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hubie writes:

Professor Madhab Neupane and collaborators have demonstrated experimental evidence of altermagnetism in a layered material:

To build the ultrafast computers of the future, scientists are looking beyond the electrical charge of electrons to another property: their spin. While conventional hardware relies entirely on the movement of charge to process data, the ability to tap into this intrinsic quantum property could enable researchers to completely reinvent how information travels through a circuit.

Now, a team led by UCF Professor of Physics Madhab Neupane has identified a promising candidate. Neupane and his collaborators found evidence of altermagnetism, an emerging form of magnetism that combines useful characteristics of the two more familiar types of magnetism: ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.

Ferromagnetism produces the behavior most people associate with everyday magnets. In these materials, magnetic moments align in the same direction, creating a magnetic field. That property can be useful in electronics, but the resulting stray magnetic fields can interfere with nearby components.

Antiferromagnets behave differently. Their magnetic moments point in opposing directions and cancel one another out, largely avoiding the stray fields. However, they lack some of the useful electronic properties found in ferromagnets.

Altermagnets offer another possibility by combining desirable characteristics of both.

Like antiferromagnets, they can avoid producing unwanted stray magnetic fields. But they can also generate and detect spin currents — the movement of electron spins through a material — that researchers hope to use for future electronics.

Neupane and his collaborators experimentally identified signatures of this unusual magnetic state in Co₁/₄TaSe₂, a layered material containing magnetic cobalt atoms. The discovery gives researchers a promising, versatile platform for studying altermagnetism and could help advance future electronic and spintronic technologies.

"These materials are distinguished from more conventional antiferromagnets by their ability to generate and detect spin currents without the negative effect of producing stray fields," Neupane says. "This new property makes them very well positioned for use in many different applications — including spintronics, ultrafast memory devices, terahertz networks and energy-efficient electronics."

[...] Finding evidence of altermagnetism was only part of what made Co₁/₄TaSe₂ interesting to researchers.

The material is built from extremely thin layers stacked on top of one another. Because those layers are weakly bound, scientists can separate and combine them into extremely thin structures, making layered materials promising for use in thin-film devices and other emerging technologies.

Scientists call this family of layered materials transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs.

[...] Most conventional electronics rely on the electrical charge of electrons to transmit and process information. But electrons possess another property, their spin, that researchers are exploring as another way to carry information.

This emerging field is known as spintronics.

Altermagnets could be particularly useful for spintronics because they can generate and detect spin currents without producing the stray magnetic fields that can interfere with densely packed electronic components.

"As electronic devices continue to shrink, researchers need new materials that can operate faster while consuming less energy," Neupane says.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

No more cheap phones. We can all guess the reason. It's good old AI again, the gift that keeps on giving. The market for cheap chips is shifting due to AI datacenter demands. So to enjoy your future AI fun you now need to get a better, ie more expensive, phone.

It is possibly not a large market segment in Europe and the USA. Unless you are seriously into burner phones for one reason or another. But for the rest of the world the "cheap" phone is a substantial market.

The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear
AI data centers are driving demand for memory chips, pushing phone makers to raise prices and abandon some of their most affordable models.

The world's cheapest smartphones are disappearing because AI infrastructure is absorbing the components.

Prices of existing smartphone models have risen by about 15% globally this year, while newly launched models are roughly 25% more expensive than last year. A global memory chip shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, is pushing up the cost of making smartphones.

For the world's poorest consumers, the problem is not simply that smartphones are getting more expensive. It's that the cheapest phones are disappearing.

When smartphones remain available but become unaffordable, consumers make difficult sacrifices to keep themselves online. They might delay upgrading, borrow or share their devices, remain on older feature phones, or go offline when they are unable to replace a device that is no longer working or stolen. Often, it means they won't have an internet-enabled device at all

https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-data-center-memory-chip-shortage-cheap-smartphones-digital-divide/

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Relying on social media for investment advice linked to higher confidence but lower actual knowledge:

Investment advice is only a scroll away. But new research from the University of Georgia suggests social media may leave some investors feeling more knowledgeable than they actually are.

The researchers found people who relied on social media to guide their investment decisions felt very confident in their investment knowledge. But they struggled to answer basic questions on investment-related topics like corporate stocks and selling short.

