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Undersea Power Cable Connecting Finland And Estonia Experiences Outage Capacity Reduced To 35%

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sabotage isn’t ruled out yet.

Estlink 2, an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia, has unexpectedly been disrupted at around 12:26 pm local time (10:26 am GMT) on Christmas Day. While Finland Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said that the outage hasn’t affected the country’s power supply, Reuters said that it did reduce the availability capacity between the two countries to 358 megawatts from its designed 1,106-megawatt installed capacity. The incident comes after the suspected sabotage of two undersea internet cables that connect Finland and Sweden to the rest Europe.

At the time of the incident, some 658 megawatts of power have been flowing from Finland to Estonia, says Finnish national electricity transmission operator Fingrid. Estonia’s electricity transmission operator Elering has also acknowledged the incident but is yet to report any disruption in its electrical supply.

There are two undersea power cables between Finland and Estonia—Estlink 1, which is west of Helsinki and Tallinna and has a capacity of 350 megawatts, and Estlink 2, which lies east of both cities and has a larger capacity of 650 megawatts. Finnish public broadcaster Yle says that Estlink 2 was unserviceable for several months earlier this year as it was undergoing maintenance, but the connection has since been restored in September. Because of this, Fingrid Operations Manager Arto Pahkin said that action by external forces could not be discounted.

“The possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out. However, we are examining the situation as a whole and will provide information once the cause is identified,” says Pahkin. He also said, “An investigation into the incident has been initiated.” Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo also weighed in on the matter, saying on X (formerly Twitter) (machine translated), “Authorities are still on standby over Christmas and are investigating the matter.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Few things seem to push government officials to become officious faster than the mild irritation of people making a slight mockery of government machinery. In the grand scheme of things, the scofflawishness is almost imperceptible. But it’s the scoffing part that bothers these officious entities the most. And that is almost always greeted with a pettiness inversely proportionate to the original acts that put these particularly irritating burrs under the government’s saddle.

And so it is here, in the case of artist Morry Kolman, which has the possibility of turning into The State vs. Morry Kolman. As Samantha Cole explains for 404 Media, Kolman took publicly available information and added even more publicly available information to turn New York City’s traffic cameras into ad hoc selfie stations.

The locations of the cameras are already known and people can access the feeds through the NYC Dept. of Transportation site. The only thing Kolman added was instructions on how to use the cameras to capture photos on demand of anyone within range of the camera.

This apparently bothered the NYC DOT so much it decided to send Kolman a half-assed cease-and-desist letter[.]

[...] Kolman has responded appropriately. He acquired a 25-foot window washing pole, which he used to take a photo of the C&D letter sent by the city, as well as to hoist a mirror to camera-level to obtain a traffic cam “selfie” — both of which were featured in a recent Miami art exhibition.

[...] But it’s no longer just a New York City problem. Kolman has provided code that enables other users to upload/link to traffic cam location data, which means this is starting to spread across the nation.

Minneapolis, Minnesota has entered the chat. So have sizable portions of the upper east coast and the state of Georgia

The NYC government is still free to criminally charge selfie-takers for, I don’t know… aggravated jaywalking? But it doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on when it comes to threatening people for providing the public with access to data the city and its DOT already have made publicly accessible. That this particular use of that data may be ill-advised doesn’t make it a violation of the DOT site’s terms of use. The only thing the city has done here is provide national advertising for a site that had flown well under the radar right up until the NYC government decided to make an issue of it.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Developer Niels Provos has a short guide on building your own generative AI search engine using Python and PlanAI:

PlanAI is an open-source Python framework that simplifies building complex AI workflows. In this tutorial, we’ll implement a generative AI search engine similar to Perplexity using PlanAI’s task-based architecture and integrations.

This tutorial is aimed at developers with a basic understanding of Python and general familiarity with AI concepts. We’ll be building a search engine that can answer complex questions by synthesizing information from multiple web sources. It’s “Perplexity-style” in that it provides a concise, AI-generated answer along with cited sources, much like the search engine Perplexity.ai. PlanAI makes building this type of application much easier by handling the complexities of task dependencies, data flow, caching, and integrating with various Large Language Models (LLMs). It even allows for human-in-the-loop input when automated methods fail, making it robust for real-world scenarios.

