News gathered 2024-09-18
(date: 2024-09-18 14:08:04)
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/
Scientists Find Microplastics in Human Brain Tissue Above the Nose
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new study identified the tiny pollutants in the olfactory bulbs of eight cadavers, suggesting microplastics can travel through the nose to the brain
Lilbits: Intel Foundry to operate as a subsidiary, HTC Vive Focus Vision XR is a premium headset, and Bose unveils “Personal Surround Sound”
date: 2024-09-18, from: Liliputing
Setting up a surround-sound system at home usually involves arranging at least five speakers plus a subwoofer around the house. But Bose has introduced a new “Personal Surround Sound” system that lets you do it by pairing a soundbar placed by your TV with a pair of open-ear earbuds. Since the earbuds don’t cover your […]
The post Lilbits: Intel Foundry to operate as a subsidiary, HTC Vive Focus Vision XR is a premium headset, and Bose unveils “Personal Surround Sound” appeared first on Liliputing.
LockBit boasts of ransoming IRS-authorized eFile.com
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Add ‘ransomware’ to the list of certainties in life?
Notorious ransomware gang LockBit claims to have compromised eFile.com, which offers online services for electronically filing tax returns with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).…
Man who sold fentanyl-laced pill liable for $5.8 million in death of young female customer
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
LOS ANGELES — In 2019, Brandon McDowell was contacted by a sophomore in college who asked to buy Percocet, a prescription painkiller.
What the 20-year-old sold her instead were counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid that can be lethal in a dose as small as 2 milligrams. Hours later, Alexandra Capelouto, also 20, was dead in her Temecula, California, home.
It is an increasingly common scenario as fentanyl overdoses have become a leading cause of death for minors in the last five years, with more than 74,000 people dying in the U.S. from a synthetic opioid in 2023, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
McDowell has been behind bars since 2022 with a fentanyl possession conviction. But the Capeloutos have now won an additional $5.8 million judgment against him for the death of their daughter.
“We’ve won the battle but not the war,” said Matt Capelouto, Alexandra’s father. “We still have a long ways to go in terms of holding drug dealers accountable for deaths.”
Baruch Cohen, the Capeloutos’ lawyer, said this was the first time a drug dealer has been held liable civilly for someone’s death, to his knowledge.
“Here’s the hope that this judgment will be the shot that’s heard around the world, so to speak,” Cohen said. “Because if it inhibits another drug deal from going down, where the drug dealer … realizes that, besides the jail sentence, he is liable for millions of dollars of damages, maybe he’ll think twice.”
McDowell, now 25, first pleaded guilty in California federal court in 2022 for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, a charge that carries a 20-year minimum sentence if linked to death or serious injury and convicted by a jury. McDowell was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Alexandra’s father felt that wasn’t enough. He and his wife, who was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer that year and has been battling it since, decided to sue McDowell for wrongful death.
“For taking somebody’s life, that was not a fair sentence,” he said. “I was going to pursue every means possible to make sure justice was served.”
While McDowell filed for bankruptcy, the Capeloutos won a judgment of about $5 million against him. The Superior Court of Riverside County found he sold harmful narcotics with “willful and malicious” intent that led to Alexandra Capelouto’s death. A few months later, the Capeloutos filed another case in federal bankruptcy court to ensure that McDowell could not escape his debt under bankruptcy.
“Bankruptcy is designed for honest debtors, not crooked criminal debtors,” Cohen said. “This judgment will haunt him the rest of his life, and when he does make money, we’ll garnish it. When he does buy property, we’ll put a lien on it.”
Judge Mark Houle ruled in the Capeloutos’ favor, ordering a $5.8 million judgment against Brandon McDowell that includes a year and half of interest in addition to the initial $5 million.
Since his daughter’s death, Matt Capelouto founded the non-profit Stop Drug Homicide to advocate for families and push for more legislation to hold drug dealers accountable. One is Alexandra’s Law, which would require a formal warning be given to anyone with a drug-related conviction to inform them of the dangers of dealing drugs and that they could be charged with murder if they distribute drugs that lead to someone’s death.
In California, it can be difficult for prosecutors to charge drug dealers with someone’s death because they must prove the dealer had knowledge that the drugs could cause death, Capelouto said. Having an admonishment on the record for dealers who have been convicted of a drug-related crime could be used as evidence in future cases if someone dies from the drugs they sold. Alexandra’s Law is included in Proposition 36, a tough-on-crime ballot measure that Californians will vote on in November.
Capelouto is also part of a group of 60 families suing Snapchat for its role in the distribution of deadly narcotics. Alexandra Capelouto and Brandon McDowell had communicated over Snapchat when she bought pills from him.
Justin McDowell, Brandon’s father, said it is unfair for his son to take all the blame. He said his son was struggling with drug abuse and had been in rehab, and he didn’t live with him at the time because the McDowells had younger children.
“My son is no drug dealer at all. They were both users. They both had an addiction,” he said. “He was a stupid 20-year-old kid.”
Justin McDowell said he felt like the Capeloutos were seeking revenge through their lawsuits, and he did not have the money and resources to fight on his son’s behalf in court. Brandon McDowell was being held at the federal prison in San Pedro during the lawsuit and did not have lawyers to defend himself in civil or bankruptcy court.
“I think that’s sad, that shouldn’t be allowed,” Justin McDowell said. “We’ll wait for him to get out of prison, give him a hug, and figure out how to deal with the situation … the kid’s never going to make $5.8 million in his life.”
Matt Capelouto said there was no evidence of his daughter having a drug addiction, and Brandon McDowell’s addiction does not absolve him of responsibility in her death.
“When you go from drug user to drug dealer, you cross a line from needing help to needing to be held accountable,” he said.
Archaeologists Say They’ve Solved the Mystery of a Lead Coffin Discovered Beneath Notre-Dame
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
New research suggests the sarcophagus’ occupant, previously known only as “the horseman,” is Joachim du Bellay, a French Renaissance poet who died in 1560
Teamsters union declines to endorse Trump or Harris
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The International Brotherhood of Teamsters declined Wednesday to endorse Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president, saying neither candidate had sufficient support from the 1.3 million-member union.
“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before big business,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a statement. “We sought commitments from both Trump and Harris not to interfere in critical union campaigns or core Teamsters industries — and to honor our members’ right to strike — but were unable to secure those pledges.”
Harris met Monday with a panel of Teamsters, having long courted organized labor and made support for the middle class her central policy goal. Trump also met with a panel of Teamsters and even invited O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention, where the union leader railed against corporate greed.
The Teamsters said Wednesday that internal polling of its members showed Trump with an advantage over Harris.
The Teamsters’ choice to not endorse came just weeks ahead of the November 5 election, far later than other large unions such as the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, which have chosen to back Harris.
https://www.voanews.com/a/teamsters-union-declines-to-endorse-trump-or-harris/7789592.html
GNOME 47 released with accent colours and completely new open/save file dialogs
date: 2024-09-18, from: OS News
The GNOME project has released their newest major version, GNOME 47, and while it’s not the most groundbreaking release, there’s still a ton of good stuff in here. Two features really stand our, with the first one being the addition of accent colours. Instead of being locked into the default GNOME blue accent colour, you can now choose between a variety of colours, which is a very welcome addition. I use the accent colour feature on all my computers, and since I run KDE, I also have this nifty KDE feature where it’ll select an accent colour automatically based on your wallpaper. No, this isn’t a groundbreaking feature, but considering GNOME’s tendency towards not allowing any customisation, this is simply very welcome. A much more substantial feature comes in the form of brand new open/save file dialogs, and I’m sure even the GNOME developers themselves are collectively sighing in relief about this one. GNOME’s open/save dialogs were so bad they became a meme, and now they’re finally well and truly fixed, thanks to effectively removing the old ones and adding new ones based on the GNOME Files file manager. GNOME 47 comes with brand new file open and save file dialogs. The new dialogs are a major upgrade compared with the previous versions, and are based on the existing Files app rather than being a separate codebase. This results in the new dialogs having a much more complete set of features compared with the old open and save dialogs. With the new dialogs you can zoom the view, change the sort order in the icon view, rename files and folders, preview files, and more. ↫ GNOME 47 release notes And yes, this includes thumbnails. There’s tons more in GNOME 47, like a new design for dialog windows that look and feel more like they belong on a mobile UI, tons of improvements to Files, the Settings application, GNOME Online Accounts, Web, and more. GNOME 47 will make its way to your distribution of choice soon enough, but of course, you can always build and install it yourself if you’re so inclined.
NASA Shares Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Remarks
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson released his remarks as prepared for Wednesday’s Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal ceremony in Washington. The awards recognized the women who contributed to the space race, including the NASA mathematicians who helped land the first astronauts on the Moon under the agency’s Apollo Program. “Good afternoon. “The remarkable things that NASA […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-hidden-figures-congressional-gold-medal-remarks/
Smartphones Leaking Data
date: 2024-09-18, from: Purism News and Events
When you use smartphones from big tech companies, you’re often trading your privacy for convenience. These devices are designed to collect vast amounts of data about you, from your location to your browsing habits, and even your conversations. This data is then used to build detailed profiles that are sold to advertisers, used to exploit you, and even handed over to government agencies without your knowledge nor consent.
The post Smartphones Leaking Data appeared first on Purism.
https://puri.sm/posts/smartphones-leaking-data/
Longshoremen at key US ports threatening to strike over automation, pay
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
Giant Leaps Start at Johnson for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
As the hub of human spaceflight, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston holds a variety of unique responsibilities and privileges. Those include being the home of NASA’s astronaut corps. One of those astronauts – Nick Hague – is now preparing to launch to the International Space Station along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on the […]
Hubble Examines a Busy Galactic Center
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 4709 located around 240 million light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopium. Hubble beautifully captures its faint halo and swirling disk filled with stars and dust bands. The compact region at its core might be the most remarkable sight. It holds an active galactic […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/hubble-examines-a-busy-galactic-center/
Putin really wants Trump back in the White House
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
US govt, Microsoft report on Kremlin trolls’ latest antics to Make America Grate Again
Russia really wants Donald Trump to be the next US President, judging by reports from American government agencies and now Microsoft’s threat intelligence team.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/russia_putin_trump_white_house/
MSI Cubi NUC 13MQ mini PC supports up to an Intel Core i7-1365U vPro processor
date: 2024-09-18, from: Liliputing
While some mini PC makers are starting to introduce compact computers featuring the latest Intel Lunar Lake or AMD Strix Point processors, MSI is taking a slow and steady approach by launching several new models powered by Intel Raptor Lake processors… which are two generations behind the chip maker’s latest architecture. Earlier this year MSI […]
The post MSI Cubi NUC 13MQ mini PC supports up to an Intel Core i7-1365U vPro processor appeared first on Liliputing.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-18, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
SpectreKit for Swift is making steady progress!
https://github.com/patriksvensson/spectre-kit
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113160206747291996
Climate week talks to include critical minerals and seabed mining debate
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
Washington — When activists, policymakers and representatives from across the globe gather next week in New York to participate in climate week, one pressing issue on the agenda that is less frequently discussed and known will be the environmental impact of seabed mining.
As countries look for ways to lower emissions, critical minerals are playing a key role in that transition. Critical minerals are used in all kinds of green technologies, from solar panels and wind turbines to batteries in electric vehicles. And one place where those mineral resources are abundant is deep under the sea.
The debate over accessing seabed resources is heated. Supporters say the technology exists to safely access these critical minerals undersea, but environmentalists and activists say the potential of undiscovered biodiversity on the seafloor is too important to endanger.
During climate week, which will take place on the sidelines of U.N. General Assembly meetings, organizers are expected to host a roundtable on the environmental impact of seabed mining and other discussions about critical minerals.
The World Economic Forum says that if the globe wants to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, two-thirds of vehicles must be powered by electric batteries. And the International Energy Agency says that to reach that goal, the world needs six times more mineral resources by 2040 than it has today.
Some of the largest mineral deposits are found on the ocean floor in the form of polymetallic nodules, or rocks.
Ocean of resources
According to the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, there are 21 billion tons of polymetallic nodules strewn across the seabed of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ. Each nodule contains a combination of electric vehicle battery components such as nickel, manganese, copper and cobalt. The ISA plans to release regulations for mining in the international waters of the CCZ by 2025.
The ISA has already awarded 17 exploration contracts for polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone – a large swath of the Pacific Ocean the size of the continental United States which sits between Hawaii and Mexico. Three of those exploration contracts went to The Metals Company, a Canadian deep-sea mining company.
The Pacific Island Nations of Nauru, Kiribati and Tonga have sponsored The Metals Company’s efforts to develop a portion of the seabed. In an interview with VOA, CEO Gerard Barron said the company is ready to begin as soon as the ISA allows mining.
“Our collector methodology is to put a robot on the seafloor which crawls around the ocean floor and fires a jet of water at the nodule and it creates an inverse pressure and lifts the nodule up, and so we don’t go down and scour the seafloor,” said Barron via Zoom, adding that TMC has spent the past decade focused on testing this equipment and collecting data on its environmental impact as part of its permit application to the ISA.
Moratorium needed
Critics worry scooping up these mineral-rich rocks will disrupt important biodiversity – much of it still unnamed and some of it undiscovered. Researchers have found that 90% of the more than 5,000 species in the zone are new to science. Eddie Palu, president of the Tonga Fishery Association, wants a pause for more research.
“We demand a moratorium on the seabed mining until the environmental, economic and social risk are comprehensively understood,” he said during a panel discussion at the recent Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga.
Shiva Gounden from Greenpeace Australia Pacific, who also sat on the panel, agreed.
“We know only very little of the deep sea, and the race for the final frontier could cause irreversible damages to the people and to the communities of our Pacific,” Gounden said.
But scientists say no light and very little oxygen reaches the deep sea – limiting the life there to mostly bacteria and small invertebrates.
The Metals Company’s Barron said combating climate change is a bigger threat to the planet than undersea mining, adding that the company’s environmental impact studies show that “we can safely collect these nodules” and turn them into battery metals without having “a negative impact on the ocean.”
“The notion that we can do any extraction with zero impact is a dream,” added Barron. “The oceans are impacted by every single thing we do today, especially global warming. So, we need to address the main driver for climate change and reduce emissions.”
Fueling innovation
Still, the quest to do just that – access minerals on the seabed with minimal impact to the environment – has created competition between technology companies.
U.S. tech startup Impossible Metals is testing a robot which can avoid nodules where it detects life and harvests those where it does not.
“The vehicle hovers above the seabed, uses the camera and it actually picks up the nodules one by one. So this really minimizes all of the negative concerns around big sediment plumes,” CEO Oliver Gunasekra told VOA in an interview.
Gunaskera’s company spun off Viridian Biometals. Its technology bypasses energy-intensive processes such as smelting with bacteria which can separate metal ore from the rock around it. The process creates no emissions or waste.
“The bacteria need oxygen just like we do to breathe. And when there’s not enough oxygen in the water around them, the bacteria have learned that there’s oxygen in the rocks, and they have adapted to breathe that oxygen,” said Viridian CEO Eric Macris.
Impossible Metals and Viridian Biometals say they are two to three years out from commercializing their technology, depending on funding. TMC says it could be ready to begin its collection operations as soon as international regulations are released next year.
IBM is quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
We did warn you, Big Blue tells The Reg
IBM has been laying off a substantial number of employees this week and is trying to keep it quiet, our sources have said.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/ibm_job_cuts/
Mississippi town moves Confederate monument that became an eyesore
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
grenada, mississippi — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land, a concrete slab behind a fire station about 5.6 kilometers from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 6.1-meter stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in a discussion about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family … fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Representative Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Renewable Energy’s Farmland Free-for-All
date: 2024-09-18, from: Heatmap News
Farms are fast becoming one of the most powerful opponents to renewable energy in the United States, second perhaps only to the fossil fuel industry. And it’s frighteningly unclear how developers will resolve this problem – or if they even can.
As solar and wind has grown rapidly across the country, so too have protests against solar and wind power on “prime farmland,” a loose term used by industry and government officials to describe property best suited for growing lots of crops. Towns and counties are banning the construction of solar and wind farms on prime farmland. State regulators – including those run by Democrats – are restricting renewable development on prime farmland, and members of Congress are looking at cutting off or restricting federal funds to projects on prime farmland.
In theory, meeting our country’s climate goals and industry needs should require very little farmland. But those same wide expanses flush with sunlight and gusts of wind sought after by developers happen to often be used by farmers: A USDA study released this year found more than 90% of wind turbines and 70% of solar farms in rural areas were sited on agricultural land.
It would be easy for an activist or energy nerd to presume this farmland free-for-all is being driven by outside actors or adverse incentives (and there’s a little bit of that going on, as we’ll get to).
However, weeks of reporting – and internal Heatmap News datasets – have revealed to me that farmland opposition actually has a devilishly simple explanation: many large farm owners are just plain hostile to land use changes that could potentially, or even just hypothetically, impact their capacity to grow more crops.
This means there is no easy solution and as I’ll explain, it is unclear whether the renewables sector’s efforts to appear more accommodating to agricultural businesses – most notably agri-voltaics – will stem the tide of local complaints from rural farmers.
“This is a new land use that is very quickly accelerating across the country and one of the major reactions is just to that fact,” Ethan Winter of American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit promoting solar education in farm communities, told me. “These are people who’ve been farming this land for generations in some instances. The idea of doing anything to take it out of agricultural production is just hard for them, for their community, and it’s about the culture of their community, and if solar is something that can be considered compatible with agriculture.”
Tracking the conflict
Over 40% of all restrictive ordinances and moratoriums in Heatmap Pro’s database are occurring in counties with large agricultural workforces.
In fact, our internal data via Heatmap Pro has found that agricultural employment can be a useful predictor of whether a community will oppose the deployment of renewables. It’s particularly salient where there’s large-scale, capital-intensive farming, likely because the kind of agriculture requiring expensive machinery, costly chemicals, and physical and financial infrastructure — think insurance and loans — indicates that farming is the economic cornerstone of that entire community.
Resentment against renewables is pronounced in the Corn Belt, but it’s also happening even in the bluest of states like Connecticut, where state environmental regulators have recommended against developing on prime farmland and require additional permits to build on preferred fertile soils. Or New York, where under pressure from farming groups including the state Farm Bureau, the state legislature last year included language in a new permitting authority law limiting the New York Power Authority from approving solar and wind on “land used in agricultural production” unless the project was agrivoltaics, which means it allows simultaneous farming of the property. The state legislature is now looking at additional curbs on siting projects in farmland as it considers new permitting legislation.
Deanna Fox, head of the New York Farm Bureau, explained to me that her organization’s bottom-up structure essentially means its positions are a consensus of its grassroots farm worker membership. And those members really don’t trust renewables to be safe for farmland.
“What happens when those solar arrays no longer work, or they become antiquated? Or farmland loses its agricultural designation and becomes zoned commercial? How does that impact ag districting in general? Does that land just become commercial? Can it go back to being agricultural land?” Fox asked. “If you were to talk to a group of farmers about solar, I would guarantee none of them would say anything about the emotional aspect of it. I don’t think that’s what it really is for them. [And] if it’s emotional, it’s wrapped around the economics of it.”
Surveys of farmers have hinted that fears could be assuaged if developers took steps to make their projects more harmonious with agricultural work. As we reported last week, a survey by the independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association found up to 70% of farmers they spoke with said they were “open to large-scale solar” but many sought stipulations for dual usage of the land for farming – a practice known as agrivoltaics.
Clearly, agrivoltaics and other simultaneous use strategies are what the industry wants to promote. As we hit send on last week’s newsletter, I was strolling around RE+, renewable energy’s largest U.S. industry conference. Everywhere I turned, I found publicity around solar and farming.
The Department of Energy even got in on the action. At the same time as the conference, the department chose to announce a new wave of financial prizes for companies piloting simultaneous solar energy and farming techniques.
“In areas where there has been a lot of loss of farmland to development, solar is one more factor that I think has worried folks in some communities,” Becca Jones-Albertus, director of DOE’s solar energy technologies office, told me during an interview at the conference. However agri-voltaics offer “a really exciting strategy because it doesn’t make this an either or. It’s a yes and.”
It remains to be seen whether these attempts at harmony will resolve any of the discord.
Grazing: Helpful or irrelevant?
One industry practice being marketed to farm communities that folks hope will soften opposition is sheep grazing at solar farms. At RE+, The American Solar Grazing Association, an advocacy group, debuted a documentary about the practice at the conference and had an outdoor site outside the showroom with sheep chilling underneath solar panel frames. The sheep display had a sign thanking sponsors including AES, Arevon, BP, EDF Renewables, and Pivot Energy.
Some developers like Avangrid have found grazing to be a useful way to mitigate physical project risks at solar farms in the Pacific Northwest. Out in rural Oregon and Washington, unkempt grasslands can present a serious fire risk. So after trying other methods, Avangrid partnered with an Oregon rancher, Cameron Krebs, who told me he understands why some farmers are skeptical about developers coming into their neck of the woods.
“Culturally speaking, this is agricultural land. These are communities that grow wheat and raise cattle. So my peers, when they put in the solar farms and they see it going out of production, that really bothers the community in general,” he said.
But Krebs doesn’t see solar farms with grazing the same way.
“It’s a retooling. It may not be corn production anymore. But we’re still going to need a lot of resources. We’re still going to need tire shops. I think there is a big fear that the solar companies will take the land out of production and then the meat shops and the food production would suffer because we don’t have that available on the landscape, but I think we can have utility scale solar that is healthy for our communities. And that really in my mind means honoring that soil with good vegetation.”
It’s important to note, however, that grazing can’t really solve renewables’ farmland problem. Often grazing is most helpful in dry Western desert. Not to mention sheep aren’t representative of all livestock – they’re a small percentage. And Heatmap Pro’s database has found an important distinction between farms focused on crops versus livestock — the latter isn’t as predisposed to oppose renewable energy.
The uproar around Oak Run
Ground zero for the future of renewables on farmland is Savion’s proposed Oak Run project in Ohio, which at up to 800 megawatts of generation capacity would be the state’s largest solar farm. The developer also plans to let farmers plant and harvest crops in between the solar arrays, making it the nation’s largest agri-voltaics site if completed.
But Oak Run is still being opposed by nearby landowners and local officials citing impacts to farmland. At Oak Run’s proposed site, neighboring township governments have passed resolutions opposing construction, as has the county board of commissioners, and town and county officials sued to undo Oak Run’s approval at the Ohio Power Siting Board. Although that lawsuit was unsuccessful, its backers want to take the matter to the state Supreme Court.
Some of this might be tied to the pure fact Ohio is super hostile to renewables right now. Over a third of counties in the state have restricted or outright banned solar and wind projects, according to Heatmap Pro’s database.
But there’s more at play here. The attorney representing town and county officials is Jack Van Kley, a lawyer and former state government official who remains based in Ohio and who has represented many farms in court for myriad reasons. I talked to Van Kley last week for an hour about why he opposes renewables projects (“they’re anything but clean in my opinion”), his views on global warming (“I don’t get involved in the dispute over climate change”) and a crucial fact that might sting: He says at least roughly two thirds of his clientele are farmers or communities reliant on agricultural businesses.
“It’s neighbor against neighbor in these communities,” he told me. “You’ve got a relatively low number of farmers who want to lease their land so that the solar companies can put solar panels on them for thirty or forty years, and it’s just a few landowners that are profiting from these projects.”
Van Kley spoke to a concern voiced by his clients I haven’t really heard addressed by solar developers much: overall impacts to irrigation. Specifically, he said an outsized concern among farmers is simply how putting a solar or wind farm adjacent or close to their property will impact how groundwater and surface water moves in the area, which can impact somebody’s existing agricultural drainage infrastructure.
“If you do that next to another property that is being farmed, you’ll kill the crop because you’ll flood the crop,” he claimed. “This is turning out to be a big issue for farmers who are opposing these facilities.”
Some have tried to paint Van Kley as funded or assisted by the fossil fuel lobby or shadowy actors. Van Kley has denied any involvement in those kinds of backroom dealings. While there’s glimpses of evidence gas and coal money plays at least a minor role with other characters fomenting opposition in the state, I really have no evidence of him being one of these people right now. It’s much easier and simpler to reason that he’s being paid by another influential sect – large landowners, many of whom work in agriculture.
That’s the same conclusion John Boeckl reached. Boeckl, an Army engineer, is one of the property owners leasing land for construction of the Oak Run project. He supports Oak Run being built and has submitted testimony in the legal challenge over its approvals. Though Boeckl certainly wants to know more about who is funding the opposition and has his gripes with neighbors who keep putting signs on his property that say “no solar on prime farmland,” he hasn’t witnessed any corporate skullduggery from shadowy outside entities.
“I think it’s just farmers being farmers,” he said. “They don’t want to be told what to do with their land.”
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/renewable-energys-farmland-free-for-all
Trouble for Renewables in Rhode Island, Oregon, Iowa, and More
date: 2024-09-18, from: Heatmap News
1. Newport County, Rhode Island – I’ve learned that climate activists in Rhode Island are now using local protests to oppose NIMBYs who are challenging renewables projects.
- On Sept. 19, members of Climate Action Rhode Island – a local offshoot of 350.org – will be on the ground disrupting the entrance to a lavish dinner hosted by the Preservation Society of Newport County, a wealthy architectural conservation group that sued federal regulators over their approval of Eversource’s Revolution offshore wind project.
- As that lawsuit works its way through the courts, activists are using local opposition to draw public attention to the Preservation Society and portray it as an obstacle to progress on decarbonization with op-eds, meetings, and now more protests.
- Nick Horton of Climate Action Rhode Island told me that this public awareness campaign may also target the TV network HBO, as its show “The Gilded Age” has been filmed at the Preservation Society’s historic mansions.
- “I think broadly speaking the environmental movement really needs to start organizing around the threat of NIMBYism, and needs to start identifying these NIMBY organizations as prime bad actors in the pushback against the renewable energy transition,” Horton said.
