Earth’s Pulse with NASA Satellites
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
Natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, floods, and tornados can dramatically change the surface of Earth to the point where alterations are visible in space. Changes driven by human actions and interventions, such as mining and deforestation, are also visible in satellite imagery. For over 50 years, NASA’s Landsat satellites have recorded our planet’s changing surface. […]
Astronauts To Patch Up NASA’s NICER Telescope
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is planning to repair NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer), an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station, during a spacewalk later this year. It will be the fourth science observatory in orbit serviced by astronauts. In May 2023, scientists discovered that NICER had developed a “light leak.” Unwanted sunlight was entering the instrument […]
BMW’s ‘Soul-Searching’ After The i3 Led To EV Success Today
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
We look at BMW’s stealth success in the EV realm, as well as the pressure on Tesla and a crucial UAW vote in the American South this week.
https://insideevs.com/news/716429/bmw-i3-critical-materials/
AlmaLinux 9.4 beta prepares to tread where RHEL dares not
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
CIQ also has an alternative approach to compatible kernels with RockyLinux
The bigger RHELatives continue to diverge slightly from Red Hat, with additional drivers and newer kernel versions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/almalinux_94_ciq_lts_kernels/
The World’s Fourth Mass Coral Bleaching Event Is Underway—and It Could Become the Worst One Yet
date: 2024-04-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The impacted reefs represent 54 percent of the planet’s total, and that figure is currently increasing by 1 percent each week, NOAA scientists say
Have Disneyland Magic Key prices finally outpaced demand?
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
Disneyland raised Magic Key prices in October to $1,649 for the Inspire Key, $1,249 for the Believe Key, $849 for the Enchant Key and $499 for the Imagine Key.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/04/17/have-disneyland-magic-key-prices-finally-outpaced-demand/
OJ Simpson was chilling with a beer on a couch before Easter, lawyer says. 2 weeks later he was dead
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
Malcom LaVergne, who is handling Simpson’s estate, shared details of his final meetings with the former football hero, movie actor, sportscaster, television pitchman and celebrity murder defendant who he has represented since 2009.
Volkswagen to launch new EV platform in China to slash costs and compete with BYD
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
To boost sales in the world’s largest EV market and one of Volkswagen’s most important regions, the company is launching a new digital EV platform with China’s XPeng. VW says the EV platform will slash costs as it looks to recapture market share in China.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/vw-launch-new-china-ev-platform-cut-costs-rival-byd/
Whistleblower cries foul over alleged fuselage gaps in Boeing 787 Dreamliner
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Company rejects claims as ‘inaccurate’
A Boeing whistleblower has called for the embattled aircraft manufacturer’s fleet of 787s to be grounded for gap checks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/boeing_whistleblower_fuselage_gaps/
NASA’s Roman Space Telescope’s ‘Eyes’ Pass First Vision Test
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
Engineers at L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York, have combined all 10 mirrors for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Preliminary tests show the newly aligned optics, collectively called the IOA (Imaging Optics Assembly), will direct light into Roman’s science instruments extremely precisely. This will yield crisp images of space once the observatory launches. “This […]
Going Through Changes: Total Eclipse Over NASA Hangar
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
This composite image shows the dazzling phases of the total solar eclipse, seen above the Flight Research Building at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland on April 8, 2024. Glenn was the only NASA center in the eclipse path of totality, plunging into darkness for nearly four minutes as the face of the Sun was […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/going-through-changes-total-eclipse-over-nasa-hangar/
Institute That Pioneered AI ‘Existential Risk’ Research Shuts Down
date: 2024-04-17, from: 404 Media Group
The Future of Humanity Institute, which along with philosopher Nick Bostrom taught the world to fear existential AI risks, is finished.
https://www.404media.co/institute-that-pioneered-ai-existential-risk-research-shuts-down/
NPR suspends editor who criticized employer for what he calls an unquestioned liberal worldview
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — National Public Radio has suspended a veteran editor who wrote an outside essay criticizing his employer for, in his view, journalism that reflects a liberal viewpoint with little tolerance for contrary opinions.
Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, was suspended five days without pay, according to an article posted Tuesday by NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik. He wrote that Berliner was told he violated the company’s policy that it must approve work done for outside news organizations.
Berliner told NPR that he was not appealing the suspension. An NPR spokeswoman said the company would not comment on individual personnel matters.
He wrote his essay last week for The Free Press. Berliner wrote that NPR has always had a liberal bent, but for most of his 25-year tenure had an open-minded, curious culture.
“In recent years, however, that has changed,” he wrote. “Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
His commentary became an instant hit with outside conservative activists who have made similar criticisms of NPR. He specifically criticized his employer for its coverage of former President Donald Trump, of accusations against the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following publication, NPR’s top editor, Edith Chapin, said she strongly disagrees with Berliner’s conclusions and is proud to stand behind NPR’s work.
One of his NPR colleagues, “Morning Edition” co-host Steve Inskeep, wrote on Substack Tuesday that Berliner’s essay in The Free Press was filled with errors and assumptions.
“If Uri’s ‘larger point’ is that journalists should seek wider perspectives, and not just write stories that confirm their prior opinions, his article is useful as an example of what to avoid,” Inskeep wrote.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7573628.html
Editor who criticized NPR resigns after being suspended
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal views resigned on Wednesday, attacking NPR’s new chief executive on the way out.
Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, posted his resignation letter on X, formerly Twitter, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended for five days for violating company rules about outside work done without permission.
“I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems” written about in his essay, Berliner said in his resignation letter.
Katherine Maher, a former tech executive appointed in January as NPR’s chief executive, has been criticized by conservative activists for social media messages that disparaged former President Donald Trump. The messages predated her hiring at NPR.
NPR’s public relations chief said the organization does not comment on individual personnel matters.
The suspension and subsequent resignation highlight the delicate balance that many U.S. news organizations and their editorial employees face. On one hand, as journalists striving to produce unbiased news, they’re not supposed to comment on contentious public issues; on the other, many journalists consider it their duty to critique their own organizations’ approaches to journalism when needed.
In his essay, written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of Trump’s presidency.
“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”
He said he’d brought up his concerns internally and no changes had been made, making him “a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love.”
In the essay’s wake, NPR top editorial executive, Edith Chapin, said leadership strongly disagreed with Berliner’s assessment of the outlet’s journalism and the way it went about its work.
It’s not clear what Berliner was referring to when he talked about disparagement by Maher. In a lengthy memo to staff members last week, she wrote: “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving their mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning.”
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo revealed some of Maher’s past tweets after the essay was published. In one tweet, dated January 2018, Maher wrote that “Donald Trump is a racist.” A post just before the 2020 election pictured her in a Biden campaign hat.
In response, an NPR spokeswoman said Maher, years before she joined the radio network, was exercising her right to express herself. She is not involved in editorial decisions at NPR, the network said.
Maher is the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation. NPR’s own story about the 40-year-old executive’s appointment in January noted that she “has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization.”
In his resignation letter, Berliner said that he did not support any efforts to strip NPR of public funding. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote.
https://www.voanews.com/a/editor-who-criticized-npr-resigns-after-being-suspended-/7573628.html
Podcast: The ‘Com World War’
date: 2024-04-17, from: 404 Media Group
This week we cover a ‘world war’ inside nebulous crime culture the Com; Google’s miss on AI science; and a sex box.
https://www.404media.co/the-com-world-war-podcast-404-media/
Weight loss drug Zepbound may help people with obstructive sleep apnea, drugmaker says
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
Based on results from trials in people with sleep apnea, the company said it plans to submit the material to the US Food and Drug Administration to potentially expand the use of Zepbound for obstructive sleep apnea.
Take a hidden tour of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco’s Gothic masterpiece
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
Secret passageways and ancient artifacts are the stars of new “behind-the-scenes” tours of the famous church.
Top EV Carmakers By Sales In Q1 2024: Tesla Vs. BYD
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
After BYD’s win in Q4, Tesla easily won in Q1, but Q2 might be a close call.
https://insideevs.com/news/716305/top-electric-carmakers-sales-2024q1-tesla-vs-byd/
Taste-Off: The best supermarket prosciutto — and the ones not worth the price
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
How do U.S.-made prosciutto brands compare to Italian imports? We taste-tested 13 prosciuttos, from Principe Prosciutto Di Parma to Trader Joe’s house brand, to find the most delicious prosciutto available locally – and the stringy ones to avoid.
Exploit code for Palo Alto Networks zero-day now public
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Race on to patch as researchers warn of mass exploitation of directory traversal bug
Various infosec researchers have released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits for the maximum-severity vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks’ PAN-OS used in GlobalProtect gateways.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/researchers_exploit_code_for/
Quick Cook: Banana Coffee Waffles start the weekend with flavorful style
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
These easy, gluten-free, vegan waffles feature all the signature flavors of banana bread – with a hint of coffee, too.