He goes over the prerequisite skills and tools, gives an overview of the architecture, and then walks through the steps with code examples.

The result is a search engine build from a Large Language Model (LLM)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This week's hero we'll Regomize as "Trey" because back in the first decade of this millennium he was working for one of the many startup telcos trying to cash in on 3G. (Sadly, he tells Who, Me? it was not one of the ones that succeeded.)

Trey worked on the platforms and services team, which created and maintained apps for internal users and customers. Among his responsibilities was working with external service providers, such as a payment provider, an identity services outfit, and bulk SMS handler.

One day, Trey noticed the payments gateway misbehaving, so he wrote a piece of software that sent it a test transaction, checked it had worked, then repeated the process five minutes later.

Another experiment saw him write a demo app that automated payments, using SMS as prompts.

The app had its own syntax for commands. In theory, the message “Credit 5” would send that sum to an account, and so on.

Trey showed the automated payments applications to the head of his department, who was well pleased – so pleased he asked for it to be deployed immediately.

Oh yeah, immediate deployment. That never goes wrong, right?

Wrong. It turns out Trey's little demo had exactly three bugs in it that had not been spotted in his limited testing.

[...] When he arrived at work the next morning, there were some very serious faces – including a security team – waiting to greet him and find out what sort of fraud he thought he was trying to pull. The account had amassed a considerable fortune by that stage.

Thankfully the head of department, who had authorized the deployment, came to Trey's rescue and explained the situation. Tragically, though, the balance of the test account was reset to zero.

Ever had a programming error make a fortune appear – or disappear – like magic? Tell us all about it in an email to Who, Me? and we may share your adventure on some future Monday morning.

Before you submit it to them, do any of you Soylentils have stories to share of pushing buggy code to production that failed so quickly?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US finalizes up to $6.75 billion in chips awards for Samsung, Texas Instruments, Amkor:

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it was finalizing an award of up to $4.745 billion to South Korea's Samsung Electronics and up to $1.61 billion for Texas Instruments to expand chip production.

The department also finalized an award of up to $407 million to help fund Amkor Technology's planned $2 billion advanced semiconductor packaging facility in Arizona, which is set to be the largest of its kind in the U.S.

The Samsung award is about $1.7 billion smaller than the preliminary award announced in April of up to $6.4 billion and reflects its revised smaller investment plans, the department said.

A Commerce spokesperson said the department "changed this award to align with market conditions and the scope of the investment the company is making."

[...] Texas Instruments has pledged to invest more than $18 billion through 2029 in two new factories in Texas and one in Utah, which are expected to create 2,000 manufacturing jobs. The company is getting $900 million for its Texas operations and $700 million.

Amkor's Arizona plant when fully operational will pet a nearby Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC facility.

Amkor CEO Giel Rutten said the facility "will serve as a critical cornerstone in establishing a robust semiconductor manufacturing supply chain within the United States."

Congress in August 2022 approved a $39 billion subsidy program for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and related components along with $75 billion in government lending authority.

Last month, Commerce finalized an award of up to $7.86 billion for Intel down from $8.5 billion announced in March after the California-based chips maker won a separate $3 billion award from the Pentagon.

Commerce has now finalized the largest awards it offered earlier this year, including this week, finalizing up to $458 million for SK Hynix in Indiana. In total, Commerce has finalized over $33 billion of the over $36 billion in proposed incentives funding.

"With this investment in Samsung, the U.S. is now officially the only country on the planet that is home to all five leading-edge semiconductor manufacturers," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic:

A lot of people threaten to leave Twitter. Not many of them have actually done it.

This was true even before Elon Musk's purchase of the platform a year ago. But the parade of calamities since — cutting back on moderation, unplugging servers, reinstating banned accounts, replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges, throttling access to news sites, blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising — has made stepping away more appealing, either because the timeline is toxic or because the site simply doesn't function the way it used to.

Last April, the company gave NPR a reason to quit — it labeled the network "U.S. state-affiliated media," a designation that was at odds with Twitter's own definition of the term. NPR stopped posting from its account on April 4. A week later, it posted its last update — a series of tweets directing users to NPR's newsletters, app, and other social media accounts. Many member stations across the country, including KUOW in Seattle, LAist in Los Angeles, and Minnesota Public Radio, followed suit.

