News gathered 2024-10-08
(date: 2024-10-08 06:51:37)
US lawmakers dig into FCC’s $900M Starlink snub in wake of Hurricane Helene
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Nearly a billion dollars in rural broadband subsidies wouldn’t go amiss
The Chairman of the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer, is investigating the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to revoke an award of almost $900 million in rural broadband subsidies to Elon Musk’s Starlink.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/fcc_starlink_subsidies_probe/
Offline dating, friendship meetups trending in US
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
While online dating apps are as popular as ever, some singles prefer meeting in person. Karina Bafradzhian has a look at some services that offer face-to-face meetups for people who are looking for friends as often as dates. Camera: Sergii Dogotar
https://www.voanews.com/a/offline-dating-friendship-meetups-trending-in-us/7814565.html
Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren’t going to ‘hit climate goals anyway’
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Perhaps the power-draining tech is the solution after all, posits former Google CEO
Google’s former chief Eric Schmidt thinks we shouldn’t let AI’s ballooning power consumption worry us, because putting AI to work on climate change issues will be our best shot at solving them.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/eric_schmidt_speech/
Shortwave Radio: A Unique Collection from the Cold War Era
date: 2024-10-08, from: Internet Archive Blog
It was the mid-1980s, Chuck Vesei developed a fascination with shortwave radio. He used his portable radio to tune into shortwave broadcasts from around the globe. Because shortwave signals can travel […]
https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/08/shortwave-collection/
Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Stability? Predictability? Reliability? Where’s the fun in that?
EuroBSDcon 2024 One of Stefano Marinelli’s NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_to_bsd/
Forecasters Are Horrified By Hurricane Milton
date: 2024-10-08, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: What remains of former Hurricane Kirk could bring heavy rain and dangerous winds to Europe • Wildfires in Bolivia have scorched nearly 19 million football fields worth of land this year • It is 55 degrees Fahrenheit and rainy today at the Alpe du Grand Serre, an 85-year-old Alpine ski resort in France that announced it will close for good due to a lack of snow.
THE TOP FIVE
- Hurricane Milton’s rapid intensification shocks forecasters
Hurricane Milton has horrified meteorologists with its swift transformation into a monster system, exploding from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm in about 18 hours. As of this morning it has maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center, and is expected to make landfall near Tampa, Florida, overnight on Wednesday. Milton will likely weaken slightly as it approaches the Sunshine State but will nonetheless bring life-threatening wind, rain, and storm surge to an area still in tatters from last month’s Hurricane Helene. “If Milton stays on its course this will be the most powerful hurricane to hit Tampa Bay in over 100 years,” the Tampa Bay National Weather Service said. “No one in the area has ever experienced a hurricane this strong before.”
NHC/NOAA
Veteran Florida meteorologist John Morales broke down in tears reporting on Milton’s remarkable drop in air pressure – generally the lower a storm’s pressure, the greater its strength. “This is just horrific,” Morales said. “The seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot. You know what’s driving that. I don’t need to tell you: Global warming.”
- Onslaught of weather disasters tests FEMA
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is under strain from back-to-back extreme weather events, including Hurricane Helene and looming Hurricane Milton. Last week Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that FEMA “does not have the funds” to get through the rest of hurricane season. The agency’s former administrator, Craig Fugate, told Bloomberg the damage from Milton could be more costly than Helene’s. Staff shortages are compounding funding shortfalls, with just 9% of FEMA workers available to respond to disasters as of Monday, as personnel struggle to address a number of recent disasters in other parts of the country. “The agency is simultaneously supporting over 100 major disaster declarations,” Brock Long, who led FEMA during the Trump administration, said. “The scale of staffing required for these operations is immense.”
- Kerry joins Steyer’s green investing firm
John Kerry has joined billionaire Tom Steyer’s sustainable investing firm, Galvanize Climate Solutions, as co-executive chair alongside Steyer and Katie Hall. The former secretary of state and top U.S. climate diplomat “will focus on expanding the resources and reach of Galvanize’s investment strategies, originating differentiated opportunities, and leveraging firsthand knowledge as to how technology, policy, and geopolitics are shaping the energy transition,” the firm said in a statement. Steyer and Hall launched Galvanize in 2021. It manages around $1 billion and focuses on “generating long-term value from the energy transition.” Kerry said Galvanize would play a key role in the energy transition by “bringing competitive, commercially viable solutions to market.”
- Lithios raises $12 million to unlock new sources of lithium
Lithios, a Massachusetts-based startup with a novel method of lithium extraction, just raised a $12 million seed round. Energy market analysts predict that the world is hurtling towards a global lithium shortage by the 2030s, but Lithios is aiming to help unlock previously untapped lithium sources around the world, specifically salty groundwater deposits, a.k.a. brines. The company’s CEO, Mo Alkhadra, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that while about two-thirds of the world’s lithium is contained in brine rather than hard rock, only about 15% to 20% of these brines are currently worth mining. Lithios, he said, will get that number up to around 80% to 85%, in theory. The funding is led by Clean Energy Ventures with support from Lowercarbon Capital, among others. The round included $10 million in venture funding and $2 million in venture debt loans from Silicon Valley Bank.
- White House eyes more decomissioned nuclear plants for revival
The Biden administration wants to restart more nuclear power plants that have been decommissioned in an effort to provide zero-emission electricity to meet soaring demand, according to White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi. Two revivals are already in progress: The Department of Energy finalized over $2.8 billion in loans and grants to help restart the Palisades plant in Michigan, and tech giant Microsoft made a deal with energy company Constellation to revive Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Zaidi said he could think of at least two other plants that could be brought back online, but didn’t get specific.
THE KICKER
“Governments come and go and they may change things, but the energy transition has passed the inflection point.” –Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of solar-module maker Heliene, which this week announced a strategic equity investment of up to $54 million that will support its new manufacturing operation in Minnesota.
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-milton-forecaster-cry-morales
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Daring Fireball: 30 Years of Dave Winer's Seminal Blog, Scripting News.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/10/07/scripting-news-30-years
Ready to Believe a Conman
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/10/08/ready-to-believe-a-conman/
Florida, flood insurance and yet another hurricane
date: 2024-10-08, from: Marketplace Morning Report
As Hurricane Milton barrels toward the Tampa Bay region, home to some 3 million people, residents there are still recovering from Hurricane Helene. Helene caused billions of dollars in damage. Yet nearly every homeowner who may be affected lacks adequate flood insurance. Plus, our TVs may also be watching us. And we’re coming up on one year since Microsoft finalized the largest video game deal ever: $68 billion for Activision Blizzard.
Prime Big Deals Day mobile tech deals (Oct 8 – Oct 9, 2024)
date: 2024-10-08, from: Liliputing
Amazon’s Prime Big Deals Days sale runs from October 8 through October 9 this year, with deep discounts on thousands of products. The only catch is that you need an Amazon Prime membership to score kat deals, but you can always sign up for a free trial membership and cancel after you’re done shopping. While […]
The post Prime Big Deals Day mobile tech deals (Oct 8 – Oct 9, 2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/prime-big-deals-day-mobile-tech-deals-oct-8-oct-9-2024/
Vanishing Culture: Keeping the Receipts
date: 2024-10-08, from: Internet Archive Blog
The following guest post from editor and journalist Maria Bustillos is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. On August 13, 1961, […]
https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/08/vanishing-culture-keeping-the-receipts/
Four things I learned from coaching that made me a better leader
date: 2024-10-08, from: Accidentally in Code
About two and a half years ago, I finally completed CTI’s coach training courses – about 18 months after I started them, and much longer thinking “I think this would be useful and one day I will take it”. I find some people conceive of coaching as being a professional advice giver, or asking questions, […]
https://cate.blog/2024/10/08/four-things-i-learned-from-coaching-that-made-me-a-better-leader/
China is oversupplying lithium to eliminate rivals, US official says
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
LISBON — Chinese lithium producers are flooding the global market with the critical metal and causing a “predatory” price drop as they seek to eliminate competing projects, a senior U.S. official said on a visit to Portugal that has ample lithium reserves.
Jose Fernandez, undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the U.S. Department of State, told a briefing late on Monday that China was producing much more lithium “than the world needs today, by far.”
“That is an intentional response by the People’s Republic of China to what we are trying to do” with the Inflation Reduction Act - the largest climate and energy investment package in U.S. history valued at over $400 billion, Fernandez said.
“They engage in predatory pricing… [they] lower the price until competition disappears,’’ Fernandez said. ’’That is what is happening.”
China accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s lithium chemical output, which is mainly used in battery technologies including for electric cars. Prices of lithium have fallen more than 80% in the past year largely due to overproduction from China and a drop in demand for electric vehicles.
However, the price collapse is also affecting China as it has forced Chinese companies like battery giant CATL to suspend production at certain mines.
Job cuts
Europe aims to reduce its dependence on imports from China and other countries of lithium and other materials essential to the green transition.
Fernandez said the low price “constrains our ability to diversify our supply chains on a broad, global scale” and also hurts countries such as Portugal that need investment to develop these industries.
Falling prices have forced many global lithium producers to scale back production and cut jobs.
Portugal, with some 60,000 tons of known reserves, is already Europe’s biggest producer of lithium, traditionally mined for ceramics.
Along with neighboring Spain, the country wants to take advantage of local lithium deposits, aiming to cover the entire value chain from mining and refining to cell and battery manufacturing to battery recycling.
Several mining companies in Portugal have been looking for financing, customers and suppliers to crank up projects.
“We want to help them, and we think we can… lithium mining companies, everywhere, have to survive this difficult phase that was created by predatory pricing,” Fernandez said.
China’s Premier Li Qiang in June used his address at a World Economic Forum meeting in Dalian to hit back at accusations from the United States and E.U. that Chinese firms benefit from unfair subsidies and are poised to flood their markets with cheap green technologies.
Trade tensions intensified last Friday when the European Union said it would press ahead with hefty tariffs on China-made electric vehicles to counter what it sees as unfair Chinese subsidies, after a year-long anti-subsidy investigation. China on Tuesday imposed temporary anti-dumping measures on imports of brandy from the E.U.
AI-driven e-commerce fraud is surging, but you can fight back with more AI
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Juniper Research argues the only way to beat them is to join them
E-commerce fraud is expected to surge in the next five years thanks to AI, and merchants are advised to respond with … AI.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/ecommerce_fraud_ai/
China retaliates against EU’s electric vehicle tariffs
date: 2024-10-08, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Days after the European Union voted in favor of steep import taxes on electric vehicles from China, Beijing has now hit back with tariffs on brandy imports. Other EU products could also face extra charges. Then, Uber’s CEO reflects on the benefits of low-cost EVs from China. And later: A major copper mine in Panama remains closed, hampering the country’s economy.
Lithios Raises $12 Million to Unlock New Sources of Lithium
date: 2024-10-08, from: Heatmap News
With the markets for electric vehicles and battery energy storage systems on the come-up, energy market analysts predict that the world is hurtling towards a global lithium shortage by the 2030’s. Lithios, a Massachusetts-based startup with a novel method of lithium extraction, is aiming to help by unlocking previously untapped lithium resources around the world.
The company just raised a $12 million seed round to help fund this mission, led by Clean Energy Ventures with support from Lowercarbon Capital, among others. The round included $10 million in venture funding and $2 million in venture debt loans from Silicon Valley Bank.
It’s not as if the world actually lacks for lithium, the energy dense mineral that is the primary component in lithium-ion batteries. It’s just that many current reserves are too low-grade to be economically exploited, and traditional extraction methods are land-intensive, inefficient, and often controversial with local communities. Chile, Australia, and China dominate the market, while the U.S. contributes less than 2% of the world’s annual supply.
Lithios aims to make it more economical and environmentally friendly to extract lithium from salty groundwater deposits, a.k.a. brines. The company’s CEO, Mo Alkhadra, told me that while about two-thirds of the world’s lithium is contained in brine rather than hard rock, only about 15% to 20% of these brines are currently worth mining. Lithios, he said, will get that number up to around 80% to 85%, in theory. “The vision with Lithios’ tech is to enable access to these lower-grade resources at a similar or maybe slightly higher cost structure relative to the highest grade deposits that are mined today,” Alkhadra explained.
The normal lithium brine extraction process involves pumping saline water from underground reservoirs to the surface, where it’s then moved through a series of large, wildly colored evaporation ponds, often located in the middle of vast salt deserts. Over a period of about 18 months, the sun slowly evaporates the brine, leaving behind increasingly high concentrations of lithium. But Lithios’ tech avoids these ponds altogether. Instead, the brine is pumped to the surface and delivered directly to the company’s refrigerator-sized electrochemical reactors, which contain stacks of electrodes that capture the lithium.
