China’s
FortiGate attacks more extensive than first thought
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Dutch intelligence says at least 20,000 firewalls pwned in just a few
months
The Netherlands’ cybersecurity agency (NCSC) says the previously
reported attack on the country’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) was far more
extensive than previously thought.…
NASA’s
Roman Mission Gets Cosmic ‘Sneak Peek’ From Supercomputers
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Researchers are diving into a synthetic universe to help us better
understand the real one. Using supercomputers at the U.S. DOE’s
(Department of Energy’s) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois,
scientists have created nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the
cosmos as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin
Observatory, jointly funded […]
Jerry
West dies; Basketball Hall of Famer, model for NBA logo
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
West, nicknamed “Mr. Clutch” for his late-game exploits as a player,
went into the Hall of Fame as a player in 1980 and again as a member of
the 1960 U.S. Olympic Team.
UK
CMA says public sector will be in cloud services probe after all
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Nothing is as juicy as a nice fat tender, amirite tech giants?
Britain’s competition watchdog says it is including the public sector in
its investigation into the UK cloud services market, following earlier
claims that this area could be overlooked.…
Taste-Off:
The primo pickled peppers — and the bad ones
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
We taste-tested 10 varieties of pickled peppers – primarily
pepperoncini and banana peppers – available at local markets to find the
ones worth buying and the ones best avoided.
Computation
Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try
date: 2024-06-12, from: Quanta Magazine
Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the
computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our
seemingly random world.
Current conditions: Temperatures in northern China
will top 107 degrees Fahrenheit today • Months-long water shortages have
sparked riots in Algeria • Unseasonably cold and wet weather is being
blamed
for stunted economic growth in the U.K.
THE TOP FIVE
Torrential rains flood southern Florida
More than 7 million people are under flood advisories in Florida, with a
tropical storm stalled over the state at least through Friday. Flooding
was reported across the southern part of Florida including Fort Myers,
Miami, and even farther north. In Sarasota, just south of Tampa, nearly
four inches of rain fell in an hour, a new record for the area, with
total rainfall reaching about 10 inches on Tuesday. The downpour was a
one-in-1,000-year event. “The steadiest and heaviest rain will fall on
South and central Florida through Thursday, but more spotty downpours
and thunderstorms will continue to pester the region into Saturday,”
AccuWeather senior meteorologist Reneé Duff
said.
Report: New hydropower installations see ‘downward trend’
There has been a “downward trend” in global hydropower output over the
last five years, according to the International Hydropower Association’s
new
2024
World Hydropower Outlook. Hydropower is the largest renewable source
of electricity,
according
to the International Energy Agency. It generates more electricity
than all other renewable technologies combined, and plays a key role in
the energy transition. But hydropower installations must double to meet
net zero goals by 2050. The IEA has also projected that “without major
policy changes, global hydropower expansion is expected to slow down
this decade.” That may already be happening:
The report estimates that investment needs to double – to $130 billion
per year – in order to double installed hydropower capacity by 2050.
NO2 emissions rise, but HCFC levels fall
Nitrous oxide doesn’t get as much attention as carbon dioxide or
methane, but it should: This greenhouse gas is more potent than both,
depletes the ozone, and is the third largest contributor to climate
change,
according
toCarbon Brief. A new
study
published in the journal Earth System Science Data
finds that human-caused NO2 emissions rose by 40% over the past 40
years, and that most of this increase was driven by the use of nitrogen
fertilizer and manure in agriculture to meet growing demand for meat and
dairy. Agriculture emissions of NO2 were 67% higher in 2020 than they
were in 1980. The concentration of NO2 in the atmosphere is now 25%
higher than in pre-industrial years. “The unfettered increase in a
greenhouse gas with a global warming potential approximately 300 times
larger than carbon dioxide, presents dire consequences for the planet,”
the researchers said in a press release.
But it’s not all bad news. A separate
study
out this week finds that atmospheric levels of ozone-depleting
greenhouse gases called hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) peaked in 2021
– five years ahead of schedule – and are declining faster than expected.
Latest talks on climate finance goals end in stalemate
UN climate finance talks in Bonn, Germany, ended on a sour note
yesterday, “with negotiators from developing and developed countries
blaming each other in fiery exchanges,”
according
toClimate Home News. The discussions were a
lead-up to November’s COP29 in Azerbaijan, where countries are expected
to put forward a new annual finance goal for helping vulnerable
countries protect themselves from climate change and shift to clean
energy. The current target, set in 2009, sits at $100 billion annually.
Boosting this fund is seen as
“the
most important decision” expected to come out of this year’s climate
summit. But so far, there has been little progress. Rich countries only
managed to meet the existing $100 billion annual pledge in 2022, two
years late.
Rising sea levels threaten Greek island known as mythological
birthplace of Apollo
One of the most important sites in Greek and Roman mythology is sinking
into the sea as climate change causes water levels to rise. The tiny
abandoned Greek island of Delos, in the Aegean Sea, was first settled in
the third millennium BC and was once a busy port city with 30,000
occupants. In Greek mythology, it was the birthplace of Apollo and his
sister Artemis. Today it is dotted with 2,000-year-old archaeological
ruins and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1990. But sea
levels around the island have risen 66 feet in just 10 years, and
archaeologists
toldAFP the ruins will disappear entirely in about 50
years, eaten away by encroaching sea water and rising temperatures.
Joey Chestnut, the 16-time winner of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating
Contest in Coney Island,
has
been banned from the competition this year because he struck a deal
with plant-based food company Impossible Foods.
Payoff
from AI projects is ‘dismal’, biz leaders complain
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
No wonder most orgs are slowing their spending
Businesses have become more cautious about investing in artificial
intelligence tools due to concerns about cost, data security, and
safety, according to a study conducted by Lucidworks, a provider of
e-commerce search and customer service applications.…
People in the U.S. are outsourcing the hunt for Adderall to people in
the Philippines; an Apple AirTag stalking case; and the Gateway Pundit’s
(alleged) bankruptcy.
NASA
Supports California Students Aiming to Advance Technology
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
Students from a minority-serving university in California are helping
solve challenges of autonomous systems for future drone operations on
Earth and other planets. These students are making the most of
opportunities with NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and industry,
focusing on autopilot development and advanced systems that adapt and
evolve. Students from California State […]
Analysts
see closer US-Indonesia ties under incoming president
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
Indonesia’s Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto is set to be sworn in
as the country’s next president in October, after having resoundingly
won elections in February. VOA’s Virginia Gunawan reports on what this
means for U.S. relations with Southeast Asia’s largest country. Ahadian
Utama, Hafizh Sahadeva contributed to this report
These
wrongly arrested Black men say a California bill would let police misuse
face recognition
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Three men falsely arrested based on face recognition technology have
joined the fight against a California bill that aims to place guardrails
around police use of the technology. They say it will still allow abuses
and misguided arrests.
Microsoft
sued by ParTec in Texas over AI supercomputer patents
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
German HPC outfit asks for damages, injunction that would see Azure AI
shut down
Microsoft is facing legal action from German HPC vendor ParTec over
claims of patent infringement relating to technology used in putting
together AI supercomputers.…
Oracle’s
Netravalkar relishes big cricket moment as U.S. faces India, his country
of birth
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
Netravalkar and his U.S. teammates already completed one of the
biggest upsets in the history of the sport when they stunned Pakistan in
its second match of the month-long international tournament.
California’s
Transitional Kindergarten Expansion Creates Big Choices For Parents
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The LAist
As California moves toward its goal of serving more than 300,000
students by the fall of 2025, the success of universal TK will largely
depend on parents buying into the program.
Single
family residence sells for $2.6 million in Fremont
date: 2024-06-12, from: San Jose Mercury News
A house located in the 41600 block of Joyce Avenue in Fremont has new
owners. The 1,670-square-foot property, built in 1960, was sold on April
25, 2024.
It’s been called the largest economic development project in Georgia’s
history. And it’s massive — six times the size of Disneyland. When
Hyundai’s Metaplant comes online, it will pump out up to 300,000
electric vehicles per year, plus batteries. Jobs at the plant will pay
more than the area average, and job training will be free of charge.
We’ll hear more. Also on the program: banishing medical debt from credit
reports.
AMD’s
DC chief happy to work with Intel and others to chip away at Nvidia’s AI
empire
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
‘If everybody’s got their own little ecosystem, it’s very inefficient’
AMD and Intel have been rivals for decades, but there’s at least one
thing they can agree on: they have a common enemy in Nvidia. And the
enemy of your enemy can be your friend.…
From the BBC World Service: The European Commission will add
tariffs to electric vehicles coming into the European Union from China,
and China’s not too happy about it. Then, the World Health Organization
(WHO) has blamed major industries — tobacco, ultra-processed foods,
fossil fuels and alcohol — for 2.7 million deaths a year in Europe.
Also: news on bread in Egypt and spicy ramen noodles in Denmark.
US
Rep. Nancy Mace overcomes McCarthy-backed challenger to win Republican
primary in South Carolina
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
COLUMBIA, S.C. — U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace has won the Republican
nomination after a tumultuous second term in South Carolina that saw her
go from a critic to an ally of former President Donald Trump and make
headlines for plenty of things off the House floor.
Mace defeated challengers Catherine Templeton and Bill Young in
voting that ended Tuesday. She will face a Democratic opponent in the
general election in the 1st District, which is the closest thing South
Carolina has to a swing district in the Republican-dominated state.
Trump’s endorsement — after he called her crazy and terrible in 2022
— is just one of many ways Mace has attracted a spotlight far greater
than a typical second-term member of Congress.
She’s a regular on interview shows, often antagonizing the hosts. She
calls for her party to moderate on abortion and marijuana but joined
seven of the farthest right members to oust former House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy.
McCarthy threw his weight against Mace and the other defectors. His
political action committee gave a $10,000 contribution to Templeton, and
the American Prosperity Alliance, where a McCarthy ally serves as a
senior adviser, donated to a group called South Carolina Patriots PAC,
which spent more than $2.1 million against Mace.
Mace has said her positions and beliefs aren’t erratic — she is just
reflecting the values of the 1st District, which stretches from the
centuries-old neighborhoods of Charleston down the coast to Beaufort
County’s booming freshly built neighborhoods of retirees moving to South
Carolina from somewhere else.
Mace, the first woman to graduate from South Carolina’s military
academy The Citadel, thanked her voters for tuning out the “senseless
noise” from her opponents and realizing she is unafraid to stand up to
powerful people.
“When you are the first woman to sit in The Citadel’s barber chair to
get all of your hair chopped off, you don’t get your feelings hurt when
you don’t get invited to the fancy cocktail parties in Washington,
D.C.,” Mace said. “While sometimes I may be a caucus of one, I’m not
alone because I’m not there for me — I’m there for each and every one of
you.”
Mace’s opponents argued that by seeming to land everywhere on issues,
Mace is nowhere.
Templeton ran South Carolina’s health and environmental agency to
some angst a decade ago and in her only political race finished third in
the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary won by Gov. Henry McMaster. Young is
a Marine veteran and financial planner.
Templeton didn’t mention Mace’s name, but asked Tuesday for her
voters to keep backing Republicans.
“I think it is safe to say everybody in here has the conservative
values that we share, and in November we are all going to stand behind
our president and we are all going to join together to support the
Republican Party,” Templeton said.
In the Democratic primary, businessman and former International
African American Museum CEO Michael Moore defeated Mac Deford, a Citadel
graduate and lawyer for a couple of the larger bedroom communities in
the district.
South Carolina lawmakers drew the district to be more Republican
after the seat flipped for one term in 2018. The 1st District was the
only congressional district won by Nikki Haley over Trump in the 2024
South Carolina Republican presidential primary.
4th District
For the second election in a row, U.S. Rep. William Timmons has
fought off a spirited challenge in the Republican primary.
