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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Drone Swarm is Coming, and NATO Air Defenses Are Too Expensive to Cope

NATO is unprepared to deal with attacks by cheap, mass-produced drones and urgently needs layered, affordable air defense systems to counter the threat, taking a cue from the experience gained by Ukrainian forces over the past four years.

Experts at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) recently held a debate on the lessons armed forces should take from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, highlighting that low-cost drones are reshaping how wars are fought.

CEPA describes itself as a nonpartisan, public policy institution, headquartered in Washington, DC.

The takeaway from Iran's tactics is that adversaries are likely to combine precision weapons with cheap, mass-produced drones to overwhelm air defense systems so that the precision weapons can get through. Managing this threat means developing low-cost defensive weapons, produced and used at scale, to complement the interceptor missiles costing millions that are built to target aircraft and ballistic missiles.

"The question is no longer how just to defeat a threat. The question is how to do so to sustainable cost and scale," said Gordon "Skip" Davis, former deputy assistant secretary general for NATO and previously director of operations for US European Command.

He noted a decisive shift in the character of war: Iran has shown that relatively unsophisticated weapons like the Shahed-type drones, which cost $20,000 each, can impose real operational stress on even the most advanced forces such as the US and its regional allies.

Ukraine is ahead of NATO in one critical area – the ability to produce and deploy low-cost systems at scale. It is manufacturing tens of thousands of interceptor drones annually, and delivering them to frontline units at rates exceeding 1,500 per day.

Instead of relying solely on expensive interceptors, Ukraine has built a layered system in which cheap one-way interceptor drones - costing as little as $2,000 - now account for the majority of drone takedowns across the country. This is typified by the small Bullet model produced by defense firm General Cherry (General Chereshnya), which can reach speeds of up to 310 km per hour (192 mph), engage targets at a distance of up to 20 km (12 miles), and operate at altitudes of up to 6 km (about 4 miles).

Davis said NATO should take several lessons from this - integrated air and missile defenses must be layered and cost-effective, not reliant purely on high-end interceptors. It must field attritable and autonomous systems en masse, not in niche roles, and this means having the industrial capacity to produce them and "magazine depth" – meaning having stockpiles available.

"The overarching conclusion, in my view, is that NATO must move from a model built around technological superiority to one built around integrated systems, scalable production and rapid adaptation," he stated.

Jason Israel, senior fellow for Defense Technology Initiative at CEPA, said software and interoperability were another vital piece of the puzzle. By this he means the various drones operated will need to integrate with command-and-control (C2) systems to coordinate operations.

"That drone that you're using, or the unmanned system that you're using, what software is behind it? Does the software allow it to be interoperable with headquarters?" he asked.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: TechCrunch

If Google's AI researchers had a sense of humor, they would have called TurboQuant, the new, ultra-efficient AI memory compression algorithm announced Tuesday, "Pied Piper" — or, at least that's what the internet thinks.

The joke is a reference to the fictional startup Pied Piper that was the focus of HBO's "Silicon Valley" TV series that ran from 2014 to 2019.

The show followed the startup's founders as they navigated the tech ecosystem, facing challenges like competition from larger companies, fundraising, technology and product issues, and even ( much to our delight ) wowing the judges at a fictional version of TechCrunch Disrupt.

Pied Piper's breakthrough technology on the TV show was a compression algorithm that greatly reduced file sizes with near-lossless compression. Google Research's new TurboQuant is also about extreme compression without quality loss, but applied to a core bottleneck in AI systems. Hence, the comparisons.

Google Research described the technology as a novel way to shrink AI's working memory without impacting performance. The compression method, which uses a form of vector quantization to clear cache bottlenecks in AI processing, would essentially allow AI to remember more information while taking up less space and maintaining accuracy, according to the researchers.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

GNU inetutils Telnetd CVE-2026-32746 Pre-Auth RCE:

A long, long time ago, in a land free of binary exploit mitigations, when Unix still roamed the Earth, there lived a pre-authentication Telnetd vulnerability.

In fact, this vulnerability was born so long ago (way back in 1994) that it may even be older than you. To put the timespan in perspective: it came into existence the same year the seminal movie Hackers was released.

That was so long ago that RISC was still a distant dream.

