News gathered 2024-10-10
(date: 2024-10-10 20:59:25)
Healthcare attacks spread beyond US – just ask India’s Star Health
date: 2024-10-11, updated: 2024-10-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Acknowledges bulk customer data leak weeks after Telegram channels dangled it online
Leading Indian health insurance provider Star Health has admitted to being the victim of a cyber attack after criminals claimed they had posted records of 30-milion-plus clients online.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/star_health_breach/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-11, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Zero to internet: your first website.
https://htmlforpeople.com/zero-to-internet-your-first-website/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-11, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
2022: Markdown is just enough HTML.
http://scripting.com/2022/08/25/210902.html
US calls operations ‘targeted’ as Israel strikes central Beirut
date: 2024-10-11, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-calls-operations-targeted-as-israel-strikes-central-beirut/7818583.html
12 rescued from Colorado gold mine where elevator mishap killed 1 person
date: 2024-10-11, from: VOA News USA
denver — Twelve people were rescued Thursday night after being trapped for about six hours at the bottom of a former Colorado gold mine when an elevator malfunctioned at the tourist site, authorities said. One person died in the accident.
The elevator was descending into the Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine near the town of Cripple Creek when it had a mechanical problem around 150 meters beneath the surface, creating a “severe danger for the participants,” and one person was killed, Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell said.
The 12 adults who were trapped were about 305 meters below ground, but they had access to water and the atmosphere was considered good. They were safe and in communication with authorities with radios while waiting, Mikesell said.
They were in good spirits after they were rescued, and authorities gave them pizza once they were out and told them everything that had happened, he said. While at the bottom, authorities had told them only that there was an elevator issue.
Mikesell said during a nighttime briefing that authorities do not know yet what caused the malfunction and an investigation is underway. Engineers worked to make sure the elevator was working safely again before bringing the stranded visitors back up on it. They had been prepared to bring them up by rope if necessary, had they not been able to get the elevator fixed.
Mikesell declined to reveal the identification of the victim.
The incident, which was reported to authorities at about noon, happened during the final week of the Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine season before it shuts down for the winter, Mikesell said.
Earlier in the afternoon — while the 12 were stuck at the bottom — 11 other people who were riding the elevator were rescued. Four had minor injuries. The sheriff did not elaborate on how they were injured.
The elevator ride typically takes about two minutes, travelling about 152 meters per minute, according to the mine’s website.
Mikesell said the last time there was an incident was in the 1980s when a couple of people were trapped on the elevator. Nobody died in that incident.
Mines that operate as tourist attractions in Colorado must designate someone to inspect the mines and the transportation systems daily, according to the state Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety. Mikesell said he didn’t know the date of the last inspection. Records of the inspections weren’t immediately available online.
Gov. Jared Polis sent state resources including a mine rescue team.
Cripple Creek is a town of about 1,100 in the Rocky Mountains southwest of Colorado Springs.
The mine opened in the 1800s and closed in 1961, but still operates tours. Its website describes a one-hour tour in which visitors descend 304 meters. It says they can see veins of gold in the rock and ride an underground tram.
A woman named Mollie Kathleen Gortner discovered the site of the mine in 1891 when she saw quartz laced with gold, according to the company’s website.
Chinese boffins build soft robot finger that can take your pulse
date: 2024-10-11, updated: 2024-10-11, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
It can also type, so the robo-doctor can heal you and write legibly
Robot hands are commonplace, but their sense of touch is crude compared to that of a human. A design proposed by a group of scientists in the Middle Kingdom may change that.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/soft_robot_finger/
Afghan charged in Election Day terror plot passed multiple screenings
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
washington — The Afghan national charged in a plot to carry out an Election Day terror attack in the United States passed multiple background checks before being allowed to enter the country, U.S. officials told VOA.
FBI agents arrested Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on Monday, alleging he and a juvenile co-conspirator had been in contact with a recruiter for the Islamic State terror group and had been planning to die in a mass shooting.
Court documents also stated that Tawhedi hoped to relocate most of his family, including his wife and 1-year-old daughter, back to Afghanistan to live according to what he described as “pure Islam.”
However, U.S. officials, speaking to VOA on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of a case still under investigation, said Thursday that there were no indications Tawhedi was sympathetic to the Islamic State, also known as IS, ISIS or Daesh, either when he worked for the United States in Afghanistan or when he was screened immediately before to coming to the U.S. three years ago.
“Every Afghan being resettled in the United States undergoes a rigorous screening and vetting process, no matter which [U.S.] agency they worked with,” the official said.
“That process includes checking against a full range of relevant U.S. records and holdings,” the official added. “Tawhedi would not have been admitted to the United States had information of concern surfaced.”
Kinds of data
A second U.S. official told VOA that Tawhedi’s vetting included checks that involved both biometric data collected by the U.S. Department of Defense and the FBI, and classified information held by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Subsequent screenings that allowed him to be approved for a Special Immigrant Visa after he entered the U.S. also came up clean.
“Vetting is a point-in-time check that evaluates information available to the U.S. government at that time,” the official said.
The second official also said the government can take additional actions “if individuals who have entered the country are later found to be associated with information indicating a potential national security or public safety concern.”
NBC News, which first reported that Tawhedi’s background checks failed to detect any red flags, quoted sources as saying he had worked as a security guard for the CIA before being resettled in the U.S.
When reached by VOA, the CIA declined comment.
But the arrest has raised concerns among some U.S. lawmakers.
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Representative Mark Green, sent a letter Wednesday to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security demanding more information.
“These recent arrests raise serious concerns about the ongoing threat that ISIS and its fanatical supporters pose to U.S. national security, as well as the shortfall in the Biden-Harris administration’s screening and vetting capabilities,” Green wrote.
“Additionally, news of these potential Afghan terrorists comes when only months ago, it was widely reported that eight Tajikistanis with ties to ISIS were arrested in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia after they had illegally crossed the border,” Green added.
The FBI confirmed receipt of Green’s letter but declined further comment.
A Homeland Security spokesperson did not comment on the letter but described the vetting process for Afghans fleeing Taliban rule as “multilayered.”
“Afghan evacuees who sought to enter the United States were subject to multilayered screening and vetting against intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism information,” the spokesperson told VOA in an email. “If new information emerges after arrival, appropriate action is taken.”
When was he radicalized?
But in the case of Tawhedi, questions remain.
“What’s not clear from the information currently available is exactly when Tawhedi was radicalized to the Islamic State ideology,” said Austin Doctor, the director of counterterrorism research initiatives at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center (NCITE).
“We don’t know yet whether he radicalized after arriving to the United States or if he already held pro-ISIS beliefs prior to leaving Afghanistan,” Doctor told VOA. “This matters.”
According to court documents, a search of Tawhedi’s phone and social media accounts showed he had been doing internet searches to find and consume IS propaganda, though when that started is not clear.
The earliest date for any involvement with IS, according to the criminal complaint filed Monday, is sometime around March of this year, when Tawhedi made two cryptocurrency transfers worth at least $540 to what prosecutors described as a charity that fronts for IS.
About four months later, in July, someone made a video recording – saved to Tawhedi’s phone – of Tawhedi reading to a nephew and his daughter about the rewards waiting for martyrs in the afterlife.
The first indications of a possible terror plot emerged that same month, when the FBI said Tawhedi did online searches about webcams for the White House and the Washington Monument, as well as about procuring guns.
It also remains unclear whether Tawhedi’s Islamic State contact was working for the group’s Afghan affiliate, known as IS-Khorasan or ISIS-K.
“We’ve seen ISIS-K make a concerted effort to recruit from diaspora communities,” NCITE’s Doctor told VOA. “And facilitating external operations and inspiring homegrown violent extremist attacks are both prominent elements of the group’s playbook.”
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
iPhone 16 Pro or Pro Max?
https://doc.searls.com/2024/10/10/iphone-16-pro-or-pro-max/
Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Up to $100 for planning to vote and a public smear – how is this not illegal?
The troublemakers behind the party game Cards Against Humanity have launched a campaign demonstrating how easy it is to buy sensitive personal data about American voters, while simultaneously encouraging those Americans to plan how to cast a vote in the upcoming presidential election.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/cards_against_humanity_us_election/
MINISFORUM EliteMini AI370 mini PC with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 goes up for pre-order October 28
date: 2024-10-10, from: Liliputing
The MINISFORUM EliteMini AI370 is a 5.12″ x 5″ x 1.85″ computer powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 “Strix Point” 12-core processor with Radeon 890M integrated graphics and a Ryzen AI NPU that delivers up to 50 TOPS of AI performance. It’s one of only a handful of mini PCs announced to feature […]
The post MINISFORUM EliteMini AI370 mini PC with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 goes up for pre-order October 28 appeared first on Liliputing.
Crooks stole personal info of 77k Fidelity Investments customers
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But hey, no worries, the firm claims no evidence of data misuse
Fidelity Investments has notified 77,099 people that their personal information was stolen in an August data breach. …
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/fidelity_investment_data_breach/
A Rare Monet Painting Has Been Returned to the Family of Its Rightful Owners—Eight Decades After It Was Stolen by the Nazis
date: 2024-10-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The Gestapo seized the Impressionist painting from storage after its owners fled from their home in Vienna. Now, the piece has been returned to their granddaughters
This $120 fanless mini PC features two 2.5 GbE LAN ports and support for dual displays
date: 2024-10-10, from: Liliputing
The SZBOX H9 mini PC is a small fanless computer featuring a 6-watt Intel N100 quad-core processor, support for up to 16GB of DDR5-4800 memory, and a PCIe or SATA SSD. It’s also positioned as a device that can be used as a firewall, server, or for other networking applications thanks to two 2.5 GbE LAN […]
The post This $120 fanless mini PC features two 2.5 GbE LAN ports and support for dual displays appeared first on Liliputing.
Sail Along with NASA’s Solar Sail Tech Demo in Real-Time Simulation
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA invites the public to virtually sail along with the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System‘s space journey using NASA’s “Eyes on the Solar System” visualization tool, a digital model of the solar system. This simulation shows the real-time positions of the planets, moons, and spacecraft – including NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. Solar sails use the pressure […]
GSA plows ahead with face matching tech despite its own reliability concerns
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A week after saying remote ID verification tech is unreliable, the GSA is expanding access to other agencies
The US government's General Services Administration's (GSA) facial matching login service is now generally available to the public and other federal agencies, despite its own recent report admitting the tech is far from perfect.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/gsa_plows_ahead_with_face/
Meet Milagra, a Rare Condor Rescued as an Egg and Newly Released Back Into the Wild
date: 2024-10-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Milagra, Spanish for “miracle,” was hatched and raised in captivity by foster condor parents after her mother died of avian flu in April 2023
Igniting Inspiration: Jennifer Becerra’s STEM Legacy at Johnson
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
Jennifer Becerra has nearly three decades of experience in education, both in the classroom and within the NASA community. Leading a team dedicated to fostering a passion for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), she develops programs that inspire students and educators alike. Whether coordinating internships or organizing engagement events, Becerra creates educational opportunities to […]
NASA Awards Aerospace Research, Technology, and Simulations Contract
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has selected Metis Technology Solutions Inc. of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to provide engineering services as well as develop and maintain software and hardware used to conduct simulations for aerospace research and development across the agency. The Aerospace Research, Technology, and Simulations (ARTS) contract is a hybrid cost-plus-fixed-fee and firm-fixed-price contract with an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity component […]
Apple TV+ in Amazon Prime Video
date: 2024-10-10, from: Michael Tsai
Jess Weatherbed: Amazon is adding Apple TV Plus to Prime Video, a move that could help bolster the iPhone maker’s languishing streaming service. Apple TV Plus will be available on Prime Video in the US later this month as a $9.99 monthly add-on — the same you’d otherwise pay directly to Apple. The difference now […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/10/apple-tv-in-amazon-prime-video/
Internet Archive Hacked
date: 2024-10-10, from: Michael Tsai
Lawrence Abrams (Hacker News): Internet Archive’s “The Wayback Machine” has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records.[…]Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive’s authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/10/internet-archive-hacked/
Apple Passwords’ Generated Strong Password Format
date: 2024-10-10, from: Michael Tsai
Ricky Mondello (Mastodon): To make these passwords easier to type on suboptimal keyboard layouts like my colleague’s game controller, where the mode switching might be difficult, these new passwords are actually dominated by lowercase characters. And to make it easier to short-term have in your head little chunks of it to bring over to the […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/10/apple-passwords-generated-strong-password-format/
Sequoia Security Scoped Bookmarks Bug
date: 2024-10-10, from: Michael Tsai
Matthias Gansrigler: If you’re using Yoink on macOS Sequoia, you might have encountered an issue where Yoink would not accept any files anymore.[…]Basically any app that handles file URLs and saves them as a security-scoped bookmark for later access can be bitten by this bug, currently occurring on macOS 15.0 and 15.0.1. DTS Engineer: What […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/10/sequoia-security-scoped-bookmarks-bug/
Revolutionary War Diplomacy: Lessons for Today
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: RAND blog
In the Revolutionary War, diplomacy was essential for U.S. survival. Adept diplomacy remains no less important to help the United States navigate new risks and opportunities.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/10/revolutionary-war-diplomacy-lessons-for-today.html
The NES game console has an unused expansion port, this NES Hub project could put it to use
date: 2024-10-10, from: Liliputing
Nintendo’s first home game console to launch in North America was an 8-bit system with support for up to two removable controllers and a 15-pin expansion port on the bottom. But Nintendo never actually released any accessories for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) that use the expansion port. Over the years, some hardware hackers have […]
The post The NES game console has an unused expansion port, this NES Hub project could put it to use appeared first on Liliputing.
Microsoft admits Outlook crashes, says impact ‘mitigated’
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Users just need to 'refresh/restart' their sessions
Microsoft's Outlook app is crashing for European users due to memory problems, Redmond has warned, and evidence suggests the problems are spreading to the US.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/microsoft_outlook_outage/
NASA Highlights Low Earth Orbit, Sustainability at Space Conference
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy will lead the agency’s delegation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) from Monday, Oct. 14, to Thursday, Oct. 17, in Milan. During the congress, NASA will discuss its Low Earth Orbit Microgravity Strategy, emphasizing the agency’s efforts to advance microgravity science, technology, and exploration. The agency […]
FEMA Forces Storm-Wrecked Homeowners to Choose: Build Up or Move Out?
date: 2024-10-10, from: Heatmap News
After the storm, we rebuild. That’s the mantra repeated by residents, businesses and elected officials after any big storm. Hurricane Milton may have avoided the worst case scenario of a direct hit on the Tampa Bay area, but communities south of Tampa experienced heavy flooding just a couple weeks after being hit by Hurricane Helene.
While the damage is still being assessed in Sarasota County’s barrier islands, homes that require extensive renovations will almost certainly run up against what is known as the 50% rule — or, in Southwest Florida, the “dreaded 50% rule.”
In flood zone-situated communities eligible to receive insurance from the National Flood Insurance Program, any renovations to repair “substantial damage” — defined as repairs whose cost exceeds 50% of the value of the structure (not the land, which can often be quite valuable due to its proximity to the water) — must bring the entire structure “into compliance with current local floodplain management standards.” In practice, this typically means elevating the home above what FEMA defines as the area’s “base flood elevation,” which is the level that a “100-year-flood” would reach, plus some amount determined by the building code.
The rule almost invites conflict. Because just as much as local communities and homeowners want to restore things to the way they were, the federal government doesn’t want to insure structures that are simply going to get destroyed. On Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall, the base flood elevation ranges from 7 feet to 9 feet, meaning that elevating a home to comply with flood codes could be beyond the means — or at least the insurance payouts — of some homeowners.
“You got a 1952 house that’s 1,400 square feet, and you get 4 feet of water,” Jeff Brandes, a former state legislator and president of the Florida Policy Project, told me on Wednesday, explaining how the rule could have played out in Tampa. “That means new kitchens and new bathrooms, all new flooring and baseboards and drywall to 4 or 5 feet.” That kind of claim could easily run to $150,000, which might well surpass the FEMA threshold. “Now all of the sudden you get into the 50% rule that you have the entire house up to current code levels. But then you have to do another half-a-million above what [insurance] paid you.”
Simple probability calculations show that a 100-year flood (which is really a flood elevation that has a 1-in-100 chance of occurring every year) has a more than 25% chance of occurring during the lifetime of a mortgage. If you browse Siesta Key real estate on Zillow, much of it is given a 100% chance of flooding sometime over the course of a 30-year mortgage, according to data analysis by First Street.
Sarasota County as a whole has around 62,000 NFIP policies with some
$16.6 billion in total coverage (although more than 80% percent of
households have
no
flood insurance at all). Considering that flood insurance is
required
in high-risk areas for federally-backed mortgages and for new homeowners
insurance policies
written
by Florida’s state backed property insurer of last resort,
Citizens, FEMA is likely to take a close interest in whether communities
affected by Milton and Helene are complying with its rules.
If 2022’s Hurricane Ian is any indication, squabbles over the 50% rule are almost certain to emerge — and soon.
Earlier this year, FEMA told Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Cape Coral, that it was rescinding the discount its residents and a handful of towns within it receive on flood insurance because, the agency claimed, more than 600 homeowners had violated the 50% rule after Hurricane Ian. Following an outcry from local officials and congressional representatives, FEMA restored the discount.
In their efforts to avoid triggering the rule, homeowners are hardly rogue actors. Local governments often actively assist them.
FEMA had initiated a similar procedure in Lee County the year before, threatening to drop homeowners from the flood insurance program for using possibly inaccurate appraisals to avoid the 50% rule before eventually relenting. The Fort Myers News Press reported that the appraisals were provided by the county, which was deliberately “lowering the amount that residents could use to calculate their repairs or rebuilds” to avoid triggering the rule.
Less than a month after Ian swept through Southwest Florida, Cape Coral advised residents to delay and slow down repairs for the same reason, as the rule there applied to money spent on repairs over the course of a year. Some highly exposed coastal communities in Pinellas County have been adjusting their “lookback rules” — the period over which repairs are totaled to see if they hit the 50% rule — to make them shorter so homeowners are less likely to have to make the substantive repairs required.
This followed similar actions by local governments in Charlotte County. As the Punta Gordon Sun put it, “City Council members learned the federal regulation impacts its homeowners — and they decided to do something about it.” In the Sarasota County community of North Port, local officials scrapped a rule that added up repair costs over a five-year period to make it possible for homeowners to rebuild without triggering elevation requirements.
