News gathered 2024-07-02
(date: 2024-07-02 08:48:06)
Despite OS shields up, half of America still clings to third-party antivirus – just in case
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Wisdom of the oldies or just a traditional fear of malware?
Nearly half of Americans are still using third-party antivirus software, despite the fact that most mainstream operating systems have security code baked in.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/third_party_secutity/
LG Gram SuperSlim (2024) is a 2.2 pound Intel Meteor Lake laptop with a 15 inch OLED display (available now for $800)
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
The latest version of the LG Gram SuperSlim notebook is a thin and light laptop with a 15.6 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel OLED display, an Intel Meteor Lake-H processor, LPDDR5x-7467 memory and PCIe Gen 4 storage. It weighs just 2.18 pounds and measures less than half an inch thick. LG is currently selling a model […]
The post LG Gram SuperSlim (2024) is a 2.2 pound Intel Meteor Lake laptop with a 15 inch OLED display (available now for $800) appeared first on Liliputing.
Jgs Font
date: 2024-07-02, from: Tilde.news
https://adelfaure.net/tools/jgs/
The Supreme Court Is Slowly Breaking the EPA
date: 2024-07-02, from: Heatmap News
Perhaps it’s futile to talk about any Supreme Court decision this term other than the justices’ unprecedented ruling in the Trump case. The court’s decision to grant broad immunity to the president from criminal prosecution could reshape the modern presidency and empower Donald Trump during his potential — and increasingly likely — second term.
That ruling, too, will have profound practical implications for Americans who care about climate change. During his presidency, Trump flexed his power to slow the energy transition, bury scientific reports, and attack protesters. What will happen now that he is unbound?
But just as the court was expanding the president’s personal authority, it was confining and shrinking the power of any president to address climate change or regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
In a series of important rulings over the past week, the Supreme Court sharply limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon pollution. These rulings could resonate for years to come, no matter who wins the White House in November.
It did so by focusing on a corner of federal law that is often overlooked by the mass public: administrative law, the body of rules that govern how federal agencies constrain and regulate the private sector. Although Americans rarely interact with these rules, they affect the water we drink, air we breathe, and the food and drugs that we ingest.
Taken together, the four cases — Loper Bright Enterprises, Corner Post, Jarkesy, and Ohio v. EPA — are not as high-profile as the Supreme Court’s broad grant of immunity to Trump. But they could substantially weaken the EPA for decades to come, stymying its ability to write and enforce rules limiting carbon pollution. They could also slow down the permitting and construction of new clean energy infrastructure.
“All of these decisions — all four of them — inflate the role of the courts relative to the bureaucracy. This is part of a longstanding campaign by the conservative legal movement to bring the administrative state to judicial heel,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told me.
“Congress has not comprehensively addressed climate change but the agencies are trying to,” Emily Hammond, an environmental law professor at George Washington University, told me. “What these cases do, all together, is fairly comprehensively limit the ability of agencies to protect health and human safety and try to mitigate climate change.”
“It’s a shocking and scary grab of power by a court that is rapidly discarding principles that we’ve been able to rely on and expect for a long time,” she added.
In the first case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court repealed a 40-year-old tenet of American regulatory law that said courts should generally defer to executive agencies such as the EPA when interpreting an ambiguous law. In the second, Corner Post v. Board of Governors, the court opened the door to lawsuits targeting federal regulations that have been on the books for years. Instead of allowing companies to challenge a new rule during the first six years after it was published, the court ruled that companies can challenge a new rule during the six years after the rule begins to affect them. That seemingly allows companies to challenge federal regulations long after they have been issued and treated as settled law.
In the EPA’s case, these two cases may have less influence than it may seem— not because the EPA won’t be subject to these precedents, but rather because the agency receives so little deference from the justices already.
The high court has asserted since 2022 that agencies cannot write new rules on questions of “vast economic and political significance” without clear authorization from Congress. This principle, called the “major questions doctrine,” was first invoked by the justices to overturn the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that restricted greenhouse gas pollution from power plants in part by setting up an interstate carbon trading scheme. But the doctrine would seem to constrain almost any EPA attempt to regulate activities related to climate change, Carlson said. The EPA’s recent attempt to limit tailpipe pollution from cars — in addition to rules cutting carbon pollution from heavy-duty trucks — could run astray of the major questions doctrine.
“At least in my mind, in terms of what regulations will be challenged and how, the major questions doctrine poses the biggest threat to regulatory authority,” Carlson said.
The Corner Post ruling, which effectively extends the statute of limitations for suing over new regulations, may also mean less for the EPA than for other agencies. That’s because virtually every EPA climate protection is already battled over in court, and once a court has decided whether a given regulation is legal, everyone has to abide by that precedent.
“Most rules worth challenging will already have been challenged,” Bagley said.
The EPA may escape, too, from the worst of the Corner Post ruling, but only because its rules are almost always litigated within the first six years of their life anyway, Carlson told me. That means companies probably won’t need to sue after that, as they might want to do for other federal regulations.
Even if those cases have a muted effect on the EPA, however, the other two rulings — which have received less attention so far — could prove far more restrictive to the agency’s authority.
In one case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the court ruled 6-3 that the SEC cannot use an in-house tribunal of administrative judges to impose a civil penalty on a company. Instead, the agency must grant the company a full jury trial in federal court. But many other agencies, including the EPA, also use administrative judges and in-house trials to punish individuals or companies for breaking the law. Each year, the EPA imposes hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on companies that violate the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
Over the next few years, federal judges — and eventually the Supreme Court — will have to decide whether the Jarkesy ruling affects all executive agencies, including the EPA. If they decide it does, then it could slow down the agency’s efforts to penalize polluting companies by forcing virtually every decision into an already overworked court system.
But perhaps the most ominous ruling, Bagely said, is the one in a lawsuit concerning the EPA itself. On Thursday, in Ohio v. EPA, the court blocked the agency’s “good neighbor” rule, meant to limit how much air pollution upwind states can release into downwind states. The five-justice majority did so not only because it disagreed about the agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but also because the justices felt that the EPA had not properly addressed a few of the more than 1,100 comments about the rulemaking that it had received from the public. As such, they stayed the rule — temporarily blocking it from being enforced — and sent the case back down to a lower court.
That decision could change how every court views the rulemaking process, Bagley told me. Whenever the EPA drafts a new environmental rule, it receives thousands of public comments criticizing and praising different aspects of the proposal. Under a law called the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies deal with the public, it must respond to the substance of each of those comments before it can finalize and enforce the rule.
The EPA did respond to the comments at the center of the Ohio case, but Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, decided the agency did not address a few specific concerns sufficiently.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett issued a dissent — joined by the court’s liberals — and castigated Gorsuch for focusing on “an alleged procedural error that likely had no impact” on the EPA’s actual anti-pollution plan.
“Given the number of companies included and the timelines for review, the court’s injunction leaves large swaths of upwind States free to keep contributing significantly to their downwind neighbors’ ozone problems for the next several years,” Barrett wrote.
“The reason this worries me in the environmental context is that every major environmental action is going to come with 1,000, 2,000 — 3,000 public comments,” he said. “What the court did here is flyspeck those comments,” meaning it looked for a tiny error and used it to justify pausing the entire rule. That’s despite the fact that the Clean Air Act, which the EPA was enforcing in the Ohio case, says that the courts must already meet an unusually high standard to intervene in an agency’s response to public comments.
“By flyspecking these comments … it increases the incentive to submit lots and lots of comments” in the hope that the EPA misses one of them. In those comments, “industry groups strew rakes all over your lawn in the hope that you’ll step on one — eventually an agency will.”
That has dire implications for the EPA’s ability to propose new climate rules, he said, but more broadly it affects any regulatory proceeding where the federal government has to reply to hundreds or thousands of public comments. In recent years, for insurance, some Democrats and many clean energy developers have grown frustrated with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires the government to study the environmental impact of any action that it takes. NEPA seems to particularly hamstring clean energy projects, such as transmission lines and geothermal wells.
NEPA does not require that agencies minimize a project’s impact to the environment; only that the government study all potential impacts. But as part of the NEPA process, the government must respond to public comments about the proposed action. It can receive hundreds or thousands of comments about a given NEPA case.
That means virtually every NEPA process could now be subject to the same high level of scrutiny that the court imposed on the EPA in Ohio v. EPA. “This is a dramatic intensification of the stringency of judicial review across a number of domains,” Bagley said.
It is ironic, at best, that these sharp new limits on executive agencies’ ability to regulate carbon pollution came from the same Court that vastly expanded the president’s immunity under the law.
“This is a court that is hostile to environmental regulation,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor and the former acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me. “I don’t think there’s any other way to view it.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/supreme-court-epa
Rainbow Family moves to new Northern California campsite after ouster
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Rainbow Family campers were still declining to apply for the permit that the Forest Service requires of all groups larger than 75 people.
The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich
date: 2024-07-02, from: John August blog
John welcomes Simon Rich (Man Seeking Woman, Miracle Workers) to look at how he crafts a comedic premise. Using his work on SNL, his time writing Inside Out at Pixar and his plethora of short stories, they look at how he develops a funny idea into a story with narrative and emotional punch. We also […] The post The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-comedic-premise-with-simon-rich
PeerJ Awards – Half-year Roundup 2024
date: 2024-07-02, from: PeerJ blog
2024 has marked a remarkable surge for PeerJ Awards, celebrating a grand total of 29 recipients across 14 conferences in the first half of the year! Tailored primarily towards students and early career researchers (ECRs), PeerJ Awards grant winners with a free publication in any of the PeerJ journals (subject to peer review), along with […]
https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284889414/peerj-awards-half-year-roundup-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This is the only RSS 2.0 spec. Anyone who claims to have the real one is basically not telling the truth. And anyone who says the spec has changed since 2002 is also not telling the truth.
https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html
Trove of Tombs Sheds Light on How Ancient Egyptian Families Lived—and Died
date: 2024-07-02, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The finds include mummies from many social classes, some of whom were buried alongside relatives after succumbing to disease
US Supreme Court to weigh in on flavored e-cigarette products
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court took up an e-cigarette case Tuesday, weighing whether the Food and Drug Administration wrongly blocked the marketing of sweet, flavored products amid a surge in vaping by young people.
Vaping companies argue the FDA unfairly denied more than a million applications to market fruit or candy flavored versions of nicotine-laced liquid that’s heated by the e-cigarette to create an inhalable aerosol.
The case comes as the FDA undertakes a sweeping review after years of regulatory delays intended to bring scientific scrutiny to the multibillion-dollar vaping market, which includes thousands of flavored vapes that are technically illegal but are widely available in convenience stores, gas stations and vape shops. The FDA recently approved its first menthol-flavored electronic cigarettes for adult smokers.
The agency says the sweet, flavored e-liquids pose a “serious, well-documented risk” of enticing more young people to pick up a nicotine habit. In 2020, nearly 20% of high school students and almost 5% of middle school students used e-cigarettes, and almost all of those kids used flavored products, the agency said in court documents.
The agency says companies were blocked because they couldn’t show the possible benefits for adult smokers outweighed the risk of underage use. The companies say they had prepared detailed plans to avoid appealing to young people.
The companies scored a victory when the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with vaping companies and tossed out orders denying the marketing of e-liquids with names like “Jimmy The Juice Man in Peachy Strawberry.”
The 5th Circuit found the agency was unfair because it required the companies, without warning, to present studies showing that flavored products would help with smoking cessation.
The FDA appealed that finding to the Supreme Court. The justices are expecting to hear the case in the fall.
Other appeals courts have sided with the FDA, which regulates new tobacco products under a 2009 law aimed at curbing youth tobacco use.
Vaping companies have long claimed their products can help blunt the toll of smoking, which is blamed for 480,000 U.S. deaths annually due to cancer, lung disease and heart disease.
Youth vaping has declined from all-time highs in recent years, but about 10% of high schoolers still reported e-cigarette use last year.
https://www.voanews.com/a/supreme-court-to-weigh-in-on-flavored-e-cigarette-products/7682165.html
Report: New “Google AI” features will debut with the Pixel 9 including an image generator and screenshot index & search tool
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
Google already offers a bunch of optional AI features for its Pixel smartphones including Circle to Search, and a bunch of photography tools, and “Magic Eraser” and “Magic Editor” tools in Google Photos. But Android Authority has obtained some leaked screenshots suggesting that Google is preparing to launch even more AI features for Pixel smartphones. Grouped […]
The post Report: New “Google AI” features will debut with the Pixel 9 including an image generator and screenshot index & search tool appeared first on Liliputing.
Where’s the toughest place to find an apartment in California?
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Silicon Valley ranks as the hardest. Western Los Angeles County the easiest.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/02/wheres-the-toughest-place-to-find-an-apartment-in-california/
Big Fremont apartment complex lands buyer in $100 million-plus deal
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
A big apartment complex in Fremont has been bought for well over $100 million.
Back from the Edge
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
An animal lover’s faithful work to overcome dog behavior problems.
The post Back from the Edge appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/back-from-the-edge/
FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Anniversary time and both are going strong into their 30s
The FreeDOS project celebrates its 1994 beginnings, about a week before Amazon – and just a year after FreeBSD got started.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/freedos_30_freebsd_31/
International students see opportunity at Colorado State University
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
The Western U.S. state of Colorado is a popular destination for international students. Colorado State University in Fort Collins is one of the state’s largest. Svitlana Prystynska takes a look at what draws so many students from other countries. Videographer: Volodymyr Petruniv
Sun family returns to Los Gatos after yearlong world tour
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Travels took them to 21 countries on 4 continents.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/02/sun-family-returns-to-los-gatos-after-yearlong-world-tour/
Intense Bay Area heat to crank up even more, and it may last longer than anticipated
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
PG&E began public safety power shutdowns in eight California counties on Tuesday.
‘Strong possibility of violence’: Documents shed some light on Cal Poly Humboldt protests, police response
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
In what could be the largest show of police force in Arcata for a generation, documents shared by the Appeal and published this week shed some light on the plan to break up the occupation of Siemens Hall on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus with hundreds of police.
ACEMAGIC X1 laptop has a second screen that rotates for use in dual-screen or tablet modes
date: 2024-07-02, from: Liliputing
The ACEMAGIC X1 is a Windows laptop with a 12th-gen Intel i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an unusual dual-screen design that lets you use the laptop in several different ways. The notebook’s primary display is a 14 inch FHD screen. But there’s also a second 14 inch FHD display connected to the first with a […]
The post ACEMAGIC X1 laptop has a second screen that rotates for use in dual-screen or tablet modes appeared first on Liliputing.
Authorities Identify Juan Lopez as the Victim of the Fatal Hit-and-Run Incident on Mesa in Santa Barbara, Suspect Remains At Large
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Juan Lopez, 39, was killed by an unknown suspect in a hit-and-run on June 29 on the 800 block of Cliff Drive.
The post Authorities Identify Juan Lopez as the Victim of the Fatal Hit-and-Run Incident on Mesa in Santa Barbara, Suspect Remains At Large appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Juveniles reportedly throwing hot dogs, rocks at passing cars in Los Gatos
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Four separate incidents reported.
Labor Department to propose first-ever heat protections for worker
date: 2024-07-02, from: Marketplace Morning Report
More than 60 million Americans are facing a potentially record-breaking heat wave across the South and Western U.S. this week. Still, people will be showing up to work on farms, construction sites and other workplaces where extreme heat exposure is a threat. Now, the Labor Department is proposing new safety standards. Also: a conversation with James LeBrecht, director of the film “Crip Camp” about accessibility in the film industry.
Figma Disables AI App Design Tool After It Copied Apple’s Weather App
date: 2024-07-02, from: 404 Media Group
The design tool Figma has disabled a newly launched AI-powered app design tool after a user showed that it was clearly copying Apple’s weather app.
Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking
https://www.404media.co/figma-disables-ai-app-design-tool-after-it-copied-apples-weather-app/
New immigrants change southern Florida ambience
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
Just south of the Florida mainland lies a string of islands called the Florida Keys. The southernmost tip is Key West. Its location makes it a natural first stop — and eventual home — for migrants, especially those fleeing Haiti and Cuba. VOA’s Senior Washington Correspondent Carolyn Presutti takes a look at who’s settling there and how it’s changing the look and feel of Key West. VOA footage and video editing by Mary Cieslak.
https://www.voanews.com/a/new-immigrants-change-southern-florida-ambience/7682093.html
LogOn: New test will be game changer in tuberculosis diagnostics
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
UCLA molecular bioengineer Mireille Kamariza has developed a new tuberculosis test that tackles shortcomings of existing TB diagnostics. VOA’s Genia Dulot reports for this week’s episode of LogOn.
NASA Shares Use Requirements with Commercial Destination Partners
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
NASA hosted a meeting to share knowledge with companies developing future commercial destinations at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The discussion could aid in developing safe, reliable, innovative, and cost-effective space stations. Industry representatives from more than 20 companies attended. The program focused on NASA’s planned use of commercial destinations, draft utilization requirements, […]
NASA’s Webb Captures Celestial Fireworks Around Forming Star
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
The colors within this mid-infrared image reveal details about the central protostar’s behavior. The cosmos seems to come alive with a crackling explosion of pyrotechnics in this new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Taken with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), this fiery hourglass marks the scene of a very young object in the process […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-captures-celestial-fireworks-around-forming-star/
With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits
date: 2024-07-02, from: Quanta Magazine
After decades of uncertainty, a motley team of programmers has proved precisely how complicated simple computer programs can get.The post With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Road repairs estimated at $3 million after Santa Cruz Mountains landslide
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
Residents near slide area get bleak status report.
Things Have Got to Change
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
There is little doubt Joe Biden can still win, but things have got to change.
The post Things Have Got to Change appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/things-have-got-to-change/
Short-Term Rental, Indeed
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Short-term vacation rentals are a separate animal from owner-occupied vacation rentals.
The post Short-Term Rental, Indeed appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/short-term-rental-indeed/
Repair cafe at Saratoga Library helps divert trash from landfills
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
For Saratoga residents with broken toasters, bicycles, blenders and other household items, a new panacea awaits: the Saratoga Library’s repair cafe.
Affirm admits customer info pwned in ransomware raid at Evolve Bank
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Number of partners acknowledging data theft continues to rise
The number of financial institutions hit by the breach at Evolve Bank & Trust continues to rise as fintech businesses Wise and Affirm both confirm they have been materially affected.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/affirm_evolve_ransomware_breach/
Showers Ahead
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I appreciated the retelling of the story of Lillian Child and how she welcomed people to build little houses on her land 100 years ago.
The post Showers Ahead appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/02/showers-ahead/
fnec ece commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
Your thinking incorrect; HotKeys module is not for oberon subsystem usage, just for A2.
I think you are using latest UnixAos version Rev. 10272 by Günther. In that distribution, "SystemTools" module name is not changed by "System" in HotKeys.XML file, so,
- Replace all occurences of "SystemTools" module name with "System" module name in HotKeys.XML file, there are 3 of them.
After then, KbdMouse module will forvard the key messages to oberon subsystem as it understands.
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_192892
No fireworks? No problem: Bay Area cities host Fourth of July drone shows
date: 2024-07-02, from: San Jose Mercury News
These mini unmanned aircrafts are fitted with LED lights and can create a variety of patterns, shapes and animations in the sky.
Fiverr Freelancers Offer to Dox Anyone With Powerful U.S. Data Tool
date: 2024-07-02, from: 404 Media Group
Dozens of Fiverr sellers are advertising access to TLOxp, a potent data surveillance tool sold by credit bureau TransUnion.
https://www.404media.co/fiverr-freelancers-offer-to-dox-anyone-with-powerful-u-s-data-tool-tloxp/
Bente Eegholm: Ensuring Space Telescopes Have Stellar Vision
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Bente Eegholm is an optical engineer working to ensure missions like the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope have stellar vision. When it launches by May 2027, the Roman mission will shed light on many astrophysics topics, like dark energy, which are currently shrouded in mystery. Bente’s past work has included Earth-observing missions and the James […]
Kassidy Beattie | Duty, Respect and Clarity
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
I am writing to express my heartfelt appreciation for the recent article published on May 26, about the Memorial Day veteran flag placement at Eternal Valley. The article beautifully captured […]
The post Kassidy Beattie | Duty, Respect and Clarity appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/kassidy-beattie-duty-respect-and-clarity/
Dan Walters | Homelessness Lingering Under Newsom
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
Homelessness is the political albatross hanging around Gavin Newsom’s neck, something that’s plagued him not only as governor but even earlier during his stint as mayor of San Francisco. He […]
The post Dan Walters | Homelessness Lingering Under Newsom appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/dan-walters-homelessness-lingering-under-newsom/
Christine Flowers | Demonizing Our Blue Collar Values
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
By the time I knew what the term “blue collar” meant, I wasn’t. I come from a long line of blue-collar people, proud Italians and Irish who were carpenters and […]
The post Christine Flowers | Demonizing Our Blue Collar Values appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/christine-flowers-demonizing-our-blue-collar-values/
Cindy Josten | Too Much Made of Pride
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
The following is a summary of comments delivered during the June 25 Santa Clarita City Council meeting: I respect each one of you sitting on this council and I know […]
The post Cindy Josten | Too Much Made of Pride appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/cindy-josten-too-much-made-of-pride/
Nintendo sues alleged Switch pirate pair for serious coin
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
And if court finds for gaming giant? It’s-a me! Bankruptcy!
Mario has tossed blue shells at what Nintendo alleges are two figures deeply involved in the piracy and circumvention of the Switch console ecosystem.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/nintendo_piracy_lawsuits/
NASA Stennis Achieves Primary Success for Historic In-Space Mission
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Stennis Space Center and partner Sidus Space Inc. announced primary mission success July 2 for the center’s historic in-space mission – an autonomous systems payload aboard an orbiting satellite. “Our ASTRA (Autonomous Satellite Technology for Resilient Applications) payload is active and operational,” NASA Stennis Center Director John Bailey said. “This is an incredible achievement […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/success-for-historic-in-space-mission/
Mission Success: HERA Crew Successfully Completes 45-Day Simulated Journey to Mars
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Four dedicated explorers—Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro, Shareef Al Romaithi, and Piyumi Wijesekara—just returned from a 45-day simulated journey to Mars, testing the boundaries of human endurance and teamwork within NASA’s HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) habitat at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Their groundbreaking work on HERA’s Campaign 7 Mission 2 contributes to NASA’s efforts to […]
Biden’s LNG Permitting Pause Is No More
date: 2024-07-02, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Raging wildfires are forcing evacuations on several Greek islands • More rain is forecast for China’s sodden rice growing regions • Temperatures in Death Valley could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit early next week.
THE TOP FIVE
- Judge blocks Biden’s LNG permitting pause
A federal court last night blocked President Biden’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export terminals. The administration issued a temporary moratorium on new LNG approvals in January, allowing the Energy Department to study what effect terminals have on the climate, a move seen as a big win for climate activists. But it was quickly followed by a lawsuit from 16 states accusing the administration of violating federal law. A Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana agreed that the pause was hurting states, and said it was “completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy [sic].” The Energy Department disagreed with the ruling and is considering its next steps. Some early reaction and analysis to the news:
- “The ruling represents the latest example of how the judiciary is increasingly constraining President Biden’s climate goals at the behest of conservative and corporate challengers.” –Maxine Joselow at The Washington Post.