2. Coos County, Oregon – The Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians have sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management requesting it delay an offshore wind lease sale scheduled on Oct. 15.
- The tribes are opposing offshore wind for many of the same reasons tribes in California and Washington state have fought against development – impacting the viewshed could hinder tribal cultural practices. This litigation also cites potential environmental impacts and requests additional government analysis.
- This lawsuit arrives as two coastal counties – Coos and Curry – will vote this November on a non-binding ballot measure expressing opposition to offshore wind.
3. Polk County, Iowa – Landowners have sued the Iowa Utilities Commission over permitting the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline and providing eminent domain authority, the latest in a string of setbacks that has galvanized local opposition from the midwest to the Dakotas.
- Fresh off news of the lawsuit, Gevo – a sustainable aviation fuel startup that plans to use the pipeline to transport its products – today announced it acquired a new biofuels plant in North Dakota that it said can “mitigate risk” tied to the South Dakota plant it plans to link to Summit.
- I spoke with Gevo CEO Patrick Gruber last month about Summit and his answer presaged this move: “When do we need a pipeline? Do I need it tomorrow? Nope. I don’t need it until 2027, 2028, I have a lot of time here. I don’t need it until then. I’ve got options, really. We have a lot of game to play still.”
- I’ll be watching for future developments in the Summit saga as well as whether CO2 pipeline opposition is fueling local moratoria against solar and wind as well.
4. Houston County, Georgia – One of Georgia’s largest proposed solar projects has been rejected by a potential host county over its potential impacts to bear habitat and property values.
- The roughly 4,600-acre Silicon Ranch solar project would be built next to a wilderness management area in an area home to black bears.
- After reviewing county planning meeting minutes and local press reports, it appears these nature concerns galvanized residents, as well as recent legal challenges against other solar projects and home value concerns.
- I’m watching this project because I’m seeing this fight pop up in opposition Facebook group discussions likely due to wildlife impacts. As Heatmap’s internal polling shows, bipartisan opposition to renewables is strongest when it involves concerns about animals.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
- In southern Georgia, Brooks County is facing an outcry against a NextEra solar project so loud it’s spurring momentum for a moratorium. Bizarrely, news coverage of the backlash and ensuing public hearing has rippled across airwaves in other parts of the country too, from Michigan to New York.
- In Kansas, Orsted’s efforts to expand the Sunflower wind farm have triggered a local moratorium – effective now.
- In Maryland, a 70-mile power line proposed by Public Service Enterprise Group is beginning to face local opposition, including from local leaders in Baltimore County.
- In New York, a family seeking to let BlueWave Solar build on their farm is facing the wrath of its neighbors.
In Washington state, Scout Clean Energy’s embattled Horse Heaven wind farm project has gotten the blessing of the state’s energy siting authority. The final approval now goes to Gov. Jay Inslee.
US Federal Reserve cuts key rate by sizable half-point, signaling end to its inflation fight
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday cut its benchmark interest rate by an unusually large half-point, a dramatic shift after more than two years of high rates helped tame inflation but that also made borrowing painfully expensive for American consumers.
The rate cut, the Fed’s first in more than four years, reflects its new focus on bolstering the job market, which has shown clear signs of slowing. Coming just weeks before the presidential election, the Fed’s move also has the potential to scramble the economic landscape just as Americans prepare to vote.
The central bank’s action lowered its key rate to roughly 4.8%, down from a two-decade high of 5.3%, where it had stood for 14 months as it struggled to curb the worst inflation streak in four decades. Inflation has tumbled from a peak of 9.1% in mid-2022 to a three-year low of 2.5% in August, not far above the Fed’s 2% target.
The Fed’s policymakers also signaled that they expect to cut their key rate by an additional half-point in their final two meetings this year, in November and December. And they envision four more rate cuts in 2025 and two in 2026.
In a statement, the Fed came closer than it has before to declaring victory over inflation: It said it “has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2%.”
Though the central bank now believes inflation is largely defeated, many Americans remain upset with still-high prices for groceries, gas, rent and other necessities. Former President Donald Trump blames the Biden-Harris administration for sparking an inflationary surge. Vice President Kamala Harris, in turn, has charged that Trump’s promise to slap tariffs on all imports would raise prices for consumers even further.
Rate cuts by the Fed should, over time, lower borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans and credit cards, boosting Americans’ finances and supporting more spending and growth. Homeowners will be able to refinance mortgages at lower rates, saving on monthly payments, and even shift credit card debt to lower-cost personal loans or home equity lines. Businesses may also borrow and invest more.
Average mortgage rates have already dropped to an 18-month low of 6.2%, according to Freddie Mac, spurring a jump in demand for refinancings.
The Fed’s next policy meeting is Nov. 6-7 — immediately after the presidential election. By cutting rates this week, soon before the election, the Fed is risking attacks from Trump, who has argued that lowering rates now amounts to political interference. Yet Politico has reported that even some key Senate Republicans who were interviewed have expressed support for a Fed rate cut this week.
The central bank’s officials fought against high inflation by raising their key rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023. Wage growth has since slowed, removing a potential source of inflationary pressure. And oil and gas prices are falling, a sign that inflation should continue to cool in the months ahead. Consumers are also pushing back against high prices, forcing such companies as Target and McDonald’s to dangle deals and discounts.
Yet after several years of strong job growth, employers have slowed hiring, and the unemployment rate has risen nearly a full percentage point from its half-century low in April 2023 to a still-low 4.2%. Once unemployment rises that much, it tends to keep climbing. Fed officials and many economists note, though, that the rise in unemployment this time largely reflects an influx of people seeking jobs — notably new immigrants and recent college graduates — rather than layoffs.
At issue in the Fed’s deliberations is how fast it wants to lower its benchmark rate to a point where it’s no longer acting as a brake on the economy — nor as an accelerant. Where that so-called “neutral” level falls isn’t clear, though many analysts peg it at 3% to 3.5%.
Time for Tariffs and Permitting Reform?
date: 2024-09-18, from: Heatmap News
Tariffs time, baby – All eyes are on the U.S. Trade Representative after the Biden administration locked in 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports effective in a week and a half, and determined up next are a 50% tariff on solar cells and 25% tariff on steel, aluminum, EV batteries and transition metals.
- Before the duty news came down, walking around RE+ last week, I was honestly surprised at the sheer number of Chinese manufacturers with convention showroom booths, from EV company BYD to companies like Gotion that have riled up lawmakers in D.C. It was a charm offensive.
- If Ford executives are to be believed, China could still play a role in the future of the U.S. automotive industry. But that being said, I have my doubts U.S. trade policy will change on EV and solar supply chains given the big lobbying spend from domestic manufacturers and mining companies in Washington.
Permit time, time permitting – Lots of hay is being made of permitting reform back in D.C., where congressional Republicans have revived legislative efforts to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act.
- Action lately has largely taken place in the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees land use issues. The committee held a hearing on legislation to modify NEPA implementation last week. Its chair Bruce Westerman also introduced legislation that would change federal species preservation.
- These bills go much further than the bipartisan permitting compromise reached in the Senate, which focuses on judicial review, fossil fuel leasing, and renewable energy timelines.
- I’ll say this with all the painful confidence of someone who covered Congress for far too long: some centrists have applauded the bills but they’re DOA – especially if Kamala Harris wins the November presidential election. That’s simply because the math for radically changing NEPA just isn’t there, and doubly so for wildlife protection law.
Maine’s offshore wind – The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it’ll officially hold the first offshore wind lease sale on Maine waters on Oct. 29.
- It is widely expected that for offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine to succeed it must consist of floating turbines to accommodate concerns from the state’s politically powerful fishermen.
- BOEM issued a research lease for a floating offshore wind pilot project last month to the University of Maine for studying the technology.
Transformers, too – A White House-led infrastructure policy committee recommended the federal government should create a “virtual reserve” of transformers for energy security.
- The recommendations note a growing wait time for procuring transformers for the grid and note physical products wouldn’t be necessary. Instead, it says the government needs ample data on what’s in stock domestically and the capacity to offer pricing support to businesses for purchasing transformers and products in the supply chain.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
- The Treasury Department this morning proposed wide eligibility parameters for the IRA electric vehicle charging station credit.
- House Speaker Mike Johnson said congressional Republicans may preserve some IRA credits if the GOP maintains control of Congress next year. He didn’t say which credits, though I took a stab at predicting which would stay over the summer.
- Fresh off his op-ed for Heatmap, former White House National Economic Council head Brian Deese authored a new report on building out advanced transmission.
Climate activists are urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reverse its approval of the Southeast Energy Exchange Market, a regional energy trading platform.
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/policy-watch/tariffs-evs-solar-steel-batteries
Eric Dresselhuys, CEO of ESS, Makes the Case for Iron-Flow Batteries
date: 2024-09-18, from: Heatmap News
While in Anaheim for RE+ last week, I met with Eric Dresselhuys, CEO of
long duration iron-flow battery storage manufacturer ESS Inc. We chatted
about battery fires, community buy-in, and the future of China policy. I
came in expecting optimism and left feeling we need a lot more
conversations like this one.
The following is an abridged version of our conversation that has been edited for clarity.
How does your product address the opinion that battery storage has a buy-in problem?
It’s not so much an opinion as just reporting the obvious, which is that lithium-ion batteries on the grid have a buy-in problem. Maybe if you’re in rural western Australia nobody cares because there are no human beings around, but if you look at the need for energy storage to facilitate the energy transition, it’s pretty clear we have to put batteries all over the place and specifically close to where human beings live. And that’s a problem.
Can iron-flow help solve that problem? I think unequivocally we can. It’s a very different architecture. It’s a battery that’s really designed from the beginning to operate as a grid backup battery. If you go back to look at lithium, it was never designed to go onto the grid. It was designed to go into camcorders, phones. This is not the technology I think anybody would’ve picked for the grid if they had started from scratch.
Are you seeing any change in demand for your product from protests over lithium battery projects?
I think it’s the old gag of all politics are local. The politics of siting is a local problem. What’s simultaneously true is adoption of storage on the grid is growing at a phenomenally high rate. And yet there are stories [about opposition] all over the place. There was just one up in Marin County, California, where the community said it’s in an area adjacent to wetlands. And they said you know what? We’re just not going to put a–
But are these communities opposed to lithium storage actually choosing iron-flow over these projects, or are they just saying no to any development?
Right now, they’re just saying no. The communities are not going to solve the problem. They’re going to tell you what is unacceptable and it’s going to be somebody else’s job to solve the problem.
I’ll use Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam [as an example]. They said, we have thousands of gallons of jet fuel laying around. And people. And airplanes. We can’t put a lithium battery out here. So they’re using an iron-flow and sought out a non-lithium battery to solve their energy storage problems because it was safer.
China policy looms large over the future of U.S. battery supplies. What do you think the final endgame will be of our approach to China’s dominance in this business segment?
It’s a great question that I don’t think I know the answer to. I think the next step is to try and get the playing field somewhat level. The amount of subsidy that goes into renewables in general and batteries in particular in China is daunting. People talk about the IRA and all these things as if it’s a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to what China is putting in.
Getting the playing field a little more level in the short term through a combination of incentives here and tariffs coming on will be a next step. Until we get carbon accounting — cradle-to-grave carbon accounting — it’ll be hard to get things totally level because in the U.S. we enforce environmental laws and we don’t employ prison labor to build [these] things. Until we get that full ESG accounting, I think there’s going to be some limitation.
Okay one fun question – what was the last song you listened to? Keeping ’em honest here at Heatmap News.
“Impossible Germany” by Wilco.
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/qa/eric-dresselhuys-ess-ceo-iron-flow-batteries
The Hotel Chelsea’s Iconic Neon Sign Will Be Divided Into Pieces and Sold One Letter at a Time
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The vertical sign stretched across three stories of the Manhattan hotel, which once welcomed the likes of Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Janis Joplin
Construction Project Unearths Millions of Fossils Beneath a Los Angeles High School
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The discoveries include sharks, shorebirds, mammals and saber-toothed salmon, with the oldest remains dating to almost nine million years ago
Lebanon now hit with deadly walkie-talkie blasts as Israel declares ‘new phase’ of war
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Second wave of exploding gear kills at least 14 today
First it was pagers, now Lebanon is being rocked by Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies detonating across the country, leaving more than a dozen dead.…
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-18, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Update: I am typing the shit out of all these exceptions.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113159827609099896
Feedback Feedback
date: 2024-09-18, from: Michael Tsai
Cesare Forelli: I want to file a constructive Feedback to Apple about the developer experience with the Feedback process itself (very meta, I know), and I need yours! 5 quick & unbiased questions, please 🙏 answer them now. Previously: Mail Extension Postmortem Feedback Through an Intermediary WWDC Lab More Useful Than Feedback Getting Feedback to […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/18/feedback-feedback/
macOS Firewall Regressions in Sequoia
date: 2024-09-18, from: Michael Tsai
Will Dormann: [Running] nslookup clearly causes a DNS request and a response to go over the wire, but nslookup eventually gives up thinking that no servers could be reached.[…]So if I turn off the macOS firewall, this all works fine. 🤔[…]Problem #1: “Block incoming connections” includes DNS responses is new as of macOS Sequoia. Prior […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/18/macos-firewall-regressions-in-sequoia/
Apple Drops Lawsuit Against NSO Group
date: 2024-09-18, from: Michael Tsai
Ryan Naraine (via Hacker News): Apple has abruptly withdrawn its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing increased risk that the legal battle might unintentionally reveal sensitive vulnerability data and difficulties in acquiring essential information from the spyware vendor. In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/18/apple-drops-lawsuit-against-nso-group/
Canva Hikes Prices
date: 2024-09-18, from: Michael Tsai
Denham Sadler (via Hacker News, Slashdot): Canva has announced a tripling of their prices for some of its users as the Australian tech company prepares for a public listing in the US.In the US, some users have had their subscription increase from $119.99 per year to $300 per year for the first 12 months, then […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/18/canva-hikes-prices/
LincPlus LincStation N1 Review: An affordable 6-bay NAS with support for up to 48TB of solid state storage
date: 2024-09-18, from: Liliputing
The LincStation N1 is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device from a company called LincPlus. But it is different from most recent consumer-oriented NAS systems, in that it’s not just a plain-looking box designed to hold a few hard drives and run a proprietary operating system. Instead, it’s a small and sleek looking NAS with […]
The post LincPlus LincStation N1 Review: An affordable 6-bay NAS with support for up to 48TB of solid state storage appeared first on Liliputing.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-18, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
The mind contortions the US has to pull to say something this stupid is truly staggering:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113159813600506477
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Podcast: Let's use feeds to hook together pieces of the twittersphere.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Let's go on a ride on Hudson River bike path. (A number of years ago when I lived in NYC.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRPeChYMV04
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs makes fresh bid for bail in sex trafficking, conspiracy case
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
New York — Lawyers for Sean “Diddy” Combs asked a judge Wednesday to let him await his sex trafficking trial at his luxury home on an island near Miami Beach, rather than a grim federal jail in Brooklyn.
Combs’ lawyers offered a $50 million bail package — using his mansion as collateral — in exchange for releasing him to home detention with GPS monitoring. A hearing on the request was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. On Tuesday, a U.S. magistrate judge in Manhattan ordered Combs held without bail.
The hip-hop mogul whose career blossomed in the 1990s was arrested on Monday on charges contained in an indictment that accuses Combs of using his “power and prestige” for “sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.”
It describes the inducement of female victims and male sex workers into drugged-up, elaborately produced sexual performances dubbed “Freak Offs” that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during and often recorded. The events would sometimes last days and require IVs to recover from, the indictment said.
It alleges he coerced and abused women for years while using blackmail, including the videos he shot, and shocking acts of violence to keep his victims in line, coordinated and facilitated from the top down by a network of associates and employees.
Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo submitted a letter to Judge Andrew L. Carter on Wednesday seeking the release of Combs, 54, on conditions including home detention with GPS monitoring, along with a restriction on all visitors to his residences except for family, property caretakers and friends who are not considered co-conspirators.
Combs’ house is on Star Island, a man-made dollop of land in Biscayne Bay, reachable only by a causeway or boat. It is among the most expensive places to live in the United States. Combs’ request echoes that of a long line of wealthy defendants who have offered to pay multimillion-dollar bails in exchange for home detention in luxurious surroundings.
“Sean Combs has never evaded, avoided, eluded or run from a challenge in his life,” the defense said in a court filing. “He will not start now.”
Combs was expected to reenter his not guilty plea in his initial appearance before Carter.
So far, prosecutors have successfully argued that he is a danger to the community and a flight risk and should remain incarcerated until trial.
For all the revelations that came with the unsealing of the indictment Tuesday, most of what it outlines had been described in a November lawsuit filed by his former longtime girlfriend and protege, the R&B singer Cassie, whose legal name is Cassandra Ventura. The suit was settled the following day, but its allegations have followed Combs since.
Its descriptions of beatings, sexual assaults, silencing tactics and “Freak Offs” were echoed throughout the criminal indictment, though it did not use her name or the names of any other women.
Agnifilo, also without naming Ventura but clearly referring to her, argued at Tuesday’s arraignment that the entire criminal case is an outgrowth of one long-term, troubled-but-consensual relationship that faltered amid infidelity.
The “Freak Offs,” Agnifilo contended, were an expansion of that relationship, and not coercive.
“Is it sex trafficking?” Agnifilo asked. “Not if everybody wants to be there.”
Prosecutors, however, portrayed the scope as far larger. They said in court papers that they had interviewed more than 50 victims and witnesses and expect the number to grow.
Like many aging hip-hop figures — including many of those he beefed with in the bicoastal rap feuds of the 1990s alongside the Notorious B.I.G. — the Bad Boy Records founder Combs had established a gentler, more worldly public image. The doting father of seven children was a respected international businessman, whose annual “White Party” in the Hamptons was once a must-have invitation for the jet-setting elite.
But prosecutors said he used the same companies, people and methods he used to build his business and cultural power to facilitate his crimes. They said they would prove it with financial, travel and billing records, electronic data and communications and videos of the “Freak Offs” to prove their case.
The AP does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Ventura did.
Combs was arrested late Monday in a Manhattan hotel, roughly six months after federal authorities raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami and revealed they were conducting a sex trafficking investigation.
During the searches, law enforcement seized narcotics, videos of the “Freak Offs” and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, according to prosecutors. They said agents also seized firearms and ammunition, including three AR-15s with defaced serial numbers.
The indictment portrays Combs as so violent that he caused injuries that often took days or weeks to heal. His employees and associates sometimes witnessed his violence and kept victims from leaving or tracked down those who tried, the indictment said.
A conviction on every charge in the indictment would require a mandatory 15 years in prison with the possibility of a life sentence.
Combs and his attorneys denied similar allegations made by others in a string of lawsuits filed after Ventura’s.
TerraMaster F8 SSD is an 8-bay NAS that supports up to 64TB of solid state storage and 10 GbE networking
date: 2024-09-18, from: Liliputing
TerraMaster has added 9 new systems to its line of NAS (Network Attached Storage) products, including two new SSD-only models with support for up to 8 PCIe NVMe drives, Intel Alder Lake-N processors, and a 10 GbE LAN port. The new TerraMaster F8 SSD features an Intel N95 quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 8 M.2 […]
The post TerraMaster F8 SSD is an 8-bay NAS that supports up to 64TB of solid state storage and 10 GbE networking appeared first on Liliputing.
NASA, US Department of Education to Launch STEM Project in Washington
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
Media are invited to the kickoff event of a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Department of Education at 4 p.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 23, at the Wheatley Education Campus in Washington. The interagency project, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, aims to engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education during after-school hours. […]
False reports of explosives found in car near Trump rally spread online
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
New York — Law enforcement officials on Long Island worked quickly on Wednesday to publicly knock down social media posts falsely reporting that explosives had been found in a car near former President Donald Trump’s planned rally in New York.
The false reports of an explosive began circulating hours before the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign event at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, just days after he was apparently the target of a second possible assassination attempt.
Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said police questioned and detained a person who “may have been training a bomb detection dog,” near the site of the rally and “falsely reported explosives being found.”
Lt. Scott Skrynecki, a spokesperson for the county police, said in follow-up messages that the person, who police have not yet identified, was a civilian and not a member of a law enforcement agency.
He also said the person was not working at or affiliated with the event, which is expected to draw thousands of Trump supporters to the arena that was formerly the home of the NHL’s New York Islanders.
The rally is Trump’s first on Long Island, a suburban area just east of New York City, since 2017.
In 2020, President Joe Biden defeated Trump by a roughly 4% margin on Long Island, besting him in Nassau County by about 60,000 votes, though Trump carried neighboring Suffolk County by more than 200 votes.
Earlier Wednesday, Skrynecki and other county officials responded swiftly to knock down the online line claims, which appear to have started with a post from a reporter citing unnamed sources in the local police department.
The claims were then shared widely on X, formerly Twitter, by a number of prominent accounts, including that of the company’s owner, Elon Musk, which has nearly 200 million followers. Spokespersons for X didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
“False,” Skrynecki texted the AP as the claims spread.
“No. Ridiculous. Zero validity,” said Christopher Boyle, spokesperson for Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.
Chinese spies spent months inside aerospace engineering firm’s network via legacy IT
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Getting sloppy, Xi
Exclusive Chinese state-sponsored spies have been spotted inside a global engineering firm’s network, having gained initial entry using an admin portal’s default credentials on an IBM AIX server.…
Boeing to start temporary furloughs amid Seattle strike
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
New York — Boeing said Wednesday it would start temporary furloughs of professional and white-collar staff as it seeks to conserve cash amid a labor strike that has shuttered Seattle manufacturing plants.
The furloughs, which pertain to executives, managers and workers, will be initiated in the coming days and affect tens of thousands of Boeing employees, company officials said.
Boeing plans for “selected employees to take one week of furlough every four weeks on a rolling basis for the duration of the strike,” said a message to employees from CEO Kelly Ortberg.
The new Boeing boss added that he and the rest of the leadership team “will take a commensurate pay reduction for the duration of the strike.”
Boeing had said that furloughs were on the table earlier in the week when it announced a hiring freeze, travel budget austerity measures and a reduction of supplier expenditures.
About 33,000 Seattle-area Boeing workers with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 751 walked off the job Friday after overwhelmingly rejecting a contract renewal.
The two sides resumed talks Tuesday with the assistance of mediators from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.
The IAM blasted Boeing in a bargaining update posted late Tuesday.
“We are frustrated,” the IAM said. “The company was not prepared and was unwilling to address the issues you’ve made clear are essential for ending this strike: Wages and Pension. The company doesn’t seem to be taking mediation seriously.”
Ortberg’s message to employees reiterated his commitment to “resetting our relationship with our represented employees and continuing discussions with the union to reach a new agreement that is good for all of our teammates and our company as soon as possible.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/boeing-to-start-temporary-furloughs-amid-seattle-strike/7789296.html
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Breathtaking New York City Paintings Are Finally Get the Attention They Deserve
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The artist’s cityscapes, once dismissed as too masculine, would later influence the floral artworks that became central to her iconic style
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Breathtaking New York City Paintings Are Finally Getting the Attention They Deserve
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The artist’s cityscapes, once dismissed as too masculine, would later influence the floral artworks that became central to her iconic style
DRC Roundup September 2024
date: 2024-09-18, from: Digital Humanities Quarterly News
What’s New at the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative? We hope that you are having a great start to the academic year! We’re excited to share some updates on what has been happening and what’s coming up at the Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC)! Announcements We’ve welcomed four new DRC Advisory Board members this summer: Janine […]@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Shouting fire in a crowded theater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater
System76 Press Release: Software Freedom Day
date: 2024-09-18, from: System76 Blog
System76 Partners with Digital Freedom Foundation to Promote Software Freedom Day
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Bipartisan Legislators Join Calls for Clemency for Robert Roberson.
https://www.texasobserver.org/robert-roberson-clemency/
Two years after Mahsa Amini death, Western allies sanction a dozen Iranian officials
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S., Canada and Australia hit a group of Iranian officials with sanctions Wednesday for their participation in suppressing protests and detaining people in relation to the death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman who died in the custody of Iran’s morality police two years ago for improperly wearing a mandatory headscarf.
Amini, 22, died on Sept. 16, 2022, in a hospital after being arrested for allegedly not wearing her mandatory headscarf, or hijab, to the liking of the authorities. Her death sparked nationwide protests against the country’s hijab laws and its ruling theocracy.
Included in Wednesday’s sanctions are a dozen officials accused of killing and detaining protesters, suppressing protests in 2019 and 2022 and arresting journalists.
The country’s new reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian campaigned on a promise to halt the harassment of women by morality police. Still, since Amini’s death, videos have emerged of women and girls being roughed up by officers.
In 2023, a teenage Iranian girl was injured in a mysterious incident on Tehran’s Metro while not wearing a headscarf and later died in the hospital. In July, activists say police opened fire on a woman fleeing a checkpoint in an attempt to avoid her car being impounded for her not wearing the hijab.
U.S. Treasury official Bradley T. Smith said, “Despite the Iranian people’s peaceful calls for reform, Iran’s leaders have doubled down on the regime’s well-worn tactics of violence and coercion.” The U.S. and its allies “will continue to take action to expose and hold accountable those responsible for carrying out the Iranian regime’s cruel agenda,” Smith said.
The sanctions, which block access to U.S. property and bank accounts and prevent the targeted people and companies from doing business with the U.S. are largely symbolic since many of the individuals do not interact with the U.S.
In March, a United Nations fact-finding mission determined that Iran is responsible for the “physical violence” that led to the death of Amini. It also found that the Islamic Republic employed “unnecessary and disproportionate use of lethal force” to put down the demonstrations that erupted following Amini’s death and that Iranian security forces sexually assaulted detainees.
Increasingly, on the streets of Iranian cities, it’s becoming more common to see a woman passing by without a mandatory headscarf.
Ten Ways Project 2025 Could Undermine Workers’ Rights
date: 2024-09-18, from: Capital and Main
The blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term revives familiar Republican plans to weaken unions and undermine employee protections.