Timmons defeated state Rep. Adam Morgan, the leader of the state
House Freedom Caucus who argued Timmons was too liberal.
Timmons’ divorce — and a widely shared Instagram post by a husband
who said Timmons had an affair with his wife — complicated his
reelection bid. Timmons has denied the allegations.
Timmons has Trump’s endorsement as he seeks a fourth term in the
district anchored by Greenville and Spartanburg.
Timmons was not in his district Tuesday night, instead staying in
Washington, where Republicans only have a two vote majority in the U.S.
House.
He said he was thankful his voters recognized his strong conservative
record and saw through the “countless lies” from his opponent.
“In Washington I am focused on policy not headlines, on representing
my constituents not myself, and working with my colleagues instead of
working against them,” Timmons said in a statement on social media.
In November’s general election, Timmons will face Democrat Kathryn
Harvey, who helps nonprofit organizations with marketing, fundraising
and leadership, and Constitutional Party candidate Mark Hackett.
3rd District
South Carolina’s 3rd District is open after Republican Rep. Jeff
Duncan decided not to run again after seven terms. Duncan’s wife of 35
years filed for divorce in 2023, accusing him of several affairs.
The Republican nomination is going to a runoff between a candidate
endorsed by Trump and another endorsed by his good friend McMaster.
Mark Burns is a Black pastor who has backed Trump since before his
first race for president and made it to the runoff after losing twice
before in the GOP primary in the neighboring 4th District.
His opponent is nurse practitioner Sheri Biggs, who along with her
husband have been faithful contributors and friends of McMaster for
years.
They defeated five other candidates including South Carolina
Rep. Stewart Jones and Kevin Bishop, who handled communications for U.S.
Sen. Lindsey Graham for more than two decades.
Sherwin-Williams paint store manager Byron Best from Greenwood won
the Democratic nomination in the 3rd District.
Other races
The only other U.S. House incumbent facing a primary challenger is
Republican Rep. Joe Wilson who won the party’s nomination as he seeks a
12th full term in the 2nd District, which stretches from suburban areas
around Columbia west and south toward Aiken.
Wilson will face David Robinson II. The U.S. Army veteran who
enlisted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and is an advocate for missing
people after his son disappeared in the desert in Arizona won the
Democratic primary.
Attorney Duke Buckner won the Republican 6th District primary and
will face Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, who is seeking a 17th term
in the state’s majority-minority district that is bounded by areas
around Charleston, Beaufort and Columbia.
In the 7th District Democratic primary, teacher Mal Hyman, who calls
himself an independent Democrat, faces Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom
veteran Daryl Scott. The winner takes on Republican U.S. Rep. Russel
Fry, who is seeking a second term in the district that stretches from
Myrtle Beach to Florence in the northeast part of the state.
date: 2024-06-12, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
June 19th, or “Juneteenth,” is the oldest known celebration
commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Today’s post,
looking at the history of the federal holiday, comes from Saba Samy, an
intern at the National Archives in Washington, DC. On September 17,
1862, the United States Civil War reached a gruesome peak with …
Continue
reading Juneteenth: The First
Commemoration of Abolition
Space health
shocker: Astronauts return mostly fine
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Largest ever study reveals some of the effects on human body aren’t as
bad as thought, but work needs to be done
Scientists have dumped a mountainous cache of research papers on the
unsuspecting public in what amounts to the largest collective study of
the effects of space travel on human health.…
Have you looked at your power bill — like, really
looked at it? If you’re anything like Rob, you pay whatever number
appears at the bottom every month and drop it in the recycling. But how
everyone’s power bill is calculated — in wonk terms, the “electricity
rate design” — turns out to be surprisingly important and could be a big
driver of decarbonization.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why power
bills matter, how Jesse would design electricity rates if he was king of
the world, and how to fix rooftop solar in America. This is the finale
of our recent series of episodes on rooftop solar and rate design. If
you’d like to catch up, you can listen to our previous episodes
featuring Sunrun CEO
Mary
Powell, the University of California, Berkeley’s
Severin
Borenstein, and Heatmap’s own
Emily
Pontecorvo.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of
Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at
Princeton University.
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: There’s other issues we could talk
about electricity rate design, and I want to come back to them in a
second. But let’s say you were made Grand Vizier of all public utility
commissions across the country. How would you fix this? Like, what do we
need to do?
Jesse Jenkins: I think there’s
basically two options that we have, here — and this is, you know, a
reflection of the fact that there is no one unified electricity market
structure in the U.S. We have a bunch of different ways that we do
things. And so I’ll just sketch two kind of classic examples of that.
There are lots of little gradations in between.
One is a kind
of traditional regulated market where you get your power from a
regulated or publicly owned utility, like a municipal utility, or a
rural utility district, or an investor-owned utility. It’s regulated by
the state, and you buy power at whatever the regulated rate is. And so,
if that’s the case, we need to get those rates right. And by that I
mean: There are multiple things you’re paying for when you’re paying for
your bill. You’re paying for the actual energy you’re consuming, and
that is a kind of volumetric thing — you know, you should pay more the
more you consume, all else equal.
But the interesting
feature of electricity pricing is that it varies from hour to hour
because of the fact that demand is changing all the time and renewable
energy availability is changing all the time. And so the actual marginal
cost of generating electricity depends on this intersection of how much
you demand and what the available supply is. And if you have a lot of
cheap renewables, for example, flooding the grid, that price could be
very low. It could even be zero — when you’re curtailing solar or wind,
you have excess free power, effectively. And at other times it can be
very expensive when you’re running diesel generators or inefficient gas
turbines to meet this sort of peak demand requirements. Electricity
prices could be several hundred dollars a megawatt-hour.
And
so we have a very wide range of pricing and we don’t communicate that at
all to people today. And I think we have to restore that, in some way —
to let people understand that if you consume more energy during the
middle of the day when there’s lots of solar available, even if you
don’t have solar on your roof, it’s coming from your neighbor or
utility-scale solar farm far away, that’s the cheapest, best time to
consume electricity. And if you’re consuming when fossil power plants
are producing expensive power, you should think about how to reduce that
consumption. So it’s really important that we get that kind of time
dynamic rate right for the energy component.
Robinson Meyer: So you would expose people to prices. I
mean, that’s kind of your basic answer is that you would expose people
to these time-of-day prices even if — and I just want to be clear, here.
You’re talking about folks who live in Washington, D.C., who live in New
York, who live in Philadelphia, who live in San Francisco, who live in
Atlanta …
Jesse Jenkins: All over. Yeah,
everywhere.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure
and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an
audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get
the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at
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As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions,
Sungrow invests heavily in research and development,
constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter
technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean
energy transition by visiting
sungrowpower.com.
This
roof-mounted Raspberry Pi tracks flights and photographs the aurora
borealis
date: 2024-06-12, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
An Alaska-based maker sees your flight tracker and raises you with a
two-for-one: a flight-tracking, aurora borealis-photographing,
roof-mounted setup.
In 2006, The Commons project from Monteverde Development was presented
to city staff but withdrawn by Monteverde before any formal plans were
submitted to the city. In this proposed project […]
With regards to Mr. David Smith of Santa Clarita (letters, May 14), I
recently ran into a childhood neighbor friend of mine at the Lowes on
Bouquet Canyon Road. He […]
Kyndryl
and Apollo Global linked to bid for DXC Technology
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Creating economies of scale by merging ever-shrinking infrastructure
services businesses
DXC Technology, the beleaguered tech services provider that emerged from
the alliance between HPE Enterprise Services and CSC then lost billions
in revenue, is again reportedly the subject of takeover talks.…
Chiquita Canyon. After a couple years of record precipitation, rainwater
percolated through the soil. Then, bacteria and other thirsty microbes
metabolized the waste and their metabolic processes warmed up the […]
The
Savvy Senior | Long-Term Care Benefits for Veterans and Surviving
Spouses
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
Dear Savvy Senior, I understand that the Veterans Administration has a
benefit that can help veterans and spouses with long-term care costs. We
recently had to move my elderly […]
Christine
Flowers | Hunter’s Verdict Should Thrill Gun Control Advocates
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
There is so much concern for the tender sensitivities of a former drug
addict from Delaware. It’s incredibly touching how the media, and Joe
Biden supporters, are rallying around a […]
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
French firm has nearly tripled in value since beginning of the year
France’s Mistral AI drew €600 million ($640 million, £510 million) in
its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to €5.8 billion ($6.2
billion, £4.9 billion).…
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition.
Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the
Classifieds.
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
Workers called attention to the ongoing contract negotiations between
the University and the Keck National Union of Healthcare Workers group,
which have been unfolding for the past four months.
Microsoft’s
Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of
CEOs
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Small businesses have seldom had the chance to understand how they work.
A history of PC use makes it possible
Column A year and a half into the explosion of AI
fueled by ChatGPT, the hype and fear of missing out has begun to thin
just enough to make out the shape of two starkly different visions for
AI: one that imagines using it to replace people and the other
that wants AI to enhance people.…
UAE
minister says US fears over Middle East becoming an AI proxy for China
are valid
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
But we’re America’s friends, insists Omar Al Olama
Fears that China could be using Middle East countries as a proxy to
overcome US sanctions on machine learning accelerators are justifiable,
according to the United Arab Emirates minister of AI and digital
economy.…
Aug. 2-11:
‘Eye Candy’ at SCAA Gallery in Old Town Newhall
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Three award winning local Santa Clarita Valley artists, Harriette
Knight, Patty Haft and Georgette Arison invite the public to an opening
reception of a visually stimulating art show called “Eye Candy” on
Saturday, Aug. 3, from 5-8 p.m. at the Santa Clarita Artists Association
Gallery in Old Town Newhall
Residents
say historic Mentryville property in need of some TLC
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
A historic area off Pico Canyon Road known as Mentryville represents a
town that sprouted up after “black gold” began pouring out of the ground
in 1876. The first commercially […]
Vigil
held at Fair Oaks Park for man killed in shooting
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
Community members gathered Sunday evening at Fair Oaks Park to mourn the
life of a 20-year-old man who was killed in a June 2 shooting in Los
Angeles. Medical examiners […]
Santa
Barbara County Supervisors Approve Additional $85M in Funding for
Behavioral Wellness Department
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The contract renewal grants BeWell millions more in state and federal
funding over the next three years to treat Medi-Cal beneficiaries’
substance-use disorders.
Parker
named chairman of the board at Mission Valley Bank
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
News release Mission Valley Bank has announced the appointment of John
Parker as the new chairman of the board, succeeding Earle S. Wasserman.
Parker, executive officer and co-founder of […]
News release The Santa Clarita Artists Association is inviting the
community to a free demo by artist Annette Power during the group’s
monthly meeting on Monday. The event, which […]
NASA Ames
Hosts National Wildfire Coordinating Group
date: 2024-06-12, from: NASA breaking news
On May 21-23, 2024, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG)
visited NASA Ames Research Center, with participants representing 13
agencies and organizations. NWCG is a cooperative group focused on
providing national leadership to enable interoperable wildland fire
operations among federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial
partners. NASA became an associate member of NWCG in February […]
Santa
Barbara’s Lee Gabler, Legendary Agent to David Letterman, Dies at
84
date: 2024-06-12, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Hope Ranch resident helped create the iconic films and TV series of
the past half century, including ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’, ‘American
Idol,’ ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ ‘The West Wing,’ and ‘Mad Men.’
At
G7, Biden to push plans for frozen Russian assets, Chinese
overcapacity
date: 2024-06-12, from: VOA News USA
At the Group of Seven summit this week, U.S. President Joe Biden will
seek agreement on using interest from frozen Russian assets to aid
Ukraine’s war effort. He will also push for unity in tackling global
challenges such as infrastructure funding, artificial intelligence, and
Chinese overcapacity in green technologies. However, as White House
Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports, a shift right in the European
political landscape could complicate his plans.