While the company wouldn’t disclose the electrodes’ exact chemistry, Alkhadra told me they are made from “inorganic compounds which have geometries that fit basically only lithium and none of the other larger ions that you would find in these brine mixtures.” After lithium is extracted, the company produces a purified lithium concentrate and sends that off for refining into battery chemicals. The final batteries could end up in EVs, energy storage systems, or even just plain old portable consumer electronics.
Lithios’ tech comes at a good time, as the Inflation Reduction Act’s domestic content requirements for EVs incentivizes manufacturers to source critical minerals from the U.S. and countries that the U.S. has free trade agreements with. Alkhadra told me that Lithios could open up opportunities for brine mining in the Smackover formation, which spans a number of southern states including Texas and Arkansas, the Salton Sea area, which has been dubbed “Lithium Valley,” as well as deposits in Utah and Nevada. More areas in Canada and Europe could also be in play. (The company said it couldn’t talk yet about any specific partnership agreements.)
While there are a number of other companies such as Lilac Solutions and EnergyX that are also pursuing more efficient and less land-intensive brine-based extraction methods, they rely on a different, purely chemical process known as direct lithium extraction, which uses technology adapted from the water treatment industry. “The core thesis around what we’re building at Lithios stems from that work,” Alkhadra told me, explaining that electrifying these chemical processes makes them “much more selective, energy efficient, and water efficient” — resulting in “modest to significant cost reduction.”
Lithios’ new funding will help the company scale its research and development efforts as well as build out a pilot facility in Medford, Massachusetts, with initial production to begin in the first quarter of next year. At first, output will be limited to just “several battery packs” per year, Alkhadra told me, scaling up to commercial production “in the coming years.”
Alkhadra is excited to see investors and the federal government alike beginning to express interest in the upstream, “dirtier” portions of the battery supply chain, which he told me have generally been overlooked in favor of downstream sectors such as battery manufacturing and cell production. “I think the U.S. departments of both energy and defense, and investors too, are coming to realize that the real bottlenecks in battery manufacturing and EV production are on the resource side.”
https://heatmap.news/technology/lithios-12-million-seed-round
Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Linux contributors told to sort out their grammar lest they be actively corrected
Picture this. A developer submits a patch to improve the kernel’s performance, only to be met with the scornful gaze of Linux chieftain Linus Torvalds, who declares: “Ah, but your participle is dangling! How do you expect the kernel to thrive under such conditions?”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/torvalds_grammar_complaint/
The State of Security in 2024
date: 2024-10-08, from: O’Reilly Radar
In August 2024, we asked our customers to tell us about security: their role in security, their certifications, their concerns, and what their companies are doing to address those concerns. We had 1,322 complete responses, of which 419 (32%—roughly one-third) are members of a security team. 903 respondents aren’t on a security team, although 19% […]
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-state-of-security-in-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
It’s not anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth.
http://scripting.com/2024/10/07.html
Workday beats Oracle and Microsoft in UK ‘Matrix’ ERP deal
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The SaaS-only provider and Cognizant snag £144.3M in gov software shake-up
A cluster of government departments has opted for Workday HR and finance software, as Oracle and Microsoft make up the vendors losing out to the SaaS-only provider.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/workday_uk_treasury_oracle/
Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
How do you indent yours?
Veteran Microsoft engineer Larry Osterman is the latest to throw his hat into the “tabs versus spaces” ring.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/microsoft_engineer_tabs_spaces/
A year after taking on Intel’s NUC mini-PCs, Asus says it’s ready to improve them
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
AI is showing the way to new possibilities after a tricky first year
A year after winning the rights to build machines based on Intel’s Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini-PC spec, Taiwan’s Asus claims it has stabilized the product line and the team that makes it – and is poised to innovate.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/asus_nuc_year_one/
MASTER PLAN, Ep 9: Going Big
date: 2024-10-08, from: The Lever News
Indiana attorney James Bopp wrote the case allowing dark money in politics specifically with the court’s “swing vote” in mind.
https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-ep-9-going-big/
Happy birthday, Putin – you’ve been pwned
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Pro-Ukraine hackers claim credit for Russian state broadcasting shutdown
Ukrainian hackers shut down Russian state news agency VGTRK’s online broadcasting and streaming services on Monday – president Vladimir Putin’s 72nd birthday – as Kremlin officials vowed to bring those responsible for the “unprecedented” cyber attack to justice.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/russia_state_news_shutdown/
Milton could strike Florida Wednesday
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — Florida’s Gulf Coast braced Tuesday for the impact of Hurricane Milton’s near-record winds and expected massive storm surge, which could bring destruction to areas already reeling from Helene’s devastation 12 days ago and still recovering from Ian’s wrath two years ago.
Almost the entirety of Florida’s west coast was under a hurricane warning early Tuesday as the Category 5 storm and its 265 kph winds crept toward the state at 14 kph, sucking energy from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm water. The strongest Atlantic hurricane on record is 1980’s Allen, which reached wind speeds of 306 kph as it moved through the Caribbean and Gulf before striking Texas and Mexico.
Milton’s center could come ashore Wednesday in the Tampa Bay region, which has not endured a direct hit by a major hurricane in more than a century. Scientists expect the system to weaken slightly before landfall, though it could retain hurricane strength as it churns across central Florida toward the Atlantic Ocean. That would largely spare other states ravaged by Helene, which killed at least 230 people on its path from Florida to the Appalachian Mountains.
Tampa Bay has not been hit directly by a major hurricane since 1921, and authorities fear luck is about to run out for the region and its 3.3 million residents. President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Florida, and U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor said 7,000 federal workers were mobilized to help in one of the largest mobilizations of federal personnel in history.
“This is the real deal here with Milton,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor told a Monday news conference. “If you want to take on Mother Nature, she wins 100% of the time.”
The Tampa Bay area is still rebounding from Helene and its powerful surge — a wall of water up to 2.4 meters it created even though its eye was 160 kilometers offshore. Twelve people died there, with the worst damage along a string of barrier islands from St. Petersburg to Clearwater.
Forecasters warned that Milton could bring a possible 2.4- to 3.6-meter storm surge, leading to evacuation orders being issued for beach communities all along the Gulf coast. In Florida, that means anyone who stays is on their own and first responders are not expected to risk their lives to rescue them at the height of the storm.
Stragglers were a problem during Helene and 2022’s Ian. Many residents failed to heed ample warnings, saying they evacuated during previous storms only to have major surges not materialize. But there was evidence Monday that people were getting out before Milton arrives.
A steady stream of vehicles headed north toward the Florida Panhandle on Interstate 75, the main highway on the west side of the peninsula, as residents heeded evacuation orders. Traffic clogged the southbound lanes of the highway for miles as other residents headed for the relative safety of Fort Lauderdale and Miami on the other side of the state.
About 240 kilometers south of Tampa, Fort Myers Beach was nearly a ghost town by Monday afternoon as an evacuation order took effect. Ian devastated the 5,000-resident community two years ago, its 4.5-meter storm surge destroying or severely damaging 400 homes and businesses. Fourteen people died there as they tried to ride out the storm, and dozens had to be rescued.
On Monday, the few residents who could be found were racing against the clock to safeguard their buildings and belongings. None said they were staying.
The signs of Ian’s devastation remain visible everywhere. Rebuilt homes stand next to others in various states of construction. There are numerous vacant lots, which were once rare.
“This whole street used to be filled out with houses,” said Mike Sandell, owner of Pool-Rific Services. His workers were removing and storing pumps and heaters Monday from his clients’ pools so they wouldn’t get destroyed.
Home construction supplies like bricks, piping and even workers’ outhouses lined the streets, potential projectiles that could do further damage if a surge hits.
At the beach Monday afternoon, workers busily emptied the triple-wide trailer that houses The Goodz, a combined hardware, convenience, fishing supply, ice cream and beach goods store. Owner Graham Belger said he moved his “Your Island Everything Store” into the trailer after Ian destroyed his permanent building across the street.
“We’ll rebuild, but it is going to be bad,” he said.
Nearby, Don Girard and his son Dominic worked to batten down the family’s three-story combination rental and vacation home that’s about 30.5 meters from the water. It’s first-floor garage and entranceway were flooded by Helene last month, Hurricane Debby in August, and a tide brought by a recent supermoon.
Ian was by far the worst. Its waves crashed into the 14-year-old home’s second floor, destroying the flooring. Girard repaired the damage, and his aqua-blue and white home stands in contrast to the older, single-story house across the street. It was submerged by Ian, never repaired and remains vacant. Its once-off-white walls are now tinged with brown. Plywood covers the holes that once contained windows and doors.
Girard, who owns a banner and flag company in Texas, said that while his feelings about owning his home are mostly positive, they are becoming mixed. He said every December, his extended family gathers there for the holidays. At that time of year, temperatures in southwest Florida are usually in the low 20s Celsius with little rain or humidity. The area and its beaches fill with tourists.
“At Christmas, there is no better place in the world,” Girard said.
But flooding from Ian, the other storms and now Milton is leaving him frustrated.
“It’s been difficult, I’m not going to lie to you,” Girard said. “The last couple years have been pretty bad.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/florida-braces-for-hurricane-milton-/7814306.html
XCP-NG thanks Broadcom for increased interest, swipes Citrix for not helping build an alternative
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
XenServer fork plans to make its next version a better target for VMware migrations
Vates, the developer behind Xen Server fork XCP-NG, has thanked Broadcom for increasing interest in its work, and criticized Citrix for presenting challenges to its efforts.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/cxp_ng_8_3_futures/
Samsung apologizes for bad financial performance
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Profit doesn’t pop despite AI-inspired memory boom, leading to executive mea culpa
Samsung Electronics has issued an apology to customers, investors and employees after releasing disappointing preliminary results Tuesday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/samsung_q3_2024_apology/
Do prediction markets have a future in US elections?
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/do-prediction-markets-have-a-future-in-us-elections-/7814268.html
Google brings better bricking to Androids, to curtail crims
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Improved security features teased in May now appearing around the world
Google has apparently started a global rollout of three features in Android designed to make life a lot harder for thieves to profit from purloined phones.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/google_android_security/
US warns voters of disinformation deluge
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — American voters are likely about to be swamped by a flood of misinformation and influence campaigns engineered by U.S. adversaries aiming, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, to sway the results of the upcoming presidential election and cast doubt on the process itself.
The latest assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, issued Monday, comes just 29 days before the November 5 election that will see U.S. voters choose the country’s next president and cast ballots in hundreds of other state and local races.
“We’ve continued to see actors ramp up their activities as we get closer to Election Day,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official, briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity.
“They recognize that individuals are already voting, and operations can have a greater impact as we get closer to Election Day,” the official said, noting that the election itself may just be a starting point.
“The intelligence community expects foreign influence actors to continue their campaigns by calling into question the validity of the election results after the polls close,” the official added.
A second U.S. intelligence official warned the pace of such influence efforts, especially those targeting specific races or political campaigns, has also picked up.
“We have had more than a threefold increase,” the official said, explaining that the number of private briefings to candidates and campaigns has likewise jumped.
Intelligence agencies also cautioned that U.S. adversaries will likely seize upon the damage done by Hurricane Helene and potential damage from Hurricane Milton as it strengthens off the U.S. coastline to further amplify and manufacture narratives meant to undermine confidence in the election results.
“It does take time for those types of narratives to be formed and put out into the wild, so to speak,” the first intelligence official said. “But we certainly expect foreign countries to take advantage of such situations and promote further divisive rhetoric.”
Monday’s assessment follows a series of earlier public warnings about foreign efforts to meddle in the U.S. election.
U.S. officials said Monday that Russia, Iran and China continue to be responsible for most of the influence efforts targeting U.S. voters.
And, they said, there have been no indications that any of those countries have changed their goals.
Russia, they said, continues to run influence campaigns aimed at boosting the chances of former U.S. President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, while seeking to hurt the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
Iran’s efforts remain focused on helping Harris by hurting Trump, they said, pointing to the ongoing hack-and-leak operation against the Trump campaign, which has been traced to three operatives working for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Targeting state, local races
U.S. intelligence agencies assess that China has yet to wade into the U.S. presidential campaign, focusing instead on persuading American voters to reject state and local candidates perceived as detrimental to Beijing’s interests, especially those voicing support for Taiwan.
But the latest public assessment pointed to some changes.
U.S. intelligence officials on Monday warned that Russia and Cuba have joined China, in targeting congressional, state and local races.
“Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians,” the intelligence official said.
“Havana almost certainly has considered influence efforts targeting some candidates,” the official added. “This is consistent with what they’ve done in past cycles.”