Come to think of it, maybe it was even the product of Zero Cool himself?

Anyway. Recently, this vulnerability was brutally put to rest.

[...] CVE-2026-32746, discovered by the DREAM Security Research Team, is a BSS-based buffer overflow that allows an attacker to corrupt roughly 400 bytes of adjacent variables.

It resides in the LINEMODE SLC (Set Linemode Characters) negotiation handler. While strictly speaking it affects 'just' GNU inetutils, most vendors have based their Telnetd implementations on the same code, making the blast radius vast and somewhat difficult to estimate. It definitely includes all the major Linux distributions (we checked).

With a vulnerability like this, we expected the Internet to explode with excitement - yet it's been almost a week now with no good analysis. We thought we might as well publish where we got to.

We'll go through a few things - how we isolated the vulnerability, what it enables attackers to do (and under what circumstances), and we'll talk about why this particular vulnerability is more of a Pandora's box to exploit than you might think.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Google has begun testing a feature that changes the headlines of published articles without notifying publishers, sparking concerns among media executives:

Google is courting fresh controversy after starting to test a feature that rewrites article headlines without seeking permission or even notifying the publishers. The trial expands on earlier artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as AI Overviews, which condense articles into short summaries.

Media leaders voiced outrage at the complete lack of communication or approval, with one executive calling it "another overreach by Google taking liberties with content without permission." They regard headlines as a core part of "editorial judgment" and essential to journalistic integrity. Changing them without disclosure could create serious problems, including a loss of reader confidence if the new versions turn out to be inaccurate or misleading.

Marc McCollum of Raptive, which partners with thousands of publishers, questioned how far the practice might go. "Would they also test changing the lead that shows up in Google? Would they consider imagery that didn't come from the original publisher?" McCollum asked, expressing concern that Google is altering original work excessively.

From TheVerge:

What we are seeing is a "small" and "narrow" experiment, one that's not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how "small" that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it's tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://mashable.com/article/nasa-x-59-supersonic-jet-test-problem

Nothing seemed amiss as NASA's experimental X-59 supersonic jet touched down after its second test in the air, smoothly coasting onto the runway. 

But the sleek, needle-nosed airplane had completed only nine minutes in the air on Friday, March 20, before a cockpit warning light forced an early landing. That warning was separate from a caution light that occurred during an earlier takeoff attempt just before 10 a.m. P.T., said Cathy Bahm, project manager at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center.

The brief flight left from Edwards Air Force Base in California at 10:54 a.m. P.T. marked only the second time the aircraft had flown. While the team originally planned for about an hour, leaders stressed that even short flights provide new data for moving the project forward. You can watch the landing in the video below. 

[...] "Sometimes it's easy to forget that building this kind of experimental aircraft means creating something that never existed before," Pearce said during a news conference. "As far as X-planes go, it's not unusual."

The X-59 is part of a long-term effort to change how fast commercial airplanes fly over land. Traditional supersonic aircraft create a loud boom when they break the sound barrier, which is why the U.S. government bans routine supersonic passenger flights over populated areas. NASA and its contractor, Lockheed Martin, built the X-59 to fly faster than sound while producing only a "thump," with the goal of providing regulators and the industry with the evidence needed to reconsider the restrictions.

AnonTechie writes:

The project removes the birthDate field systemd added last week in response to age verification laws.

The project's latest move has not helped its reputation among the skeptics. Last week, developers merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user records, tied to age verification laws in California, Colorado, and Brazil.

Earlier, we covered what that actually means, but to recap, the field is optional, can only be set by an administrator, and systemd itself does nothing with the data. It is simply a standardized field in the user record file that other projects like xdg-desktop-portal can build age verification compliance on top of—distros that do not need it can ignore it entirely.

But "optional" has not been enough to stop people from treating it as a line being crossed, and now a solo developer has responded the way the open source community usually reacts: by forking.

[...] Compared to mainline systemd, the fork changes 12 files across 5 commits, all focused on scrubbing out everything related to the birthDate addition. That means not just the field itself but also the option to set a birth date via homectl, the relevant man page entries, display code, and tests.

Though, as of writing this, it was 37 commits behind from systemd, so that is something to keep in mind if you are hoping to implement this on a general-use or production system.