Newsom
appoints pair of SCV residents to state posts
date: 2024-06-12, from: The Signal
News release Gov. Gavin Newsom has announced the appointments of a pair
of Santa Clarita residents to two different state boards. According to
a news release from the governor’s office, […]
Let’s
kick off our summer with a pwn-me-by-Wi-Fi bug in Microsoft Windows
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Redmond splats dozens of bugs as does Adobe while Arm drivers and PHP
under active attack
Patch Tuesday Microsoft kicked off our summer season
with a relatively light June Patch Tuesday, releasing updates for 49
CVE-tagged security flaws in its products – including one bug deemed
critical, a fairly terrifying one in wireless networking, and one listed
as publicly disclosed.…
California
Credit Union Foundation Awards Grants to Two SCV Teachers
date: 2024-06-12, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Two Santa Clarita Valley schools will launch new programs, thanks to
funding from California Credit Union Foundation through its Spring 2024
Teacher Grant program. As part of its commitment to help educators
create innovative learning opportunities for their students, the
Foundation provided 10 grants of $500 each to underwrite class projects
in Los Angeles and Ventura counties
California
Can Ban Gun Sales At Fairgrounds And On State Property, Federal Judges
Rule
date: 2024-06-12, updated: 2024-06-12, from: The LAist
Judges at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals distinguished between gun
buyers’ First Amendment rights and the government’s authority to decide
what kind of commerce takes place on public property.
HighGo Software is pleased to announce the first GitHub community
release of wal2mongo v1.0.7, which can be used to replicate PostgreSQL
database changes to an output format that can be directly fed into the
mongo client tool to achieve logical replication between PostgreSQl and
MongoDB. Wal2mongo plugin is useful for a case where PostgreSQL is used
as the main raw data source to collect data from outside world but
MongoDB is used internally for data analytics purposes. Manual data
migration between PostgreSQL and MongoDB poses a lot of potential
problem and having a logical decoding plugin like wal2mongo can help
reduce the data migration complexity between the two databases.
Source Code on GitHub
The source code releases of wal2mongo plugin can be found
here
Project Home on GitHub
https://github.com/HighgoSoftware/wal2mongo
About wal2mongo
wal2mongo is a PostgreSQL logical decoding output plugin designed to
simplify logical replication from PostgreSQL to MongoDB by formatting
the output into a JSON-like format accepted by MongoDB. For detailed
information on how to use it, you can find it
here
The logical replication application project that can be used with
wal2mongo to achieve a fully automatic logical replication setup with
enhanced control, security and performance in mind. We will continue to
improve the logical decoding performance and enhance wal2mongo
functionalities based on community feedback.
UN
Chief puts Israeli military, Hamas on blacklist for harming
children
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
united nations — The United Nation’s secretary-general has included
Israel’s military and Hamas on the annual blacklist of perpetrators who
harm children.
“I am appalled by the dramatic increase and unprecedented scale and
intensity of grave violations against children in the Gaza Strip, Israel
and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” Antonio Guterres
said in the report, which was sent to U.N. Security Council members on
Tuesday but has not yet been published.
The annual Children and Armed Conflict report names and shames those
who recruit, kill, maim or abduct children, commit sexual violence
against them, deny them humanitarian assistance, or attack schools and
hospitals. Guterres’ special representative Virginia Gamba is mandated
by the Security Council to work to prevent and end these violations.
In the report, obtained by VOA, the United Nations said it has
verified 8,009 grave violations against Israeli and Palestinian
children, but the process is ongoing and slow due to the conflict. Of
them, 113 were against Israeli children, and the rest were against
Palestinian children in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The report says most child casualties in Gaza from October 7 to the
end of last year were caused by “the use of explosive weapons in
populated areas by Israeli armed and security forces.”
In addition to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad was also listed. Both
groups are listed for the first time, accused of killing, maiming and
abducting children.
The report covers the period from January to December 2023. Hamas
carried out its terror attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering
the war that is now in its ninth month. The report covers only the
casualties reported or verified in 2023.
This is the first time either Israel or Hamas has been included on
the report’s blacklist, despite the killing and maiming of hundreds of
children in at least three previous wars in Gaza.
Israel’s armed and security forces are listed for the killing and
maiming of children and for attacks on schools and hospitals.
“The inclusion of Israeli forces on the U.N.’s ‘list of shame’ is
long overdue and reflects overwhelming evidence of grave violations
against children,” Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at
Human Rights Watch, told VOA in an email.
Israeli officials have expressed outrage at being included on the
list, which also includes the Taliban and terror groups al-Qaida and
Islamic State.
A U.N. spokesperson said last week that Israel was notified of its
inclusion “as a courtesy.” The country promptly sought to get ahead of
the report’s publication, dismissing it as more anti-Israel action by
the United Nations.
“Today, the U.N. added itself to the blacklist of history when it
joined those who support the Hamas murderers,” Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said on Friday. “The IDF is the most moral army in the world.
No delusional U.N. decision will change that.”
His United Nations ambassador went further, publishing the video of
part of his phone call with Guterres’ chief of staff.
“I’m utterly shocked and disgusted by this shameful decision of the
secretary-general,” Gilad Erdan said in the call on Friday, adding that
it would reward Hamas and extend the war.
Russia makes blacklist again
Last year, Russia’s armed forces landed on the blacklist for their
war in Ukraine. This year, they remained listed despite a significant
drop in the number of violations attributed to them. The United Nations
verified the killing of 80 children and the maiming of 339 others
attributed to Russian forces and affiliated groups.
A senior U.N. official said a decrease was not enough. Russia must
continue this trend for at least a year and also sign a joint action
plan with Gamba’s office to be delisted.
No party previously on the list was delisted this year.
Both sides in Sudan conflict make list
The situation in Sudan, which devolved into brutal violence in April
2023 when two rival generals went to war in a power struggle that
continues today, has seen the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary
Rapid Support Forces both land on this year’s blacklist.
The report found a dramatic increase in 2023 in the military
recruitment and use of children in Sudan, as well as their killing,
maiming and sexual abuse. Attacks on schools and hospitals were also
reported.
“I urge all parties to take preventive and mitigating actions to
avoid and minimize harm and better protect children, including to
refrain from the use of explosive devices,” Guterres said in the
report.
The 2023 report verified nearly 33,000 grave violations committed
against the world’s children in several countries experiencing conflict
— an increase of 21% over the previous year. There were 11,649 confirmed
child killings and maimings. Recruitment is again on the rise, after
trending downward for the past two years.
Grave violations were reported in countries including Afghanistan,
Burkina Faso, Colombia, Congo, Myanmar, Somalia and Syria, among
others.
EPA
Issues Violation of Clean Air Act to Chiquita Canyon Landfill
date: 2024-06-11, from: SCV New (TV Station)
In a communication sent on Tuesday, June 4 to Steve Cassulo, District
Manager of Waste Connections, the operator of the Chiquita Canyon
Landfill, the landfill operators were notified they are in violation of
the federal Clean Air Act by the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency
Lilbits:
A startup says it can double the performance of any CPU
date: 2024-06-11, from: Liliputing
A new chip design company called Flow Computing claims to have developed
a technology that can double the performance of any existing CPU by
using a custom co-processor called a PPU (Parallel Processing Unit) to
increase the efficiency with which a CPU can switch between tasks. And
that’s just using hardware – Flow says that […]
Dive into the world of water pollution at the Old Town Newhall
Library, Makerspace, 24500 Main St., Newhall, CA 91321 on Wednesday,
June 12, from 3:30-4:30 p.m
Gates-backed
nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it’ll have fuel
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
TerraPower’s atomic facility needs lots of low-enriched uranium and who
mainly makes it … ah, jeez
Unwilling to let a little thing like reality stand in its way, Bill
Gates’ TerraPower has broken ground on its Wyoming nuclear power plant
without any guarantee it’ll have the fuel needed to run the thing once
it’s finished. …
William Gallagher: Now with macOS Sequoia, it’s having a third go —
and this time it’s mimicking third-party window management apps. There
are very many of these, including perhaps the most popular, Moom.All of
them, including Apple’s new window tiling feature, let you either drag a
given window to a certain spot on your screen, […]
NASA
Selects 2024 Small Business, Research Teams for Tech Development
date: 2024-06-11, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will award funding to nearly 250 small business teams to develop
new technologies to address agency priorities, such as carbon neutrality
and energy storage for various applications in space and on Earth. The
new awards from NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and
Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program invest in a diverse
portfolio […]
The
Light Phone III is a distraction-free phone that’s a little less
minimalist (Coming in January, up for pre-order now for half price)
date: 2024-06-11, from: Liliputing
Most smartphone makers try to convince you to buy their products by
telling you all about the things they can do. Light has taken the
opposite approach, but offering minimalist phones under the Light Phone
brand, which are designed around the idea that less can be more. They
offer users a way to stay connected and reachable […]
NASA’s Flight Opportunities program sent two university payloads on
suborbital flight tests onboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity on June 8
when it launched from Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The
payloads carrying scientific research from University of California,
Berkeley and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, align with
critical technology needs that NASA has […]
NASA
Funds Study of Proposals to Investigate Space Weather Systems
date: 2024-06-11, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has selected three proposals for concept studies of missions to
investigate the complex system of space weather that surrounds our
planet and how it’s connected to Earth’s atmosphere. The three concepts
propose how to enact the DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral
Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling) mission, which was recommended by the
2013 Decadal Survey for Solar and Space […]
Ed
Stone, Former Director of JPL, Voyager Project Scientist, Dies
date: 2024-06-11, from: NASA breaking news
Known for his steady leadership, consensus building, and enthusiasm
for engaging the public in science, Stone left a deep impact on the
space community. Edward C. Stone, former director of NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and longtime project
scientist of the agency’s Voyager mission, died on June 9, 2024. He was
88. He […]
Last year, as I was building a game for VisionPro, I wanted the 3D
characters I placed in the world to navigate the world, go from one
point to another, avoid obstacles and have those 3D characters avoid
each other.
Almost every game engine in the world uses the C++ library
RecastNavigation library to do this -
Unity, Unreal and Godot all use it.
SwiftNavigation
was born: Both a Swift wrapper to the underlying C++ library which
leverages extensively Swift’s C++ interoperability capabilities and it
directly integrates into the RealityKit entity system.
This library is magical, you create a
navigation
mesh from the world that you capture and then you can
query
it for paths to navigate from one point to another or you can create
a
crowd
controller that will automatically move your objects.
Until I have the time to write full tutorials, your best bet is to look
at the
example
project that uses it.
Jennifer
Wilcox on Building the First U.S. Carbon Removal Office
date: 2024-06-11, from: Heatmap News
In November of 2020, Jennifer Wilcox had just moved to Philadelphia and
was preparing to start a new chapter in her career as a tenured
“Presidential Distinguished Professor” at the University of
Pennsylvania. Then she got the call: Wilcox was asked to join the
incoming Biden administration as the principal deputy assistant
secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy, a division of the Department
of Energy.
Wilcox had never even heard of the Office of Fossil Energy and was
somewhat uneasy about the title. A chemical engineer by training, Wilcox
had dedicated her work to climate solutions. She was widely known for
having written the first textbook on carbon capture, published in 2012,
and for her trailblazing research into removing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere. With Penn’s blessing, she decided to take the job. And in
the just over three years she was in office, she may have altered the
course of U.S. climate action forever.
First, Wilcox led a total transformation of the department to align it
with the Biden administration’s climate goals. She started by arranging
15-minute meetings with each of the nearly 150 employees who worked with
her at the D.C. office to understand their perspectives on their work,
whether they were happy, and their fears and challenges. She admits she
can be intense.
“I took all that information, and I sat on it with many weekends and a
blank piece of paper and a pencil and drew crazy diagrams,” she told me,
trying to funnel everyone’s feedback into a new vision for the
department.