When the 50% rule “works,” it can lead to the communities most affected by big storms being fundamentally changed, both in terms of the structures that are built and who occupies them.The end result of the rebuilding following Helene and Milton — or the next big storm to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast — or the one after that, and so on — may be wealthier homeowners in more resilient homes essentially serving as a flood barrier for everyone else, and picking up more of the bill if the waters rise too high again.
Florida’s Gulf Coast has long been seen as a place where the middle class can afford beachfront property. Elected officials’ resistance to the FEMA rule only goes to show just how important keeping a lid on the cost of living — quite literally, the cost of legally inhabiting a structure — is to the voters and residents they represent.
Still, said Brandes, “There’s the right way to come out of this thing. The wrong way is to build exactly back what you built before.”
https://heatmap.news/economy/fema-flood-50-percent-rule
World-First Stem Cell Treatment Reverses Diabetes for a Patient in China, Study Suggests
date: 2024-10-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Scientists converted the patient’s own cells into blood sugar-regulating cell clusters before injecting them back into her abdomen—and one year later, she still doesn’t need insulin injections
BBC weather glitch shows 13k mph winds in London, 404℃ in Nottingham
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
We'd know if it were true, and our reporters are just fine
Those who rely on the BBC's online weather forecasts to plan their day would be forgiven if they woke up this morning and thought the world was ending, but those 13,508 mile-an-hour winds in London and 404℃ lows forecasted for Nottingham tomorrow are an obvious error.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/bbc_weather_error_predicts_lows/
Han Kang Becomes the First South Korean Author to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature
date: 2024-10-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Best known for “The Vegetarian,” the novelist and poet was praised for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”
First Greenhouse Gas Plumes Detected With NASA-Designed Instrument
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally. Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections […]
https://www.nasa.gov/earth/first-greenhouse-gas-plumes-detected-with-nasa-designed-instrument/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Putin Has Convinced Trump He's Keeping Trump's Weakness Secret.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/10/10/donald-trump-bednurse-to-vladimir-putin/
Ring Around the Mountain
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
On June 10, 2023, the Operational Land Imager on Landsat 8 acquired this image of Mount Taranaki, a snow-capped mountain in New Zealand that is ringed by a dark green forest. Two older and extinct volcanoes, Kaitake and Pouakai, lie to the northwest of its peak. Learn more about Mount Taranaki. Image Credit: NASA/Wanmei Liang, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/ring-around-the-mountain/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How the fediverse could work. 1. Copy the URL of a post from one site. 2. Paste it into a post on another site. That's how you open a wormhole into another universe.
https://www.threads.net/@sandibachom/post/DA8wWXlBeS7
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How the fediverse could work.
- Copy the URL of a post from one site.
- Paste it into a post on another site.
That's how you open a wormhole to another universe.
Highly intuitive. Easy for everyone. You just need a format for embedding a post from one sphere in another sphere.
- Paste it into a post on another site.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The FBI conducted a sham investigation into Brett Kavanaugh.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
What’s Next for the Phillies After Their 2024 NLDS Game 4 Loss?
AMD pumps Epyc core count to 192, clocks up to 5 GHz with Turin debut
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Just not on the same chip, of course
Intel's 128-core Granite Rapids Xeons are barely two weeks old and AMD has already fired back with a family of fifth-gen Epycs that boast double-digit IPC gains with up to 192 cores or clock speeds as high as 5 GHz.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/amd_epyc_turin/
AMD targets Nvidia H200 with 256GB MI325X AI chips, zippier MI355X due in H2 2025
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Less VRAM than promised, but still gobs more than Hopper
AMD boosted the VRAM on its Instinct accelerators to 256 GB of HBM3e with the launch of its next-gen MI325X AI accelerators during its Advancing AI event in San Francisco on Thursday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/amd_mi325x_ai_gpu/
AMD launches Ryzen AI PRO 300 series chips for business
date: 2024-10-10, from: Liliputing
AMD’s new Ryzen AI PRO 300 series processors are based on the same Strix Point architecture as the Ryzen AI 300 consumer chips that the company launched earlier this year, but the new PRO versions bring enterprise security and management features. The chip maker is also introducing its first 8-core Strix Point processor as part […]
The post AMD launches Ryzen AI PRO 300 series chips for business appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/amd-launches-ryzen-ai-pro-300-series-chips-for-business/
AMD aims latest processors at AI whether you need it or not
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ryzen AI PRO 300 series leans heavily on Microsoft's Copilot+ PC requirements
AMD has introduced its latest processors designed for business applications. The line-up includes the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375, Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, and Ryzen AI 7 HX PRO 360. Built on AMD's Zen 5 microarchitecture, the devices aim for high performance and advanced AI capabilities for enterprises.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/amd_ryzen_ai_pro_300_series/
Florida residents take shelter, lean on federal program for assistance
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
When major disasters like hurricanes and floods hit the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, coordinates major rescue efforts that would overwhelm local officials. VOA’s Jessica Stone reports on how the agency works.
What Happens to a Landfill in a Hurricane?
date: 2024-10-10, from: Heatmap News
In the coming days and weeks, as Floridians and others in storm-ravaged communities clean up from Hurricane Milton, trucks will carry all manner of storm-related detritus — chunks of buildings, fences, furniture, even cars — to the same place all their other waste goes: the local landfill. But what about the landfill itself? Does this gigantic trash pile take to the air and scatter Dorito bags and car parts alike around the surrounding region?
No, thankfully. As Richard Meyers, the director of land management services at the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, assured me, all landfill waste is covered with soil on “at least a weekly basis,” and certainly right before a hurricane, preventing the waste from being kicked up. “Aerodynamically, [the storm is] rolling over that covered waste. It’s not able to blow six inches of cover soil from the top of the waste.”
But just because a landfill won’t turn into a mass of airborne dirt and half-decomposed projectiles doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. Because landfills — especially large ones — often contain more advanced infrastructure such as gas collection systems, which prevent methane from being vented into the atmosphere, and drainage systems, which collect contaminated liquid that’s pooled at the bottom of the waste pile and send it off for treatment. Meyers told me that getting these systems back online after a storm if they’ve been damaged is “the most critical part, from our standpoint.”
A flood-inundated gas collection system can mean more methane escaping into the air, and storm-damaged drainage pipes can lead to waste liquids leaking into the ground and potentially polluting water sources. The latter was a major concern in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria destroyed a landfill’s waste liquid collection system in the Municipality of Juncos in 2017.
As for methane, calculating exactly how much could be released as a result of a dysfunctional landfill gas collection system requires accounting for myriad factors such as the composition of the waste and the climate that it’s in, but the back of the envelope calculations don’t look promising. The Southeast County Landfill near Tampa, for instance, emitted about 100,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2022, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (although a Harvard engineering study from earlier this year suggests that this may be a significant underestimate). The EPA estimates that gas collection systems are about 75% effective, which means that the landfill generates a total of about 400,000 metric tons of CO2-worth of methane. If Southeast County Landfill’s gas collection system were to go down completely for even a day, that would mean extra methane emissions of roughly 822 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That difference amounts to the daily emissions of more than 65,000 cars.
That’s a lot of math. But the takeaway is: Big landfills in the pathway of a destructive storm could end up spewing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. And keep in mind that these numbers are just for one hypothetical landfill with a gas collection system that goes down for one day. The emissions numbers, you can imagine, start to look much worse if you consider the possibility that floodwaters could impede access to infrastructure for even longer.
So stay strong out there, landfills of Florida. You may not be the star of this show, but you’ve got our attention.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/hurricane-milton-landfills
Hurricane disinformation leads to danger, experts say
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Disinformation and conspiracy theories have spread quickly in response to natural disasters in the southeastern United States, creating distrust in the government response, according to the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a Tuesday call.
The spread of lies surrounding the natural disasters comes at a time when social media infrastructure will allow “virtually any claim” to amplify and spread, experts say.
Hurricane Helene left more than 200 people dead and many more injured or without power, and Hurricane Milton has left at least four dead after ravaging Florida, according to the Associated Press.
Some frequently spread falsehoods include accusations that FEMA prevented Florida evacuations and claims that funding for storm victims was instead given to undocumented migrants.
Such misinformation is “demoralizing” to first responders, Criswell said in the press call.
Additionally, the fabrications could put first responders and residents of impacted areas in even more danger, according to Matthew Baum, a Harvard University professor who focuses on fake news and misinformation.
“When you’re talking about life-and-death situations, [misinformation] can cause people not to take advantage of help that’s available to them, and it can also be dangerous for first responders who are being accused of all sorts of badness,” Baum told VOA. “And if first responders start to worry about their own safety, that’s going to undermine how they do their jobs.”
Many of the other falsehoods stem from former President Donald Trump’s campaign and allies.
In an October 3 rally, the former president falsely claimed that the Biden-Harris administration was diverting FEMA funding to house illegal migrants.
Last week, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, claimed that “they control the weather” in a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. She did not specify who “they” are.
To combat popular conspiracies surrounding hurricane relief efforts, FEMA launched a “Hurricane Rumor Response” webpage to “help correct rumors and provide accurate information,” according to a press release.
Baum, however, told VOA that those who believe the false claims may not be swayed by the government-funded website, as they are already “deep down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking.”
“I don’t think the website will have a significant effect, but it’s still worth doing because journalists read it and having that information out there gets it into the news ecosystem,” Baum said. “But fundamentally, it’s not likely to reach many of the people that are at risk of being harmed by this disinformation.”
FEMA put up a similar rumor response webpage during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
On social media platforms such as X, misinformation tends to spread faster than true stories, a 2018 MIT study found. False news stories are 70% more likely to be reposted than true ones are.
Media scholar Matt Jordan told VOA the vast amount of disinformation circulating is part of a “firehose of falsehood” strategy, in which bad actors publish so much “garbage” that people don’t know what to believe.
“It’s a way of eliminating the capacity for the press to help generate democratic consensus by just putting so much garbage into the zone,” the Penn State professor said.
U.S. President Joe Biden said during a Tuesday morning briefing that this misinformation “misleads” the public.
“It’s un-American, it really is,” he said in his remarks. “People are scared to death; people know their lives are at stake.”
https://www.voanews.com/a/hurricane-disinformation-leads-to-danger-experts-say/7817837.html
You Could See Dazzling Auroras Tonight as ‘Strong’ Solar Storm Hits. Here’s What to Know
date: 2024-10-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Predicted to bring the northern lights as far south as parts of California and Alabama, a large coronal mass ejection from the sun collided with our planet Thursday morning
OS/2 TCPBEUI name resolution
date: 2024-10-10, from: OS News
Sometimes I have the following problem to deal with: An OS/2 system uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP (aka TCPBEUI) and should communicate with a SMB server (likewise using TCPBEUI) on a different subnet. This does not work on OS/2 out of the box without a little bit of help. ↫ Michal Necasek My 40° fever certainly isn’t helping, but goes way over my head. Still, it seems like an invaluable article for a small group of people, and anyone playing with OS/2 and networking from here on out can refer back this excellent and detailed explanation.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140896/os-2-tcpbeui-name-resolution/
38C3: Call for Participation hat begonnen
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-11, from: Chaos Computer Club Updates
Die Vorbereitungen für den 38. Chaos Communication Congress sind im vollen Gange und wir freuen uns, euch dazu einzuladen, mit uns das Konferenzprogramm auf den Bühnen zu gestalten, das von Zehntausenden in den Sälen und an den Streams verfolgt wird.
https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2024/38c3-call-for-participation
Lunar Autonomy Mobility Pathfinder: An OTPS-Sponsored Workshop
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
OVERVIEW NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS), is hosting a Lunar Autonomy Mobility Pathfinder (LAMP) workshop on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, to provide a community forum to discuss modeling and simulation testbeds in this domain. NASA’s agency chief technologist is organizing the event in coordination with the Space Technology Mission Directorate. With the Artemis […]
https://www.nasa.gov/organizations/otps/lunar-autonomy-mobility-pathfinder-workshop/
Asahi Linux brings support for AAA gaming to Apple Silicon Macs running Linux
date: 2024-10-10, from: Liliputing
When Apple’s laptop and desktop computers were shipping with Intel processors, it was relatively easy to port GNU/Linux distributions to run on Apple hardware. Things got trickier when the company switched to designing its own chips in-house. But the folks behind the Asahi Linux team have been busy reverse engineering Apple’s M series processors for […]
The post Asahi Linux brings support for AAA gaming to Apple Silicon Macs running Linux appeared first on Liliputing.
The .io domain isn’t going anywhere anytime soon amid treaty
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
UK-Mauritius handshake holds but Chagos Islands shift could eventually phase out the ccTLD
The .io country code top-level domain (ccTLD) will not disappear anytime soon, at least not within the next five years. Beyond that, its future is uncertain.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/io_domain_uk_mauritius/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Pyramid Flow open source AI video generator launches.
Blinken builds ties with Thailand, Malaysia after turbulence
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
VIENTIANE, LAOS — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced hope Thursday for cooperation with Thailand and Malaysia after recent turbulence as he met their prime ministers at an Asia summit.
In a shift of focus after exhaustive diplomacy on the Middle East crisis, Blinken is representing the United States in Laos at the annual East Asia Summit, which President Joe Biden is skipping for the second straight year.
Blinken met Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the 38-year-old heir of a political dynasty who took over a month ago after her predecessor was ousted and the main opposition party dissolved.
Blinken said the United States hoped to work with Shinawatra to “focus on things that we can do to better the lives of our people,” including on the economy, security and climate change.
“The two countries have such an extraordinary history together, and we simply want to build on it,” Blinken told her.
Shinawatra told Blinken of northern Thailand’s recent deadly floods and voiced support for long-term relations with the United States.
Thailand is the oldest U.S. ally in Asia, but Washington has repeatedly criticized its record on democracy, although usually gently.
The State Department voiced alarm in August after a Thai court dissolved the reformist Move Forward Party and banned from politics the kingdom’s most popular politician, Pita Limjaroenrat.
Blinken, wearing a dark blue, traditional Laotian jacket, later met separately with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who has been a vocal critic of U.S. support for Israel.
Neither mentioned the Middle East in brief remarks in the presence of reporters, with Blinken instead noting that the United States is the top foreign investor in Malaysia.
“I think this is a tremendous sign of both trust and confidence, because the investments don’t happen unless there’s tremendous confidence in the country,” Blinken told Anwar.
U.S. officials privately say that they understand the political pressure in the Muslim-majority country and that they seek a cooperative relationship with Anwar, who enjoyed strong advocacy from Washington when he was controversially imprisoned.
Thailand has taken a lead at the Laos summit in seeking diplomatic progress on the crisis engulfing its neighbor Myanmar, whose military junta sent a representative to a top-level Southeast Asian gathering for the first time in more than three years.
The United States, while backing diplomatic efforts, said it would press for sustained pressure on the junta, seeing no progress on key concerns such as freeing political prisoners and reducing violence.
Blinken, who met two weeks ago with his Chinese counterpart in New York, will also back efforts by Southeast Asia to raise concerns with Beijing about its actions in the South China Sea.
The summit marks a rare occasion in which Blinken is in the same room as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, but no talks between the two are expected.
The Biden administration, including presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, has ruled out talks with Russia on its invasion of Ukraine without involving Kyiv.
https://www.voanews.com/a/blinken-builds-ties-with-thailand-malaysia-after-turbulence/7817731.html
Intel Arrow Lake-S desktop chips can match Raptor Lake-R performance using half as much power
date: 2024-10-10, from: Liliputing
Intel’s new Core Ultra 200S series processors, also known by the code-name Arrow Lake-S, are designed to do two things: offer significant gains in CPU, graphics, and AI performance and also reduce power consumption. The chip maker says that the new chips can deliver 15 percent better multithreaded CPU performance than previous-gen Raptor Lake Refresh […]
The post Intel Arrow Lake-S desktop chips can match Raptor Lake-R performance using half as much power appeared first on Liliputing.
Ethel Kennedy, social activist and widow of Robert F. Kennedy, dies at 96
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
Boston, Massachusetts — Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy who raised their 11 children after he was assassinated and remained dedicated to social causes and the family’s legacy for decades thereafter, died on Thursday, her family said. She was 96.
Kennedy had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke in her sleep on Oct. 3, her family said.
“It is with our hearts full of love that we announce the passing of our amazing grandmother,” Joe Kennedy III posted on X. “She died this morning from complications related to a stroke suffered last week.”
“Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren and 24 great-great grandchildren along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the family statement said.
The Kennedy matriarch, whose children were Kathleen, Joseph II, Robert Jr., David, Courtney, Michael, Kerry, Christopher, Max, Douglas and Rory, was one of the last remaining members of a generation that included President John F. Kennedy. Her family said she had recently enjoyed seeing many of her relatives, before falling ill.
A millionaire’s daughter who married the future senator and attorney general in 1950, Ethel Kennedy had endured more death by the age of 40, for the whole world to see, than most would in a lifetime.
She was by Robert F. Kennedy’s side when he was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, just after winning the Democratic presidential primary in California. Her brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in Dallas less than five years earlier.
Her parents were killed in a plane crash in 1955, and her brother died in a 1966 crash. Her son David Kennedy later died of a drug overdose, son Michael Kennedy in a skiing accident and nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash. Another nephew, Michael Skakel, was found guilty of murder in 2002, although a judge in 2013 ordered a new trial and the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated his conviction in 2018.
In 2019, she was grieving again after granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an apparent drug overdose.
“One wonders how much this family must be expected to absorb,” family friend Philip Johnson, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation, told the Boston Herald after Michael Kennedy’s death.
Ethel Kennedy sustained herself through her faith and devotion to family.
“She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert. F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saorise and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie. Please keep our mother in your hearts and prayers,” the family statement said.
Ethel’s mother-in-law, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, initially worried about how she would handle so much tragedy.
“I knew how difficult it was going to be for her to raise that big family without the guiding role and influence that Bobby would have provided,” Rose recalled in her memoir, “Times to Remember.” “And, of course, she realized this too, fully and keenly. Yet she did not give way.”
She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights soon after husband’s death and advocated for causes including gun control and human rights. She rarely spoke about her husband’s assassination. When her filmmaker daughter, Rory, brought it up in the 2012 HBO documentary, “Ethel,” she couldn’t share her grief.