- A “major victory for American energy.” –Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.
- “We remain committed to informing our decisions with the best available economic and environmental analysis, underpinned by sound science.” –White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández.
- “Although the court order immediately enjoins the pause, the short-term practical effects are likely to be minimal.” –Jennifer A. Dlouhy at Bloomberg News.
- Hurricane Beryl gains strength and aims for Jamaica
Hurricane Beryl has strengthened into a monster category 5 storm, the earliest storm of that magnitude ever to form in the Atlantic in recorded history. The system slammed into Grenada’s Carriacou Island, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines, leaving catastrophic damage in its wake. “In half an hour, Carriacou was flattened,” Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said. The National Hurricane Center said the storm had maximum sustained winds of 165 miles per hour and was “still intensifying” this morning as it headed toward Jamaica. “Hurricane Beryl could never have formed where and when it did were it not for the unprecedented heat in the Atlantic Ocean,” wrote Jake Bittle at Grist, noting that surface temperatures are as much as 3 or 4 degrees Fahrenheit above average.
- Analysts expect Q2 drop in Tesla deliveries
Tesla is expected to report Q2 deliveries today. Analysts think the EV maker will show a 6% drop in deliveries compared to the same period last year, marking the second declining quarter in a row. The company has “few excuses for its sales slowdown,” wrote Dana Hull and Kara Carlson at Bloomberg. The problem is straightforward, they added: “Tesla’s older lineup of vehicles is having a harder time keeping up with fresher offerings from rival EV manufacturers.”
Meanwhile, Chinese EV powerhouse BYD just reported its highest ever monthly sales of new energy vehicles, and a 21% rise in EV sales for the second quarter. The total number of vehicles sold (426,039) is about 12,000 short of what is expected from Tesla, but the gap is closing.
- Biden administration proposes federal rules to protect workers from
heat
The Biden administration today put forward a proposal to “establish the nation’s first-ever federal safety standard addressing excessive heat in the workplace.” The rules would require employers to identify heat hazards, have response plans for heat illness and heat emergencies, and provide access to shade, water, and rest breaks. New workers would also need to be acclimatized to higher temperatures. A White House official told The Associated Press that we’d see more penalties for heat-related violations in workplaces. If finalized, the rule would apply to about 36 million workers and reduce heat-related health problems in the workplace significantly. The plan is “likely to face legal challenges from businesses and lobbying groups that have staunchly opposed such a measure,” The Guardian reported.
Also today, the EPA will publish a new report outlining how climate change continues to affect the U.S., so be on the lookout for that.
- ITER fusion project completes its magnet system
An international fusion mega-project long in the making has received a delivery of 19 massive, 56-foot-tall magnets that are essential for controlling and confining the reactions that will take place inside its tokamak. Here is a rendering of the magnets surrounding the tokamak (human for scale!):
ITER
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, which is under construction in southern France, will be the world’s largest experimental fusion facility once completed. It is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power, which is the process by which stars produce energy and, if harnessed on Earth, could provide abundant clean energy. While the delivery of the magnets is a big step, the ITER project is struggling with delays and mounting costs. Its first fusion reaction was slated to happen next year but that timeline was recently pushed back by 10 years to 2035. Another large fusion reactor called JT-60SA fired up last October in Japan.
THE KICKER
A new bill set to be signed into law in Michigan will prohibit the state’s homeowners’ associations from banning projects that improve a home’s energy efficiency, like rooftop solar or EV chargers.
https://heatmap.news/politics/lng-pause-biden-judge-block
‘Kitten season’ sounds cute, but it’s one of the toughest times for LA’s cat crusaders
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The LAist
Summer is one of the most difficult times for volunteers working to save cats and kittens on Los Angeles streets. There are ways you can help.
https://laist.com/kitten-season-sounds-cute-but-its-one-of-the-toughest-times-for-las-cat-crusaders
California voters will decide an anti-crime measure in November. Democrats say this one is better
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The LAist
The Democrats’ proposal calls for a new felony for drug dealers who cut fentanyl into other drugs and for increased penalties for repeat thieves.
Podcast: It Shipped that Way (v2!)
date: 2024-07-02, from: Accidentally in Code
Returned to the It Shipped That Way podcast to talk about my book.
https://cate.blog/2024/07/02/podcast-it-shipped-that-way-v2/
Salesforce investors reject plan to add extra $20M to Benioff’s total pay
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Board to take non-binding vote at mega SaaS haus into consideration
Investors have turned down billionaire Marc Benioff’s bid for greater compensation from Salesforce, the SaaS company he helped found 25 years ago, a proxy statement filed on Monday reveals.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/salesforce_benioff_20m/
There’s a new economic indicator in town. And it’s powered by AI.
date: 2024-07-02, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Standard economic indicators like the unemployment and inflation rates are backward-looking. Now, a new tool, the Zeta Economic Indicator, analyzes the economy in real time and utilizes artificial intelligence. We’ll hear more. Plus, regulators in France are set to level antitrust charges against chipmaker Nvidia, and the EU says a Meta subscription service in violates Europe’s Digital Markets Act. Then, is paying farmers to conserve Colorado River water worth the cost?
Will Sri Lanka debt deal solve its economic woes?
date: 2024-07-02, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Sri Lanka’s President Ranil Wickremesinghe is presenting lawmakers with a deal made by creditors after the country’s 2022 financial crisis, but the government is facing criticism over the agreement. Also: Samsung workers in South Korea are planning a strike. Then, David Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly — the maker of popular weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound — says more needs to be done on global drug counterfeiting.
Biden says US leaders will be ‘free to ignore the law’ after Supreme Court decision
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Hurricane Beryl eyes Jamaica, strengthens into Category 5 storm.
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/30/hurricane-beryl-category-4-barbados-islands
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-02, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
“I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”
Google Translate now fluent in 110 additional languages from Abkhaz to Zulu
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ta shoh scansh mie, son ymmyd
Google is adding more languages to Google Translate – lots more. This time around, 110 of them, including Manx.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/google_translate_expansion/
How tech went from free love to pay-per-click
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
FOSS, AI, blockchain, and the cycle of empty nonsense
Devconf.cz This year, along with all the usual in-depth technical talks about Linux at Red Hat’s Devconf.cz developer conference, there were also several people there to promote AI-linked projects and the tech bros’ previous favorites – blockchain projects.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/foss_ai_blockchain/
Get started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico with our latest book
date: 2024-07-02, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Our book, Get Started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico, has been revised with coverage of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and more.
The post Get started with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico with our latest book appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/get-started-micropython-pico-new-book/
MIT’s bionic leg upgrade leaves amputees walking like the wind
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Researchers expect treatment to be available clinically in around 5 years
Researchers have shown a combination of special surgery and a bionic limb can enhance walking speed in some amputees by 40 percent, within the range of able-bodied individuals.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/bionic_leg_interface_mit/
Sols 4232-4233: Going For a Ride, Anyone?
date: 2024-07-02, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Monday, July 1, 2024 Have you ever wondered what it might look like to ride along with the rover? Probably not as much as we have here on the planning team, where we are looking at the images on a daily basis. I always wish I could walk around there myself, or […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4232-4233-going-for-a-ride-anyone/
‘Almost every Apple device’ vulnerable to CocoaPods supply chain attack
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Dependency manager used in millions of apps leaves a bitter taste
CocoaPods, an open-source dependency manager used in over three million applications coded in Swift and Objective-C, left thousands of packages exposed and ready for takeover for nearly a decade – thereby creating opportunities for supply chain attacks on iOS and macOS apps, according to security researchers.…
Shared reality
date: 2024-07-02, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>Online interactions are weirdly unique. They happen in shared, digital spaces—forums, chats, comment sections, social media platforms—where it’s easy to forget that more often than not, the people interacting with each other don’t share the same day-to-day reality. And sometimes that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of topics we can chat about that don’t have a connection with our lives. But there are also plenty who do have a connection and a profound one. From food to politics, from everything related to society to cultural norms. We all live in bubbles whether we like it or not. And it’s easy to forget about this fact when interacting online. Every time I stumble on someone making some wild claims about something I have to remind myself that maybe that specific thing appears wild to me because of my circumstances and it might be perfectly normal and reasonable somewhere else. And that’s why when I’m interacting with someone online I try to be both charitable in my interpretations of what others are saying and also generally curious and open-minded. Sometimes asking a question is all it takes to make a bubble pop and help a conversation move to a more interesting place.</p> <hr>
<p>Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.</p>
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https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/Eny0wqSO82gDriSS
LASD Seeks Public’s Help Locating Man Missing from Canyon Country
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Missing Persons Unit investigators are asking for the public’s help locating At Risk Missing Person Tim Paul Hood
https://scvnews.com/lasd-seeks-publics-help-locating-man-missing-from-canyon-country/
Today in SCV History (July 2)
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1869 – Sanford Lyon (as in Lyons Avenue) appointed postmaster of Petroliopolis (today’s Eternal Valley Cemetery area) [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-2/
Austin hosts Ukraine’s defense chief ahead of NATO summit
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/austin-hosts-ukraine-s-defense-chief-ahead-of-nato-summit/7681786.html
Trouble in space as Boeing’s not going, and China’s back from the Moon
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vultures chew over a busy few days in orbit with a transatlantic chat
Kettle It’s been a busy time for space, with Boeing’s test pilots stuck (at time of writing) on the International Space Station due to a faulty capsule, and then being forced to take shelter from debris.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/kettle_iss_boeing/
Hello Auto Group Launches Annual Back-to-School Backpack Drive
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Hello Auto Group has announced its third annual Back-to-School Backpack Drive. This year, the Hellow Auto Group will partner with three Santa Clarita Valley school districts, Sulphur Springs Union School District, Newhall School District and Castaic Union School District, t support students preparing for the upcoming school year.
https://scvnews.com/hello-auto-group-launches-annual-back-to-school-backpack-drive/
Baddies hijack Korean ERP vendor’s update systems to spew malware
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Notorious ‘Andariel’ crew takes a bite of HotCroissant backdoor for fresh attack
A South Korean ERP vendor’s product update server has been attacked and used to deliver malware instead of product updates, according to local infosec outfit AhnLab.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/korean_erp_backdoor_malware_attack/
Dev Digest 122 – Cracks in the polyfill
date: 2024-07-02, from: Chris Heilmann
Hello and join me to learn about removing malicious code, what the web is up to and why there are some cool new careers in AI. News and articles First things first: if you use Polyfill.io delete it immediately from your server! The – by now pretty unnecessary library – has been acquired and is […]
https://christianheilmann.com/2024/07/02/dev-digest-122-cracks-in-the-polyfill/
China working on standard for brain-computer interfaces
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
This is more than a thought bubble: Beijing aspires to dominate international standards
China’s government wants to develop a standard for brain-computer interfaces.…
US, Panama partnering to address Darien Gap migration
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-panama-partnering-to-address-darien-gap-migration/7681748.html
When Lying, Cheating, Thieves Prevail
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Supreme Court’s political bias reached a crescendo with today’s absurd ruling.
The post When Lying, Cheating, Thieves Prevail appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/when-lying-cheating-thieves-prevail/
Like Uber, but for rainy days: Japan eases its ridesharing restrictions
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Nation turns once again to technology to help with declining population
Japan has loosened its ride-sharing rules to allow more passengers to use the services when it rains.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/japan_lets_more_ridehailing_vehicles/
Trump seeks to set aside New York verdict hours after Supreme Court ruling
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
New York — Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked the New York judge who presided over his hush money trial to set aside his conviction and delay his sentencing scheduled for later this month.
The letter to Judge Juan M. Merchan cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier Monday and asked the judge to delay Trump’s sentencing while he weighs the high court’s decision and how it could influence the New York case, the people said.
The people could not discuss details of the letter before it was made public and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution.
Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, arising from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a hush money payment just before the 2016 presidential election.
Merchan instituted a policy in the run-up to the trial requiring both sides to send him a one-page letter summarizing their arguments before making longer court filings. He said he did that to better manage the docket, so he was not inundated with voluminous paperwork.
YouTube confirms it’ll pull AI fakes in 48 hours if a complaint’s upheld
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As ever, terms and conditions apply
YouTube has enacted privacy guidelines that allow people to request the removal of AI-generated videos that mimic them.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/youtube_deepfake_privacy_rules/
Deepening Russia-North Korea ties test US-South Korea deterrence strategy
date: 2024-07-02, from: VOA News USA
washington — The United States’ commitment to providing extended deterrence to South Korea is being put to the test, with some South Korean politicians publicly questioning the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear umbrella after Russia and North Korea reached a new defense pact.
Debate over the U.S. extended deterrence was sparked by Representative Na Kyung Won, a five-term lawmaker of South Korea’s ruling People Power Party, who is running for the party leadership.
“The deterrence under the solid South Korea-U.S. alliance is currently working, but it does not guarantee the capacity to respond to the future changes in the security environment,” Na said in a social media post last week.
“The international situation, such as cooperation between North Korea and Russia, is adding uncertainty to the security of South Korea,” she added, referring to the stronger military ties between Russia and North Korea, bolstered by the comprehensive strategic partnership treaty signed by Russia’s President Vladmir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang last month.
The new treaty mandates Russia and North Korea to immediately assist each other militarily if either of them is attacked by a third country. The prospect of quasi-automatic Russian involvement in any future war between the two Koreas is now causing alarm in Seoul.
The credibility of extended deterrence is a frequent topic of conversation in today’s South Korea, where citizens must contend with seemingly endless threats and provocations from the North.
Seoul is doing its best to allay citizens’ fears by invoking the April 2023 Washington Declaration, which reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea through its extended nuclear umbrella as well as robust missile defense and conventional forces.
The Washington Declaration outlined a series of measures, including the establishment of the bilateral Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG), to deter North Korea’s use of nuclear weapons.
In the joint declaration, the U.S. additionally vowed to enhance the visibility of its strategic assets, such as a nuclear-armed submarine, around the Korean Peninsula.
The Washington Declaration’s measures are collectively sufficient to deter aggression from Pyongyang, according to some experts in the U.S.
The joint declaration was “unprecedented in its strength and clarity,” Evans Revere, a former State Department official who negotiated with North Korea, told VOA’s Korean Service on Sunday. “And the NCG process is designed to be flexible, creative, and allow for adaptation to a broad range of future contingencies.”
Troop presence
David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces colonel who served on the Combined Forces Command of the U.S and South Korea, told VOA’s Korean Service on Sunday that a large troop presence on the Korean Peninsula demonstrates Washington’s firm commitment to the defense of its key ally.
“How many Russian troops are committed to North Korea? There is no comparison as to the commitment,” said Maxwell, who now serves as vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.
Currently, the U.S. has about 28,500 service members deployed in South Korea.
In contrast, Elbridge Colby, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development in the Trump administration, suggested the U.S. might have to go beyond the Washington Declaration to ensure the security of South Korea.
“I think we need to take very seriously how dire the threat from North Korea is, and that the Washington Declaration is not a solution,” Colby told VOA’s Korean Service on the phone last week.
“It’s been a failure that both North Korea and China are a nuclear breakout. They’re increasing the size and the sophistication of the nuclear forces. So it’s very unsurprising that serious people in South Korea are coming to this conclusion.”
Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, believes some South Koreans may lack confidence in the Washington Declaration because the NCG’s work is not made public.
“Because the NCG that it established has carried out most of its work in secrecy and provided little substance to reassure the South Korean people, many of the South Koreans with whom I have spoken are concerned that it is an inadequate means for rebuilding South Korean trust,” Bennett told VOA’s Korean Service on Sunday.
Responding to an inquiry from VOA’s Korean Service, a State Department spokesperson said Thursday that “the U.S. and the ROK are enhancing and strengthening extended deterrence through the Nuclear Consultative Group, established as part of the Washington Declaration.”
The spokesperson also stressed that the Washington Declaration is “a landmark U.S. extended deterrence commitment to the Republic of Korea.” The Republic of Korea is South Korea’s official name.
Earlier last week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell maintained that the series of mechanisms put in place between the United States and South Korea through the Washington Declaration “has given us what we need to work with” regarding the alliance’s deterrence posture.
North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles Monday, one of which is presumed to have failed and fallen inland near Pyongyang. The latest missile test came just five days after North Korea conducted a ballistic missile test in which it claimed to have successfully tested its multiple-warhead missile technology. South Korean authorities have dismissed such a claim.
Eunjung Cho contributed to this report.
Castaic district’s budget gets OK with full transportation
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
The Castaic Union School District governing board approved a budget for the 2024-25 school year that includes an operating transportation department that should allow for the same routes to be […]
The post Castaic district’s budget gets OK with full transportation appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/castaic-districts-budget-gets-ok-with-full-transportation/
Excessive heat warning for SCV set to run through the weekend
date: 2024-07-02, from: The Signal
Officials are warning of excessive heat coming to the Santa Clarita Valley in the near future, with temperatures near or in excess of 105 degrees expected over the weekend. According […]
The post Excessive heat warning for SCV set to run through the weekend appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/excessive-heat-warning-for-scv-set-to-run-through-the-weekend/
CSUN Students Find Stable Living Situations Through CREA Scholarship
date: 2024-07-02, from: SCV New (TV Station)
As a high schooler, Angelina Zuniga Kramer accompanied her stepfather to construction sites where he worked, and it inspired her to dream big
https://scvnews.com/csun-students-find-stable-living-situations-through-crea-scholarship/
Prognosis: Improving
date: 2024-07-02, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I saw a perfect example of what Robert Taylor’s refreshing article (pun intended) was talking about at the Summer Solstice parade.
The post Prognosis: Improving appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/prognosis-improving/
Brace for new complications in big tech takedowns after Supreme Court upended regulatory rules
date: 2024-07-02, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Matters like antitrust cases against AI players, Adobe’s subscription mess, and net neutrality could be decided by judges – not experts
Analysis The US Supreme Court has ruled that the judges should no longer defer to government agency interpretations of ambiguous laws – a decision with potential ramifications for some of the biggest cases against tech companies.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/supreme_court_chevron/
Crossmark community consultation: What did we learn?
date: 2024-07-02, from: Crossref Blog
In the first half of this year we’ve been talking to our community about post-publication changes and Crossmark. When a piece of research is published it isn’t the end of the journey—it is read, reused, and sometimes modified. That’s why we run Crossmark, as a way to provide notifications of important changes to research made after publication. Readers can see if the resesarch they are looking at has updates by clicking the Crossmark logo. They also see useful information about the editorial process, and links to things like funding and registered clinical trials. All of this contributes to what we call the integrity of the scholarly record.
Crossmark has been around a long time and the context around it is constantly changing. It last had a major update in 2016 and in 2020 we removed fees for its use.
The past few years have seen a more intense focus on research integrity, leading to more retractions and calling out large-scale manipulation of editorial processes. At the same time, we haven’t seen an increase in the uptake of Crossmark, which is still used by only a minority of our members. We would like to know why the uptake is low and whether there is more we can do in this area. To dig into this, in the first part of 2024 we reached out to members of our community.
What did we do?
We wanted to learn about attitudes towards Crossmark and related aspects of research integrity. This was done in several ways:
- Structured interviews with eight of our members.
- Round tables at Crossref LIVE events in Bogota and Nairobi
- Surveying a selection of our members, which led to 94 responses.
The topics we asked about were related to how post-publication updates are made and communicated, and which metadata demonstrates good practice.
We are extremely grateful to the members who contributed. They provided valuable feedback and have helped to shape the future of Crossmark and our approach to the integrity of the scholarly record.
What did we find?
Across the various groups there were a few common themes, which fell into several areas.
-
Communication of updates is highly valued, and seen as the most important role that Crossmark can play. Some of those we spoke to would like readers to see if there is an update as soon as a page opens, without having to open a popup. This could be done by having a logo that changes colour, shape, or size.
-
Conversely, not as much enthusiasm was shown for the metadata assertions. These are additional fields that can be displayed to readers in the Crossmark popup. There wasn’t a strong consensus on which commonly-made assertions are the most important for research integrity.
-
There is diversity in attitudes towards making updates to published works, what research integrity means, and approaches to workflows for updates. Even within a single organisation, a number of different workflows and multiple staff members might be called on to update published research. This makes things complex and means that it can be difficult to fit Crossmark in.
-
There are technical challenges to getting started with Crossmark. Those responsible for implementing Crossmark are often technical staff who struggle with the documentation we provide in English. There is also no plugin for OJS, a widely-used open source editorial software. It is more difficult to deposit Crossmark metadata for books than journal articles, and many article types don’t permit Crossmark metadata at all. On the other hand, those who successfully installed Crossmark found it easy to use and low-maintenance.
Overall, it seems that Crossmark still has an important role to play but there are changes and improvements we can make.
What’s next?
Here are the main areas we intend to follow up on in the coming months.
Implementation
We need to look at how to make implementation more straight-forward. Can we provide multilingual documentation, plugins, run workshops or webinars, or make changes to Crossmark to lower the barrier to entry?
Understanding workflows
Can we collaborate with our members and other organisations to reach a better understanding of how to update published works? Are there alternative workflows we need to support? Have we made it too difficult to understand and implement the options we currently have?
While updates are always likely to be rare, we want to help members understand the benefits of making them. We talked to some members who were proud of never having published a retraction or correction, which left us wondering whether they are missing legitimate opportunities to correct the scholarly record. We also know that for some members and many work types (preprints, for example), updates are made without a separate published notification. Can we better understand the role that the published updates play and communicate updates even if there isn’t a published notice?
Ongoing feedback
Clearly one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to implementing and communicating updates. We need to find ways of keeping in touch with the community to test new solutions with as broad a range of members as possible. We want to avoid catering to a minority and leaving others struggling to find ways to implement a solution.
Custom metadata?
Is there an ongoing need for metadata assertions? Many of the assertions currently made are possible as standard metadata and others could be included in our deposit schema. We want to consider removing the option to add assertions. This needs more feedback from the community, especially those who currently make use of assertions.
Redesign the UI
Crossmark doesn’t have the recognition with readers we would like. Is there a way we can redesign it to make it more associated with Crossref and accurate metadata? We intend to explore different designs, and test them with members and readers.
https://www.crossref.org/blog/crossmark-community-consultation-what-did-we-learn/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-01, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump World Is Giddy Over Supreme Court Decision.
https://politicalwire.com/2024/07/01/trump-world-is-giddy-over-supreme-court-decision/
Nikki Haley voters could swing US presidential election
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Former South Carolina Governor and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley continued to draw support from Republican voters long after she dropped out of this year’s U.S. presidential race. VOA’s Dora Mekouar looks at how Haley supporters may help determine the winner of the election between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
https://www.voanews.com/a/nikki-haley-voters-could-swing-us-presidential-election-/7681340.html
Klay Thompson’s defection to Dallas adds to storied Bay Area pipeline
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Klay Thompson is the latest Bay Area sports legend to defect for a Dallas-based team.
