Open Hardware/Modding

Science

• The Conversation ☛ [NASA]’s science mission spacecraft are at risk from hackers, but a new law could help protect them

  A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report exposed alarming vulnerabilities in [NASA]’s current cybersecurity practices. The report highlighted that while the space agency has cybersecurity requirements for spacecraft once they are operational, it lacks mandatory guidelines for embedding such protections in the design of spacecraft during acquisition and development.

• Trail of Bits ☛ Our crypto experts answer 10 key questions

  Cryptography seems like a complex and perplexing “mathemagical” puzzle for many. As a blockchain security engineer, I’ve always been fascinated by cryptography but never dived deeply into the topic. Luckily, my colleagues at Trail of Bits are world-class cryptography experts! I asked them ten questions to help you unravel some of cryptography’s mysteries. Keep in mind that some questions are reasonably advanced and may require extra background knowledge. But if you’re an aspiring crypto enthusiast, don’t be discouraged—keep reading!

• Science Alert ☛ Scientists Discover a New Hormone That Makes Super-Strong Bones

  A clue for treating osteoporosis.

• New York Times ☛ NASA’s Perseverance Rover Finds Hints of Potential Ancient Life on Mars Rock

  The rock, studied by NASA’s Perseverance rover, has been closely analyzed by scientists on Earth who say that nonmicrobial processes could also explain its features.

• Science Alert ☛ Komodo Dragon Teeth Have Iron Caps For Sharpness, Scientists Discover

  Keeping them like razors for tearing flesh.

• Science Alert ☛ First Ever Footage Shows Endangered Shark Hit by Boat, Hours After Tagging

  Let's see less of this please.

• Science Alert ☛ NASA Reveals 25 Breathtaking Space Images We've Never Seen Before

  Celebrating 25 years of Chandra!

• Science Alert ☛ Scientists Discover Brain Circuit That Could Explain How Placebos Ease Pain

  It was there all along.

• Science Alert ☛ Surprise Hair Loss Breakthrough: Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Regrowth

  Results seen in mice within weeks.

• Science Alert ☛ Monday Was The Hottest Day on Earth, Breaking Sunday's Record

  "Exactly what climate science told us would happen."

• Science Alert ☛ Global Study Reveals a Powerful Hidden Way Trees Are Fighting Climate Change

  Time to rethink forests.

• Science Alert ☛ Dark Matter Solves The Mystery of How Supermassive Black Holes Exist

  We finally have the solution.

• Federal News Network ☛ Newest constellation of weather satellites gets flight plan

  Space Hour host Eric White spoke to Dylan Powell, Lead Strategist for Weather and Earth Science at Lockheed Martin.

Education

• Robin Rendle ☛ Robin Rendle — The computer is a feeling

  The Computer History Museum is real neat because you realize that the difference between a calculator, or even an abacus, and a full-fledged super computer in your pocket is not one lone technological revolution.

  Folks in tech wanna break it down like that because those neat legal divides in intellectual [sic] property [sic] are where billions of dollars emerge—as if ideas have owners! How silly and dystopian that is I now realize!—but tech is much more like evolution than we care to admit. There was nothing that came before a chicken, it was all things that kinda looked like a chicken until about a million years ago when the ascendents of that chicken suddenly looked...less chickeny.

• Andrei Ciobanu ☛ How to compose math problems

  When I was a young student (around 12), my math teacher came-up with an unique requirement for his students to not only solve math problems but also to compose them.

  This unconventional approach encouraged his students (me and my classmates) to think creatively and critically, fostering a deeper understanding of the areas we were learning about. While the task was not mandatory, some classmates and I embraced the challenge and worked on developing geometry and algebra exercises from “scratch”. I am not sure how original we were, but the efforts paid off when our little creations were published in an obscure math magazine I cannot find online.

Hardware

• Tom's Hardware ☛ $4 billion in restricted US chips flowed to Russia through one Hong Kong address

  Several shell companies using the address of a seemingly unused office near Hong Kong's financial district have sent millions of dollars worth of banned chips to sanctioned Russia.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• JURIST ☛ UK High Court rules doctors may withdraw life support from brain-damaged man

  A high court judge ruled that doctors may withdraw life support from a 66-year-old man suffering from brain damage or prolonged disorder of consciousness on Tuesday.

• Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Resting is hard

  This post has been a struggle to write. Not just because it requires a lot of vulnerability, though that's part of it. And it's not just about finding the right words. Most of the struggle has been fatigue. It's hard to find the energy to open my text editor and when I do, my brain feels like mush.

  Most of my life revolves around productivity. This is typical for Americans. From a young age, we are steeped in productivity culture. We are always doing something, running from boredom. But lately, I've fallen ill, and I'm forced to rest.

• IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Social media bans essential, but only as effective as the education and policing that surround them

  The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) last year warned that digital distractions are lowering students’ school results across the world. In Australia, the results showed teenagers are significantly lagging the academic performance of kids from 20 years ago, before the advent of smartphones. This should no longer come as a shock, given that 90% of OECD teenagers reported owning a smartphone or having access to one in 2019, spending an average of 3 hours online per day outside of school. Shockingly, over 20% report spending more than 6 hours online outside school hours. This is a huge chunk of time that kids are missing out on spending outdoors, playing sport, interacting with friends or family face to face, or engaging in other stimulating activities like schoolwork, reading, art or play – even rest – all of which increase wellbeing among kids.

• Crooked Timber ☛ Getting old and being old

  First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.

  It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Silicon Angle ☛ Juniper disappoints with earnings and revenue that fall well short of analyst’s expectations

  Juniper Networks Inc. delivered disappointing financial results today in what is likely to be one of the last times it reports as an independent company, prior to being gobbled up by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

• Buttondown ☛ The Grimy Residue of the AI Bubble

  Doctorow thinks that the residue of the bubble popping will be minimal--large models will no longer be cost-effective to train, but small open-source models will remain, adept for smaller, better scoped tasks. If that's all that the AI bubble leaves behind, then we'd be in a better place for society and science.

  But I'm more pessimistic--and frankly upset--about what will be left behind once the AI bubble pops. Already, Google and Microsoft have sheepishly admitted that they are far from reaching their climate goals, due to the large investment in AI. Data center growth is putting immense stress on existing power grids, not to mention are turning literal Black bodies into grist for the mill for this insatiable machine. After the dust settles and NVIDIA has stopped churning out shovels (e.g. H100s) for the gold rush, what will be left behind? Will data centers go the way of shopping malls? Likely not--they'll be repurposed for other massive computing projects. But what about those climate pledges? Will they be continued to be kicked down the road? To 2050? To 2075? Likely to some time which is too little, too late.

• Chip Huyen ☛ Building A Generative AI Platform

  After studying how companies deploy generative AI applications, I noticed many similarities in their platforms. This post outlines the common components of a generative AI platform, what they do, and how they are implemented. I try my best to keep the architecture general, but certain applications might deviate. This is what the overall architecture looks like.

• [Old] Chuck Carroll ☛ Why I'm Not on LinkedIn

  Furthermore, LinkedIn has devolved into a "walled garden". In order to view someone's LinkedIn page, oftentimes you must also be signed in to an active LinkedIn account to view it. Many social media platforms have begun doing this and I absolutely hate this kind of practice. It is a blatant attempt to increase their user base and forcing people to have an account in order to see content users have created. This is yet another reason why I believe it's important to have your own website. However, it's entirely possible they did this because information databases were routinely scraping the site for information which would later be sold as a people-search service.

• Tripwire ☛ SEXi / APT Inc Ransomware - What You Need To Know

  So the SEXi gang breaks into EXSi servers and encrypts the data?

  That's correct. For instance, in April Chilean data centre and hosting provider IxMetro PowerHost had its VMware ESXi servers and backups encrypted. The attackers demanded a ransom of $140 million worth of Bitcoin.

• Security Week ☛ Network of 3,000 GitHub Accounts Used for Malware Distribution

  Multiple GitHub accounts are used to star and verify the malicious links distributed through the Stargazers Ghost Network, to make them appear legitimate, and automation is used to create phishing templates targeting different social platforms.

• The Register UK ☛ AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

  The University of Oxford team found that using AI-generated datasets to train future models may generate gibberish, a concept known as model collapse. In one example, a model started with a text about European architecture in the Middle Ages and ended up – in the ninth generation – spouting nonsense about jackrabbits.