A Pleasanton woman got a restraining order against her ex. He killed her five days before court hearing to make it permanent, police say
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
Sean Barry wrote a hate-filled message signed “see you in hell” to Jasmine Del Mar before he allegedly killed her and died by suicide during a subsequent police chase.
A Spy Site Is Scraping Discord and Selling Users’ Messages
date: 2024-04-17, from: 404 Media Group
404 Media tested the service, called Spy Pet, and verified it is collecting information on Discord users, including the messages they post across usually disparate servers.
https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/
The 2024 Lucid Air Grand Touring Gets Faster Charging, Still 516 EPA Miles Of Range
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
The Lucid Air Grand Touring gets a raft of efficiency improvements for 2024, and it’s still the longest-range EV on sale right now.
https://insideevs.com/news/716352/lucid-air-grand-touring-2024/
ASML profits plunge 40% amid dip in chipmaking tool orders
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Except in China, where customers accounted for almost half of the photolithography giant’s top line
Chipmaking kit maestro ASML generated almost half of its sales from China in calendar Q1, amid a wider downturn in orders and plunging profits.…
These new EV charging features are coming to Google Maps
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Google’s new Maps features help EV drivers find exact information about EV chargers’ locations, plan charging stops for road trips, and more.
https://electrek.co/2024/04/17/these-new-ev-charging-features-are-coming-to-google-maps/
We’re Drooling All Over Aprilia’s SE-09 SBK RSV4 And Tuono V4 Factory
date: 2024-04-17, from: Ride Apart, Electric Motorcycle News
The limited-edition models commemorate Max Biaggi’s success back in 2009.
https://www.rideapart.com/news/716037/aprilia-rsv4-tuono-v4-se09-sbk-editions/
News publishers group urges government to investigate Google for blocking some California news outlets
date: 2024-04-17, from: San Jose Mercury News
The move from Google, which drew swift backlash, came over a proposed law that would require tech companies to pay for news content.
Tesla asks shareholders to move to Texas and re-pass Elon Musk’s massive compensation plan
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla has filed a proxy with shareholders to ask them to vote for the company to move its state of incorporation to Texas and re-pass Elon Musk’s 2018 CEO massive compensation plan that was rescinded by a Delaware judge earlier this year.
Official: EU users can swerve App Store and download iOS apps from the web
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Anticompetitive remedies? We’ve heard of them
Apple is turning on Web Distribution for iOS apps, allowing EU users to download applications directly from developer websites.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/apple_eu_ios_web_downloads/
Biden to triple tariffs on Chinese steel ahead of reelection bid
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — In response to mounting pressure from labor unions anxious about the impact of cheap Chinese exports on the U.S steel industry, President Joe Biden is poised to triple tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from China.
“They’re not competing. They’re cheating,” Biden said Wednesday in remarks to the United Steelworkers union in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “They’re cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America.”
Pennsylvania is one of a few battleground states that could determine the success of the president’s reelection bid against former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
“Under my predecessor, who’s busy right now, Pennsylvania lost 275,000 jobs,” Biden said in a jab at Trump, who is on trial in New York on charges of falsifying business accounts to disguise hush money payments related to his 2016 election campaign.
Biden boasted of creating 800,000 new manufacturing jobs since taking office, including 28,000 in Pennsylvania.
He accused Beijing of “heavily” subsidizing Chinese steel companies that dump their products on the global markets at “unfairly low” prices. China is responsible for almost half of global steel production.
The tariff hike proposal by Biden, who calls himself the “most pro-union president in American history,” echoed Trump’s “America First” trade approach against China.
In 2018, the former president announced a 25% tariff on some imported steel products and a 10 percent tariff on some imported aluminum products, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act.
However, Trump’s action did not increase tariffs for some other steel and aluminum products, which are currently levied at a much lower 7.5% rate. Biden is directing U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to explore tripling the tariff rate on those products under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the White House said in a statement.
Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, said the Biden administration is reviewing why some Chinese steel derivatives currently have a 25% tariff and some have a 7.5% tariff.
“Arguably, what they’re proposing to do now might normalize the level of steel tariffs across almost all sorts of steel products that are coming in from China,” she told VOA.
In a statement to VOA, the Trump campaign dismissed Biden’s proposal.
“The Biden campaign is attacking President Trump’s effective tariffs on China – while the Biden White House is planning to implement similar tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum,” said Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. “Biden’s team is either run by hypocrites or people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
Protectionist sentiment
The proposed tariffs reflect the resurging protectionist sentiment now embraced by politicians on both sides of the aisle.
“Rather astonishingly, trade tariffs have entered the political mainstream,” said William Howell, Sydney Stein professor in American politics at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.
“After decades of bipartisan agreement on the benefits of open international markets, Republican and Democratic presidents now are looking for ways to protect select domestic industries from international competition,” he told VOA.
The shift, Howell added, involves a rethinking of the costs and benefits of free trade as well as political considerations of the two presidential candidates as they try to shore up union support in key battleground states.
The White House denies political motivation. A senior administration official said the move is not aimed at courting union workers, a powerful voting bloc.
“It has nothing to do with elections,” the official told reporters during Wednesday’s briefing. “We’re actually acting from a place of self-confidence and strength because our economy is growing and manufacturing is rebounding.”
China was the seventh-largest exporter of steel to the United States in 2023 with 598,000 net tons total shipments of all steel products, according to Census Bureau data compiled by the American Iron and Steel Institute, an industry trade group that welcomed Biden’s proposal.
The economic effect of tripling the tariffs against such small volumes of Chinese steel and aluminum imports will be minor, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“But the announcement may shift some votes,” he told VOA.
While Biden has signaled that the Section 301 review is a high priority, the timeline of his proposed tariff increase, and its potential impact, are not clear.
“There are a lot of details to come out that won’t be clear until the final rule and judgment is revealed,” Ziemba of CNAS said.
Working with Mexico
Since Section 232 is related to national security rather than dumping or import surges, exemptions were allowed on certain derivatives of aluminum and steel from partner countries beginning in 2020.
Full or partial exemptions apply to steel derivatives from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, the European Union, Mexico, South Korea and the United Kingdom. The same applies to aluminum derivatives from Argentina, Australia, Canada, the EU, Mexico and the U.K.
Biden said he recently sent a delegation to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to ensure that Chinese companies can’t circumvent the tariffs by shipping steel there for subsequent export to the U.S.
“Mexico and the United States are going to work together to solve this, I promise you,” he said.
He said his administration will unveil a probe into “unfair practices” in the Chinese shipbuilding industry, following a petition from United Steelworkers and four other unions.
In a statement to VOA, Chinese Embassy Spokesperson Liu Pengyu said U.S. tariffs against China are “the embodiment of unilateralism and protectionism.” He pointed out that in 2020, the World Trade Organization ruled that Trump-era tariffs imposed on China in 2018 breached international trade rules.
“The U.S. is making the same mistake again and again by seeking to triple the tariff rate on Chinese steel and aluminum products and launching Section 301 investigations targeting China’s maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors,” he said.
Liu added his government hopes the administration will “implement the important consensus and spirit” agreed by Biden and President Xi Jinping during their 2023 meeting in San Francisco and cancel tariffs through the Section 301 review.
Asked Wednesday if he was concerned his tariff hike plans would impact relations with Xi, Biden said, “No,” without elaborating.
Increasingly, steel has become an election issue particularly in the so-called “Rust Belt,” the country’s manufacturing, steelmaking, and coal-producing heartland that went through industrial decline, resulting in high unemployment.
During a visit earlier this month by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a staunch U.S. ally, Biden repeated his opposition to the proposed acquisition of U.S. Steel by Japanese group Nippon Steel.
“U.S. Steel has been an iconic American company for more than a century. And it should remain totally American,” Biden underscored Wednesday.
The USW endorsed Biden for reelection in March, shortly after he announced his opposition to the takeover deal.
Trump has also pledged that he would block the $14.9 billion offer for U.S. Steel.
Paris Huang and Lin Feng contributed to this report.
Mega city council’s Oracle ERP system still not legally safe, compliant… 2 years after rollout
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Fusion software misses another deadline, one external auditors for Birmingham City Council described as ‘absolutely crucial’
Birmingham City Council has failed to enter the new financial year with auditable accounting software after a disastrous implementation of Oracle Fusion, which has seen its expected project costs mushroom from around £20 million ($26 million) to around £131 million ($163 million).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/birmingham_city_councils_oracle_erp/
In Garden At A Sylmar High School, Students Connect With City’s Floricultural History
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The LAist
Floriculture blends science, sustainability, financial literacy, and creativity. At Sylmar Charter High, the school’s gardens also invite a rare moment of calm in a hectic high school day.
Why Won’t Health Insurance Companies Pay for New Drugs?
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: RAND blog
The FDA is prioritizing listening to patients by approving treatments quickly. So why are health insurers standing in the way?
