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Category: Technology

Elon Musk’s unmatched power in satellite internet technology

Elon Musk’s unmatched power in satellite internet technology

The New York Times reports: On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses. They also talked about Elon Musk. General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology…

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U.S. hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure

U.S. hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration is hunting for malicious computer code it believes China has hidden deep inside the networks controlling power grids, communications systems and water supplies that feed military bases in the United States and around the world, according to American military, intelligence and national security officials. The discovery of the malware has raised fears that Chinese hackers, probably working for the People’s Liberation Army, have inserted code designed to disrupt U.S. military operations in…

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Events that never happened could influence the 2024 presidential election – a cybersecurity researcher explains situation deepfakes

Events that never happened could influence the 2024 presidential election – a cybersecurity researcher explains situation deepfakes

The volatile mix of deepfakes and political campaigns is a good reason to be on guard. Sean Anthony Eddy Creative/E+ via Getty Images By Christopher Schwartz, Rochester Institute of Technology Imagine an October surprise like no other: Only a week before Nov. 5, 2024, a video recording reveals a secret meeting between Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The American and Ukrainian presidents agree to immediately initiate Ukraine into NATO under “the special emergency membership protocol” and prepare for a nuclear…

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Modern ‘sixth mass extinction’ event will be worse than first predicted, says report

Modern ‘sixth mass extinction’ event will be worse than first predicted, says report

GrrlScientist writes: Tragically, the global mass extinction event that we find ourselves in the midst of will be even worse than originally predicted, according to a recent study (ref). The international team of scientists came to their conclusion after analyzing population trends data for more than 71,000 animal species — including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and insects — from around the world to see how their numbers have changed since record-keeping first began. Generally, scientists agree that an extinction…

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U.S. recovered non-human ‘biologics’ from UFO crash sites, former intel official says

U.S. recovered non-human ‘biologics’ from UFO crash sites, former intel official says

NPR reports: Three military veterans testified in Congress’ highly anticipated hearing on UFOs Wednesday, including a former Air Force intelligence officer who claimed the U.S. government has operated a secret “multi-decade” reverse engineering program of recovered vessels. He also said the U.S. has recovered non-human “biologics” from alleged crash sites. But while the topic of “little green men” did come up, much of the discussion centered on improving processes for reporting unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs — the military’s term…

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The OpenAI CEO’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence

The OpenAI CEO’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence

Ross Andersen writes: On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in November had…

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Bankman-Fried planned to buy island state of Nauru and build apocalypse bunker

Bankman-Fried planned to buy island state of Nauru and build apocalypse bunker

The Guardian reports: The disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX exchange, had planned to purchase the small Pacific island nation of Nauru in case the world came to an end, according to a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by FTX against its 31-year-old founder and three other former executives, and seeking $1bn, included a memo created by Bankman-Fried’s younger brother Gabriel and an FTX Foundation executive. The memo detailed plans to buy Nauru. The plan…

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Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas for free, forever

Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas for free, forever

CBS News reports: The 65,000 Hollywood actors now on strike in the U.S. have much in common with the 11,000 script writers who remain off the job because of a labor dispute with the motion picture studios. Among those shared grievances: concerns that studio executives want to replace them with artificial intelligence. For the many background actors whose names and faces aren’t instantly recognizable, the advent of ever more powerful types of AI threatens their ability to make ends meet…

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The brain-rotting contrarianism of the billionaire tech bros

The brain-rotting contrarianism of the billionaire tech bros

Paul Krugman writes: But for [Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s] last name, nobody would be paying him any attention — and despite that last name, he has zero chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Yet now that Ron DeSantis’s campaign (slogan: “woke woke immigrants woke woke”) seems to be on the skids, Kennedy is suddenly getting support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures…

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Extracting electricity from air

Extracting electricity from air

The Observer reports: In the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small….

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White House cautiously opens the door to study geoengineering to slow global warming

White House cautiously opens the door to study geoengineering to slow global warming

Politico reports: The White House offered measured support for the idea of studying how to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface as a way to limit global warming, in a congressionally mandated report that could help bring efforts once confined to science fiction into the realm of legitimate debate. The controversial concept known as solar radiation modification is a potentially effective response to fighting climate change, but one that could have unknown side effects stemming from altering the chemical makeup…

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Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Quantum computers could break the internet. Here’s how to save it

Emily Conover writes: Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too. And it’s about to get even harder. There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. That information’s privacy relies on encryption, a way to mathematically scramble data to prevent any snoops from deciphering it — even with…

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Fresh air matters

Fresh air matters

Emily Anthes writes: In January 1912, in the depths of a New York City winter, an unusual new apartment complex opened on the Upper East Side. The East River Homes were designed to help poor families fend off tuberculosis, a fearsome, airborne disease, by turning dark, airless tenements inside out. Passageways led from the street to capacious internal courtyards, where outdoor staircases wound their way up to each apartment. Floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto balconies where ailing residents could sleep. The…

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Khashoggi’s widow sues Israeli firm over spyware she says ruined her life

Khashoggi’s widow sues Israeli firm over spyware she says ruined her life

The Washington Post reports: The Israeli spyware firm NSO Group destroyed the life of Hanan Elatr, the wife of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, forcing her to live in fear and isolation, never able to safely return to, or even visit, her family in Egypt or have a normal life, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia where Elatr lives and works as she awaits approval of her…

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There’s a deeper problem hiding beneath global warming

There’s a deeper problem hiding beneath global warming

Mark Buchanan writes: During the past two centuries at least (and likely for much longer), our yearly energy use has doubled roughly every 30 to 50 years. Our energy use seems to be growing exponentially, a trend that shows every sign of continuing. We keep finding new things to do and almost everything we invent requires more and more energy: consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining or the accelerating energy requirements of AI. If this historical trend continues, scientists estimate waste heat will pose…

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Kakhovka dam breach raises risk for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – receding waters narrow options for cooling

Kakhovka dam breach raises risk for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – receding waters narrow options for cooling

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant seen across the Dnieper River, which was receding after a downstream dam was destroyed. Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images By Najmedin Meshkati, University of Southern California A blast on June 6, 2023, destroyed the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River in eastern Ukraine. The rupture lowered water levels in a reservoir upriver at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Enerhodar. The reservoir supplies water necessary for cooling the plant’s shutdown reactors and…

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