  In a paper published in Nature yesterday, work led by Ilia Shumailov, Google DeepMind and Oxford post-doctoral researcher, found that an AI may fail to pick up less common lines of text, for example, in training datasets, which means subsequent models trained on the output cannot carry forward those nuances. Training new models on the output of earlier models in this way ends up in a recursive loop.

• 404 Media ☛ Anthropic AI Scraper Hits iFixit’s Website a Million Times in a Day

  The web scraper bot for Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude hit iFixit’s website nearly a million times in a single day, despite the repair database having terms of service provisions that state “reproducing, copying or distributing any Content, materials or design elements on the Site for any other purpose, including training a machine learning or AI model, is strictly prohibited without the express prior written permission of iFixit.”

• Tim Bornholdt ☛ Who lives in the white house?

  This riddle initially reminded me of what it was like to work with large language models.

  It's easy, I assumed, to trick these models into outputting virtually whatever you want by presenting them with leading questions. Giving them "few shot" answers like this (e.g. "the blue man lives in the blue house, red man lives in the red house") would certainly result in them getting it wrong like I did, right?

• Mere Civilian ☛ Why did I buy the M2 iPad Pro instead of the M4?

  However, it wasn't just about the money. The new iPad Pro has one major flaw that really matters to me: it doesn't have a sim card slot. I use a data sim that I transfer between devices as needed, and I can't do that with an e-sim. Unfortunately, my current provider doesn't offer an e-sim option. This was a deal breaker for me.

• The Atlantic ☛ Silicon Valley’s ‘Audacity Crisis’

  Where has it gotten us? Although enthusiasts eagerly use the technology to boost productivity and automate busywork, the drawbacks are also impossible to ignore. Social networks such as Facebook have been flooded with bizarre AI-generated slop images; search engines are floundering, trying to index an internet awash in hastily assembled, chatbot-written articles. Generative AI, we know for sure now, has been trained without permission on copyrighted media, which makes it all the more galling that the technology is competing against creative people for jobs and online attention; a backlash against AI companies scraping the internet for training data is in full swing.

Defence/Aggression

• New York Times ☛ Gaza’s Death Toll Was Largely Accurate in Early Days of War, Study Finds

  Though the war has clearly devastated the civilian population, the credibility of the Gazan Health Ministry’s toll has been a subject of debate.

• New York Times ☛ Woman Who Blocked Planned Parenthood Entrance in Manhattan Is Sentenced

  Bevelyn Beatty Williams, an anti-abortion activist, physically confronted patients in 2020 as they tried to enter a health clinic in Manhattan, prosecutors said.

• The Straits Times ☛ North Korean hackers are stealing military secrets, say US and allies

  North Korean hackers have conducted a global cyber espionage campaign to try to steal classified military secrets to support Pyongyang's banned nuclear weapons programme, the United States, Britain and South Korea said in a joint advisory on Thursday.

• RFA ☛ US offers $10M reward for info on North Korean hacker

  The group ‘Andariel’ allegedly accessed US military computers after holding hospitals to ransom.

• RFA ☛ Trump appears in North Korean ‘anti-American’ propaganda video

  Residents are confused that Trump’s image was used in a negative light after 2019 summits were touted as successes.

• New York Times ☛ Typhoon Gaemi Reaches China as Cargo Ship Sinks Off Taiwan

  The storm, weaker but still dangerous, made landfall just before 8 p.m. local time. Six sailors were still missing after a cargo ship sank near Taiwan.

• Hong Kong Free Press ☛ At least 2 dead after Typhoon Gaemi batters Taiwan with strong winds, heavy rains

  Typhoon Gaemi passed through Taiwan overnight and was headed towards eastern China on Thursday, leaving two dead as heavy rains and strong gusts continued to lash the island in its wake.

• New York Times ☛ What a Professor’s Firing Shows About Sexual Harassment in China

  A top Chinese university described the conduct of a professor accused of sexual harassment as a moral failing, language feminists say downplays harm to women.

• RFA ☛ US sanctions China-based individuals, entities over North Korea support

  The sanctions came after the disbandment of a UN sanctions-monitoring panel in April.

• RFA ☛ Taiwanese TV series explores possible invasion from China

  The 10-part series shows chaos on the island as a hypothetical cross-strait crisis unfolds.