Previously, the Office of Fossil Energy’s primary function was to
support research into oil, gas, and coal extraction and use. Wilcox
flipped the mission on its head, reorganizing the department into one
that would support research, development, and deployment of solutions
that reduced dependency on those resources and minimized their
environmental impacts. By July, she had codified that mission in a new
name — the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
Wilcox maxed out her leave this spring. I caught up with her about a
week after she left the DOE, as she was picking up where she left off —
preparing for her first semester as a professor of chemical engineering
and energy policy at Penn. She’s also starting a new side gig as chief
scientist at Isometric, a carbon credit certification company that’s
trying to improve trust in carbon removal measurement and verification
through rigorous standards and transparency.
I asked her to reflect on her time at the Department of Energy, the
changes she oversaw, and what she’s looking to do next. Our conversation
has been edited for length and clarity.
When was your last day at DOE? Did you leave because you had an
obligation to come back to Penn?
My last day was Friday, May 31, so just a week or so ago. Typically,
when you’re in an academic tenured position, you can have a maximum of a
two-year leave. Within the first year of my appointment at DOE, the
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law went through, and then in the second year,
the IRA went through — the Inflation Reduction Act. And I was like, this
is big stuff. It felt like just a defining moment — in my career, but
also in terms of climate legislation. And I thought, how could I
possibly leave now? So I went back to Penn and I wrote, I thought, a
pretty thoughtful letter of the impact that I could have if I could stay
just a year and a half longer. And they said yes.
Could you share the story of how you were asked to go work for
the department in the first place?
Sure, it’s pretty funny. Something that many people don’t know is we
have a small farm — we had 22 acres in Massachusetts, and goats and a
pig and chickens and oh my goodness. Penn was like, “We’ll move your
goats, too,” and so we moved everybody. And here I am at the kitchen
table amidst boxes, and the goats are outside, and I’m on my laptop, and
I get this email from the Biden-Harris transition team. I was like,
ain’t nobody got time for that. That’s spam. Delete! And then a couple
days go by and I get another one, and I was like, come on. Is this real?
And I forwarded it to my husband. He’s an ER doctor, and he’s like,
“Honey, that’s real. You have to respond!” And so I sent my CV.
One of the first things you did was rename the department. How
did that happen?
When I came in, it was really early days of, okay, net zero by 2050, and
there was a question of, what does that mean for our office? Should this
office exist in a net zero world?I knew that I was being
recruited to think about reshaping, rethinking the portfolio.
We only had two R&D offices at the time. One was called Oil and Gas
— we renamed that Office of Resource Sustainability. The other was
literally the Office of Coal. What I decided to do was take that program
and move it over. That whole office is all about, if you’re choosing to
extract energy resources from the Earth, how do you do it in a way
that’s minimal impact?
Now, what’s left is how you manage the pollution of how we use fossil
fuels — that’s the carbon dioxide. And so we built out a whole new
division on carbon removal. We teased out a whole program on hydrogen,
and then we also separated out carbon conversion into its own division,
and then carbon transport and storage. And so rather than one program
focused on carbon, we had five, which is pretty cool. I mean, the amount
that I was empowered and supported — and by the way, we got it all
through without a single pushback, in nine months. So that was huge.
How would you characterize how the field changed from the time
that you entered the office until now? Have research questions changed?
Have policy priorities changed?
I think things are starting to change. One of the
things from these last few years of having the resources that have
started to become mobilized, it’s helping us to recognize where the gaps
really are. When you have money to be able to put out for certain topic
areas, you get to see who’s going to apply, and who applies gives you an
indication of where the technology is at and how much of it’s ready.
For instance, if you look at the $3.5 billion for direct air capture
hubs, we had to write the funding opportunity announcement to meet
industry where they’re at. There’s only a couple of companies that are
really even at a stage where they can start to think about demonstration
on the tens of thousands of tons of removal, let alone a million tons
per year.
Some of the gaps that we saw were, in direct air capture, making sure
that there’s enough companies that are supported to be able to get us to
the scale that we need to. And then for the other approaches to carbon
removal, making sure that if we want these projects to be durable, in
terms of carbon removed on a time scale that impacts climate, we need to
figure out how to quantify the net carbon that’s removed.
And then one significant gap that we saw that we are trying to fill with
this funding: When we think about corporations and net zero pledges, a
lot of times the carbon removal purchasing is associated with Scope 3
emissions that companies don’t have the ability to control. These are
supply chains. It could be paper, it could be fuel, food, glass, cement,
steel. And so looking at that whole sector, it’s about 10 different
industrial sectors that we need to figure out how to decarbonize. If we
can think about decarbonizing these supply chains, it’ll take some of
the pressure off of the carbon removals to counterbalance those.
The last piece that I feel like gets forgotten is, in the infrastructure
law, we had $2.5 billion for building out geologic storage. That’s an
issue because you can do the carbon capture, but the big question is,
where are you going to put it? And can you get it from point A to point
B? We have a whole program called CarbonSAFE that essentially shepherds
the industry through the process, starting with characterization all the
way to a class six permit from EPA. Building that capacity out means
that’s one less thing that industry has to worry about as they’re
looking at carbon capture.
During your time there, the department was interfacing with
hundreds of researchers and startup founders who were all trying to get
new projects or companies off the ground. I’m curious, what are some of
the most common misunderstandings you saw from applicants?
There’s a couple of things, but one that stands out — and maybe this is
because I have a background in academia — there’s a lot of technologies
out there that are actually pretty far along, especially in point source
capture [technologies that capture carbon from the smokestacks of
industrial facilities before it enters the atmosphere]. Yet, at
universities, they’re still trying to develop the next solvent or solid
sorbent. It’s like, we can stop doing that.
Where the R&D comes in is actually getting data over a long period
of time. How does the material behave? How can we recycle it and reuse
it over and over again? How can we design it in a way that reduces NOx,
SOx pollution, particulate matter, making the air cleaner? But it’s not
about how do we just develop a new technology, because there’s a lot out
there.
It seems like one of the hardest things the department was
trying to do under your leadership was to strengthen its work on
community engagement and community benefits — hard because many
advocates for fenceline communities are so skeptical of the solutions
you were working on. How did you navigate that tension?
Well, one thing is, I know what I don’t know, and I’m usually pretty
willing to say what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. In the early
days, I knew that this was going to be a challenge for our office and so
I recruited a social scientist: Holly Jean Buck, she’s a professor at
the University of Buffalo. We brought Holly in to help us develop some
of the language around … it started off with community benefits, but
some of our investments don’t always lead to benefits, so let’s be
honest, right? And so what we wanted to think about is, what are the
societal considerations and impacts of our investments? We ended up
recruiting a few others, and now we have a team that’s focused on
domestic engagement, and also communications and outreach.
What do you think it could mean for some of what you’ve
accomplished and other things you’ve set in motion if Biden is not
reelected?
I feel pretty good about what we’ve put in place, that it’s sustainable.
The other thing about what I saw is that industry is really leaning in
on doing these things. The low-carbon supply chains — a lot of
glassmakers, cement facilities — are very interested in improving energy
efficiency, are interested in carbon capture or using hydrogen as a heat
source. And so what we have done is really looking at making sure
they’re economic. All of these efforts that we’ve put in place are
extremely bipartisan, and they’re essentially just supporting industry
in a way such that they’re achievable because they’re economic.
Let’s talk a little bit about what’s next. Why did you want to
work with Isometric? What are you going to be doing there?
When I was at DOE, from the beginning, we were looking at, you know,
there’s a lot of the carbon removal portfolio where we don’t have the
rigor in place to be able to determine the durability of the removals,
the additionality of them, the time scale on which the carbon is
actually removed, quantifying net removed. And so we started a
commercialization effort, leveraging our national labs to help us to
develop the framework. Isometric is working toward establishing rigorous
frameworks, and I’m hoping to leverage the efforts ongoing at DOE — and
with transparency, so that others may follow, which could lead to more
durable removals and greater impact at the end of the day.
What about on the academic side of your career. Where do you
plan to focus your research?
Some of the work that we were doing, or the team has been continuing to
do while I’m at DOE, is mineralization, looking at different waste
feedstocks that have alkalinity [a property that’s useful for carbon
removal], like magnesium and calcium. One of the things that we’re going
to focus a little bit more on is asking the question of, what else is
there? You know, if there’s rare earth elements or critical minerals
that could be used for clean energy technologies, EV motors, magnets for
wind turbines. And so, I’m really excited about looking at these
materials and seeing what value is there.
I’m also really excited about helping with the measurement and
quantification of some of the more natural systems of removal, like
forests. One of the new majors at Penn is artificial intelligence. I
think there’s an opportunity right now to think about, how can we take
data, whether it’s from drones or whether it’s from Lidar and airplanes
or satellite data, bringing it together in an integrated way again, so
that we have more robust databases that are also transparent.
There’s so many debates going on around carbon removal right
now, and it feels like they often come down to philosophical
differences. Are these debates important? Or do we just need to decide
what we’re going to do and then reevaluate it later?
We’re not in a position anymore to think we can just decarbonize and not
do greenhouse gas removals. We know we need to do both. And so I think
that there are some kind of “no regrets” things that we can do —
opportunities, as we’re scaling up both in the near term, to think about
them in a coordinated way. In communities that don’t have solar today,
imagine you have a direct air capture facility going in, and then
they’re bringing clean energy that they’re using for direct air capture,
but they’re bringing it for the first time ever to a community that
wouldn’t otherwise have access.
But it really is regional. I think it’s regional in that there’s limited
resources in any given region, whether it’s low-carbon energy, land,
clean water, even geologic pore space. You have it in some states and
not others. And so we really need to look at those resources and always
prioritize decarbonizing, but recognize that it’s not necessarily one or
the other.
IBM dream
to gobble up HashiCorp challenged in court
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
This benefits management, but not us shareholders!
Enterprise software firm HashiCorp and its executives have been sued by
an investor who claims the public company’s agreement to be acquired by
IBM is designed to enrich corporate leaders at the expense of
shareholders.…
These
Wrongly Arrested Black Men Say A California Bill Would Let Police Misuse
Face Recognition
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The LAist
Three men falsely arrested based on face recognition technology have
joined the fight against a California bill that aims to place guardrails
around police use of the technology. They say it will still allow abuses
and misguided arrests.
Under
pressure from Russian censors, Mozilla removes anti-censorship
extensions
date: 2024-06-11, from: OS News
A few days ago, I was pointed to a post on the Mozilla forums, in
which developers of Firefox extensions designed to circumvent Russian
censorship were surprised to find that their extensions were suddenly no
longer available within Russia. The extension developers and other users
in the thread were obviously not amused, and since they had received no
warning or any other form of communication from Mozilla, they were left
in the dark as to what was going on. I did a journalism and contacted
Mozilla directly, and inquired about the situation. Within less than 24
hours Mozilla got back to me with an official statement, attributed to
an unnamed Mozilla spokesperson: Following recent regulatory changes in
Russia, we received persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that
five add-ons be removed from the Mozilla add-on store. After careful
consideration, we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within
Russia. Recognizing the implications of these actions, we are closely
evaluating our next steps while keeping in mind our local community. ↫
Mozilla spokesperson via email I and most people I talked to already
suspected this was the case, and considering Russia is a totalitarian
dictatorship, it’s not particularly surprising it would go after browser
extensions that allow people to circumvent state censorship. Other
totalitarian dictatorships like China employ similar, often far more
sophisticated methods of state control and censorship, too, so it’s
right in line with expectations. I would say that I’m surprised Mozilla
gave in, but at the same time, it’s highly likely resisting would lead
to massive fines and possible arrests of any Mozilla employees or
contributors living in Russia, if any such people exist, and I can
understand a non-profit like Mozilla not having the means to effectively
stand up against the Russian government. That being said, Mozilla’s
official statement seems to imply they’re still in the middle of their
full decision-making process regarding this issue, so other options may
still be on the table, and I think it’s prudent to give Mozilla some
more time to deal with this situation. Regardless, this decision is
affecting real people inside Russia, and I’m sure if you’re using tools
like these inside a totalitarian dictatorship, you’re probably not too
fond of said dictatorship. Losing access to these Firefox extensions
through the official add-store will be a blow to their human rights, so
let’s hope the source code and ‘sideloaded’ versions of these extensions
remain available for them to use instead.