“When we lost Daddy …” she began, then teared up and asked that her youngest daughter “talk about something else.”
Presidential Medal of Freedom
In 2008, she joined brother-in-law Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline Kennedy in endorsing Sen. Barack Obama for president, likening him to her late husband. She made several trips to the White House during the Obama years, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 and meeting Pope Francis in 2015.
Many of her progeny became well known. Daughter Kathleen became lieutenant governor of Maryland; Joseph represented Massachusetts in Congress; Courtney married Paul Hill, who had been wrongfully convicted of an IRA bombing; Kerry became a human rights activist and president of the RFK center; Christopher ran for governor of Illinois; Max served as a prosecutor in Philadelphia and Douglas reported for Fox News Channel.
Her son Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also became a national figure, although not as a liberal in the family tradition. First known as an environmental lawyer, he evolved into a conspiracy theorist who spread false theories about vaccines. He ran for president as an independent after briefly challenging President Joe Biden, and his name remained on ballots in multiple states after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.
Ethel Kennedy did not comment publicly on her son’s actions, although several other family members denounced him.
Decades earlier, she seemed to thrive on her in-laws’ rising power. She was an enthusiastic backer of JFK’s 1960 run and during the Kennedy administration hosted some of the era’s most well-attended parties at their Hickory Hill estate in McLean, Virginia, including one where historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was pushed fully clothed into the swimming pool. In the Kennedy spirit, she also was known as an avid and highly competitive tennis player and a compulsive planner.
“Petite and peppy Ethel, who doesn’t look one bit the outdoorsy type, considers outdoor activity so important for the children that she has arranged her busy Cabinet-wife schedule so she can personally take them on two daily outings,” The Washington Post reported in 1962.
In February of that year, she accompanied her husband on a round-the-world goodwill tour, stopping in Japan, Hong Kong, Italy and other countries. She said it was important for Americans to meet ordinary people overseas.
“People have a distinct liking for Americans,” she told the Post. “But the Communists have been so vocal, it was a surprise for some Asians to hear America’s point of view. It is good for Americans to travel and get our viewpoint across.”
Kennedy was born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, the sixth of seven children of coal magnate George Skakel and Ann Brannack Skakel, a devout Roman Catholic. She grew up in a 31-room English country manor house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended Greenwich Academy before graduating from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx in 1945.
She met Robert Kennedy through his sister Jean, her roommate at Manhattanville College in New York. They moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he finished his last year of law school at the University of Virginia, and then in 1957, they bought Hickory Hill from by John and Jacqueline Kennedy, who had bought it in 1953.
Robert Kennedy became chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee in 1957. He later was appointed attorney general by his brother, the newly elected President Kennedy.
She had supported her husband in his successful 1964 campaign for the U.S. Senate in New York and his subsequent presidential bid. Pregnant with their 11th child when he was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan, her look of shock and horror was captured by photographers in images that remained indelible decades later.
The assassination traumatized the family, especially son David Kennedy, who watched the news in a hotel room. He was just days before his 13th birthday and never recovered, struggling with addiction problems for years and overdosing in 1984.
In 2021, she said Sirhan Sirhan should not be released from prison, a view not shared by some others in her family. Two years later, a California panel denied him parole.
Although Ethel Kennedy was linked to several men after her husband’s death, most notably singer Andy Williams, she never remarried.
In April 2008, Ethel Kennedy visited Indianapolis on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A monument there commemorated King’s death and the speech her husband had given that night in 1968, which was credited with averting rioting in the city.
“Of all the Kennedy women, she was the one I would end up admiring the most,” Harry Belafonte would write of her. “She wasn’t playacting. She looked at you and immediately got what you were about. Often in the coming years, when Bobby was balking at something we wanted him to do for the movement, I’d take my case to Ethel. ‘We have to talk to him,’ she’d say, and she would.”
Ethel Kennedy joined President Obama and former President Bill Clinton — each held one of her hands — as they climbed stairs to lay a wreath at President Kennedy’s gravesite during a November 2013 observance of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death.
The nonprofit center she founded remains dedicated to advancing human rights through litigation, advocacy, education and inspiration, giving annual awards to journalists, authors and others who have made significant contributions to human rights.
She also was active in the Coalition of Gun Control, Special Olympics, and the Earth Conservation Corps. And she showed up in person, participating in a 2016 demonstration in support of higher pay for farmworkers in Florida and a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Hickory Hill was sold in 2009 for $8.25 million, and Ethel Kennedy divided her time between homes in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and Palm Beach, Florida.
into the wreck
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/into-the-wreck/
Seniors Move and Dance to Build Brain Health
date: 2024-10-10, from: Capital and Main
In the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, classes at a community art center help to prevent and manage Parkinson’s and other age-related illnesses.
The post Seniors Move and Dance to Build Brain Health appeared first on .
https://capitalandmain.com/seniors-move-and-dance-to-build-brain-health
Kathryn Sullivan: The First American Woman to Walk in Space
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
Forty years ago, in October 1984, Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space. But being the first presented several challenges that started well before she took those historic steps. Things got complicated just after she learned of her assignment. Questions of Physiology Biomedical researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) raised what […]
https://www.nasa.gov/history/kathryn-sullivan-the-first-american-woman-to-walk-in-space/
Does Distant Planet Host Volcanic Moon Like Jupiter’s Io?
date: 2024-10-10, from: NASA breaking news
The existence of a moon located outside our solar system has never been confirmed but a new NASA-led study may provide indirect evidence for one. New research done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reveals potential signs of a rocky, volcanic moon orbiting an exoplanet 635 light-years from Earth. The biggest clue is a sodium cloud […]
https://www.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/does-distant-planet-host-volcanic-moon-like-jupiters-io/
Rome’s Trevi Fountain Will Get a Much-Needed Cleaning—and a Controversial New Entry Fee
date: 2024-10-10, from: Smithsonian Magazine
During the restorations, visitors will be able to see the famous site via a temporary walkway, which officials will use to study the flow of foot traffic
SAP promises developer ‘fusion teams’ in cloud low-code environment
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But projects must be completed in old desktop IDE
TechEd Enterprise software giant SAP is set to introduce a slew of features for developers on its platform, promising AI agents, knowledge graph, and cloud-based integration features in SAP’s low code-development environment Build.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/sap_promise_developer_fusion_teams/
There’s gold in them there central banks!
date: 2024-10-10, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The value of gold is up 28% since the beginning of the year. And while some see the precious metal as shiny and pretty, central banks around the globe view it differently — as a safe asset during a time of geopolitical tensions. Also on the program: We’ll discuss how markets are responding to this morning’s inflation data, and we’ll hear about a lawsuit against some top universities for alleged financial aid price-fixing.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/theres-gold-in-them-there-central-banks
Ultra-Portable Data Center: Part Two
date: 2024-10-10, from: mrusme blog
After over four years, I am simplifying the UPDC to make it more lightweight, more portable, and less in the way. This is a status update on the Ultra-Portable Data Center.
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/ultra-portable-data-center-part-two/
Sick Of Fake Meat
date: 2024-10-10, from: Tedium site
On meat analogues and the way that lucrative algorithm waves gradually burn us out on our interests. Call it an “interest analogue.”
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16839342/social-media-algorithms-fake-interests
Arrow Lake splashdown: Intel pins hopes on replacement for Raptors
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
New silicon, new architecture, and loads of new motherboards rise to support it, but will power be anchored down?
Back in September 2023, Intel unveiled its newly designed Meteor Lake SoC for the mobile market, which was the first disaggregated chip for mobile using multiple tiled packaging. While in consensus opinion indicates Meteor Lake flopped, it did pave the way for Intel to try new things in the consumer space.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/intel_arrow_lake_deep_dive/
In photos: Hurricane Milton slams Florida
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/in-photos-hurricane-milton-bears-down-on-florida/7817525.html
US inflation reaches lowest point since February 2021, though price pressures remain
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Inflation in the United States dropped last month to its lowest point since it first began surging more than three years ago, adding to a spate of encouraging economic news in the closing weeks of the presidential race.
Consumer prices rose 2.4% in September from a year earlier, down from 2.5% in August, and the smallest annual rise since February 2021. Measured from month to month, prices increased 0.2% from August to September, the Labor Department reported Thursday, the same as in the previous month.
But excluding volatile food and energy costs, “core” prices, a gauge of underlying inflation, remained elevated in September, driven higher by rising costs for medical care, clothing, auto insurance and airline fares. Core prices in September were up 3.3% from a year earlier and 0.3% from August. Economists closely watch core prices, which typically provide a better hint of future inflation.
Taken as a whole, the September figures show that inflation is steadily easing back to the Fed’s 2% target, even if in a gradual and uneven pattern. Apartment rental costs grew more slowly last month, a sign that housing inflation is finally cooling, a long-awaited development that would provide relief to many consumers.
Overall inflation last month was held down by a big drop in gas prices, which fell 4.1% from August to September. Grocery prices jumped 0.4% last month, after roughly a year of mild increases, though they’re 1.3% higher than a year earlier.
Restaurant food prices increased 0.3% last month and are up 3.9% in the past year. And clothing prices rose 1.1% from August to September and are up 1.8% from a year ago.
The improving inflation picture follows a mostly healthy jobs report released last week, which showed that hiring accelerated in September and that the unemployment rate dropped from 4.2% to 4.1%. The government has also reported that the economy expanded at a solid 3% annual rate in the April-June quarter. Growth likely continued at roughly that pace in the just-completed July-September quarter.
Cooling inflation, solid hiring and healthy growth could erode former President Donald Trump’s advantage on the economy in the presidential campaign as measured by public opinion polls. In some surveys, Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled even with Trump on the issue of who would best handle the economy, after Trump had decisively led President Joe Biden on the issue.
At the same time, most voters still give the economy relatively poor marks, mostly because of the cumulative rise in prices over the past three years.
For the Fed, last week’s much-stronger-than-expected jobs report fueled some concern that the economy might not be cooling enough to slow inflation sufficiently. The central bank reduced its key rate by an outsized half-point last month, its first rate cut of any size in four years. The Fed’s policymakers also signaled that they envisioned two additional quarter-point rate cuts in November and December.
In remarks this week, a slew of Fed officials have said they’re still willing to keep cutting their key rate but at a deliberate pace, a signal that any further half-point cuts are unlikely.
The Fed “should not rush to reduce” its benchmark rate “but rather should proceed gradually,” Lorie Logan, president of the Federal Reserve’s Dallas branch, said in a speech Wednesday.
Inflation in the United States and many countries in Europe and Latin America surged in the economic recovery from the pandemic, as COVID closed factories and clogged supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine worsened energy and food shortages, pushing inflation higher. It peaked at 9.1% in the U.S. in June 2022.
Economists at Goldman Sachs projected earlier this week that core inflation will drop to 3% by December 2024. And few analysts expect inflation to surge again unless conflicts in the Middle East worsen dramatically.
Though higher prices have soured many Americans on the economy, wages and incomes are now rising faster than costs and should make it easier for households to adapt. Last month, the Census Bureau reported that inflation-adjusted median household incomes — the level at which half of households are above and half below — rose 4% in 2023, enough to return incomes back to their pre-pandemic peak.
In response to higher food prices, many consumers have shifted their spending from name brands to private labels or have started shopping more at discount stores. Those changes have put more pressure on packaged foods companies, for example, to slow their price hikes.
This week, PepsiCo reported that its sales volumes fell after it imposed steep price increases on its drinks and snacks.
Book of Making 2025 on sale now: build superb projects from plant monitors to rockets
date: 2024-10-10, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Learn how to recreate all of the best projects from HackSpace magazine with the Book of Making 2025.
The post Book of Making 2025 on sale now: build superb projects from plant monitors to rockets appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Fore-get about privacy, golf tech biz leaves 32M data records on the fairway
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Researcher spots 110 TB of sensitive info sitting in unprotected database
Nearly 32 million records belonging to users of tech from Trackman were left exposed to the internet, sitting in a non-password protected database, for an undetermined amount of time, according to researcher Jeremiah Fowler.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/trackman_unprotected_database/
Dookie Demastered
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/10/10/dookie-demastered/
DC’s Hirshhorn Museum bustles with bright Brazilian art
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
The vibrant world of yellow-skinned giants, surreal landscapes and a massive mechanical zoetrope have taken over the Hirshhorn Museum in the largest U.S. showcase of work by Brazilian twin brothers OSGEMEOS. It’s the most comprehensive display of the siblings’ art ever presented in the United States. Maxim Adams has the story. Camera: Sergii Dogotar.
https://www.voanews.com/a/dc-hirshhorn-museum-bustles-with-bright-brazilian-art/7817502.html
CISA adds fresh Ivanti vuln, critical Fortinet bug to hall of shame
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Usual three-week window to address significant risks to federal agencies applies
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says vulnerabilities in Fortinet and Ivanti products are now being exploited, earning them places in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/cisa_ivanti_fortinet_vulns/
oberon@gitlab.inf.ethz.ch pushed to project branch main at Felix Oliver Friedrich / Oberon A2
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: Oberon A2 repository
oberon@gitlab.inf.ethz.ch (4213ac1a) at 10 Oct 15:15
handle an unaccounted case
https://gitlab.inf.ethz.ch/felixf/oberon/-/commit/4213ac1ada7f4a1e080fb4c948cc07e24a20e224
‘I Applied to 2,843 Roles’: The Rise of AI-Powered Job Application Bots
date: 2024-10-10, from: 404 Media Group
Using AI Hawk’s Auto Jobs Applier bot, I applied for 17 jobs in an hour on LinkedIn.
https://www.404media.co/i-applied-to-2-843-roles-the-rise-of-ai-powered-job-application-bots/
What Hurricane Milton Left Behind
date: 2024-10-10, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Large parts of Pennsylvania are under a frost advisory today and tomorrow • The remnants of Hurricane Kirk killed at least one person in France • A severe solar storm is expected to hit Earth today.
THE TOP FIVE
- Hurricane Milton moves toward Atlantic after slamming into Florida
Hurricane Milton is headed out to the Atlantic after raking across Florida overnight, and as the sun comes up, residents are assessing the damage left in its wake. Milton made landfall near Sarasota as a Category 3 storm, bringing heavy rainfall, dangerous winds, and flooding. St. Petersburg reported 16 inches of rain, which meteorologists say is a 1-in-1,000-year event. The storm also triggered more than 130 tornado warnings, possibly a new record. The Tropicana Field Stadium in Tampa sustained significant damage. While deaths have been reported, it’s not yet clear how many. More than 3 million people are without power.
Before the storm hit, the Florida Department of Financial Services issued a rule that requires insurance claims adjusters to provide an explanation for any changes they make to a claimant’s loss estimate, The Washington Post reported, calling the move “a groundbreaking win for policyholders.”
- WWF report charts steep wildlife population decline
The World Wide Fund for Nature published its 2024 Living Planet Report yesterday, which tracks nearly 5,500 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles all over the world. It found that wildlife populations plummeted by about 73% between 1970 and 2020, as illustrated in this rather bleak but very effective chart:
WWF
Latin America, which is home to some of the most biodiverse regions in the world, saw the worst losses, at 95%. Freshwater species experienced the greatest decline at 85%. There are some success stories, such as a 3% increase in the mountain gorilla population, and the incredible comeback of the European Bison, but generally the report is pretty heartbreaking. It underscores the interconnected nature of the climate crisis and nature destruction. “It really does indicate to us that the fabric of nature is unraveling,” said Rebecca Shaw, WWF’s chief scientist. The report comes days ahead of the start of the UN COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, where delegates will discuss concrete ways to stop biodiversity loss.
- CEOs publish letter urging more government action on climate
More than 100 CEOs from some of the world’s biggest corporations have published a letter urging governments and the private sector to boost efforts to keep Paris Agreement goals alive. The letter, signed by the heads of companies including Ikea, AstraZeneca, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Bain & Company, Iberdrola, Orsted, and Volvo Cars, calls for governments to:
- put forward aggressive and transparent new emission reduction plans
- scale up climate finance including expanding the use of carbon pricing and phasing out fossil-fuel subsidies
- eliminate permitting barriers for renewable projects
- enact policies to help create a market for and scale breakthrough technologies
- IMO boss says shipping industry must target ‘low hanging fruit’ to
get reduce emissions
The head of the International Maritime Organization this week called on the shipping industry to do more to cut emissions from the sector. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The IMO recently set a new industry-wide target of a 20% emissions reduction by 2030, and net-zero by 2050. But the IMO’s Arsenio Dominguez said there is more to be done to hit these goals. That includes “low hanging fruit” like reducing ship speed, charting routes according to the weather, and cleaning the hulls of ships to reduce friction, The Associated Press reported. But in the long-term, he said, the industry will need to switch to cleaner fuels, which have yet to scale.
- Form Energy raises $405 million for iron-air battery tech
Long-duration energy storage startup Form Energy, closed a $405 million Series F funding round this week, bringing its total funding to more than $1.2 billion. Form uses a novel method for storing energy, combining iron and oxygen to make rust, a process that the company claims can be used to store and discharge up to 100 hours of battery power. As renewable energy production ramps up, new ways of storing variable energy from wind and solar is essential, and Form’s latest fundraising underscores this need. Canary Media reported that Form’s technology isn’t proven at utility scale yet but the company is working on commercial deployments and broke ground on a project in August to provide energy to a utility in Minnesota.
THE KICKER
Some dragonfly species have evolved to have darker wing spots as a breeding advantage. A new study finds these dragonflies have also evolved to be able to withstand higher temperatures.
Noah
Leith
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-milton-florida-damage
PC shipments stuck in neutral despite AI buzz
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Analysts can't agree whether market is marginally up or down
The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/pc_market_gartner_canalys/
@Chris Coyier blog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Chris Coyier blog)
I’m certainly not above government criticism nor do I think lying for political gain is a new trick. I am bummed that a website needs to exist called Hurricane Rumor Response from FEMA in order to combat a barrage of lies accusing them of everything stealing donations to literally preventing aid. Hey, I’m not on […]
https://chriscoyier.net/2024/10/10/11592/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
You aren't upset enough about the war on hyperlinks.
https://www.hottakes.space/p/you-arent-upset-enough-about-the
What shoppers really want is some disinflation
date: 2024-10-10, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Later this morning, we’ll get the consumer price index for September. While inflation is way down from its peak in June 2022, consumers are frustrated with persistently high prices. We’ll hear more. Plus, how does a Nobel win in literature influence book sales? We’ll hear from the publishers of last year’s Nobel laureate, Norwegian playwright and author Jon Fosse, about how they dealt with a surge in demand.