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR's main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, "the platform's algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform," the memo says.

There's one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. "It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount," says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR. But Twitter wasn't just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it's not impossible to replace.

[...] These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

upstart writes:

The Water on Earth Might Have Been Delivered From Space by Comets:

Comets may have been potential sources of water for early Earth, researchers said this week.

When Earth formed around 4.6 billion years ago, some water likely existed in that gas and dust — though much of it would have been vaporized by the sun's intense heat. How Earth got so much liquid water remains a source of debate, but research has shown some came through volcanic vapor that became rain.

There is also new evidence that a substantial portion of Earth's oceans came from ice and minerals on asteroids — and maybe comets — that crashed into Earth. Measurements of Jupiter-family comets, controlled by the planet's gravitational effects, have shown a strong link between their water and Earth's based on a key molecular signature.

NASA says its scientists found that water on Jupiter-family Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the first comet to be orbited and landed upon by robotic spacecraft from Earth, had a similar molecular signature to the water in Earth's oceans and that cometary dust infects the interpretation of spacecraft measurements.

These results, the agency said, contradict some recent research. In 2014, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to the comet analyzed water measurements, finding the highest concentration of deuterium on it compared to of any other comet - and about three times more deuterium than there is in Earth's oceans.

Deuterium is a rare type of the element hydrogen, and the molecular signature is its ratio to regular hydrogen in the water of any object. The ratio helps researchers figure out where the object was formed, and water with deuterium is more likely to form in cold environments. There are 33 grams of deuterium in every cubic meter of seawater.

"It was a big surprise and it made us rethink everything," Kathleen Mandt, planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

That research might now be incorrect based on the new findings after the robot spacecraft landed on the comet and scientists analyzed the findings. Mandt led the new research that was published last month in the journal Science Advances.

Measurements of deuterium in the last couple of decades in the water vapor of other Jupiter-family comets had shown similar levels to Earth's water.

"It was really starting to look like these comets played a major role in delivering water to Earth," said Mandt.

Journal Reference: Kathleen E. Mandt et al., A nearly terrestrial D/H for comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp2191(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp2191

Original Submission

SAE is running this https://www.sae.org/news/2024/11/refrigerant-fight story about near-term changes in the working fluid used in car air conditioning systems. Your boomer submitter remembers when Freon/R-12 was universal. By the 1990s R-134a was the standard, more recently followed by much lower global warming potential (GWP) gas R-1234yf which is nearly universal at present. However,

The EU is currently revisiting R-1234yf emissions rules and may ban the substance in a few years. In the U.S., the EPA stands by its use.
[...]
But does R-1234yf also pose serious health problems when it degrades into the environment? Chemours defended its product vigorously to SAE Media, claiming that it "delivers a 99% reduction in global warming potential versus the incumbent refrigerant [R-134a], advancing global climate targets without compromising performance." But concerns remain.

A 2021 study from the University of Bristol found that both R-134a and R-1234yf result in emissions of organic trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), but the latter is much worse in that regard. The study found that changing from one chemical to the other caused a "33-fold increase of the global burden of TFA, from an annual value of 65 tons formed from the 2015 emissions of 134a to a value of 2,200 tons formed from an equivalent emission of 1234yf."
[...]
The EPA [USA] declared R-134a "unacceptable" for new vehicles as of model year 2021 but has not taken any action against R-1234yf and does not classify it as an environmentally persistent per- and polyfluorinated substance (PFAS) chemical. A study from consulting firm Ducker Carlisle, however, said that "many OEMs and thermal-management suppliers anticipate that the EU will implement a regulation banning R-1234yf by 2030." A proposal that would include it on a list of banned chemicals is under review at the European Chemical Agency, the report said.

After an interesting discussion, the end game is summarized and it appears that large molecule fluids ( are on the way out...to be replaced by either propane (aka R-290) or CO2 (R-744). This will come at the cost of larger, more expensive air conditioning systems--one estimate is an additional Euro300 or USD330 to the manufacturing cost (more in the purchase price of the car).