We had tickets for the Sunday morning Wigmore Hall concert with the
Pavel Haas Quartet playing Smetana and Janacek, our first post-Covid
occasion to see them play live. But, so it turned out, there were no
trains from Cambridge North that morning. Which was, shall we say,
massively disappointing. Consolation: three of the Quartet played […]
Amazon is offering discounts on recent (and previous-gen) MacBook and
Mac Mini computers. Amazon is also offering discounts on a bunch of
Echo, Kindle, and Fire products. And while Amazon isn’t running a sale
on the Kindle Paperwhite at the moment, Target is. Here are some of the
day’s best deals. Apple Devices Apple Mac Mini (2023) […]
City
to Begin Construction on Traffic and Pedestrian Safety Improvement
Project
date: 2024-06-11, from: City of Santa Clarita
City to Use $1.5 Million in Federal Funding for Road Enhancements
Working in close collaboration with Senator Alex Padilla and Congressman
Mike Garcia, the City of Santa Clarita was awarded $1.5 million in
federal funding to address traffic circulation and pedestrian
improvements within our community. To mark the start of construction,
Congressman Mike Garcia and […]
The Santa Clarita Valley Fourth of July Parade Committee is seeking
entries for the 92nd Annual Santa Clarita Valley Fourth of July Parade.
Deadline for businesses, individuals and groups to enter the parade
lineup without a late fee has been extended to Wednesday, June 19.
NASA
Invites Media for Launch of New Disaster Response System
date: 2024-06-11, from: NASA breaking news
NASA invites media to an event at the agency’s headquarters at 2 p.m.
EDT Thursday, June 13, to learn about a new Disaster Response
Coordination System that will provide communities and organizations
around the world with access to science and data to aid disaster
response. The event will be held in NASA’s James E. […]
Don’t
Call Wombats Heroes, but Their Burrows Do Provide Food, Water and
Shelter for Other Animals
date: 2024-06-11, from: Smithsonian Magazine
During Australia’s devastating bushfires in 2019 and 2020,
misinformation spread about wombats welcoming animals into their
underground homes—but a new study finds a kernel of truth in the viral
story
I attended Apple’s WWDC event yesterday. When the new macOS Sequoia
was announced, I tweeted the following: “I think Apple and Tim_cook
should donate $1 per copy of Mac OS copies shipped (downloaded) towards
the preservation of a California location they use as code name for the
MacOS. Start with Sequoia. Save out parks, monuments. …
The Intersex Progress Pride flag (beneath the American flag) flies in
front of the Administration Building at NASA’s Ames Research Center in
California’s Silicon Valley on June 5, 2024, to commemorate LGBTQI+
Pride Month. This is the first time the flag has flown at any NASA
center. We celebrate and honor the LGBTQI+ members of […]
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close —
and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the
AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the
company’s operating systems. If you missed out on watching the keynote
live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check
out below. ↫ Emma Roth at The Verge Most of the stuff Apple announced
aren’t particularly interesting – a lot of catch-up stuff that has
become emblematic of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft when it
comes to their operating systems. The one thing that did stand out is
Apple’s approach to offloading machine learning requests to the cloud
when they are too difficult to handle on device. They’ve developed a new
way of doing this, using servers with Apple’s own M chips, which is
pretty cool and harkens back the days of the Xserve. In short, these
server are using the same kind of techniques to encrypt and secure data
on iPhones, but now to encrypt and secure the data coming in for
offloaded machine learning requests. The root of trust for Private Cloud
Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings
the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the
same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure
Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating
system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored
to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while
presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take
advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code
Signing and sandboxing. ↫ Apple’s security research blog Apple also
provided some insight into where its training data is coming from, and
it claims it’s only using licensed data and “publicly available data
collected by our web-crawler”. The words “licensed” and “publicly
available” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m not entirely
sure what definitions of those terms Apple is using. There are enough
people out there who feel every piece of data – whether under copyright,
available under an open source license, or whatever – is fair, legal
game for ML training, so who knows what Apple is using based on these
statements alone. From Apple’s presentations yesterday, as well as any
later statements, it’s also not clear when machine learning requests get
offloaded in the first place. Apple states they try to run as much as
possible on-device, and will offload when needed, but the conditions
under which such offloading happens are nebulous and unclear, making it
hard for users to know what’s going to happen when they use Apple’s new
machine learning features.
@Dave Winer’s
linkblog (date: 2024-06-11, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump voters want revenge. It doesn't have much to do with inflation
or unemployment, material wealth. It's deeper than that. We're all
living a lie, that if we had money we'd be happy. The sad truth is no
one is happy with this arrangement.
NASA
Glenn Visits Duluth for Air and Aviation Expo, STEAM Festival
date: 2024-06-11, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Glenn Research Center public engagement staff arrived in
Minnesota for the Duluth Air and Aviation Expo, May 17-18, with several
exhibits and two hometown stars who joined as part of a larger NASA
presence. Duluthian Heather McDonald met with local students to talk
about living and working in space and how she became the […]
Research shows that STEM education is important to middle school
students because it helps them develop critical thinking and
problem-solving skills. It is also crucial for preparing students for
their future careers. NASA Glenn Research Center’s Office of STEM
Engagement invited middle school students from several area schools to
TECH Day at NASA Glenn in […]
ASRock
DeskMate X600: Small PC supports PCIe extension cables for external
graphics
date: 2024-06-11, from: Liliputing
The ASRock DeskMate is a small desktop computer that packs a lot of
features into a small space… as well as support for some hardware
that doesn’t fit inside the box. It’s now available in China with prices
starting at around $190 for a barebones configuration. It has a
motherboard with an AMD AM5 chipset that […]
SCV
Water to Construct PFAS, VOC Treatment Project in Saugus
date: 2024-06-11, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As part of its commitment to restoring local groundwater reliability
the Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency will soon begin construction of a
new treatment facility to remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and
restore three wells to service that are currently offline due to PFAS
detection. The proposed facility will also remove volatile organic
compounds from two additional wells.
Biden
admin fuels up Rocket Lab with $24M for space-grade solar cell chip
shop
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Funding will expand manufacturing by 50% in three years, says Uncle Sam
The Biden administration’s push to bring more semiconductor
manufacturing to the US has reached new heights with $23.9 million to
expand Rocket Lab’s New Mexico space chip bakery.…
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: RAND blog
Former South Korean President Moon Jae-in claims in his recent memoir
that Kim was sincere in promising to denuclearize in 2018, and Moon
believed him. Moon sees the failure to pursue Kim’s willingness as a
major lost opportunity. Can we believe such a claim?
June
11: Chiquita Canyon Landfill Community Advisory Committee Meets
date: 2024-06-11, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Community Advisory Committee Meeting for the
Chiquita Canyom Landfill will meet Tuesday, June 11 6-8 p.m. at the
Castaic Library, 27971 Sloan Canyon Road, Castaic, CA 91384.
BlackBerry-owned cybersecurity shop Cylance says the data allegedly
belonging to it and being sold on a crime forum doesn’t endanger
customers, yet it won’t say where the information was stored
originally.…
At
G7 Italy, Biden to push plans to deal with Russian frozen assets,
Chinese overcapacity
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
White House — The last time leaders of the world’s seven richest
economies met, at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan in 2023, they
denounced China’s rising economic security threats and vowed to support
Ukraine against Russia’s invasion for as long as it takes.
This week in Apulia, Italy, U.S. President Joe Biden wants the group
to restrain the same two adversaries while continuing to tackle common
global challenges, including infrastructure funding and AI, or
artificial intelligence.
However, a shift to the right of the European political landscape
following EU parliamentary elections could complicate his plans.
The U.S. is aiming for the G7 to agree on a united front against
Chinese overcapacity, when production of goods exceeds demand, in key
green technologies and a mechanism to use Russian frozen assets to aid
Ukraine’s war efforts, a source familiar with Biden’s plans told
VOA.
On Russia, Biden is pushing a plan to give Kyiv tens of billions of
dollars up front, using interest from the approximately $280 billion in
Russian assets immobilized in Western financial institutions.
Weeks after announcing new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, or
EVs, and other strategic industries, Biden also wants leaders to
confront Beijing’s practice of flooding global markets with cheap
exports in those industries.
Much work still needs to be done on both fronts, and officials are
scrambling to agree on a final communique before the summit ends.
Shifting political landscape in Europe
With far-right parties gaining support in the European Parliament
elections over the weekend, French President Emmanuel Macron and German
Chancellor Olaf Scholz have been weakened, while G7 host Italian Prime
Minister Giorgia Meloni consolidated her power.
The European far-right has divergent views on China and Russia,
adding another layer of uncertainty to the G7’s posture. A key factor:
whether Ursula von der Leyen can keep her job as president of the
European Commission for another five years.
“If von der Leyen remains the likely candidate, we can expect
continuity on the G7 agenda — she has been forward-leaning on Ukraine
and on China,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on
Foreign Relations.
While von der Leyen is in a strong position, her second term is not
guaranteed. Snap French parliamentary elections in late June, as
announced by Macron on Sunday following his party’s loss in the
parliamentary election, could be the wild card, Fix told VOA. With the
prospects of a far-right government, Macron may be hesitant to confirm
von der Leyen just a few days before the French elections.
Russian retaliation
Moscow sees the freezing of its assets by Western financial
institutions following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine as theft. It has
threatened to retaliate, should the G7 agree to adopt the plan pushed by
Biden.
The plan will provide Kyiv with a loan of up to $50 billion, which
will be paid back to Western allies using interest earned from Russian
assets, estimated at $3 billion a year or more until it is paid, or
Moscow agrees to pay reparations.
It’s a more aggressive plan than the EU agreed to in May, which would
provide Ukraine with the interest income as it is generated annually.
It’s also riskier — there’s no guarantee that Russian assets would be
immobilized for the duration it takes to repay the loan. Under EU rules,
the sanctions regime that freezes the funds must be unanimously renewed
every six months by the bloc’s 27 member states.
The push comes as Moscow’s forces gained strategic advances on the
battlefield, and amid war funding fatigue settling deeper among American
and European taxpayers. A deal will be an important signal of
transatlantic unity against Russia ahead of the NATO summit in
Washington next month and give a measure of relief as Kyiv faces the
prospects of a changing political landscape in the U.S. and Europe.
“This used to be partly about (former president Donald)
Trump-proofing support to Ukraine, but may now also be about (Marine) Le
Pen-proofing it, considering the possibility of (the far-right) National
Rally (political party) winning the French parliamentary election in a
few weeks,” said Armida van Rij, director of the Europe program at
Chatham House.
The prospects of more populist, Putin-friendly politicians coming to
power in Europe may help further galvanize support for Biden’s loan plan
for Ukraine, she told VOA.
Concern over Chinese overcapacity
“There is no question that the U.S. and Europe share the concern that
China is trying to export its way out of its domestic industrial
overcapacity problem,” said Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute.
G7 finance ministers have highlighted Beijing’s “comprehensive use of
non-market policies and practices” and said they will consider “steps to
ensure a level playing field, in line with World Trade Organization
principles.”
Just as “Trump’s greater economic nationalism has forced Biden to be
more protectionist,” the rise of right-wing European parties could add
more urgency to address Chinese overcapacity, Lachman told VOA.