• RFA ☛ Glitzy Shanghai mall closes, leaving US visa office sole occupants

  The city's streets are less obviously busy as stores and eateries close amid the economic downturn, residents say.

• RFA ☛ Xi Jinping 'sharing out' political power among rival allies

  A bigger role for top party ideologue Wang Huning comes after reports that chief of staff Cai Qi was favored.

• Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

  • Latvia ☛ Ukrainian kids welcomed at Saeima

    "Love is what unites us, and it is strength that helps us overcome the most difficult moments. You have been through a lot and our hearts go out to you... We are together to prove that we are united and ready to support each other," said the speaker of the Saeima, Daiga Mieriņa, on Thursday, July 25, welcoming a large group of Ukrainian children, who are recovering from the horrors of Russia's war in summer camps in Latvia."Love unites us, but statehood and responsibility are values ​​that help build a strong and just society. Latvia stands shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine, and we are here to strengthen you in this difficult time," said Mieriņa to the children.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ The West should articulate the possibility of a European future for Belarus now

    Failure to articulate the possibility of a European future for Belarus leaves the Euro-Atlantic community at risk of being caught off guard without a plan when Belarus reaches its fork in the road, writes Richard Cashman.

  • LRT ☛ NATO finds gaping holes in Europe’s defences

    The war in Ukraine and the looming US presidential election dominated a NATO summit in Washington this month but, away from the public stage, the alliance’s military planners have been focused on assessing the enormous cost of fixing Europe’s creaking defences.

  • LRT ☛ Why some Ukrainians may face deportation from Lithuania?

    While Ukrainian citizens who fled the war to the EU enjoy protections, those who came before February 2022 find themselves in a contradictory situation.

  • RFERL ☛ Pentagon Finds Another $2 Billion Of Accounting Errors For Ukraine Aid

    The Pentagon has found $2 billion worth of additional errors in its calculations for ammunition, missiles, and other equipment sent to Ukraine, a U.S. government report revealed on July 25.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Deputy Announces Slowdown In YouTube Upload Speeds

    State Duma Deputy Alexander Khinshtein announced on July 25 that by the end of next week, the speed of video uploads to YouTube in Russia will decrease by 70 percent.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia to deliberately slow down YouTube to punish Google, State Duma deputy says — Meduza

  • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Asks Hong Kong Not To Let Russia Use It To Circumvent Sanctions

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on July 25 visited Hong Kong and called on its leader to prevent Russia from using Hong Kong to circumvent Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its full-scale war in Ukraine.

  • RFERL ☛ Series Of Terrorist Acts Prevented In Ukraine, EU Countries, Kyiv Says

    Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) said on July 25 that its officers, along with the National Police, had prevented a series of terrorist attacks in the country and in EU member states Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

  • RFERL ☛ Suspect In Killing Of Former Ukrainian Lawmaker Iryna Farion Detained

    President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on July 25 that a suspect in the shooting death of former lawmaker Iryna Farion, who was known for campaigns promoting the Ukrainian language, was detained in the eastern city of Dnipro.

  • New York Times ☛ How US Chips Continue to End Up in Russian Missiles

    Defying sanctions, Russia has obtained nearly $4 billion in restricted chips since the war began in Ukraine. Many were shipped through a cluster of shell companies in Hong Kong.

  • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Detains Suspect in Killing of Iryna Farion

    An 18-year-old suspect was arrested after an intense manhunt. The authorities are investigating evidence that suggests that the suspect planned the killing with others.

  • Latvia ☛ "Amber Latvijas balzams" owner declared "extremist" in Russia

    A Russian court on Wednesday, July 24, declared billionaire Yuri Shefler, owner of the "Amber Latvijas balzams" alcoholic beverages company, and his companies an "extremist association" and decided to confiscate part of Shefler's assets in Russia and hand them over to the state, news agency LETA reports.

  • NYPost ☛ Russia and China’s joint Alaska flight was a test for lame-duck Biden

    Message received, loud and clear: Beijing and Moscow are signaling they believe no one is fully in charge at Biden's lame-duck White House.

  • New York Times ☛ Russia and China Conduct First Joint Bomber Patrol Near Alaska

    Two Russian and two Chinese bombers patrolled the airspace near American territory and were intercepted by U.S. and Canadian jets.