A quick search for...
      is r12 better than r134a
...turns up many diy sites that favor the older, ozone-killing R-12 in terms of air conditioner performance in really hot weather. Yet another instance of the tragedy of the commons.

For reference, https://www.360quadrants.com/chemicals/refrigerants has an overview of refrigerant manufacturers and a wider look at the options in this 6+ billion dollar market.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A 4,000-year-old murder mystery began with a massacre in what’s now southwestern England. Then came dismemberment, possibly accompanied by cannibalism.

At least 37 men, women and children suffered this violent fate, ending up dumped into a 15-meter-deep natural shaft by unknown attackers, say archaeologist Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford and colleagues. The perpetrators also threw butchered parts of cattle and other domestic and wild animals into the shaft, the researchers report December 16 in Antiquity.

Motives for the gruesome Early Bronze Age event remain murky. No weapons or any other possible clues to attackers’ identity have turned up.

In Britain, the Early Bronze Age ran from about 2200 B.C. to 1500 B.C. “There has been no [previous] indication of violence on this scale in Britain at that time, both regarding the number of victims and the way in which they were treated after death,” Schulting says.

[...] Schulting’s team analyzed more than 3,000 human bones and bone fragments excavated in the 1970s and 1980s at a British site called Charterhouse Warren. Radiocarbon dates indicate that human and nonhuman remains were deposited in a single event between around 4,200 and 4,000 years ago, the scientists say.

Diet-related chemicals in the bones suggest that most victims grew up near Charterhouse Warren.

Nearly half of 20 recovered skulls displayed fatal wounds caused by being struck with weapons such as wooden clubs. Victims showed no skeletal signs of a fight, suggesting that they may have been taken as captives before the attack or killed during a surprise raid.

A cycle of escalating revenge killings between nearby communities might have created enough antagonism to trigger the ancient British massacre, Schulting speculates. Revenge killings have accounted for high homicide rates in some modern hunter-gatherer societies (SN: 7/18/13).

Signs of possible cannibalism at Charterhouse Warren consist of tool incisions on leg bones where flesh was removed, fractures at the ends of long bones linked to marrow removal and human chew marks on foot and hand bones and ribs.

Journal Reference: R.J. Schulting et al. ‘The darker angels of our nature’: Early Bronze Age butchered human remains from Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, UK. Antiquity. Published December 16, 2024. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.180. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.180

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Web Hacking Service 'Araneida' Tied to Turkish IT Firm:

Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix, a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services, one of which KrebsOnSecurity traced to an information technology firm based in Turkey.

Cyber threat analysts at Silent Push said they recently received reports from a partner organization that identified an aggressive scanning effort against their website using an Internet address previously associated with a campaign by FIN7, a notorious Russia-based hacking group.

But on closer inspection they discovered the address contained an HTML title of "Araneida Customer Panel," and found they could search on that text string to find dozens of unique addresses hosting the same service.

It soon became apparent that Araneida was being resold as a cloud-based service using a cracked version of Acunetix, allowing paying customers to conduct offensive reconnaissance on potential target websites, scrape user data, and find vulnerabilities for exploitation.

Silent Push also learned Araneida bundles its service with a robust proxy offering, so that customer scans appear to come from Internet addresses that are randomly selected from a large pool of available traffic relays.

The makers of Acunetix, Texas-based application security vendor Invicti Security, confirmed Silent Push's findings, saying someone had figured out how to crack the free trial version of the software so that it runs without a valid license key.

"We have been playing cat and mouse for a while with these guys," said Matt Sciberras, chief information security officer at Invicti.

[...] Silent Push notes that the website where Araneida is being sold — araneida[.]co — first came online in February 2023. But a review of this Araneida nickname on the cybercrime forums shows they have been active in the criminal hacking scene since at least 2018.

[...] Researchers at Silent Push say despite Araneida using a seemingly endless supply of proxies to mask the true location of its users, it is a fairly "noisy" scanner that will kick off a large volume of requests to various API endpoints, and make requests to random URLs associated with different content management systems.

What's more, the cracked version of Acunetix being resold to cybercriminals invokes legacy Acunetix SSL certificates on active control panels, which Silent Push says provides a solid pivot for finding some of this infrastructure, particularly from the Chinese threat actors.