State Farm seeks ‘massive’ insurance rate hike for California homeowners
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
The insurance giant is asking regulators to raise rates for the second time in months.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/01/state-farm-california-insurance-rate-hike-wildfire/
Newsom touts rival shoplifting and drugs ballot initiative to weaken Prop 47
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Both proposals would reverse provisions of 2014’s Prop 47, which reduced most drug possession and property crimes valued at $950 or less to misdemeanors and allowed for re-sentencing of those convicted of felonies for those offenses. The goal was depopulating crowded prisons and addressing social-justice concerns.
Letters: Restraint needed | Charreadas’ responsibility | No freebies | Justice for tribe | Trump economy
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
East Bay Times Letters to the Editor for July 2, 2024
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/01/letters-1782/
High-speed rail reaches major milestone for route between Bay Area and Los Angeles
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
The last segment of the Bay Area to L.A. route received environmental clearance.
Meet Me in Old Town Goleta
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the City of Goleta, announces the continuation of “Meet
The post Meet Me in Old Town Goleta appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/meet-me-in-old-town-goleta/
A Streaming Tax Bait and Switch in Santa Barbara
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The utility tax on cable television was narrow, to apply to cable-like technologies but not internet streaming. Until now.
The post A Streaming Tax Bait and Switch in Santa Barbara appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/a-streaming-tax-bait-and-switch-in-santa-barbara/
Triple Digit Heat Coming to SCV
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Los Angeles County Health Officer has issued an excessive heat warning for the Santa Clarita Valley Wednesday through Monday, July 8 as high temperatures have been forecast
https://scvnews.com/triple-digit-heat-coming-to-scv/
Letters: Costly closure | Christian home | Homeless services | Fire safety | Gun ownership | Jesus’ words
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Mercury News Letters to the Editor for July 2, 2024
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/01/letters-1781/
Supreme Court rules that Trump has significant criminal immunity
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Logic(s) Enters The Collective at Incite
date: 2024-07-01, from: Care
<p>Editor in Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman introduces The Collective, the new organizational configuration of Logic(s)</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/logic-s-enters-the-collective-at-incite
Warriors fans on social media react to Klay Thompson reportedly leaving for Mavericks
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
With Klay Thompson reportedly leaving the Warriors to sign with the Dallas Mavericks, here is how people are reacting to the news online
The Democrat Banished For Warning Us About Biden
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Lever News
A congressman faced a “quiet throat slit” for sounding the alarm — now his adviser discusses what may happen if Biden drops out.
https://www.levernews.com/the-democrat-banished-for-warning-us-about-biden/
Merger Between Six Flags, Cedar Fair Complete
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, the largest and most diverse amusement park operator in North America, announced Monday the successful completion of the merger of equals between Cedar Fair, L.P. and former Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, effective July 1,
https://scvnews.com/merger-between-six-flags-cedar-fair-complete/
Firefighters stop Canyon Country blaze
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
Los Angeles County Fire Department personnel responded to a half-acre brush fire in Canyon Country on Monday afternoon and it was knocked down at one and a half acres, according […]
The post Firefighters stop Canyon Country blaze appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/brush-fire-breaks-out-in-canyon-country/
Lilbits: Linux on Snapdragon X, a PlayStation Portal knockoff, and a cheap smart glasses dev kit
date: 2024-07-01, from: Liliputing
The first laptops and tablets with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chips are now available, and so far they all come with Windows 11 pre-installed. But Qualcomm has already made it clear that the chips can be used with other operating systems and the company has already done some work to bring […]
The post Lilbits: Linux on Snapdragon X, a PlayStation Portal knockoff, and a cheap smart glasses dev kit appeared first on Liliputing.
Contra Costa County school district faces unprecedented financial crisis
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Marcus Walton, communications director for the county’s office of education, called the situation “unprecedented,” but clarified that the district will remain fully operational.
Santa Barbara City College Welcomes Dan Le Guen-Schmidt as New Assistant Superintendent/Vice President, Human Resources
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Santa Barbara, Calif. (July 1, 2024) — Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) welcomes Dan Le Guen-Schmidt, MBA, SHRM-CP, as the new Assistant
The post Santa Barbara City College Welcomes Dan Le Guen-Schmidt as New Assistant Superintendent/Vice President, Human Resources appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Town Council to discuss soil permit in Castaic
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
The Land Use Committee for the Castaic Area Town Council is scheduled Monday night to discuss a plan proposed for the Valencia Commerce Center, which is part of the neighboring […]
The post Town Council to discuss soil permit in Castaic appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/town-council-to-discuss-soil-permit-in-castaic/
Garcia supports House passage of defense bill
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
News release Rep. Mike Garcia, R-Santa Clarita, last week voted in favor of the FY2025 Defense Appropriations Act, which passed the House. “This bill strengthens our military, better ensures […]
The post Garcia supports House passage of defense bill appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/garcia-supports-house-passage-of-defense-bill/
US military says European forces vigilant amid reports of terror alert
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
By Jack Phillips Contributing Writer The U.S. military on Sunday responded to reports that bases across Europe were placed on their second-highest level alert, saying that its European command will “remain […]
The post US military says European forces vigilant amid reports of terror alert appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
Solar-panel saga continues for east side
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
The city’s lawsuit over a judge’s $5 million ruling for a local mobile home park is headed back to the Second Appellate District for the Judicial Branch of California in […]
The post Solar-panel saga continues for east side appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/solar-panel-saga-continues-for-east-side/
Fourth of July Visitors Reminded That Fireworks are Always Prohibited on Los Padres National Forest
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
SOLVANG, Calif. – Los Padres National Forest officials are reminding Fourth of July visitors that the possession or use of fireworks—including the
The post Fourth of July Visitors Reminded That Fireworks are Always Prohibited on Los Padres National Forest appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Shakespeare Festival Summer Camp Lowers Age for Next Session
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Organizers for the Santa Clarita Shakespeare Festival summer camp were so blown away by the performances from its young actors in the Comedy of Errors, that the camp has decided to lower the age range of its next camp, which begins July 8.
https://scvnews.com/shakespeare-festival-summer-camp-lowers-age-for-next-session/
Dive Headfirst Into Swimming Pool Safety
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
You might be ready for a summer of swimming pool games like Marco Polo or simply frolicking and swimming your
The post Dive Headfirst Into Swimming Pool Safety appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/dive-headfirst-into-swimming-pool-safety/
Attorney General Bonta Issues Consumer Alert, Warns Californians about Text-Based Toll Charge Scams
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today issued a consumer alert following an uptick in text-based scams claiming consumers owe
The post Attorney General Bonta Issues Consumer Alert, Warns Californians about Text-Based Toll Charge Scams appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
Kurtenbach: Klay Thompson is gone and the Warriors’ situation has gone from bad to worse
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Klay Thompson is leaving for Dallas. He leaves behind serious wreckage in Golden State.
$20 billion for climate change and school construction bonds heading toward November ballot
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
California voters are expected to decide key spending decisions this fall
Sols 4229-4231: More Analyses of the Mammoth Lakes 2 Sample!
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
Earth Planning Date: Friday, June 28, 2024 After reviewing results from the Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA) experiment that were downlinked yesterday afternoon (Sols 4226-4228: A Powerful Balancing Act), the SAM team decided they’d like to go ahead with a second experiment to analyze the Mammoth Lakes 2 drilled sample. This experiment is known as the […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/sols-4229-4231-more-analyses-of-the-mammoth-lakes-2-sample/
NASA’s NEOWISE Infrared Heritage Will Live On
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s near-Earth-object-hunting mission NEOWISE is nearing its conclusion. But its work will carry on with NASA’s next-generation infrared mission: NEO Surveyor. After more than 14 successful years in space, NASA’s NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission will end on July 31. But while the mission draws to a close, another is taking shape, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/neowise/nasas-neowise-infrared-heritage-will-live-on/
Deputies arrest multiple people in retail theft operation, including two women with children
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
The Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station Crime Prevention Unit arrested several theft suspects, including two women who took three minors along with them on a heist, during a retail theft […]
The post Deputies arrest multiple people in retail theft operation, including two women with children appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
‘Agatha’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party’ Coming to The MAIN in August
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Mark your calendars for Agatha’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party, as it comes to The MAIN in Old Town Newhall Aug. 9, 10, 11 and Aug. 16, 17, 18.
https://scvnews.com/agathas-murder-mystery-dinner-party-coming-to-the-main-in-august/
Chaucer’s, Hooray
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
All of us who love books look forward to the next generation led by Jen and Greg
The post Chaucer’s, Hooray appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/chaucers-hooray/
France poised to bring ‘charges against Nvidia’
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Euro nation’s monopoly gendarmes cheesed off with GPU giant’s dominance
French regulators are reportedly poised to bring charges against Nvidia over alleged anti-competitive practices.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/french_nvidia_competition/
SpamSieve 3.0.5
date: 2024-07-01, from: Michael Tsai
SpamSieve 3.0.5 is a maintenance release for my Mac e-mail spam filter. It seems to work great with the current macOS Sequoia beta, though I expect another update will be required when Apple releases the AI-enabled beta of Mail later this summer. Unfortunately, Apple tends to make big changes to Mail through August, so we […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/01/spamsieve-3-0-5/
Keyboard Shortcut for Contextual Menus in Sequoia
date: 2024-07-01, from: Michael Tsai
Nathan Manceaux-Panot: Haven’t seen this mentioned yet: in macOS Sequoia, you can open a context menu by pressing ⌃⏎, for the current selection. Very nice—Windows has had this for ages! The shortcut is Control-Return. I’m looking forward to this, since I’ve often made the selection using the keyboard and don’t want my fingers to leave […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/01/keyboard-shortcut-for-contextual-menus-in-sequoia/
Stainless Steel Battery Case in iPhone 16
date: 2024-07-01, from: Michael Tsai
Ming-Chi Kuo (tweet, via Hacker News): Increasing the energy density of the battery cells will increase the battery temperature when running. To avoid overheating the battery, Apple uses the stainless steel battery case for the first time as a thermal solution. Stainless steel is not as effective as aluminum in dissipating heat, but it is […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/01/stainless-steel-battery-case-in-iphone-16/
Microsoft’s Suleyman on AI Scraping
date: 2024-07-01, from: Michael Tsai
Thomas Claburn: Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said this week that machine-learning companies can scrape most content published online and use it to train neural networks because it’s essentially “freeware.”Shortly afterwards the Center for Investigative Reporting sued OpenAI and its largest investor Microsoft “for using the nonprofit news organization’s content without permission or […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/07/01/microsofts-suleyman-on-ai-scraping/
Free Parking = Shoppers Downtown
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
The one-on-one relationship between retail sales volume and available shopping time should easily be discerned by even the most unaware city official.
The post Free Parking = Shoppers Downtown appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/free-parking-shoppers-downtown/
Supreme Court rules Trump has some immunity in federal election case
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
By Sam Dorman Contributing Writer The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for official, but not unofficial, acts — in a decision that’s expected to delay […]
The post Supreme Court rules Trump has some immunity in federal election case appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/07/supreme-court-rules-trump-has-some-immunity-in-federal-election-case/
Support Downtown Businesses
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
I just want to remind everyone that our local downtown businesses need your support.
The post Support Downtown Businesses appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/07/01/support-downtown-businesses/
Cassini Sees Saturn
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft captured this last “eyeful” of Saturn and its rings on March 27, 2004, as it continued its way to orbit insertion. This natural color image shows the color variations between atmospheric bands and features in the southern hemisphere of Saturn, subtle color differences across the planet’s middle B ring, as well as […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/cassini-sees-saturn/
Supreme Court orders rethink on Texas, Florida laws banning web moderation
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Sites and apps aren’t given a say? That doesn’t seem very free speech
The US Supreme Court on Monday told lower courts to reconsider separate, conflicting rulings on social media laws in Florida and Texas because those courts failed to properly think about the free speech rights of internet platforms.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/supreme_court_social_media/
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-07-01, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to poisoning attacks in a number of ways. How might that play out once internet advertising gets involved?
My latest blog post:
LLM Marketing Poison
https://labs.tomasino.org/llm-marketing-poison/
#llm #ai #marketing #advertising #web
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/112713214116057219
Apple Publishes “Longevity, by Design” White Paper
date: 2024-07-01, from: TidBITS blog
Although much of the white paper addresses issues surrounding repairability, Apple points out that the larger goal of longevity requires a more all-encompassing approach.
https://tidbits.com/2024/07/01/apple-publishes-longevity-by-design-white-paper/
A Story of Resignation and Revival
date: 2024-07-01, from: Care
<p>Personal narrative of michael falco-felderman, facilitator of The Collective (aka mf2), about their experiences and the future of their work on the The Collective</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/a-story-of-resignation-and-revival
Fixing Slack for iPhone’s “Only Some People Can Post” Error
date: 2024-07-01, from: TidBITS blog
If Slack on the iPhone displays “Only some people can post.” in channels where you should have posting permissions, force-quit it to fix the problem.
https://tidbits.com/2024/07/01/fixing-slack-for-iphones-only-some-people-can-post-error/
Editorial Note: On Medicine and the Body in Tech
date: 2024-07-01, from: Care
<p>Editorial Note from Editor Khadijah Abdurrahman for Logic(s) Issue 21</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/editorial-note-on-medicine-and-the-body-in-tech
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Energy Efficiency Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
You can take the real estate magnate out of development, but becoming a politician hasn’t made Donald Trump less invested in dishwashers and water flow. Here’s what he’s gotten right and wrong about at-home energy efficiency on the campaign trail.
All I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” [Jan. 5, 2024]
Fact check: Trump made this comment while discussing electric catapults and magnetic elevators on aircraft carriers. While there have certainly been problems with the roll-out of these advanced systems on the ships, none involved water-damaged magnets. Magnets are waterproof, and therefore their performance does not suffer from water damage.
“They want to talk about your dishwashers and how much water you’re going to have in your dishwasher, even though they don’t work and all of the other things that you have that were so precious and dear and that you never really appreciated until now because they want to take them away.” [December 2, 2023]
Fact check: As someone who lives in a New York City apartment, I would absolutely describe my dishwasher as “precious and dear,” so that part is true. It is also true that, as I explained last year, rules proposed by the Biden administration call for new dishwashers imported and made in the U.S. to use 34% less water, or no more than 3.3 gallons, during their default cycles by 2027. But it is not true that those dishwashers don’t work.
Energy-efficient dishwashers can take a long time to clean your dishes; many cycles last more than two hours and some up to three. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: In order to achieve the same level of cleanliness as old, water- and energy-inefficient dishwashers, new water- and energy-efficient dishwashers need to swish around longer.
But the “default cycles” are the only dishwasher mode the government restricts; “short cycle” modes, which require more water and take less time, are still allowed on dishwashers sold in the U.S. and aren’t regulated by the new rules. That fast mode just can’t be the default. As Wirecutter writes, “crappy cleaning performance and long cycles aren’t an inevitable outcome of efficiency standards,” and “if your dishwasher is slow and sucks (and a better detergent doesn’t fix the problem), blame the company that built it.”
“Now their new thing is your heating systems in the house. They don’t want you to have a modern-day heating system. They want you to use a heating system that will cost you at least $10,000 to buy and won’t work very well.” [August 24, 2023]
Fact check: It’s really gas furnace systems that are, technically speaking, dated. Gas furnaces were considered state-of-the-art in the 1920s and 1930s, while heat pump technology — which works by transferring, rather than generating, heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa — took off in the 1970s as a response to surging oil prices. Heat pumps can be up to five times more efficient than fossil-fuel furnaces, according to electrification advocacy group Rewiring America, which means that at least 70% of people could save money on their energy bills by switching from fossil fuel heaters, the group estimates.
The cost of a heat pump itself varies widely depending on size (how much house it has to heat), type (geothermal vs. air source), and efficiency, then when you add in factors like the cost to refit you existing HVAC system and the cost of labor, well, it adds up. While heat pumps aren’t cheap, they do at least serve as both a furnace and an air conditioner, two appliances for the price of one, an investment that can pay back over time, Rewiring America said.
“You want to wash your beautiful hair. And you stand under a shower and the suds never go — the water comes out very slowly. I’m sure you’ve seen this. It usually takes place in new hotels and new homes.” [August 24, 2023]
Fact check: This might have been true when Seinfeld was on the air, but it hasn’t been for quite a while. Modern low-flow shower heads are specifically designed to “push out water that feels like a higher pressure even with a lower flow rate,” U.S. News and World Report writes.
When Trump was on his way out of the White House, his administration reinterpreted a 2013 regulation about how much water can flow out of a showerhead. “Manufacturers [had not demanded] the rollback,” The Washington Post writes. “Instead, the call for more powerful showers came from Trump himself, who complained that the conservation standards led to low water pressure and a dissatisfying shower experience.” With four or five or more nozzles, as Trump had allowed, “you could have 10, 15 gallons per minute powering out of the showerhead, literally probably washing you out of the bathroom,” Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the energy conservation group Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told PBS.
Biden restored the old water flow regulations.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-energy-efficiency-fact-check
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Oil and Gas Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
For being so cozy with (not to mention bankrolled by) the oil and gas industry, Donald Trump still manages to get a lot wrong about the world’s dominant petroleum industry. Here’s everything he’s gotten wrong, and occasionally right, about the oil and gas industry while on the 2024 campaign trail.
“On January 6, we were energy independent.” [June 27, 2024]
Fact check: What does “energy independence” actually mean? Experts frequently dismiss the term as a political buzzword that isn’t helpful for understanding the United States’ position in the global energy market.
According to one definition, “energy independence” means that the United States produces more energy than it consumes. By this metric, the U.S. became energy independent in 2019, during the Trump administration, for the first time in 40 years, though it was the cumulative result of the shale boom that started in 2005 and stretched across three presidential administrations. By this same metric, U.S. “energy independence” actually reached its highest level in 70 years in 2022 under President Biden, not Trump.
Another way to define “energy independence” would be that the U.S. doesn’t import any energy. This definition would also make Trump’s statement inaccurate: In 2020 under Trump, the U.S. imported 7.9 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day. In 2023, under Biden, that number rose to 8.51 million barrels per day. Under both Trump and Biden, the U.S. has been a net exporter of oil products due in large part to its processing of crude oil. Check out this visualization from the U.S. from the Energy Information Administration for more granular detail on U.S. petroleum flows.
“We’re refining the oil. We have our refinery for that oil. It’s really, I call it tar. It’s not oil. It’s terrible. We have real stuff, but we’re refining it in Houston. So for all of the environmentalists, you ought to look at that because all of that tar is going right up into the atmosphere. You just ought to take a look. It’s the only plant that can do it. We have the only plants that can take tar and make it into oil.” [ March 6, 2024]
Fact check: Just because Trump decides to call something “tar” doesn’t mean it actually is tar. What he seems to be talking about here are the Canadian oil sands, sometimes called tar sands, which contain bitumen. The heavy, dirty, and diluted crude oil is transported via rail and pipeline from Canada to Texas, which is where most (but contrary to Trump’s claim, not all) of the world’s specialized heavy oil refineries are located.
Extracting, transporting, and refining bitumen is a pollution-heavy process. “All of that tar” doesn’t literally go “right up into the atmosphere,” but the refining process does emit benzene, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide, which are known to increase instances of cancer, asthma, and other health conditions in the people who live or work nearby.
“Just yesterday, Biden blocked the export of American natural gas to other countries … Now, why he stopped it, I guess it was the environmentalists. I guess. But it’s good for the environment, not bad. And it’s good for our country. I will approve the export terminals on my very first day back.” [Jan. 27, 2024]
Fact check: This is wrong in a number of ways. Let’s take it from the top: First, Biden did not block the export of liquified natural gas to other countries; he temporarily paused the approval of new licenses to export LNG, including 17 that had been in the, er, pipeline. The United States is already the top exporter of LNG in the world, with output expected to double by the end of the decade from projects that are already licensed and under construction. The LNG licensing pause “will not impact our ability to continue supplying LNG to our allies in the near-term,” the Biden administration has said; current exports have been more than enough to meet Europe’s needs so far, even accounting for the war in Ukraine.
The permitting process will resume once the Department of Energy has updated its criteria for determining whether new LNG export terminals are in the “public interest” once their climate impacts are considered.
Now, about those climate impacts: It’s true that natural gas burns “cleaner” than coal, producing about 40% less carbon dioxide (and about 30% less than oil). But natural gas is also largely composed of methane, “a climate-altering super pollutant,” Jeremy Symons, an environmental and political analyst and strategist, told Heatmap.
While methane breaks down more quickly in the atmosphere than CO2, it also traps more heat — about 80 times more heat over the course of 20 years. The process of liquifying natural gas not only requires additional energy, it also introduces new opportunities for methane to leak, adding to the fuel’s climate impacts. Once all those leaks have been quantified, argues Cornell University researcher Robert Howarth, LNG is not only not beneficial to the environment, it’s actually worse than other fossil fuels. Howarth’s paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, and some have questioned his conclusions in the past. But there’s no question that building new LNG facilities will lock the U.S. into producing planet-warming fuel for years to come.
LNG certainly isn’t “good for the environment” of the people who live near fracking sites and export terminals, either, where health issues are rampant. In addition to methane, LNG plants release volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to higher instances of cancer, asthma, and birth defects.
“You have the highest energy costs in the entire country. In the first year, they’re going to be reduced by 50% because we’re going to drill, baby, drill.” [Jan. 23, 2024]
Fact check: Trump made these remarks after winning the New Hampshire primary — and they’re wrong. For one thing, while energy is expensive in the Granite State, New Hampshire’s Department of Energy says its energy costs are the fifth-highest in the lower 48.
There’s an even bigger fallacy in Trump’s statement, though: that drilling can quickly lower energy prices. For one thing, oil from new leases doesn’t hit the market for at least four years, according to the Government Accountability Office. (Offshore drilling takes even longer since building the rigs alone can take two to three years.) As NPR explains, there are also operational limits; drilling new wells is “not as simple as turning a spigot and watching oil gush out.”
Much to the dismay of environmentalists, the Biden administration has also been keeping pace with Trump’s historic drilling. In fact, as of 2024, the U.S. is producing more domestic crude than at any point during Trump’s presidency.
But even with all this new domestic crude, the U.S. is still susceptible to fluctuations in the global price of oil. That’s partially because the U.S. imports a different kind of oil than it exports — what those in the trade call light, sweet crude, compared to the gunkier, heavy crude most U.S. refineries are set up for. Reconfiguring refineries to handle the light crude oil “could underserve some product markets and idle (or even strand) the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in refinery conversion capacity,” the American Petroleum Institute warns. Plus, it would also take even more time.
All that means that the U.S. is stuck relying on importing and exporting oil even if domestic production ramps up even more than it already has. And that, in turn, means we’re at the mercy of fluctuations in global energy costs, which remain out of the White House’s singular control.
One more thing to note: “The oil industry can decide to produce more oil whenever it wants,” the Center for American Progress, a liberal public policy think tank, explains, noting that the oil industry is sitting on “more than 9,000 approved — but unused — drilling permits on federal lands.” This is the base of the criticism that the oil industry is raking in “unprecedented profits” and burdening Americans with an artificially high cost of energy.