Jeffrey also maintains a companion repository, systemd-suite, which is meant for testing the fork. So, while this is very much a one-person project, there seems to be at least some technical groundwork behind it beyond the birthDate revert.

[Source]: IT'S FOSS

Previously: Age Checks Creep Into Linux, systemd Locks It in, Developer Defends Himself

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

He then seemed to slightly walk back the claim.

On a Monday episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a hot-button statement: "I think we've achieved AGI."

AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a vaguely defined term that has incited a lot of discussion by tech CEOs, tech workers, and the general public in recent years, as it typically denotes AI that's equal to or surpasses human intelligence. In recent months, tech leaders have tried to distance themselves from the term and create their own terminology that they view as less over-hyped, more useful, and more clearly defined (although the new phrases they've come up with essentially mean the same thing as AGI). The term has also been the subject of key clauses in big-ticket contracts between companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, upon which a significant amount of money may hinge.

[...] But Huang then seemed to slightly walk back his earlier claims, saying, "A lot of people use it for a couple of months and it kind of dies away. Now, the odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia is zero percent."

[Source]: The Verge

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/24/foss_age_verification/?td=rt-3a

From TFA:

After weeks of debate, code to record user age was finally merged into the Linux world's favorite system management daemon.

Pull request #40954 to the systemd project is titled "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records." It's a new function for the existing userdb service, which adds a field to hold the user's date of birth.

[...] The change comes after the recent release of systemd 260 but unless it is reverted for some reason, it will be part of systemd 261. One of the justifications is to facilitate the new parental controls in Flatpak, which are still in the draft stage.

[...] The TBOTE findings suggest that Meta is the biggest donor behind the lobbying for these age-verification laws and the App Store Accountability Act (ACCA). TBOTE claims it has directly traced more than $25 million, and that Meta could have spent upward of $2 billion on this over the last year. It also points to €10 million-plus spent lobbying in Europe.

In the US, the main group pushing for these laws is the relatively young Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA). As right-wing think tank the "Institute for Family Studies" reported a year ago, this was assembled by over 50 conservative groups. Six months later, in July 2025, Bloomberg also reported that Meta was funding the DCA. For such a young and small organization, the DCA certainly seems to have had a rapid and almost disproportionate impact.

Nuff said.

The Engineer Who Tried to Put Age Verification Into Linux

Dylan, useful idiot with commit access, pushed age verification PRs to systemd, Ubuntu & Arch, got 2 Microslop employees to merge it, called it 'hilariously pointless' in the PR itself, then watched Lennart personally block the revert:

In March of 2026, systemd, the init system that boots most modern Linux distributions, merged a pull request adding a birthDate field to its user database. The stated purpose was compliance with California's AB-1043, Colorado's SB26-051, and Brazil's Lei 15.211/2025, a wave of age verification laws requiring operating systems to collect birth dates from users at account setup, then feed that data to app stores via a real-time API. The PR was submitted by a contributor using the GitHub handle dylanmtaylor. Within days it had 945 comments and was locked by maintainers. Someone opened a revert PR. Lennart Poettering closed it without merging on March 19th, saying the field is optional and systemd "enforces zero policy." The birthDate field is still in systemd. systemd PR #40954 revert PR #41179

The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/22/cern_eggheads_burn_ai_into/

Like the major league pitcher who comes to his kid's take-your-parent-to-school day, CERN's Thea Aarrestad gave a presentation at the virtual Monster Scale Summit earlier this month about meeting a set of ultra-stringent requirements that few of her peers may ever experience.

Aarrestad is an assistant professor of particle physics at ETH Zurich. AT CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), she uses machine learning to optimize data collection from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Her specialty is anomaly detection, a core component of any proper observability system. 

Each year the LHC produces 40,000 EBs of unfiltered sensor data alone, or about a fourth of the size of the entire Internet, Aarrestad estimated. CERN can't store all that data. As a result, "We have to reduce that data in real time to something we can afford to keep." 

By "real time," she means extreme real time. The LHC detector systems process data at speeds up to hundreds of terabytes per second, far more than Google or Netflix, whose latency requirements are also far easier to hit as well. 

Algorithms processing this data must be extremely fast," Aarrestad said. So fast that decisions must be burned into the chip design itself. 