You Can Chat With an A.I. Replica of Salvador Dalí
date: 2024-04-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
At a Florida museum, “Ask Dalí” allows visitors to speak with the Surrealist artist via a lobster telephone
Touring a Rental? A Face Scan May Be Required
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Markup blog
With the rise of self-guided tours, many companies are requiring facial recognition to see a property
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2024/04/17/touring-a-rental-a-face-scan-may-be-required
The Black businesses behind some of baseball’s best players
date: 2024-04-17, from: Marketplace Morning Report
For this month’s Econ Extra Credit, we’re watching “The League,” which chronicles the history of baseball’s Negro Leagues, established several decades before the sport was integrated. The Leagues gave rise to many Black businesses and entrepreneurs. Today, we have a conversation with Larry Lester, co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Also on the program: Aircraft-maker Boeing faces scrutiny over safety practices during two Senate hearings.
Tesla Shareholders Will Vote Again on Musk’s Pay
date: 2024-04-17, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: It was 103.5 degrees Fahrenheit in Mumbai yesterday, the warmest April day recorded in a decade • Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology declared El Niño over • It will be rainy today in Washington, D.C., where negotiators will be pushing for more climate investment at the IMF and World Bank spring meetings.
THE TOP FIVE
- Tesla asks shareholders to re-ratify Musk pay package that judge
voided
Tesla shareholders will get a second chance to approve CEO Elon Musk’s pay package at the company’s upcoming June 13 annual meeting. In January, a Delaware court voided Musk’s 2018 pay deal, which was originally approved by 73% of shareholders and could have seen Musk’s stock award soar to $55 billion based on meeting financial targets (which he subsequently met). The judge said the approval process for that package had been “deeply flawed” and rife with conflicts of interests. “The company’s board is effectively asking shareholders, now armed with all of the information that was revealed about the negotiations in court, to make the court’s ruling moot,” The New York Times explained, adding that the vote will no doubt raise tensions between investors and governance experts. The company also said it will let shareholders vote on the plan to move the incorporation from Delaware to Texas.
- Climeworks to become a carbon trader
Climeworks, the Swiss startup that became the first company to launch a commercial-scale facility that sucks carbon out of the air and buries it deep underground, is getting into carbon trading with the launch of an offshoot called Climeworks Solutions, reported Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo. Under the new banner, Climeworks will purchase carbon removal credits from other providers, package them into portfolios that include its own direct air capture credits, and sell the bundles to buyers looking for “high quality” carbon removal. Adrian Siegrist, the company’s vice president of climate solutions, said the credits will have “the stamp of Climeworks quality.”
There are already more than half a dozen companies promising to source only the highest quality carbon removal credits for buyers, and Climeworks is relying on its name as a trusted brand to set itself apart. Siegrist said Climeworks is already in talks with more than 50 other companies interested in working with them. “But it’s unclear where all of this carbon removal is going to come from,” Pontecorvo wrote. “The company’s direct air capture credits are already sold out through 2027.”
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
- White House launches task force to tackle global trade emissions
The White House yesterday announced the creation of a new Climate and Trade Task Force aimed at reining in emissions from global trade. Speaking at the Columbia Global Energy Summit in New York, White House climate adviser John Podesta said the lack of widespread standards for tracking embodied emissions from traded goods – aka the emissions that come from their production – has led to a global “race to the bottom” to set up supply chains in countries with low emissions standards. “If the global trade of goods was its own country, it would be the second-largest carbon polluter in the world after [China],” Podesta said. The new task force will focus on developing a policy toolkit on climate and trade, measuring emissions to help inform and enforce climate-smart trade policies, and supporting producers to clean up their manufacturing processes.
- Dubai records 2 years worth of rain in 24 hours
A massive storm this week dropped unprecedented amounts of rain on the United Arab Emirates, turning streets into rivers and causing widespread chaos. The government described the event as the largest amount of rainfall seen in the last 75 years. In Dubai, at least 6 inches fell over 24 hours on Tuesday, which is about two years worth of rain. Flash floods inundated highways and halted flights. In neighboring Oman, flooding has killed at least 18 people. There’s some debate over how big of a role the UAE’s cloud seeding practices (which are an attempt to induce rain by dispersing tiny particles into clouds) played in worsening the storm. Bloomberg reported that the state’s National Center of Meteorology dispatched seeding planes on Monday and Tuesday.
Christopher
Pike/Getty Images
- Team Japan’s Paris Olympics uniforms will display carbon footprint
stamp
Team Japan unveiled its official uniforms for the upcoming Paris Olympics today, and said the clothing items would include a stamp that shows their carbon footprint. “By figuring out the carbon footprint of each item and labeling it on the products, we hope to boost transparency as well as raise awareness among athletes towards the environment,” said Makoto Ohori, manager of Asics’ apparel and equipment development. The company said it had cut the overall emissions needed to produce the uniforms by 34% since the Tokyo Games by switching to renewable energy and working with recycled and lighter material. The Paris Games aim to have half the carbon footprint of the typical Summer Olympics.
THE KICKER
“Finance is the golden thread through all climate action.” –Rachel Kyte, professor in practice of climate policy at Oxford University
https://heatmap.news/tesla-musk-pay-shareholder-vote
The Savvy Senior | Choosing a Senior Community That Offers All Levels of Care
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, Can you help me identify some good senior living communities that offer all levels of housing and care from independent living to nursing home care? I am in my late seventies and know I need to downsize from my current house, but I want my next move to be my last. […]
The post The Savvy Senior | Choosing a Senior Community That Offers All Levels of Care appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Bike crash 2023 anniversary
date: 2024-04-17, from: Liam Proven blog
(Not really update 22.)
Huh. Missed the anniversary of the
latest bike crash – it was on Monday.
Today, the
ever-helpful Google showed me a selfie I took from my hospital bed a
year ago. (Thanks so much for the reminder,
Googs.)
So, a year ago today I had more or less got some kind
of alertness back and was hoping to get transferred over to Liverpool
for my arm to be reassembled. Little did I know it would take another 4
days, because they were hoping to put me in an ordinary airline
seat…
comments
https://lproven.dreamwidth.org/309377.html
IMF: Russia to beat other advanced economies
date: 2024-04-17, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Despite extensive sanctions, the International Monetary Fund has forecast Russia’s economy will grow more than any other rich nation this year. Also: The small Pacific Island nation of Palau has warned delays to U.S. funding could open the door to China’s influence in the region.
2024 Ford F-150 Lightning Goes Back On Sale After Two-Month Hiatus
date: 2024-04-17, from: Inside EVs News
The automaker had paused sales of the 2024 model year F-150 Lightning due to an undisclosed quality issue.
https://insideevs.com/news/716411/ford-resumes-2024-f-150-lightning-sales/
Logitech intros free tool for ChatGPT prompts… plus a mouse with an AI button
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
For when the AI service cannot grok what it’s being asked
Logitech has launched a free software tool to help existing users of its kit with ChatGPT prompts, but those that splash out on the upcoming Signature AI Edition Mouse, get a… dedicated AI prompt button.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/logitech_introduces_ai_prompt_tool/
Climeworks Is Becoming a Carbon Trader
date: 2024-04-17, from: Heatmap News
Climeworks made a name for itself as the first company to launch a commercial-scale facility that sucks carbon out of the air and buries it deep underground. The Swiss startup is widely recognized as a global leader in direct air capture technology.
But on Wednesday, Climeworks made a surprising move away from hard tech and into carbon trading with the launch of an offshoot called Climeworks Solutions. Under the new banner, it will purchase carbon removal credits from other providers, package them into portfolios that include its own direct air capture credits, and sell the bundles to buyers looking for “high quality” carbon removal.
The credits will have “the stamp of Climeworks quality,” Adrian Siegrist, the company’s vice president of climate solutions, told reporters this week. “It is a very, very selective vetting process.”
Corporate demand for carbon removal is growing. In the past, companies primarily bought a different kind of carbon credit to support their sustainability strategies. These credits came from projects that prevented emissions by protecting forests or distributing cleaner cookstoves, and they were cheap. But they came under fire after countless investigations into the projects turned up flimsy methodologies and inflated claims.
Meanwhile, there’s been a growing consensus in the world of corporate sustainability that even if these credits were based on real emission reductions, they shouldn’t be part of a net-zero strategy. For example, the Science Based Targets Initiative, the leading arbiter of corporate net-zero plans, only allows companies to apply carbon removal credits — and not conventional carbon avoidance credits — toward their goals. The only way to zero-out the climate impact of putting carbon in the atmosphere, SBTI says, is to take out an equal amount.
These two factors, along with a view that supporting the nascent carbon removal industry is the “right thing to do,” have fueled a carbon removal credit market that grew from at least 105,000 tons sold to 50 buyers in 2021 to more than 4 million tons sold to nearly 200 buyers last year.
Siegrist said Climeworks Solutions is responding to a gap in the market. Companies face barriers to purchasing carbon removal, he said. They don’t want to put their reputations at risk and buy dubious credits, but they lack the time and expertise to do careful sourcing. They also want to sign simple one-and-done contracts, but they don’t want to purchase credits from a single supplier — especially not just from Climeworks, which sells top-shelf credits for upwards of $600 per ton.