The post Ten Ways Project 2025 Could Undermine Workers’ Rights appeared first on .
https://capitalandmain.com/ten-ways-project-2025-could-undermine-workers-rights
Gyasi Mitchell Was Unhoused and Depressed, But Didn’t Trust Therapists. That Began to Change With a Basketball Game.
date: 2024-09-18, from: Capital and Main
For many young people, peer support can be the first step to accessing effective mental health care.
The post Gyasi Mitchell Was Unhoused and Depressed, But Didn’t Trust Therapists. That Began to Change With a Basketball Game. appeared first on .
US targets second major Chinese hacking group
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States has identified and taken down a botnet campaign by China-directed hackers to further infiltrate American infrastructure as well as a variety of internet-connected devices.
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced the disruption of what he called Flax Typhoon during a cyber summit Wednesday in Washington, describing it as part of a much larger campaign by Beijing.
“Flax Typhoon hijacked Internet-of-Things devices like cameras, video recorders and storage devices — things typically found across both big and small organizations,” Wray said. “And about half of those hijacked devices were located here in the U.S.”
Wray said the hackers, working under the guise of an information security company called the Integrity Technology Group, collected information from corporations, media organizations, universities and government agencies.
“They used internet-connected devices — this time, hundreds of thousands of them — to create a botnet that helped them compromise systems and exfiltrate confidential data,” he said.
But Flax Typhoon’s operations were disrupted last week when the FBI, working with allies and under court orders, took control of the botnet and pursued the hackers when they tried to switch to a backup system.
“We think the bad guys finally realized that it was the FBI and our partners that they were up against,” Wray said. “And with that realization, they essentially burned down their new infrastructure and abandoned their botnet.”
Wray said Flax Typhoon appeared to build on the exploits and tactics of another China-linked hacking group, known as Volt Typhoon, which was identified by Microsoft in May of last year.
Volt Typhoon used office network equipment, including routers, firewalls and VPN hardware, to infiltrate and disrupt communications infrastructure in Guam, home to key U.S. military facilities.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington Wednesday rejected the U.S accusations.
“Without valid evidence, the U.S. jumped to an unwarranted conclusion and made groundless accusations” Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told VOA in an email, responding to the allegations about Flax Typhoon.
“The U.S. itself is the origin and the biggest perpetrator of cyberattacks,” Liu added. “We urge the U.S. to stop its worldwide cyber espionage and cyberattacks, and stop smearing other countries under the excuse of cyber security.”
The FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have previously warned that Chinese-government directed hackers, like Volt Typhoon, have been positioning themselves to launch destructive cyberattacks that could jeopardize the physical safety of Americans.
Following Wednesday’s announcement by the FBI, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) issued an advisory encouraging anyone with a device that was compromised by Flax Typhoon to apply needed patches.
It said that as of this past June, the Flax Typhoon botnet was making use of more than 260,000 devices in North America, Europe, Africa and Southeast East.
The NSA said almost half of the compromised devices were in the U.S. Another 18 countries, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, Albania, China, South Africa and India, were also impacted.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-targets-second-major-chinese-hacking-group-/7789181.html
Asus Tinker System 3N is a fanless mini PC with a RK3566 chip and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
date: 2024-09-18, from: Liliputing
The Asus Tinker System 3N is a small, fanless computer with a rugged design and a set of ports and expansion options that position it as a system that can be used in industrial settings, among other places. While I don’t normally give a lot of thought to industrial PCs, this model stands out in that it’s […]
The post Asus Tinker System 3N is a fanless mini PC with a RK3566 chip and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports appeared first on Liliputing.
‘Pirate Seabirds’ Could Become a Pathway for Deadly Avian Flu to Spread to Australia, Study Finds
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Kleptoparasitism, in which a bird harasses another to steal its food, might introduce avian flu to the continent, currently the only one without the severe H5N1 strain
California governor goes on AI law signing spree, but demurs on the big one
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Newsom still worried about SB 1047’s ‘chilling effect’ on AI industry
tax dollar revenue innovation in the state
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed five AI-related bills into law this week, but a pivotal one remains unsigned, and the Democrat politico isn’t sure about its future.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/california_newsom_ai_bills/
US Justice Department sues over Baltimore bridge collapse and seeks $100 million in cleanup costs
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
BALTIMORE — The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday sued the owner and manager of the cargo ship that caused the Baltimore bridge collapse, seeking to recover more than $100 million that the government spent to clear the underwater debris and reopen the city’s port.
The lawsuit filed in Maryland alleges that the electrical and mechanical systems on the ship, the Dali, were improperly maintained, causing it to lose power and veer off course before striking a support column on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March.
“This tragedy was entirely avoidable,” according to the lawsuit.
The collapse snarled commercial shipping traffic through the Port of Baltimore for months before the channel was fully opened in June.
“With this civil claim, the Justice Department is working to ensure that the costs of clearing the channel and reopening the Port of Baltimore are borne by the companies that caused the crash, not by the American taxpayer,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in written statement.
The case was filed against Dali owner Grace Ocean Private Ltd. and manager Synergy Marine Group, both of Singapore. The companies filed a court petition days after the collapse seeking to limit their legal liability in what could become the most expensive marine casualty case in history.
The ship was leaving Baltimore bound for Sri Lanka when its steering failed because of the power loss. Six members of a road work crew on the bridge were killed in the collapse. The men were working an overnight shift filling potholes on the bridge deck when it suddenly crumbled beneath them, sending them tumbling into the water.
“This accident happened because of the careless and grossly negligent decisions made by Grace Ocean and Synergy, who recklessly chose to send an unseaworthy vessel to navigate a critical waterway and ignored the risks to American lives and the nation’s infrastructure,” said Chetan Patil, the acting deputy assistant attorney general.
On Tuesday, the victims’ families declared their intent to file a claim seeking to hold the ship’s owner and manager fully liable for the disaster. Several other interested parties, including city officials and local businesses, have filed opposing claims accusing the companies of negligence.
The families are also calling for more robust workplace protections, especially for immigrant workers. All the victims were Latino immigrants who came to the United States in search of better-paying jobs and opportunities.
How online shopping is saving the economy
date: 2024-09-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
We learned this week that retail sales rose in August. A big part of that was thanks to online shopping, which was up almost 8% from last year. And retailers think e-commerce has even more room to grow. Plus, it’s a big day for the direction of the economy. And later, we’ll hear about corporate executives’ thoughts on the economy, artificial intelligence and the return-to-the-office push.
Homemade Porn Site Promises Not to Train AI on Performers
date: 2024-09-18, from: 404 Media Group
Lustery, a site for consent-based homemade porn, has added a new clause to its contract promising not to replace human performers with AI without consent.
https://www.404media.co/homemade-porn-site-promises-not-to-train-ai-on-performers/
Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
What do you mean you don’t want Copilot and Microsoft 365 services?
Microsoft has released what could be the penultimate perpetual licensed version of Office.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/microsoft_office_ltsc_2024/
See why 2024 will be like ”1984”
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/09/18/see-why-2024-will-be-like-1984/
Rob Gutro: Clear Science in the Forecast
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
Rob Gutro has never been one to stay idle. From his start working at a paper factory as a teenager, Rob navigated his way to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center where he serves as the deputy news chief in the Office of Communications until he retires in October 2024. In this role, Rob manages all […]
https://www.nasa.gov/people-of-nasa/rob-gutro-clear-science-in-the-forecast/
NASA’s Webb Provides Another Look Into Galactic Collisions
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
Smile for the camera! An interaction between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy, collectively known as Arp 107, seems to have given the spiral a happier outlook thanks to the two bright “eyes” and the wide semicircular “smile.” The region has been observed before in infrared by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2005, however […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-provides-another-look-into-galactic-collisions/
LinkedIn Is Training AI on User Data Before Updating Its Terms of Service
date: 2024-09-18, from: 404 Media Group
Multiple LinkedIn users on Wednesday noticed a setting that showed LinkedIn was using user data to improve its generative AI. LinkedIn told 404 Media it will update its terms of service “shortly.”
https://www.404media.co/linkedin-is-training-ai-on-user-data-before-updating-its-terms-of-service/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Tupperware: Embattled food container firm files for bankruptcy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gdprv2ddxo
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Powerful Harris ad about women's freedom.
https://www.threads.net/@kamalahq/post/DAD3IZXvuYZ
Intuitive Machines shoots for the Moon with NASA’s $4.82B lunar relay jackpot
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Surely at least one crew will get there in the next ten years?
Intuitive Machines has bagged a contract worth up to $4.82 billion to support NASA’s lunar relay systems.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/intuitive_machines_lunar_relay/
US now allows passport renewals online
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Americans can now renew their passports online, bypassing a cumbersome mail-in paper application process that often caused delays.
The U.S. State Department announced Wednesday that its online passport renewal system is now fully operational.
“By offering this online alternative to the traditional paper application process, the Department is embracing digital transformation to offer the most efficient and convenient passport renewal experience possible,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
After staffing shortages caused mainly by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in lengthy passport processing delays, the department ramped up hiring and introduced other technological improvements that have reduced wait times by about one-third over last year. It says most applications are now completed in far less than the advertised six to eight weeks. The online renewal system is expected to further reduce that.
The system will allow renewal applicants to skip the current process, which requires them to print out and send paper applications and a check by mail and submit their documents and payment through a secure website, www.Travel.State.Gov/renewonline.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-now-allows-passport-renewals-online/7788978.html
Anus-Breathing Animals and Pigeon-Guided Missiles: Ig Nobel Prizes Reward Unusual but Valuable Science
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The annual award ceremony featured costumes, songs and paper airplanes as scientists recognized comedic research across ten disciplines
Microsoft, BlackRock form fund to sink up to $100B into AI infrastructure
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tech is going to need datacenters and power sources, and a lot of ’em
Microsoft is joining with BlackRock and other private equity investors in a new AI fund that aims to eventually raise $100 billion for datacenters and their supporting power infrastructure.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/microsoft_and_blackrock_form_fund/
Podcast: Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers
date: 2024-09-18, from: 404 Media Group
Some expertise on batteries and how that relates to the exploding pagers in Lebanon; an AI-powered surveillance dystopia that is already here; and how Snapchat reserves the right to serve you ads with your own AI likeness.
https://www.404media.co/podcast-hezbollahs-exploding-pagers/
NASA Astronaut Tracy C. Dyson’s Scientific Mission aboard Space Station
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson is returning home after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station. While on orbit, Dyson conducted an array of experiments and technology demonstrations that contribute to advancements for humanity on Earth and the agency’s trajectory to the Moon and Mars. Here is a look at some of the science […]
Frontier Inks New Carbon Removal Deals
date: 2024-09-18, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Ecuador’s government-enforced blackouts will begin tomorrow night as drought threatens hydroelectric plants • Storm Boris is causing flooding in parts of Italy • Montana could see very heavy rainfall and flash flooding today.
THE TOP FIVE
- Frontier announces new carbon removal prepurchase agreements
Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers, announced this morning a fourth round of prepurchase agreements, worth $4.5 million. The coalition facilitated agreements with nine suppliers to remove carbon from the atmosphere on behalf of five of Frontier’s buyers: Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, H&M Group, and Match. The removal projects are located across six countries and utilize a range of techniques, including rock weathering, direct air capture, and ocean alkalinity enhancement. In a press release, Frontier said “a significant number of companies in this purchase cycle are integrating carbon removal into existing large-scale industries. This strategy can reduce costs and accelerate scale-up relative to standalone carbon removal projects.”
Frontier
- Rivers dry up in Amazon as extreme drought worsens
Brazil’s worst drought on record, now in its second year, has caused water levels in the rivers that run through the Amazon to fall to historic lows, and some have even dried up entirely. One key tributary that supplies the mighty Amazon River, the Solimoes, has water levels that are 14 feet below average for the first half of September. The drought is fueling numerous large fires, many of which were started by humans but have plenty of dry vegetation to keep them going.
Plumes
of wildfire smoke hang over South
America.
NASA
According to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, almost half of the Amazon fires are burning pristine forest. This is unusual, The New York Times reported, and “means fighting deforestation in the Amazon is no longer enough to stop fires.” The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s most important carbon sinks. If it collapses, it could release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis. Researchers with World Weather Attribution say climate change is the main driver of the Amazon’s ongoing drought. “Climate change is no longer something to worry about in the future, 10 or 20 years from now,” Greenpeace spokesperson Romulo Batista told Reuters. “It’s here and it’s here with much more force than we expected.”
- New coalition will test charging corridor for long-haul heavy-duty
electric trucks
A coalition of some of the world’s most prominent shipping and carrier companies is piloting the “first-ever U.S. over-the-road electrified corridor.” Participants include AIT Worldwide Logistics, DB Schenker, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo, who will drive their long-haul heavy-duty electric trucks along the I-10 corridor between L.A. and El Paso to identify pain points and share learnings in an effort to hasten the decarbonization of land freight. Terawatt Infrastructure will provide the charging infrastructure for the corridor with six of its own charging hubs. Terawatt’s website says it has 14 sites under development, four of which are expected to come online this year. Heavy-duty vehicles account for a quarter of transport-related greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The new coalition is supported by the global nonprofit Smart Freight Centre.
- Gore’s asset management firm calls for speedy grid upgrades
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s green asset management business, Generation Investment Management, put out its eighth annual Sustainability Trends Report this week. The paper is packed full of interesting insights (both uplifting and depressing), but one stands out. It says upgrading the power grid is “the critical issue to get the energy transition moving faster in the big, developed economies.” It includes this graphic showing the cumulative backlog of renewable-energy projects wanting to connect to the grid in the U.S.:
Generation
Investment Management
Gore has been doing the media rounds this week. He told the Financial Times that a Trump victory in November “would be very bad.” “Most climate activists that I know in the United States believe that the single most important near-term decision America can make with regard to climate is who is the next president. It’s a bit of a Manichaean choice.” But, he added that the energy transition was, at this point, “unstoppable.”
- EVs overtake gas-powered cars in Norway
In case you missed it: Norway has become the first country in the world to have more electric vehicles on the road than gas-powered cars. Diesel still reigns supreme in terms of registered vehicles, but the share of fully electric cars registered is now larger than the share of cars that run on gasoline. The director of the Norwegian road federation said he expects EVs will overtake diesel cars, too, by 2026. EVs already make up the vast majority (94%!) of new vehicle sales in Norway, and could very well approach 100% sometime next year.
THE KICKER
A recent study finds that most people have a tendency to grossly underestimate the average carbon footprint of the richest individuals in society, while overestimating the carbon footprint of the poorest individuals.
https://heatmap.news/technology/frontier-carbon-removal-agreements-stripe
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinking.
https://ma.tt/2024/09/ecosystem-thinking/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Worst Magazine In America. I subscribed to the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, because I found myself reading a lot of their stories for free and decided to use the money I was spending on the Washington Post to broaden my horizons.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-america
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
John Grisham on death row prisoner: ‘Texas is about to execute innocent man.’
Cops across the world arrest 51 in orchestrated takedown of Ghost crime platform
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Italian mafia mobsters and Irish crime families scuppered by international cops
Hours after confirming they had pwned the supposedly uncrackable encrypted messaging platform used for all manner of organized crime, Ghost, cops have now named the suspect they cuffed last night, who is charged with being the alleged mastermind.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/51_arrests_ghost_platform/
Reinventing the Clock: NASA’s New Tech for Space Timekeeping
date: 2024-09-18, from: NASA breaking news
Here on Earth, it might not matter if your wristwatch runs a few seconds slow. But crucial spacecraft functions need accuracy down to one billionth of a second or less. Navigating with GPS, for example, relies on precise timing signals from satellites to pinpoint locations. Three teams at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are at work to push timekeeping for space exploration to new levels of precision.
What Fed rate decisions look like during election years
date: 2024-09-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Today, the Federal Reserve will announce what it will do with the interest rates that steer the economy. It’ll cut them — that’s almost certain, but the question is how aggressively. The Fed is independent. Fed Chairs generally refuse to get dragged into politics, though their decisions can be politicized. We’ll look at the politics of rate decisions. Then, we’ll examine why Patagonia encourages its employees to get political.
Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI-coded contributions? Most would rather skip the bot’s work
The majority of open source project maintainers are not being paid for their work, spend three times as much time on security than they did three years ago, and have become less trusting of contributors following the xz backdoor, according to open source package security firm Tidelift.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_maintainers_underpaid/
In Norway, EVs overtake gas-powered cars
date: 2024-09-18, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Norway’s electric vehicle policies appear to be paying off. There, nine out of 10 new cars sold is electric. The Nordic nation wants to be the first country to stop selling gas and diesel-engine vehicles. Also on the show: Sri Lankans head to the polls this weekend, two years on from the economic crisis that left the country in turmoil.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/in-norway-evs-overtake-gas-powered-cars
UK pensions department’s project to unite government ERP systems comes to £1.9B
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Four branches attempt to streamline HR and business processes
The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is leading a £958.7 million ($1.2 billion) search for a supplier to develop business processes for new ERP and HR systems to bring together four central government departments.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/dwp_business_processes_procurement/
Count Your Lucky Starch: It’s National Potato Month!
date: 2024-09-18, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
Boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew; grow them in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon too! September is National Potato Month, and that amazing spud is so ingrained in our national subconscious that we could scarcely imagine a world without them. Everything from cleansers, home remedies, agriculture, to making them crinkle cut and julienne … Continue reading Count Your Lucky Starch: It’s National Potato Month!
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/09/18/count-your-lucky-starch-its-national-potato-month/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-18, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
What Happens in Springfield Won’t Stay in Springfield.
Cloud giants point the finger at each other during regulator hearings
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Those are some mighty powerful underdogs you’ve got there
Google thinks Microsoft’s software licensing is impeding customer choice; Microsoft says AWS has “first mover” advantage; AWS also picks on Microsoft’s licensing – but all are against remedies being applied to the cloud market that might impact themselves.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/cma_cloud_hearings/
Boeing, striking union set to resume contract talks Wednesday
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/boeing-striking-union-set-to-resume-contract-talks-wednesday-/7788783.html
Boost Your Pico Projects with the new Pico VS Code Extension
date: 2024-09-18, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Introducing the public beta of the Raspberry Pi Pico Visual Studio Code Extension.
The post Boost Your Pico Projects with the new Pico VS Code Extension appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/pico-vscode-extension/
Police Hack Into ‘Ghost’, An Encrypted Platform for Criminals
date: 2024-09-18, from: 404 Media Group
Operation Kraken is a sign that organized criminals are moving away from larger encrypted phone companies to a decentralized collection of smaller players and consumer access apps that the rest of us use.
https://www.404media.co/police-hack-into-ghost-an-encrypted-platform-for-criminals/
Intel to spin off its chipmaking business
date: 2024-09-18, from: OS News
Intel’s woes are far from over. Pat Gelsinger, the company’s CEO, has announced that Intel’s chipmaking business will be spun off and turned into a separate company. A subsidiary structure will unlock important benefits. It provides our external foundry customers and suppliers with clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel. Importantly, it also gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding and optimize the capital structure of each business to maximize growth and shareholder value creation. There is no change to our Intel Foundry leadership team, which continues to report to me. We will also establish an operating board that includes independent directors to govern the subsidiary. This supports our continued focus on driving greater transparency, optimization and accountability across the business. ↫ Pat Gelsinger This is a big move, and illustrated the difficulties Intel is facing. Its foundry business lost $7 billion last year, and it’s cutting 15% of its workforce – 15000 people – indicating it needs to do something to turn the ship around. Intel is also pausing construction on two additional plants in Europe, but will continue its expansion efforts in the United States. Bitter note is that Intel received a massive cash injection from the US Biden administration, yet then proceeds to fire 15000 people. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140767/intel-to-spin-off-its-chipmaking-business/
Google wins challenge against $1.66B EU antitrust fine
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
BRUSSELS — Alphabet unit Google won its challenge on Wednesday against a $1.66 billion antitrust fine imposed five years ago for hindering rivals in online search advertising, a week after it lost a much bigger case.
The European Commission, in its 2019 decision, said Google had abused its dominance to prevent websites from using brokers other than its AdSense platform that provided search adverts. The practices it said were illegal took place from 2006 to 2016.
The Luxembourg-based General Court mostly agreed with the European Union competition enforcer’s assessments of the case, but annulled the fine.
“The court […] upheld most of the commission’s assessments, but annulled the decision imposing a fine of almost 1.5 billion euros [$1.66 billion] on Google, on the grounds in particular that it had failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair,” the judges said.
The AdSense fine, one of a trio of fines that have cost Google a total of some $9 billion, was triggered by a complaint from Microsoft in 2010.
Google has said it changed the targeted contracts in 2016 before the Commission’s decision.
The company last week lost its final fight against a $2.6 billion fine levied for using its price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
https://www.voanews.com/a/google-wins-challenge-against-1-66b-eu-antitrust-fine/7788759.html
Despite Russia warnings, Western critical infrastructure remains unprepared
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
‘Lives will be lost’ as Moscow ramps up offensive cyber military units
Feature As Russian special forces push more overtly into online operations, network defenders should be on the hunt for digital intruders looking to carry out cyberattacks that end in physical destruction and harm.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/russia_west_critical_infrastructure/
Why Geothermal Is So Hot Right Now
date: 2024-09-18, from: Heatmap News
Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-s2-e6-fervo-geothermal
To Strike Fear Into Napoleon’s Occupying Army, These Retreating Soldiers Burned Down Their Own City
date: 2024-09-18, from: Smithsonian Magazine
When the blaze in Moscow subsided on September 18, 1812, the French—who had traveled hundreds of miles into Russia—were left without vital resources as a brutal winter approached
Iconic US container firm Tupperware files for bankruptcy
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Tupperware Brands and some of its subsidiaries filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday, the food container firm said in a statement.
The company, known for its trademark food storage containers, has been hit by dwindling sales in recent years.
Last year the New York Stock Exchange-listed firm warned of “substantial doubt” about its ability to keep operating in light of its poor financial position.
“Over the last several years, the company’s financial position has been severely impacted by the challenging macroeconomic environment,” president and CEO Laurie Ann Goldman said in a statement announcing the bankruptcy filing.
“As a result, we explored numerous strategic options and determined this is the best path forward,” added Goldman.
The company said it would seek court approval for a sale process for the business to protect its brand and “further advance Tupperware’s transformation into a digital-first, technology-led company.”
The Orlando, Florida-based firm said it would also seek approval to continue operating during bankruptcy proceedings and would continue to pay its employees and suppliers.
“We plan to continue serving our valued customers with the high-quality products they love and trust throughout this process,” Goldman said.
The firm’s shares were trading at $0.5099 Monday, well down from $2.55 in December last year.
Tupperware said it had implemented a strategic plan to modernize its operations and drive efficiencies to ignite growth following the appointment of a new management team last year.
“The company has made significant progress and intends to continue this important transformation work.”
In its filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Tupperware listed assets of between $500 million and $1 billion and liabilities of between $1 billion and $10 billion.
The filing also said it had between 50,000 and 100,000 creditors.
Tupperware, whose name became synonymous with its airtight plastic containers, in recent years lost popularity with consumers and an initiative to gain distribution through big-box chain store Target failed to reverse its fortunes.
The company’s roots date to 1946, when chemist Earl Tupper “had a spark of inspiration while creating molds at a plastics factory shortly after the Great Depression,” according to Tupperware’s website.
“If he could design an airtight seal for plastic storage containers, like those on a paint can, he could help war-weary families save money on costly food waste.”
Over time, Tupper’s hermetically sealed plastic containers also became associated with “Tupperware Parties,” where friends would gather with food and drink as a company representative demonstrated the items.
https://www.voanews.com/a/iconic-us-container-firm-tupperware-files-for-bankruptcy-/7788733.html
The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As AI automates programming, it could be worth exploring the value of bespoke code
Part 2 A thought experiment: If the computer business responds to commoditization and globalization like other manufacturing industries do, where does that leave programmers – and users?…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/the_future_of_software_part_2/
US decision on Nippon bid for US Steel pushed to after election, sources say
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON/TOKYO — The U.S. national security panel reviewing Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid for U.S. Steel let the companies refile their application for approval of the deal, a person familiar with the matter said, delaying a decision on the politically sensitive merger until after the Nov. 5 presidential election.
The move offers a ray of hope for the companies, whose proposed tie-up appeared set to be blocked when the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) alleged on Aug. 31 the transaction posed a risk to national security by threatening the steel supply chain for critical U.S. industries.
CFIUS needs more time to understand the deal’s impact on national security and engage with the parties, the person said on Tuesday. Refiling sets a new 90-day clock to review the proposed tie-up and make a decision.
The review was expected to take close to the full 90 days, another person familiar with the matter said.
Nippon Steel declined to comment. CFIUS and U.S. Steel did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
“Extending the timeline takes pressure off the parties and, importantly, pushes the decision past the election in November,” said Nick Klein, a CFIUS lawyer with DLA Piper.
The deal has become a political hot potato. This month, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said at a rally in Pennsylvania, the swing state where U.S. Steel is headquartered, that she wants U.S. Steel to remain “American owned and operated,” echoing a view held by President Joe Biden.
The White House reiterated that position on Tuesday.
Harris’ Republican rival Donald Trump has pledged to block the deal if elected. Both candidates have sought to woo union votes.
Postponing the decision to after the U.S. elections will “dial down” the political temperature but does not guarantee approval, said David Boling, a former U.S. trade official who is now an analyst at Eurasia Group.
“Regardless of the CFIUS review, Nippon Steel still must reach an agreement with the United Steelworkers,” Boling said. “Without that, it’s very hard to see this deal happening.”
The United Steelworkers Union, which vehemently opposes the deal, said on Tuesday “nothing has changed regarding the risks that Nippon’s acquisition would pose to national security or the critical supply chain concerns that have already been identified.”
The deal is being closely watched in Japan, a close U.S. ally and its biggest foreign investor.
“Further strengthening economic relations, including expanding mutual investment between Japan and the U.S., are essential for both countries,” Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshi Moriya told reporters on Wednesday.