“Energy caused inflation, and energy has destroyed many families. Energy is considered very strongly. Energy is considered a country killer.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: Economists mostly agree that “energy caused” the spike in inflation that we’ve seen since 2020, so in that sense, Trump is correct. But in making this argument, he inadvertently endorses the case for clean energy — since renewables aren’t subject to the same kinds of supply volatility as fossil fuels, they are therefore considered intrinsically deflationary.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and others for oil. ‘Please, please, please help us,’ Joe Biden says, and yet we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country anywhere in the world. We are a nation that just recently heard that Saudi Arabia and Russia will be reducing their oil production while at the same time substantially increasing the price. And we met that threat by announcing that we will no longer be drilling for oil in large areas in Alaska or elsewhere, anywhere in our states. We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal, yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal is fake. It is really the green new scam.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: First, the United States is the top oil-producing country globally, followed by Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is true that the U.S. eased oil sanctions on Venezuela late last year, though that reprieve was explicitly temporary and contingent on the country holding free and fair elections.
Trump also appears to be referencing the Biden administration’s recent decision to cancel oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and block 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska from new drilling. While that does qualify as a large area in Alaska, the moves notably do not stop ConocoPhillips’ controversial Willow drilling project from going forward.
Trump further seems to be alluding to Biden’s campaign promise to not approve any new drilling (“ …anywhere in our states!”), but that hasn’t exactly gone to plan; although Biden issued a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands one week after taking office, the administration then lifted that pause a little over a year later in the face of numerous legal and political challenges. Over the summer, however, the Interior Department did raise the cost of drilling on federal lands.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-oil-gas-fact-check
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Electric Vehicles Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
Donald Trump claims to be a “big fan” of electric vehicles despite making them a frequent target of derision on the campaign trail. He might be a bigger fan, though, if he got his facts straight. Here’s what Trump has gotten right and wrong about EVs since 2021.
“To China, if you’re listening — President Xi, you and I are friends, but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you are building in Mexico right now, and you think you are going to get that, not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the car to us — no. We are going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the lot.” [March 16, 2024]
Fact check: “There actually are no operating Chinese-owned EV factories in Mexico,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an expert on Chinese climate policy, told me. “So this is very preemptive at this point.”
But it is also, probably, only a matter of time: BYD, which last year passed Tesla as the world’s No. 1 EV maker, is reportedly scouting plant locations in Mexico, and could confirm plans as soon as the second half of 2024. That has made U.S. automakers justifiably nervous. As Robinson Meyer previously wrote for Heatmap, “BYD recently advertised an $11,000 plug-in hybrid targeted at the Chinese market … Even doubling its price with tariffs would keep it firmly among [the United States’] most affordable new vehicles.”
In Mazzocco’s opinion, this isn’t wholly a bad thing — “there’s a point of value to competition that we shouldn’t forget” — and the threat of cheap Chinese EVs has already driven American automakers like Ford to pivot their electric lineups.
But “EVs have encapsulated everybody’s fears of competition with China,” Mazzocco said. The rude awakening has been that they are “actually better at something than the Americans are.” As a result, Biden and Trump are jostling to look tougher on Beijing ahead of the election, especially since big auto manufacturing states like Michigan and Ohio could potentially decide control of the White House. Biden has already ordered the Commerce Department to investigate the potential national security threat of Chinese-made EVs, which currently make up only about 2% of EV imports; Polestar became the first Chinese-owned EV company to make moves in the U.S. last year, but it’s hardly thriving. Meanwhile, Trump has warned that “it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country” if he isn’t elected.
“If we build all the charging booths that are necessary, our country would go bankrupt. It would cost like $3 trillion. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” [Feb. 17, 2024]
Fact check: $3 trillion is a huge number, and it is also very inaccurate in this case. While there are valid concerns about the Biden administration’s high-speed electric vehicle push, Trump almost certainly got his “$3 trillion” price tag from the total cost of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which aims to address significantly more than just the country’s EV-charging infrastructure.
In fact, the BIL earmarks a comparatively small $7.5 billion for the development of 500,000 public charging stations, although even this is a “generational-level investment,” Noah Barnes, the communications director of the Electrification Coalition, told me. With just a fraction of $3 trillion, the U.S. will be able to jumpstart the “national network of EV chargers that will be necessary to power the next generation of vehicles and end our dependence on oil from countries that don’t share our values.”
But what would it cost to build and operate all the charging booths necessary to meet the current federal target of zero-emission cars making up half of new vehicle sales by 2030? A 2022 report from McKinsey & Company estimated that the U.S. will need “1.2 million public EV chargers and 28 million private EV chargers” by 2030 to meet Biden’s zero-emission sales goals. Those public chargers would cost about $38 billion, including the hardware, planning, and installation. Wrap in the cost to residences, workplaces, and depots, and the total cost of public and private charging installation approaches $97 billion. In a separate analysis, AlixPartners, a consulting firm, found that it would take $50 billion to build the charging infrastructure to meet the 2030 zero-emission vehicle goal in the U.S., and $300 billion worldwide.
Needless to say, though, there are a thousand billions in a trillion, so whatever way you cut it, it certainly would not cost the U.S. $3 trillion to build enough charging stations to accommodate zero-emission vehicles.
“I will also rescue the ethanol industry by canceling crooked Joe Biden’s insane ethanol-killing electric vehicle mandate on day one.” [Dec. 20, 2023]
Fact check: It’s not wrong to say that Biden has tried to reduce the role of liquid fuel in vehicles. Trump has gunned for Iowa voters by claiming Biden’s goal (albeit not a binding mandate) of ramping up EV sales will kill the local ethanol industry. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — Iowa’s former governor — has stressed that just because the administration is pushing for more EVs, “Does that mean we won’t have a need for E15 or E85” — gasoline blends that contain up to 15% and 85% ethanol content, respectively — “in the future? No.”
For example, new rules defining what qualifies as a “sustainable aviation fuel” — and thus for generous tax credits under the IRA — include ethanol and other plant-based fuels, despite opposition from environmental groups. “The Biden administration plans to invest $4.3 billion to support production of 35 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel annually by 2050,” presenting a significant opportunity for Iowa’s farmers, The Des Moines Register writes. As Vilsack added, “You have to think beyond cars and trucks.”
“They want to have electric trucks, so a truck — a big, beautiful truck like Peterbilt or one of them, with the big ones, 18 wheelers, they can go about 2,000 miles, they say, 2,000 on a big tank of diesel. An electric truck, comparable — which it can’t be comparable because you need so much room for the battery. Most of the area that you’re going to carry your goods, going to be battery. But assuming we take away that problem, which is not easy to take away, you’d have to stop approximately seven times to go 2,000 miles, right? You go about 300 miles, and they don’t want to change that.” [Dec. 20, 2023]
Fact check: There’s a lot to unpack here, but the gist is that most of these are the kind of early-stage problems you would find with any emerging technology. While the technology powering heavy-duty electric trucks is promising, there is still a long way to go when it comes to range and capacity.
Still, even a semi that goes only around 375 miles — longer than Trump’s estimate — on a single charge would ultimately be cheaper than a diesel truck, one 2021 study found. Because of the lower cost of ownership, electric semis have a net savings of $200,000 over a 15-year lifespan.
Battery size, and in particular battery weight, will be a major hurdle for long haul electric semis; shipping rates are often determined based on weight, among other factors, and since freight companies already operate on narrow margins, carrying less freight weight is a problem. But the technology is constantly improving. Plus, it’s pretty silly to claim electric truck developers “don’t want to change” their range per charge; electric truck manufacturers are constantly boasting about their new mileage numbers.
“This electric car thing is just crazy. If you want to drive, maybe, let’s say you are here. If you say, ‘Let’s take a drive to beautiful, safe Chicago. It’s so safe. Let’s drive there.’ How many times would you have to stop, about nine? It’s just crazy. They know it. They know it’s crazy.” [Dec. 20, 2023]
Fact check: The distance from Waterloo, Iowa — where Trump made these comments — to “beautiful, safe Chicago” is 269 miles. While the EVs with the worst range would have to charge one single time on a trip of that distance, in 2022, the average EV range was nearly 300 miles. Most cars would make it on a single charge.
“And now we are a nation that wants to make our revered and very powerful army tanks, the best in the world, all-electric, so that despite the fact they are also not able to go far, fewer pollutants will be released into the air as we blast our way through enemy territory, at least in an environmentally friendly way. And they also want to make our jet fighters with a green stamp of energy savings through losing 15% efficiency.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: Trump has repeatedly slammed the Biden administration for supposedly wanting to switch to “all-electric” tanks. This is mostly false, though it has its roots in the Army’s first-ever climate strategy, released early last year. In it, the Army stated that it aims to electrify all noncombat vehicles by 2035 and some tactical vehicles by 2050.
The reason the Army wants to go electric isn’t because of some woke environmentalist agenda, though. “The primary reason the Army wants to electrify its fighting vehicles is to reduce wartime casualties,” Bloomberg writes. “An all-electric fleet would mean personnel wouldn’t have to go on dangerous refueling missions that draw combat forces away from fighting the enemy … [and] electric vehicles are also much quieter and harder to spot on enemy surveillance systems because they generate so little heat.”
Trump has also slammed the Air Force for its climate action plan, although the roots of his claim that Biden wants to make jet fighters green by “losing 15% efficiency” are much less clear. He may be referring to the Air Force’s exploration of alternative fuels — which again, it is doing primarily for strategic reasons, since the Air Force reports 30% of the casualties in Afghanistan came from attacks on fuel and water convoys. “We’re not doing the climate plan for climate’s sake … Everything is about increasing our combat capability,” Edwin Oshiba, assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations, and the environment, told the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.
“The problem is you won’t find a charger. And if you do, it’s got lines.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: Many EV drivers are dissatisfied with the state of charging infrastructure in the U.S., and lines are an issue. While more charging stations will continue to open up as EVs become more popular — the IRA allotted $7.5 billion to build out 500,000 public chargers by 2030, with another $623 million in EV charging grants awarded last week — this seems, at the moment, to be a fair criticism.
“We are a nation whose leaders are demanding all-electric cars despite the fact that they can’t go far, cost too much, and whose batteries are produced in China with materials only available in China when an unlimited amount of gasoline is available inexpensively in the United States but is not available in China.” [Dec. 17, 2023]
Fact check: China indeed dominates the EV battery market. The Inflation Reduction Act — which Trump has promised to gut — has tried to change this by restricting EV tax credits only to models with batteries and components sourced from the U.S. or its trading partners. The law also includes funding to help seed a domestic EV battery and mineral supply chain.
And it’s working. As my colleague Neel Dhanesha wrote last year, “Battery manufacturers around the country — many of them automakers themselves — have announced over 1,000 gigawatt hours of U.S. battery production that’s slated to come online by 2028, far outpacing projected demand,” according to estimates from the Environmental Defense Fund. All told, domestic battery production has been the greatest beneficiary of the IRA, reports RMI, a clean energy research group.
“Let’s say your [electric] boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big powerful battery and the boat’s going down. Do I get electrocuted?” [Oct. 1, 2023]
Fact check: Battery packs on electric boats are designed to be watertight because, believe it or not, it’s crossed the mind of electric boat manufacturers that their products could potentially end up underwater. All the electric boat makers I spoke to in my lengthy investigation into this question told me the battery packs they use have a waterproofing standard that is either at, or just below, what is required for a submarine. The high-voltage batteries are also kept in “puncture-resistant shells” so they won’t be exposed to the water even if the boat somehow got mangled in an accident.
All this is a very long way of saying: No, you very likely won’t be electrocuted if your electric boat sinks. But you may get eaten by a shark!
“Hundreds of thousands of American jobs, your jobs, will be gone forever. By most estimates, under Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, 40% of all U.S. auto jobs will disappear.” [Sept. 27, 2023]
Fact check: As Heatmap has reported, there is little evidence to suggest that making electric vehicles will result in fewer jobs. “A number of analyses showed that electric vehicles could actually require more labor to build than gas-powered cars in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future,” Emily Pontecorvo writes.
“The happiest moment for somebody in an electric car is the first 10 minutes. In other words, you get it charged, and now for 10 minutes. The unhappiest part is the next hour because you’re petrified that you’re not going to be finding another charger.” [August 24, 2023]
Fact check: We don’t know what every single EV driver thinks, but EV drivers as a group tend to be pretty satisfied; plug-in hybrids were level with internal combustion vehicles in J.D. Power’s annual survey of performance, execution, and layout-based consumer satisfaction, with fully battery-powered EVs just a few points behind on a 1,000-point scale. Some 90% of EV drivers say they hope to buy another EV as their next car, a 2022 Plug-In America survey found.
And while range anxiety is real, studies show that it declines the longer someone owns an EV and gets comfortable with charging. Only 8% of EV drivers told Escalent they’ve ever run out of juice while driving.
It’ll take more than an hour for you to start getting anxious, too. The average EV sold in the U.S. last year had a range of 291 miles, or a little over four hours of driving at 70mph.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-electric-vehicles-fact-check
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Wind and Solar Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
Donald Trump loves eagles and whales and therefore he wants to protect them — from clean energy development.
Trump may, however, be relieved to hear that many of his concerns about wind and solar energy are unfounded. Here’s what he gets right and wrong.
Pointing out the window to the Atlantic Ocean at one point, one attendee said, the former president claimed that offshore wind turbines break down when they are exposed to saltwater … [April 17, 2024]
Fact check: Let’s just get this out of the way: offshore wind turbines are designed to withstand saltwater exposure. People have been building things in saltwater for a long, long time. From the oldest known ships constructed 6,000 years ago out of papyrus reeds to Norway’s Troll A platform — a reinforced concrete offshore natural gas platform and the tallest structure ever moved by humankind — we’ve learned a few things about resisting salt corrosion.
This scene occurred during a fundraising dinner with oil and gas executives at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort reported on by The Washington Post, which also pointed out this obvious fact. That said, to the former president’s credit, “the ocean is indeed a difficult environment” for construction and engineering, Eric Hines, a civil and environmental engineering professor and the director of the offshore wind energy graduate program at Tufts University, told me. But the lifespan of offshore structures can range from a few years to more than a century.
According to Hines, most offshore wind farms today are built to have “approximately 25-year service lives,” but the design is always evolving. His department, for example, is working on developing advanced underwater foundations that are built to last more than a century and double as artificial reefs.
“I like the concept of solar, but it’s not powerful like what we need to fire up our factories.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: “That question is actually a little bit tricky,” Baker, the assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, told me, when I asked him whether solar alone could power a factory — but it’s also not really what we should be asking. “One thing I’ve noticed people do a lot is they’ll just compare efficiency of power generation,” Baker explained. But “it’s not just about the efficiency — it’s about other things, too, like solar’s ability to be distributed. You can’t put a nuclear fission power plant in your house — you know, not yet — but you can put solar panels, so that’s a huge benefit. It offers some resiliency that other sources just can’t offer.”
It’s true that solar power is less efficient than other sources of energy, including wind, and that it requires a lot of surface area, which could be an undue burden for a manufacturer. But at the same time, “I don’t know if anybody is proposing to power an entire factory based off of solar,” Baker said.“Their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up on shore. I saw it this weekend: Three of them came up! You wouldn’t see it once a year; now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.” [Sept. 25, 2023]
Fact check: If you ever want to feel ridiculous, try asking a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if windmills are making whales “a little batty.”
NOAA actively studies how “sound, vessel, and other human activities” impact marine life, Lauren Gaches, the director of NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs, told me over email. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” she said.
An ongoing “unusual mortality event” for humpback whales has resulted in 200 whale deaths between 2016 and June 2023 along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida — that much is true. But “there are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys,” Gaches told me. NOAA’s fact page on whales and offshore wind explains that of “roughly 90 whales examined, about 40% had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement.”
There has been some chatter about underwater surveying work disrupting whales, which may be true in the case of oil and gas surveys, which use seismic air guns to penetrate deep into the ocean floor. The surveying equipment used for offshore wind is, by contrast, used in 15-second bursts and limited to a specific area, “so the likelihood of an animal encountering and coming right into that sound beam is quite low,” Erica Staaterman, the deputy director for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Center for Marine Acoustics, said on a NOAA-hosted call with the press early last year.
As Ben Laws, the deputy chief of NOAA’s Permits and Conservation Division in the Office of Protected Resources, said on the same call, “There is no information that would support any suggestion that any of the equipment that’s being used in support of wind development for these site characterization surveys could directly lead to the death of a whale.”
“If you go out hunting and you happen to shoot a bald eagle, they put you in jail, like, for five years, right? They kill thousands of them with these windmills; nothing happens.” [Jan. 28, 2023]
“If you want to see a bird cemetery, go under a windmill sometime. You’ll see birds like you never saw. If you love birds, you’ll start to weep.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: Trump has had a vendetta against wind turbines since long before he ever ran for president. “Wind farms are killing many thousands of birds,” reads one illustrative tweet from 2012. “They make hunters look like nice people!”
Lewis Grove is the director of wind and energy policy at the American Bird Conservancy, and he told me that while it’s “not necessarily as simple as Mr. Trump painted it out to be, wind turbines absolutely kill birds.”
But the context here is extremely important. Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for the American Clean Power Association, a leading renewable energy trade group, pointed me to research from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that shows wind farms “represent just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S.” Grove likewise told me that, for the most part, bird deaths due to wind turbines do “not have population-level impacts.”
There are exceptions, such as an infamous wind farm in California’s Altamont Pass built in 1981 that “just happened to be in a place that was really heavily used by golden eagles,” Grove told me. Because golden eagle populations were already very low, having 100 or so killed a year by turbines was “unsustainable.” Even in a case like this, though, it behooves one to look at the whole picture: “They found it was a few individual turbines that were causing the damage,” Grove said. These days, around 60 golden eagles a year are killed in Alameda County, the Alameda Post reports, and the operating company must pay steep penalties for eagle deaths.
What’s more, “climate change is one of the greatest threats birds face, with two-thirds of North American species at risk of extinction due to our warming planet,” Jon Belak, senior manager of science and data analysis at The National Audubon Society, told me in a statement. “We need to build more wind and solar facilities to help slow the rise in global temperatures and protect birds and their habitats from a changing climate.”
Wind farms may not have population-level impacts on birds, but fracking does — “the onset of shale oil and gas production reduces subsequent bird population counts by 15%,” even after accounting for factors like weather and other land-use changes, according to one just-published, peer-reviewed study.
“Remember the windmills? ‘Darling, darling, I want to watch the president, I love him so much. I want to watch him on television tonight.’ ‘I’m sorry, but the wind isn’t blowing, you’ll have to wait ‘til another time.’ Windmills.” [March 26, 2022]
Fact check: “I mean, it’s possible with any mix of generation that if supply and demand aren’t equal, your TV will go out. That’s just physics,” Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, told me when I asked her if Trump’s scenario had any merit. In other words, a power outage could happen whether your electricity is coming from coal or natural gas or anything else. The difference, she said, is that “wind is by nature variable, intermittent. But it’s also not reliant on fuel like natural gas or coal plants or even nuclear plants are.”
What happens on days when there is no wind? “Grids are extremely regulated,” Baker explained to me. “There’s so many layers of redundancy that aim specifically to not have [an outage] happen.” A grid is made up of diverse electricity sources (for my visual learners, Canary imagines what a net-zero grid could look like here), as well as measures like offline backup generators, which can kick in if need be, so service isn’t disrupted.
Battery storage is another huge part of this equation. While they’re still fairly cutting-edge as climate technology goes, high-capacity batteries that can manage grid-scale energy needs are getting better and more plentiful.
“Stop with all of the windmills all over the place that are ruining the atmosphere.” [Jan. 20, 2022]
Fact check: Wind turbines do not damage the literal atmosphere.
But maybe Trump meant atmosphere as in “sense of place”? Most Americans don’t seem to think windmills are “ruining” anything. In a recent Heatmap poll, nearly eight in 10 Americans said they want the government to make it easier to build new wind farms. The Washington Post similarly found last year that about 70% of Americans said they wouldn’t mind living near a wind farm.
As my colleague Robinson Meyer has written, “American laws today give even a small, well-resourced minority plenty of tools to block a project” like a wind farm, and “what’s more, once that small group starts campaigning against a project, the public’s broad but shallow support for, say, a general technology can crater. That’s what happened recently in New Jersey, where a once broadly pro-wind public has turned against four proposed offshore wind farms.”
“It’s a very expensive form — probably the most expensive form of energy.” [Jan. 20, 2022]
Fact check: Wind in general is not the most expensive form of energy, but offshore wind is very expensive — for now.
Of the energy sources we’re currently used to, nuclear is usually cited as having the highest levelized cost of electricity — that is, it has the highest average cost per unit of electricity generated after construction, maintenance, and operation have been taken into account. Peaker plants — gas-powered plants that run just during times of peak demand — usually come in second.
Offshore wind is costly, with the levelized cost of electricity from a subsidized U.S. offshore wind project increasing “to $114.20 per megawatt-hour in 2023, up almost 50% from 2021 levels in nominal terms,” BloombergNEF reports. Many of the factors making offshore wind so expensive — including permitting delays, high interest rates, and supply chain issues — will abate with time. Meanwhile, onshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of electricity available and has boasted a “lower LCOE than gas plants since 2015,” Sustainable Energy in America reports.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-wind-solar-fact-check
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About the Paris Agreement Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
If Donald Trump retakes the White House in November, he will direct the U.S. to leave the Paris Agreement — again. This time, though, the ex-president and his allies also plan to make it more difficult for any future Democratic president to rejoin the international deal to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.
Trump’s most frequently proclaimed gripe with the climate treaty (beyond not believing in climate change) is that it rips off the U.S.
“The Paris Accord was going to cost us $1 trillion and China, nothing, Russia, nothing, India, nothing. It was a ripoff of the United States.” [June 27, 2024]
Fact check: This is inaccurate even by Donald Trump standards. In Trump’s 2017 Rose Garden address announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — the 2015 treaty that united most countries around the world in the quest to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius — Trump claimed that by 2040, compliance would entail a cost to the economy that would approach “$3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs.” As proof, he cited a study conducted by NERA Economic Consulting, which later issued a news release stating that “the Trump administration selectively used results” from its study and that “NERA’s study was not a cost-benefit analysis of the Paris Agreement, nor does it purport to be one.”
The claim that China, Russia, and India would pay “nothing,” meanwhile, appears to be an allusion to the obligation for wealthier nations like the U.S. to direct hundreds of billions of dollars to poorer nations to adapt to the impacts of climate change. As my colleague Katie Brigham said, it’s true there’s controversy around whether China or India, which have giant (but still developing) economies, should either provide this funding or receive this funding. Russia, which joined the agreement in 2019, hasn’t really been a part of this conversation, though.