“Companies asked us, in your opinion, can you tell us what is the best in X and the best in Y?” he said. “That made us realize there’s a real need for clarity and for guidance.”
But Climeworks is entering a crowded field. There are already more than half a dozen companies — Patch, Supercritical, Ceezer, Carbon Direct, Watershed, Cur8, Lune — promising to source only the highest quality carbon removal credits for buyers. Each one has a slightly different model, with some acting more as an open marketplace, others more as a brokerage.
Climeworks is relying on its name as a trusted brand to set itself apart. But part of the reason it is a trusted brand is that it has focused on direct air capture — the form of carbon removal that is the most permanent and easy to measure and verify. Now the company will be venturing into the thornier science of other approaches like tree planting schemes and bioenergy with carbon capture. It also plans to source credits from biochar projects, which involve turning plants into a carbon-rich, durable, form of charcoal, and enhanced rock weathering, which speeds up the natural ability of rocks to absorb carbon from the environment.
“If you’re saying that companies can come to you and use that trusted brand, what are the standards?” Erin Burns, the executive director of the carbon removal advocacy group Carbon 180, told me she wanted to know. “High quality doesn’t mean anything. How transparent are they going to be about what those standards are?”
I asked Siegrist about how Climeworks defines high quality, especially when it comes to nature-based solutions like reforestation, and he said there were “various elements” that signaled quality, such as the use of remote sensing technologies that can more accurately track forest growth. He said they would publish their standards at some point in the future.
But he did share some general principles the company would use to tailor its portfolios for buyers: Fossil fuel emissions should be neutralized with carbon removed and stored for thousands of years, on par with how long carbon stays in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, a company’s emissions from land use could be offset using nature-based approaches that are still effective but inherently less enduring.
Climeworks Solutions’ first customer is Breitling, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, which signed a 12-year contract. It is purchasing a mix of direct air capture credits, to offset emissions from fossil fuel combustion in its factories, and enhanced rock weathering credits, to address emissions in its mineral supply chains. Breitling’s global director of sustainability Aurelia Figueroa said that focusing on high-cost direct air capture credits to compensate for direct emissions created an incentive to prioritize reducing emissions, summing up the strategy as “we do our best and remove the rest.”
Siegrist said Climeworks was already in talks with more than 50 other companies interested in working with them. But it’s unclear where all of this carbon removal is going to come from. The company’s direct air capture credits are already sold out through 2027.
“There’s not a lot of high quality CDR happening, and in general, people are buying carbon removal years out,” said Burns. “Depending on how many tons they’re being asked to put together for other companies to purchase, they’re gonna run up against limits pretty quickly if they’ve got really high standards.”
Siegrist declined to name any companies or projects that Climeworks was sourcing carbon credits from. But in terms of supply, he said it was a chicken and egg scenario — that the only way to increase supply was to bring in more demand, and that the bigger constraint was limited buyer bandwidth.
I reached out to a carbon removal company called Charm Industrial to ask how developers feel about the rise of all of these brokerage services. Like Climeworks, Charm is another startup that scrupulous corporate buyers with big science teams, like Microsoft and Shopify, have deemed “high quality.” Charm’s head of sales, Harris Cohn, said the fees these services charge matter and vary widely. “There’s a risk these services make the market worse if they make transactions harder or feel more expensive to buyers,” he said. But he noted that they have, indeed, already accelerated demand.
Peter Reinhardt, the CEO of Charm, agreed that there was no downside to having more players in the game. “We’ll break the supply constraint fairly soon :)” he added in an email.
https://heatmap.news/technology/climeworks-solutions-carbon-removal
OpenAI’s GPT-4 can exploit real vulnerabilities by reading security advisories
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
While some other LLMs appear to flat-out suck
AI agents, which combine large language models with automation software, can successfully exploit real world security vulnerabilities by reading security advisories, academics have claimed.…
Robot Etch A Sketch
date: 2024-04-17, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
What maker Micah Tilton lacks in drawing skills, he more than makes up for in robotics know-how. So rather than spend years learning how to create a masterpiece of illustration, he automated an Etch A Sketch with Raspberry Pi.
The post Robot Etch A Sketch appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/robot-etch-a-sketch/
NetBSD 10 proves old tech can still kick apps and take names three decades later
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Proper old-school Unix, not like those lazy, decadent Linux types
FOSDEM 2024 NetBSD 10 marks a new level of maturity for this venerable open source Unix system, which somehow manages to be both modern and retro at the same time.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/30yo_netbsd_releases_v10/
The U.S. Has a Tesla Problem
date: 2024-04-17, from: Heatmap News
It isn’t just bad vibes: Electric vehicle sales are slumping in the United States. Fewer than 300,000 EVs were sold nationwide during the first three months of 2024 — although it could be more than 350,000, depending on how you count and whose data you trust. That’s a slight decline from last quarter at a time when EV sales need to be accelerating.
What caused the slump, and what can be done about it? And could hybrids or plug-in hybrids help solve the problem? In this week’s episode, Rob and Jesse chat with Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF. They talk about Tesla’s spiraling problems, whether Detroit can pull its EV strategy together, and whether plug-in hybrids can co-exist with a climate strategy. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton professor of energy systems engineering.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: The PHEV story is really interesting here, and the hybrid story is interesting here, because three years ago, four years ago, Toyota was talking about how hybrids and plug-in hybrids were going to be the bridge for consumers. And what we have seen is that plug-in hybrid and hybrid sales have increased.
Now, what’s funny is that Toyota has actually not really been selling those plug-in hybrids. It’s like a Stellantis story, right? It’s Jeep. Ford sells a very expensive plug-in hybrid. Toyota actually doesn’t sell plug-in hybrids. In fact, if Toyota made more plug-in hybrids, if they made more Prius Primes, this amazing-looking recent car for them — it’s a plug-in hybrid — then they would sell them. But they don’t make enough. So Toyota has kind of won this discursive cycle, but not actually made the plug-in hybrids that they were advocating for, you know, two or three years ago.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah. I mean, if you look at the numbers, about half of all the plug-in hybrids sold are Stellantis vehicles, right? Across the Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, and Alfa Romeo brands, they don’t sell hybrids. They only sell plug-in hybrids. And they also don’t sell any, BEVs yet, either. They’re coming, later than the end of this year, probably, their first U.S. battery electric vehicle.
So, you know, Stellantis’ only offerings right now are a set of plug-in hybrids, and they’ve been selling them very effectively, partly because I think the tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act make them very competitively priced relative to the conventional Jeep or, Chrysler Pacifica minivan, or whatever else you’re looking at in the market. Why not get the plug-in hybrid, even if you don’t plug it in?
But if you look at it, so they’ve sold about 46,000 plug-in hybrids in the first quarter of the year. Toyota, who talks about it more than anybody, only sold 11,600. So they sold like a quarter as many as Stellantis did —
Meyer: Which is so crazy because also, the Toyota plug-in hybrids are great. They’re awesome cars. They should be making more of them!
Jenkins: Yes, they should be selling 50,000 of them a quarter.
Meyer: Yeah, exactly. But they treat them — it’s so funny. The Toyota plug-in hybrids are central to the Toyota argument, and then they treat them like compliance cars. They don’t make enough, even though they’re like, this is what consumers want.
And it’s funny: They were right. That is seemingly what consumers want. And it does seem like the availability of BEVs has like defanged plug-in hybrids and hybrids for consumers in a way that maybe we didn’t expect. Toyota’s not making them. It’s like they won the discourse cycle, but they’re not actually selling vehicles.
Jenkins: Yeah. I mean, Toyota Group and Honda are really the undisputed kings or queens of hybrid electric vehicles. They sell far more than anybody else. But on the plug-in side, Stellantis is the No. 1 by far. They’re like half of the market, just themselves.
Corey Cantor: I was just going to say, to Rob’s point on just how much better the Toyota plug-in hybrids are, they’re getting 40-mile electric range between the Prius Prime and the RAV4 Prime — which by the way: RAV4, Model Y, you could have a RAV4 Prime-Model Y-off every quarter if Toyota was selling enough of those.
For those Stellantis PHEVs, the other one that’s big is the Chrysler Pacifica minivan, which, I know how much you guys love your minivans, here. Those are in the low 20-mileage. So what you’ve seen policymakers in California advocate for is really going towards a 50-mile minimum to begin to count PHEVs in what’s called Advanced Clean Cars II. Which, in the kind of conventional popular media is often referred to as California’s ban of gas cars, which actually isn’t a ban of gas cars because even in 2035, you could sell 20% PHEVs if they meet a 50-mile electric range minimum.
My hope, from a climate standpoint, is if PHEVs are going to be a part of the story — and again, data-wise, they’re just not in the U.S. In some European countries … or BYD, for example, you see 50-50 split between BEV and PHEV. Here, it’s remained 80-20.