Nippon Steel shares were up 1.1% in afternoon trading in Tokyo. U.S. Steel shares closed down 0.4% on Tuesday.
CFIUS is concerned Nippon Steel’s merger could hurt the supply of steel needed for critical transportation, construction and agriculture projects, it said in its August letter to the companies, exclusively obtained by Reuters.
It also cited a global glut of cheap Chinese steel, and said that under Nippon, a Japanese company, U.S. Steel would be less likely to seek tariffs on foreign steel importers. It added that decisions by Nippon could “lead to a reduction in domestic steel production capacity.”
In a 100-page response letter to CFIUS, also exclusively obtained by Reuters, Nippon Steel said it will invest billions of dollars in U.S. Steel facilities that otherwise would have been idled, “indisputably” allowing it to “maintain and potentially increase domestic steelmaking capacity in the United States.”
The company also reaffirmed a promise not to transfer any U.S. Steel production capacity or jobs outside the U.S. and would not interfere in any of U.S. Steel’s decisions on trade matters, including decisions to pursue trade measures under U.S. law against unfair trade practices.
The deal, Nippon added, would “create a stronger global competitor to China grounded in the close relationship between the United States and Japan.”
Robust CFIUS reviews take 90 days but it is common for companies to withdraw their filings and resubmit them to give them more time to address the panel’s concerns.
According to CFIUS’s 2023 annual report, 18% of companies seeking deal approval refiled their applications last year. Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel filed for the review in March, and CFIUS allowed them to refile in June, starting a second 90-day clock that runs out on Sept. 23, Reuters reported on Friday.
In December, CFIUS could approve the deal, possibly with measures to address national security concerns, recommend that the president block it, or extend the timetable again.
Python in Excel goes live – but only for certain Windows users
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Mac and Android loyals: you can look, but no calculation for now
Office power users, rejoice: Python in Excel is now generally available - provided you have the right license and machine. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/python_in_excel_general_release/
New RFC explains how protocol developers can avoid building human rights abuses into the internet
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Something tells us Vlad and Xi probably won’t bother reading it
The Internet Research Task Force has published a Request For Comments document its authors hope will mean developers of comms protocols and architectures consider the human rights implications of their efforts.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/rfc_9620/
curl 8.10.1
date: 2024-09-18, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog
Welcome to this follow-up patch release, just a week after we shipped 8.10.0. A bunch of bugfixes. Numbers the 261th release0 changes7 days (total: 9,679)24 bugfixes (total: 10,828)50 commits (total: 33,259)0 new public libcurl function (total: 94)0 new curl_easy_setopt() option (total: 306)0 new curl command line option (total: 265)19 contributors, 7 new (total: 3,246)9 authors, … Continue reading curl 8.10.1
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/09/18/curl-8-10-1/
China’s tech giants buy into Indonesia - just like US tech giants did in India
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
GoTo commits to the Alibaba Cloud, and Alibaba promises not to sell its stake
Chinese tech giant Alibaba showed it’s not just Meta, Google and Amazon that can use their financial heft to buy a foothold in the developing world by striking a deal with Indonesian superapp firm GoTo Group.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/alibaba_goto_mou/
Trump resumes campaigning after apparent assassination attempt
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
Australian Police conducted supply chain attack on criminal collaborationware
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Sting led to cuffing of alleged operator behind Ghost – an app for drug trafficking, money laundering, and violence-as-a-service
Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) yesterday arrested and charged a man with creating and administering an app named Ghost that was allegedly “a dedicated encrypted communication platform … built solely for the criminal underworld” and which enabled crims to arrange acts of violence, launder money, and traffic illicit drugs.…
Gates Foundation: Funding needed to save children from climate-induced hunger
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
US Air Force general: Russia military larger, better than before Ukraine invasion
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
PENTAGON — Russia’s military is bigger and stronger than it was prior to invading Ukraine in February 2022, the commander of United States Air Forces in Europe and Africa cautioned Tuesday.
“Russia is getting larger, and they’re getting better than they were before. … They are actually larger than they were when [the invasion] kicked off,” Air Force General James Hecker told reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.
The improvements come despite heavy casualties inflicted by Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has estimated that since 2022, more than 350,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded.
“The rates of casualties that they’re experiencing are staggering,” Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday in response to a question from VOA.
On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered that the Russian army grow by 180,000 active-duty troops for a total of 1.5 million soldiers, making Russia’s military the second largest in the world, behind China’s.
“Russia is going to be something that we’re going to have to deal with for a long time, no matter how this thing ends,” Hecker said.
However, William Pomeranz, a senior scholar at the Kennan Institute, told VOA that “this move suggests that Vladimir Putin is losing the war.”
“This is an open signal from Vladimir Putin that his army and his military is in trouble and doesn’t have the resources to maintain troops in the field,” Pomeranz said.
Despite Russian improvements on the battlefield, Ukraine has continued to put chinks in Russia’s armor, shooting down more than 100 Russian aircraft since Moscow began its full-scale invasion, which amounts to dozens more aircraft than Russia has been able to down on the Ukrainian side, according to General Hecker.
“So what we see is the aircraft are kind of staying on their own side of the line, if you will, and when that happens, you have a war like we’re seeing today, with massive attrition, cities just being demolished, a lot of civilian casualties,” he said.
To gain even the slightest advantages in a war where no clear side dominates the skies, Ukraine has turned to low-cost solutions that also appeal to the U.S. military.
“We have to get on the right side of the cost curve with this. Taking down $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 one-way UAVs [drones] with $1 million missiles, we just can’t afford to do that in the long-term,” the general told reporters.
General Chance Saltzman, the chief of the U.S. Space Force, announced Tuesday that a Space Force pilot program that uses commercial satellite imagery and related analytics to create more situational awareness for military leaders has proven very cost-effective when compared with traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance collection via U.S. MQ-9 drones, which are expensive and limited in number.
AFRICOM was able to use the $40 million Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking Program to maintain situational awareness during the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from two air bases in Niger in July and August. The drawback, however, was that instead of real-time situational awareness, the data took one to four hours to get to the security team.
“Not as good as real time, right? With MQ-9 that you would have, but it’s better than nothing, right?” Hecker said.
Hecker also said the U.S. was looking into more cost-effective ways to sense incoming threats around bases, including methods like Ukraine’s Sky Fortress system that uses thousands of inexpensive sensors to identify aerial threats. He says the technology has been demonstrated in Romania and other countries.
China’s influence campaign intensifies as US election nears
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
washington — At first glance, Noah R. Smith might seem like your typical social media user. His bio says he’s a father, a former “Track and Field representative,” and a current member of the PanAm Sports organization.
On July 14, a day after the first assassination attempt on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Smith shared three posts from an account named “TRUMP WON.”
One post declared, “AMERICA was attacked today … we must get it together. It’s literally a matter of life and death,” accompanied by an image depicting a divine hand halting a bullet aimed at Trump.
Another post urged “all MAGA GOD Fearing Patriots” to connect, stating, “Grow These Accounts, UNITED We Are Strong.”
While it might seem that Smith is a devoted Trump supporter, closer inspection suggests otherwise. His cover photo features Chinese watermarks, his profile picture is sourced from a company that provides photos, videos and music, and his bio is lifted from an authentic account named Laurel R. Smith.
In reality, Noah R. Smith is impersonating a U.S. voter who supports Trump. A joint investigation by VOA Mandarin and Doublethink Lab (DTL), a Taiwanese social media analytics firm, uncovered 10 such accounts on X.
These accounts are linked to China’s Spamouflage network — a state-sponsored operation aimed at supporting the Chinese government and undermining its critics. This network was first identified by social media analytics company Graphika in 2019 and was used to target Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters at that time.
Following the assassination attempt on July 14, the accounts began promoting pro-Trump content. Previously, they shared material consistent with Spamouflage’s broader interests: defending China, criticizing U.S. foreign policy, and exploiting divisive domestic issues such as gun violence and racial tensions.
DTL labeled this network of accounts posing as Americans “MAGAflage 1,” because they all seem to be promoting Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again [MAGA].”
“The MAGAflage accounts are different because they are not just criticizing stuff. They are amplifying positive content about Trump,” Jasper Hewitt, a digital intelligence analyst at Doublethink Lab, told VOA Mandarin.
He added that it’s too early to draw conclusions about whom China is supporting, as researchers are still tracking accounts that criticize both Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
“Engaging with the MAGA movement, or any part of the political spectrum, might merely be a new attempt to generate authentic traffic,” Hewitt told VOA.
The first MAGAflage network was discovered by Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, in April 2024. This network focuses on promoting positive content of Trump. She told VOA earlier that by wrapping a topic in a U.S. partisan political frame, these accounts got “a reasonable amount of engagement from real American users.”
Limited influence
The VOA Mandarin investigation revealed that the accounts operate in coordination. Six out of the 10 accounts were created in 2015 but had their first visible posts on May 18 or May 19, 2022.
The batch accounts — the 10 new accounts — are not very active. Each account has roughly 100 posts or reposts over the last two years. The batch accounts were inactive for one year but were awoken after the first Trump assassination attempt.
Additionally, these accounts occasionally post or repost Chinese content.
For example, an account named Super-Rabbit shared praise for China’s political and economic model from state-linked influencers like Shanghai Panda and Xinhua News Agency’s reporter Li Zexin. One post from September 3 contrasted U.S. President Joe Biden’s inactivity with China’s President Xi Jinping’s engagement in Africa.
“When Joe Biden is sitting on the beach wasted away, China’s President Xi is shaking hands with various African leaders and making a better impact in Africa,” the post said.
VOA contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment but did not receive a response as of publication time.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA in a statement that “China has no intention and will not interfere in the U.S. election, and we hope that the U.S. side will not make an issue of China in the election.”
So far, the newly discovered MAGAflage 1 accounts have had limited influence, with only a handful of followers and minimal interactions.
U.S. intelligence agencies issued their latest assessment earlier this month, warning that Russia, Iran, and China are intensifying efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election.
While Russia remains the primary concern, officials noted that Chinese online influence actors have “continued small scale efforts on social media to engage U.S. audiences on divisive political issues, including protests about the Israel-Gaza conflict and promote negative stories about both political parties.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-influence-campaign-intensifies-as-us-election-nears/7788292.html
Senate Republicans again block legislation to guarantee rights to IVF
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Republicans have blocked for a second time this year legislation to establish a nationwide right to in vitro fertilization, arguing that the vote is an election-year stunt after Democrats forced a vote on the issue.
The Senate vote was Democrats’ latest attempt to force Republicans into a defensive stance on women’s health issues and highlight policy differences between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in the presidential race, especially as Trump has called himself a “leader on IVF.”
The 51-44 vote was short of the 60 votes needed to move forward on the bill, with only two Republicans voting in favor. Democrats say Republicans who insist they support IVF are being hypocritical because they won’t support legislation guaranteeing a right to it.
“They say they support IVF — here you go, vote on this,” said Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the bill’s lead sponsor and a military veteran who has used the fertility treatment to have her two children.
The Democratic push started earlier this year after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. Several clinics in the state suspended IVF treatments until the GOP-led legislature rushed to enact a law to provide legal protections for the clinics.
Democrats quickly capitalized, holding a vote in June on Duckworth’s bill and warning that the U.S. Supreme Court could go after the procedure after it overturned the right to an abortion in 2022.
The bill would establish a nationwide right for patients to access IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies and a right for doctors and insurance companies to provide it, an effort to pre-empt state efforts to limit the services. It would also require more health insurers to cover it and expand coverage for military service members and veterans.
In a statement after the vote, Harris said Republicans in Congress “have once again made clear that they will not protect access to the fertility treatments many couples need to fulfill their dream of having a child.”
Republican vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who missed the vote because he was campaigning, said during a stop in Wisconsin that the measure was not a serious IVF bill, but a measure designed to make Republicans look bad.
“The Senate blocked a ridiculous showboat bill that had no chance of passing,” Vance said.
Republicans argued that the federal government shouldn’t tell states what to do and that the bill was an unserious effort. Only Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted with Democrats to move forward on the bill both times.
South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said that Democrats are trying to create a political issue “where there isn’t one.”
“Let me remind everybody that Republicans support IVF, full stop,” Thune said just before the vote.
Open source orgs strengthen alliance against patent trolls
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The more successful FOSS gets, the more it becomes a target
Patent trolls are increasingly targeting cloud native open source projects, leading the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation to make efforts to extend their legal shields over such efforts.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/open_source_orgs_strengthen_alliance/
US lawmakers welcome Russian activist freed in August prisoner swap
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers welcomed Vladimir Kara-Murza to Capitol Hill Tuesday, celebrating the release of the Russian activist from a Kremlin prison last month.
Kara-Murza was part of the biggest prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia since the end of the Cold War.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin said Tuesday that Kara-Murza “was at the forefront of the human rights struggle and an inspiration for so many people around the world.”
In a letter written upon Kara-Murza’s release, Cardin said, “Your return home is both a personal victory and a testament to the unwavering strength of the human spirit.”
Democratic Representative Bill Keating described Kara-Murza as one of the people Russian President Vladimir Putin most despises because of his ability to speak directly to the Russian people. Kara-Murza has twice survived suspected poisoning attempts.
Kara-Murza, a deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party, was arrested in Russia in April 2022 and later faced charges of treason and spreading disinformation about the Russian military. Russian prosecutors suggested he face the maximum 25-year sentence in a prison colony.
Kara-Murza was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in October 2022 and the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2024.
“Surreal doesn’t come close to describing what I feel — just a few weeks ago sitting in a maximum-security prison in Siberia and now seeing so many friends in the halls of the U.S. Congress,” Kara-Murza told a gathering of lawmakers, journalists and activists on Capitol Hill.
Kara-Murza thanked the public for keeping their attention focused on his situation.
“The only way we will be able to achieve long-term peace, stability, security and democracy on the European continent will be with a peaceful, free and democratic Russia,” he said.
The Biden administration secured the release of 16 detainees in return for the release of eight detainees and two minors on Aug. 1.
James O’Brien, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, thanked Kara-Murza for his work on the Global Magnitsky Act, bipartisan legislation that authorizes the U.S. government to sanction government officials throughout the world who are human rights offenders.
“Vladimir, you gave us one of the main tools that we use to focus our advocacy for your freedom in the Global Magnitsky Act, and your work on that, I’m sure you didn’t do it as a tool for yourself, but your work on that has helped us enormously as we work to free prisoners in the Western Hemisphere, in other countries across the world,” O’Brien said.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons said Putin is still holding untold numbers of political prisoners in Russia.
“We must realize [Putin] does that, like all authoritarians, because he’s afraid, afraid of his own people, afraid of accountability, afraid of the Ukrainians who just on the border of Russia are fighting with determination,” Coons said.
WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all
date: 2024-09-18, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
So far it’s more like View Forever
Updated Meta’s efforts to stop people repeatedly viewing WhatsApp’s so-called View Once messages – photos, videos, and voice recordings that disappear from chats after a recipient sees them – so far remain incomplete.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/whatsapp_view_once_flaw_unfixed/
Experts say voters should feel confident in US elections this year
date: 2024-09-18, from: VOA News USA
washington — American voters face a challenging duality as they count down the days until November’s presidential election: a security landscape that officials say has become ever more dangerous even as the infrastructure to hold elections has become ever-more secure.
The run-up to the 2024 election has seen the “most complex threat landscape yet,” according to Cait Conley, a senior adviser at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the government body responsible for overseeing election security.
“We do see a growing and diverse array of foreign adversaries, foreign actors, trying to disrupt our elections,” Conley said Tuesday, speaking at Politico’s AI and Tech Summit in Washington.
But U.S. voters should feel confident, she added.
“We have been surging resources,” Conley said. “We have seen tremendous investment and progress in ensuring the full spectrum of security and resilience of our election infrastructure.”
Nevertheless, Conley and other U.S. officials acknowledge the dangers are widespread, often extending beyond the voting booth.
Physical threats
The FBI and U.S. Postal Service said Tuesday they are investigating suspicious packages sent to election workers in at least 12 states.
CISA officials have reported a growing number of swatting incidents — false reports to emergency services about violence or an emergency at a home or other location — targeting election workers.
And the number of direct threats is rising rapidly.
“We are seeing an unprecedented and extremely disturbing level of threats of violence, and violence, against public officials,” said U.S. Deputy General Lisa Monaco, also speaking at the summit in Washington.
“For sure weekly and, sometimes, daily,” Monaco said of the frequency of the threats.
Many of the threats target officials responsible for conducting elections.
“These are people who are simply volunteering their time to help all of us undertake the most fundamental right,” she said. “These are people who are being threatened simply for doing their job.”
Officials also warn that other public servants are getting a growing number of threats, including law enforcement officers, prosecutors and elected officials and candidates.
“It’s serious,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, citing Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump as he played golf at his course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
He also pointed to the rash of threats in Springfield, Ohio, following the spread of unsubstantiated rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
“We are in a heightened threat environment … a threat environment that is of deep concern,” Mayorkas said. “It requires vigilance at every level of government and frankly on every block of each community across this country.”
Concerns about the heightened threat environment are not new.
Homeland Security officials have been warning of the dangers since at least January 2021, saying lone offenders or small groups could be motivated to carry out attacks motivated by a range of political and personal grievances.
Only now, high emotions over the election combined with efforts by U.S. adversaries are fueling discontent and anger that could lead to more attacks.
Cyber operations
“When it comes to malign influence campaigns, we are seeing a very aggressive set of actors,” Monaco said.
Many of the efforts to sow discord have originated in Russia and Iran, and to a lesser extent China. But they are far from alone.
“We’re seeing more actors in this space acting more aggressively in a more polarized environment and doing more with technologies, in particular AI,” Monaco said.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department took action against what it said were two Russian plots to spread disinformation, taking down 32 fake news websites while bringing charges against two employees of Russia-backed media outlet RT, accusing them of funneling nearly $10 million to a U.S. company to promote material favorable to the Russian government.
And last week, the U.S. State Department accused a number of Russian media companies, including RT, of working directly for Russia’s intelligence agencies – charges Russia and RT denied.
US preparations
The best defense, Monaco said, is for U.S. voters to be careful about where they get their information.
“We have to be very vigilant on what we are consuming,” she said.
Experts like Margaret Talev, who directs the Syracuse University Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship in Washington, agree.
Voters should “take a pause. Take a minute,” Talev told VOA. “It involves all of us teaching ourselves, taking our time and trying to verify information from multiple sources rather than just believing the first thing that we see.”
The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), whose members play key roles in running elections, has also sought to make getting verified information easier, pushing a social media campaign it calls #TrustedInfo2024.
NASS says its goal is “to promote election officials as the trusted sources of election information during the 2024 election cycle and beyond.”
And CISA, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, has been working with election officials across the country to make sure they are ready for almost any contingency.
CISA officials have also tried to rein in the hype about the dangers of AI, or artificial intelligence, blamed for helping U.S. adversaries to spread disinformation more effectively.
“Generative AI is not going to fundamentally introduce new threats to this election cycle,” the agency’s Conley told VOA earlier this month.
While AI is exacerbating existing threats, so far it has not produced anything elections officials have not already seen.
“This threat vector is not new to them,” Conley said. “And they have taken the measures to ensure they’re prepared to respond effectively.”
Bluesky’s Current Efforts on Trust and Safety
date: 2024-09-18, from: Bluesky web news
This is a big quarter for Trust and Safety at Bluesky, as we work on a large number of improvements. Here’s a preview of everything that is in progress.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-update
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Going to a meditation session in preparation to adopt Swift 6.0
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113155224072761445
What Does OpenAI’s New Breakthrough Mean for Energy Consumption?
date: 2024-09-17, from: Heatmap News
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they’re used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities
of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in
artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a
range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds,
but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks.
Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new
cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann
Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI
researcher
Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks”
will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased
performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more
carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model … Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.
https://heatmap.news/technology/openai-o1-energy
FreeBSD 13.4 released
date: 2024-09-17, from: OS News
FreeBSD 13.4 has been released. This is already the fifth release in the FreeBSD 13 series, and contains the usual set of security fixes, driver updates, important updated packages, like openssh, LLVM, clang, and so on. If you’re running FreeBSD 13, you already know how to upgrade, and if you want to start using FreeBSD 13, here’s the download page.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140764/freebsd-13-4-released/
Things you really should know about Windows Input, but would rather not
date: 2024-09-17, from: OS News
Are you developing a game for Windows, and are you working on input handling? At first, it could reasonably be assumed that mouse and keyboard should be the simplest parts of this to deal with, but in reality, they are not – at least if we are talking about Windows. In fact, several extremely popular AAA games ship with severe mouse input issues when specific high-end mice are used, and some popular engines have issues that are still extant. In this article we’ll explore a few reasons why that is the case, and end up with a solution that works but is still unsatisfactory. I assume that there is a whole other level of complexity involved in properly dealing with accessories like steering wheels, flight sticks, and so on in simulators, but so far I never had the pleasure of working on a game that required this, and this article will not cover those types of input devices. ↫ Peter ‘Durante’ Thoman So, what is the problem? Basically, there are two ways to handle mouse input in Windows: if you use batched raw input processing, which is pretty much a requirement, you need to also choose whether or not to keep legacy input enabled. If you keep it enabled, the legacy input will add so much junk to your message queue it can negatively impact the performance of your game quite harshly. If you disable it, however, something really fun happens: you can no longer move the game window… Because the Windows UI uses legacy input. Thoman has a solution that he and his company uses, and he considers it an ugly hack, but they just don’t know of a better way to solve this issue. Thoman keeps legacy input enabled, but just limits the number of message queue events per frame that are being processed (they limit it to 5). As far as they can tell, this doesn’t seem to have any negative side effects, but it’s clearly a bit of an ugly hack that shouldn’t be necessary. I found this a rather interesting niche topic, and I wonder how many people have struggled with this before, and what kind of other solutions exist.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
These lifelong Republicans say they're finally done with Trump.
Tariffs in U.S.-China trade war may impact U.S. consumers, experts say
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
The Biden and Trump administrations have accused China of unfair trade practices and flooding international markets with artificially cheap goods. Analysts say both presidential candidates are using tariffs to counter China and encourage U.S. manufacturing jobs. Elizabeth Lee explains how this trade war could impact consumers.
VMware patches remote make-me-root holes in vCenter Server, Cloud Foundation
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Bug reports made in China
Broadcom has emitted a pair of patches for vulnerabilities in VMware vCenter Server that a miscreant with network access to the software could exploit to completely commandeer a system. This also affects Cloud Foundation.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/vmware_vcenter_patch/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Neat conference for Apple developers/companies in Boston on November 19th:
They also have an online version.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113154838500897932
Measuring Moon Dust to Fight Air Pollution
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
Moon dust, or regolith, isn’t like the particles on Earth that collect on bookshelves or tabletops – it’s abrasive and it clings to everything. Throughout NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon, regolith posed a challenge to astronauts and valuable space hardware. During the Apollo 17 mission, astronaut Harrison Schmitt described his reaction to breathing in […]
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/measuring-moon-dust-to-fight-air-pollution-2/
NASA Selects Lunar Relay Contractor for Near Space Network Services
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has awarded a contract to Intuitive Machines, LLC of Houston, to support the agency’s lunar relay systems as part of the Near Space Network, operated by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. This Subcategory 2.2 GEO to Cislunar Relay Services is a new firm-fixed-price, multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity task order contract. The […]
No major AI model is safe, but some do better than others
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Anthropic Claude 3.5 shines in Chatterbox Labs safety test
Feature Anthropic has positioned itself as a leader in AI safety, and in a recent analysis by Chatterbox Labs, that proved to be the case.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/ai_models_guardrail_feature/
More Thunderbolt 5 products arrive: the first TB5 docking station and portable SSD
date: 2024-09-17, from: Liliputing
It’s been almost exactly a year since the Thunderbolt 5 standard was adapted, allowing for theoretical data transfer speeds up to 120 Gbps. And this year the first Thunderbolt 5 products are starting to roll out… slowly. The first Thunderbolt 5 cables arrived in July. Earlier this month OWC started taking pre-orders for the first […]
The post More Thunderbolt 5 products arrive: the first TB5 docking station and portable SSD appeared first on Liliputing.
Little Snitch 6 and DNS Encryption
date: 2024-09-17, from: Michael Tsai
Norbert Heger: Little Snitch 6 offers a new feature: DNS encryption. With DNS encryption enabled, all name lookups are routed through Little Snitch and performed in encrypted form. For this purpose, Little Snitch registers a DNS proxy. macOS then sends all DNS requests to that proxy, which in turn performs the lookup in encrypted form. […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/17/little-snitch-6-and-dns-encryption/
Does Google Chrome Still Devastate Mac Battery Life?
date: 2024-09-17, from: Michael Tsai
Matt Birchler (Hacker News): That brings us to the “Chrome devastates your Mac’s battery” claim that is commonly thrown around as fact, although rarely while citing any sources. This is presented as common knowledge. It’s as indisputable as gravity – a fact of the universe – Chrome crushes your battery and Safari sips it. […] […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/17/does-google-chrome-still-devastate-mac-battery-life/
The Accuracy of “Find My” AirPods
date: 2024-09-17, from: Michael Tsai
Mark Frauenfelder (via Slashdot): A SWAT team terrorized an innocent St. Louis County family last May, all due to a pair of stolen AirPods and questionable police tactics. Brittany Shamily and her family, including a three-month-old baby, were terrified when heavily armed officers smashed through their front door screaming searching for evidence related to a […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/17/the-accuracy-of-find-my-airpods/
Glowtime Ennui
date: 2024-09-17, from: Michael Tsai
John Gruber (Mastodon, Hacker News): Last week’s “It’s Glowtime” event was very strong for Apple. It might have been the single strongest iPhone event since the introduction of the iPhone X. All three platforms are now in excellent, appealing, and coherent shape[…] […] But, still, flying home from California on Tuesday, I was left with […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/09/17/glowtime-ennui/
Google Cloud Document AI flaw (still) allows data theft despite bounty payout
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-18, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chocolate Factory downgrades risk, citing the need for attacker access
Overly permissive settings in Google Cloud’s Document AI service could be abused by data thieves to break into Cloud Storage buckets and steal sensitive information.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/google_cloud_document_ai_flaw/
These Ancient Egyptian Barracks Paint a Vivid Picture of Military Life During the Reign of Ramses II
date: 2024-09-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Archaeologists unearthed a series of mudbrick rooms filled with religious tributes, soldiers’ personal effects, engraved weaponry and animal bones
NASA Selects Lockheed Martin to Develop Lightning Mapper for NOAA
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected Lockheed Martin Corp. of Littleton, Colorado, to develop a lightning mapping instrument as part of NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program. This cost-plus-award-fee contract is valued at approximately $297.1 million. It includes the development of two flight instruments as well as […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-lockheed-martin-to-develop-lightning-mapper-for-noaa/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Harris calls ‘hateful rhetoric’ surrounding Springfield ‘a crying shame.’