“I will also immediately stop crooked Joe Biden’s latest ripoff of the American people, his plan to give — listen to this — global climate reparations to foreign nations. He’s going to give billions of dollars, because he’s saying that we have a dirty climate.” [Dec. 16, 2023]
Fact check: The U.S. will not “under any circumstances” pay climate reparations to developing nations, climate envoy John Kerry vowed in front of Congress last year. The situation is, however — and unsurprisingly — more complicated than that.
At COP28 last year, the U.S. pledged $17.5 million to the UN’s “loss and damage” fund, which is intended to help developing countries recover from future climate disasters. While some outlets — including this publication — have characterized this fund as “reparations,” the fund has more in common with other international pledges directed at helping developing countries than calls for climate reparations that hold historic polluters morally and financially responsible.
“We have China that doesn’t partake; we have India that doesn’t partake; and we have Russia that doesn’t partake. None of them partake in cleaning the climate. They laugh at us, how stupid we are. We clean the climate and then their air flows to us from Asia.” [March 3, 2022]
Fact check: China, India, and Russia are all Paris Agreement signatories. But even if they truly didn’t “partake” at all in international climate mitigation efforts, that hardly means the U.S. shouldn’t try to be cleaner.
But let’s take Trump at face value here. When asked to assess if the Paris Agreement gives an unfair advantage to nations like China and India, law professor Daniel Bodansky at the Arizona State University College of Law pointed out to USA Today that “the United States is the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and has higher per capita emissions than either China or India. It is misleading to point the finger at China and India and label them as the real polluters.”
What about the bad air flowing to us “from Asia,” then? This isn’t total nonsense. For one thing, we do all share the same atmosphere; that’s kind of the whole point of the global movement to stop climate change. But more concretely, yes, researchers have found that pollutants from China can make their way to the Western U.S.
Here’s where it gets awkward: “An estimated 36% of manmade sulfur dioxide, 27% of nitrogen oxide, 22% of carbon monoxide, and 17% of black carbon over China are the result of manufacturing goods for export. About a fifth of each of these was associated with products exported to the U.S. in particular,” Scientific American writes. In other words, a lot of that “bad air” flowing to us from Asia that Trump is complaining about is from manufacturing products for Americans.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-paris-agreement-fact-check
CHP Maximum Enforcement Period Launches Wednesday
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
In preparation for the Independence Day holiday, the California Highway Patrol is launching a statewide enforcement effort aimed at keeping the public safe on our roads
https://scvnews.com/chp-maximum-enforcement-period-launches-wednesday/
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Climate and Weather Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
Long before Donald Trump ever became a politician, he was a climate change denier. “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing,” he tweeted back in 2013. “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump has continued to claim that cold weather is proof that the planet isn’t warming — and that if it is, the consequences won’t be that bad. If only he were correct.
Here’s our fact-check of everything Trump has said about climate and weather since he left office in 2021.
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air — and we had it. We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever. And we were using all forms of energy, all forms of everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. My top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage.” [June 27, 2024]
Fact check: Trump likes to claim that he is “the number one” environmentalist president, but it’s hard to conceive of any metric where that could be true.
Historically, Trump has cited as evidence a book written by a longtime Trump Organization staffer that called him “An Environmental Hero,” as well as the fact that “I did the best environmental impact statements.” But Trump’s Project 2025 roadmap for a second term details targeting the waiver that allows California to set more stringent emissions standards for new cars, reducing fuel economy requirements, and making it more difficult to keep big polluters in check.
Trump’s presidential record also speaks for itself: During his four years in office, he rolled back at least 100 environmental rules, including removing pollution controls on streams and wetlands and gutting Obama-era emissions standards. According to one estimate in the British medical journal The Lancet, Trump’s environmental policies resulted in 22,000 deaths in 2019 alone. He’s been described as the worst president for the environment in U.S. history.
During the presidential debate, Trump also referred to a “statistic” from his “top environmental people” that supposedly proved he had the “best environmental numbers ever.” He appeared to be referring to a message from his former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler that he posted to Truth Social before the debate, which claims that “CO2 emissions went down” during the Trump administration. This, in turn, appears to be an old talking point of Wheeler’s from 2019 about the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which he claimed would lead to a 34% reduction in CO2 emissions from 2005 in 2030. While that number is nearly correct, most of those reductions would have occurred anyway, without ACE. More accurate calculations for ACE can be found here.
“It’s not certainly great for your clime. Your clime. They call it ‘climate.’” [Jan. 20, 2024]
Fact check: Trump’s mumbling about “clime” at a New Hampshire rally resulted in speculation about his mental well-being — as well as a late-night bit by Stephen Colbert. While it’s unclear exactly what Trump was going on about, we can get a few things straight:
- “Clime” is usually used as a geographic term to refer to a particular region’s climate. As in, “We left New York for the warmer climes of Florida.” The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary says its use is usually “literary or humorous.”
- “Climate” refers to weather patterns in a given area, taken as a whole. “When scientists talk about climate, they’re often looking at averages of precipitation, temperature, humidity, sunshine, wind, and other measures of weather that occur over a long period in a particular place,” NOAA explains. (A 30-year window is pretty typical when speaking about a place’s climate.)
And just for good measure, “weather” differs from “climate” or “clime” in that it refers to short-term meteorological events in a specific place. So while the weather on a given day, week, or month can be unseasonably cold, the overall climate can still be warming.
“You know they don’t call it global warming so much now, they call it climate change because it wasn’t working … Global warming wasn’t working when it was cooling. So now they call it climate change, that takes care of everything.” [Dec. 5, 2023]
Fact check: The term “climate change” was initially popularized by Republicans. In a 2002 memo, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged President George W. Bush to drop the phrase “global warming” in favor of “climate change” since the former sounds more “frightening” and “has catastrophic communications attached to it,” while “climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
That said, scientists generally prefer the term “climate change” for pretty much exactly the reason Trump highlighted here — because it encompasses phenomena caused by the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere that don’t manifest as warming, like ocean acidification. For the record: Global warming doesn’t mean that the weather will never get cold, just that it will get less cold on average, over time. In fact, research shows that the cold parts of the globe are warming much, much faster than the rest.
“You can’t miss with climate change. Anything can happen because of climate change. ‘It’s raining like hell!’ Climate change!” [July 13, 2022]
“Most of the country has plenty of water. Rain from heaven. It comes right from heaven. Beautiful rain, you don’t know what to do.” [Aug. 17, 2023]
Fact check: That’s … true, actually. “When the atmosphere warms, that means it can hold more water,” Matthew Rodell, the deputy director of Earth sciences for hydrosphere, biosphere, and geophysics at NASA, who has made an extensive study of extreme drought and deluges, told me. That means there will be both more droughts and more rainfall, even though the two phenomena might appear at a glance to contradict each other.
“On the drought side of things, when the air is warmer, more water can evaporate — can be pulled out of the land and out of the plants, into the air, and then transported away,” Rodell explained. “So you have, basically, more water being net removed from an area.” But water in the air has to return to Earth, eventually, in the form of more — and often extreme — rainfall.
Shouldn’t those two extremes effectively balance each other out? As Rodell put it to me, “Floods and droughts are both catastrophes.” During a drought, crops die and wells go dry. And while extreme rainfall might refill an aquifer, “if it’s at the point of being extreme and there’s a flood, that’s not good, either.” Think about Libya, where extended heavy rains in the summer of 2023 broke through dams and inundated towns, killing 4,300 people, displacing an estimated 44,800 more, and causing over $60 million in damage.
One last thing to mention here: While our ability to determine the precise contribution of climate change to individual extreme weather events is improving rapidly, that is, in some ways, beside the point. Rodell explained that “in terms of the frequency, and looking at all these events together and how they’ve changed over time, we’re seeing that they’re increasing in number and severity in correlation with global warming. That doesn’t mean you can say any particular event is 100% by global warming, but, I mean — statistically, it’s extremely unlikely that this is just a coincidence.”
“In my opinion, you have a thing called weather …” [March 21, 2022]
Fact check: True!
“… It goes up, and it goes down.” [March 21, 2022]
Fact check: While it’s true that the climate has always changed, it hasn’t always changed like this. The rapid rise in both atmospheric carbon dioxide and observed average surface temperature since the Industrial Revolution can only be credited to humans, and specifically to the burning of fossil fuels, which release CO2, a heat-trapping gas. There is now near-universal scientific consensus that the warming we’re witnessing has been caused by human activity.
“The most popular climate myths are the ones that are simple and easy to say,” as John Cook, a senior research fellow at Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences who’s made a specialty of combatting climate disinformation, told me. “It’s the single-cause fallacy, thinking that only one thing can cause natural causes. But you can have other things like human activity that also drive climate change,” Cook added.
Start digging into this kind of logic and it quickly falls apart. For example, Trump’s argument is that the climate has changed naturally in the past; therefore, it must be changing naturally now, as well. But, Cook told me, the same logic could also be used to argue, People have died of cancer in the past; therefore, cigarettes don’t cause cancer now.
“The oceans are gonna rise 1/100th of an inch within the next 300 years. It’s gonna kill everybody. It’s going to create more oceanfront property, that’s what it’s going to do.” [March 12, 2022]
“They said the other day, I heard somebody, that the oceans are going to rise 1/8th of an inch over the next 300 years. We have bigger problems than that. We’ll have a little more beachfront property; that’s not the worst thing in the world.” [July 9, 2022]
Fact check: For starters, Trump’s numbers are orders of magnitude off the mark. The oceans are on track to rise 3.5 feet to 7 feet along America’s coastlines by 2100 — well ahead of Trump’s schedule — according to an independent assessment conducted by federal scientific agencies. Even if global carbon emissions had peaked in 2020 (which we know they did not) and declined relatively rapidly thereafter, the oceans would still probably rise more than 3 feet worldwide by 2300 compared to their 2000 levels, researchers have found, because so much heat is already trapped in the climate system.
According to the latest scientific report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “sea level rise greater than 15 meters,” or 49 feet, by the year 2300 “cannot be ruled out” in a high-emissions scenario.
While unlikely, 49 feet of sea-level rise would be catastrophic. Large swaths of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens would be completely submerged, with waves lapping at the walls of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. The southern half of Florida would vanish (bye-bye, Mar-a-Lago!). Countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh would, literally, disappear from the map.
As for that supposedly new oceanfront property Trump is so excited about, scientists expect some 650,000 beachfront properties to flood due to sea level rise in the United States by 2050 — not to mention that globally, some 230 million people live within 3 feet of current high-tide lines.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-climate-change-fact-check
The YouTube Effect
date: 2024-07-01, from: Tilde.news
https://www.pbs.org/video/the-youtube-effect-4p4nci/
Two Pandas Arrive at the San Diego Zoo, the First to Enter the U.S. in 21 Years
date: 2024-07-01, from: Smithsonian Magazine
For months, the only pandas in the country had been in Atlanta. Next, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are expected to also receive pandas this year
Former Trump aide Bannon reports to prison
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/former-trump-aide-bannon-reports-to-prison-/7681166.html
Blinken: No main actors want war between Israel, Hezbollah
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
State Department — The United States is “determined” to prevent military conflict between Israel and Hezbollah fighters based in southern Lebanon from escalating into an all-out war, America’s top diplomat said Monday.
While acknowledging “forces of momentum … may be leading” toward a war between Israel and Hezbollah, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “None of the main actors actually want a war.”
“I don’t believe Hezbollah actually wants a war,” he told an audience at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “Israel doesn’t want a war, although they may well be prepared to engage in one if necessary. …
“Lebanon certainly doesn’t want a war because it would be the leading victim in such a war,” he added. “And I don’t believe that Iran wants a war, in part because it wants to make sure that Hezbollah is not destroyed and that it can hold onto Hezbollah as a card if it needs it.”
Blinken’s comments come as Israel signals that a military “downshift” in Gaza would allow its forces to allocate more resources to addressing the threat posed by the Iran-backed Hezbollah on the northern front.
As Blinken spoke, pro-Palestinian protesters outside the Brookings Institution could be heard through his microphone.
Blinken renewed his call on Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, to accept a U.S.-proposed Gaza cease-fire and said Washington is “determined not to be outpaced” in Gaza’s post-war reconstruction.
“We know that there are three things that are unacceptable for Gaza’s future: an Israeli occupation; Hamas perpetuating its leadership; or chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, which is what we’re seeing in big parts of Gaza today.”
In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said Israel is “advancing to the end of the phase of eliminating” Hamas’ military capabilities in the Gaza Strip, nearly nine months into Israel’s war with the militants.
Blinken also defended U.S. President Joe Biden following Thursday night’s presidential debate with former president Donald Trump, which many deemed a disappointing performance by Biden. Blinken said that U.S. allies “like the choices and the policies” Biden is pursuing.
China
In his foreign policy speech on Monday, Blinken also addressed China.
“I think China’s objectives are clear. Over time, over the coming decades, they would like to be the leading country, the dominant country in the international system, militarily, economically, diplomatically, that’s clear,” said Blinken.
While the U.S. has stated that its goal is to responsibly manage competition with China, the government in Beijing has refuted this, saying the relationship between the world’s two largest economies should not be defined by competition.
Chinese officials have said that “major-country competition” provides “no answer to the problems in the U.S. or the challenges in the world.”
The U.S. will host a NATO summit in Washington from July 9 to July 11, with a focus on European security amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
Four countries from the Indo-Pacific region — Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand — are set to attend the summit.
Secretary Blinken warned that while China is not directly providing arms to Russia, its supply of critical materials has helped Moscow sustain its war on Ukraine, posing serious repercussions for European security. Blinken said that 70% of Russia’s imported machine tools and 90% of its microelectronics come from China.
Chinese officials have rejected what they describe as Washington’s “smear,” asserting that Beijing regulates the export of dual-use articles in accordance with its laws and regulations.
https://www.voanews.com/a/blinken-no-main-actors-want-war-between-israel-hezbollah/7681164.html
Ladybird browser goes serious: GitHub billionaire co-founder now involved
date: 2024-07-01, from: OS News
Well, it seems we’ve got a better understanding now of why Andreas Kling decided to leave the SerenityOS project to focus entirely on Ladybird, the web browser that grew out of his hobby operating system. They’ve got some big plans for where to take Ladybird, and I’m saying “they” because it’s being backed by a big name. They’ve set up a fancy new website for the project, which makes it all look a bit more presentable to a general audience. The project is aiming for a first alpha release for Linux and macOS in 2026, and Windows or mobile versions are not something they’re currently interested in – they want to get the desktop version to be presentable first. It also seems we’re not in Kansas anymore – they’ve got four full-time paid engineers working on Ladybird at the moment, with three more starting soon. Sure, they’ve got some sponsors, but that seems like a lot of people, so where’s the cash coming from? Well, the project also announced its first two board members, and it won’t surprise you Andreas Kling himself is one of them. The other name is none other than Chris Wanstrath, and if that name doesn’t ring a bell – he’s the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, which he sold to Microsoft in 2018. He also created the Atom text editor and led several other projects. Oh, he also happens to be a billionaire who apparently has donated 1 million dollars to Ladybird. In other words, the Ladybird project is a lot more of a serious, grown-up effort than it may have seemed when Kling first announced his departure from SerenityOS. This means the project has some serious money behind it, an influential name with probably some great networking skills, and, of course, Kling’s unique experience working on browser engines for Nokia and Apple in the past. All in all, this is great news.
Lambda on the hunt for ‘another $800M’ to fuel its GPU cloud
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Why sell shovels when you can rent them
In the AI gold rush, if you can’t be the one selling the GPUs then the next best thing could be to rent them. This week, we learned that Lambda is seeking $800 million in funding to do just that.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/lambda_seeks_funding/
Introducing The Collective
date: 2024-07-01, from: Care
<p>A press release from Incite, introducing our new initiative called The Collective</p>https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/introducing-the-collective
How Apple Intelligence Sets a New Bar for AI Security, Privacy, and Safety
date: 2024-07-01, from: TidBITS blog
Apple Intelligence, backed by the company’s Private Cloud Compute service, takes a new approach to generative AI which prioritizes user security, privacy, and safety. Cloud computing expert and TidBITS security editor Rich Mogull explains how this works, starting with the chips in our iPhones.
The Smithsonian Acquires the Earliest Known Photograph of an American First Lady
date: 2024-07-01, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The National Portrait Gallery purchased an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolley Madison for $456,000
Below MI – IBM i for hackers
date: 2024-07-01, from: OS News
In this writeup we provide a summary of technical information crucial to evaulate the exploitability and impact of memory safety problems in IBM i programs. As administrators and developers of IBM i aren’t supposed to work “below MI level” this kind of information is not officially documented by the vendor. The information presented here is thus based on already published reverse engineering results, and our own findings uncovered using IBM’s System Sertice Tools (SST) and the POWER-AS specific Processor extensions we developed for the Ghidra reverse engineering framework. Tests were performed on a physical POWER 9 system running IBM i V7R4. Programs were compiled by the default settings of the system in the ILE program model. C language source code will be provided separately. ↫ Silent Signal Some light reading.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140117/below-mi-ibm-i-for-hackers/
NASA’s Upgraded Hyperwall Offers Improved Data Visualization
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
In May, the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility, located at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, celebrated the newest generation of its hyperwall system, a wall of LCD screens that display supercomputer-scale visualizations of the very large datasets produced by NASA supercomputers and instruments. The upgrade is the fourth generation of hyperwall clusters […]
US Supreme Court orders lower courts to reexamine social media laws
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
SCV-Based Lief Labs Names Randy Rosinski CCO
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Santa Clarita-based Lief Labs, a premier formulation and product development innovator and manufacturer of dietary supplements, welcomes Randy Rosinski as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), leading Lief’s Sales and Marketing departments and joining the Executive Leadership team
https://scvnews.com/scv-based-lief-labs-names-randy-rosinski-cco/
An Open Letter to the United Nations
date: 2024-07-01, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">[Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Hadley Beeman, Daniel Appelquist, Robin Berjon, et al]
“Government engagement in digital and Internet governance is needed to deal with many abuses of this global system but it is our common responsibility to uphold the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that has served the world for the past half century.”
A tremendously important open letter to the United Nations in light of the opaque, hierarchical process the Global Digital Compact is being developed with, and the centralized governance many of its proposals can be read to call for.
It’s worth clicking through to read the list of signatories: these are people we can thank for the existence of the internet and the web at all. That they believe this is important enough to create this open letter is worth paying attention to.
<p>[<a href="https://open-internet-governance.org/letter">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/an-open-letter-to-the-united-nations
Booting Linux off of Google Drive
date: 2024-07-01, from: OS News
On the brink of insanity, my tattered mind unable to comprehend the twisted interplay of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of madness, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the ground lest I be pulled in, and found my magnum opus. Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root. ↫ Ersei That’s not… You shouldn’t… Why would…
https://www.osnews.com/story/140111/booting-linux-off-of-google-drive/
Sotomayor says immunity ruling makes a president ‘king above the law’
date: 2024-07-01, from: Ben Werdmuller’s blog
<div class="known-bookmark">
<div class="e-content">[Rachel Leingang at The Guardian]
“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
I’ve been worried about the world my son will grow up into since before he was born. Over time, my worry has been upgraded to a fear that is becoming ever more visceral and searing. Today the volume of my fear turned up still further.
The thing is, this isn’t the only thing allowing for misconduct. The President has effectively been able to commit crimes internationally with very little accountability since forever. Coups, backroom exchanges, and assassinations are all things the US has done to other countries for generations.
My hope is that (1) we come out of this more or less intact, (2) we eventually use this as an opportunity to create stronger ethical and legal rules for our leadership, wherever they act.
Whatever happens, these are truly scary times.
<p>[<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/01/sonia-sotomayor-dissent-trump-immunity-case">Link</a>]</p>
</div>
</div>https://werd.io/2024/sotomayor-says-immunity-ruling-makes-a-president-king-above-the
Saugus High Music Club Clothes for Cash Campaign Begins July 6
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Saugus High School Instrumental Music Booster Club is inviting the community to help those in need with its Clothes for Cash campaign beginning Saturday, July 6, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
https://scvnews.com/saugus-high-music-club-clothes-for-cash-campaign-begins-july-6/
US sanctions suspected drug cartel money launderers
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-sanctions-suspected-drug-cartel-money-launderers/7681047.html
Artist Marina Abramović Silences Glastonbury Crowd for Seven Minutes
date: 2024-07-01, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The typically boisterous crowd went quiet for a collective peace protest
Thunderbolt 5 cables are now available (even though there’s not much to use them with yet)
date: 2024-07-01, from: Liliputing
When the Thunderbolt 4 standard launched in 2020 it brought support for a bunch of new features including support for high-speed connections over longer cables and guaranteed support for up to two 4K displays or a single 8K display. But data transfer speeds topped out at the same 40 Gb/s as Thunderbolt 3, which had […]
The post Thunderbolt 5 cables are now available (even though there’s not much to use them with yet) appeared first on Liliputing.
Earth’s Inner Core May Be Slowing Its Spin, Another Study Suggests
date: 2024-07-01, from: Smithsonian Magazine
New research adds evidence to the controversial idea that the hot, solid ball at the center of our planet has been reducing its speed for years as part of an oscillating cycle
Individual vs AI: Why Personal Matters
date: 2024-07-01, from: Om Malik blog
As generative AI fills our feeds with regurgitated mush, our innate trust in individuals over brands will determine the winners of both attention and revenue. Everyone in media should be racing to become a trusted individual right now. The personal website and the personal newsletter have always been more interesting to me. They’re also more …
https://om.co/2024/07/01/individual-vs-ai-why-personal-matters/
He used to run a nightclub. Now he’s pushing for new laws to fight drink spiking
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The LAist
Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, who owns restaurants that serve drinks, has introduced several bills adding requirements for bar owners and drink servers to do more to prevent drink spiking.
https://laist.com/news/politics/new-laws-to-fight-drink-spiking
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-01, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
A Post-Mortem for Social Podcast Discovery.
https://every.to/divinations/a-post-mortem-for-social-podcast-discovery
‘Local Residents’ Terrorizing City Council Meetings Were Actually Overseas, Feds Allege
date: 2024-07-01, from: 404 Media Group
A racist ‘Zoom Bombing’ group was made up of American teenagers collaborating on a Roblox-owned chat with foreign nationals, according to a criminal complaint.
Antitrust cops cry foul over Meta’s pay-or-consent ultimatum to Europeans
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Facebook, Instagram gobble up same data whether you hand over cash or not
European Union antitrust regulators have accused Meta of violating the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) with its “pay or consent” advertising model, a source of complaints since it was announced last year.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/meta_eu_dma_violation/
The Uncertain Russia–North Korea Relationship
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: RAND blog
The United States and South Korea have ample reasons to worry about the new agreement between Russia and North Korea. But what is not clear is how much of a difference this agreement will make.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/07/the-uncertain-russia-north-korea-relationship.html
Pierce powers up for first-ever Powwow
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Round Up (Peirce College Student Paper)
With the continuous sounds of drums beating and men singing, regalia-dressed individuals—at their own moments—stepped out of the cool shadows of their tents and into
The post Pierce powers up for first-ever Powwow appeared first on .