Further reading: Silent Push's research on Araneida Scanner.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

And it does not violate the laws of physics.

Engineers at Northwestern University have successfully achieved quantum communication in parallel with classical channels by identifying specific wavelengths with minimal interference from classical signals (Source: northwestern.edu). This breakthrough lays the groundwork for quantum communication by leveraging existing infrastructure and sending quantum data alongside classical data. The researchers managed quantum teleportation over a 30.2km fiber optic cable carrying 400 Gbps of classical traffic.

Quantum computing seems to be all the hype these days. Google claims its new quantum chip can solve problems swiftly, which classical computers would otherwise take, and I quote 10 billion years to do; that's 10, followed by 24 zeroes. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon wherein two particles are linked so that their quantum states (spin, polarization, energy levels, etc.) are connected, regardless of the physical distance. When measuring the state of one particle, the entanglement collapses, revealing the correlated state of the other particle. However, this does not allow for FTL (Faster Than Light) communication in line with the no communication theorem.

Enter Quantum teleportation. This concept combines entanglement with a classical channel, such as the Internet, and is the backbone of this research. It transfers one particle's quantum state to another located elsewhere.

Jordan Thomas, one of the research paper's authors, underlined the essence of quantum teleportation; “By performing a destructive measurement on two photons — one carrying a quantum state and one entangled with another photon — the quantum state is transferred onto the remaining photon, which can be very far away.” A key point to understand here is that the photons aren't transmitted physically. Instead, information encoded within their quantum states is what is sent.

The primary concern with a worldwide network employing quantum teleportation is compatibility; will quantum communication work over classical channels? The likelihood of interference is exceptionally high among the billions of photons being sent concurrently in a fiber optic cable. The research discovered specific wavelengths where the density of classical photons was lower, making such wavelengths suitable for the photons in quantum teleportation. Bell state measurement, or simply state measurement, is performed at the mid-point of the cable. Coupled with other methods to reduce noise and interference, this method can potentially support multiple TB/s of classical data alongside quantum communication.

While it may take years or decades before quantum communication goes mainstream, Prem Kumar, the head of the research team, has high hopes for the future. Based on the current roadmap, the next major milestones are using two pairs of entangled photons instead of one and scaling this experiment to real-world optical fiber networks.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How to build (and rebuild) with glass:

[...] For their new study, Becker, Stern, and coauthors Daniel Massimino, SM '24, and Charlotte Folinus '20, SM '22, of MIT and Ethan Townsend at Evenline used a glass printer that pairs with a furnace to melt crushed glass bottles into a material that can be deposited in layered patterns. They printed prototype bricks using soda-lime glass that is typically used in a glassblowing studio. Two round pegs made of a different material, similar to the studs on a Lego brick, are incorporated into each one so they can interlock. Another material placed between the bricks prevents scratches or cracks but can be removed if a structure is to be dismantled and recycled. The prototypes' figure-eight shape allows assembly into curved walls, though recycled bricks could also be remelted in the printer and formed into new shapes. The group is looking into whether more of the interlocking feature could be made from printed glass too.

The team printed glass bricks and tested their mechanical strength in an industrial hydraulic press that squeezed the bricks until they began to fracture. The researchers found that the strongest bricks were able to hold up to pressures that are comparable to what concrete blocks can withstand. Those strongest bricks were made mostly from printed glass, with a separately manufactured interlocking feature attached to the bottom of the brick. These results suggest that most of a masonry brick could be made from printed glass, with an interlocking feature that could be printed, cast, or separately manufactured from a different material. "Glass is a complicated material to work with," said Becker. "The interlocking elements, made from a different material, showed the most promise at this stage." The group is looking into whether more of a brick's interlocking feature could be made from printed glass, but doesn't see this as a dealbreaker in moving forward to scale up the design. To demonstrate glass masonry's potential, they constructed a curved wall of interlocking glass bricks. Next, they aim to build progressively bigger, self-supporting glass structures. "We have more understanding of what the material's limits are, and how to scale," said Stern. "We're thinking of stepping stones to buildings, and want to start with something like a pavilion – a temporary structure that humans can interact with, and that you could then reconfigure into a second design. And you could imagine that these blocks could go through a lot of lives."