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4884768-harris-trump-vance-springfield/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December.
NASA Marshall to Present 2024 Small Business Awards Sept. 19
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, invites media to its annual Small Business Industry and Advocate Awards ceremony on Thursday, Sept. 19. The awards recognize small businesses and small business champions from government and industry for their outstanding achievements in fiscal year 2024. The ceremony will take place during the 38th meeting of […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-marshall-to-present-2024-small-business-awards-sept-19/
Myanmar diaspora protests at Chinese Embassy in Washington
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — More than 50 Burmese Americans gathered in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, protesting China’s alleged interference in Myanmar’s internal affairs.
The protest on Saturday, part of a global campaign, called on China to withdraw its support for Myanmar’s military junta and respect the will of the people, who have been fighting for democracy since the February 2021 coup.
The protest — with demonstrators waving banners that read “Reject Junta’s Sham Elections” and “Solidarity With the People of Myanmar” — was sparked by a statement released earlier Saturday by the Chinese Embassy in Myanmar, saying that China was not interfering in the country’s affairs and would continue to promote peace and stability.
“We reject the Chinese Embassy’s statement that they’re not interfering in Myanmar’s internal matters,” said Yin Aye, a protest leader who has been organizing demonstrations in the Washington area since the 2021 coup. “If they would stop supporting sham elections and truly pressure the military to stop causing so much pain to our people, we might believe them.”
Yin Aye referred to China’s close ties with Myanmar’s military junta and its alleged interference in the operations of ethnic resistance forces in northern Shan State, actions that have drawn widespread criticism from Burmese and pro-democracy groups.
On August 29, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, or TNLA, an armed ethnic group fighting against the junta in northeastern Myanmar, said it had received a letter from Chinese authorities in the border town of Ruili warning the group to halt its offensive in northern Shan State, where key Belt and Road Initiative projects are located, or face consequences.
Hla Kyaw Zaw, a veteran observer of China-Myanmar relations, said China’s recent actions, particularly its warning to the TNLA, have sparked outrage among the Myanmar public, who view it as a direct threat to ethnic resistance forces fighting for democracy.
“The language used in the letter was undiplomatic and threatening,” Hla Kyaw Zaw told VOA’s Burmese Service.
A spokesperson for the TNLA told VOA that Chinese authorities had warned the group in the letter to stop fighting, maintain stability along the China-Myanmar border and protect Chinese citizens. The letter warned that failure to comply would result in China “teaching them a lesson” and holding the group responsible for any consequences.
When asked about the letter at a regular press briefing in late August, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Liu Jian did not confirm or deny Beijing had sent the letter.
“China is closely following the situation in Myanmar and the developments of the conflict in northern Myanmar and has been working to promote peacetalks and ceasefire,” spokesperson Liu Jian said. “As Myanmar’s biggest neighboring country, China has all along sincerely hoped that Myanmar will achieve stability and development and has worked actively to this end.”
Since then, members of the Myanmar diaspora have intensified protests outside Chinese embassies worldwide, accusing China of supporting Myanmar’s military coup.
Protests worldwide
Saturday’s protest in Washington was part of a series of coordinated demonstrations by Burmese diaspora communities worldwide.
In July, activists in Washington, New York, San Francisco, London and Tokyo protested outside Chinese embassies and consulates.
In the July protest in Washington, protesters attempted to hand deliver an open letter to Chinese authorities, urging Beijing to halt its support for Myanmar’s military junta. However, the letter went unanswered.
“When we handed the letter to the Chinese embassy here in D.C., they refused to accept it. They didn’t even acknowledge our demands,” said Yin Aye.
Activists were instructed to send the letter by post, but previous attempts to mail similar letters to the Chinese Embassy were returned undelivered.
Despite the lack of formal response, Myanmar activists say the Chinese Embassy in Washington has been monitoring their protest activities in recent weeks.
“Now, we see them videotaping our protests,” Yin Aye said.
Voice of America reached out to the Chinese embassies in Washington and Yangon for comment about the protests but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
War crimes allegations
The Myanmar diaspora argues that China’s support for Myanmar’s military is not only undermining the will of the people but also enabling war crimes, including aerial bombardments and the targeting of internally displaced persons.
Minmin Berwald, an activist of Myanmar descent, was compelled to participate in the protest on Saturday.
“I want to ask China to immediately stop supporting this military regime and interfering in Burma’s internal affairs,” Berwald said. “It’s not just homes being set on fire. Internally displaced people who have fled war are being bombarded.”
China’s contradictory stance
China has maintained a complex position toward Myanmar since the February 2021 coup, balancing its own interests with regional stability, Hla Kyaw Zaw said. She noted that China has sent high officials to Myanmar, called for peace in the country and sponsored mediating talks between the junta and the armed ethnic groups.
After the coup, however, China’s official Xinhua news agency described the military’s takeover and replacement of elected ministers as a “major cabinet reshuffle,” avoiding the use of the term “coup.”
Beijing called for all parties in Myanmar to “resolve their differences” and refrained from condemning the military. In 2022, China also abstained from voting on U.N. Security Council Resolution 2669, which called for an end to violence in Myanmar. However, critics argue that China’s actions on the ground suggest deeper involvement.
A veteran China-Myanmar affairs expert in Yangon, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said China’s statements often appear contradictory. “It’s clear that China wants to control the situation to its advantage,” the expert said, referring to China’s public calls for peace while its actions suggest otherwise.
China, for its part, has denied interfering in Myanmar’s internal affairs on multiple occasions. In its statement Saturday, the Chinese Embassy in Myanmar reiterated its position of noninterference and called for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The embassy also condemned what it called “unjustified accusations” from individuals and media.
The fight continues
Protesters also called for China to take a more active role in cutting off support to Myanmar’s junta, including halting the supply of jet fuel used in airstrikes against civilians. Amnesty International has documented multiple cases of the Myanmar military using airpower to target civilian areas, and activists argue that China’s continued engagement with the junta implicates them in these atrocities.
For now, the protesters have vowed to keep returning to the Chinese Embassy in Washington. “We will continue to protest, continue to speak out,” said Yin Aye.
https://www.voanews.com/a/myanmar-diaspora-protests-at-chinese-embassy-in-washington/7788046.html
Deaths From Antibiotic-Resistant Infections Could Reach 39 Million by 2050, Study Suggests
date: 2024-09-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new paper analyzes three decades of fatalities around the world and predicts how “superbugs” will affect human health in the future
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Dan Rather interview with Ringo Starr.
https://axs.tv/video/ringo-talks-about-how-the-beatles-didnt-get-along/
Experts: Lebanon Pager Explosions Likely Not Lithium Batteries Alone
date: 2024-09-17, from: 404 Media Group
Lithium-ion battery fires are dangerous, but small batteries alone don’t usually cause this much damage.
https://www.404media.co/experts-lebanon-pager-explosions-likely-not-lithium-batteries-alone/
Hey kids, wanna clock the ISS? ESA’s Astro Pi challenge runs your code in space
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Send astronauts nice pixel art, or try something a little harder
The next round of the European Space Agency’s Astro Pi challenge is open, inviting participants to use the diminutive computers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to calculate the orbiting outpost’s speed.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/astro_pi_challenge/
Johnson Space Center Ignites STEM Passion at Houston’s Japan Festival
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
From Sept. 6-7, 2024, NASA’s Johnson Space Center brought the excitement of space exploration to the annual Japan Festival at Hermann Park in Houston. The lively cultural event featured traditional food, dance, martial arts, and more, while Johnson’s booth attracted attendees with interactive space exhibits and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) activities. Johnson employees […]
A brief history of QuickTime
date: 2024-09-17, from: OS News
We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime. QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more. ↫ Howard Oakley As a Windows users before I switched to the Mac somewhere in 2003 or 2004 or so, I mostly associated QuickTime with an annoying piece of crapware I sometimes had to install to watch videos, despite my Windows installation being perfectly capable of playing a whole slew of video codecs just fine. To make matters worse, Apple eventually started forcing Windows users to also install their auto-update tool that ran in the background, which would occasionally just… Install stuff without your permission. Of course, QuickTime was a whole lot more than that, especially on the Mac, where it was simply a core technology of the Mac operating system and the name of the built-in video player. It also served as underpinnings for a whole slew of related technologies, from movie editors like iMovie to the QuickTime streaming tools included in Mac OS X Server, so odds are that somehow, somewhere, you’ve used QuickTime in your life time. I’m not entirely ashamed to admit I had to check if QuickTime was still part of macOS today – I haven’t actively used macOS since, I think, the Snow Leopard days in 2009 – but it obviously has been sunset quite a while ago in favour of AVFoundation, which macOS still uses today.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140760/a-brief-history-of-quicktime/
Pentagon inspector general: Ukraine is ‘job one’ for defense oversight
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. Congress has appropriated $174 billion, including U.S. weapons and materiel, to respond to the crisis and help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s aggression.
U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General Robert Storch calls the oversight of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine his office’s “job one,” with more than 200 people assigned to that task.
In an interview with Voice of America’s Ukrainian Service, Storch discussed the challenges in obtaining the information necessary for such oversight in a country that is fighting a war, suffers from endemic corruption and has no large-scale U.S. military presence.
According to the most recent quarterly Special Inspector General report to the U.S. Congress on Operation Atlantic Resolve (the name of the U.S. military response to Russian operations in Ukraine), issued in mid-August, there were 57 open investigations as of June 30, 2024. They involved “grant and procurement fraud, corruption, theft, program irregularities, and diversion and counter-proliferation of technology of weapons systems components.”
In January, Ukraine’s SBU security service reported that it had uncovered a $40 million corruption scheme, implicating defense ministry officials and arms supplier managers, that involved the embezzlement of funds for purchase of 100,000 mortar shells.
That case did not involve U.S.-provided materiel. However, in September 2023, Oleksii Reznikov was removed as Ukraine’s defense minister “over various corruption cases despite enjoying a solid reputation in representing Ukraine in its discussions with Western allies,” Reuters reported.
Storch told VOA that the Pentagon is working with Ukraine’s military to ensure that it provides timely and accurate information, and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government to fight corruption. He said that in the days immediately following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s armed forces were delinquent in providing information, but that the situation has improved, in part thanks to oversight.
While corruption remains endemic in Ukraine, Storch said that Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions are maturing and that the oversight community is working to ensure that such progress continues. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
VOA: You are overseeing numerous Pentagon programs. How robust is oversight of the delivery of weapons to Ukraine?
Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defense Robert Storch: We are leading a robust, comprehensive oversight effort that really covers all aspects of U.S. assistance to Ukraine. I have responsibility over the security assistance that’s provided, and we partner very closely, hand-in-glove, with our great colleagues from the State Department Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Agency for International Development Office of Inspector General to make sure we’re covering all aspects of humanitarian or other assistance that’s being provided to Ukraine.
VOA: How large is your team that is overseeing the Ukrainian program?
Storch: We have a lot of things pulling at us and lots going on in the world with the Department of Defense. But Ukraine is very much job one. I always say it’s really a matter of the highest priority for my office and for my colleagues’ offices as well.
So, in the case of the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General, we have over 200 people who are engaged in one aspect or another of oversight over U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. That includes about 30 people who were forward deployed in the region. We have several offices in Germany. We have folks in Poland. And we have both investigators and programmatic oversight personnel at the [U.S.] Embassy in Kyiv. If you take all of our partners from State and AID in oversight entities, it is between 300 and 400 people who are engaged in oversight in this whole-of-government effort.
VOA: When you talk to Ukrainian officials, do they appreciate the importance of reporting?
Storch: Without exception, they acknowledge the importance of making sure that we get the information we need to be able to do our oversight to make sure there’s accountability, and frankly to be able to tell the decision-makers here in Washington that that’s going on. …
I go up to the Hill [Capitol Hill, location of the U.S. Congress] not infrequently. And you know, I’m not a policymaker. It’s up to the administration and the Congress to set what the policies are. But one of the things I get asked all the time is, ‘Are we getting the information we need to carry out our work?’ and we have been getting that, and we’re going to work to make sure we continue to.
VOA: The Pentagon transfers materiel to the Ukrainian armed forces. Do they understand the importance of oversight, and do they provide timely self-reporting?
Storch: We work really closely to make sure that’s the case. That’s one of the big lines of effort with regard to our oversight. We’ve done a number of reports looking at the monitoring and the reporting. There are obligations that the Ukrainian armed forces have for reporting on the status of the equipment, and U.S. personnel keep track and there’s a database. When things are lost or destroyed, they have to be reported in a certain way. … [T]hat’s one area where I like to think that our oversight has really made a difference. When we first started on that, the level of delinquency in that reporting was really pretty high, and some of that was because, when the war started, the U.S. personnel had to leave the country.
There was equipment being provided and really no one doing that sort of accountability and inventory. So, a lot of it has been playing catch-up. And … there are challenges with a wartime setting and a lot of this equipment is being used on the front lines and [in] really difficult and sad situations. And so being able to maintain accountability is difficult, but we do a lot of work on that.
VOA: In one of your reports, you mentioned endemic corruption in Ukraine. You worked in Ukraine in 2007 to 2009 to help the country overcome corruption. Can you compare the situation in Ukraine now to what you saw back then?
Storch: I actually had the opportunity to work and live in Ukraine back in 2007 to 2009, when I was with the Department of Justice working with the Ukrainians to help them develop measures to address official corruption. And I had the opportunity to go back on a number of occasions and provide assistance in the drafting of the anti-corruption legislation, and that created the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Office of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, so I have had a lot of experience out there and have seen the way these institutions have matured. The Ukrainians made it happen …
But Ukraine has had long-standing issues with corruption, obviously, and people are working to address it. One of the things we talk about in our quarterly reporting … is that they’re continuing to make efforts to address it, and we continue as the United States both to provide assistance in that, and then, in the oversight community, to do oversight over that to make sure that progress is being made.
VOA: Your report mentions that there are 57 investigations ongoing into allegations ranging from irregularities in procurement to corruption, diversion and theft. Have any of those allegations been substantiated?
Storch: At this point, based on our completed work, we haven’t substantiated those allegations, but obviously the investigations continue, right?
VOA: About half of the allegations involve the proliferation of weapons. How high is the risk of diversion?
Storch: Sure, there’s a significant risk there, but we always want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to address it, and that’s why I mention the programmatic oversight.
We have a website [with] links to the hotlines that my office and our counterparts operate. I really encourage folks to take advantage of that to report that information. So, people can look into it.
VOA: There is reporting that the Pentagon overestimated the value of some of the U.S. equipment destined for Ukraine. Do you think this accounting error will persist or is it being corrected?
Storch: We’re doing everything we can to help the [Defense] Department to address it. We became concerned about that pretty early on and consulted with the department about it and, without getting too complex, basically the department was using a methodology to value the materiel that was being provided that resulted in an overvaluation of it. If you were donating your car, you probably wouldn’t be able to donate the cost of buying a new car like that, right? It’s a little more complicated than that, but basically it resulted in an overvaluation. Initially the Department looking into it found about $6.2 billion that they thought was overstated. We came in and did additional oversight, which is reflected in our reporting, and found about $1.9 billion additionally.
So, the answer to your question is we made recommendations to help the Department address the issues, and we’re going to keep working to make sure those recommendations are carried out and the problems addressed.
Daily Deals (9-17-2024)
date: 2024-09-17, from: Liliputing
Jabra may be pulling the plug on its earbuds and headsets for consumers, but the company just launched a new line of products in June that will be supported for at least a few more years. And while Jabra has found that it’s difficult to turn a profit in this increasingly competitive space, the company […]
The post Daily Deals (9-17-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-9-17-2024/
Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Eight-year-old among those slain, Israel blamed, Iran’s Lebanese ambassador wounded, it’s said
Lebanon says at least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed today after pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded across the country. Israel has been blamed.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/hezbollah_lebanon_explosive_pagers/
The Kursk Offensive: Triumph or Tragedy in the Making?
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: RAND blog
Ukraine’s Kursk operation is potentially a game-changing move. But it could lead to escalation, including increased Russian use of chemical weapons.
ICESat-2 Hosts Third Applications Workshop
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
Introduction The NASA Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 mission (ICESat-2), launched September 15, 2018, continues the first ICESat mission, delivering invaluable global altimetry data. Notwithstanding its icy acronym, ICESat-2 can do more than measure ice – in fact, the expanded acronym hints at these wider applications. From vegetation to inland surface water to bathymetry, […]
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/icesat-2-hosts-third-applications-workshop/
El pódcast en español de la NASA regresa con una nueva temporada
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
Read this news release in English here. Para celebrar el Mes de la Herencia Hispana, la NASA publica nuevos contenidos para Universo curioso de la NASA, el primer pódcast en español de la agencia, que inicia ahora su segunda temporada. La temporada de cinco semanas comienza el martes, con nuevos episodios disponibles semanalmente. Escucha el […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/el-podcast-en-espanol-de-la-nasa-regresa-con-una-nueva-temporada/
NASA’s Spanish-language Podcast Returns for New Season
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
Lee este comunicado de prensa en español aquí. In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, NASA is releasing new content for Universo curioso de la NASA, the agency’s first Spanish-language podcast, now in its second season. A five-week season starts Tuesday with new episodes released weekly. Listen to the preview of the second season of Universo […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-spanish-language-podcast-returns-for-new-season/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Millions Have Amnesia About the Worst of Trump’s Presidency. Memory Experts Explain Why.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/trump-pandemic-amnesia/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Coincidence. CSS was first proposed the same day in 1994 that I started my blog. October 10. Almost 30 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS#History
SpaceX faces $663K FAA fine for Musk’s alleged launch impatience
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Some good news for Elon – 2,500 planes to be Starlink Wi-Fi ready as United joins the party
Elon Musk’s impatience has led to the US Federal Aviation Administration proposing $633,009 in civil penalties against his SpaceX operation for allegedly violating its launch licenses last year. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/faa_spacex_fine_proposed/
Haitians in Ohio react to false allegations against them
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
A small town in the Midwestern state of Ohio finds itself at the center of a controversy involving fake news about migrants eating residents’ pet cats and dogs. VOA’s Creole Service traveled to Springfield and has this report, narrated by Elizabeth Cherneff.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7787728.html
The Liberty Phone: Secure Government Mobility
date: 2024-09-17, from: Purism News and Events
The Liberty Phone delivers uncompromising security for government mobile computing. With Made in USA electronics, it ensures supply chain integrity. Hardware-based security, including physical kill switches, combines with the open-source PureOS to provide superior protection and control. Featuring end-to-end encryption and user-controlled cryptography, the Liberty Phone puts agency security first. Customizable and adaptable, it’s the […]
The post The Liberty Phone: Secure Government Mobility appeared first on Purism.
https://puri.sm/posts/the-liberty-phone-secure-government-mobility/
Turing Pi 2.5 compute module cluster board launches for $259 and up
date: 2024-09-17, from: Liliputing
The Turing Pi 2.5 is a mini ITX cluster board that lets you combine up to four Raspberry Pi CM4, NVIDIA Jetson, or Turing RK1 compute modules to create a cluster computer with up to 32 CPU cores and up to 128GB of combined RAM. Unveiled in July as an updated version of the Turing Pi […]
The post Turing Pi 2.5 compute module cluster board launches for $259 and up appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/turing-pi-2-5-compute-module-cluster-board-launches-for-259-and-up/
Ukraine’s ‘Masterstroke’ Kursk Offensive Is About Geometry, not Geography
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: RAND blog
Ukraine’s Kursk offensive was a tactical masterstroke that changed the geometry of the battlefield by extending Russian lines and obliging them to rethink their force allocation assumptions. This changes the military calculus.
An 11-Year-Old Boy Rescued a Mysterious Artwork From the Dump. It Turned Out to Be a 500-Year-Old Renaissance Print
date: 2024-09-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Experts have confirmed that “Knight, Death and the Devil” is an engraving by the renowned German artist Albrecht Dürer
Rhysida ransomware gang ships off Port of Seattle data for $6M
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Auction acts as payback after authority publicly refuses to pay up
The trend of ransomware crews claiming to sell stolen data privately instead of leaking it online continues with Rhysida marketing the data allegedly belonging to Port of Seattle for 100 Bitcoin (around $5.9 million).…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/rhysida_port_of_seattle/
Locking A Loophole
date: 2024-09-17, from: Tedium site
The Biden administration’s push to close an obscure loophole on imports highlights just how disruptive the Temu model really is.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16811429/temu-de-minimis-loophole-explained
US court upholds British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking conviction
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
new york — A U.S. court on Tuesday upheld disgraced British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction on sex trafficking charges for helping the late financier Jeffrey Epstein abuse underage girls.
Maxwell’s lawyers had argued that her convictions violated an agreement Epstein reached with federal prosecutors 15 years ago and violated the statute of limitations. They also cited judicial error and a miscalculation of the federal sentencing guidelines range as reason to reject her conviction and sentence.
But the ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in Florida didn’t bar federal prosecutors in New York from bringing a case. They also found that Maxwell’s indictment was within the statute of limitations.
Maxwell, 62, was found guilty in December 2021 of luring young girls to Epstein so he could molest them, between 1994 and 2004. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in June 2022.
Epstein sexually abused children hundreds of times over more than a decade, exploiting vulnerable girls as young as 14. Prosecutors said Maxwell, his longtime companion, helped him and made the abuse possible.
He killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial.
Epstein and Maxwell’s associations with royals, presidents and billionaires were not a prominent part of her trial but mentions of friends such as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump showed how the pair exploited their connections to impress their prey.
The trial revolved around allegations from only a handful of Epstein’s accusers. Four testified that they were abused in the 1990s and early 2000s at Epstein’s mansions in Florida, New York, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands.
Maxwell is serving her sentence at a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.
Would Environmental Justice in California Survive a Second Trump White House? Doubtful.
date: 2024-09-17, from: Capital and Main
Activists question whether the state would protect communities of color if the EPA is stripped of its watchdog powers.
The post Would Environmental Justice in California Survive a Second Trump White House? Doubtful. appeared first on .
IBM scores $45M zinger from Zynga in patent wringer
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Big Blue’s Prodigy from the 1980s comes back to haunt FarmVille giant
IBM’s patent farm has yielded another bumper crop, with a Delaware jury awarding Big Blue $45 million in damages from mobile games maker Zynga. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/ibm_patent_win_zynga/
Surveillance of a Worker’s Rights Icon: Emma Tenayuca’s FBI File
date: 2024-09-17, from: National Archives, Text Message blog
Today’s post was written by Daniel Dancis, Special Access and FOIA Program Archivist at the National Archives at College Park, MD The National Archives’ Special Access and FOIA Program recently made available online the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case file on Emma Tenayuca (1916-1999) (NAID 16843150 and NAID 16843151). Tenayuca was a labor leader … Continue reading Surveillance of a Worker’s Rights Icon: Emma Tenayuca’s FBI File
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
What TikTok does not understand is that the USA has two sets of rules, one for the little people, one for the lobbies.
And TikTok enraged the AIPAC lobby.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113153702028229467
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Those colors were bothering me, going for a more demure palette:
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113153657017839665
Disinformation May Thrive as Transparency Deteriorates Across Social Media
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: RAND blog
What can be done to confront disinformation in an environment where content moderation is increasingly viewed as overly partisan and social media transparency has declined? Educating the public on disinformation tactics could help, though concerns about politicization persist.
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
It does make me wonder.
If you installed the wheels on this thing, does the About box show the wheels?
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113153570990628267
AWS claims customers are packing bags and heading back on-prem
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
See? We do have competition, cloud giant tells regulator
Cloud behemoth AWS says it is facing stiff competition from on-premises infrastructure, which is a turnaround from its once-proud boast that all workloads would eventually move to the cloud.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/aws_cma_investigation/
Snapchat Reserves the Right to Use AI-Generated Images of Your Face in Ads
date: 2024-09-17, from: 404 Media Group
Snapchat’s “My Selfie” by default reserves the right to use your likeness in ads.
https://www.404media.co/snapchat-reserves-the-right-to-use-ai-generated-images-of-your-face-in-ads/
Bill Gates on addressing AI and global malnutrition
date: 2024-09-17, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Every year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation updates progress on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — how the world is doing on lifting people from poverty, ensuring gender equality, and improving health, sanitation and more. Today, we’re joined by Bill Gates to hear about stalling progress on public health initiatives, as well as opportunities for greater investment. Plus, what we can expect from the Federal Reserve tomorrow?
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Good morning earthlings!
Reporting live from Sequoia!
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113153378215772996
Oracle brews Java 23 for just-in-time delivery
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Predictably paced programming language plods onward
Oracle on Tuesday released Java 23 (Oracle JDK 23), in keeping with its now well-established six-month cadence.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/oracle_java_23/
NASA’s Hubble Finds More Black Holes than Expected in the Early Universe
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
With the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of researchers led by scientists in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University has found more black holes in the early universe than has previously been reported. The new result can help scientists understand how supermassive black holes were created. Currently, scientists do not […]
Facebook owner Meta bans Russia state media outlets over ‘foreign interference’
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
London — Meta said it’s banning Russia state media organization from its social media platforms, alleging that the outlets used deceptive tactics to amplify Moscow’s propaganda. The announcement drew a rebuke from the Kremlin on Tuesday.