Contained in a 27-kilometer ring located a hundred meters underground between the border of Switzerland and France, the LHC smashes subatomic particles together at near-light speeds. The resulting collisions are expected to produce new types of matter that fill out our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics — the operating system of the universe.

At any given time, there are about 2,800 bunches of protons whizzing around the ring at nearly the speed of light, separated by 25-nanosecond intervals. Just before they reach one of the four underground detectors, specialized magnets squeeze these bunches together to increase the odds of an interaction. Nonetheless, a direct hit is incredibly rare: out of the billions of protons in each bunch, only about 60 pairs actually collide during a crossing.

When particles do collide, their energy is converted into a mass of new outgoing particles (E=MC² in the house!). These new particles "shower" through CERN's detectors, making traces "which we try to reconstruct," she said, in order to identify any new particles produced in ensuing melee. 

Each collision produces a few megabytes of data, and there are roughly a billion collisions per second, resulting in about a petabyte of data (about the size of the entire Netflix library). 

Rather than try to transport all this data up to ground level, CERN found it more feasible to create a monster-sized edge compute system to sort out the interesting bits at the detector-level instead.  

"If we had infinite compute we could look at all of it," Aarrestad said. But less than 0.02% of this data actually gets saved and analyzed. It is up to the detectors themselves to pick out the action scenes.

The detectors, built on ASICs, buffer the captured data for up to 4 microseconds, after which the data "falls over the cliff," forever lost to history if it is not saved.

Making that decision is the "Level One Trigger," an aggregate of about 1,000 FPGAs that digitally reconstruct the event information from a set of reduced event information provided by the detector via fiber optic line at about 10 TB/sec. The trigger produces a single value, either an "accept" (1), or "reject" ("0"). 

Making the decision to keep or lose a collision is the job of the anomaly-detection algorithm. It has to be incredibly selective, rejecting more than 99.7 percent of the input outright. The algo, affectionately named AXOL1TL, is trained on the "background" — the areas of the Standard Model that have largely been sussed out already. It knows the typical topology of a standard collision, allowing it to instantly flag events that fall outside those boundaries. As Aarrestad put it, it's hunting for "rare physics."

The algorithm must make a decision within 50 nanoseconds. Only about 0.02% of all collision data, or about 110,000 events per second, make the cut, and are subsequently saved and transported to ground level. Even this slimmed-down throughput results in terabytes per second being sent up to the on-ground servers. 

Once on the surface, the data goes through a second round of filtering, called the "High Level Trigger," which again discards the vast majority of captured collisions, identifying only about 1,000 interesting collisions from the 100,000 events per second that come through the pipe.  This system has 25,600 CPUs and 400 GPUs, to reproduce the original collision and analyze the results, and produces about a petabyte a day.

"This is the data we will actually analyze," Aarrestad said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/musk_terafab/

Elon Musk has put Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI in harness to build a chip fabrication outfit called "Terafab" capable of producing a terawatt's worth of computing power each year, then send most of it into space.

In a Sunday afternoon presentation, Musk said the world's chipmakers currently produce 20 gigawatts' worth of compute power each year, and that whatever new capacity his key suppliers Nvidia, Samsung, and Micron produce, he will buy.

But he can't see how they produce the terawatt of compute power he wants each year, so he has built an "advanced fab" in Austin, Texas, that he says can produce "any kind of chip," and lithography masks.

Musk said his companies have developed a recursive process that allows rapid chip production, plus frequent redesigns to improve performance.

He mentioned "some very interesting new physics" that he is "confident will work. It's just a question of when."

"We are going to push the limits of physics in compute and do some wild and crazy things," he said.

He plans to produce two chips. One will be dedicated to inference and for use on Earth, mostly in humanoid robots that he thinks will sell in volumes of one to ten billion a year. The upper range would mean robots outnumber humans in a year.

The second chip will power orbiting computers that ride in satellites packing just 100 kw of compute power – about the energy consumption of a rack packed full of high-end AI gear. In time, Musk expects to launch megawatt-scale satellites.

He also mentioned building a bigger version of SpaceX's Starship that can carry 200 tons into space and shared his back-of-the-envelope math that suggests putting a terawatt of compute into space, along with all the necessary solar power and other infrastructure, means launching 10 million tons into space every year.