However, it’s unclear if the G7 can agree on how it would do that. EU
members that consider China a major export market, particularly Germany
and France, are anxious to avoid a trade war.
The European Commission is expected to soon announce planned tariffs
on Chinese EVs. The action could prompt retaliation from Beijing, which
accuses the West of hyping overcapacity claims to blunt China’s
competitive edge.
AI, migration and international development
Italy’s Meloni has made AI a key priority of her G7 presidency and
invited Pope Francis to a special session to highlight the Rome Call for
AI Ethics. The initiative urges governments and companies to follow the
six ethical principles for AI: transparency, inclusion, responsibility,
impartiality, reliability, as well as security and privacy.
Leaders will discuss how AI impacts labor, sustainable development,
foreign policy, disinformation, and election interference.
A strategic partnership with Africa to curb migration to Europe is
another key theme of Meloni’s G7 presidency. In January, she launched
the “Mattei Plan,” an international investment initiative to boost
development in the continent, in line with the G7’s Partnership for
Global Infrastructure and Investment, which is also known as PGI.
PGI was launched at the G7 2021 summit as “Build Back Better World,”
echoing the Biden administration’s domestic agenda. The goal is to
mobilize $600 billion in private infrastructure funding by 2027 as an
alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road initiative that has increased
Beijing’s political clout in developing countries.
PGI is now focused on developing economic corridors, including the
Lobito Corridor that connects the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Zambia and Angola, and the Luzon Corridor in the Philippines.
Following the U.N. Security Council resolution on a cease-fire
between Israel and Hamas, the G7 is also expected to again voice its
support for peace talks in Gaza.
The president is scheduled to leave for Italy on Wednesday, the day
after his son Hunter Biden was found guilty on federal charges of
obtaining a gun in 2018 while allegedly addicted to drugs.
I consider myself really lucky that people stop by and read my posts.
Thank you!
Every year I like to pause and ask folks a little bit more about
themselves, what they’re worried about, and what they’re interested in.
It’s
a really short, anonymous survey that helps me out on many levels.
Feedback is always a gift.
This year, there’s another reason for this survey, too: I’m considering
offering services to organizations that want to tackle specific
technology challenges — particularly educational institutions,
newsrooms, and technology companies for whom engineering is not their
primary activity.
I’ve led product design and innovation sprints for many different
companies and have been directly involved in multiple innovation
accelerators. I have a well-tested process that really works, and this
is one way I might be able to add value.
This survey will help me figure out which problems and ideas people are
thinking about, which will help me figure out how helpful I can be.
But I’d also just love to know what you’re thinking about.
John and Craig decode the current state of software in the film and
television industry. With dozens of programs needed for every project,
they look at why bad and outdated programs continue to have a hold on
the industry, why it’s so hard to build something better, and how these
programs find financial success in […] The post
Industry
Software first appeared on John
August.
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: RAND blog
Western allies are finally making good on their promises, handing
Kyiv substantial economic assistance, weapons, security deals, and now
greater command freedom on the battlefield. Ukraine’s prospects look
better now than they have since early 2023.
Early
MySQL engineer questions whether Oracle is unintentionally killing off
the open source database
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Preference for proprietary features restricting open source MySQL
adoption, says Peter Zaitsev
An experienced MySQL database engineer has questioned whether Oracle
might unintentionally kill off the open source database with its
preference for adding features to its proprietary systems.…
@Miguel de
Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-11, from: Miguel de Icaza
Mastondon feed)
To celebrate that RealityKit is coming in full force to iOS, MacOS and
iPadOS, I am releasing SwiftNavigation - a Swift and RealityKit library
to do mesh navigation - with optional RealityKit integration:
Musk
wants to ban Apple at his companies for cosying up to OpenAI
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Concerned about secrecy… or just mad no one’s buying his AI tech?
Comment AI laggard Apple introduced the world to its
fashionably late spin on the tech yesterday, and of course mewling
billionaire manbaby Elon Musk had to stick an oar in – not that anybody
asked.…
Kubuntu
Focus lr14 and lr16 Gen 2 are thin and light Linux laptops with Intel
Raptor Lake
date: 2024-06-11, from: Liliputing
Kubuntu is an operating system that combines the popular Ubuntu
GNU/Linux distribution with the KDE desktop environment. And while the
developers behind Kubuntu are primarily focused on software, they’ve
also been partnering with PC makers to offer an official line of laptops
and mini PCs under the Kubuntu Focus brand since 2020. And the lineup
[…]
We’re heading into another summer with the specter of serious supply
chain disruptions. The union representing dockworkers at ports on the
East and Gulf Coasts has called off negotiations with shipping
companies, because the union says those companies are trying to replace
workers with automation. Also: a look at how failing to meet kids’ basic
needs hurts their educational outcomes and how bankruptcy has become an
“escape hatch” for big corporations.
“Justice Samuel Alito spoke candidly about the ideological battle
between the left and the right — discussing the difficulty of living
“peacefully” with ideological opponents in the face of “fundamental”
differences that “can’t be compromised.” He endorsed what his
interlocutor described as a necessary fight to “return our country to a
place of godliness.” And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how
America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: “One side or the
other is going to win.”“
If what’s at stake in the upcoming election wasn’t previously clear,
this makes it so. This is a Supreme Court justice, talking openly, on
tape, about undermining the rights of people in favor of a Biblical
worldview.
It’s easy to see this sort of rhetoric as the dying gasps of the 20th
century trying to claw back regressive values that we’ve mostly moved
away from. But to do so is to discount it; we have to take this
seriously.
It’s a little bit heartening to hear that Justice Roberts - also a big-C
Conservative - felt differently and held a commitment to the
Constitution and the working of the Court. But in the light of a
far-right majority comprised of Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch,
Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, it’s not heartening enough.
Hunter
Biden convicted of 3 felonies in federal gun trial
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
WILMINGTON, Del. — Hunter Biden has been convicted of all three
felony charges related to the purchase of a revolver in 2018 when,
prosecutors argued, the president’s son lied on a mandatory gun-purchase
form by saying he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs.
Jurors found Hunter Biden guilty of lying to a federally licensed gun
dealer, making a false claim on the application by saying he was not a
drug user and illegally having the gun for 11 days.
He faces up to 25 years in prison when he is sentenced by Judge
Maryellen Noreika, though first-time offenders do not get anywhere near
the maximum, and it’s unclear whether she would give him time behind
bars.
Now, Hunter Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump, the chief political rival of President Joe Biden, have
been convicted by American jurors in an election year that has been as
much about the courtroom as it has been about campaign events and
rallies.
Joe Biden has steered clear of the federal courtroom in Delaware
where his son was tried and said little about the case, wary of creating
an impression of interfering in a criminal matter brought by his own
Justice Department. But allies of the Democrat have worried about the
toll that the trial — and now the conviction — will take on the
81-year-old, who has long been concerned with his only living son’s
health and sustained sobriety.
Hunter Biden and Trump have both argued they were victimized by the
politics of the moment. But while Trump has continued to falsely claim
the verdict was “rigged,” Joe Biden has said he would accept the results
of the verdict and would not seek to pardon his son.
After the jury’s decision was announced, President Biden said he
accepts the outcome of the case and “will continue to respect the
judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”
“Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our
family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that,” the
president said in a statement.
Hunter Biden’s legal troubles aren’t over. He faces a trial in
September in California on charges of failing to pay $1.4 million in
taxes and congressional Republicans have signaled they will keep going
after him in their stalled impeachment effort into the president. The
president has not been accused or charged with any wrongdoing by
prosecutors investigating his son.
The prosecution devoted much of the trial to highlighting the
seriousness of Hunter Biden’s drug problem, through highly personal
testimony and embarrassing evidence.
Jurors heard Hunter Biden’s ex-wife and a former girlfriend testify
about his habitual crack use and their failed efforts to help him get
clean. Jurors saw images of the president’s son bare-chested and
disheveled in a filthy room, and half-naked holding crack pipes. And
jurors watched video of his crack cocaine weighed on a scale.
Hunter Biden did not testify but jurors heard his voice when
prosecutors played audio excerpts of his 2021 memoir “Beautiful Things,”
in which he talks about hitting bottom after the death of his brother
Beau in 2015, and his descent into drugs before his eventual
sobriety.
Prosecutors felt the evidence was necessary to prove that Hunter, 54,
was in the throes of addiction when he bought the gun and therefore lied
when he checked “no” on the form that asked whether he was “an unlawful
user of, or addicted to” drugs.
Defense attorney Abbe Lowell had argued that Hunter Biden’s state of
mind was different when he wrote the book than when he bought the gun —
when he didn’t believe he had an addiction. Lowell pointed out to jurors
that some of the questions on the firearms transaction record are in the
present tense, such as “are you an unlawful user of or addicted to”
drugs.
And Lowell suggested Hunter Biden might have felt he had a drinking
problem at the time, but not a drug problem. Alcohol abuse does not
preclude a gun purchase.
Hunter Biden had hoped last year to resolve a long-running
investigation federal investigation under a deal with prosecutors that
would avoided the spectacle of a trial so close to the 2024 election.
Under the deal, he would have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses
and avoid prosecution in the gun case if he stayed out of trouble for
two years.
But the deal fell apart after Noreika, who was nominated by Trump,
questioned unusual aspects of the proposed agreement, and the lawyers
could not resolve the matter.
Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed top investigator
David Weiss, Delaware’s U.S. attorney, as a special counsel last August,
and a month later Hunter Biden was indicted.
Hunter Biden has said he was charged because the Justice Department
bowed to pressure from Republicans who argued the Democratic president’s
son was getting special treatment.
The reason that law enforcement raised any questions about the
revolver is because Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow, found it unloaded in
Hunter’s truck on Oct. 23, 2018, panicked and tossed it into a garbage
can at Janssen’s Market, where a man inadvertently fished it out of the
trash. She testified about the episode in court.
Hallie Biden, who had a romantic relationship with Hunter after Beau
died, eventually called the police. Officers retrieved the gun from the
man who inadvertently took the gun along with other recyclables from the
trash. The case was eventually closed because of lack of cooperation
from Hunter Biden, who was considered the victim.
The problem with Adobe is not any single decision it has made. It is
the company’s longer track record, which suggests a genuine lack of
respect for non-enterprise users. They’re allowing things to rot.
LogOn:
Washington state tests drones to remove hard-to-reach graffiti
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
A drone equipped with a painting hose is being deployed against
stubborn graffiti in hard-to-reach areas. Natasha Mozgovaya has more in
this week’s episode of LogOn.
“Open Rights Group has published its six priorities for digital rights
that the next UK government should focus on.”
These are things every government should provide. I’m particularly
interested in point number 3:
“Predictive policing systems that use artificial intelligence (AI) to
‘predict’ criminal behaviour undermine our right to be presumed innocent
and exacerbate discrimination and inequality in our criminal justice
system. The next government should ban dangerous uses of AI in
policing.”
It’s such a science fiction idea, so obviously flawed that Philip K Dick
wrote a novel and there’s a famous movie about how bad it is, and yet,
police forces around the world are trying it.
I’d hope for beyond an Open Rights Group recommendation: it should be
banned, everywhere, as an obvious human rights violation.
The other things on the list are table stakes. Without those guarantees,
real democratic freedom is impossible.
‘AI Call
Center Software’ Is Powering a Scam Call Center
date: 2024-06-11, from: 404 Media Group
Internal data from a scam call center shows it is using Voiso to
power its scam operation. Voiso does offer some AI-powered features,
although it’s unclear if the scammers are using those particular
products.
Ancestry
Releases Records of 183,000 Enslaved Individuals in America
date: 2024-06-11, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The genealogy company has digitized and published 38,000 newspaper
articles from between 1788 and 1867—before Black Americans were counted
as citizens in the U.S. census
@Miguel de
Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-06-11, from: Miguel de Icaza
Mastondon feed)
Apple trained their models to work with the AppIntents schema (this
powers shortcuts and existing Siri commands), a great way of surfacing
the existing capabilities of apps and extend their reach.