The company, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, said late Monday that it will roll out the ban over the next few days in an escalation of its efforts to counter Russia’s covert influence operations.
“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta said in a prepared statement.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lashed out, saying that “such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” and that “Meta with these actions are discrediting themselves.”
“We have an extremely negative attitude towards this. And this, of course, complicates the prospects for normalizing our relations with Meta,” Peskov told reporters during his daily conference call.
RT was formerly known as Russia Today. Rossiya Segodnya is the parent company behind state news agency RIA Novosti and news brands like Sputnik.
“It’s cute how there’s a competition in the West — who can try to spank RT the hardest, in order to make themselves look better,” RT said in a release.
Rossiya Segodnya did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
Meta’s actions comes days after the United States announced new sanctions on RT, accusing the Kremlin news outlet of being a key part of Russia’s war machine and its efforts to undermine its democratic adversaries.
U.S. officials alleged last week that RT was working hand-in-hand with the Russian military and running fundraising campaigns to pay for sniper rifles, body armor and other equipment for soldiers fighting in Ukraine. They also said RT websites masqueraded as legitimate news sites but were used to spread disinformation and propaganda in Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration seized Kremlin-run websites and charged two RT employees of covertly providing millions of dollars in funding to a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish English-language social media videos pushing pro-Kremlin messages.
Moscow has rejected the allegations.
Meta had already taken steps to limit Moscow’s online reach. Since 2020 it has been labeling posts and content from state media. Two years later, it blocked state media from running ads and putting their content lower in people’s feeds, and the company, along with other other social media sites like YouTube and TikTok, blocked RT’s channels for European users. Also in 2022 Meta also took down a sprawling Russia-based disinformation network spreading Kremlin talking points about the invasion of Ukraine.
Meta and Facebook “already blocked RT in Europe two years ago, now they’re censoring information flow to the rest of the world,” RT said in its statement.
Moscow has fought back, designating Meta as an extremist group in March 2022, shortly after sending troops into Ukraine, and blocking Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms — as well as Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, which is also blocked — were popular with Russians before the invasion and the subsequent crackdown on independent media and other forms of critical speech. The social media platforms are now only accessible through virtual private networks.
Predator spyware kingpins added to US sanctions list
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Designations come as new infrastructure spins up in Africa
Five individuals and one company with ties to spyware developer Intellexa are the latest to earn sanctions as the US expands efforts to stamp out spyware.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/predator_spyware_sanctions/
Innovative Instrument Reveals Hidden Features Deep Inside the Van Allen Radiation Belts
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
A new instrument is using advanced detection techniques and leveraging an orbit with specific characteristics to increase our understanding of the Van Allen belts—regions surrounding Earth that contain energetic particles that can endanger both robotic and human space missions. Recently, the instrument provided a unique view of changes to this region that were brought on […]
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-09-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
A true friend will message you privately when your design has a misaligned pixel.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113153121982558210
Larry Ellison’s AI-Powered Surveillance Dystopia Is Already Here
date: 2024-09-17, from: 404 Media Group
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
https://www.404media.co/larry-ellisons-ai-powered-surveillance-dystopia-is-already-here/
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs charged with racketeering, sex trafficking
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — Music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has been hit with three federal charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday.
Combs, 54, was arrested in Manhattan by federal agents on Monday night, following a year in which his career was derailed by several lawsuits accusing him of physical and sexual abuse.
Marc Agnifilo, Combs’ lawyer, said he was disappointed with the decision to pursue an “unjust prosecution” of the rapper and producer.
“Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man, and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children, and working to uplift the Black community,” Agnifilo said on Monday night. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”
Agnifilo added that Combs voluntarily relocated to New York in anticipation of the charges.
Combs, who has also been known as P. Diddy and Puff Daddy, was a major figure in hip-hop in the 1990s and 2000s. He founded the label Bad Boy records, and is credited with helping turn rappers and R&B singers such as Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Notorious B.I.G. and Usher into stars.
His reputation came under fire last November when former girlfriend Casandra Ventura, an R&B singer known as Cassie, accused him in a lawsuit of serial physical abuse, sexual slavery and rape during their decade-long relationship. She agreed to an undisclosed settlement one day after suing, even as Combs denied her allegations.
His legal pressures mounted, and he has faced several civil lawsuits by women and men who accused him of sexual assault and other misconduct. His lawyers have been fighting those cases in court. Federal agents raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Florida six months ago.
Singer Dawn Richard, formerly of Danity Kane, last week accused Combs in a lawsuit of sexual assault, battery, sex trafficking, gender discrimination and fraud.
A Michigan judge this month ordered Combs to pay $100 million to Derrick Lee Smith, who said Combs drugged and sexually assaulted him at a party almost 30 years ago, after Combs failed to show up to defend himself in court. A lawyer for Combs said he would seek to dismiss that judgment.
Combs has also rejected claims in a February sex trafficking lawsuit by Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, who Combs employed as a producer on his 2023 release “The Love Album: Off the Grid.”
The indictment is not Combs’ first brush with the law. He was acquitted in March 2001 of bribery and weapons charges in a criminal trial stemming from a nightclub shooting that left three people wounded.
https://www.voanews.com/a/sean-diddy-combs-arrested-indictment-expected-to-be-unsealed/7787440.html
Antitrust Lawsuit Filed Against Large Academic Publishers
date: 2024-09-17, from: Authors Union blogs
On September 12, a San Francisco-based law firm filed an antitrust lawsuit on behalf of UCLA professor Lucina Uddin against six prominent academic publishers and the trade association that represents them: Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publications, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers […]
Prosecutors confirm probe into SAP CTO amid allegations of sexual harassment
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Jürgen Müller agreed to step down from his role at the end of September
German prosecutors have confirmed to The Register that SAP’s outgoing CTO is under investigation following allegations of sexual harassment.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/sap_cto_investigation/
Investigators search for motive of would-be Trump assassin
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/investigators-search-for-motive-of-would-be-trump-assassin/7787418.html
65 Years Ago: First Powered Flight of the X-15 Hypersonic Rocket Plane
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
The X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft, built by North American Aviation (NAA), greatly expanded our knowledge of flight at speeds exceeding Mach 6 and altitudes above 250,000 feet. A joint project among NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Navy, the X-15’s first powered flight took place on Sept. 17, 1959, at the Flight Research […]
https://www.nasa.gov/history/65-years-ago-first-powered-flight-of-the-x-15-hypersonic-rocket-plane/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-09-17, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
To fight climate change, we must create political will.
US boosts military ties with Southeast Asian countries
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
The United States has deepened its cooperation with allies in the Indo-Pacific region in recent years, including Japan and South Korea. But it has also reached out to non-allies, including non-aligned countries of Southeast Asia like Indonesia. VOA’s Virginia Gunawan reports. Camera: Ahadian Utama, Hafizh Sahadeva.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-boosts-military-ties-with-southeast-asian-countries/7787394.html
Analysts say Vietnam official’s US trip could set path to C-130 deal
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Analysts say this week’s visit to Washington by Vietnamese Defense Minister Phan Van Giang shows advances in cooperation between the two countries, despite rising Vietnamese nationalism that may indicate rising anti-American sentiment in Vietnam.
A U.S.-based analyst told VOA on September 12 that Giang’s trip set the groundwork for Hanoi to potentially purchase military cargo planes from the United States this year.
Giang met with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon on Monday. [September 9] Both leaders “reaffirmed the importance of the U.S.-Vietnam partnership,” the Defense Department said in a statement, and noted the one-year anniversary of the elevation of the countries’ ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest tier in Hanoi’s diplomatic hierarchy.
The leaders also underscored the importance of working together to address the lasting impacts of the U.S.-Vietnam War. Austin announced that the U.S. would budget $65 million over the next five years to complete the decontamination of Bien Hoa airbase of dioxin, bringing the total from department to $215 million. The airbase was the primary storage site for the toxic chemical Agent Orange during the U.S.-Vietnam War and remains an environmental and public health hazard for those nearby.
Andrew Wells-Dang, who leads the Vietnam War Legacies and Reconciliation Initiative at the United States Institute of Peace, told VOA by phone on September 5 that diplomatic visits are key to advancing war-remediation efforts, including finding and identifying the remains of missing soldiers. He said that along with the U.S. visit of Deputy Defense Minister Vo Minh Luong in July, visits from authorities provide “opportunity for them to have high level support.”
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington and an expert on Southeast Asia, said joint war-reconciliation efforts also set the groundwork for defense cooperation more broadly.
“The United States is very pleased with the growth in bilateral defense relations, and it started from very low levels and was built on humanitarian missions,” Abuza said during the August 29 call.
“We’ve just continued to build on that,” he added.
Cargo planes
Reuters reported in July that Hanoi was considering purchasing Lockheed Martin C-130 cargo planes from the U.S., according to unnamed sources.
The U.S.-based analyst, who asked that his name to be withheld because he has not been cleared to discuss the topic, said the C-130 deal was discussed but not finalized during Giang’s visit. The analyst said the deal was held back by the “massive [U.S.] bureaucracy” and because solidifying the purchase during the Washington visit would be “too inflammatory for the Chinese.”
Ian Storey, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, noted Vietnam’s delicate diplomatic balancing act, illustrated by Giang’s travel itinerary before the Washington trip.
“Vietnam aims to keep its relations with the major powers in balance,” he wrote in an email on August 30. “As such, Vietnamese Defense Minister Phan Van Giang visited Russia and China in August.”
Storey added that the purchase of C-130 planes would not pose a threat to China in its maritime territorial disputes with Vietnam.
“C-130 aircraft would enable the Vietnamese to transport troops and supplies to its occupied atolls in the South China Sea, but these assets are non-strategic and won’t shift the dynamics in the South China Sea,” he wrote.
Nguyen The Phuong, a maritime security expert at the University of New South Wales Canberra, said the C-130 purchase would be a “symbolic move.”
“Vietnam will try to explore more areas of security and defense cooperation between Vietnam and the United States to upgrade to a higher, more meaningful level,” he told VOA on August 30. “The C-130 would be the symbol of that kind of evolving relationship,” he said.
Phuong said a C-130 is a likely entry point as there is still mistrust between the former foes regarding lethal weapons, and the deal would not rankle China too much.
“It could be quite advantageous for Vietnam,” he said of a potential C-130 purchase. “Vietnam can improve its relationship with the United States, and at the same time, we could not anger China because Vietnam would just buy non-lethal weapons.”
Rising nationalism
Although there are positive signs to improving Hanoi-Washington relations, there have also been recent instances of anti-Western sentiment that could be an impediment to the countries relations, Phuong said.
Fulbright University Vietnam, which has significant backing from the United States, is facing accusations of fomenting a “color revolution,” similar to the popular uprisings in former Soviet republics.
On August 21, Vietnam National Defense TV aired a critique of Fulbright for allegedly not displaying the Vietnamese flag at a graduation ceremony and facilitating a color revolution.
The report has since been taken down, but Phuong said the Fulbright issue and other recent incidents show tension between Vietnam’s conservative and liberal factions.
“It’s a presentation of a continuous struggle between different factions, one conservative and one liberal,” Phuong said.
Abuza said that Vietnamese authorities may be attempting to tighten control ahead of the anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
“Next April is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon,” he said. “The Vietnamese want to control that narrative 100%. There are a lot of sensitivities.”
Along with the Fulbright incident, Phuong pointed to recent uproar around Vietnamese celebrities who were pictured with the South Vietnam flag while traveling to the United States. In addition, a Vietnamese high school student faced cyber bullying and was summoned by police after posting in September that he wanted to leave the country and would “probably never see the [Communist] Party positively again.”
“There’s extreme nationalism in Vietnam at the moment,” Phuong said. “It’s against Western values.”
What’s in the COP29 ‘Action Agenda’
date: 2024-09-17, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Thousands of firefighters are battling raging blazes in Portugal • Shanghai could be hit by another typhoon this week • More than 18 inches of rain fell in less than 24 hours in Carolina Beach, which forecasters say is a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
THE TOP FIVE
- Azerbaijan unveils COP29 ‘action agenda’
Azerbaijan, the host of this year’s COP29, today put forward a list of “non-negotiated” initiatives for the November climate summit that will “supplement” the official mandated program. The action plan includes the creation of a new “Climate Finance Action Fun” that will take (voluntary) contributions from fossil fuel producing countries, a call for increasing battery storage capacity, an appeal for a global “truce” during the event, and a declaration aimed at curbing methane emissions from waste (which the Financial Times noted is “only the third most common man-made source of methane, after the energy and agricultural sectors”). The plan makes no mention of furthering efforts to phase out fossil fuels in the energy system.
- Biden administration announces date for Gulf of Maine offshore wind
lease sale
The Interior Department set a date for an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Gulf of Maine, an area which the government sees as suitable for developing floating offshore wind technology. The auction will take place on October 29 and cover eight areas on the Outer Continental Shelf off Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The area could provide 13 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, if fully developed. The Biden administration has a goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and has approved about half that amount so far. The DOI’s terms and conditions for the October lease sale include “stipulations designed to promote the development of a robust domestic U.S. supply chain for floating wind.” Floating offshore wind turbines can be deployed in much deeper waters than traditional offshore projects, and could therefore unlock large areas for clean power generation. Last month the government gave the green light for researchers to study floating turbines in the Gulf of Maine.
- BP to sell its U.S. onshore wind business
In other wind news, BP is selling its U.S. onshore wind business, bp Wind Energy. The firm’s 10 wind farm projects have a total generating capacity of 1.3 gigawatts and analysts think they could be worth $2 billion. When it comes to renewables, the fossil fuel giant said it is focusing on investing in solar growth, and onshore wind is “not aligned” with those plans.
- Solar jobs grew last year but hiring challenges remain
The number of jobs in the U.S. solar industry last year grew to 279,447, up 6% from 2022, according to a new report from the nonprofit Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Utility-scale solar added 1,888 jobs in 2023, a 6.8% increase and a nice rebound from 2022, when the utility-scale solar market recorded a loss in jobs. The report warns that we might not see the same kind of growth for solar jobs in 2024, though. Residential installations have dropped, and large utility-scale projects are struggling with grid connection. The report’s authors also note that as the industry grows, it faces a shortage of skilled workers.
Interstate
Renewable Energy Council
Most employers reported that hiring qualified solar workers was difficult, especially in installation and project development. “It’s difficult because our projects are built in very rural areas where there just aren’t a lot of people,” one interviewee who works at a utility-scale solar firm said. “We strive to hire as many local people as possible because we want local communities to feel the economic impact or benefit from our projects. So in some communities where we go, it is difficult to find local people that are skilled and can perform the work.”
- Death toll rises from Europe’s floods
The torrential rain that has battered central Europe is tapering off a bit, but the danger of rising water remains. “The massive amounts of rain that fell is now working its way through the river systems and we are starting to see flooding in areas that avoided the worst of the rain,” BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor explained. The Polish city of Nysa told its 44,000 residents to leave yesterday as water rose. In the Czech Republic, 70% of the town of Litovel was submerged in 3 feet of flooding. The death toll from the disaster has risen to 18. Now the forecast is calling for heavy rain in Italy. “The catastrophic rainfall hitting central Europe is exactly what scientists expect with climate change,” Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist with Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, told The Guardian.
THE KICKER
A recent study examining the effects of London’s ultra-low emissions zone on how students get to school found that a year after the rules came into effect, many students had switched to walking, biking, or taking public transport instead of being driven in private vehicles.
https://heatmap.news/climate/cop29-action-agenda-fossil-fuels
S&P 500’s AI FOMO fizzles: Less than half mentioned it in Q2 earnings
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Is the hype over already?
Despite all the hype and billions poured into AI, fewer than half of S&P 500 firms actually mentioned it in their Q2 2024 earnings reports. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/ai_sp_500_q2/
“Mini” Is Overselling It
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/09/17/mini-is-overselling-it/
Retailers try to get just enough on the shelves for the holidays
date: 2024-09-17, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Later this morning, we’ll to get an update on how much inventory businesses built up in July, courtesy of the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the Logistics Managers’ Index found that inventory levels picked up in August after contracting throughout the summer, ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season. It appears to be a return to just-in-time inventory for companies. And later: the secretive and scandalous world of offshore finance.
China says it tailed US aircraft over Taiwan Strait
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
Beijing — The Chinese military tailed a U.S. aircraft that flew through the politically sensitive Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, Beijing’s army said, vowing to “resolutely defend national sovereignty.”
“On September 17, a U.S. P-8A anti-submarine patrol aircraft flew through the Taiwan Strait,” Li Xi, a senior captain and spokesperson for the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, PLA, said in a statement.
The PLA theater command “organized fighter jets to tail and stand guard against the US aircraft’s flight, dealing with it in accordance with the law,” Li said.
“Theater troops are on constant high alert to resolutely defend national sovereignty and security and regional peace and stability.”
Beijing views self-ruled Taiwan as a renegade province and claims jurisdiction over the body of water that separates the island from the Chinese mainland.
The U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in a statement that a “P-8A Poseidon transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace on Sept. 17 (local time).”
The statement did not mention the aircraft being tailed by the Chinese military.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said.
“The aircraft’s transit of the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Taiwan’s defense ministry said in a statement “a US P-8A aircraft passed through Taiwan Strait from south to north this morning.”
“The military has monitored the situation and no anomaly was detected in our surroundings,” it said.
China also accused Germany of heightening security risks in the Taiwan Strait on Saturday after two of its military vessels sailed through the waterway.
Taipei thanked Washington on Tuesday for approving $228 million worth of “return, repair, and reshipment of spare parts” for its aircraft and related equipment, the 16th such sale of arms to the island under U.S. President Joe Biden.
Taiwan’s defense ministry said in a separate statement the deal was expected to take effect in a month and “will help maintain the combat readiness and safety of various types of aircraft equipment of our air force”.
The end is in sight for Windows 10, but Microsoft keeps pushing out fixes
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Persistent SSO prompts after DMA update addressed in release preview
Microsoft continues to apply the electrodes to Windows 10 with an Insider build to deal with single sign-on problems arising from changes made for the European Digital Markets Act and Edge freezing when using Internet Explorer mode.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/windows_10_insider_update/
The Sprawling Sculpture at the Center of the National World War I Memorial Has Been Unveiled in Washington, D.C.
date: 2024-09-17, from: Smithsonian Magazine
“A Soldier’s Journey,” a 58-foot-long bronze artwork depicting vivid scenes from the war, was illuminated for the first time at a ceremony on September 13
Economists say Brexit bureaucracy is hitting UK-EU goods trade — and is getting worse
date: 2024-09-17, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: A comprehensive study has found goods imports and exports between the United Kingdom and European Union have slumped since Brexit, with red tape continuing to tie up British businesses. The value of U.K. goods exported to the EU fell by 27%. We dig in. Also on the program: Farmers in Malawi are looking for ways to use harvests damaged by extreme weather, such as turning bananas into wine.
On Call’s Greatest Hits, as voted for by you, the readers
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The 20 most-commented-on tech support columns from On Call’s first 500 instalments
On Call To celebrate the recent 500th appearance of On-Call, the column that features your tales of tech support torture, The Register has trawled through the archives to find the 20 columns that generated the most comments.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/on_call/
Preparing for AI
date: 2024-09-17, from: O’Reilly Radar
AI is everywhere—we’re in a middle of a technology shift that’s as big (and possibly bigger) than the arrival of the web in the 1990s. Even though ChatGPT appeared almost two years ago, we still feel unprepared: we read that AI will change every job and we don’t know what that means or how to […]
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/preparing-for-ai/
Using AI in your tech stack? Accuracy and reliability a worry for most
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Churns out apps, but testing needed to iron out performance woes
Researchers are finding that most companies integrating AI into their tech stack have run headlong into performance and reliability issues with the resulting applications.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/ai_is_great_for_churning/
NASA, GE Aerospace Advancing Hybrid-Electric Airliners with HyTEC
date: 2024-09-17, from: NASA breaking news
Hybrid-electric cars have been a staple of the road for many years now. Soon that same idea of a part-electric-, part-gas-powered engine may find its way into the skies propelling a future jet airliner. NASA is working in tandem with industry partner GE Aerospace on designing and building just such an engine, one that burns […]
https://www.nasa.gov/aeronautics/nasa-ge-hybrid-electric-research-092024/
New book release: Design an RP2040 board with KiCad
date: 2024-09-17, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
We’re releasing a new book that helps you design and manufacture your own RP2040 boards.
The post New book release: Design an RP2040 board with KiCad appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-book-release-design-an-rp2040-board-with-kicad/
Objections to datacenter builds may be overruled now they are ‘Critical National Infrastructure’
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Well you wouldn’t get far protesting a water system or a power grid, right?
The UK government’s decision to designate datacenters as critical national infrastructure (CNI) may do more than just offer protection against critical incidents; it may also allow developers to override any local objections to such facilities being built.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/objections_to_datacenter_builds_cni/
Sainsbury’s bags a ticket to RISE with SAP, hoping not to trip like Asda
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
UK’s second largest retailer set to move ERP to the cloud with AWS, Accenture, and the German software gaint
Sainsbury’s has become the third top-ten UK retailer to join the SAP program to lift legacy applications to the cloud and migrate them to its latest S/4HANA ERP system.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/sainsburys_rise_with_sap/
Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
If there’s one thing we know about Big Red, it’s being entirely reasonable
JavaScript luminaries and at least 2,500 other interested parties have again asked Oracle to set the programming language free by walking away from the trademark for its name.…
MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine
date: 2024-09-17, from: The Lever News
After John McCain got caught up in a corruption scheme, he went to war with his own party to try to make sure it never happened again.
https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-ep-6-the-maverick-vs-the-corruption-machine/
MASTER PLAN, Ep 6: The Maverick Vs. The Corruption Machine
date: 2024-09-17, from: The Lever News
After John McCain got caught up in a corruption scheme, he went to war with his own party to try to make sure it never happened again.
https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-ep-6-the-maverick-vs-the-corruption_machine/
Alibaba Cloud waiting for hardware to dry out before trying to restore customer data
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Digital Realty’s Singapore disaster still complicating cloud after a week
A week after a fire broke out at a Singapore datacenter, Alibaba Cloud is waiting for some hardware to dry out before it restores services and customer data.…
Desktop hypervisors are like buses: None for ages, then four at once
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMware have all upgraded
September has been a big month for desktop hypervisors, with the field’s big players all delivering significant updates.…
China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
If this really was that useful, they wouldn’t be telling us
According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/china_starlink_stealth/
Judge rejects former Trump aide’s bid to move Arizona case to federal court
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
PHOENIX — A judge has rejected a bid by Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump, to move his charges in Arizona’s fake elector case to federal court, marking the second time he has failed in trying to get his charges out of state court.
In a decision Monday, U.S. District Judge John Tuchi said Meadows missed a deadline for asking for his charges to be moved to federal court, didn’t offer a good reason for doing so and failed to show that the allegations against him related to his official duties as chief of staff to the president.
Meadows faces charges in Arizona and Georgia in what authorities allege was an illegal scheme to overturn the 2020 election results in Trump’s favor. He had unsuccessfully tried to move charges in the Georgia case last year. It’s unknown whether Meadows will appeal the decision. The Associated Press left phone and email messages for two of Meadows’ attorneys.
While not a fake elector in Arizona, prosecutors said Meadows, while chief of staff, worked with other Trump campaign members to submit names of fake electors from Arizona and other states to Congress in a bid to keep Trump in office despite his November 2020 defeat. Meadows has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Arizona and Georgia.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes.
The decision sends Meadows’ case back down to Maricopa County Superior Court.
In both Arizona and Georgia, Meadows argued his charges should be moved to federal court because his actions were taken when he was a federal official working as Trump’s chief of staff and that he has immunity under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says federal law trumps state law.
Arizona prosecutors said Meadows’ electioneering efforts weren’t part of his official duties at the White House.
Meadows last year tried to get his Georgia charges moved but his request was rejected by a judge whose ruling was later affirmed by an appeals court. Meadows has since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling.
The Arizona indictment says Meadows confided to a White House staff member in early November 2020 that Trump had lost the election. Prosecutors say Meadows also had arranged meetings and calls with state officials to discuss the fake elector conspiracy.
Meadows and other defendants are seeking a dismissal of the Arizona case.
Meadows’ attorneys said nothing their client is alleged to have done in Arizona was criminal. They said the indictment consists of allegations that he received messages from people trying to get ideas in front of Trump — or “seeking to inform Mr. Meadows about the strategy and status of various legal efforts by the president’s campaign.”
In all, 18 Republicans were charged in late April in Arizona’s fake electors case. The defendants include 11 Republicans who had submitted a document falsely claiming Trump had won Arizona, another Trump aide and five lawyers connected to the former president.
In August, Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, who worked closely with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors that led to the dismissal of her charges. Republican activist Loraine Pellegrino became the first person to be convicted in the Arizona case when she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to probation.
The remaining defendants have pleaded not guilty to the forgery, fraud and conspiracy charges in Arizona.
Trump wasn’t charged in Arizona, but the indictment refers to him as an unindicted coconspirator.
The 11 people who were nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claimed Trump had carried the state.
A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin have also filed criminal charges related to the fake electors scheme.
Suspect in apparent attempt to assassinate Trump charged in federal court
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
An apparent assassination attempt on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over the weekend raised new questions Monday about political violence in the United States. Democratic and Republican leaders called for more resources for the U.S. Secret Service. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more
Chinese national accused by Feds of spear-phishing for NASA, military source code
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
May have reeled in blueprints related to weapons development
A Chinese national has been accused of conducting a years-long spear-phishing campaign that aimed to steal source code from the US Army and NASA, plus other highly sensitive software used in aerospace engineering and military applications.…
Next generation of Buffetts is poised to become one of the biggest forces in philanthropy
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
OMAHA, Neb. — The next generation of Buffetts — Howard, Susie and Peter — is poised to become one of the most powerful forces in philanthropy when their 94-year-old father, the legendary businessman and leader of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, eventually passes away.