People who gleaned their investment information from traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, felt like they knew their stuff and actually did.

"People have a lot of ways to access information now," said Xiaoyuan Sun, first author of the study and a doctoral student in UGA's College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "But if they're getting their investment information off social media, they probably don't know the deeper things. They don't know how it works, and they cannot verify that an investment product is the right fit for them."

"Basically, we find that when people are using social media, it increases their confidence but not their real knowledge," added Swarn Chatterjee, corresponding author of the study and a professor of financial planning, housing and consumer economics.

[...] That doesn't mean social media is all bad news for investors. Platforms like YouTube and Reddit make financial information easier to find, especially for people who may have previously found investing intimidating or confusing.

"In some ways, social media is democratizing that," Chatterjee said. "So it's helping expand access to people."

But easier access doesn't always mean better information.

Financial professionals have rules and regulations that govern what they do; people on social media don't. On social media, anyone can offer financial information or opinions. And while short videos and posts can make complicated topics easier to understand, details can get lost along the way.

The researchers aren't telling investors to delete their apps. But they do advise consumers to get better at questioning the financial information they find there.

Chatterjee compared it to searching for medical advice online. The internet might give you an idea of what's wrong, but you should probably consult a doctor before making an important medical decision.

The same principle applies to money.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Meta says FDA isn't sufficient to Muse reading messages. Apple begs to differ.

Apple says it is changing its macOS privacy settings to stop third-party app developers from misusing them to access message histories.

Friday's announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta's new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.

Meta CTO David Singleton joined the fray with a rebuttal that appeared solid. For Muse to access Apple Messages, a user must manually give it two privileges. One is full-disk access, a macOS system-level permission. The other is to enable a Messages connector setting in Muse.

"The Messages integration in the Muse Mac app is opt in," Singleton said. "Your Muse can only read Messages content if macOS system-level Full Disk Access is granted and the Messages connector is enabled."

Singleton's implication was clear. Muse could have read Aten's Messages communications only if he had enabled both settings, and if so, the columnist had only himself—and certainly not Meta—to blame.

Earlier this week, I spoke to macOS security expert Patrick Wardle, who questioned Singleton's denial. His reasoning: "From a technical point of view, with FDA (full-disk access), any (non-root file), is readable, browsing history, browser cookies, chats, etc etc etc." I asked Meta how Muse couldn't read messages when the app had full disk access, while every other app with that privilege could. Meta PR's only response was to requote Singleton saying: "The Messages integration in the Muse Mac App is opt-in. Your Muse can only read Messages content if macOS system-level Full Disk Access is granted and the Messages connector is enabled."

Now, Apple is setting the record straight. In explaining why it was going to make changes to the FDA permission setting, the company wrote:

Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users' full knowledge and understanding. For communication apps, this can also compromise the privacy of the people users are communicating with.

[...] Taken together, the events suggest that Muse may not be worthy of the extraordinary access it must have to work as billed by Meta. People who use the assistant should configure permissions carefully, though as Aten's experience suggests, that precaution only goes so far.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Fresh analysis of First Dynasty mass burials finds signs of fatal blunt force trauma on 39 percent of skulls:

Egyptologists have long debated whether the earliest pharoahs of the First Dynasty were buried with various servants and officials to serve them in the afterlife—a form of human sacrifice. But there is very little archaeological evidence available, given that many of the earliest Egyptian tombs were plundered and/or hastily excavated. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reassesses a collection of skulls excavated from tombs in the 1920s and concludes that over one-third show evidence of blunt force trauma. This suggests that they may have been victims of so-called "retainer sacrifice."

Author Roselyn Campbell is a bioarchaeologist at Purdue University who has long been fascinated with the history of human sacrifice. "I'm interested in how we as human beings decide which types of violence are okay and which are not, and how we even define violence," Campbell told Ars. "It's very context specific. We have to be careful not to extend our own ideas about what violence is and how it's used into other cultures. With Egypt, we have such a long history of European and colonial archeology; they came in with very specific ideas about what this culture was. You really have to make an effort to contextualize the legacy data we have."