FCC (Finally) Has a Good Idea
date: 2024-07-01, from: Om Malik blog
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed that the agency require mobile providers to unlock customers’ mobile phones within 60 days of activation. New unlocking rules would allow consumers the freedom to take their existing phones and switch from one mobile wireless service provider to another more easily, as long as the consumer’s phone is compatible with …
https://om.co/2024/07/01/fcc-finally-has-a-good-idea/
Peter Easthope commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
Hi, I compiled your Unix.KbdMouse.Mod in the working
directory.
So KbdMouse.GofUu and
KbdMouse.SymUu should shadow the duals in /usr/local/A2.
A2 appears to start OK with this heading on the window. LinuxA2 (64-bit, Rev. 10272), Work: /home/root
I open Kernel.log and press . This appears in the log. {P cpuid= 0, pid= 64 Starting logger} HotKeys: Error when executing command SystemTools.Free HotKeys, res: 3401 (SystemTools.GofUu not found)
SystemTools invoked whereas Sergey stated that System replaced SystemTool. Three different names. =8~/
Thanks & Best Regards, … P.
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_192811
NASA Awards Support STEM Research at Minority Serving Institutions
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has selected 23 minority-serving institutions to receive $1.2 million to grow their research and technology capabilities, collaborate on research projects, and contribute to the agency’s missions for the benefit of humanity. Through NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Partnership Learning Annual Notification (MPLAN) award, selected institutions will receive up to $50,000 each […]
Six Productions Filming in Santa Clarita
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The city of Santa Clarita’s Film Office has released the list of six productions currently filming in the Santa Clarita Valley for the week of Monday, July 1 - Sunday, July
https://scvnews.com/six-productions-filming-in-santa-clarita/
US manufacturing contraction deepens in June
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Washington — U.S. manufacturing activity edged lower in June, deepening a recent slump on continued weak demand, according to industry survey data published Monday.
The Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) manufacturing index came in at 48.5% last month, down 0.2 percentage points from May.
The June data came in below market expectations of 49.1%, according to Briefing.com, and marked the third consecutive month where the reading was below the 50-point mark separating expansion from contraction.
“U.S. manufacturing activity continued in contraction at the close of the second quarter,” ISM survey chief Timothy Fiore said in a statement.
“Demand remains subdued, as companies demonstrate an unwillingness to invest in capital and inventory due to current monetary policy and other conditions,” he continued, referring to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s ongoing battle against rising prices.
Inflation has fallen sharply since the Fed began hiking interest rates in 2022, but remains stuck above its long-term target of 2% — keeping borrowing costs high for both consumers and producers.
“Production execution was down compared to the previous month, likely causing revenue declines, putting pressure on profitability,” Fiore said.
June’s data extends the recent slump, which began after a positive reading in March briefly snapped 16 straight months of contraction.
The ISM survey found that eight manufacturing industries reported growth in June, including petroleum and coal products, and chemical products, while nine contracted, including textile mills, transportation equipment, and electrical equipment.
“Manufacturing activity remained in contraction territory in June, but in a sign of moderating inflation pressure, the prices paid component fell 4.9 points,” Wells Fargo economists wrote in a note to clients.
“New orders rose more than any other component but remains in contraction,” they added.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-manufacturing-contraction-deepens-in-june/7680761.html
VAIO Vision+ 14 portable monitor weighs just 325 grams (11.5 ounces)
date: 2024-07-01, from: Liliputing
Portable monitors come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and capabilities these days. You can find models with dual screens, ePaper displays, touchscreens, and all sorts of other features. But while it’s nice to have plenty of options when looking for a second screen for your laptop, tablet, phone, or game console, that’s still one […]
The post VAIO Vision+ 14 portable monitor weighs just 325 grams (11.5 ounces) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/vaio-vision-14-portable-monitor-weighs-just-325-grams-11-5-ounces/
Ken Striplin | Enjoy Fourth of July Responsibly
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
By day, the sounds of music and laughter fill the streets as we celebrate Independence Day in true Santa Clarita fashion with the annual Fourth of July Parade
https://scvnews.com/ken-striplin-enjoy-fourth-of-july-responsibly/
SK hynix pumps billions into HBM chips to meet AI demand
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’s already sold out of stock for this year and next
High bandwidth memory (HBM) is becoming a key technology in the continued AI investment race as SK hynix plans to spend billions on memory chip production and China’s Huawei looks to develop its own in partnership with a local foundry.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/sk_hynix_hbm_investment/
US bases across Europe bracing for possible terror attack
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Washington — U.S. military bases and personnel across Europe are on heightened alert, after new intelligence warned of a possible terror attack targeting either facilities or personnel.
A U.S. defense official Monday confirmed to VOA that military installations across U.S. European Command (EUCOM) have been elevated to Force Protection Condition “Charlie,” which means an attack of some sort is likely.
The official did not elaborate on the contents of the intelligence that sparked the change, although counterterrorism officials from multiple countries have warned of an increased threat, including some surrounding the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris.
The U.S. defense official said that the military is “taking extra steps to ensure [U.S. troops] remain vigilant during both business and pleasure activities.”
A second U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, emphasized it was the overall threat picture and not one single piece of intelligence, that led to the increased force protection posture.
“There is no specific or imminent threat to U.S. forces in Europe,” the official told VOA. “This was a step taken out of an abundance of caution.”
A statement Monday from EUCOM likewise indicated the increased security measures are the result of a combination of factors.
“Our increase in vigilance is not related to any one single threat, but out of concern of a combination of factors such as ongoing and upcoming large public forums including the Euro Cup and the Olympics, along with an increasing the threat of attacks by potential bad actors against various non-military targets in Europe,” the statement read.
EUCOM “advises personnel in the European theater to remain vigilant and stay alert at all times, including reporting suspicious activity, monitoring Department of State travel advisories, and implementing prudent personal risk mitigation measures,” it added.
A report issued last month by the by the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future warned that despite a high risk of cyberattacks, the greatest threat to the Paris Olympics remains the possibility for terror attacks.
French authorities have already disrupted at least two separate terror plots. In one of the cases, the 18-year-old suspect was charged with plotting to carry out an attack on one of the stadiums serving as Olympic venues in the name of the Islamic State.
Top U.S. counterterrorism officials have also acknowledged that the Islamic State terror group, known as IS or ISIS, has also been gaining momentum in recent months.
Much of the concern has focused on the group’s Afghan affiliate, known as IS-Khorasan.
“Both ISIS and ISIS-Khorasan … have demonstrated a capability and intent to conduct external operations,” White House Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Jen Daskal told a counterterrorism conference in Omaha, Nebraska, last week.
National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid also warned about IS-Khorasan this past May.
“This ability of the global ISIS enterprise, even without territorial solidity, the ability to reach out virtually to a network of supporters, some of whom are going to conduct attacks, is quite concerning,” she told a security conference in Doha.
Abizaid further called IS-Khorasan’s ability to reestablish itself in Afghanistan “probably the most significant additive capability we’ve seen to the global ISIS network in the last three years.”
IS-Khorasan claimed responsibility for the January attack on a memorial service in Kerman, Iran, that killed about 90 people, and also the March attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed more than 140 people.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have also raised concerns that IS-Khorasan has become more adept at using transnational criminal networks and human smuggling rings, eying potential plots to send its operatives into the United States.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-bases-across-europe-bracing-for-possible-terror-attack/7680810.html
Behind the Scenes of a NASA ‘Moonwalk’ in the Arizona Desert
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
NASA astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Douglas recently performed four moonwalk simulations to help NASA prepare for its Artemis III mission. Due to launch in September 2026, Artemis III will land two, yet-to-be-selected, astronauts at the Moon’s South Pole for the first time. Traveling to space requires immense preparation, not just for the astronauts, but […]
What happened last Friday in Hachette v. Internet Archive?
date: 2024-07-01, from: Internet Archive Blog
Last Friday, the Internet Archive was in court, fighting for the digital rights of libraries. Our appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, was heard […]
https://blog.archive.org/2024/07/01/what-happened-last-friday-in-hachette-v-internet-archive/
We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Climate Change Since 2021
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
Donald Trump has never been closer to returning to the White House than he is at this moment. Despite becoming a convicted felon in early June, Trump was polling on par with President Biden at the start of the summer — and that was before Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Now, Dems really do seem to be in disarray over the best course of action going into the critical final months before the November election.
What voters ultimately decide will have significant ramifications for Biden’s climate legacy — namely, the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark bill enacted in 2022. In the years since the IRA’s passage, Republicans have become savvier in their attacks on climate change, honing their rhetoric and misinformation about EVs, the energy transition, and climate science more broadly. The Heritage Foundation even published an extensive playbook on how, exactly, Trump should dismantle the progress made in the green transition.
The stakes are consequential, to say the least: One recent estimate by CarbonBrief found that a Trump reelection would add an extra 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere by 2030 compared to a Biden reelection. That is enough to “negate — twice over — all of the savings from deploying wind, solar, and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” the report said.
With the climate agenda on the line, Heatmap is keeping a running list of Trump’s climate-related statements on the campaign trail. We’ve looked at his rallies, TV appearances, social media comments, and debate quotes and compiled a list of his most frequent and blatantly inaccurate claims since he vacated the White House in January 2021. While some of his musings (okay, fine, a lot of them) might be laughably absurd, others might be something you’ve wondered about yourself. To help you better separate fact from fiction, we’ve added context and explanation to each quote, along with a bottom-line determination of the remark’s facticity.
This list is a work in progress and will be regularly updated in the
coming months. If you’re looking for just the newest stuff, you can find
that
here,
here,
and
here.
For ease of navigation, you can find what you’re looking for by using
the new pages below:
Climate and Weather | The Paris Agreement | Wind and solar | Electric Vehicles | Oil and Gas | Efficiency, etc.
This article was originally published on January 15, 2024. It was last updated on July 1, 2024 at 4:45pm ET.
https://heatmap.news/politics/trump-fact-check-intro
Boeing to reacquire spun-off supplier Spirit AeroSpace to shore up safety
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Because the best place for a troubled supplier is beneath the wing of original parent company
Nineteen years and a whole bunch of controversy later, Boeing has decided to reacquire Spirit AeroSystems, maker of parts including the door plug included in select Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/boeing_reacquires_spirit/
GPD Duo is a dual-screen laptop with two 13.3 inch OLED displays that unfold vertically
date: 2024-07-01, from: Liliputing
The GPD DUO is an upcoming laptop with a 35-watt processor, a 13.3 inch OLED display, and a second 13.3 inch OLED display that can be extended upward to give you more screen space when you need it. GPD says it’s like having a tall display that measures 18 inches diagonally. GPD’s upcoming laptop is powered by […]
The post GPD Duo is a dual-screen laptop with two 13.3 inch OLED displays that unfold vertically appeared first on Liliputing.
NASA Invites Media to Northrop Grumman’s 21st Station Resupply Launch
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
Media accreditation is open for the next launch to deliver NASA science investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. This launch is the 21st Northrop Grumman commercial resupply services mission to the orbital laboratory for the agency and will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX are targeting […]
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-07-01, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Supreme Court says Trump has absolute immunity for official acts only.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/01/nx-s1-5002157/supreme-court-trump-immunity
Introducing Category Theory — a full draft, at last!
date: 2024-07-01, from: Logic Matters blog
There is now, at last, a full draft of Introducing Category Theory. You can download the PDF here. The second half still needs more proof-reading and needs indexing. But I don’t envisage adding significantly to the content. After all — rather crazily for a book I didn’t originally set out to write — it is […]
The post Introducing Category Theory — a full draft, at last! appeared first on Logic Matters.
https://www.logicmatters.net/2024/07/01/introducing-category-theory-a-full-draft-at-last/
Verizon hit with whopping $847M verdict for infringing 5G and hotspot patents
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Must be hard to face a huge, unexpected bill, amirite?
In one of the most massive patent verdicts in legal history, a federal jury in East Texas has ordered cellular giant Verizon to pay patentholder General Access Solutions $847 million.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/verizon_patents_ruling/
Markets, economics and elections outside the United States
date: 2024-07-01, from: Marketplace Morning Report
This morning, we’re talking economics and global politics. First, the far-right saw major wins in the first round of France’s elections. Then, high housing costs are weighing on the minds of voters in the United Kingdom, who head to the polls on Thursday. Plus, there are reports that Boeing will be offered a Justice Department arrangement that would allow the company to avoid a trial in connection with two 737 MAX crashes.
US Supreme Court: Trump entitled to broad immunity in election interference case
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Supreme Court sends Trump immunity case back to lower court, dimming chance of trial before election
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Donald Trump may claim immunity from criminal prosecution for some of the actions he took in the waning days of his presidency in a decision that will likely further delay a trial on the federal election subversion charges pending against him.
California’s economic anxieties at heights last seen in 2013
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
But what folks tell pollsters like those who create confidence indexes – and what consumers actually do – aren’t always the same thing.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/01/californias-economic-anxieties-at-heights-last-seen-in-2013/
Amazon sidesteps carbon offset standard Bezos helped fund
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-sidesteps-carbon-offset-standard-bezos-helped-fund/7680627.html
Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy
date: 2024-07-01, from: Quanta Magazine
Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.The post Tracing the Hidden Hand of Magnetism in the Galaxy first appeared on Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/tracing-the-hidden-hand-of-magnetism-in-the-galaxy-20240701/
Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Full system takeovers on the cards, for those with enough patience to pull it off
Glibc-based Linux systems are vulnerable to a new bug (CVE-2024-6387) in OpenSSH’s server (sshd) and should upgrade to the latest version.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/regresshion_openssh/
Leftover Ramen Broth Is Causing Problems on South Korea’s Mount Halla
date: 2024-07-01, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Visitors are dumping the salty liquid on the ground, and authorities are concerned about its impact on plants and animals
Car Rental Service Replaces Desk Agents With People On Video Chat
date: 2024-07-01, from: 404 Media Group
A Nu Car Rentals office in Charlotte, North Carolina offers only “virtual assistance” to customers.
https://www.404media.co/car-rental-service-replaces-desk-agents-with-people-on-video-chat/
Have allegations of horse racing abuse spoiled a July 4th tradition for Pleasanton friends?
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Plus a fireworks warning for pet owners…
Why thousands of homeowners are about to get slammed with higher monthly payments
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
For many American homeowners who took out ARM loans five years ago, before interest rates shot up to a four-decade high, a shock is coming.
Wildlife trafficking has become big problem for US
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says illegal wildlife trafficking generates about 23 billion dollars a year. Angelina Bagdasaryan has more on a new exhibit that opened in Los Angeles trying to shed some light on the practice, in this story narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Vazgen Varzhabetian.
https://www.voanews.com/a/wildlife-trafficking-has-become-big-problem-for-us/7680602.html
TasteFood: Chipotle turkey burgers topped with jammy compote
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Grill up a smoky summer staple with this fast and easy recipe for Chipotle Turkey Burgers with Peach and Cherry Jam
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/01/tastefood-chipotle-turkey-burgers-topped-with-jammy-compote/
Beijing says state owns China’s rare earth metals
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Better management of critical materials or retaliation for sanctions?
Beijing has decreed that rare earth metals belong to the state under new regulations said to be aimed at protecting supplies in the name of national security, but which will be seen as another shot in the ongoing tech wars with the US.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/china_rare_earth_clampdown/
Shakespeare Library reopens in Washington with rare artifacts on display
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Washington, D.C., home to the world’s largest collection of William Shakespeare’s works, has unveiled a treasure trove that most have never seen. The Folger Shakespeare Library reopened its doors after a four-year long renovation, revealing the most valuable part of its collection to the public for the first time. Maxim Adams visited the library.
Street medicine teams search for homeless people to deliver lifesaving IV hydration in extreme heat
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
Phoenix — Alfred Handley leaned back in his wheelchair alongside a major Phoenix freeway as a street medicine team helped him get rehydrated with an intravenous saline solution dripping from a bag hanging on a pole.
Cars whooshed by under the blazing 96-degree morning sun as the 59-year-old homeless man with a nearly toothless smile got the help he needed through a new program run by the nonprofit Circle the City.
“It’s a lot better than going to the hospital,” Handley said of the team that provides health care to homeless people. He’s been treated poorly at traditional clinics and hospitals, he said, more than six years after being struck by a car while he sat on a wall, leaving him in a wheelchair.
Circle the City introduced its IV rehydration program as a way to protect homeless people from life-threatening heat illness as temperatures regularly hit the triple-digits in America’s hottest metro. Homeless people accounted for nearly half of the record 645 heat-related deaths last year in Maricopa County, which encompasses metro Phoenix.
Dr. Liz Frye, vice chair of the Street Medicine Institute that provides training to hundreds of health care teams worldwide, said she didn’t know of groups other than Circle the City administering IVs on the street.
“But if that’s what needs to happen to keep somebody from dying, I’m all about it,” Frye said.
As summers grow warmer, health providers from San Diego to New York are being challenged to better protect homeless patients.
Even the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, featured in last year’s book, “Rough Sleepers,” now sees patients with mild heat exhaustion in the summer after decades of treating people with frostbite and hypothermia during the winter, said Dr. Dave Munson, the street team’s medical director.
“It’s certainly something to worry about,” said Munson, noting that temperatures in Boston hit 100 degrees with 70% humidity during June’s heat wave. Homeless people, he said, are vulnerable to very hot and very cold weather not only because they live outside, but they often can’t regulate body temperature due to medication for mental illness or high blood pressure, or because of street substance use.
The Phoenix team searches for patients in homeless encampments in dry riverbeds, sweltering alleys and along the canals that bring water to the Phoenix area. About 15% are dehydrated enough for a saline drip.
“We go out every day and find them,” said nurse practitioner Perla Puebla. “We do their wound care, medication refills for diabetes, antibiotics, high blood pressure.”
Puebla’s street team ran across Handley and 36-year-old Phoenix native Phillip Enriquez near an overpass in an area frequented by homeless people because it’s near a facility offering free meals. Across the road was an encampment of tents and lean-tos along a chain-link fence.
Enriquez sat on a patch of dirt as Puebla started a drip for him. She also gave him a prescription for antibiotics and a referral to a dentist for his dental infection.
Living outside in Arizona’s broiling sun is hard, especially for people who may be mentally ill or use sedating drugs like fentanyl that make them less aware of surroundings. Stimulants like methamphetamine contribute to dehydration, which can be fatal.
Temperatures this year have reached 115 degrees (45 Celsius) in metro Phoenix, where six heat-related deaths have been confirmed through June 22. Another 111 are under investigation.
“The number of patients with heat illnesses is increasing every year,” said Dr. Aneesh Narang, assistant medical director of emergency medicine at Banner Medical Center-Phoenix, which treats many homeless people with heat stroke.
Narang’s staff works frequently with Circle the City, whose core mission is providing respite care, with 100 beds for homeless people not well enough to return to the streets after a hospital stay.
Extreme heat worldwide requires a dramatic response, said physician assistant Lindsay Fox, who cares for homeless people in Albuquerque, New Mexico, through an initiative run by the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine.
Three times weekly, Fox treats infections, cleans wounds and manages chronic conditions in consultation with hospital colleagues. She said the prospect of more heat illness worries her.
Highs in Albuquerque can hit the 90s and don’t fall enough for people living outside to cool off overnight, she said.
“If you’re in an urban area that’s primarily concrete, you’re retaining heat,” she said. “We’re seeing heat exposure that very quickly could go to heat stroke.”
Serious heat stroke is far more common in metro Phoenix, where Circle the City is now among scores of health programs for the homeless in cities like New York, San Diego and Spokane, Washington.
Circle the City, founded in 2012 by Sister Adele O’Sullivan, a physician and member of the Sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet, now has 260 employees, including 15 doctors, 13 physician assistants and 11 nurse practitioners. It annually sees 9,000 patients.
Grants, donations and other gifts account for about 20% of the funding. Most of the rest comes from insurance payments for services provided through Medicaid and Medicare.
Circle the City works with medical staff in seven Phoenix hospitals to help homeless patients get after-care when they no longer need hospitalization. It also staffs two outpatient clinics for follow-up.
“This partnership allows us to offer the best outcomes for our patients,” said Craig Orsini, social work manager at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.
Often that’s a few weeks in respite care or, for less acute needs, a stay in one of a handful of medical beds at the downtown shelter for things like dressing changes for wounds. Someone who needs months to heal might go to a skilled nursing facility.
While patients recover, Circle the City works to find longer-term transitional shelter such as those for people 55 and older, or in permanent housing. About 77% of respite patients are sent somewhere other than the street or an emergency shelter.
“We try to find the best fit for people,” said Wendy Adams, Circle the City’s community outreach supervisor.
Circle the City medical staff distributes tens of thousands of water bottles each summer and tries to educate people about hot weather dangers, said Dr. Matt Essary, who works at one of five mobile clinics that stop outside soup kitchens and other services for homeless people.
Essary said Circle the City is also considering a blood analysis tool to detect electrolyte imbalances caused by dehydration.
“You can see right away how dehydrated they have become because it’s so hard to draw their blood,” he said. Other possible symptoms include headache, extreme thirst, dizziness and dry mouth.
“We also see a lot of people with surface burns,” Essary said of the wounds common in broiling Phoenix, where a medical emergency or intoxication can cause someone to fall on a sizzling sidewalk.
Rachel Belgrade waited outside Circle the City’s retrofitted truck with her black-and-white puppy, Bo, for Essary to write a prescription for the blood pressure medicine she lost when a man stole her bicycle. She accepted two bottles of water to cool off as the morning heat rose.
“They make all of this easier,” said Belgrade, a Native American from the Gila River tribe. “They don’t give you a hard time.”
California lawmakers unveil $10 billion bond proposals for climate and schools
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California lawmakers on Sunday announced they plan to put two bond measures on the ballot in November, one that would ask voter approval to borrow $10 billion for climate programs and another that would borrow $10 billion to build or repair public schools. If passed by the Legislature later this week, the bonds would appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. Lawmakers announced the bond proposals on Sunday, one day after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California’s budget. The spending plan closes an estimated $46.8 billion deficit in part through $16 billion in spending cuts.
“These bond measures are critical to the future of this state, and invest in our kids, their neighborhood schools, and they ensure communities big and small have access to clean drinking water and are wildfire safe,” Democratic state Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire said in a statement.
The climate initiative would help communities recover from wildfires, floods, drought and other natural catastrophes.
The clean water and wildfire bond would cover $10 billion in strategic investments for safe drinking water, as well as funding for “wildfire and forest resilience, sea-level rise, extreme heat mitigation, clean air, and protecting biodiversity,” according to a statement from McGuire’s office.
Officials said it would be the single largest investment in public funding for climate resilience in California’s history.
The second measure would provide $10 billion in borrowed money to modernize and repair schools. K-12 schools would get $8.5 billion, while California community colleges would receive $1.5 billion. The debt would be designated for new construction, improving existing campuses, career technical education and energy efficiency grants.
“Districts will be able to ensure schools have essential facilities like kitchens and libraries, equip students with the skills for high-demand technical careers, and provide greater access to broadband internet,” said Sen. Josh Newman, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee. “This bond ensures that our schools are safe, modern, and well-prepared for the 21st-century.”