But it wasn’t always going to be that way.
Buffett announced in June that he would donate his fortune, now valued at nearly $144 billion, to a charitable trust managed by his three children when he dies, instead of giving it to the Gates Foundation, as he indicated 18 years ago.
The next generation of Buffetts will then have 10 years to give the money away, Warren Buffett said.
In the meantime, the elder Buffett continues to make huge annual donations to the Gates Foundation and his four family foundations, which will continue throughout his lifetime. He first mentioned plans for a new charitable trust in November.
Howard Buffett told The Associated Press he’s learned what his father told him and his siblings about philanthropy was true: “It’s not so easy to give away money if you want to do it smart, if you want to be intelligent about it.”
The middle Buffett child, Howard said his father is as sharp as ever and that he hopes he lives a long time, adding: “It’s pretty amazing that he’s giving us this opportunity.”
Buffett has entrusted Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates with significant annual gifts to their foundation since 2006 — a remarkable $43 billion to date.
“Wealthy people don’t tend to give their money to other people to give away,” said James Ferris, founding director of The Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California. But many of the wealthiest people are also hesitant to hand over their fortunes to the next generation over concerns that it hampers their ingenuity, he said.
Ferris thinks the story of Buffett’s changing philanthropic intentions is a positive one. “It shows how a donor is making choices and is adapting to circumstances,” he said.
The Gates Foundation did not say when it learned of Buffett’s decision or what the impact will be on its budget. It previously said in a statement that “Warren Buffett has been exceedingly generous,” and that he has “played an invaluable role in championing and shaping the foundation’s work to create a world where every person can live a healthy, productive life.”
Over the years, Buffett gave the Gates Foundation large annual donations, but also donated billions to foundations run by his three children and a fourth family foundation. Their work offers some insight into the priorities of the next generation of Buffetts.
The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after Warren Buffett’s first wife, is the largest in terms of donations. It supports organizations that provide reproductive health care and access to contraception and abortion around the world. Susie Buffett, 71, is its board chair and Peter Buffett, 66, is a board member.
Susie Buffett also leads The Sherwood Foundation, a major supporter of early childhood development nationally that gives grants to organizations and projects within Omaha, Nebraska, the Buffetts’ hometown.
Peter Buffett’s NoVo Foundation has been an important funder of organizations advocating for the autonomy of girls and women and against gender-based violence. In 2020, Peter and his wife, Jennifer, decided to reorient their focus, expanding their support for Native American communities and projects to build sustainable, local communities with a focus on agriculture and food access.
The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has focused on conflict mitigation and agriculture around the world. Since 2022, it has donated some $800 million — more than most countries — to humanitarian initiatives in Ukraine during the country’s war with Russia. These include supporting food distribution at schools, demining activities, and the rebuilding of a major publishing company and a key bridge transporting grain.
In a relatively rare interview for a family that seldom makes time to speak with the media, Howard Buffett, 69, said he couldn’t predict exactly how he and his siblings would give away their father’s fortune. However, he said they would continue to take risks and find ways to make the biggest difference as their father recommended.
“I can tell you, we’ll sit down in a room when the time comes, and we’ll get it figured out pretty quickly,” he said, acknowledging that the directive to donate all the money within 10 years was a challenge.
The siblings’ different ways of thinking and approaches to giving are assets, he said.
“What this is going to do is we’re going to bring all of our collective experience together,” he said.
But don’t expect to find the family name on a lot of buildings, which the siblings have largely avoid even as they’ve given away more than $15 billion of their father’s money since 2006.
Kathleen Enright, president and CEO of the Council on Foundations, said the Buffetts have effectively made philanthropy a family business, with the next generation now seasoned donors who have built enduring institutions in their foundations.
“It is a big deal,” she said, of the amount of money that the Buffetts are poised to give away, noting that because the fortune will likely continue to grow, they will have to give away highly visible sums to spend it down.
The tight timeframe to give away his fortune after his death reflects one of Warren Buffett’s longstanding conditions for receiving charitable funding. He has instructed the Gates Foundation and his family’s foundations to grant out the full amount they received within a year.
The next generation of Buffetts have run their foundations with tiny staffs — much like how Warren Buffett oversees his massive Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate with only about two dozen people at its headquarters in Omaha.
Howard Buffett said his foundation employs just 22 staff members. It granted $458.1 million in 2023, according to tax documents. He acknowledged that his “lean” staff puts some limits on their capacity, but said the way they’ve scaled their work is through creating strong and enduring relationships with other organizations to help implement their ideas.
In contrast, the Gates Foundation has one of the largest endowments at $75.2 billion, funded by donations from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It employs more than 2,000 people, many of them technical experts all over the world, and is known for making highly directed grants with rigorous reporting requirements. The foundation has said it will wind down its operations within 25 years after its founders’ deaths.
Howard Buffett said he likes a challenge and thinks that in general, wealthy people should give their money away within their lifetimes, rather than holding it in perpetual foundations.
“Somebody is going to spend that money. Somebody is going to give that money away,” he said. “So, I would rather do that with my brother and sister and do it together, as a partnership, than see it done any other way.”
US will ‘continue to push’ for release of detainees in China, State Department says
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — On Monday, after the U.S. State Department announced the release of David Lin, an American pastor, from nearly two decades of imprisonment in China, officials said more work remains to secure the freedom of other Americans held in China.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that the U.S. government had been working to secure Lin’s release for some time.
“When it comes to David Lin, we are glad to see he is released. We welcome it. We’ll continue to push the release of other Americans,” Miller said during a regular press briefing.
Lin, 68, was detained in 2006 after entering China. He was later convicted of contract fraud and given a life sentence in 2009. After Chinese courts reduced his sentence, he was set to be released from Beijing in 2029.
Bob Fu, a pastor and founder of ChinaAid, a nonprofit dedicated to religious freedom in China, called the original charges against Lin a “scam” and said they were facilitated by the Chinese government as a gambit to unjustly take hostages.
The imprisonment and now release of Lin, Fu told VOA, is especially significant as China is increasingly cracking down on religious practices within the country, with human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet and growing governmental restrictions on Christian traditions.
Despite this, Fu said that the success of Lin’s release could be attributed to two factors: the souring of the global public opinion on China and the hard work of U.S. officials.
“This shows that if our top political leaders really take this seriously and persistently, it will bear fruits for our citizens’ freedom,” he said.
According to the Dui Hua Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to freeing detainees through dialogue with China, over 200 American nationals in China under coercive measures, including wrongful detentions and exit bans.
The State Department has listed two other detained individuals as priority cases: Businessman Kai Li, accused of espionage in 2016, and Mark Swidan, convicted of drug trafficking in 2019.
“We’ll continue to push the release of other Americans,” Miller said. “It’s something that we have been working on for some time.”
Miller declined to say if Lin’s release had been the result of a swap, according to a report by Reuters.
China’s embassy in Washington declined to comment when asked if Beijing had received anything from the U.S. in return for Lin’s release, according to Reuters. The embassy also told Reuters that Chinese authorities handle criminal suspects in accordance with the law and “treat them equally regardless of their nationality.”
Later this week, a U.S. congressional hearing is set to be held on Americans who have been arbitrarily imprisoned in China.
Some material for this report came from Reuters.
Microsoft confirms IE bug squashed in Patch Tuesday was exploited zero-day
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The C in these CVEs stands for Confusing
Analysis Microsoft, in a low-key update to its September Patch Tuesday disclosures, has confirmed a just-fixed Internet Explorer vulnerability was exploited as a zero-day before it could be patched.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/microsoft_zero_day_spoofing_flaw/
Boeing says it’s weighing temporary layoffs to save cash during machinists strike
date: 2024-09-17, from: VOA News USA
seattle — Boeing plans to freeze hiring and reduce travel and is considering temporary layoffs to save cash during a factory worker strike that began last week, the company told employees Monday.
The company said the moves, which include reduced spending on suppliers, were necessary because “our business is in a difficult period.”
Chief financial officer Brian West detailed 10 immediate cutbacks in a memo to employees. They include a freeze on hiring across all levels, a pause in pay increases for managers and executives who get promoted, and a cancellation of all travel that isn’t critical.
“We are also considering the difficult step of temporary furloughs for many employees, managers and executives in the coming weeks,” West said.
Boeing’s business is in a difficult spot, he said, adding: “This strike jeopardizes our recovery in a significant way.”
About 33,000 workers represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers began a strike early Friday. The walkout came after workers rejected an offer of a 25% increase in pay over four years. The union originally sought a pay hike of at least 40%.
Representatives of the company and the union are scheduled to meet Tuesday with federal mediators. The union has started to survey its members to learn what they want most in a new contract.
Striking workers are picketing at several locations around Washington state, Oregon and California.
Outside Boeing’s huge factory in Everett, Washington, Nancie Browning, a materials-management specialist at Boeing for more than 17 years, said last week’s offer was worse than the one that prompted a two-month strike in 2008. She said that without annual bonuses that workers have come to depend on, the proposed pay increase was more like 9%, not 25%.
“We just want a piece of the pie like everybody else,” she said. “Why should we work all this overtime and bust our backs while these guys [Boeing executives] are sitting up in their suites just raking in the cash?”
The bonuses have emerged as a flash point for union members. Workers say they range from $3,000 to $5,000 a year.
Boeing says it is hard to calculate bonuses in a way that is fair to 33,000 people who perform different jobs. So instead, the company proposes to ditch the payouts and replace them with automatic contributions of $4,160 per year to each employee’s 401(k) retirement account.
Workers are bitter that in contract extensions over the past 16 years, Boeing ended its traditional pension plan and lowered health care benefits.
“We want our pension back,” said Jacob Bustad, a machinist with Boeing for 14 years who was also on the picket line in Everett. “We just keep losing and we never gain, while the people at the top just get more and more money. Boeing has done really good for me and my family, but these last years have been hard.”
Boeing has lost more than $25 billion since the start of 2019 and burned through $4.3 billion in the second quarter of 2024 alone as it stood poised to post another money-losing year. The strike will delay deliveries of new planes, which are an important source of cash for the company.
Stephanie Pope, the head of Boeing’s commercial airplanes division, cited the company’s $60 billion in total debt in urging blue-collar workers to accept the contract offer last week. She called it the best offer Boeing had ever made — and it was endorsed by the union’s local president and negotiators.
But workers rejected the recommendation of their own leaders, which had not happened since 1995.
Additional cost-cutting moves spelled out in the chief financial officer’s memo included eliminating first- and business-class service for anyone on travel that is deemed critical and stopping spending on outside consultants.
West also said Boeing plans to make “significant reductions in supplier expenditures” and will stop most supplier purchase orders related to the 737, 767 and 777 airplane models.
After the strike started, Moody’s put Boeing on review for a possible credit downgrade, and Fitch said a strike longer than two weeks would make a downgrade more likely. Both agencies rate Boeing debt one notch above noninvestment or junk status.
Intel frees its Foundry biz – and that’s just one of many major shake-ups today
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Pauses European fabs, scores secret US gig, teams up with Amazon, re-orgs its innards, and more!
Intel will spin out its Foundry division as an independent subsidiary with its own board, in the hopes of bringing in new sources of capital for the ailing business unit.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/intel_foundry_aws_dod/
What’s in an (Alias) Name?
date: 2024-09-17, updated: 2024-09-17, from: Go language blog
A description of generic alias types, a planned feature for Go 1.24
https://go.dev/blog/alias-names
Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse
date: 2024-09-17, from: Blog Muffinlabs
No Running Water at Home
For people in industrial societies, few activities demand more privacy than washing and grooming the body. We usually do it alone, in our private bathrooms, with locked doors. Seen in a historical context, that is unusual. Bathing in the presence of others has been the rule rather than the exception. As late as the first half of the twentieth century, many households, even in the most advanced industrial societies, did not have running water at home, let alone a private bathroom. 1
A bathroom requires a domestic water supply, but also a sewer drain, and an energy source to heat the water. Of course, it’s possible to have a hot bath at home without these infrastructures. Ever since Antiquity, the rich have built private baths in their houses. Most often, they could do that because less well-off people - either servants or slaves - filled and emptied their bathtubs with bucketloads of water and collected firewood to heat them.
However, for most people, it was more practical to take their bodies to the water rather than the other way around. For some, that meant bathing in rivers, lakes, and springs. For others, especially in urban environments, it meant visiting the public bathhouse.
Is Bathing Unsustainable?
Modern bathing practices are a textbook example of an unsustainable lifestyle based on fossil fuels. Hot water production is the second largest energy use in many homes (after space heating and/or cooling), and much of it is used for bathing or showering. 2 The modern bathroom also uses a lot of water and adds extra energy use through space heating and waste-water treatment. Building and renovating bathrooms requires resources, too.
Sustainability advocates follow two strategies to address these problems. The first strategy concentrates on technological solutions, such as low-flow showerheads, water boilers heated by solar collectors, waste-water heat recovery systems, and greywater recycling. The second strategy counts on behavioral or social changes by questioning modern standards of cleanliness: bathing or showering shorter and less frequently, taking cold showers, or doing a cat wash at the sink. 23
These strategies are unlikely to bring much results. Many technological fixes are difficult or impossible to install in existing buildings, especially in cities. For example, as the number of floors increases, an apartment building quickly runs out of roof space to install solar collectors for all residents. On the other hand, promoting discomfort as a sacrifice for sustainability is unlikely to engage broader environmental practices. 34
Communal bathing makes it easier to disconnect bathing practices from fossil fuels.
Communal bathing could be a third approach, but it’s rarely mentioned. That’s remarkable because, in terms of resource efficiency, it’s hard to beat. Building and operating a bathhouse for 1,000 people requires much less energy than building and operating 1,000 individual bathrooms. A public bathhouse is also more efficient concerning materials, money, and space. 5
Just as importantly, public bathing makes applying the sustainable technologies mentioned above more feasible. That further reduces energy consumption and makes it possible to disconnect bathing practices from fossil fuels. Finally, a public bathhouse can achieve significantly improved sustainability without promoting discomfort. On the contrary, pooling resources to build something for a community rather than for every household separately allows for a high level of sustainable extravagance. That may be an easier sell than cold showers.
Bathing in Rivers, Lakes, and Hot Springs
Nature has provided humans with bathing facilities through streams, rivers, pools, lakes, waterfalls, and rain showers. Humanity spent much time in tropical Africa, where bathing did not require artificially heated water for comfort. When we moved into colder climates, Nature presented us with another solution: hot springs. Many tens of thousands of thermal springs exist around the planet — only a few present-day countries lack them entirely. 67
Bathing in hot springs was common in ancient civilizations all over the world. However, it’s a practice that goes back even further in time. Archeological evidence abundantly shows that many prehistoric settlements established themselves near hot springs. 68 It’s impossible to prove rock solid that people used those waters for bathing, but why wouldn’t they, especially in cold regions? 9
Enjoying a hot bath is a practice that predates recorded history.
Today’s bathing culture relies on fossil fuels, but if we consider the historical context, enjoying a hot bath is not unsustainable. In the case of hot springs, the entire infrastructure and operation — water supply, drainage, and heat source — are already in place.
Our ancestors also invented the steam or sweat bath to take advantage of cold water in all seasons and climates. Rather than heating water, it heats people so they can bathe comfortably in cold water. The earliest steam huts, from prehistoric times, were little more than small log cabins or tent-like structures covered with woolen blankets or hides. 10111213
The Birth of the Bathhouse
Artificial bathing facilities made from brick or stone appeared around 4,000 years ago. 14 They could be an open-air pool, a bathhouse, or a private bathroom. Many bathhouses and bathing pools were built on top of natural hot springs, modifying the natural environment to make it more convenient, safe, and attractive.68 People also began to divert water into urban bathing facilities using canals, pipes, and aqueducts. They started building baths that used artificially heated water as well.
The Ancient Romans are most famously associated with the public bathhouse, although they took much inspiration from the Ancient Greeks. Greek bathhouses comprised rooms with individual hip baths against the walls. Sitting up straight, the bathers threw hot water over themselves or had this done by a servant. In contrast, Roman bathers shared the water in large bathtubs or pools. Both used steam baths as well. 15161718
At the height of the Empire, there were around 1,000 public baths in the city of Rome alone for a population of about 1 million people - one bathhouse per 1,000 people. 819 The most prominent bathhouses were the “thermae,” which could hold up to a few thousand people bathing at the same time. These facilities, which only appeared in the largest cities, were richly decorated with mosaics, marble floors and pools, granite columns, and statues. However, most Ancient Roman bathhouses were smaller neighborhood baths called “balnea.” 15
The Preindustrial Bathhouse
The public bathhouse’s history continues after the Roman Empire’s demise. In the East, the Roman bathhouse evolved into the hammam, which ditched the pools and concentrated more on sweating as a cleaning method.2021 After a sweat bath, people threw water over themselves. Reminiscent of the small Roman baths known as balnea, hammams spread in large numbers in all cities of the Islamic world as they facilitated bodily cleanliness and the accomplishment of body ablutions before praying. 22
In Western Europe, many Roman baths fell into disrepair. However, the public bathhouse returned in full swing during the late Middle Ages, when a new period of urbanization set in. 232425 In the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, a lot of European cities had a public bathhouse per 2,000 to 5,000 citizens.26 Many were steam baths inspired by the hammam. A second type of bathhouse offered wooden bathtubs to seat a small group of people. The medieval bathhouse was known as a “stew,” which refers to the oven that either heated water for the bathtubs or filled the room with steam. 2325
Northern Europe and Russia - never conquered by Roman or Islamic Empires - stuck to sweat and hot air baths. For example, public “banyas” existed in towns throughout Muscovy during the Middle Ages. 12 Asia also developed independent bathing cultures. For instance, in late medieval Japan, people shared private hot baths among families, neighbors, and friends for economic reasons. For these “cooperative baths” of mostly four to ten individuals, every bather brought a portion of firewood to heat the water. That practice evolved into larger public baths - “sento” - which experienced rapid growth from the fifteenth century onwards.2728
Bathing for Pleasure
Nowadays, sustainability advocates who promote shorter or less frequent showers implicitly regard bathing as a strictly utilitarian practice. However, for most of history, bathing was never just about hygiene. Apart from getting clean, people also visited public baths to relax, have fun, and socialize. Rather than a quick affair, the bathing process — no matter its form — often went on for hours. 1528
The Ancient Greeks sat together in individual bathtubs, having conversations, for which the space’s acoustics were optimally suited. 29 In Ancient Rome, public baths were places where people went almost daily to be seen, mingle, relax, gossip, dine, or play sports and study. Bathers accessed beauty treatments such as massages, shaving, hairdressing, and depilating. They celebrated parties and anniversaries and honored foreign guests. 1517192530
Rather than a quick affair, the bathing process — no matter its form — often went on for hours.
The medieval European bathhouse continued these traditions with less splendor but not necessarily with less revelry. In particular, medieval stews with wooden bathtubs were often a place of amusement that also furnished food, drink, music, and various types of bodily care. 23 In Japan, during the 16th century, public baths became places to gather and socialize, with large groups of people eating, drinking, and singing. 2728 River bathing, which continued around cities and in rural areas until the 20th century, was a kind of play in which swimming was a potential element. 31
At the same time, bathing was considered essential to prevent and cure diseases, following the Hippocratic ideas that people could maintain or restore the balance of bodily fluids by exposing the body to cold, hot, moist, or dry circumstances. The layout of preindustrial baths reflected these ideas, featuring pools and spaces of different temperatures. 1521
Communal Luxury
While these elements of pleasure, social interaction, and health continue today in mineral spas, there is a crucial difference with earlier bathing practices. The present-day spa is far too expensive to substitute for a private bathroom. In contrast, the historical public bathhouse was an egalitarian institution.
Roman public baths had no or low entrance fees and were open to everyone. There were no areas reserved for higher-ranking patrons. Combined with the splendid architecture and opulent decoration of the baths, this ensured that even the most humble servant would have a taste of luxury. 151719 These customs continued into the European Middle Ages and were shared by bathing cultures across the world. 23 For example, in Japan, the bathhouse aided in “slowly deconstructing the existing social hierarchy and created a new cultural flow between the elite and the commoners.” 2832
The only separation happened between men and women, and it was far from universal across space and time. They would either go to different bathhouses, occupy different sections, or share the same spaces at different times of the day or the week. 1215171923
The Fuel Use of Roman Bathhouses
How sustainable was that communal luxury? Most research about the energy use of bathhouses concerns Ancient Roman baths. Historians have sometimes faulted the large bathhouses from the Empire for their wastefulness, arguing that their widespread use caused deforestation. 333435 However, in recent years, archeological research, thermal analysis, and heat transfer studies have made it increasingly clear that Ancient Roman bathhouses, in spite of their opulence, were remarkably energy-efficient buildings. 3633
The first reason was the hypocaust system. It consisted of one or more underground furnaces that distributed hot air under the floor and into the hollow walls (some baths had heated ceilings, too). Because of the large radiant surfaces, the spaces in the building could be heated at a lower temperature, saving energy. Although the water for the pools was reheated periodically in an insulated boiler close to the furnace, the heat in the floors and the walls helped to keep it warm for an extended period. 3633
A study of the Stabian Baths, one of the oldest surviving thermae, shows a fuel consumption of between 5 and 8 kg of firewood per hour, depending on the season. 3637 That corresponds to a wood supply of slightly more than 60 ash trees per year, which was unlikely to cause deforestation. 36 Firewood consumption was probably even lower because Roman baths routinely supplemented wood with other locally available fuels, often waste products: reeds, harvest by-products (olive pits, orchard trimmings, chaff), and animal wastes (dung and bones). 33
Many Roman baths were heated almost exclusively by solar energy on sunny days.
Following the same methodology, a study of a later bathing complex - the Forum Baths in Ostia - shows that the Romans continued improving their bathhouses’ energy efficiency. 3839 The Forum Baths were three times larger than the Stabian Baths - 923m2 versus 310m2 of heated spaces - but their calculated annual wood consumption is not even twice as high: roughly 100 trees per year. 3836 The newer bathhouse had thicker walls (two meters instead of one meter), as well as much larger glazed windows, which increased the share of solar radiation. 40 Earlier research has shown that the Forum baths were heated almost exclusively by solar energy on sunny days. 41
The studies above assume that the Romans heated their baths for 24 hours daily and only shut them down for maintenance. Roman bathhouses likely continued to be heated through the night, as it was more practical and energy-efficient. Many baths were open daily, and it could take a whole day to heat them from a cold state. In later centuries, medieval stews and hammams often used the heat or the ashes of the furnace to bake bread and other foods at night. 42 Hammams and medieval stews were less energy-efficient than Roman baths. Hammams had heated floors but no heated walls and few windows, while medieval stews often had none of these.
Roman Bathhouse Versus Private Shower
How does the energy use of the Roman bathhouse compare to that of the modern shower? Academic research does not provide an answer, but a quick calculation shows that the Roman bathing experience, which lasted for hours, was more energy-efficient than the present-day private shower, which lasts, on average, 9 minutes. The daily energy use of the Forum baths corresponds to the daily energy use of 557 showers. 43 While we don’t know how many people visited the Forum Baths daily, they likely surpassed that number: the baths could host up to 500 bathers simultaneously. 44
The Roman bathing experience, which lasted for hours, was more energy-efficient than the present-day private shower, which lasts, on average, 9 minutes.
Furthermore, in the calculation above, the energy use for the shower only concerns water heating, while the fuel use for the public baths also - and mainly - includes space heating. 36 For example, assuming that the water in the pools of the Stabian baths was changed only once per day, heating the water accounted for less than 10% of the total energy use, corresponding to the energy use of only 52 showers. The low energy use for water heating is partly explained by the excellent thermal insulation of the heated floors and walls, meaning that space and water heating cannot be separated. However, it is also because the Romans shared the water in pools, while every shower requires freshly heated water.
The Roman bathhouse also compares favorably to the typical backyard sauna, for which the fuel consumption hovers between 5 and 15kg of firewood per session. 45 Only sixteen such sauna sessions require as much fuel as the Stabian baths used daily. The sauna has no heated floor and walls. Furthermore, historically, it was often built partly underground to save fuel, but nowadays, it’s usually a badly insulated building standing in a cold climate.
The Public Baths of the Industrial Revolution
Bathing practices have changed quite a lot since Roman and late medieval times, particularly in most of the Western world. Few of us will have the time or even the need to linger in a bathhouse for several hours daily, and some of us may feel uncomfortable bathing in public. 30 However, a bathhouse can also take a form more in line with modern bathing habits. The public bathhouse of the Industrial Revolution demonstrates this.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities received large numbers of immigrants who came to work in factories. Most of these people were housed in overcrowded tenement buildings without running water, leading to unsanitary conditions. 46 Recurring epidemics and new medical insights led to a “gospel of cleanliness” that resulted in a new wave of public bathhouses across the Western world. Many of these baths only disappeared between the 1950s and 1980s.
The public hygiene movement began in England and peaked there in the 1840s. By 1896, more than 200 municipalities in Britain were maintaining public baths. The English bathhouse emulated the splendor of Roman baths in its architecture and decoration: it was “large, handsome, and costly.” 46 However, it did not copy the Ancient bathing customs. It now reserved different sections of the bathhouse for different social classes. Furthermore, while the pools still provided social interaction, the bathtubs were now placed in individual compartments. Finally, the modern bathhouse instituted maximum time limits for using the pool and the bathtubs. 464748
The Shower Bathhouse
Germany, the first to follow the British on the continent, also built monumental bathhouses. 49 However, in the 1880s, Berlin physician Oscar Lasser argued that the large baths were too costly to build in the necessary numbers. He proposed the introduction of smaller bathhouses with nothing but showers in individual compartments. Until then, the shower was only attached to a bathtub or used in barracks and prisons, where soldiers and inmates were showered with cold water. 484625
The shower bathhouse became the dominant public bath type in most of Western Europe and also in North America, where the sanitary reform movement took off in the 1890s. 5051 It cleared away the last vestiges of the Ancient bathing culture by ditching the pools and switching to a more practical architecture. For better or worse, the public bathhouse from the Industrial Revolution was the “antithesis of the preindustrial bathhouse.” 47 Although bathers still made use of communal infrastructure, there was no more space for pleasure, social interaction, public nakedness, and social mixing.