MIT spinoff 3D prints architectural glass bricks

According to MIT, engineers, motivated by circular construction's eco potential, are developing a new kind of reconfigurable masonry made from 3D printed, recycled glass. Using a custom 3D glass printing technology provided by MIT spinoff Evenline, the team has made strong, multilayered glass bricks – each in the shape of a figure eight, that are designed to interlock, much like LEGO bricks.

In mechanical testing, a single glass brick withstood pressures similar to that of a concrete block. As a structural demonstration, the researchers constructed a wall of interlocking glass bricks. They envision that 3D printable glass masonry could be reused many times over as recyclable bricks for building facades and internal walls.

"Glass is a highly recyclable material," said Kaitlyn Becker, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "We're taking glass and turning it into masonry that, at the end of a structure's life, can be disassembled and reassembled into a new structure, or can be stuck back into the printer and turned into a completely different shape. All this builds into our idea of a sustainable, circular building material."

"Glass as a structural material kind of breaks people's brains a little bit," said Michael Stern, a former MIT graduate student and researcher in both MIT's Media Lab and Lincoln Laboratory, who is also the Founder and Director of Evenline. "We're showing this is an opportunity to push the limits of what's been done in architecture."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Investments in semiconductor manufacturing and innovation matter more than bans and sanctions.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in an interview that the country should focus more on investments in domestic innovation than applying bans and sanctions. “Trying to hold China back is a fool’s errand,” said the politician. She also added that the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, which led the country to spend more money on building out its chip infrastructure than the past 28 years combined, “matters more than export controls.” Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal says President Biden still pushed for bans and sanctions against Chinese firms and even urged its allies, including the Netherlands and Japan, to stop China from acquiring advanced tech, especially those containing American tech.

“The only way to beat China is to stay ahead of them,” said Sec. Raimondo. “We have to run faster, out innovate them. That’s the way to win.” Despite the various export controls that the U.S. has applied against several Chinese companies, many of its companies are still able to procure banned chips through the black market and unofficial conduits. Aside from that, Chinese innovation is seemingly continuing, with many businesses and organizations forced to be creative in pursuing their goals despite the roadblocks posed by American sanctions.

Sec. Raimondo said these statements in the interview as President Trump is about to return to the White House in early 2025. The CHIPS and Science Act had bipartisan support when it passed Congress, and some states that are Republican strongholds have seen the benefits of the federal government’s investments. However, the incoming President was quoted saying in October, “That chip deal is so bad.” Instead of direct government funding, Trump spokesman Kush Desai said that he prefers “enacting tariffs, cutting taxes, slashing regulations, and unleashing American energy.”

Because of the uncertainty about the future of the CHIPS Act, many subsidy applicants are rushing to get their funding in place before January 20. Nevertheless, Trump plans to expedite permits for any company that plans to invest at least a billion dollars in the U.S., with some regulations and reviews potentially getting waived. This is likely the reason why SoftBank plans to invest $100 billion in AI and other technologies in the country. But even if Sec. Raimondo agrees that some regulations hold back the competitiveness of American industry, she still believes that Washington shouldn’t let companies act with impunity, even if they have a huge war chest.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-12-nondestructive-microwave-radar-moisture-walls.html

For homeowners, moisture buildup can cause the biggest headaches. Mold grows on drywall and wood-based materials, creeping along walls, floors and ceilings. Building materials begin to erode and rot. As insulation becomes damaged, the home's energy-efficiency decreases. Even human health suffers, as moisture also leads to air-quality issues.

The key to preventing extensive moisture damage is discovering it early, when it can be easily fixed.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using microwave radar reflection to nondestructively detect and measure the moisture content of materials within walls without removing drywall or cladding. This also expedites moisture identification and enables mold growth to be treated in the early stages.

The research team's study results were published in IEEE Xplore and presented during the IEEE Radar Conference 2024 in Denver.

"We know microwave radar shows great promise for this, because it's well known that it can measure the moisture in wood samples," ORNL's Philip Boudreaux said. "But can it measure moisture in wood that is inside a wall to detect high-moisture issues before they become a big problem? That's the challenge."