Mozilla patches critical Firefox vuln that attackers are already exploiting
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Firefixed: It's maintenance time for low-complexity, high-impact security flaw
It's patch time for Firefox fans as Mozilla issues a security advisory for a critical code execution vulnerability in the browser.…
Tributes paid to former Tata Group boss
date: 2024-10-10, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: Ratan Tata was one of India’s most internationally recognized industrialists. The tycoon oversaw a 50-fold rise in profits in his two decades as chairman of Tata Group and acquired brands like carmaker Jaguar Land Rover. He died at age 86. Also: How is Swedish furniture giant Ikea going to hit its eco targets? Plus, the drugmaker behind Zantac agrees to a huge payout.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/tributes-paid-to-former-tata-group-boss
Version 7.6 – the ‘OpenBSD of Theseus’ – released
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Ideal for black-clad ultra-minimalist types. You probably wouldn't like it
OpenBSD is arguably the most secure general-purpose OS for general-purpose computers. This version has better laptop support, includes more Arm64 kit, and brings hardware-accelerated video playback.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/version_76_openbsd_of_theseus/
Category 3 Hurricane Milton makes landfall in Florida
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
Hurricane Milton left behind widespread destruction as it hit Florida on Wednesday as a dangerous Category 3 storm – the second time in two weeks the southeastern state was hit by a powerful hurricane. VOA’s Richard Green has the latest.
https://www.voanews.com/a/category-3-hurricane-milton-makes-landfall-in-florida/7817255.html
Advania UK gobbles up IT services rival CCS Media
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Acquisition signals consolidation in the market
Exclusive The consolidation of the British tech services market is continuing with Advania UK's acquisition of CCS Media.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/advania_acquires_ccs_media/
Post Office CEO tells inquiry: Leadership was in ‘dream world’ over Horizon scandal
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Hired in 2019, he claims the recruitment failed to mention ongoing litigation
The chief executive of the Post Office has agreed the organization's leadership team was living in a "dream world" in the months leading up to the launch of a statutory inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/post_office_ceo_inquiry/
Hold my Pimms! Wimbledon turns to tech for line-ball calls
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Humans dumped by famously fusty tennis tournament
The All England Lawn Tennis Club, organizer of the famed Wimbledon tennis tournament, will make line-ball calls with machines instead of human in 2025.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/wimbledon_drops_human_line_judges/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Obama in 2009 had a chance: “People around the campaign were BEGGING him to keep the movement infrastructure alive and he scuttled it for a strategy of glazing of the biggest shitstains in the world.” Obama went for the money, not the people, and we lost.
https://bsky.app/profile/sweatpants.bsky.social/post/3l625ek3tt32r
Dutch cops reveal takedown of ‘world’s largest dark web market’
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Two arrested after allegedly trying to make off with their ill-gotten gains
The alleged administrators of the infamous Bohemia and Cannabia dark web marketplaces have been arrested after apparently shuttering the sites and trying to flee with their earnings.…
Florida residents assess Hurricane Milton’s destruction
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/powerful-hurricane-milton-hits-florida/7817200.html
You have issues with ‘Issues’ always being called ‘Issues’ in Jira, so Atlassian now allows them to be called ‘Tasks’
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Developers get auto-coding ideas drawn from bug reports, and more AI besides
Atlassian has debuted a new cut of its project management and bug-tracking tool Jira, which for the first time allows users to deal with things other than “issues”.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/atlassian_jira_issues/
OpenAI says Chinese gang tried to phish its staff
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Claims its models aren't making threat actors more sophisticated - but is helping debug their code
OpenAI has alleged the company disrupted a spear-phishing campaign that saw a China-based group target its employees through both their personal and corporate email addresses.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/china_phish_openai/
What is an October surprise?
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
Expect the unexpected, especially during the month before a U.S. presidential election. It’s called an October surprise.
https://www.voanews.com/a/what-is-an-october-surprise-/7817161.html
Biden leads officials in warning Floridians as Hurricane Milton approaches
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
US President Joe Biden warned Wednesday about the ‘storm of the century’ as Hurricane Milton churned toward Florida’s western coast. He and the head of his disaster management agency urged residents to evacuate — as did local officials who spoke to VOA on Wednesday. VOA’s Anita Powell and Jose Pernalete report from Washington and Pinellas County, Florida.
Internet Archive user info stolen in cyberattack, succumbs to DDoS
date: 2024-10-10, updated: 2024-10-10, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
31M folks' usernames, email addresses, salted-encrypted passwords now out there
The Internet Archive had a bad day on the infosec front, after being DDoSed and having had its user account data stolen in a security breach.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/10/internet_archive_ddos_data_theft/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-10, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Top Trump Media Execs Ousted as CEO Devin Nunes Faces Mismanagement Allegations.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-media-truth-social-executives-ousted-devin-nunes
Category 3 Hurricane Milton makes landfall in Florida
date: 2024-10-10, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/category-3-hurricane-milton-makes-landfall-in-florida/7817092.html
Last-minute change in US swing state’s election rules alarms some
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
leesburg, georgia — In the town of Leesburg in the U.S. state of Georgia, slightly more than a dozen election workers sit at card tables, each thumbing through stacks of 50 blank pieces of paper, practicing counting ballots by hand.
With the U.S. presidential vote only weeks away, the Georgia State Election Board, led by a pro-Donald Trump majority, passed a controversial requirement in September that counties manually hand count their ballots, a move that has caused alarm in the closely watched swing state.
Veronica Johnson, who is leading the training session as the Lee County director of elections and registration, says hand counting the ballots is unlikely to pose major operational problems in her small county.
But logistics are far from election officials’ only concern.
Georgia officials from both sides of the political aisle say the count is not only superfluous — machines already count the ballots — but also a potential tool to sow doubt by slowing the process and creating space for disinformation should discrepancies arise via error-prone human counting.
“I don’t feel it’s necessary. I have no problem saying that. I think that at our precincts here in Lee County we’re already balancing our numbers,” Johnson told AFP.
The change is all the most notable given Republican candidate Trump’s alleged election tampering in the state in 2020, pushing for Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
‘Misguided’
Lee is among Georgia’s 159 counties, which encompass major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta and rural regions like the area surrounding Leesburg, with populations ranging from majority white to majority Black.
Like many of its rural counterparts, Lee County voted heavily in 2020 for Trump, who received 72 percent of its votes.
Poll workers such as those at the training will be stationed across the county’s 10 voting precincts on November 5, when U.S. voters choose between Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, in addition to candidates in hundreds of down-ballot races.
Because of lawsuits, Johnson is unsure if hand counting will actually happen.
“Honestly, every election director I know really just wants to serve the people and not get bogged down by the political ramifications,” she said, emphasizing that ballots are already counted by machine three times.
Calling the rule change “misguided,” Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that “activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures” only “undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” while Georgia’s Republican attorney general has stated the new rule is likely illegal.
The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia sued to block the rule last week with the Harris campaign’s backing.
‘Untrusting’
The state election board passed the rule by a three-to-two vote — those in favor being staunch Trump backers praised by the ex-president as “pit bulls” fighting for “victory.”
Along the same three-to-two lines, the board passed another rule in August allowing county election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results.
Like the hand count requirement, the measure is being challenged in court, with critics particularly worried about the vagueness of the word “reasonable.”
Mitchell Brown, director of the election administration program at Auburn University in Alabama, told Agence France-Presse that such a rule is unnecessary given that election officials “have meetings regularly where they go through the documentation and the information with the certifying body.”
“The bigger, more interesting question to me is, what happens if a body chooses not to certify?”
Back in Lee County, Donna Mathis, who has served as a poll worker since 2018, noted that the “country is divided so much.”
Asked about the hand count and reasonable inquiry rule, she said, “the hand count doesn’t bother me” given how quickly they were able to tabulate the votes.
But “I think you can inquire too much, it ties things up,” she added. “People are just so untrusting anymore that they question everything.”
Moscow-adjacent GoldenJackal gang strikes air-gapped systems with custom malware
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
USB sticks help, but it's unclear how tools that suck malware from them are delivered
A cyberespionage APT crew named GoldenJackal hacked air-gapped PCs belonging to government and diplomatic entities at least twice using two sets of custom malware, according to researchers from antivirus vendor ESET.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/goldenjackal_custom_malware/
Deno 2.0 looks to backward compatibility to move forward
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript plays nicer with Node.js
Deno, the runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, reached version 2.0 on Wednesday, bringing with it baggage from the past in the form of broad Node.js compatibility.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/deno_20_now_plays_nicer/
Though voter fraud rare, US election offices feature safeguards to catch it
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — You’ve heard the horror stories: Someone casting multiple ballots, people voting in the name of dead relatives, mail-in ballots being intercepted.
Voter fraud does happen occasionally. When it does, we tend to hear a lot about it. It also gets caught and prosecuted.
The nation’s multilayered election processes provide many safeguards that keep voter fraud generally detectable and rare, according to current and former election administrators of both parties.
America’s elections are decentralized, with thousands of independent voting jurisdictions. That makes it virtually impossible to pull off a large-scale vote-rigging operation that could tip a presidential race — or almost any other race.
“You’re probably not going to have a perfect election system,” said Republican Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state and the advisory board chair of the Secure Elections Project. “But if you’re looking for one that you should have confidence in, you should feel good about that here in America.”
What’s stopping people from committing voter fraud?
Voting more than once, tampering with ballots, lying about your residence to vote somewhere else, or casting someone else’s ballot are crimes that can be punished with hefty fines and prison time. Non-U.S. citizens who break election laws can be deported.
For anyone still motivated to cheat, election systems in the United States are designed with multiple layers of protection and transparency intended to stand in the way.
For in-person voting, most states either require or request voters provide some sort of ID at the polls. Others require voters to verify who they are in another way, such as stating their name and address, signing a poll book or signing an affidavit.
People who try to vote in the name of a recently deceased friend or family member can be caught when election officials update voter lists with death records and obituaries, said Gail Pellerin, a Democratic in the California Assembly who ran elections in Santa Cruz County for more than 27 years.
Those who try to impersonate someone else run the risk that someone at the polls knows that person or that the person will later try to cast their own ballot, she said.
What protections exist for absentee voting?
For absentee voting, different states have different ballot verification protocols. All states require a voter’s signature. Many states have further precautions, such as having bipartisan teams compare the signature with other signatures on file, requiring the signature to be notarized or requiring a witness to sign.
That means even if a ballot is erroneously sent to someone’s past address and the current resident mails it in, there are checks to alert election workers to the foul play.
A growing number of states offer online or text-based ballot tracking tools as an extra layer of protection, allowing voters to see when their ballot has been sent out, returned and counted.
Federal law requires voter list maintenance, and election officials do that through a variety of methods, from checking state and federal databases to collaborating with other states to track voters who have moved.
Ballot drop boxes have security protocols, too, said Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.
She explained the boxes are often designed to stop hands from stealing ballots and are surveilled by camera, bolted to the ground and constructed with fire-retardant chambers, so if someone threw in a lit match, it wouldn’t destroy the ballots inside.
Sometimes, alleged voter fraud isn’t what it seems
After the 2020 election, social media surged with claims of dead people casting ballots, double voting or destroyed piles of ballots on the side of the road.
Former President Donald Trump promoted and has continued to amplify these claims. But the vast majority of them were found to be untrue.
An Associated Press investigation that explored every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by Trump found there were fewer than 475 out of millions of votes cast. That was not nearly enough to tip the outcome. Democrat Joe Biden won the six states by a combined 311,257 votes.
The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots. In one case, a man mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole. In another, a woman was suspected of sending in a ballot for her dead mother.
Former election officials say that even more often, allegations of voter fraud turn out to result from a clerical error or a misunderstanding.
Pellerin said she remembered when a political candidate in her county raised suspicion about many people being registered to vote at the same address. It turned out the voters were nuns who all lived in the same home.
Patrick said that when she worked in elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, mismatched signatures were sometimes explained by a broken arm or a recent stroke. In other cases, an elderly person tried to vote twice because they forgot they had already submitted a mail ballot.
“You really have to think about the intent of the voter,” Patrick said. “It isn’t always intuitive.”
Why voter fraud is unlikely to affect the presidential race
It would be wrong to suggest that voter fraud never happens.
With millions of votes cast in an election year, it’s almost guaranteed there will be a few cases of someone trying to game the system. There also have been more insidious efforts, such as a vote-buying scheme in 2006 in Kentucky.
In that case, Grayson said, voters complained, and an investigation ensued. Then participants admitted what they had done.
He said the example shows how important it is for election officials to stay vigilant and constantly improve security in order to help voters feel confident.
But, he said, it would be hard to make any such scheme work on a larger scale. Fraudsters would have to navigate onerous nuances in each county’s election system. They also would have to keep a large number of people quiet about a crime that could be caught at any moment by officials or observers.
“This decentralized nature of the elections is itself a deterrent,” Grayson said.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control.
The Marshall Star for October 9, 2024
date: 2024-10-09, from: NASA breaking news
Marshall Lends Insight, Expertise to Auburn Aerospace Industry Day Event By Rick Smith Nearly 500 students and faculty of Auburn University gathered on campus Sept. 30-Oct. 2 to hear lectures from leading NASA propulsion and engineering experts and to talk careers goals and opportunities with representatives of the U.S. space program and various aerospace industry […]
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-october-9-2024/
Smart TVs are spying on everyone
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Regulators know this is a nightmare and have done little to stop it. Privacy advocacy group wants that to change
Smart TVs are watching their viewers and harvesting their data to benefit brokers using the same ad technology that denies privacy on the internet.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/smart_tv_spy_on_viewers/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Yesterday I briefly wrote up the mass market killer app for AI. I know this is it. Ten years from now people will think everyone always knew it. Before you click the link pause for a moment and think about it. Hint: Google should totally own this but they have a blind spot.
http://scripting.com/2024/10/08/155702.html#a154242
This Exhibition Is Betting That You Don’t Know Frida Kahlo as Well as You May Think
date: 2024-10-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
“Frida: Beyond the Myth” aims to paint an intimate portrait of the artist through dozens of works created by Kahlo and photographs taken by her loved ones
Marriott settles for a piddly $52M after series of breaches affecting millions
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Intruders stayed for free on the network between 2014 and 2020
Marriott has agreed to pay a $52 million penalty and develop a comprehensive infosec program following a series of major data breaches between 2014 and 2020 that affected more than 344 million people worldwide.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/marriott_settlements_data_breaches/
Scientists’ Work on Protein Structure, Which Governs All Aspects of Life, Wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry
date: 2024-10-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper revealed how amino acids shape protein structure, a finding that could aid in drug discovery
How a Fight over Cables Could Kill Offshore Wind in New Jersey
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
One of the biggest threats to American offshore wind is a handful of homeowners on the south Jersey shoreline spouting unproven theories about magnetic fields.
Within a year of forming, the activist group “Stop The High-Risk Cables” has galvanized local politicians against the transmission infrastructure being planned for wind turbines off the coast of New Jersey known as the Larrabee Pre-built Infrastructure. The transmission route, which will run a few miles from the beaches of Sea Girt, New Jersey, to a substation nearby, is expected to be a crucial landing zone for power from major offshore wind projects in south Jersey waters, including Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between EDF Renewables and Shell that received final permits from federal regulators last week.
The only problem: while state regulators have been busy planning the route for the transmission and selecting who will build it, opponents have managed to win the war of public opinion. Activists have clearly turned their neighbors against the plan, pushing the mayors of the four boroughs targeted for Pre-Built Infrastructure to come out against the project. And this weekend Jack Ciattarelli – who narrowly lost the race for the governor’s mansion last year and is running again in 2025 – joined activists rallying against the project and is now campaigning on ending the project and cable landings like it.
Since federal regulators control the waters, what this means is, unless Democrats hit the electoral jackpot over the next year, offshore wind in New Jersey could be screwed – even if Kamala Harris wins the White House.
What makes this more dire is, this isn’t any ol’ transmission. For other offshore wind projects like Empire Wind, states have forced developers to design and construct their own transmission landings, creating a somewhat disorganized situation resembling electrical spaghetti. New Jersey’s offshore wind transmission meanwhile has been studied for years and is supposed to minimize development on the shoreline. This means the combat over this cabling could decide the fates of multiple offshore wind projects – and the first major proactive plan to reduce beach-level environmental impacts that stymie offshore wind in the first place.
So I decided to dive deep into the campaign against the so-called “high-risk” cables. After a series of interviews with organizers and a mayor critical of the state’s processes, I’ve been left feeling this relatively small transmission project represents a true test for democracy’s role in climate action. Could a small band of organized individuals be all it takes to hold back decarbonization at the pace scientists say is necessary, no matter how many climate laws are passed?
The Magnetic Fields
Sea Girt resident Kimberly Paterson remembers when she first heard about the cables. Someone had left a postcard on her door about the project. Before that, the professional executive leadership trainer had devoted her activism to preserving maritime forests on the beach. Once made aware of the transmission cables though, she and her small coterie of environmentally-conscious neighbors got active.
Paterson said they also started getting looped in with an existing network of activists concerned about offshore wind infrastructure. Those activists included familiar characters to the fight over New Jersey offshore wind development.
People like Mike Dean of Save the East Coast and Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action, who’ve spread theories without evidence about a spate of whale deaths being tied to pile drivers for offshore wind. She says her group’s work is focused on the cables, not offshore wind, despite the close allyship with these other actors. As she simply put it, “There’s a circle of people that you meet.”
“We do like to work with others, and communicate with others, but we’re not officially tied to any of those other groups.”
The group also started canvassing, making signage for homeowners, and holding public events. As calls for action grew, so too did the political focus on the area, as state legislators and members of Congress took up the issue.
“We have created an absolute firestorm here,” Paterson told me. ’It is unbelievable what we’ve accomplished.”
The group is focused on what they believe to be the health risks of simply being near high-voltage power lines.
To understand their fears, think of an electric current going through a
wire. The more current goes through a wire, the higher likelihood of
electrical waves emanating from the current’s pathway. That’s where
“electro-magnetic fields” come into play. These fields are all around us
and even Earth emits them. It’s the result of an excess of energy.
The World Health Organization
classifies
even low amounts of electromagnetic fields as a possible
carcinogen, citing studies around exposure and childhood leukemia rates.