For better or worse, the public bathhouse from the Industrial Revolution was the antithesis of the preindustrial bathhouse.
As the higher social classes gradually gained access to their private water supply and bathrooms, the public bath became increasingly associated with poverty. Although shower bathhouses did not have separate sections for different social classes, they were mainly built in low-income neighborhoods, aimed at the poor only. Bathers were led to their shower cubicle by an attendant, who opened the tap, decided on the water temperature, and started a timer. People had at most 20 minutes to undress, shower, and dress again.4647 “The poor had to be clean but not enjoy it too much.” 46
Bring Back the Public Bathhouse?
In Europe and North America, the public bathhouse disappeared once everyone got their private bathroom - although we still bathe together in sports centers and continue using communal bathrooms in hostels or campings. The public bathhouse survives elsewhere but is in decline almost everywhere. For example, Cairo had only eight hammams in 2000, compared to more than seventy at the beginning of the 19th century.5253 In 1968, greater Tokyo boasted 2,687 public bathhouses. In 2022, only 462 were left. 5455
Historically, the bathhouse was born out of the need for efficiency: bathing was too resource-intensive to organize individually. That is no longer the case thanks to the advance of central infrastructures - fossil fuels, electricity, water supply, sewers. However, in the context of the present environmental crisis, the resource efficiency of the public bathhouse has become relevant once again. It’s a solution that could reduce energy use relatively quickly without the need for new technologies or sacrificing comfort. Resilience is another argument for the bathhouse. 56
What Type of Public Bathhouse Do We Want?
The metamorphosis of the public bath in the 19th and 20th centuries, which also affected public baths outside the Western world, presents a challenge to anyone wanting to revive public bathing for sustainability. What type of bathhouse do we want? Of course, the Roman bath and the shower bathhouse are both extremes, and many intermediate forms are imaginable. Nevertheless, any designer of a future bathhouse will have to make decisions that are likely to be controversial.
For example, one could argue that the shower bathhouse not only fits modern bathing practices but also maximizes resource efficiency. That is especially true when the government, rather than the bather, controls shower duration and water temperature. In that way, the public bathhouse could become a technology to enforce frugality upon the whole population. However, to put it mildly, such an approach is unlikely to generate enthusiasm for reviving public bathhouses. Neither does it do much to improve social interaction. 57
Any designer of a future bathhouse will have to make decisions that are likely to be controversial.
Advocating for the return of the preindustrial public bathhouse, which centers around social interaction and communal luxury, may be more successful in luring people away from their private bathrooms, but it also runs into obstacles. The public bathhouse has faced resistance for 2,000 years, mostly because of conflicting views about health and morals. 58 For example, concerns about debauchery and prostitution - real and imagined - run throughout the history of the bathhouse in all cultures. 59 Separating males and females does not fully address those worries.
Any plea for reviving public baths will also have to deal with the fear of contagious disease. For example, a “lockdown” of society, as many governments applied during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021, is incompatible with public bathhouses. Such a measure only works when everybody has a private bathroom. 60 The link between communal bathing and health is complex. Science has confirmed many of the health benefits of cold, hot, and steam baths and has also shown the importance of social interaction. However, bringing people together will always raise health risks, too.
How to Build a Low-tech Bathhouse?
There’s another distinction between bathhouses built before and after the Industrial Revolution: preindustrial baths worked with renewable fuels, while industrial baths ran on fossil fuels. Many modern bathhouses had an on-site coal power plant, which heated the space and the water and provided electricity for lighting. Fossil fuel-powered bathhouses are more energy efficient than fossil fuel-powered private bathrooms, but we can do better than that.
A large bathhouse heated by a hypocaust system and large windows is still hard to beat as a carbon neutral technology, at least based on sustainable wood production. 6162 However, biomass combustion creates air pollution, while we could also power a bathhouse with renewable energy sources that don’t have that problem. The most apparent solution for space and water heating is flat plate solar collectors in which the sun heats water. Heat-generating windmills are a low-tech alternative to solar thermal collectors in less sunny climates. 63 Other potential heat sources are geothermal energy and factory waste heat.
Fossil fuel-powered bathhouses are more energy efficient than fossil fuel-powered private bathrooms, but we can do better than that.
A solar or wind-powered bathhouse’s biggest drawback is its dependency on favorable weather conditions. To compensate for that, solar or wind power can be combined with thermal energy storage, such as insulated water tanks. Storing heat in a thermal mass for longer periods is much cheaper and more sustainable than storing electricity in chemical batteries. However, it requires space that only communal bathing can offer. Steam baths and saunas are more difficult to disconnect from biomass combustion, but some innovative examples exist. 64
Clustering bathing facilities in a shared infrastructure also creates sufficient space for a bathhouse to have extensive heat insulation (a decisive factor in energy consumption) and provide for its water supply (for example, by catching and storing rainwater) as well as wastewater treatment (for example through phytoremediation using plants).
Architects have applied some of these ideas in countries where public baths are still used. For example, in a mountain village in China, a community bathhouse for 5,000 people is largely off-the-grid, pumping up its water from a well, heating it with solar collectors, and filtering the run-off wastewater from the showers and the toilets in basins filled with bamboo plants. 65
However, a public bathhouse also fits the more high-tech vision of a centralized energy infrastructure based on solar PV panels and wind turbines that provide electricity. In such a configuration, public bathhouses could absorb excess electricity during abundantly sunny or windy days. Rather than curtailing the electricity from surplus solar and wind power, we could use it to power electric heat pumps and store the heat in the thermal mass of public baths. 66 While this approach is less resource-efficient than off-grid bathhouses operating without electricity, it still beats a scenario in which a centralized renewable power grid supplies energy to many private bathrooms.
Kris De Decker
Many thanks to Jonas Görgen and Elizabeth Shove for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.
Marie Verdeil and Roel Roscam Abbing contributed to the selection of images.
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The spread of water supply and sewer networks took a lot of time, especially in older European cities. Before 1900, only the most expensive Paris flats had a bathroom. 26 Plumbed-in private baths appeared in the wealthiest British households in the 1860s. Still, it was not until the 1950s that working-class homes were routinely supplied with hot and cold running water. 3 In the newer cities of the USA, installing a water supply and sewer infrastructure was easier. From the 1870s, American plumbing outstripped that of every other country. More than half of all American houses had a complete bathroom in 1940. For comparison, in the whole of France, only one house or apartment in ten had a shower or bath in 1954. 20 ↩︎
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Mist Showers: Sustainable Decadence?, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, 2019. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/10/mist-showers-sustainable-decadence/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Pickerill, Jenny. “Cold comfort? Reconceiving the practices of bathing in British self-build eco-homes.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105.5 (2015): 1061-1077. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00045608.2015.1060880 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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The trend is towards more and longer showers 2 and more, larger and more luxurious private bathrooms. For example, more than one-third of new single-family homes in the US had three or more bathrooms in 2021, compared to “only” a quarter in 2005. Source: Number of Bathrooms in New Homes in 2021, Jesse Wade, National Association Of Home Builders, November 2022. https://eyeonhousing.org/2022/11/number-of-bathrooms-in-new-homes-in-2021/ ↩︎
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How much water public bathing can save depends on how exactly people bathe together. Shared pools and bathtubs bring water savings, but individual showers and bathtubs do not, even if placed in a communal space. ↩︎
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Erfurt, Patricia. “Hot springs throughout history. The Geoheritage of hot springs.” Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021. 119-182. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Tamburello, Giancarlo, et al. “Global thermal spring distribution and relationship to endogenous and exogenous factors.” Nature Communications 13.1 (2022): 6378. ↩︎
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Cataldi, Raffaele, Susan F. Hodgson, and John W. Lund. Stories from a heated earth: our geothermal heritage. No. 19. Nicholson, 1999. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Even some animals - like snow monkeys and capybaras - are known to enjoy bathing in hot springs. See, for example: Matsuzawa, Tetsuro. “Hot-spring bathing of wild monkeys in Shiga-Heights: origin and propagation of a cultural behavior.” Primates 59.3 (2018): 209-213. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10329-018-0661-z.pdf. ↩︎
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Sonntag, C. F. “The History of Baths and Bathing in Britain before the Norman Conquest.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 13.sect_hist_med (1920): 25-46. ↩︎ ↩︎
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Aaland, Mikkel. “Sweat: The illustrated history and description of the Finnish sauna, Russian bania, Islamic hammam, Japanese mushi-buro, Mexican temescal and American Indian & Eskimo sweat lodge.” (1978). ↩︎
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Pollock, Ethan. Without the banya we would perish: a history of the Russian bathhouse. Oxford University Press, USA, 2019. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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The first written reference to the steam bath dates back to the fifth century BC, when Greek historian Herodotus compared the Scythian sweat bath north of the Black sea to the Greek steam bath of his time. However, it’s very likely that its origins go back to prehistoric times. Not surprisingly, the steam bath and the hot air bath initially spread in regions with cold and long winters: northwestern Europe, Russia, Alaska, and Canada. It was also used by Native Americans, and spread to Central and South America as well. 10 ↩︎
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One of the earliest archeological records of human-made bathing facilities dates back to around 2300 BC in what is now Pakistan. The inhabitants of Mohenjo-daro, the probable capital of the Indus civilization, built wells and drainage systems allowing for private bathrooms in most residential buildings, as well as a large, communal bathing pool. The private bathrooms had a 1m2 shallow platform, where people threw buckets of water over themselves. The “Great Bath” was a brick basin with steps on either side and a capacity for 160 m3 of water. As the city was located in a hot desert climate, there was no need for heating the water. Sources: Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK, 2021 + Jansen, Michael. “Mohenjo-Daro, Indus Valley civilization: water supply and water use in one of the largest Bronze Age cities of the third millennium BC.” Geo: A new world of knowledge (2011). https://openarchive.icomos.org/id/eprint/1541/1/110601geo_06_2011_indian_edition_email.pdf ↩︎
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Maréchal, Sadi. Public baths and bathing habits in Late Antiquity: a study of the archaeological and historical evidence from Roman Italy, North Africa and Palestine between AD 285 and AD 700. Diss. Ghent University, 2016. https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/7235534/file/7235545.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Fagan, Garrett G. “The genesis of the Roman public bath: recent approaches and future directions.” American Journal of Archaeology 105.3 (2001): 403-426. ↩︎
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Kosso, Cynthia, and Anne Scott, eds. The nature and function of water, baths, bathing, and hygiene from antiquity through the Renaissance. Vol. 11. Brill, 2009. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Both the Greeks and the Romans also used cold baths in combination with sports facilities. Here, the act of washing was secondary. 1519 ↩︎
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Hoagland, Alison K. The bathroom: a social history of cleanliness and the body. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Ashenburg, Katherine. The dirt on clean: An unsanitized history. Vintage Canada, 2010. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Fournier, Caroline. Les bains d’al-Andalus: VIIIe-XVe siècle. Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018. https://books.openedition.org/pur/44617#anchor-resume ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Sibley, Magda, Camilla Pezzica, and Chris Tweed. “Eco-hammam: the complexity of accelerating the ecological transition of a key social heritage sector in Morocco.” Sustainability 13.17 (2021): 9935 ↩︎
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Coomans, Janna. “Janna Coomans - The Medieval Bathhouse (MA Thesis - 2013).” The Medieval Bathhouse: Bathing Culture in the Late Medieval Low Countries (2013): n. pag. Print. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Wurtzel, Ellen. “Passionate Encounters, Public Healing: Medieval Urban Bathhouses in Northern France.” French Historical Studies 46.3 (2023): 331-360. https://read.dukeupress.edu/french-historical-studies/article/46/3/331/381254/Passionate-Encounters-Public-HealingMedieval-Urban ↩︎ ↩︎
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Büchner, Robert. Im städtischen Bad vor 500 Jahren: Badhaus, bader und Badegäste im alten Tirol. Böhlau, 2014. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Thirteenth century Paris, with 200,000 inhabitants, counted around 30 public bathhouses 2324, while 14th century London, with a population of 80,000, had at least 18 public baths. 20 In the late 14th century Low Countries, Bruges (30,000 inhabitants) and Ghent (40,000 inhabitants) each had around twenty public baths, while smaller cities like Maastricht and Leuven (15,000 inhabitants) had around five. Vienna (Austria) counted 29 bathhouses in the fifteenth century. 23 Medieval bathhouses, like hammams, were smaller than Roman baths. Medieval stews found in Germany and the Low Countries had a ground surface of between 100 and 200 square meters. 23 The typical roman city bath had a surface of about 500 m2. 15 ↩︎ ↩︎
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Butler, Lee. “Washing Off the Dust”: Baths and Bathing in Late Medieval Japan." Monumenta Nipponica 60.1 (2005): 1-41. https://web.archive.org/web/20190818120651id_/http://muse.jhu.edu:80/article/182356/pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
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Merry, Adam M., “More Than a Bath: An Examination of Japanese Bathing Culture” (2013). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 665. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/665 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Gill, A. A. ““Chattering” in the Baths: The Urban Greek Bathing Establishment and Social Discourse in Classical Antiquity.” (2011). https://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/61481/CD27_Gill_CAA2008.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y ↩︎
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Górnicka, Barbara. Nakedness, shame, and embarrassment: A long-term sociological perspective. Vol. 12. Springer, 2016. ↩︎ ↩︎
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A Cultural History of Parson’s Pleasure, George Townsend, PhD, Birkbeck, University of London, 2022, unpublished. See also: Dive in! A history of river swimming in Oxford. Museum of Oxford, expo 2023. https://moxdigiexhibits.omeka.net/exhibits/show/dive-in#:~:text=Dive%20In!-,A%20history%20of%20river%20swimming%20in%20Oxford,places%20for%20bathing%20and%20swimming. ↩︎
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The egalitarian nature of the public bath was reinforced by the fact that people were partly or completely naked. “One stripped not only of their clothes but also of their social rank and material wealth, which become largely invisible”, concludes a historian of the Japanese public bath. 28 “The true collective is a naked collective”, observes another, referring to the Russian banya. Source: Gearsimova, A. “My Banya, Your Banya: From Reality to Myth.” (2016). ↩︎
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Mietz, Michael. “The fuel economy of public bathhouses in the Roman Empire.” Master’s thesis, Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Campus Boekentoren, Blandijnberg 2 (2016): 9000. https://libstore.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/303/996/RUG01-002303996_2016_0001_AC.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Wilson, A (2012) Raw materials and energy, in “The cambridge companion to the roman economy, scheidel 2012. ↩︎
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Ancient deforestation revisited, Journal of the history of biology, 44 (1), 43-57. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/J-Donald-Hughes/publication/45407393_Ancient_Deforestation_Revisited/links/08ce17d911d2244431641d70/Ancient-Deforestation-Revisited.pdf ↩︎
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Miliaresis, Ismini. “Heating the Stabian Baths at Pompeii.” Curious (2021): 83. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/58973/1/external_content.pdf#page=91 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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The study assumes that the baths were heated for 24 hours per day and only shut down for maintenance. The fuel used for heating up the bath initially (calculated at 35 kg in the case of the Stabian Baths) is added only once to the total yearly energy use. The results are also based on the assumption that the water of the baths was changed once per day (and thus had to be heated from a cold state once per day). ↩︎
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Veal, Robyn, and Victoria Leitch. Fuel and Fire in the Ancient Roman World: Towards an integrated economic understanding. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c349fc20-11d0-4ad4-a2e9-55dccca9f2df/download ↩︎ ↩︎
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Miliaresis, Ismini Alexandra. Heating and Fuel Consumption in the Terme del Foro at Ostia. Diss. University of Virginia, 2013. https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/5d86p0445 ↩︎
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Whether or not the (small) windows in the Stabian baths had glass or shutters is not entirely clear. The study concludes that energy use is pretty similar with both glazed and unglazed windows. However, the Forum baths, with windows several meters high, would have required almost 1.5 times more wood to heat rooms with unglazed windows during the month of May, and more than twice as much in the coldest month. ↩︎
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Ring, James W. “Windows, baths, and solar energy in the Roman empire.” American Journal of Archaeology 100.4 (1996): 717-724. ↩︎
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This may have been true for Roman bathhouses as well, but I could not find any reference to it. For hammamns, see, for example: Sibley, Magda, and Martin Sibley. “Hybrid transitions: combining biomass and solar energy for water heating in public bathhouses.” Energy Procedia 83 (2015): 525-532. ↩︎ ↩︎
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A fuel use of 7.5 to 12 kg/hr averages at 9.75 kg/hr, which corresponds to 234 kg firewood per day. One kg of wood contains roughly 5 kWh of thermal energy, which brings the daily fuel use of the Forum baths to 1,170 kWh. A shower of 8.9 minutes (the average in the netherlands) takes 2.1 kWh of thermal energy. 2 Conclusion: the daily energy use of the Forum Baths equals that of 557 showers. The daily fuel use of the smaller and less energy efficient Stabian baths corresponds to the energy use of 378 showers. ↩︎
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Brünenberg–Jens-Arne, Monika Trümper–Clemens, et al. “Stabian Baths in Pompeii. New Research on the Development of Ancient Bathing Culture.” (2019). https://www.academia.edu/download/67567783/Truemper_et_al._Stabian_Baths_RM_2019.pdf ↩︎
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The energy use of a sauna is more variable than the energy use of a shower, and I could not find any reliable academic research. The data I use are a rough estimation based on numbers that I found on internet forums and websites. Also note that climate explains part of the difference in energy efficiency: the sauna is often located in a cold climate, while most Roman baths stood around the Mediterranean. ↩︎
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Williams, Marilyn T. Washing” the great unwashed": public baths in urban America, 1840-1920. Ohio State University Press, 1991. https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/6282/1/Washing_the_Great_Unwashed.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Dillon, Jennifer Reed. Modernity, sanitation and the public bath: Berlin, 1896–1933, as archetype. Duke University, 2007. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/bitstreams/33e2fe84-16ec-4044-91d6-75d5c87d37e3/download ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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Ladd, Brian K. “Public baths and civic improvement in nineteenth-century German cities.” Journal of urban history 14.3 (1988): 372-393. ↩︎ ↩︎
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The Stuttgart Bathhouse, for example, had two large pools, 300 dressing rooms, 102 bath tubs, two Russian-Roman baths, two cold water baths, a sun bath, and a bath for dogs. By the end of the century, almost every German city had erected at least one monumental bathhouse, which often included a restaurant and barber shop as well. 2546 ↩︎
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New York City built 25 monumental bathhouses, and Boston included swimming pools and gymnasiums. However, other American cities exclusively built shower bathhouses for the poor classes. For example, by 1920, Chicago had erected more than twenty shower bathhouses throughout the poor and working class districts. 46 ↩︎
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Germany and Austria built shower bathhouses in poor neighbourhoods but also continued to build elaborate and expensive facilities for the higher social classes, many of them having a water supply but still lacking bathrooms. 46 ↩︎
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Talmisānī, Mayy, and Eve Gandossi. The last hammams of Cairo: a disappearing bathhouse culture. American Univ in Cairo Press, 2009. ↩︎
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Damascus went down from 40 hammams in the 1940s to 13 in 2004. Source: Sibley, Magda. “The Historic hammāms of Damascus and Fez: lessons of sustainability and future developments.” The 23rd conference on passive and low energy architecture (PLEA). 2006. https://www.academia.edu/download/52232181/The_Historic_Hammms_of_Damascus_and_Fez_20170321-32624-5s2lbk.pdf Morocco is an exception. Various sources present different numbers for operating hammams which vary between 6,000 and 10,000 hammams that still operate using the traditional heating system. 42 ↩︎
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“Tokyo starts effort to revive public bathhouses”, Julian Ryall Tokyo, October 1, 2022. https://www.dw.com/en/japan-launches-campaign-to-revive-fading-public-bathhouses/a-63282747#:~:text=In%20an%20effort%20to%20protect,pop%20into%20their%20local%20bathhouse. ↩︎
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“Public baths fade from Tokyo, with nearly half gone over 15 years”, Natsumi Nakai, October 10, 2023. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15025294#:~:text=Public%20bathhouses%20are%20swiftly%20disappearing,to%20the%20Tokyo%20metropolitan%20government. ↩︎
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“Fuel Crisis Forces Syrians to Use Public Baths”, Sputnik International, 2023. https://sputnikglobe.com/20230131/fuel-crisis-forces-syrians-to-use-public-baths-1106687250.html See also: “Aleppo bathhouse boom as Syria crisis turns showers cold”, Africanews, 2021. https://www.africanews.com/2021/12/30/aleppo-bathhouse-boom-as-syria-crisis-turns-showers-cold/ ↩︎
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“Why we need to bring back the art of communal bathing”. Jamie Mackay, Aeon Magazine, 2016. https://aeon.co/ideas/why-we-need-to-bring-back-the-art-of-communal-bathing ↩︎
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This is especially true in Western Europe, where opposition grew so strong that the bathhouse eventually disappeared in some regions between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. 23 The reasons for the temporal demise of bathing in Western Europe - a unique event in world history - are controversial among historians. Some point to the pressure of the Catholic and Protestant church, who increasingly perceived the medieval stews as places of immorality and sin. 59 Others see the cause in epidemics, or point to changing medical views - doctors no longer considered hot water and steam healthy. 23 Opposition started even before organized religion appeared. Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca was critical of the larger Roman baths and wrote several rants against them. He complained about the noise in the thermae, and accused them of extravagance and hedonism. See, for example: Moral letters to Lucilius by Seneca. Letter 86. On Scipio’s villa. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_86 ↩︎
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In Ancient Rome, some bathhouses allowed mixed bathing, while others separated male and female bathers. Prostitution was legal, but the fact that a man’s wife had bathed with other men was a legitimate reason for divorce. 15 In Muslim Spain, substantial fines were assessed to men who either slipped into the bathhouse on days assigned to women, or who were caught spying through the windows of the structure. Women risked their legal rights if they did the same. Abusing a woman in a bathhouse, even verbally, carried the death penalty. See: Powers, James F. “Frontier municipal baths and social interaction in thirteenth-century Spain.” The American Historical Review 84.3 (1979): 649.667. In the Low Countries during the middle ages, authorities distinguished “honest” from “dishonest” stews. To maintain the quality of the “honest” bathhouses, they abolished, mixed bathing, set rules for bathmaids, and made prostitution in the bathhouse illegal. 23 ↩︎ ↩︎
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There’s no doubt that public bathhouses were a vector in historical epidemics. Medical tracts even advised against visiting the bathhouse. However, almost all baths remained open, very likely because they were seen as a service too essential to withdraw. At least, that was the case in the medieval Low Countries and in the Roman Empire, see: 2321 ↩︎
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How to make biomass energy sustainable again? Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, September 2020. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/09/how-to-make-biomass-energy-sustainable-again/ ↩︎
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Moreover, the hypocaust was further improved in the middle ages, meaning that it could be made even more energy efficient than in Roman times. See: Heat storage hypocausts: air heating in the middle ages, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, March 2017. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/03/heat-storage-hypocausts-air-heating-in-the-middle-ages/ ↩︎
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Heat your house with a mechanical windmill, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, February 2019. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/02/heat-your-house-with-a-mechanical-windmill/ ↩︎
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For example, researchers at the University of Stuttgart have devised a hybrid storage system consisting of a pressurized water and steam tank that serves as a storage for solar energy. The steam can be released in a sauna anytime, while the water serves to heat the space. See: Schaefer, M., et al. “Development of a zero-energy-sauna: Simulation study of thermal energy storage.” Energy and Buildings 256 (2022): 111659. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778821009439. A very low-tech example is “Solauna”, which works with solar heat alone, basically by building a very large and well-insulated solar box cooker. See: https://www.biopiscinas.pt/en/solar-sauna/. “Lytefire” creates heat and steam by sunlight from mirrors concentrated on a metal plate or a bag of stones. See: https://lytefiresauna.com/en. ↩︎
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See: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/bao-split-bathhouse/. Another example is a bathhouse in Eastern Iran, built in 2004, which runs on two solar collector fields (195 m2 total) and two thermally insulated storage tanks (3m3 each). The facility supplies hot water for twelve showers and four baths, serving the hot water demands of 150 people per day. Source: Azad, E. “Design, installation and operation of a solar thermal public bath in eastern iran.” Energy for Sustainable Development 16.1 (2012): 68-73. Researchers are also investigating the combined use of biomass furnaces and solar thermal collectors for hammams in Morocco. See: Krarouch, M., et al. “Simulation of floor heating in a combined solar-biomass system integrated in a public bathhouse located in Marrakech.” IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering. Vol. 353. No. 1. IOP Publishing, 2018. See also: Mohamed, Krarouch, and Haller Michel. “Design optimisation of a combined pellets and solar heating systems for water heating in a public bathhouse.” Energy Reports 6 (2020): 1628-1635. See also: Sibley, Magda, Camilla Pezzica, and Chris Tweed. “Eco-hammam: the complexity of accelerating the ecological transition of a key social heritage sector in Morocco.” Sustainability 13.17 (2021): 9935. See also: Zbaidi, Mourad, et al. “Improving the Energy Efficiency of a Traditional Hammam by Using Two Types of Heat Exchanger.” International Journal on Engineering Applications 11.6 (2023). ↩︎
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How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone, Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine, September 2017. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-not-to-run-a-modern-society-on-solar-and-wind-power-alone/ See also: Battery Killers: Grid-Interactive Water Heaters, Kris De Decker, No Tech Magazine, May 2015. https://www.notechmagazine.com/2015/05/battery-killers-grid-interactive-water-heaters.html ↩︎
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/09/communal-luxury-the-public-bathhouse/