Russia, China and Iran have all rejected previous U.S. accusations of election meddling. Russia, Iran and Cuba have yet to respond to requests from VOA for comment on the latest U.S. findings.
China late Monday again dismissed the U.S. concerns.
“China is not interested in the U.S. congressional election, and we have no intention and will not interfere in it,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA in an email.
“Some U.S. congressmen stick to their wrong positions on the Taiwan question,” Liu added. “China firmly defends its national sovereignty and territorial integrity, but this does not lead to the conclusion that China has interfered in the congressional elections.”
But the U.S. intelligence assessments align with concerns voiced by some lawmakers and private technology companies.
“The 48 hours after the polls close, especially if we have as close an election as we anticipate, could be equally if not more significant in terms of spreading false information, disinformation and literally undermining the tenets of our democracy,” Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during a hearing last month.
‘Vigorous activity’
Microsoft President Brad Smith, who has warned that the most perilous moments could come in the 48 hours before the U.S. election, separately said the increase in malign cyber efforts by Russia and Iran, especially, is undeniable.
“We’re seeing vigorous activity,” Smith told a cyber conference last month. “We’re seeing the Iranians really target the Republican Party in the Trump campaign,” he said. “We’re seeing the Russians target the Democratic Party and now the Harris campaign.”
And it is unclear what impact the U.S. has made with its attempts to counter the growing number of foreign influence efforts.
Last month, the U.S. Justice Department seized 32 internet domains used by companies linked to Moscow to spread disinformation. At the same time, the department indicted employees of the state-controlled media outlet RT in connection with a plot to launder Russian propaganda through a U.S.-based media company.
U.S. intelligence officials on Monday, however, said such tactics are no longer unique to the Kremlin.
“Foreign influence actors are getting better at hiding their hand and using Americans to do it,” said one of the U.S. intelligence officials. “Foreign countries calculate that Americans are more likely to believe other Americans compared to content with clear signs of foreign propaganda.”
Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that social media is rife with fake personas generated by U.S. adversaries.
“If you’re looking at stuff on Twitter, on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram, and it’s political in nature … there is a very reasonable chance — I would put it in the 20 to 30% range — that the content you are seeing, the comments you are seeing, are coming from one of those three countries: Russia, Iran, China,” he said. “It’s not going to stop on November 5.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-warns-voters-of-disinformation-deluge/7814263.html
China reportedly tells local AI buyers to ignore Nvidia
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Plus: Google, Oracle, spend $9.5 billion on Asia datacenters; Philippines to tax clouds; Vietnam infosec praised; and more
In Brief Chinese authorities have reportedly let local orgs know they should satisfy their need for AI accelerators by shopping locally – not from Nvidia.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/asia_in_brief/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-08, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
30 Years of Blogging.
https://freeke.org/ffg/30-years-of-blogging.html
New Mexico man who shot Native American protesting statue takes plea deal
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
Feds reach for sliver of crypto-cash nicked by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A couple million will do for a start … but Kim’s crews are suspected of stealing much more
The US government is attempting to claw back more than $2.67 million stolen by North Korea’s Lazarus Group, filing two lawsuits to force the forfeiture of millions in Tether and Bitcoin.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/us_lazarus_group_crypto_seizure/
Trump, Harris mark somber anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel
date: 2024-10-08, from: VOA News USA
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are marking the anniversary of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust as the presidential candidates approach the final weeks of the campaign during a widening conflict in the Middle East.
Political leaders across the spectrum were marking the killing of about 1,200 people, including 46 U.S. citizens, by Hamas-led militants in the October 7 attack last year, and the taking of about 250 hostages. A year later, about 100 people, including several Americans, remain in captivity, as U.S.-led efforts to negotiate a cease-fire and hostage release deal have sputtered out.
Trump visited the New York City gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who led the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Orthodox Judaism from 1951 until his death in 1994. Schneerson was the movement’s seventh leader, known as Lubavitcher Rebbe. Trump then will speak before Jewish community leaders at one of his Florida resorts in the Miami suburb of Doral.
Harris and her husband planted a pomegranate tree on the grounds of the vice president’s residence in honor of the those killed a year ago.
Earlier Monday, Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, recited a prayer for peace at an event to commemorate the anniversary hosted by the American Jewish Committee in Washington.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden also hosted a somber memorial ceremony at the White House Monday to mark the anniversary of the attack. The Bidens looked on as Rabbi Aaron Alexander of Washington’s Adas Israel Congregation recited the Jewish remembrance prayer for the more than 1,200 people, including dozens of Americans, killed that day, listing the towns, villages and festival site that were the scenes of the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
The president then lit a lone memorial candle placed on a small table at the center of the Blue Room, before they observed a moment of silence.
Earlier in the day, Biden spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the White House said.
The attack sparked a deadly war in Gaza, as Israel moved to root out Hamas’ control over the territory and try to return those taken captive. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, including many women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which does not distinguish between militants and civilians.
Another Iran-backed group, Hezbollah, has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli territory in the same period from Lebanon, and Israel last month expanded a campaign of sabotage and assassination and launched a ground incursion into Lebanon to combat the threat from the group.
In 1997, the U.S. State Department designated both Hezbollah and Hamas as foreign terrorist organizations. Many other countries also label them as terrorist groups, although some apply the designation only to their military wings.
Get Real Client IPs with Ingress Nginx, Caddy or Traefik
date: 2024-10-08, updated: 2024-10-08, from: Inlets.dev, cloud tunneling
When you’re running a reverse proxy directly on a host, or an Ingress Controller in Kubernetes, you can get the real client IP with inlets.
https://inlets.dev/blog/2024/10/08/real-client-ips-ingress-nginx-caddy-traefik.html
Epic judge orders Google to let rivals set up app stores
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chocolate Factory vows to appeal
A US court has ordered Google to refrain from a wide variety of business practices the web giant uses to bolster its Play Store, as a consequence of its December 2023 antitrust defeat against Epic Games.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/google_android_play_store_epic/
NASA Project Manager Honors Mother’s Impact
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
Lee esta historia en Español aquí. Patricia Ortiz is proud to be a first-generation Salvadoran American. Her mother, born and raised in El Salvador, came to the United States for a better opportunity despite not knowing anyone or the English language. As a project manager for Space Projects and Partnerships at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/armstrong/nasa-project-manager-honors-mothers-impact/
Una gerente de proyectos de la NASA rinde homenaje a la influencia de su madre
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
Read this story in English here. Patricia Ortiz está orgullosa de ser una salvadoreña americana de primera generación. Su madre, nacida y criada en El Salvador, vino a Estados Unidos por una oportunidad mejor sin conocer a nadie ni el idioma inglés. En su función de gerente de proyectos y asociaciones espaciales en el Centro […]
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-10-07, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Speaking of triumphant returns, the writer of The Last Ronin wants Judith Hoag to reprise her role as April O’Neil in the rated-R adaptation releasing next year. My goodness do I want that too. Original turtle costumes again please. It will be incredible
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/113268606618292597
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-10-07, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
This year marks 60 years since Susan Foreman last appeared in Doctor Who. The actress wants to come back. Her storyline isn’t done. They teased us last season. Is it time? The Doctor’s Granddaughter deserves to show up again
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/113268599795792703
OpenBSD 7.6 released
date: 2024-10-07, from: OS News
OpenBSD 7.6, the release in which every single line of the original code form the first release has been edited or removed, has been released. There’s a lot of changes, new features, bug fixes, and more in 7.6, but for desktop users, the biggest new feature is undoubtedly hardware-accelerated video decoding through VA-API. Or, as the changelog puts it: Imported libva 2.22.0, an implementation for VA-API (video acceleration API). VA-API provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. ↫ OpenBSD 7.6 release announcement This is a massive improvement for anyone using OpenBSD for desktop use, especially on power-constrained devices like laptops. Problematic video playback was one of the reasons I went back to Fedora KDE after running OpenBSD on my workstation, and it seems this would greatly improve that situation. I can’t wait until I find some time to reinstall OpenBSD and see how much difference this will make for me personally. There’s more, of course. OpenBSD 7.6 starts the bring-up for Snapdragon X Elite devices, and in general comes with a whole slew of low-level improvements for the ARM64 architecture. AMD64 systems don’t have to feel left out, thanks to AVX-512 support, several power management improvements to make sleep function more optimally, and several other low-level improvements I don’t fully understand. RISC-V, PowerPC, MIPS, and other architectures also saw small numbers of improvements. The changelog is vast, so be sure to dig through it to see if your pet bug has been addressed, or support for your hardware has been improved. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and for new installations, head on over to the download page.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140873/openbsd-7-6-released/
Inflection AI Enterprise offering ditches Nvidia GPUs for Intel’s Gaudi 3
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Struggling chipmaker scores another win
In breaking trends news, Inflection AI revealed its latest enterprise platform would ditch Nvidia GPUs for Intel’s Gaudi 3 accelerators.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/inflection_ai_intel/
NASA Welcomes Dominican Republic as 44th Artemis Accords Signatory
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
The Dominican Republic is the latest nation to sign the Artemis Accords and joins 43 other countries in a commitment to advancing principles for the safe, transparent, and responsible exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond with NASA. “NASA is proud to welcome the Dominican Republic signing of the Artemis Accords as we expand the […]
NCAA’s $2.78 billion settlement with colleges to allow athlete payments gets preliminary approval
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Misinformation Is Already Swirling Around Hurricane Milton
date: 2024-10-07, from: Heatmap News
The “Meteorologists” Facebook page has 51,000 followers, an iffy grasp of grammar rules, and outsized confidence in the United States’ weather engineering capabilities. “They are Aiming this KILLER Monster Hurricane Right at FLORIDA!” one user said of Hurricane Milton on Sunday morning, shortly before sharing purported photos of dinosaurs living on Mars.
By Monday afternoon, Milton had strengthened into a Category 5 storm, and the internet conspiracies were intensifying, too. People shared videos of themselves asking their Alexas, “What kind of hurricane was Hurricane Milton?” and getting answers in the past tense — proof, surely, that the government orchestrated the whole storm. “Never ever seen a hurricane form in the western Gulf and head directly EAST… It is not right,” other users mused in the comment sections of their local weather channels. A search for “cloud seeding” on Facebook further turned up dozens of posts tracking flight paths for planes belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sharing photos of ominous-looking clouds as evidence that the “government is involved.”
Hoaxes and misinformation reliably follow extreme weather events. Pictures of Hurricane Shark have circulated on social media after pretty much every major flood since 2011, and a photoshopped image of a storm cell over the Statue of Liberty resurfaces anytime there is bad weather in New York. In the aftermath of a major disaster, it’s especially tempting for bad actors to exploit the desperation for news and images.
But Hurricane Helene — which devastated swaths of Florida up into the Appalachians just over a week ago — revealed how far this has spun out of control. For one thing, hoaxes are simpler than ever for the average person to disseminate, thanks to the availability of AI image-making tools and the degradation of content moderation on disaster-response platforms like Twitter. These conspiracies may also then be reinforced and amplified by people with an interest in making the government’s response look bad — such as the Republican candidate for president of the United States, a Georgia congressperson, and Elon Musk.
While some lies — like Deep State cloud seeding — are relatively easy to see through, many rumors are much more difficult to fact-check when power, cell service, and internet are limited. Nicole McNeill, the Asheville, North Carolina-based director of storytelling of Climate Power, told me she and many of her neighbors fell for a widespread rumor that a second storm was going to hit the western part of the state immediately after Helene. The panic the rumor sparked risked lives: She saw a fight break out in a gas line between two men who were frantically trying to get out of town, and a young couple who were renting a home nearby tried to flee and ended up on a road that was closed. “We heard later that people had to sleep in their cars,” McNeill told me. “Local police had to be diverted from emergency response to direct traffic to clear the roads so emergency vehicles could pass. Misinformation made a desperate situation worse.” McNeill herself suffered a panic attack while trying to fix the holes in her roof from trees that had fallen during Helene, all in preparation for the second storm that would never come.
While there was no merit to those manufactured claims, the truth is in some ways even more alarming: Milton is looking like a worst-case scenario storm as it bears down on Tampa Bay, and at this point, the only thing anyone can control is getting good information to the people whose lives will depend on hearing it. Forecasters are doing a great job of that already, like South Florida hurricane specialist John Morales, who let his emotions show on air and connected the storm’s intensification to climate science.
Milton isn’t due to make landfall until Wednesday, but the misinformation already circulating online will make it more challenging for early warnings from the government and local experts to be heard and trusted. That job doesn’t get any easier after a storm. To fellow hurricane survivors, McNeill warned, “If you have patchy internet and you’re at 30% battery and worried about your phone running out, you’re often making split-second decisions. That’s where misinformation gets people.”