But as many environmental and health
experts
note, studies to date have not really linked cancer occurrences
to prolonged exposure to these fields. The Bureau of Ocean Energy
Management
says
the electro-magnetic fields created by cables for offshore wind
“are well below the
recommended threshold values for human exposure.” So like whales and
wind, it’s something to watch out for, but there’s no evidence to date
of a danger here.
Nonetheless, seeking to calm any resident’s fears of magnetic fields, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last week convened their first public hearing within the planned development area.
At the event, numerous officials came and spoke to the project’s safety, including the executive director of the Board. They even played a long explanatory video from a consultant they hired to review the electro-magnetic fields that would come from the cables. The full presentation laid out numerous examples of what they said were similar underground and underwater transmission lines with magnetic emissions that had no discernable impact on public health, including lines in the New Jersey-New York region.
One person moved by the presentation’s efforts on magnetic fields was Mike Mangan, mayor of Manasquan, one of the boroughs that may be selected to host some of the transmission infrastructure. Mangan told me he joined with other mayors to press the state for more transparency on the cables at the behest of concerned constituents. But he didn’t know what the state knew about the magnetic fields.
“I’ll just be candid — I was ignorant on a lot of that,” he acknowledged. Mangan said he still has “a few very serious concerns” but “I think they addressed some of the bigger concerns,” including the magnetic fields.
I’ll admit, I felt the same. So far in The Fight, we’ve chronicled examples where there are at least somewhat reasonable concerns about renewable energy development – stuff like batteries sited in wildfire risk areas and solar farms in imperiled tortoise habitat. But in this case, I watched the entire presentation online and left thinking this was essentially a non-issue.
Yet Paterson says she was unconvinced by the presentation. The projects they’re citing aren’t comparable, she claims. And then she has a laundry list of other complaints about the potential cables.
Hearing her talk about the transmission, you’d think she just doesn’t want this built under any circumstances. So I asked her if, given her allies, the goal is to stop offshore wind. An avid wildlife painter, she says no, and that she’s “very strongly in support of alternative energy.”
Well, okay. Maybe it’s political or partisan then? I asked her who she’s voting for in this year’s presidential election. “I don’t like anyone in the election to be quite honest,” she confessed, self-identifying simply as a “libertarian.” She then added: “I love the idea of Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.] revolutionizing our health-care system. That makes me very excited.”
Tug of war over power lines
Last week, Heatmap published a risk index of the top 10 renewable energy projects worth watching for potential cancellation or major blowback to the energy transition.
We listed Atlantic Shores in the top five, primarily citing the project’s current role as a focal point for opponents to offshore wind up and down the Atlantic coastline. Hours after the risk index was published, Atlantic Shores received its final approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
Despite that win, we’re leaving the project on the index because the cables have to be built too – and that stands to be a more stressful fight.
It wasn’t supposed to be hard. In 2021, New Jersey passed a law granting the Board of Public Utilities the authority to supersede local governments opposing easements and other permits for offshore wind transmission cables. But that law’s permissibility under the state constitution hasn’t been tested yet, thanks to the cancellation of Orsted’s Ocean Wind project, which was set to be the likeliest battleground over cables before Atlantic Shores.
State officials are expected in the coming weeks to lay out who will actually build the transmission infrastructure and the route it’ll take from Sea Girt to the Larrabee substation. Between the day of that announcement and the completion of construction, a lot can go awry. Donald Trump could win the presidency and, as opponents of offshore wind expect, revisit permitting decisions for projects like Atlantic Shores. Or a Republican like Jack Ciattarelli could win the governor’s mansion, and that person could take any number of steps to undermine the cables like leaving the local control law undefended in state court if it’s challenged.
All this risk to the energy transition, started by a handful of actors with unfounded claims about magnetic fields.
I asked Atlantic Shores for comment on the opposition movement. They did not get back to me.
However, I did hear from the New Jersey Offshore Wind Alliance, a consortium of developers trying to build offshore wind off the state coast. “While we are advocates of civil discourse and engagement from communities, we urge residents to be mindful of prevalent misinformation,” said Paulina O’Connor, executive director of the alliance, in a statement sent to me Tuesday evening.
“By following best practices in environmental science and engineering, such as proper siting, minimizing disruption during construction, and adherence to all state and federal regulations, this infrastructure can be safely and responsibly integrated into our communities and local and regional power grids to provide resilient and reliable power to New Jersey homes,” O’Connor continued.
I also heard from Anjuli Ramos-Busot, executive director of Sierra Club’s New Jersey chapter, who contacted me last night after Atlantic Shores and the offshore wind alliance brought my reporting to their attention.
“Let us be clear, the microwave in your kitchen emits more electromagnetic currents than cables buried deep underground covered by insulation and concrete,” Ramos-Busot said in a statement. “This technology is vetted, goes through rigorous permitting standards, and is safe and responsible for both the environment and local communities.”
Candidly, I’m holding my breath on whether Sierra Club’s words will win over these concerned shore residents.
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/atlantic-shores-transmission-opposition
These Hurricanes Have Birthed a New Kind of Climate Denial
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
Maybe Sharpiegate wasn’t so funny after all.
You’ll recall the micro-controversy from 2019, when then-President Donald Trump said that Hurricane Dorian was headed toward Alabama (which it wasn’t), and officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were pressured to back up Trump’s mistake. It culminated in Trump presenting a map in the Oval Office on which someone drew a bubble atop the projected path of the storm so it would stretch into Alabama, apparently with a Sharpie.
At the time it was troubling but comical, a representation of how the cult-like adoration Trump demanded would distort the work of government in idiotic ways. Five years later, with a storm surge of misinformation pouring over the country in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, it looks more like a harbinger of things to come.
In any crisis, some measure of confusion is inevitable. Rumors spread and misunderstandings proliferate, fed by fear and desperation. The most extravagant varieties of misinformation are often either short-lived or confined to a minority of the population. That has not been true, however, when it comes to Helene, and it looks like Milton will repeat the same pattern. This time, the misinformation is more explicitly partisan than ever before, and it portends a disturbing future in which every natural disaster could become not just a challenging task of rescue and cleanup but a simultaneous fight against falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
It’s not that disasters have never been political; presidents are often judged by how they react (anyone over 40 knows what the phrase “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” refers to), with politicians discredited or elevated by how they performed and the opposition taking the opportunity to criticize the administration’s competence. But Trump has given that familiar criticism a particularly venomous cast, claiming not just that the disaster response is falling short but that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are intentionally ignoring the victims because of who they are.
Trump has focused in particular on three falsehoods: First, that the federal government is abandoning hurricane victims in areas where there are lots of Republican voters; second, that funds for recovery are unavailable because the Biden administration gave them to undocumented immigrants (“they stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season”); and third, that the $750 distributed immediately to survivors to enable them to obtain food and other basics, known as Serious Needs Assistance, is all the aid anyone will get.
It was like a bat-signal: As soon as Trump set the terms, conservative media and influencers swung into action, repeating Trump’s bogus claims to their audiences. And then things took a strange turn.
To bring a conspiracy theory into the mainstream, you need individuals and outlets who serve as disinformation linkages, connecting the crazier people and ideas to those with legitimacy. In this case, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, played a key role, and she had a message: The weather is being manipulated by a shadowy conspiracy with powerful technologies at its disposal. “Yes they can control the weather,” she posted on X to her 3.7 million followers. “Anyone who says they don’t, or makes fun of this, is lying to you.”
As evidence, Greene and her allies offer the fact that many people have proposed geoengineering as a solution to a warming planet, which in their eyes means it must already be taking place, and that’s why these hurricanes came to the Southeast. And who is “They”? It might be the government, but to many, it’s obviously the Jews.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories around the hurricanes are swirling on the fetid sewer of right-wing hate and misinformation controlled by the world’s richest individual. As the Washington Post reported, “The attacks, which include wild claims that Jewish officials are conspiring to orchestrate the disasters, sabotage the recovery or even seize victims’ property, are being fomented largely on Elon Musk’s X.”
The tide of misinformation can be partly explained by the calendar. “What’s different about this natural disaster is the timing,” says Danielle Lee Tomson of the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington. “We’ve never had such an incredible, devastating natural disaster within weeks of a presidential election that has impacted two swing states,” North Carolina and Georgia. That gives purchase to the claims that there are conspiracies afoot to change the outcome of the election.
In 2024, it may have been inevitable that a disaster would be tied, however implausibly, to the “one narrative to rule them all this election cycle, which is that of non-citizen voting,” Tomson notes.
Disaster makes people search for answers that give order to chaos and suffering. Even answers that describe a world of sinister forces can be weirdly comforting, by assuring their adherents that they are among a select group who understand the reality most people miss. Amidst the chaos, you can grasp onto whatever bizarre belief you choose.
In the future, we might expect that any climate-linked disaster — hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts — will become fodder for this kind of misinformation, not just passed around from person to person but driven from the top of the political food chain.
In effect, this is the inverse of the kind of climate misinformation we’re more used to, which goes under the heading of “denial”: denying that temperatures are increasing, or that carbon pollution is a problem, or that human activity drives climate change. Since the occurrence of a hurricane or fire or other observably extreme event can’t be denied, this new kind of misinformation actually posits not just that the effects of climate change are real, but that they’re worse than you realize. It isn’t just that people have lost their lives or their homes due to a disaster, but that the disaster was engineered by sinister forces (including but not limited to the government) to accomplish a nefarious political goal.
So yesterday’s climate denier could become tomorrow’s climate obsessive, seeing in every disaster the hidden hand of the same global conspiracy that is creating all the world’s problems. “Climate change is the new covid,” said Congresswoman Greene; “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.” It’s not fake, it’s a plot, one getting worse with each upward tick in global temperatures.
Of course, misinformation comes in a variety of forms — some downplayed Milton as a way of arguing that the elites are trying to frighten you — and even debunkings can be a path to elevated social media clout when so much focus is on these events.
It may be, as Tomson argues, that it takes something like an impending election to turn conspiracy theorizing around disasters up to 11. “We’ve never seen such an opportune moment to repackage disaster for political gain,” she told me. But the effects of climate change will only grow more intense and dramatic, and there will be political actors looking to turn them against their opponents — and frightened people ready to believe the worst.
https://heatmap.news/politics/hurricane-misinformation-climate-denial
Severe solar storm could disrupt power, communications
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
On the bright side, auroras may dazzle skies as far south as mid-latitudes
Watch out, Earth: There's another strong geomagnetic storm headed our way from the Sun, following the G5-class one that hit back in May.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/g4_solar_storm/
Vineyard Wind’s New Fight
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – A new group – Keep Nantucket Wild – is mobilizing opposition to the Vineyard Wind offshore wind project, seeking to capitalize on the recent blade breakage to sever the town of Nantucket’s good neighbor agreement with project developer Avangrid.
-
Keep Nantucket Wild was started weeks ago by raw bar restaurateur Jesse
Sandole and yoga studio owner Evie O’Connor. The group already has
amassed
more
than 1,000 signatures on a petition to the town select board to
pull out of the good neighbor agreement.
- Town officials have previously said they will renegotiate the pact, which included a $16 million company payment into a community fund and promises to reduce nighttime visual impacts.
2. East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana – One lowkey local election this fall may decide the future of Louisiana’s renewables: the swing seat on the state’s Public Service Commission, which is being vacated this year by a retiring moderate Republican.
-
Only 3% of Louisiana’s power generation came
from
renewables last year but that’s poised for significant growth
thanks to offshore wind development
in
the Gulf and the PSC’s decision over the summer to let Entergy
expand its solar capacity in the state
by
3 GW.
-
State Sen. J.P. Coussan is one of the leading candidates for the opening
on the PSC. A Republican, he said at an
event
last month that he’s open to more solar but is worried about
“losing the farmland” that could be used by the sugar business. He also
believes renewables will ultimately make up “lower than overall 10% of
the power matrix.”
- There are two other candidates for the open seat: Republican former state Sen. Julie Quinn, who is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and opposes renewables, and Democrat Nick Laborde, who deeply supports renewables but has never served in public office and currently works in human resources.
3. Logan County, Ohio – Invenergy’s Fountain Point solar project cleared a hurdle with the Ohio Power Siting Board last month. But the 280 megawatt proposal may face a lengthy appeals process, according to Mike Yoder, a county commissioner who had recently served as an ad hoc member of the OPSB.
-
Yoder, whose county is where the project is proposed, told
local
radio on Monday that the project is not affected by a recent law
empowering counties against solar and wind as challenges to the project
began before the law was passed.
- But discussing potential challenges to the state Supreme Court, Yoder said he expects construction is still “well down the road.”
- “I know that we got some emails from folks who were concerned we would be voting on it and moving forward and everything happened in two or three days and that’s not really the way it’s going to be,” he said.
4. Riverside County, California – The federal government is now taking public comment on a 100+ megawatt solar farm proposed in the California desert in an area demarcated as a priority for energy development.
-
The Sapphire Solar project, which was proposed by EDF Renewables, has
also been
targeted
by wildlife conservationists focused on tortoise protection.
Sound familiar?
- We’ll find out whether environmental concerns pervade at the government’s Oct. 24 in person and virtual public meetings on the project, which could shed new light on how stakeholders are grappling with solar projects on federally-preferred areas with wildlife conflicts.
Here’s some more fights we’re watching closely…
In Maryland, commissioners in eastern Berlin County have rejected a TurningPoint Energy utility-scale solar farm.
In New Jersey, the group Save Long Beach Island filed a notice of intent to sue against the Atlantic Shores offshore wind approvals last week.
In New York, the town of Oyster Bay has extended its battery storage moratorium for six months to block a project proposed by Jupiter Power Company.
In North Dakota, regulators told staff to put together a final order on the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline, though no date or decision has been discussed.
In Oregon, grassroots opposition is mobilizing against a Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing project.
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/hotspots/vineyard-wind-keep-nantucket-wild
Power Line Planning
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
Transmissions on transmission – The Energy Department last week released a must-read national planning study for transmission to connect renewables to the grid through 2040.
-
The takeaway? We could reduce billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions with
interregional transmission and constraining development would require
new nuclear and hydrogen energy to meet emission reduction targets,
instead of solar, wind, and batteries.
- The lengthy report didn’t go into the permitting challenges at all though and the mapping does read aspirational if you know the context.
- Regardless, we hope to see you on DOE’s webinar on the study next Wednesday.
SCOTUS shrugs for once – The Supreme Court declined to stay challenges to the EPA’s methane and mercury air pollution regulations, meaning at least two Biden regulatory tailwinds for renewables developers remains in play.
-
This means those challenges will have to weave their way through the
appeals process while remaining in effect for companies.
- There’s still an outstanding request for the high court to stay EPA’s CO2 regulations for power plants though, so stay tuned.
- Meanwhile, the court has asked the U.S. solicitor general to weigh in on fossil fuel climate liability cases.
Big Oil wants IRA credits – Executives for oil majors have asked former President Donald Trump to keep at least some of the Inflation Reduction Act in place, reports the Wall Street Journal.
-
However, don’t be fooled: the WSJ reporting indicates
a priority for oil executives is carbon capture – not renewables. I
first suggested this might be a possibility over the summer in my
first
story for Heatmap.
- Simply put, if you’re a developer, now’s the time to ask yourself: what’s my government affairs strategy if Trump wins?
Here’s what else I’m watching…
The U.S. International Trade Commission has received a patent protection complaint from Chinese solar manufacturer Trina Solar against Runergy and Adani Green Energy
In Wyoming, state lawmakers are trying to pass legislation allowing temporary radioactive storage for nuclear power.
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/policy-watch/doe-national-transmission-planning-study
Are Fossil Fuel Projects More or Less Insurable Than Renewables?
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
This week we chatted with Jason Kaminsky, CEO of renewables insurance
data firm kWh Analytics. Kaminsky has been laser focused on the real
risks of physical damage solar and battery projects face – and the fears
host communities feel about them. We talked about how those risks
compare to fossil fuels and whether innovation could cure this industry
ailment.
The following is an edited version of our conversation.
Are fossil fuel projects more or less insurable than the renewable projects you cover?
On the whole, renewables are more exposed to natural catastrophe risk. You’re putting glass out onto a field that has hail or fire or what have you, and you see more exposure to natural events than you would [even] a spinning turbine that’s surrounded by steel. When we were getting to insuring property, the first risk that came onto our radar screen was hail risk. The industry had shifted development into Texas for a variety of reasons and the insurance companies at that point in time were not recalibrating their models for the fact there’s actually quite significant hail in Texas. And we were seeing significant losses.
It’s not uncommon to have multiple $50 million loss events in any given year for solar projects due to hail, typically in Texas, Oklahoma. That’s the zone of hail. And we don’t see that with a gas facility particularly because, well, it’s in a building.
But it’s way more distributed than a single fossil fuel facility, so even if you have a $50 million loss, that does not have an impact on the ability of the grid to generate.
The part of the facility that is not damaged will continue to produce power and put power onto the grid. You get many more partial loss events versus a gas facility where the turbine goes and you basically have a total loss. Your ability to distribute your risk is much greater with renewables, which is a very strong pro from an insurance underwriting perspective.
Are new technologies helping with renewables’ insurability?
In the last few years, there’s been a lot of innovation. At RE+ you walk among the floor of battery providers and they all have very impressive fire management capabilities, and it’s at the forefront of how they market their technology. You also see that with solar modules some have said, we’re hail resistant. The way they’re putting sensors onto cells, the way they’re running controls on cooling devices, the way thermal management systems and battery management systems have abilities to vent for heat… they’ve made a lot of improvements.
But it’s interesting – I was at an asset management conference in March and I’d been going to that conference for 10 years, and it was the first time I’d heard at that conference about the social license to operate. They’re seeing these quasi-local thought leader groups that all seem to be using the same talking points that oppose large scale solar in their communities, and they push local regulatory rules to reduce the ability to develop solar in their backyards. It was encouraging to see a discussion around it and an acknowledgement that as an industry we need to go into these communities and spend time talking to the local communities.
Fascinating. Do you think discussions like these are enough to mean progress in dealing with project opposition?
It’s not historically been in the DNA of our industry to do that. I’d say today the opposition is much more organized than many renewable energy developers today so it’s been this interesting phenomenon. The local opposition says we don’t want this industrial solar. It’s proven to be effective at killing some of these utility scale deals.