Lawmakers passed the state budget last Wednesday after Newsom and legislative leaders both made concessions. They were forced for the second year in a row to pare back or delay some progressive policies that were previously paid for with the help of record-breaking surpluses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The bond measures, if approved by voters, would allow legislators to borrow money not allocated by the budget. In March, voters narrowly — 50.18% to 49.82% — approved a plan to borrow $6.38 billion to build 4,350 housing units for homeless residents and add 6,800 mental health and addiction treatment beds.
What Makes Hurricane Beryl So Unusual
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Intense storms in Europe killed at least seven people over the weekend • Nine inches of rain fell in 24 hours in Delhi, causing deadly flooding just days after blistering high temperatures • California will have “record-challenging heat” for the 4th of July.
THE TOP FIVE
- Potentially catastrophic Hurricane Beryl heads for small Caribbean
islands
The first hurricane of the season, Hurricane Beryl, has started lashing the southeastern islands of the Caribbean today as a category 3 storm. Barbados, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadine Islands, Grenada, and Tobago – islands that don’t normally endure storms of this magnitude – are all under hurricane warnings and bracing for catastrophic damage. The storm is forecast to push toward Jamaica before weakening slightly mid-week and then heading toward Mexico. The system strengthened from a tropical depression to a hurricane in less than 48 hours, which is unusually fast. It was at one point registering as a category 4 storm (and could do so again), the earliest ever recorded in the Atlantic, marking an ominous start to what is expected to be a very intense hurricane season. “Incredible doesn’t cut it,” wrote meteorologist Jim Cantore. “This truly is something else of a hurricane.”
X/NHC_Atlantic
Meanwhile, another tropical storm, named Chris, formed in the Gulf of Mexico. Chris is the third named storm of the Atlantic season, and is also way ahead of schedule: “On average, the 3rd Atlantic named storm forms on August 3rd,” said Philip Klotzbach, a meteorologist with Colorado State University.
- SCOTUS strikes down Chevron, curtailing agencies’ authority
In case you (somehow) missed it: On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down a 40-year-old precedent that deferred to agencies’ interpretations of their own mandates where the statutory guidance was incomplete or ambiguous, otherwise known as Chevron deference. The ruling could kneecap federal agencies in their ability to regulate everything from air and water quality to cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. “The impact will be enormous,” Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Bloomberg. “By paralyzing federal agencies and inviting lawsuits against the rules these agencies implement, this decision will profoundly undermine bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act that are meant to protect public health.”
- Climate group calls for Biden to step aside
After a pretty dismal performance at last week’s debate, President Biden has been trying to reassure donors and voters that he remains the best person to run on the Democratic ticket in the 2024 presidential election. According to The New York Times, his campaign has a call scheduled for today with its national finance committee to “calm nerves and take temperatures.” At least one prominent climate group, Climate Defiance, is urging Biden to step aside for the sake of the climate, E&E News reported. “Defeating Trump and Trumpism is existentially important for our climate and our democracy,” the group’s founder and executive director, Michael Greenberg, said Friday. “President Biden is not up for the job.” Biden’s family is reportedly urging him to stay in the race. All eyes will be on any post-debate polls that come out this week. One new CBS News/YouGov poll shows sentiment is growing among Democratic voters for Biden to step aside.
- Walmart Canada gets Nikola’s hydrogen semi truck
Walmart Canada has become the first major retailer in North America to get a hydrogen fuel cell-powered semi truck. The truck, a Nikola HFCEV Class 8, has a range of nearly 500 miles and will avoid about 100 metric tons of CO2 emissions annually when compared to a traditional semi truck. Reuters reported that major retailers including Walmart and Pepsi had been eyeing Tesla’s electric semi trucks, but became frustrated by delays and have started turning to Tesla’s rivals in the quest to curb emissions across their fleets.
- Data centers in space? EU-funded study says it’s possible.
Data centers are becoming a climate problem. As demand for artificial intelligence grows, these centers are using up huge amounts of energy and putting emissions targets at risk. But what if we put the data centers in space? That’s the suggestion that emerged from a study from a European space company and funded by the EU. The research concluded that not only would putting data centers in space be more sustainable, it could be lucrative, producing a large return on investment. The data centers would be solar powered and would not need to be cooled by water. But the study also found that, in order for these data centers to have a real emissions impact, they’d need to be launched using a yet-to-be-developed “eco-launcher” that produces less carbon dioxide. The EU’s goal is to have this launcher up and running by 2035 and start putting data center “building blocks” into space in 2036.
THE KICKER
Last Wednesday marked the first time in 469 days that global sea surface temperatures did not set a new daily record.
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-beryl-caribbean-forecast
5 charts that explain how the Bay Area’s population has changed
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
California has lost 1.2 million residents to other states since April 2020.
160th anniversary: Yosemite became a state park during Lincoln’s administration
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Here are the steps it took to make Yosemite a National Park
Gov. Gavin Newsom keeps promoting President Biden, but it’s his future that takes center stage
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
California’s governor stays loyal as a surrogate for the president, but experts see that he continues to position himself in the national spotlight.
Rainbow Sandals turns 50: Celebrating a flip flop with soul
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Jay “Sparky” Longley, a surfer and philathropist who just turned 80, started the San Clemente-based business in 1974 to make a sandal that would last.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/07/01/rainbow-sandals-turns-50-celebrating-a-flip-flop-with-soul/
Brazil set for NorCal return in Copa America 30 years after South Bay takeover
date: 2024-07-01, from: San Jose Mercury News
Brazil’s arrival to the region will no doubt bring back memories of the 1994 World Cup, when legions of Seleção fans took over mainstreet Los Gatos during the early stages of the iconic team’s run to the championship on United States soil.
Asda kisses Walmart goodbye with half a billion dollar tech breakup bill
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Project including SAP upgrade beset by cost increases and delays
The UK’s third-largest grocery retailer has spent £430 million ($544 million) on its IT separation from US giant Walmart.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/asda_walmart_separation_costs/
Hello World #24 out now: Impact of tech
date: 2024-07-01, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
Do you remember a time before social media? Mobile phones? Email? We are surrounded by digital technology, and new applications impact our lives whether we engage with them or not. Issue 24 of Hello World, out today for free, gives you ideas for how to help your learners think openly and critically about technology. Teaching…
The post Hello World #24 out now: Impact of tech appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hello-world-24-out-now-impact-of-tech/
M.A.R.S. Rover Robot | #MagPiMonday
date: 2024-07-01, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
One of the best robot kits around, it lets you explore terrain just like a NASA Mars rover, and even uses a similar suspension system.
The post M.A.R.S. Rover Robot | #MagPiMonday appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/m-a-r-s-rover-robot-magpimonday/
Why even strong progress sheltering the unhoused in LA can’t keep up with our affordable housing crisis
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The LAist
Homelessness remains high despite record housing placements, officials say, because L.A.’s affordable housing crisis keeps pushing more people onto the streets.
What you need to know about California’s new security deposit cap, including the exceptions
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The LAist
The California security deposit law, which takes effect this July 1, limits the amount of money that landlords can require as a deposit before move in. Some mom and pop owners will be exempted.
One year after blistering audit, CSU schools are hiring staff to give back Native American artifacts, remains
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The LAist
More than a half dozen Cal State schools are hiring repatriation staff. Here are qualifications for the growing field.
Author Explores ‘The Secret Lives of Elizabethans’ with Help from Internet Archive
date: 2024-07-01, from: Internet Archive Blog
After 34 years as a successful commercial real estate attorney, Dorothea Dickerman is spending her second act writing about the Elizabethan era. She’s long been fascinated with the English literary […]
Is online content moderation a form of free speech?
date: 2024-07-01, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Or does it hinder free speech? That’s the thorny issue the Supreme Court is expected to decide in just a few hours, as it releases its final rulings in what’s been another highly consequential term. We’ll hear more on a case challenging how social media companies deal with content on their platforms. Plus, a look at Major League Soccer’s surging popularity and how the Dawes Act cratered Indigenous wealth.
Juniper Networks flings out emergency patches for perfect 10 router vuln
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Get ’em while they’re hot
A critical vulnerability affecting Juniper Networks routers forced the vendor to issue emergency patches last week, and users are advised to apply them as soon as possible.…
fnec ece commented on issue #141 at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: Oberon A2 at CAS
Hi, I have corrected the problem for oberon subsystem in the MyUnix.KbdMouse.Mod file. Could you test after HotKeys disabled?
Best regards,
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/issues/141#note_192724
July 4, 1951: Celebrating America’s Demisemiseptcentennial
date: 2024-07-01, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
As we look forward to the upcoming 250th anniversary of our nation in 2026, we’re looking back at the 175th anniversary celebration in 1951. For more information on July 4 and the National Archives, visit our website. On July 4, 1951, the United States celebrated its demisemiseptcentennial—the 175th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration … Continue reading July 4, 1951: Celebrating America’s Demisemiseptcentennial
The far-right wins big in France’s elections
date: 2024-07-01, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party has pulled off a victory in the first round of elections in France and could turn French politics on its head. Then, with only three days to go before the United Kingdom’s general election, one of the big issues is housing costs. But are any of the political parties’ pledges giving people hope that they can solve Britain’s housing crunch?
CCC fordert, den Vorschlag zur Chatkontrolle endlich zurückzuziehen
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: Chaos Computer Club Updates
Die Idee der Chatkontrolle ist ein Angriff auf Verschlüsselung und bleibt eine Bedrohung für alle Menschen, die auf sichere private Kommunikation angewiesen sind. Deshalb fordert ein Bündnis aus mehr als vierzig europäischen Organisationen, die sich für Bürgerrechte und Kinderschutz engagieren, von dem gefährlichen Vorschlag der Chatkontrolle abzusehen und stattdessen endlich Maßnahmen für wirksamen Kinderschutz zu ergreifen.
https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2024/chatkontrolle-weg
Polyfill.io claims reveal new cracks in supply chain, but how deep do they go?
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There will always be bad actors in the system. We can always learn from the drama they create
Opinion Libraries. Hushed temples to the civilizing power of knowledge, or launchpads of global destruction? Yep, another word tech has borrowed and debased. Code libraries are essential for adding just the right standard tested functionality to a project. They’re also a natural home for supply chain attacks that materialize malware in the heart of the enterprise like shock troops of Klingons arriving by transporter beam.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/polyfill_io_supply_chain/
Poyfill.io claims reveal new cracks in supply chain, but how deep do they go?
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
There will always be bad actors in the system. We can always learn from the drama they create
Opinion Libraries. Hushed temples to the civilizing power of knowledge, or launchpads of global destruction? Yep, another word tech has borrowed and debased. Code libraries are essential for adding just the right standard tested functionality to a project. They’re also a natural home for supply chain attacks that materialize malware in the heart of the enterprise like shock troops of Klingons arriving by transporter beam.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/poyfillio_comment/
July’s Night Sky Notes: A Hero, a Crown, and Possibly a Nova!
date: 2024-07-01, from: NASA breaking news
Look to the skies all summer long for a Hero and a Crown – and a potential recurring nova.
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/night-sky-notes-july2024/
Electric Cars’ Heat Problem
date: 2024-07-01, from: Heatmap News
If the world is going to slash greenhouse emissions from transportation, then we need a vast number of drivers to switch from fossil fuel engines to electric cars powered by renewable energy. Yet the EVs we need to mitigate further climate damage might, in one way, be ill-suited to the warmer and more extreme climate we’ve already created.
You may have heard that frigid temps are no friend of the electric vehicle. That is true, since extreme cold is a two-pronged problem. First, physical processes in the battery happen more slowly if it’s chilly out. When the mercury drops, my Tesla Model 3 displays a little snowflake icon to warn me the battery unit is too cold to actually use all the range that should be in there. The second problem is maintaining a comfortable cabin. The battery expends a lot of energy generating enough heat to keep the interior warm for its occupants when the temperatures fall to freezing or below.
When it comes to hot days, that second problem is the big one. The agency Recurrent completed a study this month that demonstrated just how much range is lost on sweltering days like those of this month’s nationwide heat wave.
As long as the afternoon high temperature doesn’t get too high, an EV’s range loss is manageable. With an outside temp of 80 degrees Fahrenheit, they found the car loses only 2.8% of its range to keep the cabin at 70 degrees. Even at 90 degrees, the loss reaches just 5%. That amounts to just 10 miles lost from a 200-mile EV. You might not even notice it — it’s probably not that far off from what’s lost by driving 80 miles per hour down the freeway instead of the posted speed limit of 65.
When it’s dangerously hot out, though, the story changes quickly. At 95 degrees outside, the average EV loses 15% of its potential range. At 100 degrees outside, the car suffers a staggering 31% range loss to maintain 70 degrees inside the car. The bigger the difference between the outside temperature and the desired inside temperature, the more of your juice is lost to climate control rather than moving the vehicle. This is why range loss is typically worse in winter — a 10-degree day in Duluth means you’re 60 degrees away from the desired 70 Fahrenheit, while a 110-degree day in Phoenix is “only” 40 degrees from the target.
I’ve seen this phenomenon first-hand during scorching trips across the desert from Los Angeles to Las Vegas or up the interstate toward the San Francisco Bay Area, where the drive passed through areas that exceeded 110 degrees. The car offers an estimate for how much will be left on the battery upon arrival at the next charging stop — then that estimate slowly dips lower and lower as more energy is expended just on air conditioning. After a few anxious drives, I learned to hoard a bit more charge than the car thinks it needs to make it comfortably to the next station.
There is also the possibility that lots of high-temperature driving will cause long-term damage to the battery’s electrolyte or other components. There isn’t too much to do about this one other than limiting how often you drive on extreme days, if you can, and hope that future battery materials that are more resistant to heat become a reality sooner rather than later.
However, there are ways to mitigate the EV heat problem during your drive time. It takes more energy to air-condition the cabin down to the proper temperature than it does to maintain the temperature. So, if you’re plugged in to charge at home or at a public charger, have your vehicle reach the desired temp before you unplug and leave.
Also, the figures in Recurrent’s study are based on setting the climate control to 70 degrees. If you and your passengers can cope with a higher cabin temperature, say 75 degrees, then you’re shortening the difference by 5 degrees and giving your battery a break. (Plenty of EV adopters have gone through a moment of panic where they thought they might need to turn off the climate control entirely to ensure they reached their next plug-in.)
Should the planet’s new normal of extreme heat deter you from going electric? First, remember the manta that experts repeat as a rebuttal to range anxiety: Most people do the vast majority of their driving close to home. Running the A/C on max to survive an August trip to Trader Joe’s isn’t going to make your EV battery hit zero unless you were too low to begin with.
If you’re really worried about the extreme temperatures of your home region, then splurge for range. I’ve recommended this before regardless of where you live and drive. But if you live in the middle of the desert and can afford the longer-range version of a particular EV, then buy it and save yourself the mental strain of wondering whether the summer sun will limit how far you can really drive your car.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/how-does-hot-weather-affect-ev-range
CISA director: US is ‘not afraid’ to shout about Big Tech’s security failings
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Jen Easterly hopes CSRB’s Microsoft report won’t impede future private sector collaboration
CISA director Jen Easterly says the US Cybersecurity Safety Review Board (CSRB) “is not afraid to say when something is amiss” in response to questions about the future of private sector collaboration following the board’s scathing report on Microsoft.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/cisa_big_tech_security/
Go, Octopus, Go!
date: 2024-07-01, from: Status-Q blog
One of the surprising things about Octopus, the UK company from whom we purchase our gas and electricity, is that, despite growing to the point where they handle about a quarter of UK households, they continue to innovate. For a long time, we’ve been on the ‘Octopus Go’ tariff, which means that for the four Continue Reading
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/01/12105/
What do CTOs hate most about GenAI? Tool changes that break stuff
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
With so many DB vendors to choose from, our vulture claws over the bewildering choices
DataStax recently joined a growing band of database specialists in launching new tooling with the promise of helping customers build GenAI apps on its data platform. Yet the question remains for customers employing multiple databases: Which vendor – if any – should they choose as the main plank to support GenAI application development?…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/database_ai_training/
The Corporatization Of Donald Trump
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Lever News
In 2016, Donald Trump routinely went after CEOs and corporate power — now he’s their mouthpiece. What happened?
https://www.levernews.com/the-corporatization-of-donald-trump/
An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Not much if wielded by the experienced and careful operator in this story – but he was not the only actor in this tale
Who, Me? Yet again Monday is upon us, bringing the prospect of another working week filled with joy, opportunity, new horizons, and a fresh dose of Who, Me? – The Reg’s weekly confessional in which readers share stories of jobs that had promising beginnings, and … interesting ends.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/who_me/
Today in SCV History (July 1)
date: 2024-07-01, from: SCV New (TV Station)
1988 – Dr. Dianne G. Van Hook’s first day at the helm of College of the Canyons (now California’s longest serving community college CEO). [story
https://scvnews.com/today-in-scv-history-july-1/
Chinese space company accidentally launches rocket in test gone wrong
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
10, 9, 8 … hang on, did anyone check we bolted this thing down properly?
Private Chinese launch outfit Space Pioneer has launched a rocket by mistake.…
Police allege ‘evil twin’ of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger’s credentials
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Fasten your seat belts, secure your tray table, and try not to give away your passwords
Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi network on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest flier credentials for email and social media services.…
On being humble and accepting success
date: 2024-07-01, from: Manu - I write blog
<p>There’s a subtle difference between being humble and pretending to be something you’re not. If you are successful in some field you can—and should—recognise your success while still being humble and not letting the success make you arrogant. I find that not doing that, not recognising your success in any shape or form, can grind me in the wrong way. Because at some point you start to feel disingenuous. </p>People and Blog is a passion project. It’s not a “successful” project by any metric. Combining RSS, Email and the site, it probably has a few thousand readers. And don’t get me wrong, it’s great. I’m grateful for that and I’ll continue to post these interviews for as long as I can. 72 incredibly kind people have also decided to contribute some of their money to support it and that’s also something I’m very appreciative of.
Still, I think of P&B as a very niche side project, far from being a successful one. Now let’s imagine that instead of a few thousand, the P&B audience was a few hundreds of thousands and instead of 72 people, 7000 were contributing something every month. At the current average that would net me almost 16000$ a month. That’s around 200k a year and it would make me in the top 0.5% of earners here in Italy. Could I still go around claiming my project was not successful? Hell no. I’d be a hypocrite if I were to do that. And you’d be rightfully pissed at me if I were still nudging you to support for 1$ a month while also being part of the 1%.
I find it interesting that the pursuit of endless growth is something we despise when corporations are doing it but it’s not something that bothers us too much when it’s done by “content creators”. And yet, after a certain scale, it’s the same mindset. This is why I love to support small creators who do things simply because they enjoy it and are not driven by other incentives.
I love something Om said in his interview :
I love supporting the small media, but don’t have time for establishment media outlets. I don’t much care for some of the larger blogs as well. And same goes for the larger YouTubers and podcasts. You need to catch them early — that’s when they really are pure and hustling to serve the reader.
<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> ::
<a href="https://ko-fi.com/manuelmoreale">Support for 1$/month</a> ::
<a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/supporters">See my awesome supporters</a> ::
<a href="https://buttondown.email/peopleandblogs">Subscribe to People and Blogs</a></p>
https://manuelmoreale.com/@/page/qa2cajFGyOzPoQRE
How to decarbonise the world’s cement
date: 2024-07-01, from: Hannah Richie at Substack
We have several options. Can any compete on price?
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/low-carbon-cement
Indonesian government didn’t have backups of ransomwared data, because DR was only an option
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
President has ordered a datacenter audit and made backups mandatory
Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo has ordered an audit of government datacenters after it was revealed that most of the data they store is not backed up.…
Microsoft tells yet more customers their emails have been stolen
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-02, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: US auto dealers still offline; Conti coders sanction; Rabbit R1 hardcoded API keys; and more
security in brief It took a while, but Microsoft has told customers that the Russian criminals who compromised its systems earlier this year made off with even more emails than it first admitted. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/infosec_in_brief/
China warns citizens to stop posting info about spy satellites on social media
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Singapore launches global regulatory blockchain; China gets new SciTech boss; India spectrum auction fizzles
Asia In Brief China’s Ministry of State Security has asked citizens to stop posting info about the nation’s spy satellites and national security installations online.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/asia_tech_news_roundup/
Could Biden’s party replace him as their presidential nominee?
date: 2024-07-01, from: VOA News USA
U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump are back on the campaign trail following their first debate last week. Biden’s sometimes-struggling performance in that debate has some members of his political party looking at who might replace him as their nominee. VOA correspondent Scott Stearns has our story.
Think Before You Drink
date: 2024-07-01, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Americans sport the red, white, and blue in summer at parks, beaches, and ball games. Keep festivities fun and safe.
The post Think Before You Drink appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.
https://www.independent.com/2024/06/30/think-before-you-drink/
Zumbathon raises money for homeless shelter
date: 2024-07-01, from: The Signal
Dozens of Santa Clarita Valley residents gathered to dance and raise funds at a Zumbathon hosted by Bridge to Home at the Santa Clarita Athletic Club in Newhall on Sunday. […]
The post Zumbathon raises money for homeless shelter appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.
https://signalscv.com/2024/06/zumbathon-raises-money-for-homeless-shelter/
Alibaba Cloud closing Australian and Indian datacenters
date: 2024-07-01, updated: 2024-07-01, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Prioritizing Mexico and Southeast Asia
Alibaba Cloud has revealed that it will soon close its datacenter operations in Australia and India – despite previously telling The Register its Australian operations remained intact.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/alibaba_cloud_closes_india_australia/
Code for Model-Free Nonlinear Feedback Optimization
date: 2024-07-01, from: ETH Zurich, recently added
He, Zhiyu
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/646002
GHC 9.6.6 is now available
date: 2024-07-01, from: Glasgow Haskell Compiler
GHC 9.6.6 is now available
Zubin Duggal - 2024-07-01
The GHC developers are happy to announce the availability of GHC 9.6.6. Binary distributions, source distributions, and documentation are available on the release page.
This release is primarily a bugfix release addressing some issues found in the 9.6 series. These include:
- A fix for a bug in the NCG that could lead to incorrect runtime results due to erroneously removing a jump instruction (#24507).
- A fix for a linker error that manifested on certain platform/toolchain combinations, particularly darwin with a brew provisioned toolchain, arising due to a confusion in linker options between GHC and cabal (#22210).
- A fix for a compiler panic in the simplifier due to incorrect eta expansion (#24718).
- A fix for possible segfaults when using the bytecode interpreter due to incorrect constructor tagging (#24870).
- And a few more fixes
A full accounting of changes can be found in the release notes. As some of the fixed issues do affect correctness users are encouraged to upgrade promptly.
We would like to thank Microsoft Azure, GitHub, IOG, the Zw3rk stake pool, Well-Typed, Tweag I/O, Serokell, Equinix, SimSpace, Haskell Foundation, and other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance and release management over the years. Finally, this release would not have been possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work comprise this release.
As always, do give this release a try and open a ticket if you see anything amiss.
Enjoy!