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-milton-misinformation
FEMA administrator continues pushback against false claims as Helene death toll hits 230
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
American Water rinsed in cyberattack, turns off app
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-08, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It’s still safe to drink, top provider tells us
American Water, which supplies over 14 million people in the US and numerous military bases, has stopped issuing bills and has taken its MyWater app offline while it investigates a cyberattack on its systems.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/american_water_cyberattack/
Vulcan Centaur avoids FAA scrutiny after losing solid rocket booster nozzle
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Is that a sparkler attached to the bottom of your rocket or just something falling off?
An unusual event occurred during United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) second launch of the Vulcan Centaur at the end of last week. One of the twin Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) lost its nozzle, but the vehicle still made it into space as planned.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/ula_dodges_faa_scrutiny/
American Scientists Win Nobel Prize in Medicine for ‘Groundbreaking’ Gene Discovery Made by Studying Worms
date: 2024-10-07, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA, tiny molecules that play a crucial role in how cells develop, paving the way for new treatments for diseases
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness Attacked in ‘Upsetting’ Pro-Trump Ad. (The ads on MLB games are shocking, so wild so as to look like satire. Surprised MLB lets them do this.)
Geico tells El Reg, no, it’s not canceling all Cybertruck insurance
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
This comes after Tesla owner griped of dropped policies on X
Geico confirmed to The Register that, following whispering on social media, the US insurance firm is most definitely not canceling all coverage on Tesla Cybertrucks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/geico_cancel_cybertruck_insurance/
Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge
date: 2024-10-07, from: OS News
Late last year, Google’s Play Store was ruled to be a monopoly in the US, and today the judge in that case has set out what Google must do to address this situation. Today, Judge James Donato issued his final ruling in Epic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge On top of these rather big changes, Google also cannot mandate the use of Google’s own billing solution, nor can it prohibit developers from informing users of other ways to download and/or pay for an application. Furthermore, Google can’t make sweetheart deals with device makers to entice them to install the Play Store or to block them from installing other stores, and Google can’t pay developers to only use the Play Store or not use other stores. It’s a rather comprehensive set of remedies that will remain in force for three years. Many of these remedies are taken straight from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, but they will be far less effective since they’re only applied to one company, and only for three years. On top of that, Google can appeal, and the company has already stated that it’s going to ask for an immediate stay on these remedies, and if they get that stay, the remedies won’t have to be implemented any time soon. This legal tussling is far from over, and does very little to protect consumer choice. A clear law that simply prohibits this kind of market abuse, like the DMA, is much fairer to everyone involved, and creates a consistent level playing field for everyone, instead of only affecting random companies based on the whims of something as unpredictable as juries. In other words, I don’t think much is going to change in the United States after this ruling, and we’ll likely be hearing more back and forths in the court room for years to come, all while US consumers are being harmed. It’s better than nothing in lieu of a working Congress actually doing, well, anything, but that’s not saying much.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.
mikroPhone project is designing a smartphone with an emphasis on openness and privacy
date: 2024-10-07, from: Liliputing
The mikroPhone is a mobile phone that you can build yourself… at least theoretically. It’s made using a combination of off-the-shelf components and custom designed parts, but you can find a complete list of components as well as schematics and PCB fabrication files at the “How to build my mikroPhone” page. Why build your own […]
The post mikroPhone project is designing a smartphone with an emphasis on openness and privacy appeared first on Liliputing.
India Can Weather Its Bangladesh Headache
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: RAND blog
India faces challenges after a coup in Bangladesh ousted the India-friendly Awami League. Concerns include strained relations, rising anti-India sentiment, and China’s potential influence. However, India can leverage historical ties and strategic diplomacy to navigate these issues.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/10/india-can-weather-its-bangladesh-headache.html
Sols 4325-4326: (Not Quite) Dipping Our Toes in the Sand
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 4, 2024 If you read this blog very often, you know that nearly every time the rover stops for science, MAHLI and APXS focus on interesting (and accessible!) rocks as targets. The rover science team is, after all, built with a lot of geologists. But geology is not all rocks, […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/sols-4325-4326-not-quite-dipping-our-toes-in-the-sand/
Cops love facial recognition, and withholding info on its use from the courts
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Withholding exculpatory evidence from suspects isn’t a great look when the tech is already questionable
Police around the United States are routinely using facial recognition technology to help identify suspects, but those departments rarely disclose they’ve done so - even to suspects and their lawyers. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/cops_love_facial_recognition_and/
Tech Today: Spraying for Food Safety
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
Whether protecting crops from diseases and pests or sanitizing contaminated surfaces, the ability to spray protective chemicals over important resources is key to several industries. Electrostatic Spraying Systems Inc. (ESS) of Watkinsville, Georgia, manufactures electrostatic sprayers and equipment that make this possible. By licensing NASA electrostatic technology, originally made to water plants in space, ESS’s […]
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/tech-transfer-spinoffs/tech-today-spraying-for-food-safety/
40 Years Ago: STS-41G – A Flight of Many Firsts and Records
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
The 13th flight of the space shuttle program and the sixth of Challenger, STS-41G holds many distinctions. As the first mission focused almost entirely on studying the Earth, it deployed a satellite, employed multiple instruments, cameras, and crew observations to accomplish those goals. The STS-41G crew set several firsts, most notably as the first seven-member […]
https://www.nasa.gov/history/40-years-ago-sts-41g-a-flight-of-many-firsts-and-records/
NASA: New Insights into How Mars Became Uninhabitable
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale crater on Mars, is providing new details about how the ancient Martian climate went from potentially suitable for life – with evidence for widespread liquid water on the surface – to a surface that is inhospitable to terrestrial life as we know it. Although the surface of Mars is […]
Samsung chairman debunks foundry, chip biz spinoff rumors
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But not hard to believe of business units with over $2 billion in operating losses in 2023
Despite reports of poor demand and mounting losses, Samsung says it has no plans to spin off its foundry business or chip design operation.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/samsung_foundry_spin/
Instructions for Aliens
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
The golden records placed aboard Voyager 1 and 2 each have a cover with special etchings, seen here in this photo from Sept. 4, 1977. These drawings show how the record should be used to receive a message from Earth. For example, the drawing in the bottom right corner is of the phonograph record and […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/instructions-for-aliens/
This Painting Was Thought to Be a Botticelli Copy. Now, Researchers Say It Was Made in His Studio
date: 2024-10-07, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new analysis suggests that the piece was created by several artists working in the Italian Renaissance painter’s studio—and that Botticelli himself may have worked on important details
No Easy Answers: America’s Limited Choices in Dealing with North Korea
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: RAND blog
The United States faces three options with a nuclear North Korea: strategic patience, accepting North Korea’s nuclear status for concessions, or using pressure short of war. Strategic patience would avoid breakthroughs but would maintain global deterrence and save political capital.
Bottlenose Dolphins ‘Smile’ at Each Other During Playtime, Study Finds
date: 2024-10-07, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Researchers still don’t know what the open-mouth facial expression means or whether it’s akin to smiling in humans—but several animals make a similar face during play
Quantum computing dreamers face stock market reality check
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
D-Wave and Rigetti dip below $1 as AI steals the spotlight
The harsh realities of the quantum ecosystem are dawning on markets as two prominent quantum vendors acknowledge they are at risk of being delisted following shares dropping below the $1 mark.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/quantum_firms_risk_being_delisted/
Georgia Supreme Court halts ruling striking down state’s near-ban on abortions
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
savannah, georgia — The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday halted a ruling striking down the state’s near-ban on abortions while it considers the state’s appeal.
The high court’s order came a week after a judge found that Georgia unconstitutionally prohibits abortions beyond about six weeks of pregnancy, often before women realize they’re pregnant. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled Sept. 30 that privacy rights under Georgia’s state constitution include the right to make personal health care decisions.
It was one of a wave of restrictive abortion laws passed in Republican-controlled states after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended a national right to abortion. It prohibited most abortions once a “detectable human heartbeat” was present. At around six weeks into a pregnancy, cardiac activity can be detected by ultrasound in an embryo’s cells that will eventually become the heart.
Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed it in 2019, but it didn’t take effect until Roe v. Wade fell.
McBurney wrote in his ruling that “liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”
“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then — and only then — may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.
The judge’s decision rolled back abortion limits in Georgia to a prior law allowing abortions until viability, roughly 22 to 24 weeks into a pregnancy.
“Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge,” Kemp said in a statement in response to McBurney’s decision. “Protecting the lives of the most vulnerable among us is one of our most sacred responsibilities, and Georgia will continue to be a place where we fight for the lives of the unborn.”
Abortion providers and advocates in Georgia had applauded McBurney’s ruling but expressed concern that it would soon be overturned.
GLOBE Eclipse and Civil Air Patrol: An Astronomical Collaboration
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
The Civil Air Patrol (CAP) is a volunteer organization that serves as the official civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force. The organization has an award-winning aerospace education program that promotes Science, Technology Engineering, & Mathematics (STEM)-related careers and activities. The total solar eclipse on 8 April 2024 was a unique opportunity to design […]
The Meeting of the Mavericks: North Korea and Russia
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: RAND blog
One of the more unexpected outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian war has been the revitalized partnership between Russia and North Korea. But what happens after the Ukraine war. Will the special relationship between Russia and North Korea endure?
NASA, Smithsonian Open New Exhibit to Showcase Our Dynamic Earth
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joined the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington and agency leadership to unveil the new Earth Information Center exhibit during an early preview on Monday. “NASA has studied Earth and our changing climate for more than 60 years. The Earth Information Center at the Smithsonian Museum […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-smithsonian-open-new-exhibit-to-showcase-our-dynamic-earth/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
My WordPress home in the Fediverse. If you have a Mastodon account you should be able to follow me. Also with other ActivityPub clients, but so far I've only tested with Mastodon.
https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.wordpress.com
BLE caberQU is a USB-C cable tester that displays data, charging, and cable health details (crowdfunding)
date: 2024-10-07, from: Liliputing
Not all USB Type-C cables are created equal. Some support higher data transfer speeds than others. Some support fast charging and others don’t. And it can be difficult to tell what a cable is capable of just by looking at it. So a few years ago developer Peter Traunmüller created the C2C caberQU, an open […]
The post BLE caberQU is a USB-C cable tester that displays data, charging, and cable health details (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
Astronomers Are Watching for a Once-in-a-Lifetime Nova Explosion. When Will We See It?
date: 2024-10-07, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A recurrent nova, known as the Blaze Star or T Coronae Borealis, is predicted to soon appear in the night sky. But the exact timing of the rare eruption remains unknown
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This is an item in my Mastodon timeline that I posted in WordPress via ActivityPub. I did nothing but turn the feature on in a dialog box. Since WordPress itself is highly scriptable, it now can act as an easy gateway to the Fediverse. The only thing they aren't doing that the others do is hyping it up (cough Ghost cough). 😀
https://mastodon.social/@daveverse.wordpress.com@daveverse.wordpress.com/113267290477067072
Launching Before UserDefaults Is Available
date: 2024-10-07, from: Michael Tsai
Christian Selig (Mastodon): It seems at some point, even though UserDefaults is intended for non-sensitive information, it started getting marked as data that needs to be encrypted and cannot be accessed until the user unlocked their device. I don’t know if it’s because Apple found developers were storing sensitive data in there even when they […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/07/launching-before-userdefaults-is-available/
Dealing With Objective-C Protocol Types in Swift
date: 2024-10-07, from: Michael Tsai
Dave Rahardja: There are two ways to refer to this protocol in Swift: using a native Swift type, or using an Objective-C Protocol object reference. let fungibleSwiftProtocol = Fungible.self let fungibleObjCProtocol = NSProtocolFromString(“Fungible”)! These two types should be the same—after all, they refer to the same protocol—but they are not, as shown when we print […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/07/dealing-with-objective-c-protocol-types-in-swift/
Xcode 16 Folders and Groups
date: 2024-10-07, from: Michael Tsai
Sarah Reichelt (Mastodon): In Xcode 16, project files and folders are arranged differently in the Project navigator. What used to be a group is now a folder, and this simple change has some interesting effects. At first, I was against the new scheme - in fact in my SwiftUI for Mac 2024 article, I specifically […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/07/xcode-16-folders-and-groups/
Meta Fined for Logging Passwords
date: 2024-10-07, from: Michael Tsai
Alexander Martin (via Hacker News): The social media giant Meta has been fined €91 million ($101 million) for accidentally storing hundreds of millions of its users’ passwords in plaintext instead of in an encrypted format on its internal systems. Meta first announced discovering the engineering mistake back in 2019. At the time, the company stated […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/07/meta-fined-for-logging-passwords/
Chinese cyberspies reportedly breached Verizon, AT&T, Lumen
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Salt Typhoon may have accessed court-ordered wiretaps and US internet traffic
Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies were among the US broadband providers whose networks were reportedly hacked by Chinese cyberspies, possibly compromising the wiretapping systems used for court-ordered surveillance.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/verizon_att_lumen_salt_typhoon/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
1995: Eudora was a central piece of technology to the bootstrap of blogging. It's always like that, it starts out as an experiment to see what's possible, and in this case, a lot was possible. I don't know if it was open source, but it was brilliant and risky and made it all possible w/o going through gatekeepers.