Our back-of-the-envelope math suggests that means Musk needs to launch 50,000 Starships a year, or 135 a day at a rate of one giant rocket every ten minutes.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/asia_tech_news_roundup/

Australia's government on Monday announced a set of datacenter "expectations" to guide would-be bit barn builders who contemplate breaking ground down under.

The expectations strongly suggest that datacenter builders create their own electricity generation capacity, and pay for energy transmission and infrastructure costs. "Energy-intensive data centre proposals not closely aligned with the expectations will not be prioritised by Commonwealth regulatory assessments," states the formal expectations document.

The expectations also call on datacenter operators to prioritise Australia's national interest, use water sustainably and responsibly, invest in local skills and jobs, and do all that while strengthening the nation's "research, innovation and local capability."

Industry lobby group the Tech Council of Australia welcomed the expectations, as did the Electrical Trades Union.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=17&month=03&year=2026

Ten thousand StarLinks satellites: On March 16th, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base carrying 25 Starlink satellites. It was a routine launch for SpaceX, the 33rd of 2026. But those 25 Starlinks crossed a milestone. For the first time in history, more than 10,000 Starlink satellites were simultaneously circling Earth.

Consider where we started: When SpaceX launched its first operational Starlinks in May 2019, there were roughly 2,000 active satellites of all kinds orbiting Earth. Starlink alone now outnumbers the entire pre-2019 fleet five to one. The constellation has utterly transformed the orbital environment.

[...] The numbers are sobering. Since 2019, more than 11,596 Starlinks have been launched. Of those, more than 1,500 have already reentered the atmosphere as SpaceX retires older satellites to make room for newer models. Each re-entry deposits about 30 kg of aluminum oxide into the upper atmosphere--an uncontrolled chemistry experiment on a planetary scale.

[...] With so many Starlinks circling Earth, the orbital environment is increasingly unstable. It's "an orbital house of cards," according to a study led by Sarah Thiele of Princeton University, which finds that a severe solar storm could kickstart widespread catastrophic collisions in as little as 2-3 days. SpaceX itself reported to the FCC that Starlink satellites performed roughly 300,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in 2025 alone.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280 https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643

arXiv:2512.09643 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2512.09643v2 [astro-ph.EP] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.09643

Original Submission

Concerns Raised Over Shahed Kamikaze Drone Listings on Alibaba

Arthur T Knackerbracket and c0lo write:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/concerns-raised-over-shahed-kamikaze-drone-listings-on-alibaba-they-featured-ai-guidance-to-lock-onto-people-building-vehicles-ships-etc

Chinese eTail giant Alibaba has removed listings and suspended the accounts of sellers that were found to be advertising “cruise missiles” and “suicide attack drones.” Australia’s ABC News uncovered the concerning sales of several one-way attack drone models, some of which looked strikingly similar to the Iranian Shahed design, others with a cruise missile profile.

The Alibaba “commercial” listings touted the drones as “pesticide sprayers,” or for “aerial mapping”. However, ABC dug into the product catalogs to confirm the Shahed-a-likes were “suicide attack drones” capable of carrying 2kg (4.41 pound) warheads for distances up to 100km. Moreover, with their thermal imaging and AI guidance, these devices could "achieve autonomous locking of targets (people, building, vehicles, ships, etc.)”

These kamikaze drones would not be casual impulse buys. ABC reports that the listing prices of the cruise missile style drones were approaching $50,000. If that sum was reported in Australian dollars, it equates to approximately USD $35,000.

ABC continued to look closely through the various supplier catalogs it found from the Alibaba suppliers. One of the China-based suppliers offered five kinds of "suicide attack drones" with two having near identical dimensions and specs to the Iranian-made Shahed 136, says the news report.

Drones inhabit a twilight dual-use segment of the commercial landscape. Many can quickly and easily be adapted for peaceful purposes or war duties. An Alibaba statement received by ABC News, was clear, though. The online retailer stated that it “strictly prohibits the sale of military weapons.” It also acted quickly to remove what it characterized as non-compliant third-party listings.

Talking to a handful of the suppliers, the Australian news organization saw that the sellers generally didn’t care what the drones they sold were used for. For example, one of the retailers contacted shrugged “After the customer makes a purchase, what they use it for has nothing to do with us.”