Just better PHEVs — just automakers delivering better PHEVs with 40[-mile] all-electric range, or 50[-mile]. I do think Hyundai and Kia might move in that direction, where they’re delivering those better PHEVs over time. But not to just take the, kind of, spin on them, and just say, wow, because Toyota or whatever automaker says PHEVs are great, that consumers should buy them. The PHEVs now just aren’t as good as they should be, and they can be better, and automakers can still make a profit off of it.
It’s one of those big myths, where it’s like, you see so many people say, “Have you considered a PHEV?” And it’s like, which PHEV? Because it’s really just the Jeep Wrangler and the Pacifica.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-episode-12-q1-ev-sales
Calling all Manchester and surrounding – come to / apply for CODE100 on 22nd of May!
date: 2024-04-17, from: Chris Heilmann
The next edition of CODE100 is in Manchester in the UK and I am super excited to come back to the isle! It will be my first time in Manchester and as a huge Joy Division/New Order fan, I really look forward to it. CODE100 is not your typical coding competition; it’s a coding game […]
Jennifer Elkins | Landfill Making School Stink
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
Landfill odors were so horrible at Live Oak Elementary School and throughout Castaic this morning! I typically drop my kids off at the park gate on Quincy Street, but the air was so bad that I drove my kids to the front of the school. I wanted to make sure school staff was reporting to […]
The post Jennifer Elkins | Landfill Making School Stink appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/jennifer-elkins-landfill-making-school-stink/
Joe Messina | Stop the Shakedown Lawsuits
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
California’s court system is in a bad place, hurting our small businesses. Recently, the American Tort Reform Association released a report of the worst judicial hellholes in America. Our home state finished in the top five, marking its 18th appearance on the list. Being from Santa Clarita, I know all too well the threat of […]
The post Joe Messina | Stop the Shakedown Lawsuits appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/joe-messina-stop-the-shakedown-lawsuits/
Hilmar A. Rosenast | A Core Difference
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
“A solution for homelessness?” I am still wondering what the title had to do with the issue in Mr. Arthur Saginian’s letter (April 13). Actually, the letter itself is in response to an earlier letter by Mr. Saginian. He sets aside the factual corrections and generously states, “forgive the stuff he believes in.” I do […]
The post Hilmar A. Rosenast | A Core Difference appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/hilmar-a-rosenast-a-core-difference/
Gerald Staack | A Bifurcated Union
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
The state of the union is in crisis. It’s bifurcated into those of us who want our country back from the clutches of an aristocracy who rule us, and by those who say that a complete revolutionary breakdown of our government is necessary before this can happen. We are also in the midst of a […]
The post Gerald Staack | A Bifurcated Union appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/gerald-staack-a-bifurcated-union/
Bob Graham, ex-US senator and Florida governor, dies at 87
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Former U.S. Sen. and two-term Florida Gov. Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 87.
Graham’s family announced the death Tuesday in a statement posted on X by his daughter Gwen Graham.
“We are deeply saddened to report the passing of a visionary leader, dedicated public servant, and even more importantly, a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the family said.
Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq invasion.
But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.
Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores.
Graham said the notebooks were a working tool for him and he was reluctant to describe his emotions or personal feelings in them.
“I review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings I want to follow up on and things people promise to do,” he said.
Graham was among the earliest opponents of the Iraq war, saying it diverted America’s focus on the battle against terrorism centered in Afghanistan. He was also critical of President George W. Bush for failing to have an occupation plan in Iraq after the U.S. military threw out Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Graham said Bush took the United States into the war by exaggerating claims of the danger presented by the Iraqi weapons of destruction that were never found. He said Bush distorted intelligence data and argued it was more serious than the sexual misconduct issues that led the House to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. It led him to launch his short, abortive presidential bid.
“The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created,” Graham said in 2003.
During his 18 years in Washington, Graham worked well with colleagues from both parties, particularly Florida Republican Connie Mack during their dozen years together in the Senate.
Florida voters hardly considered Graham the wealthy Harvard-educated attorney that he was.
Graham’s political career spanned five decades, beginning with his election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966.
He won a state Senate seat in 1970 and then was elected governor in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982. Four years later, he won the first of three terms in the U.S. Senate when he ousted incumbent Republican Paula Hawkins.
https://www.voanews.com/a/bob-graham-ex-us-senator-and-florida-governor-dies-at-87/7573326.html
A better, more compact UI for Firefox
date: 2024-04-17, from: OS News
Proton is Firefox’s new design, starting from Firefox 89. Photon is the old design of Firefox which was used until version 88. Proton’s overall feel is good, but there were a few things I didn’t like and wanted to improve.That’s why this project was born, and Lepton to denote light theme layer. Lepton’s photon styled is preserve Photon’s feeling while keep Original Lepton’s strengths. ↫ Firefox UI Fix GitHub page I do not like the current Firefox user interface, because even with the ‘compact’ layout re-enabled in about:config, I find it just too bulky and wasteful of my screen real estate. I’ve been using the above Firefox user interface mod for ages now, and I can’t imagine using Firefox without it. The GitHub pages and guides are a bit of a mess and difficult to follow due to the project consisting of several overlapping different styles, but I just use the script listed here, selecting the style “2” when running the script. It won’t be for everyone, but for me, it makes Firefox nice and compact, turning it into a mouse-first interface without trying to accommodate touch. This is also by far not the only project with this goal, so if you’re using something else – feel free to list them.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139322/a-better-more-compact-ui-for-firefox/
US Navy flies aircraft through Taiwan Strait a day after US-China defense talks
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
TAIPEI, Taiwan — The U.S. 7th Fleet said a Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday, a day after U.S. and Chinese defense chiefs held their first talks since Nov. 2022 in an effort to reduce regional tensions.
The patrol and reconaissance plane “transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,” the 7th Fleet said in a news release.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” the release said.
Although the critical 160 kilometer- (100 mile-) wide strait that divides China from the self-governing island democracy is international waters, China considers the passage of foreign military aircraft and ships through it a challenge to its sovereignty. China claims the island of Taiwan, threatening to defend by force if necessary despite U.S. military support for the island.
China had no immediate response to the report, but has in past issued stern protests and activated defenses in response to the passage of ships and military planes through the strait, particularly those from the U.S.
China also regularly sends navy ships and warplanes into the strait and other areas around the island.
“The aircraft’s transit of the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The United States military flies, sails and operates anywhere international law allows,” the 7th Fleet statement said.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Chinese counterpart Adm. Dong Jun on Tuesday in the latest U.S. effort to improve communications with the Chinese military and reduce the chances of a clash in the region.
It was the first time Austin has talked to Dong and the first time he has spoken at length with any Chinese counterpart since November 2022. The call, which lasted a bit more than an hour, came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to China this month for talks.
Military-to-military contact stalled in August 2022, when Beijing suspended all such communication after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. China responded by firing missiles over Taiwan and staging a surge in military maneuvers, including what appeared to be a rehearsal of a naval and aerial blockade of the island.
Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The answer is not to hide from ML, but to be honest about it
Column It’s taken less than eighteen months for human- and AI-generated media to become impossibly intermixed. Some find this utterly unconscionable, and refuse to have anything to do with any media that has any generative content within it. That ideological stance betrays a false hope: that this is a passing trend, an obsession with the latest new thing, and will pass.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/devaluing_ai_content_is_lazy/
How Gogoro is making the world’s largest EV battery swapping network greener
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
With Gogoro already surpassing one million swappable EV batteries in circulation, the company’s energy network has become something of a de facto standard in swappable batteries for e-motorcycles and scooters. Now, the company is announcing the next phase of its expansive GoStation network, rolling out over a dozen new 100% renewable energy-powered stations.
Senate addresses state of USG, budget
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Senators discussed and then passed several amendments to the body’s constitution.
The post Senate addresses state of USG, budget appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/usg-addresses-state-of-the-union-budget/
Office Hours: Biden in Pennsylvania, Trump in court — who gets the biggest boost?
date: 2024-04-17, from: Robert Reich on Substack
Friends, Donald Trump is spending most of this week, and much of the coming month or two, in a Manhattan courtroom facing criminal charges. He claims he’s being politically persecuted and is acting the part of a martyr. He wants the public to see a courageous individual versus a corrupt deep state.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-biden-in-pennsylvania
LAMENT FOR THE PLEAT
date: 2024-04-17, from: Howard Jacobson blog
The above is not a photograph of me, even as I was in my hey-day. But those are my trousers. Pleated. Pleated, reader! Pleated as trousers used to be, prior to plebeian flat-fronts which are to trousers what pug noses are to dogs. They are in a museum now, as soon will I be. We both belong to a more elegant, grander, more spacious epoch, before the advent of casual wear. Imagine Sebastian Flyte pacing the terraces of Brideshead pleatless. Or Gatsby - The Not So Great Gatsby - in crowded-crotch chinos.
https://jacobsonh.substack.com/p/lament-for-the-pleat
Global IT spending forecast to reach $5.0T this year
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Comms services and AI contributing to increase, but vendors are taking ‘risks’
Gartner expects global IT spending to grow 8 percent in 2024 to $5.06 trillion in a revised forecast from the 6.8 percent uptick which the analyst predicted in January.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/gartner_global_it_spending/
Universities Are Making Billions Gatekeeping Your Meds
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Lever News
The University of California has raked in a previously undisclosed $1.6 billion from Xtandi sales, and now doesn’t want the government lowering exorbitant drug costs.
https://www.levernews.com/universities-are-making-billions-gatekeeping-your-meds/
Classifieds – April 17, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, 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.