While Microsoft could have done this, their equivalent frameworks are
just not widely used - a phenomenon caused in part by slow upgrading
windows users and in part by a void in evangelism for their Windows
platform.
The core product advances are left out in the cold to fend for
themselves.
TerraPower
Just Broke Ground on Its Next-Gen Nuclear Project
date: 2024-06-11, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Heavy rains in China are
boosting the country’s hydropower output • Late-season frost advisories
are in place for parts of Michigan • It will be 80 degrees Fahrenheit
and cloudy today near the Port of Baltimore, which has officially
reopened
after 11 weeks of closure.
THE TOP FIVE
Bill Gates’ TerraPower breaks ground on next-gen nuclear project
TerraPower, the energy company founded by Bill Gates,
broke
ground yesterday on a next-generation nuclear power plant in Wyoming
that will use an advanced nuclear reactor. As
Heatmap’s
Emily Pontecorvo and Matthew Zeitlin explained, these reactors are
smaller and promise to be cheaper to build than America’s existing
light-water nuclear reactor fleet. The design “would be a landmark for
the American nuclear industry” because it calls for cooling with liquid
sodium instead of the standard water-cooling of American nuclear plants.
“This technique promises eventual lower construction costs because it
requires less pressure than water (meaning less need for expensive
safety systems) and can also store heat, turning the reactor into both a
generator and an energy storage system.” TerraPower is still waiting for
its construction permit to be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, and TheAssociated Press
reported the work that began yesterday is just to get the site ready for
speedy construction if the permit goes through.
Construction begins on Brooklyn’s big offshore wind hub
Another big energy project also broke ground yesterday: The
South
Brooklyn Marine Terminal will support Equinor’s 54-turbine Empire
Wind 1 project and be the largest offshore wind port in the U.S. once
completed. The terminal spans 73 acres in Sunset Park. Along with
supporting the assembly and storage of wind turbine components, it will
also house a substation connecting energy from Empire Wind 1 to the
grid. Empire Wind will deliver 810 megawatts of renewable energy to New
York, enough to power nearly 500,000 homes. The terminal’s construction
is expected to be finished by the end of 2026. Below you can see what
the port looks like now, and a rendering of the finished project:
Equinor
Equinor
Environmental Defense Fund will invest in solar geoengineering
research
The nonprofit group Environmental Defense Fund will start funding
research into solar geoengineering, The New York Timesreported.
Up until very recently, solar geoengineering was “one of climate
science’s biggest taboos,”
as
Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer put it. That’s because it involves trying
to cool the planet by reflecting the sun’s heat back into space. Some
scientists and environmentalists worry geoengineering could have
unintended consequences for the climate, and would give greenhouse gas
emitters an excuse to keep on polluting. But as temperatures soar and
global emissions remain stubbornly high, scientists have started to
embrace the idea, and the EDF says because the topic isn’t going away,
it wants to fund solid research that can help inform policymakers should
geoengineering get the greenlight in the future. The EDF is looking to
issue its first grants this fall.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
FEMA’s disaster relief fund is already running low
Hurricane season has only just started, and already the Federal
Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund is running low, CNN
reported.
So far the nation has been hit with 11 extreme weather disasters this
year, costing
$25.1
billion and leaving FEMA’s fund facing the prospect of a $1.3
billion shortfall in August unless Congress frees up additional funding.
The costs are only expected to mount: Meteorologists expect the 2024
hurricane season to be extremely busy, and intense heat waves in western
states could make for a busy wildfire season.
NOAA
California lawsuit takes aim at big oil companies’ profits
California is gunning for big oil companies’ profits. Since September of
last year, the state has been pursuing a lawsuit against five major oil
companies (and the American Petroleum Institute), accusing them of
greenwashing, and deceiving the public about the risks of climate change
and how their fossil fuel products contribute to it. Yesterday
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
amended
the suit to incorporate a new state law that allows him to seek a
company’s “unjust profits” made through violating consumer protection
and advertising laws. The suit wants the profits to be directed into a
victims’ restitution fund.
According
to the Financial Times, the updated filing
includes new evidence that the companies made “false and misleading
statements” in widespread U.S. advertising campaigns.
THE KICKER
Researchers have
just
discovered that ocean algae play a key role in cooling the planet by
producing large amounts of a compound that helps with the formation of
clouds.
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Priced at £2.80, but goes beyond £3.90 in conditional trading
Raspberry Pi’s IPO took place this morning on the London Stock Exchange.
Shares were initially priced at £2.80 ($3.57), but they surged to £3.90
($4.97) during early trading.…
Today, we’re heading to the Georgia-South Carolina border to hear about
a program that pays as they train. It’s at the Savannah River Site,
overseen by the Department of Energy, where workers do everything from
from dimming down highly toxic plutonium into something no longer
weapons-grade to processing spent fuel rods pulled from nuclear
reactors. Also on the show: a lawsuit over forever chemicals in the
nation’s drinking water.
Atos
gets a reprieve with restructure plan from Onepoint consortium
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Too bad shareholders, as this will mean pain for them…
Atos has opted for a bailout proposal led by its largest shareholder
Onepoint to put the company on a firmer financial footing with the
injection of capital and a plan to transform it over the next five
years.…
Chinese
police say man under arrest in stabbing of US college instructors
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
BEIJING — Chinese police have detained a suspect in a stabbing attack
on four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College who were teaching at a
Chinese university in the northeast city of Jilin, officials said
Tuesday.
Jilin city police said a 55-year-old man surnamed Cui was walking in
a public park on Monday when he bumped into a foreigner. He stabbed the
foreigner and three other foreigners who were with him, and also stabbed
a Chinese person who approached in an attempt to intervene, police
said.
The instructors from Cornell College were teaching at Beihua
University, officials at the U.S. school said.
The injured were rushed to a hospital for treatment and none was in
critical condition, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said
at a daily briefing Tuesday. He said police believe the attack in Jilin
city’s Beishan Park was an isolated incident, based on a preliminary
assessment, and the investigation is ongoing.
Cornell College President Jonathan Brand said in a statement that the
instructors were attacked while at the park with a faculty member from
Beihua, which is in an outlying part of Jilin, an industrial city about
1,000 kilometers (600 miles) northeast of Beijing. Monday was a public
holiday in China.
The State Department said in a statement it was aware of reports of a
stabbing and was monitoring the situation. The attack happened as both
Beijing and Washington are seeking to expand people-to-people exchanges
to help bolster relations amid tensions over trade and such
international issues as Taiwan, the South China Sea and the war in
Ukraine.
An Iowa state lawmaker posted a statement on Instagram saying his
brother, David Zabner, had been wounded during a stabbing attack in
Jilin. Rep. Adam Zabner described his brother as a doctoral student at
Tufts University who was in China under the Cornell-Beihua
relationship.
“I spoke to David a few minutes ago, he is recovering from his
injuries and doing well,” Adam Zabner wrote, adding that his brother was
grateful for the care he received at a hospital.
News of the incident was suppressed in China, where the government
maintains control on information about anything considered sensitive.
News media outlets had not reported it. Some social media accounts
posted foreign media reports about the attack, but a hashtag about it
was blocked on a popular portal and photos and video of the incident
were quickly taken down.
Cornell spokesperson Jen Visser said in an email that the college was
still gathering information about what happened.
Visser said the private college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, partners with
Beihua University. A college news release from 2018, when the program
started, says Beihua provides funding for Cornell professors to travel
to China to teach a portion of courses in computer science, mathematics
and physics over a two-week period.
According to a 2020 post on Beihua’s website, the Chinese university
uses American teaching methods and resources to give engineering
students an international perspective and English-language ability.
About one-third of the core courses in the program use U.S. textbooks
and are taught by American professors, according to the post. Students
can apply to study for two years of their four-year education at Cornell
College and receive degrees from both institutions.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has unveiled a plan to invite 50,000
young Americans to China in the next five years, though Chinese
diplomats say a travel advisory by the U.S. State Department has
discouraged Americans from visiting China.
Citing arbitrary detentions as well as exit bans that could prevent
Americans from leaving the country, the State Department has issued a
Level 3 travel advisory — the second-highest warning level — for
mainland China. It urges Americans to “reconsider travel” to China.
Some American universities have suspended their China programs due to
the travel advisory.
Lin, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said China has taken
effective measures to protect the safety of foreigners. “We believe that
the isolated incident will not disrupt normal cultural and
people-to-people exchanges between the two countries,” he said.
From the BBC World Service: Singapore Airlines has offered
$10,000 compensation payments to passengers who suffered minor injuries
during a flight that hit sudden, extreme turbulence last month. Then,
European soccer championships kick off on Friday, and a thriving market
has popped up to sell counterfeit replica kits. And later: Nollywood,
Nigeria’s movie industry, could be worth as much as $15 billion by 2025,
but questions are being raised over safety.
Contributors to the curl project on GitHub tend to notice the above
sequence quite quickly: pull requests submitted do not generally appear
as “merged” with its accompanying purple blob, instead they are said to
be “closed”. This has been happening since 2015 and is probably not
going to change anytime soon. Let me explain why …
Continue
reading Why curl closes PRs on
GitHub→
UK
education department awards contract uplift to Horizon scandal-plagued
Fujitsu
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Japanese supplier gets £4.75M contract extension amid promise not to bid
for govt work
The UK’s Department for Education has awarded Japanese IT services
supplier Fujitsu a £4.75 million ($6 million) contract, despite its
promise not to bid for government work before the Post Office Horizon
Inquiry concludes.…
<p>I wrote about my dislike of money before on this site. Money and everything related to it is by far the part I enjoy the least about my job. And it’s a non-negligible part of it considering I worked solo my entire life. What’s hard for me is this idea of attaching a monetary value to what I do. I was struggling doing it 13 years ago, when I started my career, I’m struggling with it today and I’m sure it won’t change anytime soon. That’s because work, for me, is not a matter of trading money for a service. It’s a human interaction. And adding money to a human interaction makes no sense.</p>
Don’t get me wrong, I get why it does make sense in a practical sense.
I’m not an idiot. I just don’t understand it at a more deeply personal
level. What drives me is the desire to help people. This is either
directly, with my job or indirectly, with the other things I do online.
And when you’re driven by this desire to help others, money becomes a
painful obstacle. Because I just can’t spend my time helping others and
not earn a living. It’s just not an option. So I have to compromise.
I discussed this topic in the past with various people and one of the
feedback I got is to treat work just as a way of earning enough to free
more time that I can then use to help others. That’s a reasonable
suggestion but I just can’t apply it to my life. I don’t know why, I
can’t get into that type of mindset. I’m sure part of this is the good
old impostor syndrome which I’ll have to confront at some point but part
is just the nature of who I am as a person.
This is also why I struggle with the idea of monetising my side
projects. It’s why I love the “Pay What You Want” model because it
eliminates the burden of having to put a price on what I do.
This constant tension between money on one side and the desire to help
others on the other is also why I live on the edge of constant burnout.
Saying no to people is hard when you know you have the skills necessary
to help them. And it’s why I always end up with way too many projects
going on at the same time and find myself waking up in the middle of the
night thinking about all the things that I have to do and I won’t have
time to do. And it sucks. I know it’s not a healthy way of living but I
have not yet learned how to do things differently.
Money sucks. It sucks that we constantly have to keep it in mind. It
sucks that we can’t just ignore it and focus on the things that matter.
Money is also weird. You’d think that the same amount of money would
make the same type of impact in my life but it clearly doesn’t. Every
time someone signs up for my “one a month” membership I’m super happy.
And it’s just 1$. Actually, it’s not even 1$ because after the various
fees I’m left with roughly 70 cents. But those 70 cents have meaning.