  • RFA ☛ Chinese and Russian bomber jets intercepted near Alaska

    The intercept comes as Beijing, Moscow and Washington compete for geopolitical superiority in the Arctic region.

  • RFERL ☛ U.S., Canadian Warplanes Intercept Russian, Chinese Military Aircraft Near Alaska

    The United States and Canada scrambled fighter jets after two Russian and two Chinese military planes were tracked in the international airspace close to Alaska, NORAD said in a statement.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian, Chinese Foreign Ministers Discuss Cooperation On Sidelines Of ASEAN

    The foreign ministers of Russia and China met on July 25 on the sidelines of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) talks in Laos.

  • France24 ☛ US and Canada intercept Russian and Chinese bomber jets near Alaska

    Bomber jets from Russia and China flew over the far east of Russia and the Bering Sea near Alaska on Thursday during a joint aerial patrol. Although not seen as a threat by the North American Aerospace (NORAD), US and Canadian warplanes intercepted two of the bombers.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuania to get EU funding for Russia border security – minister

    Lithuania will receive financial support from the European Commission to step up the protection of its border with Russia, Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė said on Thursday.

  • RFERL ☛ Russia Fails In Bid To Regain 2022 Olympic Skating Gold

    Russia failed to have its 2022 gold medal restored in team figure skating from the Beijing Winter Olympics, the sport’s top court said on July 25.

  • RFERL ☛ New Russian Laws Will Dramatically Restrict Migrants' Rights, Activist Says

    Russian human rights defender Valentina Chupik says new legislation on migration adopted by Russia's State Duma this week will dramatically restrict the rights of labor migrants.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Warships To Make Havana Port Call

    Warships from Russia's Baltic Fleet will make a port visit to Havana on July 27-30, Russian news agencies reported, citing Cuba's Defense Ministry, the second such visit this year.

  • Meduza ☛ An unorthodox romance Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children’s rights commissioner accused of war crimes, leaves her husband for ‘Orthodox oligarch’ Konstantin Malofeev — Meduza

  • RFERL ☛ Mother, Aunt Of Jailed Belarusian Protester Detained On Extremism Charges

    Belarusian activist Yauhenia Douhaya said on July 24 that the mother and an aunt of imprisoned anarchist Alyaksandr Frantskevich have been arrested on a charge of taking part in an extremist group's activities.

  • RFERL ☛ Wife Of Jailed Journalist Losik Released In Amnesty, Rights Group Says

    The Homelskaya Vyasna human rights group in Belarus said on July 24 that Darya Losik, the wife of imprisoned RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik, was released earlier this month as part of a mass amnesty.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘They’ve raised the stakes’ Belarus sentenced a German citizen to death. Is it part of a deal with Moscow to pressure Berlin into a prisoner swap? — Meduza

  • New York Times ☛ Why Only 15 Athletes From Russia Will Compete at the Paris Olympics

    Only 15 athletes from Russia will compete at the Paris Games, under a “neutral” designation. The Kremlin is framing the ban as part of its showdown with Western adversaries.

Environment

• Energy/Transportation

  • New York Times ☛ China Rules Solar Energy, but Its Industry at Home Is in Trouble

    The solar sector shows how China conducts industrial policy: It chooses industries to dominate, floods them with loans and lets companies fight it out.

  • RFERL ☛ China Breaks Ground On Massive Afghan Copper Mine After 16 Years Of Delays

    Taliban officials said it would likely be at least two years before the first copper was extracted by China’s MCC and Chinese diplomats praised the progress as a sign of warming ties between Beijing and Kabul.

Finance

• Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China’s central bank makes surprise cut to medium-term lending rate in bid to boost growth

  China’s central bank on Thursday unexpectedly cut a medium-term interest rate by the most in more than four years, marking the latest move by authorities to boost economic growth. The world’s second-largest economy has encountered severe headwinds in recent years, as a heavily indebted property sector, sluggish consumption and high youth unemployment weigh on confidence.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• RFA ☛ Singapore’s Chinese immigrant lifestyle websites push Beijing’s positions (Part II)

  ‘New media’ and social platforms manage to slip through a tight media control system.