The post Classifieds – April 17, 2024 appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/classifieds-april-17-2024/
Today in SCV History (April 17)
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1930 – Telephone switchboard operator Louise Gipe, heroine of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster, tries and fails to kill herself over an unrequited love [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-april-17/
I’m not counting on DEI
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
I’m the director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Daily Trojan.
The post I’m not counting on DEI appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/im-not-counting-on-dei/
Celebrations, goodbyes take center stage at SSO
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Student Symphony Orchestra underlined their seniors and original scores.
The post Celebrations, goodbyes take center stage at SSO appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/celebrations-goodbyes-take-center-stage-at-sso/
Men’s volleyball playoffs to take over campus
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Trojans seek their first conference title since 2009 at the MPSF tournament.
The post Men’s volleyball playoffs to take over campus appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/playoff-mens-volleyball-takes-over-campus/
The appreciation and rejection of purely functional fashion
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Fashion and functionality do not always go hand in hand, but they can when considering individuality, growth and the element of surprise.
The post The appreciation and rejection of purely functional fashion appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/the-appreciation-and-rejection-of-purely-functional-fashion/
The opinions that didn’t make it, part three
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Not every opinion I had made it into its own column.
The post The opinions that didn’t make it, part three appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/208300/
Community learns about Armenian genocide
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
A lecture by the Institute of Armenian Studies shed light on its historical context.
The post Community learns about Armenian genocide appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/community-learns-about-armenian-genocide/
LACMA delivers historic Ruscha retrospective
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The exhibit “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN” features works from the figure of Los Angeles art.
The post LACMA delivers historic Ruscha retrospective appeared first on Daily Trojan.
https://dailytrojan.com/2024/04/17/lacma-delivers-historic-ruscha-retrospective/
Gallup: Confidence in US institutions continues to decline
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/gallup-confidence-in-us-institutions-continues-to-decline/7573289.html
Google will pump more than $100B into AI, says DeepMind boss
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Not all at once, of course
Google will eventually invest $100 billion in AI, according to DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/google_deepmind_funding/
Japanese government rejects Yahoo! infosec improvement plan
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Just doesn’t believe it will sort out the mess that saw data leak from LINE messaging app
Japan’s government has considered the proposed security improvements developed by Yahoo!, found them wanting, and ordered the onetime web giant to take new measures.…
April 16, 2024
date: 2024-04-17, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On Sunday, April 14, 2024, Iran fired about 170 drones, more than 120 ballistic missiles, and more than 30 cruise missiles from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and areas controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon toward Israel. The strike was in retaliation for a strike on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed two top commanders in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, along with other officials. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the Syrian strike, but officials from other countries believe Israel is responsible. Iran warned its attack was coming, and Israel and the U.S., along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and France, shot the missiles down. Israel sustained almost no damage. One Arab-Israeli girl was critically injured.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-16-2024
US works on ‘comprehensive response’ on Iran, urges Israel to exercise restraint
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States said it is working with allies on a coordinated response to Iran’s drone and missile strikes on Israeli soil over the weekend. At the same time, it continues to urge Israel to exercise restraint and avoid igniting a wider regional conflict.
President Joe Biden is “coordinating with allies and partners, including the Group of Seven, and with bipartisan leaders in Congress, on a comprehensive response,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement
The U.S. will impose new sanctions targeting Iran in the coming days, Sullivan said, including its missile and drone program and against entities supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s Defense Ministry.
The U.S. will bolster the integration of air and missile defense and early warning systems across the Middle East, he added.
Biden aides have repeatedly called for de-escalation. The president “does not want to see a war with Iran. Don’t want to see the conflict widen or deepen,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters Tuesday.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to retaliate, but Israeli officials have not said how or when they might strike.
“We will choose our response accordingly,” said Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, Israel’s military chief.
A direct Israeli strike on Iranian soil would amount to another significant escalation, with Tehran already pledging a much harsher response to such a counterattack.
Tehran launched more than 300 drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, most of them intercepted by the Israeli military with the help of the U.S. and regional allies, causing only minor damage to an Israeli base. That suggests Iran may have calibrated the strikes to limit casualties or telegraphed advanced notice, which the White House denies.
Israel’s counterstrike will likely target Iranian soil without killing civilians, said Jonathan Rynhold, head of the Political Studies Department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
“And it would not seek to publicly hit any very obvious public symbolic buildings of the regime,” he told VOA. “That could embarrass the regime and make them feel that they need to escalate it further.”
Rynhold said that the Iranian strikes were “very, very carefully calculated,” and predicted that a potential Israeli counterattack would be similarly calibrated. Still, they could easily lead to dangerous miscalculation, he said.
Israel could opt for covert operations targeting Iranian officials. Or it could launch a cyberattack, said Gregory Hatcher of White Knight Labs, a cybersecurity consultancy firm.
“If I was Israel, I would stick with the normal cyber warfare playbook that they’ve been using for the better part of the last 15 years, starting with Stuxnet in 2010,” he told VOA.
Under a joint operation, Israel and the U.S. created Stuxnet malware and injected it into an Iranian nuclear facility that “made the centrifuges spin uncontrollably and destroyed millions of dollars and slowed down the nuclear capabilities of Iran,” Hatcher said.
Iran said its Saturday strikes were in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike earlier this month on its diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria, that killed seven Iranian military advisers, including two generals.
Pressure on Netanyahu
Netanyahu is facing intense international pressure to bring Israel’s war in Gaza to an end and immense domestic pressure to free the hostages held by Hamas.
Israel’s war with Hamas began when the militant Palestinian group attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostage. Israel’s response has killed nearly 34,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza. Many humanitarian organizations have warned of famine.
Some international leaders are accusing Netanyahu of intentionally escalating tensions with Iran. This includes Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister of Jordan, a U.S. ally that helped protect Israel from Tehran’s attacks.
“It’s no secret that Netanyahu’s policy aims to expand the conflict to relieve the growing pressure on him globally as a result of the killing, war and destruction he is doing in Gaza,” Safadi said Tuesday.
Turkey, a NATO member, has also placed blame on Israel.
“The main one responsible for the tension that gripped our hearts on the evening of April 13 is Netanyahu and his bloody administration,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday, echoing de-escalation calls by regional and Western leaders.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the Damascus attack and has not responded to the accusations from Jordan and Turkey.
It’s unclear whether Netanyahu will heed calls to de-escalate as he calculates a response that satisfies far-right members of his government and his own political instincts, said Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center.
“He has always wanted to attack Iran, in particular to go after the Iranian nuclear sites. He may see this as his last opportunity to defeat all of Israel’s enemies — Hezbollah, Iran, you name it,” she told VOA. “And who will stop him? I’m very, very worried about that.”
Whatever option Netanyahu decides on, Biden has told him the U.S. will not participate in Israel’s counterattack.
Begum Erzos of VOA’s Turkish Service contributed to this report.
Tencent Cloud to revisit design after circular dependencies slowed emergency API fix
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Almost 2,000 customers experienced outages
Tencent Cloud has apologized for an outage that impacted customers last week – an unusual act by a Chinese cloud – and signalled it will review some aspects of its ops in the hope of avoiding future incidents of this nature.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/tencent_cloud_api_error_outage/
Twitter’s Pivot to x.com Is a Gift to Phishers
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Brian Krebs (Hacker News): On April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com, which until very recently rendered […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/16/twitters-pivot-to-x-com-is-a-gift-to-phishers/
The Apple curl Security Incident
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Daniel Stenberg (Hacker News, Slashdot): The friendly reporter showed how the curl version bundled with macOS behaves differently than curl binaries built entirely from open source. Even when running the same curl version on the same macOS machine. The curl command line option –cacert provides a way for the user to say to curl that […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/16/the-apple-curl-security-incident/
The Race to Replace Redis
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Steven Vaughan-Nichols (via Hacker News): For those of you who aren’t open-source licensing experts, this means developers can no longer use Redis’ code. Sure, they can look at it, but they can’t export, borrow from, or touch it.Redis pulled this same kind of trick in 2018 with some of its subsidiary code. Now it’s done […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/16/the-race-to-replace-redis/
Mojo Is Open Source
date: 2024-04-17, from: Michael Tsai
Modular (Hacker News): We firmly believe for Mojo to reach its full potential, it must be open source. We have been progressively open-sourcing more of Mojo and parts of the MAX platform, and today we’re thrilled to announce the release of the core modules from the Mojo standard library under the Apache 2 license! […] […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/04/16/mojo-is-open-source/
Israel weighs counterattack options on Iran as US urges restraint
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Israel is considering how to respond to Iran’s weekend missile and drone strikes, as the United States and its allies urge the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to escalate and risk igniting a wider regional conflict. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
Review: Lanthimos’ Oscar-winning “Poor Things” is an unhinged yet impactful masterpiece
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent film, “Poor Things” won four Oscars and was the second most awarded film of the night behind “Oppenheimer.” The film won Best Production Design, Best Hair…
Student organizations say: Let our valedictorian speak at commencement
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Our open letter has been co-signed by 65 University student and local organizations.