-Zubin
http://haskell.org/ghc/blog/20240701-ghc-9.6.6-released.html
Psycopg 3.2 released
date: 2024-07-01, from: PostgreSQL News
After 846 commits and close to two years in the making, we are very happy to announce the release of Psycopg 3.2!
This release adds several new features to the Psycopg 3 line, some of which are:
- support for Numpy scalar types
- easier to use notifications reception
- the possibility to run queries with PostgreSQL-format parameters
- a row factory to return a scalar from a query
- asynchronous, encrypted cancellations
- support for the many new features added in the upcoming PostgreSQL v17
- OpenSSL 3.x bundled with binary packages
A few bug bug fixes are included too, which have also been independently released in the 3.1.20 package. Given the high level of compatibility between 3.1 and 3.2, this could be the last release of the 3.1 line.
For further details please check out:
Please note that several new features in the 3.2 release require libpq v17, but, because PostgreSQL version 17 has not been released yet, they are not immediately available in the binary packages. In order to use these features you will need a development version of libpq 17 on your system and to use the Python or C source distribution. New packages bundling libpq v17 will be released as soon as the official PostgreSQL 17 has been released.
Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to the project, especially to Denis Laxalde from Dalibo, indefatigable libpq explorer and always available to solve challenging problems!
Psycopg, first v2, now v3, is the de-facto standard for the communication between Python and PostgreSQL, two major components of innumerable businesses and mission-critical infrastructures. Maintaining such a critical library to the highest standard of reliability, completeness, performance requires a lot of care and work.
If you are a Python and PostgreSQL user and would like to make sure that the interface between the two is well maintained and continuously improved, please consider supporting the project and to be one of our sponsors 💜
Happy hacking!
– Daniele
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/psycopg-32-released-2887/
pgAdmin 4 v8.9 Released
date: 2024-07-01, from: PostgreSQL News
The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 8.9. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 20 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.
pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.
Notable changes in this release include:
Features:
- Provide the option to set a theme based on OS theme preference.
Bugs/Housekeeping:
- Remove the usage of MUI makeStyles as it doesn’t support React 18.
- Fix the permissions issue in the pgAdmin installation directory on Debian and RHEL-8 platforms (CVE-2024-6238).
- Fixed an issue where resizable data editors in the query tool should not be allowed to resize beyond the app window bounds.
- Ensure that a user can connect to a server using SSL certificates and identity files from a shared storage.
- Fixed an issue where the dark theme shows a white background when all tabs are closed.
- Fixed an issue where the schema diff incorrectly marked tables as different due to schema-qualified trigger functions in the trigger definitions.
- Fixed an issue where backslash breaks syntax highlighting.
- Fixed an issue where query tool shortcuts for find/replace are not working.
- Fixed new line indentation in the query editor and added a user preference to disable it.
- Fixed migration failure while using an external database.
Builds for Windows and macOS are available now, along with a Python Wheel, Docker Container, RPM, DEB Package, and source code tarball from the tarball area.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgadmin-4-v89-released-2886/
pg_dumpbinary v2.18 released
date: 2024-07-01, from: PostgreSQL News
Grenoble, France - June 22, 2024
pg_dumpbinary
pg_dumpbinary dumps a PostgreSQL database to a binary
format. The resulting dump must be restored using
pg_restorebinary, which is provided.
This is a maintenance release that fixes two bugs in the restore process.
- Fix double copy statements when a table name requires to be quoted.
- Fix error when restoring a table with a GENERATED ALWAYS column.
pg_dumpbinary is useful when:
-
You have bytea that can not be exported by
pg_dumpbecause the total size of the escape/hex output exceeds 1Gb. -
You have custom type that stores
\0internally in bytea but data are exported by pg_dump as char/varchar/text. In this case pg_dump truncates all data after the first\0, resulting in data loss. - Other cases where a binary output format is useful.
In these kinds of cases pg_dumpbinary helps by dumping the
PostgreSQL database in a binary format. In all other cases the
pg_dump/pg_restore commands distributed with PostgreSQL are preferred.
See the documentation for a more complete description of available features.
Links & Credits
pg_dumpbinary is an Open Source project from LzLabs GmbH. Contributions and ideas are welcome. Send your ideas, features requests, or patches using GitHub’s tools.
Links :
- Documentation: https://github.com/lzlabs/pg_dumpbinary/blob/master/README.md
- Download: https://github.com/lzlabs/pg_dumpbinary/releases/
- Support: use GitHub report tool at https://github.com/lzlabs/pg_dumpbinary/pg_dumpbinary/issues
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pg_dumpbinary-v218-released-2880/
PGConf.EU 2024 Registration is open
date: 2024-07-01, from: PostgreSQL News
Hello from PostgreSQL Europe!
The registration for PGConf.EU 2024, which will take place on 22-25 October in Athens, is now open.
We have a limited number of tickets available for purchase with the discount code EARLYBIRD.
The first day of the conference traditionally consists of training sessions. These have limited spaces and can be booked as part of your conference registration process.
We are in the process of arranging onsite childcare, and more information will follow shortly.
We hope you will be able to join us in Athens in October!
For any questions, please visit our website pgconf.eu or email us by replying to this message.
Best regards,
PGConf.EU 2024 Organizers
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pgconfeu-2024-registration-is-open-2888/
Greenmask v0.2.0b1 Release
date: 2024-07-01, from: PostgreSQL News
Greenmask v0.2.0b1 Release
PostgreSQL Logical Dump and Anonymization Tool
This major beta release introduces new features and refactored transformers, significantly enhancing Greenmask’s flexibility to better meet business needs. Help us improve GreenMask and tailor it to meet community needs. We welcome your feedback in the release discussion on GitHub.
Greenmask Overview
Greenmask is a versatile open-source tool for database backup, anonymization, and restoration. Written in pure Go with ported PostgreSQL libraries, it is platform-independent and stateless, requiring no schema modifications. It is customizable and compatible with existing PostgreSQL utilities.
Greenmask is ideally suited for:
- Routine backup and restoration tasks, ensuring data integrity and availability.
- Anonymization and data masking for staging environments and analytics, protecting sensitive information while maintaining data utility.
Key features
-
Deterministic transformers — deterministic approach to
data transformation based on the hash functions. This ensures that the
same input data will always produce the same output data. Almost each
transformer supports either
randomorhashengine making it universal for any use case. - Dynamic parameters — almost each transformer supports dynamic parameters, allowing to parametrize the transformer dynamically from the table column value. This is helpful for resolving the functional dependencies between columns and satisfying the constraints.
- Database type safe - Ensures data integrity by validating data and utilizing the database driver for encoding and decoding operations. This approach guarantees the preservation of data formats.
- Transformation validation and easy maintainable - During obfuscation development, Greenmask provides validation warnings and a transformation diff feature, allowing you to monitor and maintain transformations effectively throughout the software lifecycle.
- Partitioned tables transformation inheritance - Define transformation configurations once and apply them to all partitions within partitioned tables, simplifying the obfuscation process.
- Stateless - Greenmask operates as a logical dump and does not impact your existing database schema.
- Backward compatible - It fully supports the same features and protocols as existing vanilla PostgreSQL utilities. Dumps created by Greenmask can be successfully restored using the pg_restore utility.
- Extensible - Users have the flexibility to implement domain-based transformations in any programming language or use predefined templates.
- Provide a variety of storage - Greenmask offers a variety of storage options for local and remote data storage, including directories and S3-like storage solutions.
Playground usage for the beta version
If you want to run a Greenmask playground for the beta version execute:
git checkout tags/v0.2.0b1 -b v0.2.0b1 docker-compose run
greenmask-from-source
Changes overview
-
Introduced
dynamic parameters in the transformers
- Most transformers now support dynamic parameters where applicable.
-
Dynamic parameters are strictly enforced. If you need to cast values to
another type, Greenmask provides templates and predefined cast functions
accessible via
cast_to. These functions cover frequent operations such asUnixTimestampToDateandIntToBool.
- The transformation logic has been significantly refactored, making transformers more customizable and flexible than before.
-
Introduced transformation engines
-
random- generates transformer values based on pseudo-random algorithms. -
hash- generates transformer values using hash functions. Currently, it utilizessha3hash functions, which are secure but perform slowly. In the stable release, there will be an option to choose betweensha3andSipHash.
-
Notable changes
Core
-
Introduced the
Parametrizerinterface, now implemented for both dynamic and static parameters. - Renamed most of the toolkit types for enhanced clarity and comprehensive documentation coverage.
-
Refactored the
Driverinitialization logic. -
Added validation warnings for overridden types in the
Driver. -
Migrated existing built-in transformers to utilize the new
Parametrizerinterface. -
Implemented a new abstraction,
TransformationContext, as the first step towards enabling new feature transformation conditions (#34). - Optimized most transformers for performance in both dynamic and static modes. While dynamic mode offers flexibility, static mode ensures performance remains high. Using only the necessary transformation features helps keep transformation time predictable.
Documentation
Documentation has been significantly refactored. New information about features and updates to transformer descriptions have been added.
Transformers
-
RandomEmail - Introduces a new transformer that supports both random and deterministic engines. It allows for flexible email value generation; you can use column values in the template and choose to keep the original domain or select any from the
domainsparameter. -
NoiseDate, NoiseFloat, NoiseInt - These transformers support both random and deterministic engines, offering dynamic mode parameters that control the noise thresholds within the
minandmaxrange. Unlike previous implementations which used a singleratioparameter, the new release featuresmin_ratioandmax_ratioparameters to define noise values more precisely. Utilizing thehashengine in these transformers enhances security by complicating statistical analysis for attackers, especially when the same salt is used consistently over long periods. -
NoiseNumeric - A newly implemented transformer, sharing features with
NoiseIntandNoiseFloat, but specifically designed for numeric values (large integers or floats). It provides adecimalparameter to handle values with fractions. -
RandomChoice - Now supports the
hashengine -
RandomDate, RandomFloat, RandomInt - Now enhanced with hash engine support. Threshold parameters
minandmaxhave been updated to support dynamic mode, allowing for more flexible configurations. -
RandomNumeric - A new transformer specifically designed for numeric types (large integers or floats), sharing similar features with
RandomIntandRandomFloat, but tailored for handling huge numeric values. -
RandomString - Now supports hash engine mode
-
RandomUnixTimestamp - This new transformer generates Unix timestamps with selectable units (
second,millisecond,microsecond,nanosecond). Similar in function toRandomDate, it supports the hash engine and dynamic parameters forminandmaxthresholds, with the ability to override these units usingmin_unitandmax_unitparameters. -
RandomUuid - Added hash engine support
-
RandomPerson - Implemented a new transformer that replaces
RandomName,RandomLastName,RandomFirstName,RandomFirstNameMale,RandomFirstNameFemale,RandomTitleMale, andRandomTitleFemale. This new transformer offers enhanced customizability while providing similar functionalities as the previous versions. It generates personal data such asFirstName,LastName, andTitle, based on the providedgenderparameter, which now supports dynamic mode. Future minor versions will allow for overriding the default names database. -
Added tsModify - a new template function for time.Time objects modification
-
Introduced a new RandomIp transformer capable of generating a random IP address based on the specified netmask.
-
Added a new RandomMac transformer for generating random Mac addresses.
-
Deleted transformers include
RandomMacAddress,RandomIPv4,RandomIPv6,RandomUnixTime,RandomTitleMale,RandomTitleFemale,RandomFirstName,RandomFirstNameMale,RandomFirstNameFemale,RandomLastName, andRandomNamedue to the introduction of more flexible and unified options.
Useful Links
- Public Roadmap
- Explore detailed Documentation
- Access the Latest Release on GitHub
- Contact us for support at Email Support
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/greenmask-v020b1-release-2861/
pg_back 2.4.0 released
date: 2024-07-01, from: PostgreSQL News
pg_back is a simple backup tool for PostgreSQL using pg_dump.
The main features of pg_back are:
- Dump globals and configuration
- Dump all or a subset of databases into any format supported by pg_dump
- Filter tables and schemas
- Time and count based purge of old dumps
- Dump as a non-superuser role
- Encrypt and decrypt the files with AGE using a key pair or a password
- Upload and download to major Cloud storage providers (S3, GCS, Azure Blob) or any host with SFTP
- Checksum files with sha256sum
- Pre-backup and post-backup hooks
This new version allow to store remote files under a defined prefix, along with some bugfixes, see the CHANGELOG.md file in the repository for details.
We would like to thanks all contributors who helped make this release possible.
The source code, documentation and downloads are available on github: https://github.com/orgrim/pg_back
Docker images and Kubernetes examples are provided:
- Docker image: https://github.com/orgrim/pg_back/pkgs/container/pg_back
- Kubernetes: https://github.com/orgrim/pg_back/tree/master/contrib/kubernetes
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pg_back-240-released-2879/
“No way to prevent this” say users of only language where this regularly happens
date: 2024-07-01, from: Ze Iaso’s blog
https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/CVE-2024-6387/
Celebrating five years of Grant IDs: where are we with the Crossref Grant Linking System?
date: 2024-07-01, from: Crossref Blog
We’re happy to note that this month, we are marking five years since Crossref launched its Grant Linking System. The Grant Linking System (GLS) started life as a joint community effort to create ‘grant identifiers’ and support the needs of funders in the scholarly communications infrastructure.
Some organisations at the forefront of adopting Crossref’s Grant Linking System presented their challenges and how they overcame them, shared the benefits they are reaping from participating, and provided some tips about their processes and workflows.
The funding organisations whose experiences were shared included Wellcome, FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal), and NWO (Dutch Research Council). They were joined by a new group of foundations, research councils, and private research funders from around the world—from Kenya to Singapore to Estonia—to have a first introduction to the GLS and connect them with colleagues who are further along on their journey.
We also heard about tools such as a new open source Crossref plugin for the Fluxx platform, grant management systems with in-built Crossref integrations such as ProposalCentral, Europe PMC GrantFinder which was first to implement the GLS on Wellcome’s behalf and hosts their grants, and one of the first publishers, eLife to start referencing Crossref grant links in their publications both online and in the open metadata for others to retrieve.
Read on for further information or watch the recording of the event.
What is the Crossref Grant Linking System?
The Crossref Grant Linking System, conceptualised in 2017, and launched in 2019, captures and helps clarify funding relationships for scholarly outputs. Thanks to interconnectedness with the 160 million metadata records collected and curated by Crossref members, it enables funders as well as scholars to track and analyse funding patterns and evaluate programmes, and it supports assertions about the integrity of scholarly records.
Features of the GLS
- Globally unique persistent link and identifier for each grant
- Connected with 160 million published outputs
- Funder-designed metadata schema, including project, investigator, value, and award-type information
-
Programmatic or no-code methods to send metadata
- Thanks to the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who funded development of the online grant registration form
- Open search and API for all to discover funding outcomes; all metadata is distributed openly to thousands of tools and services
- Crossref-hosted landing pages
- A global community of ~50 funder advisors and 35+ funders already in the Grant Linking System
- Membership of Crossref; influence the foundational infrastructure powering open research
The last five years has seen the GLS grow through membership, metadata, and community contributions.
The momentum for this programme is building - as illustrated by
increasing numbers of metadata records (and related relationships we’re
seeing). The 35 funder members represent over 100 funding programmes and
have created 125,000 grant records already.
During last week’s call, it was helpful to hear from the community what they see as key benefits of the Crossref Grant Linking System:
- Meaningfully delivering on and supporting Open Science policies and mandates, and contributing ‘their bit’ to the transparency of the evidence trail in the scholarly ecosystem.
- Reporting and evaluating the funding programmes, essential for the public funders who need to demonstrate the value for money in allocating their funds and other support.
- Supporting a more holistic assessment of scholarship and scholars, especially as and when metadata becomes included with a full array of outputs, not limited to books and articles.
How the Crossref Grant Linking System supports Open Science policy
Since 2020, all the grant records are openly available through our REST API which is queried more than 1.8 billion times every month so these metadata records are distributed to thousands of systems across the research enteprise. In a 2022 blog, Ed Pentz and Ginny Hendricks laid out guidelines for research funders to meet open science guidelines using existing open infrastructure such as Crossref, ORCID, and ROR. Syman Stevens, a grantmaking and private philanthropy consultant, highlighted on the call that the funders he works with are increasingly interested in ways to deliver on their open science policy and that particpation in the GLS is a tangible thing they can do to meet this goal.
As part of its open science policy, NWO will start participating in the Crossref Grant Linking System from July 2025. Research funders are a part of the scholarly communications system; we not only provide the funding to do the actual research but can also be the authoritative source of data about the projects we have funded and the outputs arising from that funding. Increasingly, all these elements – grants, researchers, outputs - are linked with metadata and unique identifiers to ensure that research is findable and accessible.
– Hans de Jonge, Director of Open Science NL, part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO)
How funders leverage the Grant Linking System in their reporting and assessment
Looking back to the origins of the system, it’s important to recognise the work of the initial working groups. Through their contribution, funders helped design the initial metadata schema for grants as well as establish the governance and fees for this service, and our Advisory Group continues to inform further developments. In this way, the Grant Linking System enables the needs and wishes of funders to contribute and see their data as part of the wider ecosystem.
An excellent example of that synergy in action is the use case presented by Cátia Laranjeira, manager of the PTCRIS programme at the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal (FCT). PTCRIS is the Foundation’s integrated national information ecosystem that supports scientific activity management. Cátia reflected on the relative fragmentation of spaces where the scientific outputs are found, and PTCRIS’s ambition for aggregating metadata in one place to be able to trace and evaluate programmes in light of the related outputs. At the start of the programme, they identified lack of a persistent identifier for grants as a major shortcoming of the system. Crossref GLS naturally fits in with their goals.
The initiative by FCT to assign unique DOIs to national public funding through Crossref is a game-changer for open science, linking funding directly to scientific outcomes and boosting transparency. Join us in this effort—let’s make every grant count and ensure open access to research information!"
– Cátia Laranjeira, PTCRIS Program Manager at Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologis (FCT Portugal)
FCT initially piloted a small subset of their grants (approximately 6,000 recent awards) at the end of 2023. Cátia pointed to researchers’ keen participation in this programme as one of its successes – and thanks to the word of mouth, FCT has already been approached by researchers requesting unique Crossref links for their grants! This appetite for grant IDs will soon be more fully satisfied, as FCT is readying to register all of their grants with Crossref, to enable further insights into funding and outcome flows, supporting them in demonstrating the value for money for the public resources they manage. Via interfaces for grant management and standardised online CVs, the system is also enabling researchers to use the system in their own future reporting and career development.
In the ensuing discussion, Rachel Bruce of UKRI mentioned that she’s hopeful that GLS will help funders ‘close the loop’ on more holistic reward and recognition, allowing for inclusion of evidence for a broader set of outputs in those processes.
How the community is working to integrate open infrastructure
Melissa Harrison, Team Leader at EMBL-EBI, manages Europe PMC and a complementary data science team, who were part of the initial FREYA project – supporting infrastructure delivery for unique identifiers for grants. The team has been adding grant records to Crossref on Wellcome’s behalf since 2019. Melissa highlighted the shortcomings of internal award numbers, which don’t tend to be understood outside of the ecosystem where they are produced (that is the funder’s administrative system), are almost certainly not unique, and don’t resolve to or connect with anything in the wider ecosystem. Therefore internal award numbers can’t signify relationships with other outputs or assets in the wider world. By contrast, Crossref’s Grant IDs are unique, persistent, resolvable, and interrelated with other Crossref metadata, whilst being retrievable for other systems to link to too.
Persistent identifiers for grants was the next logical step after identifiers for funders - open metadata registered with a PID in a central service like Crossref is invaluable to build the full picture of the research enterprise.
– Melissa Harrison, Team Leader, Literature Services at EMBL-EBI)
Ease of execution is important for scaling the Grant Linking System, and enabling its use in a diverse set of circumstances in the open science ecosystem. Altum was the trailblazer, first integrating its grant management platform Proposal Central with GLS. It was good to hear that others are now joining the integration efforts. Syman Stevens talked about the recent work initiated by Joe McArthur at OA Works, to develop a simple, open-source plug-in for any of the major grant management systems, to enable funders to deposit their grant metadata with Crossref GLS with a click of the button. Syman demonstrated the resulting interface in Fluxx, that allows for creating a record and sending grant metadata to Crossref as part of the regular grant management within the platform. He pointed out that, while this integration was developed for Fluxx, all code and documentation is openly available on GitHub and this can potentially be forked or adapted as necessary for reuse in other grant management systems.
It is heartening that others in the community are seeing such a need for this that they’re funding and creating their own tools to advance participation and use of the GLS.
Finally, Fred Atherden, Head of Production Operations at eLife, presented how they include Crossref grant identifiers in publication metadata for the version of record of the works published on their platform. eLife is the first publisher to fully integrate Crossref grant identifiers both within the article display and in the metadata. Fred shared that in addition to collecting the data from the authors, eLife also attempts matching, albeit using very restrictive methodology, to enable more grant metadata in their publication records. They recognise that so far there are very few publishers including persistent links for grants in this way, and talked about plans to start collecting and including this data further upstream, and including them in the future for reviewed preprints.
Acknowledgements and how to participate in the GLS
Reflecting on the last five years, thanks must go to the >35 funders who are already participating (see logo mashup below), to our current volunteers and to those partners working to promote and make use of the Grant Linking System. We also acknowledge that the GLS would not have been possible without the Crossref board members at the time, our staff including alumni Josh Brown, Rachael Lammey, and Geoffrey Bilder, or without the early dedicated time and input from the following people and organisations on our working groups for governance and fees, and for metadata modelling:
- Yasushi Ogasaka and Ritsuko Nakajima, Japan Science & Technology Agency
- Neil Thakur and Brian Haugen, US National Institutes of Health
- Jo McEntyre and Michael Parkin, Europe PMC
- Robert Kiley and Nina Frentop, Wellcome
- Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka and Diego Chialva, European Research Council
- Lance Vowell and Carly Robinson, OSTI/US Dept of Energy
- Ashley Moore and Kevin Dolby, UKRI (Research Councils UK / Medical Research Council)
- Salvo da Rosa, Children’s Tumor Foundation
- Trisha Cruse, DataCite
To learn more about the Crossref Grant Linking System, the best place to start is our service page. And for the next step, please reach out to us for a conversation about any questions specific to your organisation and any questions that may need to be addressed in order to enable your full participation.
Grant DOIs enhance the discovery and accessibility of funded project information and are one of the important links in a connected research ecosystem. I’m grateful and proud to contribute to the robustness and interconnectedness of the research infrastructure. Few funders are currently participating in the Crossref Grant Linking System, and I encourage others to consider doing so. This adoption follows the “network effect,” where the value and utility increase as more people participate, encouraging even wider adoption.
– Kristin Eldon Whylly, Senior Grants Manager and Change Management Lead at Templeton World Charity Fund (TWCF)
You can email me via feedback@crossref.org or set up a call with me when it suits you (you can overlay your own calendar using the toggle at the top right). We look forward to welcoming even more funders and to see those relationships in the open science infrastructure grow even further in the coming years.