http://scripting.com/frontier/apps/Eudora.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
A comment from thirty years of blogging. "Blogging seems kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, take a moment to post it to your blog. And, if appropriate, link to something in your blog post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still here and it still does."
http://scripting.com/2024/10/07.html#a121544
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Andrew is a "persistent blogger" if not natural-born as some of us are. Thanks for the good wishes, and thanks for using a blog to send your greetings. :-)
https://blog.andrewshell.org/essays/scripting-news-30/
A Monet Masterpiece That Hung in Churchill’s Home Is Now Free of Grime From Cigar Smoke
date: 2024-10-07, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The newly restored “Charing Cross Bridge,” which once hung in the politician’s drawing room, is now on display at London’s Courtauld Gallery
You’re right not to rush into running AMD, Intel’s new manycore monster CPUs
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
They put more risk in a single box than most of us are equipped to handle
Opinion Intel recently teased a 128-core Granite Rapids Xeon 6 processor, and your humble vulture thinks you can ignore them – indeed, ignoring them might be your safest course of action.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/risk_of_manycore_cpus/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
North Carolina’s second-largest newspaper condemns Trump for ‘ridiculous’ Helene response ‘falsehoods.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-carolina-second-largest-newspaper-165524092.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
It's remarkable that Republican governors work with the Democratic president on disaster relief, but they won't sign up for Medicaid and such. A reporter should dig into why there's this difference.
https://www.threads.net/@kamalahq/post/DA1DTk9MmOM
When Sheriffs Say Their Rule Is Law
date: 2024-10-07, from: Capital and Main
Author Jessica Pishko probes the beliefs and actions of the hard right constitutional sheriffs movement, whose members say their authority trumps state and federal officials.
The post When Sheriffs Say Their Rule Is Law appeared first on .
https://capitalandmain.com/when-sheriffs-say-their-rule-is-law
Daily Deals (10-07-2024)
date: 2024-10-07, from: Liliputing
Amazon is offering the best deal to date on Sony’s popular WH-1000XM4 wireless, over-ear noise-cancelling headphones. When they were first released in 2020, they were widely praised for offering some of the best sound quality and active noise cancellation available in a pair of wireless headphones. These days they’re no longer Sony’s newest or best […]
The post Daily Deals (10-07-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-10-07-2024/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trapped in the station by fallen trees, offline, with no power, no water and negligible cell phone reception, a team of local broadcasters stayed on air as Tropical Storm Helene brought flooding and devastation to Western North Carolina.
US targets Hamas with sanctions on anniversary of Gaza war
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — The United States on Monday imposed sanctions on an international Hamas fundraising network, accusing it of playing a critical role in external fundraising for the Palestinian militant group, in action marking the first anniversary of the Gaza war.
The U.S. Treasury Department in a statement said it imposed sanctions on three people and what it called a “sham charity” that it accused of being prominent international financial supporters of Hamas, as well as on the Al-Intaj Bank in Gaza that it said was controlled by the group.
Also targeted was a longstanding Hamas supporter, a Yemeni national living in Turkey, and nine of his businesses, Treasury said.
“As we mark one year since Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, Treasury will continue relentlessly degrading the ability of Hamas and other destabilizing Iranian proxies to finance their operations and carry out additional violent acts,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in the statement.
“The Treasury Department will use all available tools at our disposal to hold Hamas and its enablers accountable, including those who seek to exploit the situation to secure additional sources of revenue.”
In their rampage through Israeli towns and kibbutz villages near the Gaza border a year ago, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli figures.
The huge Israeli security lapse led to the single deadliest day for Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, shattered many citizens’ sense of security and sent their faith in its leaders to new lows.
The Hamas assault unleashed an Israeli offensive on Gaza that has largely flattened the densely populated enclave and killed almost 42,000 people, Palestinian health authorities say.
The Treasury on Monday said: “Hamas has exploited the suffering in Gaza to solicit funds through sham and front charities that falsely claim to help civilians in Gaza,” adding that as of early this year, the group may have received as much as $10 million a month through such donations. The Treasury said Hamas considers Europe to be a key source of fundraising.
Monday’s action targeted an Italy-based Hamas member the Treasury said established the sham Charity Association of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which it accused of helping bankroll Hamas’ military wing.
Also targeted was a senior Hamas representative in Germany and a Hamas representative in charge of the group’s activity in Austria.
Hamas is a U.S. designated terrorist group.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-targets-hamas-with-sanctions-on-anniversary-of-gaza-war-/7813383.html
Spacecraft headed to harmless asteroid slammed by NASA in previous save-the-Earth test
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A spacecraft blasted off Monday to investigate the scene of a cosmic crash.
The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft rocketed away on a two-year journey to the small, harmless asteroid rammed by NASA two years ago in a dress rehearsal for the day a killer space rock threatens Earth. Launched by SpaceX from Cape Canaveral, it’s the second part of a planetary defense test that could one day help save the planet.
The 2022 crash by NASA’s Dart spacecraft shortened Dimorphos’ orbit around its bigger companion, demonstrating that if a dangerous rock was headed our way, there’s a chance it could be knocked off course with enough advance notice.
Scientists are eager to examine the impact’s aftermath up close to know exactly how effective Dart was and what changes might be needed to safeguard Earth in the future.
“The more detail we can glean the better as it may be important for planning a future deflection mission should one be needed,” University of Maryland astronomer Derek Richardson said before launch.
Researchers want to know whether Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — left a crater or perhaps reshaped the 150-meter (500-foot) asteroid more dramatically. It looked something like a flying saucer before Dart’s blow and may now resemble a kidney bean, said Richardson, who took part in the Dart mission and is helping with Hera.
Dart’s wallop sent rubble and even boulders flying off Dimorphos, providing an extra kick to the impact’s momentum. The debris trail extended more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) into space for months.
Some boulders and other debris could still be hanging around the asteroid, posing a potential threat to Hera, said flight director Ignacio Tanco.
“We don’t really know very well the environment in which we are going to operate,” said Tanco. “But that’s the whole point of the mission is to go there and find out.”
European officials describe the $400 million (363 million euro) mission as a “crash scene investigation.”
Hera “is going back to the crime site and getting all the scientific and technical information,” said project manager Ian Carnelli.
Carrying a dozen science instruments, the small car-sized Hera will need to swing past Mars in 2025 for a gravity boost, before arriving at Dimorphos by the end of 2026. It’s a moonlet of Didymos, Greek for twin, a fast-spinning asteroid that’s five times bigger. At that time, the asteroids will be 195 million kilometers (120 million miles) from Earth.
Controlled by a flight team in Darmstadt, Germany, Hera will attempt to go into orbit around the rocky pair, with the flyby distances gradually dropping from 30 kilometers (18 miles) all the way down to 1 kilometer (a half-mile). The spacecraft will survey the moonlet for at least six months to ascertain its mass, shape and composition, as well as its orbit around Didymos.
Before the impact, Dimorphos circled its larger companion from 1,189 meters out. Scientists believe the orbit is now tighter and oval-shaped, and that the moonlet may even be tumbling.
Two shoebox-sized Cubesats will pop off Hera for even closer drone-like inspections, with one of them using radar to peer beneath the moonlet’s boulder-strewn surface. Scientists suspect Dimorphos was formed from material shed from Didymos. The radar observations should help confirm whether Didymos is indeed the little moon’s parent.
The Cubesats will attempt to land on the moonlet once their survey is complete. If the moonlet is tumbling, that will complicate the endeavor. Hera may also end its mission with a precarious touchdown, but on the larger Didymos.
Neither asteroid poses any threat to Earth — before or after Dart showed up. That’s why NASA picked the pair for humanity’s first asteroid-deflecting demo.
Leftovers from the solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago, asteroids primarily orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in what’s known as the main asteroid belt, where millions of them reside. They become near-Earth objects when they’re knocked out of the belt and into our neck of the woods.
NASA’s near-Earth object count currently tops 36,000, almost all asteroids but also some comets. More than 2,400 of them are considered potentially hazardous to Earth.
Global semiconductor sales up 20.6% to record $53.1B as trade wars rage on
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chip boom continues as demand surges, but challenges remain
A reported hefty increase in sales is no doubt welcome news for the semiconductor industry, which still remains on precarious footing given the continued supply chain disruptions and geopolitical tensions, especially around US-China trade relations.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/semiconductor_sales_surge/
For US adversaries, Election Day won’t mean end to efforts to influence Americans
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Soon, the ballots will be cast, the polls will close and a campaign marked by assassination attempts, animosity and anxiety will come to an end. But for U.S. adversaries, the work to meddle with American democracy may be entering its most critical phase.
Despite all the attention on efforts to spread disinformation in the months before the Nov. 5 election, the hours and days immediately after voting ends could offer foreign adversaries like Russia, Iran and China or domestic extremist groups the best chance to mess with America’s decision.
That’s when Americans will go online to see the latest results or share their opinions as the votes are tabulated. And that’s when a fuzzy photo or AI-generated video of supposed vote tampering could do its most damage, potentially transforming online outrage into real-world action before authorities have time to investigate the facts.
It’s a threat taken seriously by intelligence analysts, elected officials and tech executives, who say that while there’s already been a steady buildup of disinformation and influence operations, the worst may be yet to come.
“It’s not like at the end of election night, particularly assuming how close this election will be, that this will be over,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. “One of my greatest concerns is the level of misinformation, disinformation that may come from our adversaries after the polls close could actually be as significant as anything that happens up to the closing of the polls.”
Analysts are blunter, warning that a particularly effective piece of disinformation could be devastating to public confidence in the election if spread in the hours after the polls close, and if the group behind the campaign knows to target a particularly important swing state or voting bloc.
Possible scenarios include out-of-context footage of election workers repurposed to show supposed fraud, a deepfake video of a presidential candidate admitting to cheating or a robocall directed at non-English speakers warning them not to vote.
When a false or misleading claim circulates weeks before the election, there’s time for local election officials, law enforcement or news organizations to gather the facts, correct any falsehoods and get the word out. But if someone spreads a deceptive video or photo designed to make a big chunk of the electorate distrust the results the day after the election, it can be hard or even impossible for the truth to catch up.
It happened four years ago, when a drumbeat of lies about the 2020 results spurred the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Often, those arrested on accusations of trying to interfere with the transfer of power have cited debunked election fraud narratives that circulated shortly after Election Day.
An especially close election decided in a handful of swing states could heighten that risk even further, making it more likely that a rumor about suitcases of illegal ballots in Georgia, to cite an example from 2020, could have a big impact on perceptions.
President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020 wasn’t especially close, and no irregularities big enough to affect the result were found — and yet false claims about vote-rigging were still widely believed by many supporters of the Republican, who’s running for president again.
The relatively long run-up to Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 gives those looking to sow doubt about the results ample time to do so, whether they are propaganda agencies in Moscow or extremist groups in the U.S. like the Proud Boys.
Ryan LaSalle, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Nisos, said he won’t feel relief until a new president is sworn in without any serious problems.
“The time to stay most focused is right now through the peaceful transfer of power,” LaSalle said. “That’s when real-life activities could happen, and that’s when they would have the greatest chance of having an impact on that peaceful transfer.”
Another risk, according to officials and tech companies, is that Russia or another adversary would try to hack into a local or state election system — not necessarily to change votes, but as a way of making voters question the security of the system.
“The most perilous time I think will come 48 hours before the election,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee last month. The hearing focused on American tech companies’ efforts to safeguard the election from foreign disinformation and cyberattacks.
Election disinformation first emerged as a potent threat in 2016, when Russia hacked into the campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton and created networks of fake social media accounts to pump out disinformation.
The threat has only grown as social media has become a leading source of information and news for many voters. Content designed to divide Americans and make them mistrust their own institutions is no longer tied only to election seasons. Intelligence officials say Russia, China and other countries will only expand their use of online disinformation and propaganda going forward, a long-range strategy that looks beyond any one election or candidate.