The post Student organizations say: Let our valedictorian speak at commencement appeared first on Daily Trojan.
Indian PM’s 25-year roadmap laid out with help from AI
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI is so good at drawing pictures and driving cars, why not let it govern a country?
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, used AI to help develop the nation’s 25-year development roadmap, according to comments made during a live-streamed interview with news agency ANI on Monday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/modi_roadmap_for_india_ai/
One transported following two-vehicle collision on Sierra Highway
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
One person was transported to the hospital following a two-vehicle collision that occurred Tuesday near the 17200 block of west Sierra Highway, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “We were dispatched at 3:54 p.m. and then on scene at 4 p.m,” said Fire Department representative Geovanni Sanchez. “I had one patient transported.” The […]
The post One transported following two-vehicle collision on Sierra Highway appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/one-transported-following-two-vehicle-collision-on-sierra-highway/
Whitey Herzog, Hall of Fame baseball manager in US, dies at 92
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Whitey Herzog, the gruff and ingenious Hall of Fame manager who guided the St. Louis Cardinals to three pennants and a World Series title in the 1980s, and perfected an intricate, nail-biting strategy known as “Whiteyball,” has died. He was 92.
Cardinals spokesman Brian Bartow said Tuesday that the team, based in the U.S. state of Missouri, was informed of Herzog’s death by his family. Herzog, who had been at Busch Stadium on April 4 for the Cardinals’ home opener, died on Monday, according to Bartow.
“Whitey Herzog devoted his lifetime to the game he loved, excelling as a leader on and off the field,” Jane Forbes Clark, chair of the Hall of Fame’s board of directors, said in a statement. “Whitey always brought the best out of every player he managed with a forthright style that won him respect throughout the game.”
A crew-cut, pot-bellied tobacco chewer who had no patience for the “buddy-buddy” school of management, Herzog joined the Cardinals in 1980 and helped end the team’s decade-plus pennant drought by adapting it to the artificial surface and distant fences of Busch Memorial Stadium. A typical Cardinals victory under Herzog was a low-scoring, 1-run game, sealed in the final innings by a “bullpen by committee,” relievers who might be replaced after a single pitch, or temporarily shifted to the outfield, then brought back to the mound.
The Cardinals had power hitters in George Hendrick and Jack Clark, but they mostly relied on the speed and resourcefulness of switch-hitters Vince Coleman and Willie McGee, the acrobatic fielding of shortstop and future Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith, and the effective pitching of starters such as John Tudor and Danny Cox and relievers Todd Worrell, Ken Dayley and Jeff Lahti. For the ’82 champions, Herzog didn’t bother rotating relievers, but simply brought in future Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter to finish the job.
Under Herzog, the Cards won pennants in 1982, 1985 and 1987, and the World Series in 1982, when they edged the Milwaukee Brewers in seven games. Herzog managed the Kansas City Royals to division titles in 1976-78, but they lost each time in the league championship to the New York Yankees.
Overall, Herzog was a manager for 18 seasons, compiling a record of 1,281 wins and 1,125 losses. He was named Manager of the Year in 1985 and voted into the Hall by the Veterans Committee in 2010, his plaque noting his “stern, yet good-natured style,” and his emphasis on speed, pitching and defense. Just before he formally entered the Hall, the Cardinals retired his uniform number, 24.
Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog was born in New Athens, Illinois, a blue-collar community that would shape him long after he left. He excelled in baseball and basketball and was open to skipping the occasional class to take in a Cardinals game. Signed up by the Yankees, he was a center fielder who discovered that he had competition from a prospect born just weeks before him, Mickey Mantle.
Herzog never played for the Yankees, but he did get to know manager Casey Stengel, another master shuffler of players who became a key influence.
Like so many successful managers, Herzog was a mediocre player, batting just .257 over eight seasons and playing several positions. His best year was with Baltimore in 1961, when he hit .291. He also played for the Washington Senators, Kansas City Athletics and Detroit Tigers, with whom he ended his playing career, in 1963.
“Baseball has been good to me since I quit trying to play it,” he liked to say.
Herzog is survived by his wife of 71 years, Mary Lou Herzog; their three children, Debra, David and Jim, and their spouses; nine grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.
Masseuse takes plea to battery charge
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
A Santa Clarita masseuse pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge in December, after a client accused him of a sexual assault. As part of the plea deal, one count of touching a person intimately against their will for sexual arousal against Salvador Gonzalez, 30, of Santa Clarita, was dropped. He was sentenced to […]
The post <strong>Masseuse takes plea to battery charge</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/masseuse-takes-plea-to-battery-charge/
Federal appeals court upholds SCV Water judgment
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
A federal appeals court this week upheld a $68.5 million June 2022 judgment in favor of the Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency, according to water officials. The agency also claimed a win in its effort to obtain additional declaratory relief under CERCLA, or the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, in a news release […]
The post Federal appeals court upholds SCV Water judgment appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/federal-appeals-court-upholds-scv-water-judgment/
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Says Goodbye … for Now
date: 2024-04-17, from: NASA breaking news
The final downlink shift by the Ingenuity team was a time to reflect on a highly successful mission — and to prepare the first aircraft on another world for its new role. Engineers working on NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter assembled for one last time in a control room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in […]
South Korea cautiously optimistic about US-Japan military upgrades
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — South Korea is cautiously optimistic about alliance upgrades that the U.S. and Japan have planned to bolster security in East Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesperson said the ministry “noted” that the U.S. and Japan, at their summit in Washington last week, spoke of “the defensive nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance” and emphasized “peace and stability” in the region.
The spokesperson continued via email to VOA’s Korean Service on Friday that “South Korea, the U.S. and Japan are making efforts to institutionalize expanded trilateral cooperation through agreements made at Camp David last year” and “to strengthen rules-based international order.”
The three countries held a trilateral summit at Camp David in August after Seoul and Tokyo mended ties frayed by disputes rooted in Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
At their bilateral summit held in Washington on April 10, Washington and Tokyo announced wide-ranging plans to revamp their military ties.
The plans include preparations for Japan to develop and produce with the U.S. military hardware, including hypersonic missile interceptors.
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel toured a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries F-35 fighter jet factory near Nagoya on Tuesday. He underlined the importance of Japan’s role in manufacturing weapons as U.S. supplies run thin amid crises in Europe and the Middle East.
The plans announced at the summit also call for Japan’s possible involvement in the AUKUS Pillar II security pact, enabling it to develop quantum computing, hypersonic, undersea and other advanced technologies.
AUKUS is a defense and security group of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. AUKUS Pillar 2 refers to a suite of cooperative activities conducted by the three nations to develop and field “advanced capabilities.”
Japan will hold trilateral exercises with the U.S. and the U.K. starting in 2025 as the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic regions become “ever-more linked,” according to the joint statement.
The plans call for Japan to expand its security role and arms buildup in tandem with efforts to implement a national security strategy issued in 2022. That called for an increase in Japan’s defense budget and a shift from a defense-only policy to one that includes counterstrike capabilities amid threats from North Korea and China.
In December, Japan eased its arms export control regime that had allowed it to sell components but not completed weapons.
Cho Han-Bum, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said “Japan’s arms reinforcement can be viewed as a double-edged sword.”
In an interview Monday with VOA’s Korean Service, he said the arms buildup significantly helps to deter threats from the Chinese military and North Korean nuclear weapons, but that it concerns South Korea.
Due to unresolved historical disputes from Japan’s colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, “trust” between the militaries of the two countries “is not restored fully,” even as they cooperate together now, he said.
South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. conducted a two-day joint naval exercise in the East China Sea from April 11 to 12. The exercise included anti-submarine warfare drills to counter North Korea’s underwater threats and interdiction drills aimed at blocking the North’s weapons shipments.
South Korea, under President Yoon Suk Yeol, has been pursuing a policy of rapprochement with Tokyo, and has aligned itself closely with Washington in countering Beijing’s economic and military coercion.
Under the previous administration of Moon Jae-in, Seoul relied for its security on the U.S. while bolstering economic relations with China. Ties with Tokyo remained tense.
Much of the anti-Japanese sentiment still runs high in South Korea, despite Yoon’s outreach to Tokyo, especially among progressives who increased their majority in an April 10 parliamentary election.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry lodged a protest on Tuesday against Japan’s claim over a disputed island that sits midway between the two countries, called Dokdo by South Korea and Takeshima by Japan.