We still have a long way to go in educating communities and getting them comfortable with the land stewardship that happens at these facilities. The solar industry manages a ton of land. It’s not my core focus but I’ve been exposed to those challenges around the community engagement piece and I think most developers are still building the muscle in how to do that effectively.
https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/qa/jason-kaminsky-kwh-analytics-insurance
Hurricane Milton: The Latest Climate-Related Threat to American Health
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: RAND blog
While countries work to reverse the drivers of climate change there is a critical need to understand, anticipate, and develop plans to mitigate the long-term adverse health effects from climate-related extreme weather events.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/10/hurricane-milton-the-latest-climate-related-threat.html
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Furry fandom.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
How to See the Bright Comet Flaring Up in the Night Sky This Week
date: 2024-10-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS should be visible to the naked eye as it passes Earth on its way out of our solar system
National Public Data files for bankruptcy, admits ‘hundreds of millions’ potentially affected
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
One-man-band faces a mountain of lawsuits but has few assets
The Florida business behind data brokerage National Public Data has filed for bankruptcy, admitting "hundreds of millions" of people were potentially affected in one of the largest information leaks of the year.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/national_public_data_bankrupt/
Panic Drops Google Drive Access
date: 2024-10-09, from: Michael Tsai
Michael Buckley (Mastodon, Hacker News): At some unknown point in the future, Google will revoke Transmit’s access to Google Drive. Sometime after that, we’ll be releasing updates to Transmit and Nova that remove the ability to create Google Drive connections. […] In March, Transmit was re-approved for Google Drive access — but we were told […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/09/panic-drops-google-drive-access/
Musi for YouTube Removed From the App Store
date: 2024-10-09, from: Michael Tsai
Ashley Belanger: Musi, a free music-streaming app only available on iPhone, sued Apple last week, arguing that Apple breached Musi’s developer agreement by abruptly removing the app from its App Store for no good reason.According to Musi, Apple decided to remove Musi from the App Store based on allegedly “unsubstantiated” claims from YouTube that Musi […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/09/musi-for-youtube-removed-from-the-app-store/
China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor
date: 2024-10-09, from: Michael Tsai
Bruce Schneier: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994. Zack Whittaker: The wiretap systems, as mandated under a 30-year-old U.S. […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/09/china-possibly-hacking-us-lawful-access-backdoor/
MINIX Neo Z300-dB is a fanless mini PC with an 8-core Intel Core i3-N300 Alder Lake-N processor
date: 2024-10-09, from: Liliputing
Late last year MINIX launched a fanless mini PC called the MINIX Z100-0dB that packs a quad-core Intel N100 Alder Lake-N processor into a compact chassis with a passive heat sink, support for up to 16GB of RAM, PCIe 3.0 storage, and 2.5 GbE Ethernet connections. Now the company has launched a new model called […]
The post MINIX Neo Z300-dB is a fanless mini PC with an 8-core Intel Core i3-N300 Alder Lake-N processor appeared first on Liliputing.
Google App Store Monopoly Remedy
date: 2024-10-09, from: Michael Tsai
Sean Hollister (PDF, Hacker News, MacRumors): 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 […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/10/09/google-app-store-monopoly-remedy/
Evacuating from Hurricane Milton: What the Whole Community Can Do
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: RAND blog
Evacuation is a whole community effort that everyone needs to play a role in. Some actions may be longer-term, but as Milton arrives, there are steps individuals, households, government agencies, and civil society can take now.
Archaeologists Discover Intricately Decorated Coffins Belonging to the Only Daughter of an Ancient Egyptian Governor
date: 2024-10-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The 4,000-year-old burial chamber featured hieroglyphs referring to the woman, known as Idi, as the “lady of the house”
Nobel Chemistry Prize goes to AlphaFold, Rosetta creators - another win for AI
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Let’s just hope they don’t give the literature award to a bot, too
This year's Nobel Prizes are shaping up to be a triumph for AI. After awarding the physics prize to early AI pioneers yesterday, the chemistry prize has now gone to the creators of AI protein prediction platform AlphaFold and protein design tool Rosetta.…
KDE Plasma 6.2 released
date: 2024-10-09, from: OS News
Entirely coincidentally, the KDE team released Plasma 6.2 yesterday, the latest release in the well-received 6.x series. As the version number implies, it’s not a groundbreaking release, but it does contain a number of improvements that are very welcome to a few specific, often underserved groups. For instance, 6.2 overhauls the Accessibility settings panel, and ads, among other things, colourblindness filters for a variety of types of colourblindness. This condition affects roughly 8-9% of the population, so it’s an important new feature. Another group of people served by Plasma 6.2 are artists. Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. Open System Settings and look for Drawing Tablet to see various tools for configuring drawing tablets. New in Plasma 6.2: a tablet calibration wizard and test mode; a feature to define the area of the screen that your tablet covers (the whole screen or a section); and the option to re-bind pen buttons to different kinds of mouse clicks. ↫ KDE Plasma 6.2 release announcement Artists and regular users alike can now also enjoy better colour management, more complete HDR support, a tone-mapping feature in Kwin, and much more. Power management has been improved as well, so you can now manage brightness per individual monitor, control which application block going to sleep, and so on. There’s also the usual array of bug fixes, UI tweaks, and so on. Plasma 6.2 is already available in at least Fedora and openSUSE, and it will find its way to your distribution soon enough, too.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140892/kde-plasma-6-2-released/
Two Nobel Prizes for AI, and Two Paths Forward
date: 2024-10-09, from: Gary Marcus blog
As you have surely read by now, not one but two Nobel Prizes went to AI this week.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-nobel-prizes-for-ai-and-two-paths
MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 promises makes a play for next-gen flagship phones
date: 2024-10-09, from: Liliputing
MediaTek’s new Dimensity 9400 processor promises up to a 35 percent boost in single-core CPU performance, up to 28 percent faster multi-core performance, and up to a 41 boost in peak graphics performance when compared with the previous-gen Dimensity 9300. It’s also said to bring memory and AI improvements. At the same time, MediaTek is promising […]
The post MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 promises makes a play for next-gen flagship phones appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/mediateks-dimensity-9400-promises-makes-a-play-for-next-gen-flagship-phones/
Wisconsin’s Dane County could hold key to White House
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
One county in the battleground U.S. state of Wisconsin plays a disproportionate role in deciding whether Democrats or Republicans win the White House in November, analysts say. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias takes us to Dane County, where the fight to sway votes is getting hotter as the election draws near.
https://www.voanews.com/a/wisconsin-s-dane-county-could-hold-key-to-white-house-/7816425.html
‘Highly Defensive’ Mother Bear Grazer Defeats Male That Killed Her Cub to Win Fat Bear Week
date: 2024-10-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
For the second year in a row, Grazer bested the massive male named Chunk to take the crown in the single elimination online popularity contest at Katmai National Park and Preserve
‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In
date: 2024-10-09, from: 404 Media Group
WordPress.org users are forced to confirm they are not “affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise” before registering a new account or logging in.
https://www.404media.co/wordpress-checkbox-login-wp-engine/
US DoJ wades into Realtek lawsuit that accuses MediaTek of patent abuse
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Fabless chip shop alleged to be hiring 'litigation hit men' to kneecap rival
Taiwanese chip firm MediaTek is under scrutiny with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) taking an interest in an antitrust dispute with semiconductor compatriot Realtek.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/doj_intervenes_realtek_mediatek/
Bitcoin creator suspect says he is not Bitcoin creator suspect
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
'If I was Satoshi I would have destroyed my ability to prove I'm Satoshi'
The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/satoshi_nakamoto_suspect_hbo_bitcoin/
Don’t Hate AI. Enlist AI to Fight Hate
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: RAND blog
Supporting Asian Americans and others who experience hate could be just one way to harness AI technology for good. Done right, it could transform the healing capacity of communities still grappling with widespread hate, ensuring that no one is left unseen or left behind.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/10/dont-hate-ai-enlist-ai-to-fight-hate.html
Zavala 3.0
date: 2024-10-09, from: Maurice Parker
It’s Live!
Zavala 3.0 is now live in the App Stores. There are only a couple of new major features in Zavala 3.0, but I put a lot of under the hood for this release. Lots of code was changed to modernize the code base and support new operating system features. For example, Zavala will support the Apple Intelligence Writing Tools when they become available in macOS 15.1 and iOS/iPadOS 18.1 (assuming you have a supported device).
The biggest change was adopting Swift Structured Concurrency. This should not be noticeable to the average user except that there should be fewer unexplained crashes happening now. The crashes themselves are rare, but I want using Zavala to be as good as it can be.
The new Group and Sort commands are nice to have, new features. As usual there were a handful of bug fixes too.
What’s next?
I’m honestly not sure what I should, if anything enhance next. I started out to build a good, simple outliner and I think that is what Zavala is now. One of the reasons that I wanted Zavala to be free and open source is so that I didn’t have to have a constant upgrade cycle to drive revenue. Basically, I didn’t want to add features I didn’t believe in just to make a living. That could lead to Zavala suffering from feature bloat. I’ve seen enough applications fall into that trap.
This doesn’t mean that Zavala is abandoned or not being maintained. I still plan on fixing bugs and taking feature requests seriously. Stuff that fits well in Zavala and doesn’t over complicate it will be added in minor releases, the same way that it was in the 2.x series. Apple evolves their platforms at an astonishing rate and developers have to modify their apps to keep up with it. I’ll stay on top of things, like Apple Intelligence, so that Zavala doesn’t get left behind and look or feel dated.
As always, if you find a bug or have an enhancement request, drop me an email. Heck, email me just to say, Hi. Since I don’t collect any user data, this is the only way I know that anyone is even using Zavala.
https://vincode.io/2024/10/09/zavala.html
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain/
Las Vegas says goodbye to Tropicana with flashy casino implosion
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
LAS VEGAS — Sin City blew a kiss goodbye to the Tropicana before first light Wednesday in an elaborate implosion that reduced to rubble the last true mob building on the Las Vegas Strip.
The Tropicana’s hotel towers tumbled in a celebration that included a fireworks display. It was the first implosion in nearly a decade for a city that loves fresh starts and that has made casino implosions as much a part of its identity as gambling itself.
“What Las Vegas has done, in classic Las Vegas style, they’ve turned many of these implosions into spectacles,” said Geoff Schumacher, historian and vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum.
Former casino mogul Steve Wynn changed the way Las Vegas blows up casinos in 1993 with the implosion of the Dunes to make room for the Bellagio. Wynn thought not only to televise the event but created a fantastical story for the implosion that made it look like pirate ships at his other casino across the street were firing at the Dunes.
From then on, Schumacher said, there was a sense in Las Vegas that destruction at that magnitude was worth witnessing.
The city hasn’t blown up a Strip casino since 2016, when the final tower of the Riviera was leveled for a convention center expansion.
This time, the implosion cleared land for a $1.5 billion baseball stadium for the relocating Oakland Athletics, part of the city’s latest rebrand into a sports hub.
That will leave only the Flamingo from the city’s mob era on the Strip. But, Schumacher said, the Flamingo’s original structures are long gone. The casino was completely rebuilt in the 1990s.
The Tropicana, the third-oldest casino on the Strip, closed in April after welcoming guests for 67 years.
Once known as the “Tiffany of the Strip” for its opulence, it was a frequent haunt of the legendary Rat Pack, while its past under the mob has long cemented its place in Las Vegas lore.
It opened in 1957 with three stories and 300 hotel rooms split into two wings.
As Las Vegas rapidly evolved in the following decades, including a building boom of Strip megaresorts in the 1990s, the Tropicana also underwent major changes. Two hotel towers were added in later years. In 1979, the casino’s beloved $1 million green-and-amber stained glass ceiling was installed above the casino floor.
The Tropicana’s original low-rise hotel wings survived the many renovations, however, making it the last true mob structure on the Strip.
Behind the scenes of the casino’s grand opening, the Tropicana had ties to organized crime, largely through reputed mobster Frank Costello.
Costello was shot in the head in New York weeks after the Tropicana’s debut. He survived, but the investigation led police to a piece of paper in his coat pocket with the Tropicana’s exact earnings figure, revealing the mob’s stake in the casino.
By the 1970s, federal authorities investigating mobsters in Kansas City charged more than a dozen operatives with conspiring to skim $2 million in gambling revenue from Las Vegas casinos, including the Tropicana. Charges connected to the Tropicana alone resulted in five convictions.
There were no public viewing areas for the event, but fans of the Tropicana did have a chance in April to bid farewell to the vintage Vegas relic.
“Old Vegas, it’s going,” Joe Zappulla, a teary-eyed New Jersey resident, said at the time as he exited the casino, shortly before the locks went on the doors.
RUBIK Pi is a compact dev board with a Qualcomm QCS6490 and up to 12.5 TOPS of AI performance
date: 2024-10-09, from: Liliputing
The RUBIK Pi is a dev board from Thundercomm that’s positioned as a platform for developers looking to work a Qualcomm AI processor. At the heart of the board is a Qualcomm QCS6490 processor with eight ARMv8 CPU cores, Qualcomm Adreno 643 graphics, and a 6th-gen Qualcomm AI Engine that delivers up to 12.5 TOPS of […]
The post RUBIK Pi is a compact dev board with a Qualcomm QCS6490 and up to 12.5 TOPS of AI performance appeared first on Liliputing.
Hotel Workers Knock on a Million Doors, Targeting Latinos, to Keep Arizona Blue for Kamala Harris
date: 2024-10-09, from: Capital and Main
One in four voters is Latino in a critical state where Biden won but Trump now leads.
The post Hotel Workers Knock on a Million Doors, Targeting Latinos, to Keep Arizona Blue for Kamala Harris appeared first on .
CIQ takes Rocky Linux corporate with $25K price tag
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Backs RHEL-compatible distro with indemnification and update guarantees
CIQ has unveiled a version of Rocky Linux backed by service level objectives and indemnities for enterprises requiring more than the support of an enthusiastic community behind an operating system.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/rocky_linux_from_ciq/
Hurricane Milton Crashes Into Tampa’s Development Boom
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
In around 12 hours, Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall within miles of Tampa Bay, a region that is home to more than 5 million people. Once a sleepy retirement community, the area has seen a major development boom in recent years fueled by Millennials and Gen Zers seeking the perks of coastal living; it was the 11th fastest-growing city of its size in the U.S. as of this spring and has been expected to continue to grow at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the country over the next five years. A third of those residents, including many of the newcomers, live in low-lying neighborhoods now under urgent evacuation notices due to the threat of “unsurvivable” storm surge, which could rise up to 15 feet.
The development boom that has made Tampa Bay so desirable is also why it’s particularly vulnerable. In an analysis of Hurricane Ian — the most expensive storm in Florida’s history, which struck just south of Milton’s projected track in 2022 — the re-insurance company Swiss Re found that if the storm had struck in the 1970s, it would have caused a third to a half as much damage. Simply put: You can’t adapt your way out of a hurricane problem.
If there is anyone to talk to about the vulnerabilities unique to Tampa Bay, it’s Stephen M. Strader, an associate professor and hazard geographer at Villanova University. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You shared an image on Twitter of the explosive growth in the Tampa Bay area between 1940 and 2024. Why does this make the region vulnerable to a storm like Milton? Is it just about there being more people there?
When we think about disasters, we think of the intersection of three components: a violent event, like what we have with Milton; vulnerability, or what types of people could be in the path, which could be related to racial divides, age, and gender norms; and what a lot of my work focuses on, exposure.
Exposure is just the number of people or things that we care about — businesses, schools, and things like that — that are subject to losses if an event occurs. Florida is a great example of rapid urbanization since the 1900s, and it’s rapid development in a very hazard-prone region.
It can be easy for outsiders to sit back and wonder why anyone would buy a house on the water or on a barrier island near Tampa.
There are a lot of factors that come into play when you think about where we develop and why we develop certain locations. One of the biggest pressures that we see is that it’s desirable land: In the short term, people want to live near the water. It’s beautiful! People don’t think necessarily about the risk that comes with it because they’re too focused on their dream, which is to live near the ocean.
The other side of that is, from an economic standpoint, people see it as an opportunity to have businesses and to build condos. Developers see the land and think, “How much could I buy this for and sell it for with homes on it?” This really started back with Carl Fisher, who was famous for building the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He was a thrill-seeker, but also a businessman and developer, and he loved to go to South Florida — which is now Miami Beach, and then was swamps and mangroves and not developed at all. And he thought, Hmm, this would be a great place for people to visit for vacations and experiences. He slowly started filling in the wetlands with sand. And that’s the history of Florida’s development: It continued because this was very valuable land.
There is a lot of socioeconomic pressure to develop in these areas, but we’re also starting to see it change. Those pressures are lessening because you have insurance industries now and events like this year after year.
There is another issue in Southwest Florida, which is that many of the homes were constructed before building codes were updated, right?
I tend to do a lot more work on the manufactured housing side. Before 1974, all manufactured homes were called mobile homes, and there wasn’t really a standard. Then, in 1974, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development came in and said, “We need to increase the standards,” and they did.
Fast-forward to 1992 and Hurricane Andrew, and they realized these codes were not strong enough. Many people lived in manufactured homes that were destroyed by Andrew, which was a very windy hurricane. We think hurricanes are wind threats because of Andrew, but hurricanes are water threats, and most deaths occur because of that water. Andrew was the opposite.
Between 1992 and 1994, they updated building codes for manufactured housing, and actually, along the coastline, Florida has some of the strongest codes for manufactured homes in the country. A lot of the areas that will be affected by Milton will have those strong standards. But many homes were also grandfathered in if they were built before that time.
That’s just one type of housing. My guess is that when you have a lot of rapid development since the 1990s — well, I have some questions about structural integrity since building codes can be strong but they might not be followed. And we sometimes don’t know until afterwards. A lot of what is being built are condos or McMansions — it’s basically, How fast can you build them, how cheap can you build them, and how high can you sell them? And they look great until their performance is put into question.
Insurance companies are starting to see this and ask, “How do we retrofit structures?” Structure-wise, though, I think Tampa is in a decent spot. The problem is, the water is so powerful that it’s not going to matter.
What kinds of conversations do you think Floridians should be having about development or potential redevelopment after Milton?