Naturally she found the debate over whether ancient Egyptians practiced retainer sacrifice pertinent to her interests. "People tend to fall into one of two camps," said Campbell. "Either retainer sacrifice definitely happened, end of discussion, or it definitely didn't happen, end of discussion. But nobody's actually looked at the bones in a very long time." Forensic science has advanced considerably over the last century, so re-analysis could be useful. Complicating matters is the fact that older sets of remains are often incomplete and/or modified for preservation, destroying vital forensic information in the process.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/trumps-ai-voluntary-accord-wont-make-ai-safe-experts-say/

Leaders from major tech companies met at the White House on Tuesday to discuss what’s been on everyone’s mind this summer: AI safety. Afterward, President Trump announced that the group had reached a consensus to implement AI safety measures in a voluntary accord.

The accord, which Trump posted on Truth Social, outlines four main layers of controls that AI companies should implement. It also misspells United as “Unites” in Trump’s title under his signature.

Signees are a “who’s who” of Big Tech, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI president Greg Brockman. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was delivering the opening keynote of OpenAI’s DevDay in San Francisco on Tuesday.)

It’s a ceremonial move, as is Trump’s new executive order to refer to AI as “super intelligence.” Trump told reporters on Tuesday that the accord is “morally binding” rather than legally mandatory. It doesn’t have the power of law or any way to enforce it.

Big tech companies are already self-policing, Trump said. The Trump administration has taken a hands-off approach to regulating AI, with a few exceptions when the White House identified certain AI tools as a threat to national security.

Most executive action on AI has been purely discretionary — from the Biden administration’s AI safety pledge to Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge to address data center-driven increases in utility bills. While many big tech companies have agreed in theory, their emphasis on growth and investor cash flow downplays concerns about the environment, rising consumer costs and safety.

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/milt-windler-nasa-flight-director-who-helped-save-apollo-13-dies-at-94/

Milt Windler, one of the four leaders of Mission Control who in 1970 directed the round-the-clock efforts to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth safely, has died at the age of 94.

Windler died on Thursday, surrounded by his loving family, according to a brief notice posted online.

Named a NASA flight director in 1968 after working on recovery operations during the Mercury and Gemini programs, Windler also led a shift of flight controllers for the Apollo 8 first circumlunar flight and Apollo 10 lunar landing dress rehearsal, as well as the second, third and fourth moon landings — Apollo 12, Apollo 14 and Apollo 15. He then served as a flight director for all three crewed missions to the United States' first space station, Skylab.

"Apollo was such a rapid pace that I don't think people had the chance to think about it very much. It has only become more clear to me later on that we were making history," said Windler in a 2006 oral history interview for the University of North Texas. "You'd do a mission and then you'd immediately turn around and get ready for another mission."

"It was not [a] time for reflection," Windler said.

[...] Later, Windler and all of his colleagues in Mission Control were provided with a dramatic reminder about why you do not celebrate until the crew has stepped onto their recovery ship. For Apollo 13, Windler was named lead flight director.

"What that meant was you did the ascent — the liftoff from Earth, I should say, the launch — and you did the lunar surface activity," he told the UNT interviewer. "But then, of course, after we lifted off from the Earth, when we got more toward the moon, why, the whole mission changed."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-go-netip-addrto6

netip.Addr features an Unmap() method returning the unwrapped IPv4 contained in an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address: from ::ffff:203.0.113.10 or ::ffff:cb00:710a, it returns 203.0.113.10. There is no Map() or To6() method for the reverse direction. Such a method is trivial to implement, but Go maintainers have rejected it on the grounds that users should write netip.AddrFrom16(ip.As16()) and let the compiler optimize it. Today, this pattern is eight times slower than a native method. How can we teach the compiler to optimize this sequence?

Let's explore three ways to implement the map semantics for netip.Addr. My favorite is to add it to the Go standard library. Go maintainers prefer a small external helper chaining netip.AddrFrom16() and netip.Addr.As16(), hoping the compiler eventually optimizes it. The unsafe package opens a third path, with the same performance as the first solution.

[...]