But 70 extra cents on a client invoice is a rounding error. I don’t even
care. Hell, earning 2000$ doesn’t have the same effect from a personal
standpoint as getting one extra subscriber for 1$ a month. Human
psychology is fascinating.
Speaking of one-a-month members, I recently tweaked my
supporters page
because I hated the idea of not having a place to acknowledge those
people who were kind enough to support what I do at some point but are
no longer active subscribers. Just removing them from the list didn’t
feel right so I added an extra section for past members.
The internet would really benefit from having a native way to let people
support each other. It’s great that services like
Ko-Fi exist but also part
of me would love to have all these functionalities integrated at the
browser level somehow. I’m sure someone is reading this and screaming
“Crypto! Blockchain!” but I doubt that’s a solution.
Anyway, I’m curious to know if you have thoughts on this whole money
thing so if you do, please get in touch.
<hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
<p><a href="mailto:hello@manuelmoreale.com">Email me</a> ::
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/guestbook">Sign my guestbook</a> ::
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Support,
don’t micromanage, say researchers who find WFH made some of us
neurotic
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Feeling empowerment and autonomy at work reportedly key when toiling
remotely
Many office workers no longer want to sacrifice their entire working
week at their desk – the corporate altar of commerce – but for some, the
work from home revolution has led to higher levels of neuroticism.…
Legendary
Glastonbury farm using bovine excreta power plant adds graphene
boffinry
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
This is not BS, it’s cutting-edge material science
Worthy Farm, host of the world-famous Glastonbury music festival,
already uses cow manure to produce power – and will now allow Cambridge
startup Levidian to insert its tech into that carbon-producing process,
thereby producing graphene.…
Apple built
custom servers and OS for its AI cloud
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Mashup of iOS and macOS runs on homebrew silicon, with precious little
for sysadmins to scry
WWDC Apple has revealed it created its own datacenter
stack – servers using its in-house silicon and operating system – at its
Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on Monday.…
Rev. James
Lawson Jr., civil rights leader who preached nonviolent protest, dies at
95
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
Los Angeles — The Rev. James Lawson Jr., an apostle of nonviolent
protest who schooled activists to withstand brutal reactions from white
authorities as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction, has died, his
family said Monday. He was 95.
His family said Lawson died on Sunday after a short illness in Los
Angeles, where he spent decades working as a pastor, labor movement
organizer and university professor.
Lawson was a close adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who
called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the
world.”
Lawson met King in 1957, after spending three years in India soaking
up knowledge about Mohandas K. Gandhi’s independence movement. King
would travel to India himself two years later, but at the time, he had
only read about Gandhi in books.
The two Black pastors – both 28 years old – quickly bonded over their
enthusiasm for the Indian leader’s ideas, and King urged Lawson to put
them into action in the American South.
Lawson soon led workshops in church basements in Nashville,
Tennessee, that prepared John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette,
Marion Barry, the Freedom Riders and many others to peacefully withstand
vicious responses to their challenges of racist laws and policies.
Lawson’s lessons led Nashville to become the first major city in the
South to desegregate its downtown, on May 10, 1960, after hundreds of
well-organized students staged lunch-counter sit-ins and boycotts of
discriminatory businesses.
Lawson’s particular contribution was to introduce Gandhian principles
to people more familiar with biblical teachings, showing how direct
action could expose the immorality and fragility of racist white power
structures.
Gandhi said “that we persons have the power to resist the racism in
our own lives and souls,” Lawson told the AP. “We have the power to make
choices and to say no to that wrong. That’s also Jesus.”
Years later, in 1968, it was Lawson who organized the sanitation
workers strike that fatefully drew King to Memphis. Lawson said he was
at first paralyzed and forever saddened by King’s assassination.
“I thought I would not live beyond 40, myself,” Lawson said. “The
imminence of death was a part of the discipline we lived with, but no
one as much as King.”
Still, Lawson made it his life’s mission to preach the power of
nonviolent direct action.
“I’m still anxious and frustrated,” Lawson said as he marked the 50th
anniversary of King’s death with a march in Memphis. “The task is
unfinished.”
Civil rights activist Diane Nash was a 21-year-old college student
when she began attending Lawson’s Nashville workshops, which she called
life-changing.
“His passing constitutes a very great loss,” Nash said. “He bears, I
think, more responsibility than any other single person for the civil
rights movement of Blacks being nonviolent in this country.”
James Morris Lawson Jr., was born on Sept. 22, 1928, the son and
grandson of ministers, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio, where he became
ordained himself as a high school senior.
He told The Tennessean that his commitment to nonviolence began in
elementary school, when he told his mother that he had slapped a boy who
had used a racial slur against him.
“What good did that do, Jimmy?” his mother asked.
That simple question forever changed his life, Lawson said. He became
a pacifist, refusing to serve when drafted for the Korean War, and spent
a year in prison as a conscientious objector. The Fellowship of
Reconciliation, a pacifist group, sponsored his trip to India after he
finished a sociology degree.
Gandhi had been assassinated by then, but Lawson met people who had
worked with him and explained Gandhi’s concept of “satyagraha,” a
relentless pursuit of Truth, which encouraged Indians to peacefully
reject British rule. Lawson then saw how the Christian concept of
turning the other cheek could be applied in collective actions to
challenge morally indefensible laws.
Lawson was a divinity student at Oberlin College in Ohio when King
spoke on campus about the Montgomery bus boycott. King told him, “You
can’t wait, you need to come on South now,’” Lawson recalled in an
Associated Press interview.
Lawson soon enrolled in theology classes at Vanderbilt University,
while leading younger activists through mock protests in which they
practiced taking insults without reacting.
The technique swiftly proved its power at lunch counters and movie
theaters in Nashville, where on May 10, 1960, businesses agreed to take
down the “No Colored” signs that enforced white supremacy.
“It was the first major successful campaign to pull the signs down,”
and it created a template for the sit-ins that began spreading across
the South, Lawson said.
Lawson was called on to organize what became the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, which sought to organize the spontaneous efforts
of tens of thousands of students who began challenging Jim Crow laws
across the South.
Angry segregationists got Lawson expelled from Vanderbilt, but he
said he never harbored hard feelings about the university, where he
returned as a distinguished visiting professor in 2006, and eventually
donated a significant portion of his papers.
Lawson earned that theology degree at Boston University and became a
Methodist pastor in Memphis, where his wife Dorothy Wood Lawson worked
as an NAACP organizer. They moved several years later to Los Angeles,
where Lawson led the Holman United Methodist Church and taught at
California State University, Northridge and the University of
California, Los Angeles. They raised three sons, John, Morris and
Seth.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said Lawson taught Southern California
activists and organizers “and helped shape the civil rights and labor
movement locally just as he did nationally.”
“Today Los Angeles joins the state, country and world in mourning the
loss of a civil rights leader whose critical leadership, teachings, and
mentorship confronted and crippled centuries of systemic oppression,
racism and injustice,” Bass said in a statement.
Lawson remained active into his 90s, urging younger generations to
leverage their power.
Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, founder and president of the
National Action Network, called Lawson “the ultimate preacher, prophet,
and activist.”
“In his senior years, I was privileged to spend time with him at his
church in Los Angeles,” Sharpton said. “He would sit in his office and
tell me inside stories of the battles of the 1950’s and 1960’s that he
Dr. King and others engaged in. Lawson helped to change this nation —
thank God the nation never changed him.”
Eulogizing the late Rep. John Lewis last year, he recalled how the
young man he trained in Nashville grew lonely marches into multitudes,
paving the way for major civil rights legislation.
“If we would honor and celebrate John Lewis’ life, let us then
re-commit our souls, our hearts, our minds, our bodies and our strength
to the continuing journey to dismantle the wrong in our midst,” Lawson
said.
The narrator, in Tokarczuk’s Flights,
explains their difficulty in studying psychology, which I think is also
a good commentary on the difficulty of layering quantitative methods
over qualitative ones, and the tyranny of categories more generally:
How was I supposed to analyze others when it was hard enough for me to
get through all those tests? Personality diagnostics, surveys, multiple
columns on multiple-choice questions all struck me as too hard. I
noticed this handicap of mine right away, which is why at university,
whenever we were analyzing each other for practice, I would give all of
my answers at random, whatever happened to occur to me. I’d wind up with
the strangest personality profiles–curves on a coordinate axis. “Do you
believe that the best decision is also the decision that is easiest to
change?” Do I believe? What kind of decision? Change? When? Easiest how?
“When you walk into a room, do you tend to head for the middle or the
edges?” What room? And when? Is the room empty, or are there plush red
couches in it? What about the windows? What kind of view do they have?
The book question: Would I rather read one than go to a party, or does
it also depend on what kind of book it is and what kind of party?
What a methodology! It is tacitly assumed that people don’t know
themselves, but that if you furnish them with questions that are smart
enough, they’ll be able to figure themselves out. They pose themselves a
question, and they give themselves an answer. And they’ll inadvertently
reveal to themselves that secret they knew nothing of till now.
And there is that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous–that we
are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted. (Tokarczuk, 2019, pp.
14–15)
It reminds me of a poem by another Polish Nobel Prize winner, Wisława
Szymborska’s A
Word on Statistics. We can unlock new understanding with words, but
we need to enter into them first.
References
Tokarczuk, O. (2019). Flights. (J. Croft, Trans.) (First
Riverhead trade paperback edition). New York: Riverhead Books.
Snowflake
customers not using MFA are not unique – over 165 of them have been
compromised
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Mandiant warns criminal gang UNC5537, which may be friendly with
Scattered Spider, is on the rampage
An unknown financially motivated crime crew has swiped a “significant
volume of records” from Snowflake customers’ databases using stolen
credentials, according to Mandiant.…
Giuliani
processed in Arizona in criminal case over 2020 fake electors
scheme
date: 2024-06-11, from: VOA News USA
phoenix — Rudy Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and Donald
Trump attorney, was processed Monday in the criminal case over the
effort to overturn Trump’s Arizona election loss to Joe Biden, the
Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said.
The sheriff’s office provided a mug shot but no other details. The
office of the clerk of the Superior Court for Maricopa County said
Giuliani posted bond of $10,000 in cash.
“Mayor Rudy Giuliani — the most effective federal prosecutor in U.S.
history — will be fully vindicated,” said his spokesperson, Ted Goodman.
“This is yet another example of partisan actors weaponizing the criminal
justice system to interfere with the 2024 presidential election through
outlandish charges against President Trump and anyone willing to take on
the permanent Washington political class.”
Giuliani pleaded not guilty in May to nine felony charges stemming
from his alleged role in the fake electors effort. He is among 18 people
indicted in the Arizona case, including Trump attorneys John Eastman,
Christina Bobb and Jenna Ellis.
Former Trump presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump 2020
Election Day operations director Michael Roman pleaded not guilty Friday
in Phoenix to nine felony charges for their alleged roles in the
scheme.
The indictment alleges Meadows worked with other Trump campaign
members to submit names of fake electors from Arizona and other states
to Congress in a bid to keep Trump in office despite his November 2020
defeat.
Other states where criminal charges have been filed related to the
fake electors scheme are Michigan, Nevada and Georgia.
Apple
finally adds RCS support after years of mixed messages
date: 2024-06-11, updated: 2024-06-11, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
WWDC sees Cupertino up to its old trick of adding features - in this
case a password manager - that compete directly with third parties
WWDC Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday
teased assorted imminent improvements to the iGiant’s operating systems
– including enhanced app security, support for RCS in Messages, and a
dedicated password management app.…
The
Ineffable Importance of Corporate Communications
date: 2024-06-11, from: TidBITS blog
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen three examples of companies failing to
communicate with their customers effectively and suffering the slings
and arrows of online ire.
X/
Ruins
on
Delos
Equinor
Equinor
NOAA