I’m a huge proponent of resisting the urge to build right back — the reason being that’s how you get repetitive losses. The hard part is, with a lot of insurance, if you have it, you only get provisions to build back the way you were. You don’t have the ability to improve. So what I end up telling people is, sometimes these disasters provide an opportunity to assess what we need to do from a planning standpoint. This is unsustainable development, and not just because of hurricanes, but because of rising sea levels and the stress on the environment. And unfortunately, a lot of these developments were built on top of wetlands and marshes and mangroves that used to protect the island areas as natural barriers.
The hard part is that people’s emotions are very strong after disasters, and they immediately want to return to how things were. That’s why you see people picking up the pieces the day after a storm, sometimes even when they’re injured. So we have to resist the urge as a group, and say, maybe this isn’t the time to think about rebuilding here.
Many wetland restoration projects in Florida are doing that very thing: reclaiming the environments that protected people inland. But on the other side you have developers and builders and local economies that rely on people coming to these areas, and that pressures people to come right back. Then you end up with a situation of repetitive losses and that’s why FEMA has been losing money over the years — it’s not so much that we’re putting money toward disasters but that we’re not getting value out of it, because it’s so much more likely for there to be impacts because of that exposure growth. Look at what happened after Helene and what’s going to happen with Milton: We’re splitting resources between the two. But we’re doing the best with the tools we have when there’s pressure on both sides, and considerations both economic and safety.
Is there anything else people should know about the geography of Tampa or the development risk there?
This storm is going to be different than other storms, and that’s because of the direction and intensity of it. The one thing we have to remember is that all that development — and everybody, for the most part, who isn’t 100 years old — has not experienced a hurricane of this magnitude in their life. That means everyone has the cognitive bias to say, “I’ve been through hurricanes before and was fine.” That is probably not going to be the case with this event; no one has been through this before.
What’s worrisome to me is that the trajectory of the hurricane is changing. A subtle shift north or south by 20 miles could mean a big difference for the Tampa region — if you have the right side of the hurricane push water into the Bay, it’s no different than 10 people jumping into a hot tub. The water level goes up and forces all that water into a smaller region, which is going to lead to more storm surge in Tampa Bay, Clearwater, and the St. Pete area. I don’t want to call it a “perfect storm,” but if you push all that water in there, you’re going to flood people in a way that hurricanes they’ve been through before never got close to. And I worry, if it goes south, about Fort Myers and the areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Ian. So it’s multilayered.
The good news that I’ll bring up is that we’re reeling from Helene, which means people have it in their brains about how bad this can be, which is probably causing more people to evacuate than normal. We have a problem with disaster amnesia in places where a hurricane hasn’t happened in a long time so “it’s not going to happen again.” And we forget. I remember Hurricane Katrina and what it did to New Orleans. It still has effects, but the students I’m teaching now weren’t even alive when it hit. These memories are short, and many people in Florida today weren’t there 30 years ago or 20 years ago. The only good thing to come out of Helene is that people are now aware of what can happen.
https://heatmap.news/climate/hurricane-milton-tampa
Republicans, Democrats work to preempt fraud claims ahead of election
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
ANN ARBOR, FLINT AND DETROIT, MICHIGAN — U.S. election officials in battleground states are pushing back against disinformation about election integrity and working to assure Americans that their votes will be counted.
Officials from both major parties in six states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last month for panel discussions hosted by the nonpartisan group Keep our Republic. The group seeks to educate the American public about threats to the U.S. election system and build trust in the electoral system.
They’re working to avoid a repeat of November 2020 scenes in nearby Detroit and other American cities where supporters of then-President Donald Trump, riled up by his baseless accusations of election fraud, pressured officials to stop counting the votes.
This year, many Trump supporters who spoke with VOA say they worry about fraud in this election.
“Right now, our government, you’re going to question everything about it,” said Marvin Minton, a Trump supporter who attended the Republican presidential nominee’s town hall event in Flint, Michigan, in September. “I wish I could say differently, but that’s not how America feels. We don’t trust nobody.”
Angelina Kandow, who was also at the Flint event, said, “Was [the 2020 election] stolen or not? One case, one case is enough to question the whole system.”
Some Trump supporters quoted alleged instances of 2020 election fraud that were disproven during court cases triggered by the more than 60 lawsuits filed by Republicans and the Trump campaign after that year’s election.
Disinformation around election integrity has gained traction among Republicans, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts poll, released in August.
The poll found 67% of Republicans trust Trump and his campaign for accurate information on the outcome of the election. Only 51% of Republicans said they trust the government’s certification of election results.
In contrast, 87% of Democrats trust government certifications, while 82% trust Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, and her campaign.
Dangerous disinformation
Officials in battleground states say disinformation can be dangerous.
“They can in some cases lead to people making threats to election officials or worse, based on lies or misinformation they have been told about elections,” said Jonathan Brater, director of the Michigan Bureau of Elections.
“Even if it doesn’t result in any sort of physical violence, it does undermine trust long term in the election system, which is bad for our republic and is bad for our democracy,” he told VOA.
Meagan Wolfe, an election official in Wisconsin, another battleground state, has been targeted with intimidation, even death threats. Republicans loyal to Trump have attempted to oust her over false claims that she helped to rig the 2020 vote in favor of President Joe Biden.
Wolfe encouraged people who don’t trust the election process to become involved.
“They can become a poll worker. They can become a poll observer. They can watch the audits of the voting equipment,” she told VOA.” All of that is open for [the] public to view.”
In many states, efforts to ensure voters that elections are secure are supported by Republicans. Justin Roebuck, a Republican election official in Ottawa County, Michigan, acknowledges it’s an uphill battle.
“Our political leaders at every level need to also seek facts and to seek data,” he told VOA. “And I think until that happens, we will have a problem in terms of our confidence and trust in the process.”
Roebuck said he is working directly with citizens, instead of through the campaigns.
“We have very decentralized elections in the United States. There are always things that we can do better,” he said. “Sometimes we have to work through those challenges and work through those messes.”
Messy in Michigan
It’s already looking like it could become messy in Michigan. Republicans loyal to Trump have sued Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, over absentee ballot processing guidelines and voter registration lists.
“If Jocelyn Benson is not responding to what is required under the law, we will take her to court to get the courts to compel her to do that,” Michigan Republican Party chairperson Pete Hoekstra told VOA.
Benson dismissed it as a Republican strategy to create a “false sense of irregularities in the process.”
“In general, we see lawsuits masquerading as a legal strategy when they’re really a PR strategy to get misinformation or sow seeds of doubt about our elections into the narrative,” she told VOA.
She said that there are “more checks and balances in place than ever before” to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the election process.
Both parties have launched election-related lawsuits in various battleground states, which could mean chaos in the November election.
“Any kind of legal challenge happening this close to an election, typically, is lawyers putting a placeholder in case they may not win in a state or may not have an outcome they like, and it gives them the ability to challenge the election after the fact,” said Kim Wyman, senior fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project in Washington.
There are other potential disruptions, including efforts to delay election certification by county officials who support Trump.
“We’ve seen some legal maneuvers and some boards of elections that have changed the rules that allow more scrutiny over the canvas period and the certification of the election,” Wyman told VOA.
After Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, Congress sought to prevent such events from recurring by passing the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act.
Mandatory deadline
The reforms set a new mandatory December 11 deadline for states to submit certified slates of presidential electors, provided expedited court access to resolve challenges and raised the threshold for objecting to election results in Congress.
Battleground states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina have passed legislation to ensure that canvasses, recounts, audits and legal challenges meet the new deadline.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have not, leaving their electoral systems vulnerable to partisan lawsuits and political pressures that could force them to miss the certification deadline.
This could leave uncertain the fate of 29 electoral college votes. A presidential candidate needs at least 270 electoral college votes to win.
VOA’s Rivan Dwiastono contributed to this report.
Amazon Prime Day mini PC deals (Oct 9, 2024)
date: 2024-10-09, from: Liliputing
Amazon’s Prime Big Deals Day runs through midnight Pacific Time on October 9, 2024. And that means you’ve still got time to score deep discounts on a wide range of products including smartphones, tablets, laptops, headphones, chargers, and other accessories. It’s also a pretty good day to pick up a cheap (or at least discounted) […]
The post Amazon Prime Day mini PC deals (Oct 9, 2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/amazon-prime-day-mini-pc-deals-oct-9-2024/
UAW Is Threatening to Strike Again — This Time Over Shelved EV Plans
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
One of the biggest wins the United Auto Workers’ secured in its historic negotiations with the Big Three automakers last year was a commitment from Stellantis to reopen and expand its shuttered factory in Belvidere, Illinois. Now the company is shelving those plans, which included retooling the factory to produce electric vehicles and EV batteries, and suing the union for threatening to strike in response.
The dispute illustrates a new turn in the EV transition. Whereas last year auto workers were wary of the transition and fighting to keep their jobs intact, now their jobs are dependent on that transition actually happening, and happening soon. The UAW is concerned that the company will delay the plant’s reopening until 2028 — after the union’s contract expires.
Stellantis idled the Belvidere plant, which previously produced Jeep Cherokees, in February 2023, laying off more than 1,300 workers. But under its agreement with the UAW, the company said it would spend nearly $5 billion to restart the factory. The contract includes commitments to opening a parts distribution hub there this year, producing a new mid-size truck there by 2027, and building an electric vehicle battery plant at the site by 2028. Not only would jobs at Belvidere be restored, but the battery plant was expected to employ an additional 1,300 people. Former Belvidere employees would also be reclassified as temporary layoffs and receive partial pay and full healthcare benefits until operations started up again.
President Joe Biden celebrated Belvidere as a “great comeback story” in his State of the Union speech in March. “Instead of an auto factory shutting down, an auto factory is reopening and a new state-of-the-art battery factory is being built to power those cars,” he said. “Instead of a town being left behind it’s a community moving forward again!”
In July, plans to turn Belvidere into an EV hub seemed to be taking shape when the Department of Energy selected Stellantis for a $335 million grant to transition the plant’s assembly lines to be able to produce electric vehicles. The grant website says the project was anticipated to incorporate “significant upgrades” to the plant’s infrastructure and re-employ about “1,450 unionized and highly skilled employees.” Stellantis, however, did not issue any press releases about the grant. In a statement to the Chicago Tribune, the company said it was “an important step in continuing to work toward finalizing a sustainable solution” for Belvidere.
About a month later, the narrative around Belvidere started to shift. UAW president Shawn Fain posted a video on social media claiming something was “rotten” at Stellantis and accused the company of “putting the brakes” on its plans to reopen the plant. On August 20, Stellantis confirmed that “plans for Belvidere will be delayed,” though it “firmly stands by its commitment” to reopen the plant. The company’s explanation for the decision was vague and did not include a new timeline. “To ensure the Company’s future competitiveness and sustainability,” it said, “it is critical that the business case for all investments is aligned with market conditions and our ability to accommodate a wide range of consumer demands.”
As it stands, the business is not exactly in a sustainable place. In July, Stellantis reported that its U.S. revenues were down 16% compared to the first half of last year. Declining sales have left dealerships with a glut of inventory. Fain blames the company’s poor performance on its CEO Carlos Tavares, questioning how “market conditions” could be holding back investments in Belvidere when Tavares took a 56% raise last year, “making him the highest paid auto executive outside of Tesla.”
In response, the company published a fact check of the union’s claims, which notes that “there is indisputable volatility in the market, especially as the industry transitions to an electrified future. Over the past year, numerous companies across the industry have announced investment and product delays as well as outright product cancellations.” Stellantis currently sells just one EV in the U.S., the Fiat 500e, which it manufactures in Italy; in September, the company announced it had suspended production due to poor sales, though it still has several new EV models slated to launch later this year.
More than a dozen local UAW units all over the country filed grievances against Stellantis in August, arguing that the company’s “failure to plan for, fund and launch these programs constitute a violation” of its contract. The union has threatened to strike if the grievances are not addressed, citing its “right to strike over product and investment commitments” — another provision of the 2023 contract.
Stellantis denies that it has violated the contract and thrown the accusation back at UAW, noting that the agreement included a clause that says it is understood that the investments are “contingent upon plant performance, changes in market conditions, and consumer demand.” It has since filed eight lawsuits against the union and several of its locals for threatening to strike.
The company has also not completely abandoned its plans for the EV transition. A few weeks ago, it announced it would invest more than $406 million to prepare three Michigan factories for EV production. During a livestream in September, Fain wrote off those investments as representing just a small portion of what the company committed to.
In response to questions about why investment in Belvidere was delayed, whether the company would still pursue the federal grant, or what the new timeline for the plant was, a representative from Stellantis sent me bullet points from the previously published fact check.
The Department of Energy did not answer questions about the status or timeline for the factory conversion grant.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/uaw-belvidere-strike
Microsoft cleans up hot mess of Patch Tuesday preview
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Go forth and install your important security fixes
Microsoft says that the problems with the Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview have now been resolved.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/windows_patch_tuesday_fixes/
Thousands of Internal AI Training Datasets, Tools Exposed to Anyone on the Internet
date: 2024-10-09, from: 404 Media Group
“In addition to the ML models themselves, the exposed data can include training datasets, hyperparameters, and sometimes even raw data used to build models,” a security researcher said.
Cognizant discriminated against non-Indian workers in H-1B visa case, US jury finds
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
IT service giant denies claims, will appeal against verdict
A US jury has found that employment practices at Cognizant constitute discriminatory conduct toward non-Indian workers in a case that originated in 2013 and claimed the tech giant favored H-1B visa holders from India over local workers.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/us_jury_cognizant_case/
A costly lesson, often learned the hard way
date: 2024-10-09, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Medicare does not pay for general, long-term care. Now, Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s candidate for president, wants to expand Medicare to pay for long-term care for older people in their home. That would need an amenable new Congress, but many families are presently left trying to piece together care for older relatives. Also on today’s show: potential structure changes to Google and the rising value of the U.S. dollar.
An American Bomb Left Over From World War II Explodes at an Airport Taxiway in Japan
date: 2024-10-09, from: Smithsonian Magazine
No one was injured in the blast, and authorities are investigating why the ordnance detonated after so many years underground
Misappropriation of Sheep Testicles
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/10/09/misappropriation-of-sheep-testicles/
Ransomware gang Trinity joins pile of scumbags targeting healthcare
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As if hospitals and clinics didn't have enough to worry about
At least one US healthcare provider has been infected by Trinity, an emerging cybercrime gang with eponymous ransomware that uses double extortion and other "sophisticated" tactics that make it a "significant threat," according to the feds.…
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT. I just got access to this. I think I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying it out on a coding project. I have a problem I need to iterate over with ChatGPT and that has been in general a frustrating process, iterating.
https://openai.com/index/introducing-canvas/
Podcast: The Smart Glasses That Dox Strangers
date: 2024-10-09, from: 404 Media Group
Looking at someone and doxing them instantly; how a data archive was knocked offline during a recent hurricane; and a hack of an AI companion.
https://www.404media.co/podcast-the-smart-glasses-that-dox-strangers/
The narrow path from votes of despair
date: 2024-10-09, from: Enlightenment Economics
I read Sam Freedman’s Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It with a mixture of nods of recognition and gasps of disbelief. It’s all too apparent that – as the subtitle puts it – nothing works in … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/10/the-narrow-path-from-votes-of-despair/
The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes
date: 2024-10-09, from: 404 Media Group
WikiProject AI Cleanup is protecting Wikipedia from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued the rest of the internet.
https://www.404media.co/the-editors-protecting-wikipedia-from-ai-hoaxes/
Uncle Sam may force Google to sell Chrome browser, or Android OS
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Tech giant snaps back, calls DoJ proposals on splitting up Alphabet and more 'government overreach'
The US government has confirmed it is considering asking a judge to force Google to divest parts of its business as part of potential remedies in the antitrust case over its control of online searches.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/usa_vs_google_proposed_remedies/
Microsoft sprinkles AI ‘magic’ and additional storage tiers on OneDrive
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Big emphasis on photos in mobile app
Microsoft has unveiled a slew of new features for its OneDrive cloud storage service "all through the magic of AI."…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/microsoft_onedrive_updates/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
When I was a kid, Pensie Pinkies were the favored kind of street game ball.
https://canarsiegirl.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/spaldeens-vs-pensy-pinkies/
The IEA Has Good News and Bad News About Renewables
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Rare rainstorms have flooded parts of the Sahara Desert • Storm Kirk is expected to bring flooding to parts of northern France • Wyoming’s 75,000-acre Elk Fire has been burning for nearly two weeks.
THE TOP FIVE
- Category 5 Hurricane Milton approaches Florida
Hurricane Milton, currently a Category 5 storm, is expected to make landfall this evening near Tampa, Florida, as a Category 4 hurricane with 130 mph winds, according to the National Weather Service. It will bring between 10 and 15 feet of storm surge (possibly more, depending on which forecast you’re following), plus tornadoes. The conditions have already started to deteriorate and will continue to do so throughout the day. “There is no recent precedent for a major hurricane to take this path toward Florida,” said AccuWeather Director of Forecasting Operations Dan DePodwin. “This is an increasing significant risk of devastating, catastrophic impacts to this region.”
AccuWeather
- Studies link Helene and Milton to climate change
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels almost certainly made Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene a lot worse, according to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central. A storm like Hurricane Helene is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely.
“While hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up,” wrote Heatmap’s Jeva Lange. “That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.”
- IEA: Renewable capacity growth not enough to triple by 2030
There are several big energy reports out this week, and taken together, their findings tell a nuanced story of an energy transition that’s well underway, but still moving too slowly. Let’s start with the big one: The International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2024 report, published this morning. It says that the world is on track to add 5,500 gigawatts of new clean energy capacity by 2030, 80% of which will come from solar PV alone. That means renewables will account for half of global electricity generation by the end of the decade.
IEA
While this is huge progress (the report notes that 5,500 GW is roughly equal the power capacity of China, the European Union, India, and the U.S. combined), it is not enough to meet the COP28 goal of tripling renewable capacity by 2030. But! The IEA stresses that it is “entirely possible” to meet this target if governments can get their acts together, set bold new emission reduction targets in the coming months, and work together to lower the energy transition costs for poorer countries. “The market can deliver on renewables, and now governments need to prioritize investing in storage, grids, and other forms of clean flexibility to enable this transformation,” said Dave Jones, director of global insights at energy think tank Ember. “The next half decade is going to be one heck of a ride.”
So, that’s renewables. Let’s look at what all this means for emissions and, most importantly, warming.