Despite the challenges, election security officials are quick to reassure Americans that the U.S. election system is impervious to any attack that could alter the outcome of the vote. While influence operations may seek to spread distrust about the results, improvements to the system make it stronger than ever when it comes to efforts to change votes.
“Malicious actors, even if they tried, could not have an impact at scale such that there would be a material effect on the outcome of the election,” Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told The Associated Press.
US Supreme Court rebuffs Biden administration on emergency abortions in Texas
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by President Joe Biden’s administration to enforce in Texas federal guidance requiring hospitals to perform abortions if needed to stabilize a patient’s emergency medical condition.
The justices turned away the Justice Department’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that halted enforcement of the guidance in Texas, where a Republican-backed near-total ban on abortion is in effect, and against members of two anti-abortion medical associations.
The Biden administration issued the guidance in July 2022 to protect access to abortion after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority the previous month overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide.
The guidance reminded healthcare providers across the country of their obligations under a 1986 federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) to ensure Medicare-participating hospitals offer emergency care stabilizing patients regardless of their ability to pay. Medicare is the government healthcare program for the elderly. Hospitals that violate EMTALA risk losing Medicare funding.
The guidance made clear that under that law physicians must provide a woman an abortion if needed to resolve a medical emergency and stabilize the patient even in states where the procedure is banned, and that the measure preempts state bans that offer no exceptions for medical emergencies or with exceptions that are too narrow.
Texas law prohibits abortions unless the pregnancy places the woman at risk of death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
Republican-governed Texas and two anti-abortion medical associations - the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynecologists and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, sued the administration, arguing that the guidance unlawfully purports to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.
U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix in 2022 blocked enforcement of the guidance, finding that it is an unlawful interpretation of the EMTALA statute, and would allow abortions beyond what is permitted by Texas law.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 2 upheld Hendrix’s decision, ruling that “EMTALA does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion.” The 5th Circuit’s decision came a month after the top court in Texas ruled against a woman who was seeking an emergency abortion of her non-viable pregnancy.
Abortion rights advocates have challenged the scope of abortion ban exceptions in several states due to uncertainty, including among physicians, about what medical emergencies during pregnancy would permit health providers to perform the procedure.
In a similar case in June, the Supreme Court permitted, for the time being, abortions to be performed in Idaho when pregnant women are facing medical emergencies.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in the Idaho case revived a federal judge’s decision that EMTALA takes precedence over Idaho’s Republican-backed near-total abortion ban when the two conflict. While the justices lifted a block they had placed on the judge’s ruling in the case, they did not resolve the dispute on its merits, opting instead to dismiss it as “improvidently granted.”
Netflix on Mars? Yeah maybe, thanks to NASA’s laser comms demo
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Optical communications not just for night owls
NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communication (DSOC) technology demonstration has notched up another performance milestone as it approaches a year in space.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/netflix_on_mars_sure_thanks/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Just gave another $100 to the Harris Victory Fund.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Manton Reece on Automattic, WP Engine, and 37signals.
https://www.manton.org/2024/10/04/automattic-wp-engine.html
SAP offers different way to move SQL Server-based software to the cloud
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Just don’t call it an alternative to RISE with SAP
SAP has developed an alternative way of shifting customers’ legacy systems running on Microsoft’s SQL Server database to the cloud, a method that is outside of its preferred RISE with SAP program.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/sap_sql_server_shift/
Can Bilingual Window-Breaking Drones Save New Yorkers From the Next Hurricane Sandy?
date: 2024-10-07, from: Heatmap News
Last week, I took a train and two buses to an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium on Staten Island, where I watched first responders pretend another Hurricane Sandy had just struck New York City.
For the sake of the drill, organizers kept many of the details of the fictional scenario the same as they’d been then: Emergency Management officials were told to respond as if a supercharged storm was causing devastating floods and stranding people in life-threatening situations. But the dry run also featured a major difference from the disaster that hit 12 years ago this month and left more than 43 New Yorkers dead.
This time, the city has drones.
It has drones with cameras that can read the logo on your jacket from 400 feet in the air and drones with sophisticated mapping software that can estimate how deep a flooded intersection is. It has drones that come on little leashes tethered to NYPD cruisers for continuous power and drones that are so small they can fly under beds and into closets and sound like dentist drills when they’re operating. It has drones that can transmit messages in 80 languages, drones with thermal sensors, and drones that can drop flotation devices into the ocean. It even has a drone that can break a window — the highlight of the morning for the members of the local press and the top brass of the New York Police Department, Fire Department, and NYCEM (New York City Emergency Management, pronounced “Nee-chim,” newly rebranded from the more generic Office of Emergency Management) who’d gathered to observe the exercise, which was touted as the largest-known municipal unmanned aerial system drill in history.
“Breach drones,” as I’ve since learned, look a little like crudely drawn mosquitos. Held aloft by four rotary wings, the $87,750 contraptions are affixed with rods on their fronts that resemble an insect’s proboscis but function essentially like a battering ram. Given the drone’s unsteady, bobbing flight and the way it repeatedly banged itself against the window to chip a hole in the pane big enough to fly through, I found the whole demonstration to be surprisingly entomological for what New York City’s first responders claim is the bleeding edge of its extreme weather response.
“We’re really just scraping the first layer” of what is possible, Louis Font, a citywide interagency coordinator, told me during the drill. As he put it, drones are “the Swiss army knife of the public safety world.”
There is a small problem, though: New Yorkers really, really hate drones. Actually, they hate all autonomous gadgets that give off a whiff of Big Brother. A security robot deployed in the Times Square subway station over the winter had to be guarded by two human officers around the clock to prevent it from being vandalized, and the cheeky New York City news blog Hell Gate proposed that bots like the NYPD’s crime-fighting “Digidog” are “the city’s most expensive punching bags” and teased, “we’re excited to watch as the situation unfolds.” Even the local wildlife seems willing to take matters into its own talons, with birds attacking drones deployed to Rockaway Beach over the summer.
The city acquired its first set of drones in 2018 and is now one of about 900 U.S. municipalities that have begun using unmanned aerial systems in its crime- and emergency-related responses. But with a police budget bigger than many nations’ entire military outlay and a techno-optimist mayor, New York quickly became one of the premier drone-wielding cities in the world.
It hasn’t been an entirely smooth journey, though. Plans to use drones to monitor private backyard Labor Day parties last year spurred privacy concerns rooted in a history of the NYPD abusing surveillance technologies and prompted pushback from local civil liberties groups. “We’ve got so many discredited examples of this mayor searching for high-tech gimmicks to solve real-world problems and leaving New Yorkers out to dry,” Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a.k.a. STOP, told me. “We end up spending a huge amount of money on largely unvetted vendors to buy products that simply just don’t fit the needs of our city.”
The question I wanted to answer on Staten Island was whether drones might be able to meet the needs of a city after a storm like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Sandy. The overwhelming impression I left with, though, was of agencies that are in the awkward stage of a growth spurt — eager to use technology that will one day be indispensable but, for the time being, presents the risk of overcomplicating situations that would otherwise benefit from a more old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground approach, with potentially both comic and tragic results.
Much of this is simply because of the physical limitations of drones. For one thing, they can’t fly in winds of more than about 20 to 30 miles per hour, making them pretty much useless during an actual storm (or in a Manhattan wind tunnel, for that matter). That narrows their use to two main categories: before a storm, as early warning systems, and after, in search-and-rescue operations.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of the former use. Scientists expect New York will get about 25% more annual rainfall by 2100 due to climate change, and the city has over 500 miles of coastline vulnerable to storm surge, with over half of its environmental justice communities living within its 100-year floodplains. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, 11 people drowned in flooded basement apartments, which are illegal under the city housing code and often used as housing by low-income immigrant families. Making matters worse, New York’s emergency alert system requires a voluntary opt-in and currently has just 1,281,938 subscribers — roughly 15% of a city of 8.3 million. Last year, the city comptroller further claimed that the notification list for people living in basement apartments reached less than 1% of its target population. (A spokesperson for NYCEM told me there has been a 35% increase in their basement subscriber numbers since the comptroller’s comments.)
The drones come in handy, then, because “not every New Yorker is on Twitter, not every New Yorker is on Instagram or Facebook, not every New Yorker reads The New York Times, the Post, or the Daily News, not all of them are tuned into our press conferences,” NYCEM Commissioner Zachary Iscol told me. “And so especially for vulnerable populations and immigrant communities, you’ve got to reach them where they are.”
This summer, NYCEM piloted a program using drones to broadcast bilingual flood warnings in low-lying neighborhoods ahead of storms — an idea Mayor Eric Adams had after seeing hurricane sirens on telephone poles during a visit to Puerto Rico, Iscol told me. The drones’ machine-generated Spanish translations, however, were slammed as “incomprehensible” by native speakers. (Font, the interagency coordinator, admitted the translations are still crude since “they’re robots” and told me the agencies are working to improve the messages.)
Carolina Salguero, the founder and executive director of PortSide NewYork, which works with the waterfront community in Red Hook, told me she fears drone-delivered storm warnings could potentially alienate their intended audiences. “Why would you believe the government if it’s dissed the community for this long?” she said, recalling how some Red Hook residents unwisely ignored warnings ahead of Sandy. (One can only imagine the added element of distrust that would come from a drone shouting those same warnings at you.). Cahn, of STOP, was also skeptical of the message’s delivery system: “The idea that you’re going to warn people with a fleet of drones is ludicrous. It’d take hundreds of thousands of drones operating throughout the day to reach the number of people that [NYCEM] can reach through a single text message,” he told me.
That problem of scale is also true after a storm. While I was impressed by the drones’ heat-seeking capabilities — operators could quickly find human actors and mannequins heated to lifelike temperatures during the Staten Island drill — the NYPD only had 85 drones in its arsenal as of this spring. Because connectivity issues are common after major weather disasters, drones cannot travel terribly far from human-toted hotspots, meaning the actual ground drones can cover to look for stranded, trapped, hurt, or drowning New Yorkers is relatively small. Drones also have a limited battery life of about half an hour and must repeatedly return to handlers to have their batteries swapped out as they conduct searches.
Sometimes it seems almost as if the city government is creating problems for drones to solve. A scenario where a window-breaching drone would be more beneficial than having a firefighter simply walk into a building feels like an edge case, and while a drone can inform someone in Mandarin that help is on the way, that “help” still ultimately takes the form of human paramedics, police, or firefighters. Font told me that drones helped supplement the rescue of “multiple drowning victims” in the Rockaways this summer by providing an extra vantage, but the systems were only deployed in the first place because of an unresolved lifeguard shortage. (Though there was excited chatter at the Staten Island drill about drones one day being able to tow distressed swimmers to shore, currently they can only bonk you with a hotdog-sized floatation device that inflates to three feet long to buy first responders some extra time — and that’s if you manage to grab ahold of it while flailing about in rough waters.)
Perhaps the biggest problem the drone exercise appeared poised to address was concerns about whether the city government could continue to function adequately under Adams’ leadership. Though the drill had reportedly been in the works for six months, mounting scandals and resignations in the administration made the large-scale demonstration of interagency cooperation conveniently timed. On Monday, less than a week after the drill, Phil Banks — the deputy mayor for public safety whose phone was seized last month as part of a federal bribery investigation — resigned. His departure leaves a gaping hole in the office that is tasked with coordinating the agencies involved in an extreme weather response, including directly overseeing NYCEM and the FDNY. (Banks reportedly was also at the forefront of promoting the city’s use of “high-tech devices, including drones.)
When I asked Iscol — who has publicly admitted to having had his own conversations about leaving the administration due to the ongoing turmoil — during the drill (i.e. before Banks resigned) whether he was confident that there could still be smooth operations between City Hall and its agencies in the event of a near-term disaster, he told me firmly that he was. “There are 300,000 people that work for the city of New York, and they’re showing up every day,” he told me. “It’s our job to show up and make sure they have the resources and support and the guidance and direction they need to be successful to deliver for New Yorkers.” He emphasized that “it’s business as usual for the agencies,” despite how things look in the headlines.
As for the drones, the commissioner seemed clear-eyed in assessing their usefulness. “As you do things that are new and for the first time, it’s an evolution — you’re always improving,” he told me. Drone advancements are “iterative, kind of like an iPhone,” and he’s aware they’re not all the way there yet. But “it’s not like we’re only using drones,” he stressed. “We’re still taking a multi-channel approach.”