Importantly, just because these kamikaze drone adverts exist, it doesn’t mean that the advertisers would actually ship these exact products.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/03/23/palantir_fca/

US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has handed the American analytics biz a three-month trial contract worth more than £30,000 a week to analyze its internal "data lake," a sprawling repository of regulatory intelligence covering fraud, money laundering, insider trading, and consumer complaints.

According to The Guardian, which first reported on the deal, Palantir will gain access to data including case files, reports from banks and crypto firms, and even communications data such as emails, phone records, and social media material tied to investigations.

The idea, at least on paper, is straightforward: use Palantir's software to help sift signal from noise across the roughly 42,000 businesses the FCA oversees, and spot patterns of financial crime faster than human analysts can manage alone.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Palantir has spent the past few years embedding itself across the British state – from the NHS to policing and defense – racking up more than £500 million in public sector contracts in the process.

Critics have long described this as a classic "land and expand" strategy: start with a narrowly scoped deployment, prove value, then become very hard to remove. The FCA deal, which appears to follow the same pattern, arrives just days after the government signaled that it wants to rethink how it buys technology, amid concerns about overreliance on a small number of large vendors and the need for more "sovereign" capability.

Yet here is another sensitive system being handed, at least temporarily, to a US company whose entire business is built on ingesting and analyzing other people's data.

The FCA, for its part, has stressed that Palantir is acting strictly as a "data processor," that all data remains hosted in the UK, and that the company cannot use the information to train its own models.

"Effective use of technology is vital in the fight against financial crime and helps us identify risks to the consumers we serve and markets we oversee," an FCA spokesperson told The Register. "We ran a competitive procurement process and have strict controls in place to ensure data is protected."

Those assurances mirror language used in earlier public sector deals, particularly in the NHS, where officials have repeatedly argued that contractual controls and technical safeguards govern use. Whether that is enough to calm critics is another matter.

There's also the small matter of optics. Palantir's track record – spanning US defense, intelligence, and immigration enforcement – has made it a lightning rod for concerns about surveillance and civil liberties, especially when deployed in civilian contexts.

Still, for regulators under pressure to do more with less, the appeal is clear. The FCA is sitting on vast amounts of data, much of it underused, and AI vendors are lining up to promise that they can turn it into actionable intelligence.

Whether that promise outweighs the risks of handing the keys – even temporarily – to a company that has made a habit of sticking around is a question the UK keeps asking, and so far, keeps answering the same way.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Juan Carlos Pino says charcoal-conversion 'the best option we have'

Juan Carlos Pino, a Cuban mechanic with an eighth-grade education, may have found a way to outsmart the U.S. oil blockade.

Employing the kind of ingenuity many Cubans have developed over decades of U.S. ‌sanctions, Pino, 56, modified his 1980 Polish-built Fiat Polski to run on charcoal, a cheaper and more abundant fuel than gasoline since Washington cut off oil shipments to the Caribbean island in January.

[...] "In a crisis like this, ⁠it's the best option we have," said Pino, who wants to ‌modify a tractor next. "We need mobility, we need to be able to plant crops."

Pino built his device entirely from scrap and repurposed items. The charcoal burns inside a converted propane tank that is sealed shut with the lid of a transformer. A filter is made from a stainless steel milk jug stuffed with old ⁠clothes.

[...] Enter the inventor. Pino once created a machine, built from a motorcycle, to milk three cows at a time. He said he'd been contemplating the charcoal-fired automobile for several years, inspired at first by his late uncle. Pino also ​credited open-source technology promoted by Edmundo Ramos, an Argentine innovator behind DriveOnWaste.com.

[...] He said just about any engine can be converted to run on charcoal by drawing ⁠hot gas ⁠instead of gasoline into the carburetor.

Pino rolled out the charcoal-powered Polski on March 4. In one early test run, the car completed an 85-kilometre trip, reaching a top ​speed of 70 km/h.

[...] Cruz knows something about Cuban jury-rigging. He drives a 1953 Pontiac that runs on a 1940s Perkins engine with a Mercedes transmission, a steering system from the Czech group AVIA, and a differential made by the East German company ⁠Ifa.

Original Submission