- Rhodium and DNV forecast 2100 warming levels
An energy transition report published this morning from Norwegian risk management company DNV concludes, rather remarkably, that energy-related emissions are set to peak this year and begin a steady decline thanks to the plummeting costs of solar and batteries, especially in China. “Emissions peaking is a milestone for humanity,” said Remi Eriksen, group president and CEO of DNV. However, the projected rate of emission reduction is only enough to limit warming to 2.2 degrees Celsius by 2100. “We must now focus on how quickly emissions decline and use the available tools to accelerate the energy transition,” Eriksen added.
The Rhodium Climate Outlook 2024 report, out yesterday, concluded that there is a less than 7% chance of the world limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius “if current trends in policy and technology development continue.” In fact, it projected a “very likely” increase between 2 degrees Celsius and gulp 3.7 degrees Celsius by century’s end. However, odds of limiting warming to 2 degrees jump to 96% if all countries can get to net-zero emissions by 2070. To date, 149 countries (representing 88% of global emissions) have made net-zero or carbon neutrality commitments, though it remains to be seen if and when they’ll meet those goals.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
- Study suggests green hydrogen will remain ‘prohibitively expensive’
The cost of “green” hydrogen – that which is produced with clean energy – is likely to remain “prohibitively expensive,” according to a new study published yesterday in the journal Joule. The fuel is seen as key to curbing emissions from hard-to-abate sectors (industry, for example), and many are banking on the price of production falling. But the researchers say the high storage and distribution costs are often overlooked. Taking those costs into consideration, carbon capture and storage is cheaper than green hydrogen when it comes to curbing emissions, the researchers found. “Even if production costs decrease in line with predictions, storage and distribution costs will prevent hydrogen being cost-competitive in many sectors,” said lead author Roxana Shafiee, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. “Our results challenge a growing idea that hydrogen will be the ‘Swiss army knife of decarbonization’ and suggest that the opportunities for hydrogen may be narrower than previously thought.”
THE KICKER
“After 40 years in a career, hopefully, I get a little leeway from the folks who are accustomed to seeing me cool as a cucumber. But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected.” –Meteorologist John Morales on his emotional on-air reaction to Hurricane Milton’s rapid intensification.
https://heatmap.news/climate/iea-renewables-report-emissions-warming
Let’s get apolitical
date: 2024-10-09, from: Marketplace Morning Report
In a time of fraught political polarization, it’s hard for companies to decide whether to take political stands or remain quietly on the sidelines. Today, as a continuation of our Office Politics series, we’ll hear why some places that once mixed business and politics may be keeping a lower profile now. Then, nearly a month into a strike, negotiations between aerospace giant Boeing and its union members have broken off. We hear why.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/lets-get-apolitical
Study: Climate change made deadly Hurricane Helene more intense
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Hurricane Helene’s torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10% more intense due to climate change, according to a study published Wednesday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.
Although a 10% increase “might seem relatively small… that small change in the hazard really leads to big change in impacts and damage,” said climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads the research organization.
The study also found that fossil fuels — the primary cause of climate change — have made hurricanes like Helene 2.5 times more likely to occur.
In other words, storms of Helene’s magnitude were formerly anticipated once every 130 years, but now the probability is closer to once every 53 years, on average.
To conduct the study, researchers focused on three aspects of Hurricane Helene: precipitation, winds and the water temperature of the Gulf of Mexico — a key factor in its formation.
“All aspects of this event were amplified by climate change to different degrees,” Ben Clarke, a co-author of the study and researcher at Imperial College London, told a press conference.
“And we’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm,” he continued.
The research by WWA, an international group of scientists and meteorologists who study the role of climate change in extreme weather events, comes as the southeastern US state of Florida prepares for the arrival of another major hurricane, Milton, just 10 days after it was hit by Helene.
Destruction
Helene made landfall in northwestern Florida on September 26 as a Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 140 mph (225 kph).
The storm then moved north, causing heavy rain and devastating floods in several states, including North Carolina, where it claimed the highest death toll.
The authors of the study emphasized that the risk posed by hurricanes has increased in scope beyond coastal areas.
Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at NGO Climate Central, said Helene “had so much intensity” that it would take time for it to lose strength, but the “storm was moving fast… so it could go farther inland pretty quickly.”
This study utilized three methodologies to examine the three aspects of the storm, and was conducted by researchers from the US, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands.
To study its rainfall, researchers used an approach based on both observation and climate models, depending on the two regions involved: one for coastal areas like Florida, and another for inland areas like the Appalachian mountains.
In both cases, the study found precipitation had increased by 10 percent because of global warming, which is currently at 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
To study Helene’s winds, scientists looked at hurricane data dating back as far as 1900.
They determined Helene’s winds were 11 percent stronger, or 13 mph (21 kph), as a result of climate change.
Lastly, the researchers examined the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico, where Helene formed, finding it was around 2 degrees Celsius above normal.
This record temperature was made 200 to 500 times more likely due to climate change, the study asserts.
Warmer oceans release more water vapor, providing more energy for storms as they form.
“If humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the US will face even more destructive hurricanes,” Clarke warned in a statement.
It’s not me, it’s you: Google faces a break-up
date: 2024-10-09, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: The U.S. Department of Justice is taking aim at Google, saying the tech giant might need to be broken up because it’s too dominant in the market. This comes after a major ruling in August where a judge found Google has been running an illegal monopoly when it comes to online searches. Plus, an agency enabling the international mail system celebrates its 150th birthday.
Historic Staff Spotlight: Mario Lopez Feliu
date: 2024-10-09, from: National Archives, Pieces of History blog
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month and American Archives Month, today’s Historic Staff Spotlight is on Cuban-born National Archives intern turned staff member, Mario Lopez Feliu. It’s from Alyssa Moore in the National Archives History Office. Mario Lopez Feliu was born on March 22, 1918, in Havana, Cuba. In 1946, while heading the preservation department … Continue reading Historic Staff Spotlight: Mario Lopez Feliu
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2024/10/09/historic-staff-spotlight-mario-lopez-feliu/
UK Regulatory Innovation Office vows to slash red tape – but we’ve heard it all before
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The real issue is a reluctance to invest
Comment Over summer, the UK witnessed a change in government. However, the incoming Labour Party shares some ideas about regulation and innovation with its Conservative predecessor.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/uk_regulatory_innovation_office/
US urges peaceful resolution of any Taiwan disputes
date: 2024-10-09, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — A top U.S. official said the United States expects differences across the Taiwan Strait to be resolved peacefully and opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo as Taiwan prepares to celebrate the founding of the Republic of China on Thursday.
The People’s Republic of China, or PRC, celebrates its national day on October 1, marking the founding of the country in 1949. Taiwan chooses October 10, known as Double Ten Day, to celebrate the founding of the ROC in 1912, just months after an uprising that began on October 10, 1911.
The PRC typically closely monitors speeches from Taiwan’s leaders during Double Ten Day celebrations. Since Taiwan’s democratically elected President Lai Ching-te took office in May, Beijing has increased military pressure on Taiwan, deeming Lai a “separatist.”
On Tuesday, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink said that the U.S.’s “fundamental interest is in the maintenance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” reiterating that Washington’s longstanding One China policy remains unchanged, “guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances.”
“We oppose unilateral changes to the status quo by either side. We do not support Taiwan independence, and we expect cross-strait differences to be resolved peacefully,” Kritenbrink told VOA during a briefing.
Speaking at an event Saturday, Lai noted that the PRC celebrated its 75th anniversary on October 1, and in a few days, it would be the ROC’s 113th birthday.
“In terms of age, it is absolutely impossible for the People’s Republic of China to be considered the motherland of the people of the Republic of China. On the contrary, the ROC may be the motherland of the people of the PRC who are over 75 years old,” Lai told an audience in Taipei.
PRC officials have remained largely muted on Lai’s remarks, but some analysts say that could be because Beijing is preparing to launch another round of military exercises after Lai delivers his Double Ten Day speech.
U.S. officials have referred inquiries to “President Lai’s office for any commentary on his specific comments.”
European visit
Meanwhile, former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen will visit the Czech Republic this month, a visit seen as sensitive since Beijing has repeatedly denounced the democratic leader as a “separatist.”
In Beijing on Tuesday, a spokesperson from the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked to comment on Tsai’s planned visit to Prague.
“We firmly oppose anyone who seeks “Taiwan independence” visiting countries with diplomatic ties with China under any pretext. We urge the Czech Republic and relevant countries to earnestly abide by the One China principle and respect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters Tuesday.
Taiwan has been self-ruled since 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists took power in Beijing after defeating Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalists in a civil war, prompting the nationalists’ relocation to the island.
The U.S. does not maintain an official relationship with Taiwan but provides defense equipment to the self-ruled democracy under the Taiwan Relations Act.
Treaty of Aigun
In a TV interview in September, Lai remarked that if China’s claims over Taiwan are genuinely rooted in concerns about territorial integrity, it should also seek to reclaim the land it ceded to Russia in the 19th century.
He referenced the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, through which China, under the Qing dynasty, gave up a vast area of land — now part of Russia’s Far East — to the Russian Empire, establishing much of the modern border along the Amur River.
The Treaty of Aigun, along with the 1860 Convention of Peking, saw China relinquish 600,000 square kilometers — an area almost the size of Ukraine — to the Russian Empire, enabling Russia to establish a naval base at Vladivostok. Many Chinese people still brood over this period of history, harboring lingering resentment over the fact that the land once belonged to China before being annexed by Russia.
In 2023, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources mandated that new maps use Chinese names for Vladivostok — Haishenwai — as well as several other cities in the region.
https://www.voanews.com/a/us-stresses-desire-for-peaceful-resolution-of-taiwan-disputes/7815248.html
Game of phones: Voda-Three merger left rivals dialing for help
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
BT and some MVNOs very much against union, VMO2 more relaxed because of spectrum deal
Opinion is divided in the telecoms industry over the proposed Vodafone and Three UK merger, with at least one rival in favor of the deal, while others want to see the Brit competition regulator scrap it altogether.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/vodafone_three_merger_remedies/
Want to Decarbonize Your Life? Here’s How.
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
How can you fight climate change in your daily life? Last month, Heatmap published our attempt at answering that question: Called Decarbonize Your Life, it’s a series of stories and guides to help you make better, smarter decisions to nudge the energy system away from fossil fuels. We consulted studies, ran our own analysis (with a little help from some friends), and used our expert judgment to arrive at six big, high-leverage actions you can take to fight climate change and cut carbon pollution.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Heatmap’s deputy editor Jillian Goodman and founding staff writer Emily Pontecorvo about what those six big actions are, how the guide came together, and why big choices matter so much more than small ones. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: So it’s more than just the carbon impact which is the key here, right? This systemic leverage point that you’re trying to make is that you’re trying to think about — beyond just reducing emissions, which is important — how is that actually having some kind of systemic impact on reorienting the global capitalist system, right? That we all live in, towards where we want to go, towards what a net zero emissions lifestyle and society looks like.
Robinson Meyer: And instead of every dollar you spend going to the task of taking oil out of the ground, and the task of building more internal combustion cars, it’s going to the task of building more EVs and harvesting electricity. Anyway, Jillian, I interrupted you.
Jillian Goodman: I was just going to add — and again, I’m just paraphrasing you — every time you drive, it’s a marginal impact. Every single time you use the device. Not only are you emitting less in the short term, you’re emitting less in the long term. And as the grid gets cleaner, every time you drive your EV, your EV will get cleaner, as well.
Emily Pontecorvo: One other thing that we were thinking about a little bit is thinking about these actions in terms of, which ones are you, as an individual, you’re literally the one who’s burning the fossil fuels. When you drive your car, you are burning the gas. When you’re lighting your stove, you’re burning natural gas. And not to put it all on the individual, but you’re the one who has the power to say, Okay, I’m not gonna burn fossil fuels in my home anymore. And whereas with a few other actions — like with rooftop solar, with efficiency improvements — those are extremely important, and those are very high on our list for other reasons. But they’re more indirect.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
https://heatmap.news/podcast/shift-key-s2-e9-decarbonize-your-life
Announcing Deno 2
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: Deno blog
Our next major version of Deno combines the simplicity, security, and performance of Deno 1 with full Node and npm backwards compatibility, and much more.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Upstate New York City Underrated, Full Of Award-Winning Eateries.
Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
A traditional-style rich email client – but for tablets
MZLA, the company behind the Thunderbird email client, is finally putting its mobile email client app into beta testing – but it's a lot more mature than that sounds.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/thunderbird_for_android_beta/
Pilet: Mini Pi 5 modular computer
date: 2024-10-09, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Do you want a portable mini modular computer based on Raspberry Pi 5? If so, you’re in luck.
The post Pilet: Mini Pi 5 modular computer appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/pilet-mini-pi-5-modular-computer/
Copilot’s crudeness has left Microsoft chasing Google, again
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Surely Redmond knows that almost nobody has tamed unstructured data?
Opinion A year ago it looked as if the world could be Microsoft's oyster. The software giant dominated the enterprise, was catching up to cloudy rivals, and then managed to purchase forty-nine percent of the for-profit subsidiary of ChatGPT creator OpenAI.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/copilot_vs_notebooklm/
Missing Thunderbirds footage found in British garden shed
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, new Supermarionation is GO!
Video Previously unseen footage from the classic British TV show Thunderbirds has been found in a garden shed and restored – where possible – for viewing next year.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/missing_thunderbirds_footage/
Supermicro crams 18 GPUs into a 3U AI server that’s a little slow by design
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Can handle edge inferencing or run a 64 display command center
GPU-enhanced servers can typically pack up to eight of the accelerators, but Supermicro has built a box that manages to fit 18 of them inside an air-cooled chassis that'll eat up just 3U of rack space.…
OpenAI appoints international expansion boss
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Picks Singapore as APAC hub and outlines desire to get governments onside
Chat GPT-maker Open AI announced today that it's appointed a new boss to lead its international expansion.…
MediaTek enters the 4th Dimensity with 3nm octa-core 9400 smartphone brains
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Still sticking with Arm and not taking RISC-Vs
Fabless Taiwanese chip biz MediaTek has unveiled the fourth flagship entry in its Dimensity family of system-on-chips for smartphones and other mobile devices. It's sticking with close companion Arm rather than jumping ship to RISC-V for the CPU cores, for those wondering.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/mediatek_dimensity_9400/
How Climate Change Is Supercharging Hurricane Milton
date: 2024-10-09, from: Heatmap News
Contrary to recent rumor, the U.S. government cannot direct major hurricanes like Helene and Milton toward red states. According to two new rapid attribution studies by World Weather Attribution and Climate Central, however, human actors almost certainly made the storms a lot worse through the burning of fossil fuels.
A storm like Hurricane Helene, which has killed at least 227 people so far and caused close to $50 billion in estimated property losses across the southeast, is about two-and-a-half times more likely in the region today compared to what would be expected in a “cooler pre-industrial climate,” WWA found. That means Helene, the kind of storm one would expect to see once every 130 years on average, is now expected to develop at a rate of about once every 53 years. Additionally, WWA researchers determined that extreme rainfall from Helene was 70% more likely and 10% heavier in the Appalachians and about 40% more likely in the southern Appalachian region, where many of the deaths occurred, due to climate change.
“Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene — we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy,” Friederike Otto, the lead of WWA and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a statement. “But vitally, we need the political will.” Alarmingly, the attribution study found that storms could drop an additional 10% or more rain on average as soon as the 2050s if warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius.
WWA’s study is not the first to be released on Hurricane Helene, but it was still produced incredibly quickly and has not been peer reviewed. Just a few weeks ago, the group issued a correction on a report estimating the contribution of climate change to recent flooding in Europe.
Separately, Climate Central looked at Hurricane Milton, which already has the distinction of being the fifth strongest Atlantic storm on record. The nonprofit’s findings show that Milton’s rapid intensification — one of the fastest and most powerful instances of the phenomenon in history — is primarily due to high sea surface temperatures in the weeks before Milton developed, which was made at least 400 times more likely by climate change and up to 800 times more likely. (WWA relied on Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index for oceans for its research, but found “climate change made the unusually hot sea surface temperature about 200-500 times more likely.”)
Attribution science is incredibly tricky, especially for a storm system like a hurricane that has variables ranging from wind shear to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation to ocean temperatures and jet stream variations. When I spoke to a member of the WWA team earlier this year, I was told the organization specifically avoids attributing the intensification of any individual hurricane — in theory, one of the more straightforward relationships — to climate change because of the relatively limited historical modeling available. Even something like rainfall “is not necessarily correlated to the magnitude of the floods that you see because there are other factors,” WWA’s Clair Barnes previously told me — for example, the steep-sided mountains and hollows of western North Carolina, which served as funnels for rainfall to an especially devastating effect.
But regarding the relationship between hurricanes and climate change more generally, “We’re relatively confident that storms will get more intense” in a warming world, Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton geoscientist, explained on a recent episode of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. “And we’re really confident that storms will get wetter.”
Helene and Milton hammer that point home: once-in-a-generation storms can now arrive on back-to-back weekends. You can almost understand the impulse to devise a zany explanation as to why. Only, the truth is far simpler than cloud seeding or space lasers: a warmer atmosphere makes for warmer oceans, which make for wetter, more intense storms. And while hurricane seasons eventually end, global temperatures haven’t stopped going up. That, perhaps, is the more terrifying subtext of the attribution studies: There will be more Miltons and Helenes.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/climate-change-hurricane-milton-helene
Asian crime gangs are growing – fast – thanks to AI and other tech
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
UN report finds Telegram, cryptocurrency are tools of a growing 'criminal service economy'
Organized crime syndicates across Asia are using AI, messaging platforms like Telegram, and cryptocurrency to help them expand, with help from dedicated service providers, according to a report the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published on Monday.…
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Apprentice: the film Trump doesn't want you to see.
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/08/trump-apprentice-film
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
wpIdentity simplifies the WordPress REST API, making it easier to incorporate into JavaScript apps running in the browser.
https://github.com/scripting/wpIdentity/blob/main/docs/history.md
LinkedIn: If our AI gets something wrong, that’s your problem
date: 2024-10-09, updated: 2024-10-09, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Artificial intelligence still no substitute for the real thing
Microsoft's LinkedIn will update its User Agreement next month with a warning that it may show users generative AI content that's inaccurate or misleading.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/09/linkedin_ai_misinformation_agreement/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-10-09, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
It’s so funny how respectable Flushing has become. My hometown. Always found the name kind of embarrassing. 😳