Concerned onlookers will often approach Font, the interagency coordinator, to ask if he’s spying on them when they notice him flying a drone. He told me that he is always eager to show regular New Yorkers how the city is using the technology: “We’re a bunch of tech guys, so we really love getting into the nuts and bolts of it,” he said.
He expects, though, that eventually the questions and suspicious looks will start to taper off. The NYPD and FDNY already use drones in their everyday operations throughout the city; companies like Amazon have also started exploring the use of drones to deliver packages. Drones will become increasingly commonplace as the years wear on. Boring, even! So of course they’ll be used during extreme weather events, too.
“This is the world we live in now,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the
resignation of New York Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil
Banks.
https://heatmap.news/technology/new-york-disaster-drones
The Corporate Corruption Behind Hurricane Helene
date: 2024-10-07, from: The Lever News
In the South, residents are suffering from the fallout of two disasters — recent Lever reporting shows how corporate meddling and regulatory failures made both of them worse.
https://www.levernews.com/the-corporate-corruption-behind-hurricane-helene/
Windows 11 migration? Upgrade engine revs up, enterprises have no choice
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Support expiry clock ticks for Windows 10 - PC makers won’t be happy with latest stats
Windows 11 migration projects, long hoped for by Microsoft and PC chums, are picking up. But a report from asset management biz Lansweeper indicates the rush is on with “millions” of devices still running Windows 10.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/enterprise_windows_11_upgrade/
Migrants waiting in Mexico cultivate vegetable gardens
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
On Mexico’s northern border, migrants awaiting entry to the United States have found an unexpected source of solace: cultivating their own food. In this report, narrated by Veronica Villafañe, César Contreras shows how a community garden in Ciudad Juárez is sowing seeds of hope.
https://www.voanews.com/a/migrants-waiting-in-mexico-cultivate-vegetable-gardens/7813136.html
Investors are recalibrating their interest rate expectations
date: 2024-10-07, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Third quarter earnings season kicks off this week, when we’ll get a view of the economy through the lens of the companies on the front lines. We had a banner jobs report last week. Are banner earnings next? And what would all that mean for future rate cuts? Also on the show, we’ll examine why labor force participation has hovered at around 63% for a few years now.
AI-Generated Pro-North Korean TikToks Are Also Bizarre Ads for Supplements
date: 2024-10-07, from: 404 Media Group
These AI-generated people are big fans of North Korea and of Reus Research’s Nicotinamide Riboside.
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-pro-north-korean-tiktoks-are-also-bizarre-ads-for-supplements/
Aruba to Receive 2024 Internet Archive Hero Award for Groundbreaking Digital Heritage Initiatives
date: 2024-10-07, from: Internet Archive Blog
In a world where digital access to knowledge is increasingly vital, the island nation of Aruba has taken bold steps to ensure its cultural heritage is preserved and accessible for […]
What is “Derivative Work” in the Digital Age?
date: 2024-10-07, from: Authors Union blogs
Ideas and concepts, including “derivative works,” are only important to the extent they elucidate our understanding of the world. When the use of “derivative works” leads to more confusion than clarity, we should be cautious in adopting the new meaning being superimposed on “derivative works.”
https://www.authorsalliance.org/2024/10/07/what-is-derivative-work-in-the-digital-age/
Atos stumbles again as French government says ‘non’ to rescue deal
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ailing IT services giant still in hot pursuit of agreement on Big Data & Security unit
Struggling IT services giant Atos says it is continuing discussions with the French state after failing to reach an agreement for the government to buy key assets from its Big Data & Security (BDS) division.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/atos_french_deal_fails/
Mark Sonoda: Leading NASA’s Path to the Commercialization of Space
date: 2024-10-07, from: NASA breaking news
With over 34 years of experience in human spaceflight, Mark Sonoda has witnessed some of NASA’s most pivotal moments, from the startup of the International Space Station to the retirement of the space shuttle. As the acting associate program manager for the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program (CLDP), he is set to help guide […]
Rival browsers cry foul after Microsoft Edge slips through EU gatekeeper cracks
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Vivaldi and others line up behind Opera to request a rethink
The European Commission’s decision not to designate Microsoft Edge as a core platform service has rival browser makers and engineers up in arms.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/microsoft_edge_eu_gatekeeper/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump Reiterates He Wants to Be a ‘Dictator’ for 'One Day' at Rally.
‘Critical’ CUPS vulnerability chain easy to use for massive DDoS attacks
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Also, rooting for Russian cybercriminals, a new DDoS record, sneaky Linux server malware and more
Infosec In Brief The critical vulnerability in the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) reported last week might have required some very particular circumstances to exploit, but Akamai researchers are warning the same vulnerabilities can easily be exploited for mass DDoS attacks. …
Doing the numbers on campaign promises
date: 2024-10-07, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a new study this morning, looking at how the Harris and Trump campaigns’ spending plans would affect the national debt. Both estimates are pretty dire. We’ll hear the latest. Plus, the global private equity market was worth $579 billion in 2000; today, it’s worth over $8 trillion. But is there trouble ahead for private equity?
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/doing-the-numbers-on-campaign-promises
Florida braces for Hurricane Milton
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Hurricane Milton Takes Aim at Florida
date: 2024-10-07, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Rescue teams have arrived in Bosnia after intense rain triggered flooding and landslides that killed at least 18 people • Phoenix marked its 13th straight day of record heat Sunday • There are three storms churning in the Atlantic simultaneously, which has never happened before this far into hurricane season.
THE TOP FIVE
- Hurricane-battered Florida braces for another dangerous storm
Hurricane Milton is intensifying rapidly in the Atlantic and is expected to become a major hurricane later today. Forecasters believe it will make landfall near Tampa Bay in Florida by Wednesday, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene tore through the area. It could bring a foot of rain, possible more, and 10-15 feet of storm surge. “We expect the storm surge to be worse than what many people experienced during Helene,” said AccuWeather’s lead hurricane expert Alex DaSilva. “This storm has the potential to create a catastrophic storm surge that no one in Tampa has seen in their lifetime.”
AccuWeather
More than 15 million people across southern and central Florida are under flood watches, and a state of emergency has been declared in 51 of the state’s counties. Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management said the state was preparing for “the largest evacuation that we have seen, most likely since 2017, Hurricane Irma.” In a bleak warning, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said those who choose not to evacuate should “write your name in permanent marker on your arm, so that people know who you are when they get to you afterwards.”
- Oil giants reportedly want Trump to keep the IRA
Some large fossil fuel companies have urged Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump not to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he comes into power again in November, The Wall Street Journal reported. The IRA, President Biden’s landmark climate law, provides tax credits for renewable energy and carbon capture projects, including many that these oil giants have heavily invested in. According to the Journal, executives from Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, and Occidental Petroleum have been in discussions with the Trump campaign and congressional allies to make the case for the law, which Trump has called the “Green New Scam” and vowed to roll back. Political strategists told the Journal that Trump may try to “rebrand” the IRA given its popularity among Republican states. A recent report found that nearly 60% of the projects supported by the IRA are based in Republican congressional districts.
- Meanwhile, at BP…
BP has dropped its ambitious 2030 plan to reduce its oil and gas production by 40% and shift to renewables, three sources told Reuters. The company made the commitment in 2020, and had already watered it down last year. Now it has reportedly abandoned the plan entirely and will focus on new investments to increase oil and gas output. Other oil giants including Shell have also walked back their energy transition goals.
Tangentially related: Fossil fuel company Equinor announced this morning it had acquired a 9.8% stake in wind energy giant Orsted. That makes Equinor the firm’s second largest shareholder, behind the Danish government.
- Mexico’s Sheinbaum reiterates focus on ramping up renewables in 1st
speech
In case you missed it: Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, pledged last week to “boost renewable energies” to a 45% share of the country’s total energy mix by 2030. Sheinbaum, who was inaugurated on Tuesday, is a climate scientist, and her ascension has raised hopes among environmentalists that Mexico could ramp up climate action. Sheinbaum made many promises during her campaign but analysts have been skeptical of their staying power because she also promised to carry on the legacy of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who doubled down on fossil fuels. But the strong words during Sheinbaum’s first speech as president “marks a sharp departure” from López Obrador, noted The Associated Press. “The terms ‘sustainability’ or ‘renewable energy’ really never appeared” in his policies, one expert commented. “He didn’t use the term in any speech, in any document. And she has been using it all the time.” Sheinbaum promised to soon unveil her energy transition program focused on “the reduction of greenhouse gases that cause climate change.” Mexico is the only G20 nation that does not have a net zero target.
- WMO water report shows a hydrological cycle in chaos
The World Meteorological Organization published its 2023 State of Global Water Resources report today. It found that more than half of the world’s “river catchments” – watersheds or drainage basins – saw unusual levels of water flow last year. Mostly, there was less water than normal, with “large territories” of North, Central, and South America especially dry and many river flows falling to all-time lows. But in some places, like the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom, there was much more water than normal. These extremes – drought in some places and extreme flooding in others – were reflected in the regional soil moisture and terrestrial water levels. Glaciers lost more than 600 gigatons of water last year, the largest loss registered in the last 50 years. “Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change,” WMO secretary general, Celeste Saulo, told The Guardian. “As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions.”
THE KICKER
“In the U.S., there is a decision being made now – and I’m not a part of it – as to whether to stop making pure ICE for the U.S. market. Just the fact that we’re thinking of that means that, OK, it must be close.” –Gill Pratt, Toyota’s chief scientist, speaking to Bloomberg about the future of the internal combustion engine.
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-milton-florida-tampa
Russian court sentences 72-year-old American to nearly 7 years in prison for fighting in Ukraine
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
MOSCOW — A Russian court on Monday sentenced a 72-year-old American in a closed trial to nearly seven years in prison for allegedly fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.
Prosecutors said Stephen Hubbard signed a contract with the Ukrainian military after Russia sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022 and he fought alongside them until being captured two months later.
He was sentenced to six years and 10 months in a general-security prison. Prosecutors had called for a sentence of seven years in a maximum-security prison.
Hubbard, from the state of Michigan, is the first American known to have been convicted on charges of fighting as a mercenary in the Ukrainian conflict.
The charges carried a potential sentence of 15 years, but prosecutors asked that his age be taken into account along with his admission of guilt, Russian news reports said.
Arrests of Americans have become increasingly common in Russia in recent years. Concern has risen that Russia could be targeting U.S. nationals for arrest to use later as bargaining chips in talks to bring back Russians convicted of crimes in the U.S. and Europe.
Also on Monday, a court in the city of Voronezh sentenced American Robert Gilman to seven years and 1 month for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers while serving a sentence for another assault.
According to Russian news reports, Gilman was arrested in 2022 for causing a disturbance while intoxicated on a passenger train and then assaulted a police officer while in custody. He is serving a 3 1/2-year sentence on that charge.
Last year, he assaulted a prison inspector during a cell check, then hit an official of the Investigative Committee, resulting in the new sentence, state news agency RIA-Novosti said.
The U.S. and Russia in August completed their largest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history, a deal involving 24 people, many months of negotiations and concessions from other European countries, which released Russians in their custody as part of the exchange. Several U.S. citizens remain behind bars in Russia following the swap.
US Supreme Court taking the bench with ghost guns, a capital case and transgender rights on the docket
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S Supreme Court is taking the bench again on Monday, ready to hear cases on ghost guns, a death sentence and transgender rights.
The docket doesn’t have quite as many blockbuster cases as it did last term, when its rulings included an opinion granting broad immunity to former President Donald Trump.
Still, it’s possible that the conservative-majority court could yet be asked to intervene in election disputes after the ballots are cast in November.
The justices also stayed relatively busy during their summer break. The orders they issued on emergency appeals included a refusal to restore President Joe Biden’s student loan plan and a partial approval of an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
The new term also opens against the backdrop of low public trust in the Supreme Court, and continued debate about whether their newly adopted code of ethics should have an enforcement mechanism.
Here’s a look at some of the cases coming up:
Ghost gun regulations
The justices will hear a case Tuesday on regulations for ghost guns, privately made weapons that are hard for police to track because they don’t have a serial number.
The number of the firearms found at crime scenes has soared in recent years, from fewer than 4,000 in 2018 to nearly 20,000 recovered by law enforcement in 2021, according to Justice Department data.
The numbers have been declining in multiple cities since the Biden administration began requiring background checks and age verification for ghost gun kits that can be bought online.
But manufacturers and gun rights groups argue that the administration overstepped and the rule should be overturned.
Doubts about a death sentence
In the decades since Richard Glossip was sentenced to die over a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme, the case has become a rare one where prosecutors are conceding mistakes.
Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general has joined with Glossip in seeking to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence.