The Go compiler has several phases:

• Parsing: The compiler tokenizes and parses the source code. It builds a syntax tree for each source file.
• Type checking: The compiler maps each identifier to the object it denotes, folds constants, and infers the type of every expression.
• IR construction: The compiler converts the syntax tree and its types into its own intermediate representation (IR). This process, called "noding," goes through a serialization format named unified IR.
• Middle end: The compiler performs several optimization passes on the IR, such as devirtualization, function call inlining, and escape analysis.
• Walk: This phase runs two steps: order of evaluation decomposes complex statements into simpler ones, and desugaring transforms higher-level Go constructs, like switch or channels, into more primitive instructions or calls to the runtime.
• Generic SSA: The compiler converts the IR into Static Single Assignment (SSA) form, a lower-level intermediate representation suited for machine-independent optimizations and rewrite rules.
• Machine code generation: The compiler rewrites the SSA form into machine-specific variants, allocates registers, and applies more optimization passes. At the end, the assembler turns the generated instructions into machine code.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

That's the amount of economic value AI will have to deliver to justify all the investment:

The AI industry must generate $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031 to keep funding the infrastructure needed to meet anticipated demand, and this will require imaginative new uses beyond simply enhancing employee productivity.

That $6 trillion figure comes from the 2026 annual Global Technology Report from management consultants Bain & Company, which put its thinking cap on to figure out how the AI sector can possibly meet this challenge.

It says the massive demand for AI compute infrastructure has revived the hardware industry. Some of the fastest growing segments include high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in GPUs, advanced packaging and custom silicon, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) all scaling rapidly.

As The Register reported last year, AI spending is actually keeping the US economy out of recession, with datacenter infrastructure and model development providing the only significant growth areas.

Bain points to the "arms race" among hyperscalers for AI capacity, claiming that capital expenditure by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle could hit $780 billion for the whole of 2026, nearly five times the level seen just three years earlier.

By 2031, it estimates that annual spending on AI infrastructure could reach $1.5 trillion, a figure that is not far off the $1.6 trillion forecast separately by analyst firm Omdia. The $6 trillion comes from the Bain's assumption that capital expenditure will amount to about 25 percent of industry revenue, an ambitious but reasonable percentage based on trends among cloud providers, it says.

Bain expects that existing applications of AI will grow, but estimates these will add up to a total between $1.2 trillion and $1.8 trillion in revenue. This includes consumer AI, via subscriptions and advertisements, plus enterprise AI, through software development, sales, marketing, customer service, and IT operations.

That leaves a remaining $4.2 trillion of additional revenue for the industry to find from somewhere.

day of the dalek writes:

As per an article from The Hill, a federal judge in Tulsa County, Oklahoma ruled that an officer's warrantless search of ALPR data may violate the Fourth Amendment because it was done without probable cause:

The ruling concerned ALPRs' role in a Tulsa County deputy sheriff's traffic stop that resulted in a drug arrest. In this case, the deputy began following a driver after noticing she had an out-of-state license plate and ran her vehicle through an AI-powered camera database — allegedly before the officer had identified any traffic violation or other criminal activity

The officer had access to both Flock and VehicleManager systems, according to the judge's ruling, and his search turned up over 50 sightings of the woman's vehicle across several states. The deputy sheriff eventually observed an infraction and pulled over the driver.

The judge's ruling does not label the use of Flock data to aid in arrests as illegal, rather, it clarifies that the officer in this case did not have probable cause to "intruded on her reasonable expectation of privacy" with the technology — setting stricter precedent for when law enforcement may employ extensive ALPR databases during investigations.

This case involves a police officer who had access to data from both Flock and VehicleManager, the latter of which is owned by Motorola Solutions. An article from TechCrunch provides more details:

In this case, Judge Sara Hill said the deputy should have obtained a warrant before searching the Flock database for the woman's license plate, as he had "no apparent reason" for the search "other than the fact that [the woman's vehicle] had a California license plate."

The deputy then used the woman's travel history in Flock as part of the justification for searching her car, where he allegedly discovered 91 pounds of meth. But Judge Hill wrote that all evidence obtained after the Flock search "must be suppressed as the fruit of a poisonous tree."