Won Gon Park, an adjunct professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said South Korea now has to “make a choice” whether to work more closely with Japan to counter threats from North Korea and China.
He said in an interview with VOA’s Korean Service that this might be necessary, as the U.S. builds a regional security structure to bolster defenses against China.
At their summit, the U.S. and Japan also announced a planned revision of the command structure of U.S. forces in Japan. This will complement Japan’s plan to establish a joint operations command to improve coordination of its air, ground, maritime forces by 2025.
Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, said Washington “is increasingly anxious to have global partners” step up their arms manufacturing because the U.S. is not producing enough military hardware to counter all the threats from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
Speaking with VOA by telephone on Friday, Bennett said what was announced at the summit was that “Japan would be a global partner,” enabling the U.S. to share highly sensitive “information, technology and other capabilities in exchange for taking responsibility with security and stability in the regions that go outside Northeast Asia.”
He added, “The U.S. recognizes South Korea can’t afford to send multiple divisions to other areas around the world because of the North Korean threats” but is “anxious” to have South Korea play a deeper global role, especially in the Indo-Pacific.
Kim Hyungjin contributed to the report.
RISC-V AI chip upstart Rivos plans to undercut Nvidia, helped by a quarter-billion in VC lucre
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
With Apple lawsuit behind it, focussed on finalizing its designs
RISC-V chip designer Rivos has raised $250 million in series-A funding to bankroll production of its first accelerator for generative AI and data analytics workloads.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/riscv_ai_startup_rivos_funded/
Schiavo co-authors retail theft legislation
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
News release Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, alongside Attorney General Rob Bonta, State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, and a bipartisan coalition of Assembly members, has introduced a legislative package aimed at curtailing the surge in retail crimes. This bill package comes as a result of the months-long effort to tackle this growing crisis, including the formation […]
The post Schiavo co-authors retail theft legislation appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/04/schiavo-co-authors-retail-theft-legislation/
Daily EV Recap: Tesla goes all in on Robotaxi
date: 2024-04-17, from: Electrek Feed
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick Charge is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn and…
https://electrek.co/2024/04/16/daily-ev-recap-tesla-goes-all-in-on-robotaxi/
China facilitating, subsidizing US fentanyl crisis, says House committee
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
Trinity government students take part in debate with local politicians
date: 2024-04-17, from: The Signal
At Trinity Classical Academy, students are expected to learn about multiple world views. Those views may not always align with what each student actually believes, but Liz Caddow, one of the founders of Trinity and a government teacher at the school, wants them to be challenged. “We can engage in the conversation,” Caddow said. “I […]
The post <strong>Trinity government students take part in debate with local politicians</strong> appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Biden and Trump compete for voters over Israeli crisis
date: 2024-04-17, from: VOA News USA
U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump are both supporting Israel in the war in Gaza and in its hostilities with Iran. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns reports on how events in the Middle East are affecting U.S. politics.
https://www.voanews.com/a/biden-and-trump-compete-for-voters-over-israeli-crisis-/7572761.html
Serial Robbery Crew Arrested
date: 2024-04-17, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Major Crimes Bureau Detectives worked closely with Century Station Detectives after learning of a serial robbery crew committing crimes throughout Los Angeles County.
https://scvnews.com/serial-robbery-crew-arrested-during-in-progress-robbery-by-major-crimes-bureau/
Fire in the Cisco! Networking giant’s Duo MFA message logs stolen in phish attack
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Also warns of brute force attacks targeting its own VPNs, Check Point, Fortinet, SonicWall and more
Cisco is fighting fires on a couple cybersecurity fronts this week involving its Duo multi-factor authentication (MFA) service and its remote-access VPN services.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/cisco_duo_vpn/
41 new projects awarded
date: 2024-04-17, updated: 2024-04-17, from: nlnet feed
https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20240417-announcing-projects.html
Announcing IvorySQL 3.2: New Oracle XML Function Compatibility and Upgrade to PostgreSQL 16.2
date: 2024-04-17, from: PostgreSQL News
Dear Community Members,
We are excited to introduce IvorySQL 3.2, a significant update that includes a brand new feature for Oracle XML function compatibility alongside an upgrade to PostgreSQL 16.2. This release strengthens our PostgreSQL-based database project with improved capabilities and compatibility.
What’s New in IvorySQL 3.2:
- New Oracle XML Function Compatibility: Introduces compatibility with a variety of Oracle XML functions, broadening our support for Oracle-based systems.
- Upgraded to PostgreSQL 16.2: Updates the core database engine to PostgreSQL 16.2, incorporating the latest enhancements and bug fixes.
Fixed Issues:
- Resolved a documentation build failure: Issue #645
- Eliminated build warnings: Issue #649
-
Corrected a parameter issue with the
to_datefunction: Issue #592 -
Fixed label issues in the
create functionsyntax: Issue #624
For a detailed list of all the new features and fixes, please visit our release notes on IvorySQL GitHub Releases and the IvorySQL Release Page.
Acknowledgments and Contributions:
A huge thank you to all our users who contributed patches, reported bugs, and proposed new features. The names of all contributors to this release are listed in the release notes.
IvorySQL thrives on community contributions. We warmly welcome your ideas, feature requests, or patches. Please share your contributions on our GitHub page.
Useful Links:
- Homepage: IvorySQL Official Site
- Documentation: IvorySQL Docs
- GitHub Repository: IvorySQL GitHub
- Website Repository: Website GitHub
- Document Repository: Document Site GitHub
- Download IvorySQL: Download Page
- Support: Report issues here or contact contact(at)highgo(dot)ca
We look forward to your feedback on IvorySQL 3.2 and your continued support in making IvorySQL even better.
Best regards,
The IvorySQL Development Team
pgdbDiffo 5.0 Released!
date: 2024-04-17, from: PostgreSQL News
The dbDiffo Developer Team is happy to announce the release of pgdbDiffo 5.0, which is a free online data modeler for PostgreSQL.
Starting from this version, pgdbDiffo is integrated with Make Love, Not Code!, a low-code/no-code application generator for HTML/JS/PHP/PostgreSQL projects.
See https://dbdiffo.com for more information and download links.
About pgdbDiffo
pgdbDiffo is an alternate version of dbDiffo, which is a really free online data modeler (database schema designer). It runs on your on-premises servers and in your browser. It can generate SQL scripts from your model. You can execute the generated SQL scripts (create and change/alter scripts) in your database with a click.
It is integrated with Make Love, Not Code!, which is a powerful low-code/no-code application generator for HTML/JS/PHP/PostgreSQL projects. You can use your application even within a few minutes (depending on how many tables your database has).
Free for commercial and non-commercial use.
Free for unlimited database tables and unlimited projects.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgdbdiffo-50-released-2829/
PL/Haskell v4.0 Released
date: 2024-04-17, from: PostgreSQL News
We are pleased to announce the release of version 4.0 of the PL/Haskell extension. This extension allows users to write PostgreSQL functions in the Haskell functional programming language. Instructions can be found here.
Version 4.0 adds the ability to work with arrays.
This release adds the ability to pass composite values to queries.
Note that there is a break of backwards comparability regarding composite types returned from queries.
Users of Ubuntu and Fedora can install the extension directly from the rpm and apt repositories.
If you have problems with the extension or a feature request, please submit a Github issue.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/plhaskell-v40-released-2842/
SmartXML 1.0 Tool for loading XML into PostgreSQL
date: 2024-04-17, from: PostgreSQL News
SmartXML 1.0 released
SmartXML is a tool that allows you to parse XML and load data into PostgreSQL.
Key features:
-
does not require programming skills
-
works with very large and complex XML files
-
does not require XSD schema
-
can process XML with fuzzy structure
-
supports batch insertion into PostgreSQL
-
table patches can be generated from XML
-
support for generating ON CONFLICT DO queries
Operation Systems:
Windows: full support
Linux: alpha version
Links:
Website: https://redata.dev/smartxml
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/smartxml-10-tool-for-loading-xml-into-postgresql-2841/
PGConf.BE : Speakers online and Registrations open
date: 2024-04-17, from: PostgreSQL News
PGConf.BE 2024 will be held in Haasrode, Leuven, about 25km from Brussels.
The conference will take place on May 7th, 2024. Registrations are open.
The speakers and their sessions are available, as well as the preliminary schedule.
See you in Leuven in May 2024!
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgconfbe-speakers-online-and-registrations-open-2837/
Query Parsing and Understanding
date: 2024-04-17, from: Marginallia log
Been working on improving Marginalia Search query parsing and understanding. This is going to be a pretty long update, as it’s a few months’ work. Apart from cleaning up the somewhat messy query parsing code, a problem I’m trying to address is that the search engine is currently only good at dealing with fairly focused queries, they don’t need to be short, but if you try to qualify a search that is too broad by adding more terms, it often doesn’t produce anything useful.