The envelope of a building consists of exterior walls, the roof and foundation, all of which join to prevent moisture transmission. But the envelope is itself prone to moisture issues caused by many factors: too much rain, ground dampness, air leaking through holes, and vapor diffusion when moisture moves from higher to lower concentrations through the envelope.

Most homes are made from wood-frame construction, and when wood is moist, it's the perfect environment for mold to grow. If a wall is damaged or designed incorrectly, water vapor that seeps through wood can make it damp. For this reason, Boudreaux said, wood was selected as the initial material to investigate the capabilities of microwave radar.

"You can detect water within wood with microwave energy that reflects off of the material using radar," Boudreaux said. "You can also measure moisture in more than one type of material within the wall."

As part of the electromagnetic spectrum, microwaves interact with materials in a similar way to visible light, but they penetrate further, creating reflections. Radar systems work by emitting signals like microwaves and then detecting the reflections of those microwaves. When used with walls, the microwave reflection pulse characteristics are based on the moisture in the material.

Walls are made up of layers of materials, and each layer may have different amounts of moisture. However, by measuring the length of time taken for the microwaves to return to the sensor, the distance to each material in the wall can be calculated, and this can be used to map out and measure the moisture within the layers.

Journal Reference: S. Killough, P. Boudreaux and R. Zhang, "Measuring the Moisture Content of Wood Sheathing with Continuous Wave Radars," 2024 IEEE Radar Conference (RadarConf24), Denver, CO, USA, 2024, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/RadarConf2458775.2024.10548546.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

During peak COVID in 2021, when everybody was freaking out about how shitty and expensive U.S. broadband was for telecommuting and home education, NY state officials had an idea: what if we pass a law demanding that ISPs try to provide cheap broadband (a piddly 25 Mbps for $15) to low income families.

Some particulars of NY’s Affordable Broadband Act: ISPs with less than 20,000 subscribers are exempt. Only Americans on existing low-income programs could qualify. And the price increases had to be capped at two percent per year, though this was to be renegotiated on an ongoing basis. This was a limited form of rate regulation, and not particularly radical.

But NY State’s Affordable Broadband Act didn’t last long. In 2021 a US District Court judge blocked the law, claiming that the first Trump administration’s 2017 net neutrality repeal banned states from trying to regulate broadband. But courts repeatedly have shot down that claim, stating that the feds can’t abdicate their authority over broadband consumer protection and pre-empt state authority.

So in April of 2024, that judge’s ruling was reversed by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Last week the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, leaving the 2nd Circuit’s ruling, and the law, intact. It’s not clear when or if New York State will actually start enforcing it.

As Ars Technica notes, this case has particular importance given all the planned looming dismantling of the federal regulatory state during Trump 2.0:

As Trump 2.0 regulators like the FCC and FTC give up on consumer protection, it’s going to punt many of these fights to the state level. Given corporations spent so much money gutting Chevron deference in a bid to turn federal regulators into decorative gourds, they’re not going to like it much if consumer protection remains healthy and strong on the state level.

The idea of “rate regulation” is just about the most terrible phrase imaginable if you’re a telecom executive or “free market” Libertarian think tanker type. Limiting price gouging in this fashion is repeatedly brought up as a terrifying bogeyman in telecom policy conversations, though it very rarely manifests. NY’s effort to help people during COVID was a pretty far outlier in terms of policy proposals.

But Big Telecom is clearly worried that if NY’s law is allowed to stand, the years of rate regulation being off the table to address telecom monopolization will come to an end:

"ISPs are worried that their success in blocking federal rules will allow New York and other states to regulate. Telco groups told the Supreme Court that the New York law being upheld while federal rules are struck down "will likely lead to more rate regulation absent the Court's intervention. Other States are likely to copy New York once the Attorney General begins enforcing the ABA [Affordable Broadband Act] and New York consumers can buy broadband at below-market rates."

Telecoms want to have their cake (no federal regulation) and eat it too (no state laws filling the obvious void they created). To be clear, there are several cases currently ongoing where telecoms, freshly emboldened by a corrupt Supreme Court, are arguing that the FCC has no federal authority to do much of anything that helps real people (net neutrality, wireless privacy issues, and low-income affordability programs).