Judge Hill also took broader aim at warrantless searches of the Flock database, writing that tracking people's location — even when they're in public places — becomes "constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

It also prevents AI-powered surveillance of employee bathrooms:

California has enacted new legislation to protect workers from AI-powered layoffs and surveillance, governor Gavin Newsom announced. The new laws are mostly aimed at companies using AI to initiate job cuts or monitor employees, not about harnessing the tech to replace workers. However, it's some of the first legislation in the nation that gives employees rights about how AI can be deployed in the workplace.

"AI should expand opportunity — not come at the expense of workers and families," said Newsom in a statement. "As this technology reshapes the workplace, California is putting people at the center." Newsom also called recent statements from the Trump administration that the AI industry can self-regulate "bulls*it," adding "we have to do a lot more in the absence of federal leadership."

Divided into multiple bills, the new law prohibits employers from only relying on AI when making a disciplinary action or termination decision, and forces companies to provide transparency if any mass layoff, relocation or termination is caused by an AI system. It also protects against the use of surveillance tools in workplace bathrooms and prohibits lawyers from "fully handing over core legal work" like drafting briefs, to AI.

Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, also signed an exhibitive order requiring state agencies to continue to refer to the tech as "artificial intelligence" rather than "super intelligence" as Trump recently mandated for some federal employees. Newsom is positioning the state as a leader in AI regulation, likening AI tech to the airline industry in terms of potential dangers to the public.

California's new laws may have been motivated in part by Meta employee complaints that the company used biased AI tools that "disproportionately selected" people who took medical leave as candidates to be laid off. One in four managers reportedly use AI to help decide which employees to cut "often or all the time," according to human resources site HR Dive.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2271259/47-million-car-inspection-study-finds-ev-myth/

"An EV battery needs recharging too often. The car's engine isn't powerful enough. They're not as fast as standard cars." It's easy to fall into the same cycles of criticism when it comes to electric vehicles, but EV haters don't always get it right. A recent analysis by consulting British consulting firm New AutoMotive, commissioned by the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association has now busted the myth that EVs don't last as long as gasoline-powered cars, using publicly available annual inspection data from the United Kingdom's Department for Transport/Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency.

The study, which you can download over at Electrek, found that once vehicles passed the 40,000-mile mark, gasoline cars began showing higher failure rates than EVs. In fact, when vehicles reached 120,000 miles, 23.5% of gasoline-powered cars had dropped out of the dataset altogether when compared with 16% of EVs. Overall, gasoline cars were 47% more likely to have failed by that mileage marker. This was the case even though EVs were typically driven more miles each year than their gasoline counterparts.

Researchers analyzed millions of MOT test records from U.K. government records. MOT stands for the Ministry of Transportation and is the U.K.'s required annual vehicle roadworthiness test. For their analysis, researchers checked how likely vehicles were to return for another MOT test, with those that didn't return considered to have left the road. They compared EVs and gasoline-powered cars based on both mileage and age to see how their roadworthiness changed over time.

These results become more interesting when you look at the individual systems that researchers analyzed. EVs weren't staying on the road longer because of any one component. For example, their suspension systems held up better than those of gasoline cars across different mileage levels. They also had fewer brake-related problems, which researchers believed was due to the greater use of regenerative braking.

Another reason why EVs can hold up well over time is the fact that they have fewer components that need ongoing attention. An all-electric vehicle's battery, motor, and related electronics require little to no routine maintenance. It also doesn't have as many fluids to change along with fewer moving parts as a gasoline-powered vehicle. This doesn't mean that an EV is completely maintenance-free, as the battery will wear out eventually and some systems that use liquid cooling can require periodic checks.

However, according a different study cited by the EPA concerning about 15,000 EVs, only 2.5% of those vehicles had their battery replaced because of a failure. The numbers were even lower among newer vehicles, with EVs from the 2016 model year and later showing a battery failure rate below 0.5%. So while EV batteries can still lose some of their original range over time, outright failure requiring full replacement appears to be uncommon.

Electrek:

One limitation of the study is that it doesn't track battery health, since that isn't captured in British MOT tests. But we did recently see the largest-ever study of battery health that showed EV batteries last longer than many people would expect, generally retaining 90% of capacity even after 90,000 miles of operation.

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/29/google-ending-chromeos-support-two-years-early/5299674

Google's basic mathematical skills appear a little fragile, after the company revealed its promise of ten years of support for new Chromebooks will only last for eight years.