Despite those doubts, an Oklahoma appeals court has upheld Glossip’s conviction, and the state’s pardon and parole board deadlocked in a vote to grant him clemency.
The court will hear arguments in his case on Wednesday.
Transgender rights
Perhaps the court’s most closely watched case so far this year is a fight over transgender rights.
The case over state bans on gender-affirming care comes as Republican-led states enact a variety of restrictions, including school sports participation, bathroom usage and drag shows.
The administration and Democratic-led states have extended protections for transgender people, though Supreme Court has separately prohibited the administration from enforcing a new federal regulation that seeks to protect transgender students.
The justices will weigh a Tennessee law that restrict puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. The case does not yet have a hearing date, but will likely be argued in December.
Oil prices rise over Middle East tensions
date: 2024-10-07, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The biggest rise in oil prices for nearly two years was recorded on Friday, as the world watches mounting tensions in the Middle East and how Israel will respond to attacks by Iran. Then, an aging population is straining future growth prospects for Malaysia’s economy. And a British woman who spent nearly half a century wondering why a dream job application went unanswered has finally found out why.
R.I.P. Kris Kristofferson
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/10/07/r-i-p-kris-kristofferson/
Three and Vodafone: We need to merge because our networks are rubbish
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Voda users have to fall back to 2G in some places after 3G switchoff, docs claim
Vodafone and Three UK are desperately trying to convince Britain’s competition regulator to approve their merger, going so far as to denigrate their own network services - at least in some regions - as outdated.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/three_vodafone_merger/
Three and Vodafone: We need to merge because our networks are rubbish
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Voda users have to fall back to 2G in some places after 3G switchoff, docs claim
Vodafone and Three UK are desperately trying to convince Britain’s competition regulator to approve their merger, going so far as to denigrate their own network services - at least in some regions - as outdated.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/three_and_vodafone_we_need/
Nobel Prize in medicine honors American duo for their discovery of microRNA
date: 2024-10-07, from: VOA News USA
STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded Monday to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, tiny pieces of genetic material that alter how genes work at the cellular level and could lead to new ways of treating cancer.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, which awarded the prize, said the duo’s discovery is “proving to be fundamentally important” in understanding how organisms develop and function.
MicroRNA have opened up scientists’ approaches to treating diseases like cancer by helping to regulate how genes work at the cellular level, according to Dr. Claire Fletcher, a lecturer in molecular oncology at Imperial College London.
Fletcher said microRNA provide genetic instructions to tell cells to make new proteins and that there were two main areas where microRNA could be helpful: in developing drugs to treat diseases and in serving as biomarkers.
“MicroRNA alters how genes in the cell work,” said Fletcher, who is an outside expert not associated with the Nobel prize.
“If we take the example of cancer, we’ll have a particular gene working overtime, it might be mutated and working in overdrive,” she said. “We can take a microRNA that we know alters the activity of that gene and we can deliver that particular microRNA to cancer cells to stop that mutated gene from having its effect.”
Ambros performed the research that led to his prize at Harvard University. He is currently a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ruvkun’s research was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, where he’s a professor of genetics, said Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee.
Perlmann said he spoke to Ruvkun by phone shortly before the announcement.
“It took a long time before he came to the phone and sounded very tired, but he quite rapidly was quite excited and happy, when he understood what it was all about,” Perlmann said.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic.
The prize carries a cash award of ($1 million from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
The announcement launched this year’s Nobel prizes award season.
Nobel announcements continue with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Oct. 14.
The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Fletcher said there are clinical trials ongoing to see how microRNA approaches might help treat skin cancer, but that there aren’t yet any drug treatments approved by drug regulators. She expected that might happen in the next five to 10 years.
She said microRNA represent another way of being able to control the behavior of genes to treat and track various diseases.
“The majority of therapies we have at the moment are targeting proteins in cells,” she said. “If we can intervene at the microRNA level, it opens up a whole new way of us developing medicines and us controlling the activity of genes whose levels might be altered in diseases.”
Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A couple of FOSS goodies that should be ready for the festive season
The next version of Xfce, the oldest FOSS Unix desktop environment around, is nearly ready – and should have preliminary, “minimally usable” Wayland support.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/xfce_420_and_mint_221/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Scripting News: Making the social web really work.
http://scripting.com/2024/09/28/132152.html?title=makingTheSocialWebWork
macOS 15.0 now UNIX 03-certified
date: 2024-10-07, from: OS News
You have to wonder how meaningful this news is in 2024, but macOS 15.0 Sequoia running on either Apple Silicon or Intel processors is now UNIX 03-certified. The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4, C Language V2, and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces. ↫ UNIX 03 page The questionable usefulness of this news stems from a variety of factors. The UNIX 03 specification hails from the before time of 2002, when UNIX-proper still had some footholds in the market and being a UNIX meant something to the industry. These days, Linux has pretty much taken over the traditional UNIX market, and UNIX certification seems to have all but lost its value. Only one operating system can boast to conform to the latest UNIX specification – AIX is UNIX V7 and 03-certified – while macOS and HP-UX are only UNIX 03-certified. OpenWare, UnixWare, and z/OS only conform to even older standards. On top of all this, it seems being UNIX-certified by The Open Group feels a lot like a pay-to-play scheme, making it unlikely that community efforts like, say, FreeBSD, Debian, or similarly popular server operating systems could ever achieve UNIX-certification even if they wanted to. This makes the whole UNIX-certification world feel more like the dying vestiges of a job security program than something meaningful for an operating system to aspire to. In any even, you can now write a program that compiles and runs on all two UNIX 03-certified operating systems, as long as it only uses POSIX APIs.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140868/macos-15-0-now-unix-03-certified/
Embattled users worn down by privacy options? Let them eat code
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Struggle ye not with cookies, lest ye become a cookie monster
Opinion The people are defeated. Worn out, deflated, and apathetic about the barrage of banners and pop-ups about cookies and permissions.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/cookie_opinion/
“Lost” 1983 programming language bought on eBay
date: 2024-10-07, from: OS News
A YouTube channel has resurrected a programming language that hadn’t been seen since the 1980s — in a testament to both the enduring power of our technology, and of the communities that care about it. But best of all, Simpson uploaded the language to the Internet Archive, along with all his support materials, inviting his viewers to write their own programs (and saying he hoped his upstairs neighbor would’ve approved). And in our email interview, Simpson said since then it’s already been downloaded over 1,000 times — “which is pretty amazing for something so old.” ↫ David Cassel It’s great that this lost programming language, MicroText for the Commodore 64, was rediscovered, but I’m a bit confused as to how “lost” this language really was. I mean, it was “discovered” in a properly listed eBay listing, which feels like cheating to me. When I think of stories of discoveries of long-lost software, games, or media, it usually involves things like finding it in a shed after years of searching, or someone at a company going through that box of old hard drives discovering the game they worked on 32 years ago. I don’t know, something about this whole story feels off to me, and it’s ringing some alarm bells I can’t quite place. Regardless, it’s cool to have MicroText readily available on the web now, so that people can rediscover it and create awesome new things with it. Perhaps there’s old ideas to be relearned here.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140866/lost-1983-programming-language-bought-on-ebay/
After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
You had one job – doing extra is nice, but dangerous
Who, Me? On Monday, The Register readers have two jobs: survive the day, and read the fresh instalment of Who, Me? – the column based on your less-marvellous moments.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/who_me/
Raspberry Pi SD Cards and the Raspberry Pi Bumper: your new favourite accessories
date: 2024-10-07, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Two accessories we wonder how we managed without: Class A2 Raspberry Pi SD Cards, and the snap-on Raspberry Pi Bumper.
The post Raspberry Pi SD Cards and the Raspberry Pi Bumper: your new favourite accessories appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/sd-cards-and-bumper/
If Dell’s Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast
date: 2024-10-07, updated: 2024-10-07, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Despite amazing battery life and lovely speed, this one has flaws that may annoy
Desktop Tourism Across the 30 years I’ve used laptop PCs, they’ve always made me anxious about battery life. Dell’s XPS 13 9345 Copilot+ PC powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite X is the first Windows PC to relieve me of that worry and let me confidently leave my desk for a full working day without carrying any charging apparatus whatsoever – but it still has unwelcome baggage.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/07/dell_qualcomm_powered_copilot_pc/
Domains For The Masses
date: 2024-10-07, from: Tedium site
The tale of the founder of GoDaddy, a Vietnam vet who figured out the formula for getting regular people to buy domain names.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16835496/bob-parsons-godaddy-founder-interview
GSoC 2024: 3-way comparison intrinsics
date: 2024-10-07, from: LLVM Blog
Hello everyone! My name is Volodymyr, and in this post I would like to talk about the project I have been working on for the past couple of months as part of Google Summer of Code 2024. The aim of the project was to introduce 3-way comparison intrinsics to LLVM IR and add a decent level of optimizations for them.
Background
Three-way comparison is an operation present in many high-level
languages, such as C++ and its spaceship operator or Rust and the
Ord trait. It operates on two values for which there is a
defined comparison operation and returns -1 if the first
operand is less than the second, 0 if they are equal, and
1 otherwise. At the moment, compilers that use LLVM express
this operation using different sequences of instructions which are
optimized and lowered individually rather than as a single operation.
Adding an intrinsic for this operation would therefore help us generate
better machine code on some targets, as well as potentially optimize
patterns in the middle-end that we didn’t optimize before.
What was done
Over the course of the project I have added two new intrinsics to the
LLVM IR: llvm.ucmp for an unsigned 3-way comparison and
llvm.scmp for a signed comparison. They both take two
arguments that must be integers or vectors of integers and return an
integer or a vector of integers with the same number of elements. The
arguments and the result do not need to have the same type.
In the middle-end the following passes received some support for these intrinsics:
- InstSimplify (#1, #2)
- InstCombine (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5)
- CorrelatedValuePropagation
- ConstraintElimination
I have also added folds of idiomatic ways that a 3-way comparison can be expressed to a call to the corresponding intrinsic.
In the backend there are two different ways of expanding the intrinsics:
as a nested
select (i.e. (x < y) ? -1 : (x > y ? 1 : 0)) or
as a
subtraction of zero-extended comparisons (zext(x > y) -
zext(x < y)). The second option is the default one, but
targets can choose to use the first one through a TLI hook.
Results
I think that overall the project was successful and brought a small positive change to LLVM. To demonstrate its impact in a small test case, the following function in C++ that uses the spaceship operator was compiled twice, first with Clang 18.1 and then with Clang built from the main branch of LLVM repository:
#include <compare>std::strong_ordering cmp(unsigned int a, unsigned int b){ return a <=> b;}With Clang 18.1:
; ====== LLVM IR ======define i8 @cmp(i32 %a, i32 %b) {entry: %cmp.lt = icmp ult i32 %a, %b %sel.lt = select i1 %cmp.lt, i8 -1, i8 1 %cmp.eq = icmp eq i32 %a, %b %sel.eq = select i1 %cmp.eq, i8 0, i8 %sel.lt ret i8 %sel.eq}; ====== x86_64 assembly ======cmp: xor ecx, ecx cmp edi, esi mov eax, 0 sbb eax, eax or al, 1 cmp edi, esi movzx eax, al cmove eax, ecx retWith freshly built Clang:
; ====== LLVM IR ======define i8 @cmp(i32 %a, i32 %b) {entry: %sel.eq = tail call i8 @llvm.ucmp.i8.i32(i32 %a, i32 %b) ret i8 %sel.eq}; ====== x86_64 assembly ======cmp: cmp edi, esi seta al sbb al, 0 ret
As you can see, the number of instructions in the generated code had
gone down considerably (from 8 to 3 excluding ret).
Although this isn’t much and is a small synthetic test, it can still
make a noticeable impact if code like this is found in a hot path
somewhere.
The impact of these changes on real-world code is much harder to quantify. Looking at llvm-opt-benchmark, there are quite a few places where the intrinsics are being used, which suggests that some improvement must have taken place, although it is unlikely to be significant in all but very few cases.
Future Work
There are still many opportunities for optimization in the middle-end, some of which are already known and being worked on at the time of writing this, others are yet to be discovered. I would also like to allow pointers and vectors of pointers to be valid operands for the intrinsics, although that would be quite a minor change. In the backend I would also like to work on better handling of intrinsics in GlobalISel, which is something that I didn’t have enough time for and other members of LLVM community had helped me with.
Acknowledgements
None of this would have been possible without my two amazing mentors, Nikita Popov and Dhruv Chawla, and the LLVM community as a whole. Thank you for helping me on this journey and I am looking forward to working with you in the future.
https://blog.llvm.org/posts/2024-08-29-gsoc-three-way-comparison/