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Category: Technology

Apple makes plans to move production out of China

Apple makes plans to move production out of China

The Wall Street Journal reports: In recent weeks, Apple has accelerated plans to shift some of its production outside China, long the dominant country in the supply chain that built the world’s most valuable company, say people involved in the discussions. It is telling suppliers to plan more actively for assembling Apple products elsewhere in Asia, particularly India and Vietnam, they say, and looking to reduce dependence on Taiwanese assemblers led by Foxconn Technology Group. Turmoil at a place called…

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A peek inside the FBI’s unprecedented January 6 geofence dragnet

A peek inside the FBI’s unprecedented January 6 geofence dragnet

Wired reports: The FBI’s biggest-ever investigation included the biggest-ever haul of phones from controversial geofence warrants, court records show. A filing in the case of one of the January 6 suspects, David Rhine, shows that Google initially identified 5,723 devices as being in or near the US Capitol during the riot. Only around 900 people have so far been charged with offenses relating to the siege. The filing suggests that dozens of phones that were in airplane mode during the…

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company ghosts cities across America

Elon Musk’s Boring Company ghosts cities across America

The Wall Street Journal reports: The unsolicited proposal from Elon Musk’s tunnel-building venture arrived in January 2020. To the local transportation authority, it felt like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion. For just $45 million, Mr. Musk’s Boring Co. offered to instead build an underground tunnel through which travelers could zip…

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Early humans may have cooked fish 780,000 years ago

Early humans may have cooked fish 780,000 years ago

Smithsonian magazine reports: Cooking with fire marked an important turning point in human evolution. But based on available evidence, determining exactly when early humans learned to cook is challenging. While researchers have discovered the remains of charred animals and root vegetables, that doesn’t necessarily mean people were grilling up steaks for dinner; they may have simply tossed a dead animal into the fire for disposal. Now, researchers in Israel say they’ve come up with a clever solution to this problem—and,…

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Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all

Embrace what may be the most important green technology ever. It could save us all

George Monbiot writes: So what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis was at a single summit in Montreal. Nothing can now be achieved without mass protest, whose aim, like that of protest movements before us,…

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Climate inaction is making the desperate choice of solar geoengineering more likely

Climate inaction is making the desperate choice of solar geoengineering more likely

Bill McKibben writes: If we decide to “solar geoengineer” the Earth—to spray highly reflective particles of a material, such as sulfur, into the stratosphere in order to deflect sunlight and so cool the planet—it will be the second most expansive project that humans have ever undertaken. (The first, obviously, is the ongoing emission of carbon and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.) The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere;…

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This week, billionaires made a strong case for abolishing themselves

This week, billionaires made a strong case for abolishing themselves

Anand Giridharadas writes: In recent years, a swelling chorus of Americans has grown critical of the nation’s bajillionaires. But in the extraordinary week gone by, that chorus was drowned out by a far louder and more urgent case against them. It was made by the bajillionaires themselves. One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class. It is a commendable sacrifice on their part, because billionaires, remember, exist…

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Embattled crypto exchange FTX files for bankruptcy

Embattled crypto exchange FTX files for bankruptcy

The New York Times reports: On Monday, Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, took to Twitter to reassure his customers: “FTX is fine,” he wrote. “Assets are fine.” On Friday, FTX announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, capping an extraordinary week of corporate drama that has upended crypto markets and sent shock waves through the industry. In a statement on Twitter, the company said that Mr. Bankman-Fried had resigned, with John J. Ray III, a…

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Yet another Chinese rocket is set to tumble uncontrollably back to Earth this week

Yet another Chinese rocket is set to tumble uncontrollably back to Earth this week

LiveScience reports: The core stage of yet another Chinese Long March 5B rocket is set to tumble uncontrollably back to Earth this week after delivering the third and final module to China’s fledgling space station. The roughly 25-ton (23 metric tons) rocket stage, which launched Oct. 31 to deliver the Mengtian laboratory cabin module to the Tiangong space station, is predicted to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, Nov. 5 at 11:51 p.m. EDT, give or take 14 hours, according to…

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China’s high-tech surveillance drives oppression of Uyghurs

China’s high-tech surveillance drives oppression of Uyghurs

Steven Feldstein writes: On August 31, 2022, in the final hours of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s term, after months of delays and postponements, her department released a comprehensive report detailing China’s oppression in Xinjiang Province. The circumstances of China’s repression are well documented. Academics and human rights organizations estimate that 10 to 20 percent (with an upper limit calculated at 1.8 million) of adult Uyghurs in Xinjiang have been subjected to detention by Chinese authorities. Officials…

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The danger of advanced artificial intelligence controlling its own feedback

The danger of advanced artificial intelligence controlling its own feedback

DALL-E Michael K. Cohen, University of Oxford and Marcus Hutter, Australian National University How would an artificial intelligence (AI) decide what to do? One common approach in AI research is called “reinforcement learning”. Reinforcement learning gives the software a “reward” defined in some way, and lets the software figure out how to maximise the reward. This approach has produced some excellent results, such as building software agents that defeat humans at games like chess and Go, or creating new designs…

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After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran

After Ukraine, Biden administration turns to Musk’s satellite internet for Iran

CNN reports: The White House has engaged in talks with Elon Musk about the possibility of setting up SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink inside Iran, multiple officials familiar with the discussions told CNN. The conversations, which have not been previously reported, come as the Biden administration searches for ways to support the Iranian protest movement that exploded just over a month ago after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died under suspicious circumstances after being detained by the country’s morality police. The White…

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U.S. busts network providing military technology to Russia

U.S. busts network providing military technology to Russia

The Associated Press reports: The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a round of criminal charges and sanctions related to a complicated scheme to procure military technologies from U.S. manufacturers and illegally supply them to Russia for its war in Ukraine. Some of the equipment was recovered on battlefields in Ukraine, the Justice Department said, and other nuclear proliferation technology was intercepted in Latvia before it could be shipped to Russia. The Justice Department charged nearly a dozen people in separate…

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Elon Musk drops threat to halt Starlink internet service in Ukraine

Elon Musk drops threat to halt Starlink internet service in Ukraine

The New York Times reports: Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX, abruptly reversed himself on Saturday, saying that his company would continue to fund the operation of the Starlink internet service in Ukraine, where it has become a digital lifeline for both soldiers and civilians. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, drew criticism on Friday when he said on Twitter that his company could not “indefinitely” fund Ukraine’s use of Starlink. The service has been crucial for the…

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Musk threatens to stop funding Starlink internet Ukraine relies on in war

Musk threatens to stop funding Starlink internet Ukraine relies on in war

The Washington Post reports: Elon Musk said Friday that his space company could not keep funding the Starlink satellite service that has kept Ukraine and its military online during the war, and he suggested he was pulling free internet after a Ukrainian ambassador insulted him on Twitter. A Starlink cutoff would cripple the Ukrainian military’s main mode of communication and potentially hamstring its defenses by giving a major advantage to Russia, which has sought to jam signals and phone service…

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Zuckerberg hopes to stoke metaverse enthusiasm by threatening to layoff unenthusiastic Meta employees

Zuckerberg hopes to stoke metaverse enthusiasm by threatening to layoff unenthusiastic Meta employees

The New York Times reports: Last October, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, announced that the company would change its name to Meta and become a “metaverse company,” he sketched a vision of a utopian future many years off in which billions of people would inhabit immersive digital environments for hours on end, working, socializing and playing games inside virtual and augmented worlds. In the year since, Meta has spent billions of dollars and assigned thousands of employees…

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