The web giant's calculation problem appeared in a support document titled "What the Googlebook announcement means for your ChromeOS devices."

Googlebooks are the big G's replacement for Chromebooks, the web-centric computers it launched in 2011 and which run ChromeOS. Chromebooks have won plenty of admirers in the education sector, especially schools which  see them as a fine way to get decent and well-priced computers into kids' hands without having to take on the burden of managing a full OS.

The newer Googlebook range uses more powerful processors than their predecessors, plus a new OS called Googlebook OS that bakes in Google's Gemini AI – a product the Chocolate Factory is very keen to see succeed as the great AI land grab continues.

Google has so far launched Googlebooks only for consumers. None of the web giant's five current Googlebook hardware partners designed their first models for the education market or other fleet buyers.

Those five, and many other OEMs, continue to crank out Chromebooks.

Google's support policy for Chromebooks includes ten years of updates. However the support document states that if you buy a Chromebook today, updates will end in 2034 – eight years into the future, not a decade.

"For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths," the support page explains.

But those migration paths don't exist yet.

"Many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS. Details on migration paths and device eligibility will be shared at a later date," the document explains.

Whenever the migration paths arrive, they will come with a requirement to acquire a new license for Googlebook OS management tools – existing ChromeOS licenses won't make the trip.

While Google has unilaterally changed a policy, it's hard to imagine many Chromebooks currently in service or acquired in the next year or two will still be in service come 2034. So the shorter support period is largely moot. But Google's intention to make continued use of Chromebooks unattractive is clear.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Open AI has a very naughty AI that keeps breaking out and in to its own and other system. Apparently it's so complex and no human can monitor it. Solution. Let the AI monitor the AI. Something something fox guarding the hen house.

OpenAI says its review into hacks, including on Australian government sites, is costing $500,000 a day

Company says it is reviewing 50 petabytes of data after its agents accessed websites including Medicare without authorisation

"To put that in perspective, if that were all plain English text, it would take one person about 66 million years to read it at 240 words a minute, reading nonstop without ever sleeping or taking a break."

So their logs are so extensive and complex they are beyond human comprehension, or at least beyond human time parameters.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/03/openai-review-hacks-australian-government-sites-costing-500000-a-day

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/as-us-relations-fray-canada-gets-serious-about-its-own-launch-industry/

A year or two ago, a few Canadian launch companies were trying to develop small rockets, but if we're being frank, the industry was not particularly notable. Sure, something interesting might eventually happen, but no one outside of a few Canadian space geeks was paying much attention.

But then the Trump Administration started threatening and instituting tariffs. There was talk of making Canada the 51st state. And pretty much every Canadian I know began telling me how enraged they were at their neighbors to the south. It's hard to blame them.

This has led the Canadian government to reassess all manner of areas where it had previously been happy to rely largely on the US government and American companies for goods and services. This included sovereign access to space. So this spring, the government announced the first awards to three companies—NordSpace, Reaction Dynamics, and Canada Rocket Company—to support work on rockets with "light lift" capability.

The initial awards as part of Launch the North were modest, $8.33 million CAD, but the government has signaled larger awards in the future. Accordingly, one of these three companies, Toronto-based Canada Rocket Company, decided it would skip the small-rocket phase and move directly into a more ambitious medium-launch vehicle.

"The advice we got from having spoken with about 150 engineers, from the director of Starship engineering all the way down to some entry-level folks, is that you're not going to be able de-risk a rocket development program by building a smaller rocket," said Hugh Kolias, chief executive of the Canada Rocket Company, in an interview.

"From a technical perspective and an infrastructure perspective, essentially 90 percent of everything you do on that light lift piece gets thrown out the window, and it's almost like a net new program," Kolias said. "And everyone said, if you're not going to try to commercialize light lift, then why even do it in the first place? And that kind of hit us relatively hard."

So the company set its sights higher: developing the R-2 rocket, a fairly standard medium-lift vehicle that in renderings somewhat resembles SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. There are nine methane-fueled engines, a gas-generator engine cycle, and landing legs that signal a future path toward reuse of the first stage. It could carry up to 12.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. If all goes well, Kolias said, the company could be ready to launch by 2032.

That would be fantastic, but is any of this realistic?