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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/highly-reviewed-speaker-can-be-hacked-over-the-air-to-infect-connected-devices/

Operating system makers take many steps to prevent their wares from accepting commands from remote devices. The safeguards, designed to thwart malicious attacks, typically require hackers to jump through all kinds of hoops to bypass the measures. But what if remote code execution were as simple as being within Bluetooth range of a speaker connected to the targeted device?

It turns out it can, at least when the speaker is a Sound Blaster Katana V2X sold by Singapore-based Creative Technologies. The speaker, which sells for $283, is widely acclaimed with numerous reviews showering praise on the sound and performance of it and its predecessor, the Sound Blaster V2.

Researcher Rasmus Moorats stumbled on the hack by accident, after he purchased a Katana V2X, a soundbar that connects to PCs, Macs, and Linux devices over USB or Bluetooth. Moorats was curious if he could create a Linux tool that communicated with his speaker. He discovered he could do so through CTP, a proprietary mechanism he guesses is short for Creative Transport Protocol.

CTP allows devices connected via Bluetooth or USB to send commands to the speaker, such as changing LED colors and equalizer settings. CTP also allows the connected devices to receive responses from the speaker.

To Moorat's surprise, his Bluetooth device was able to connect to the speaker, which was connected to a PC via USB, without any authentication. Not only that, but his Bluetooth device didn't have to be paired first. Also surprising: One of the CTP commands, labeled "upload new firmware to device," allowed him to replace the official firmware with his own custom one. The firmware reflashing didn't use code signing or other measures to prevent the loading of unofficial code.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/06/07/uk-exam-watchdog-frets-over-smart-specs-turning-gcses-into-google-searches/5251365

England's exams watchdog is warning that the next generation of school cheating may arrive not in a student's pocket, but perched on their face.

In a new podcast, Ofqual chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham said advances in consumer technology are creating fresh headaches for exam authorities, with smart glasses, hidden earpieces, and other connected gadgets raising the prospect of increasingly sophisticated cheating during exams.

"We shouldn't underestimate the challenge involved here," Bauckham said, warning that regulators will need to move quickly as technology evolves.

Students smuggling phones into exam halls is hardly a new phenomenon. According to Ofqual, mobile phones and other smart devices were involved in 2,225 malpractice cases during 2025 exams, accounting for 44.3 percent of all student malpractice incidents. Device-related offenses have been the largest category of student malpractice every year since 2018.

What appears to be keeping regulators awake at night is what comes next.

A smartphone hidden in a blazer pocket is one thing, but a pair of ordinary-looking glasses quietly displaying information to the wearer, or a near-invisible earpiece feeding them answers from elsewhere, is harder to spot from the back of an exam hall.

The concerns arise as consumer technology companies continue to cram cameras, microphones, AI assistants, and internet connectivity into an ever-growing range of wearable devices. What starts life as a gadget for checking messages or translating languages can easily become something more useful when sitting a three-hour mathematics exam.

Bauckham also suggested artificial intelligence poses a separate challenge outside the exam hall. Ofqual is examining ways to ensure coursework remains authentic as AI-generated submissions become harder to distinguish from student work.

Possible responses include tighter requirements around referencing sources and greater involvement from teachers in verifying that students actually produced the work they hand in. Bauckham even floated the possibility of removing coursework entirely from some qualifications if confidence in its authenticity cannot be maintained.

For now, students are still expected to turn up with a pen and whatever knowledge they've managed to retain. But as smart glasses and AI gadgets become cheaper and harder to spot, invigilators may soon need to know as much about consumer electronics as they do about exam regulations.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/we-pissed-off-a-lot-of-people-giant-data-center-plan-cut-50-amid-protests/

One of the world's biggest data center projects was designed to be nearly three times the size of Manhattan, stretching across multiple Utah sites. But intense local backlash in Box Elder County has now pushed the developer to cut the project plans in half before construction starts.

Residents' top concern was the Stratos data center project draining local waters, and they were willing to pay to protect them, most especially the vulnerable Great Salt Lake. Many locals paid a $15 fee to register comments to block the transfer of 1,900 acre-feet of water from a ranch to the hyperscale data center. Other concerns include electricity bills rising and potential risks to air quality, local wildlife, and land.

Venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary, chair of O'Leary Digital and Shark Tank investor, is behind the construction of the project. He told a local ABC affiliate that he regrets not working with state officials to be more transparent about the project from the beginning.

"We really screwed it up," O'Leary said, while confirming that he "was not expecting this kind of intense blowback from the public." He claimed that he and state officials anticipated that "people would be excited" about the major local investment and "made huge mistakes" by not involving the public more in discussions, based on that "assumption."

"We pissed off a lot of people, and that's not the way I do business," O'Leary said. "That's not."

As Utahns moved to defend their resources and demanded more information, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, who is a Republican, sent a letter to O'Leary, asking him to cut the project's scope by 75 percent.

At an AI gala in Washington, DC, O'Leary claimed that he had "no choice" but to agree, NBC News reported. Initially, he planned to build the project on 40,000 acres, but now he's reduced that to about 20,000 acres. Of the remaining land, 10,000 acres will remain undeveloped, leaving about 25 percent of the initial acreage to develop the data center. O'Leary's group characterized this as bending to the Senate president's demands.

Moving forward, O'Leary wants to rebuild trust, he claimed. He told the ABC affiliate that he's personally taking over all communications on the project because he didn't "like being beaten up like this." With him as spokesperson, residents will supposedly be better informed about permitting requests and environmental impacts, rather than relying on sources that O'Leary claimed are unreliable or bent on manipulating public opinion.

"All the plans are going to be transparent," O'Leary said, while claiming that public concerns are exaggerated. "All the design is going to be transparent. Everything we do is going to be transparent because I'm not happy with where we're at right now."

He told the AI gala attendees that he now recognizes that "we should have answered all this stuff up front, now I got to do it after everybody's been pissed off."

"I hope this dialogue can serve as a model for how complex projects are best addressed—through direct, good-faith engagement between developers and elected officials rather than through public narratives that outpace the facts," O'Leary told a local Utah news site KLS.com.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/safety-officials-finally-have-a-good-idea-of-what-a-big-rocket-explosion-can-do/

Last week's explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year.

The launch base on Florida's Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff.

By 2036, the Space Force projects that the spaceport could support up to 500 launches per year, five times last year's total. The combination of these lofty launch forecasts and the Space Force's conservative safety protocols has caused some tension at the Cape Canaveral spaceport.

Competitors of SpaceX have worried that daily launches and landings of the company's reusable super-heavy Starship rocket might force evacuations of their own facilities for safety reasons. The US Space Force, which runs the spaceport, maintains strict rules for methane/liquid oxygen, or methalox, rockets. Comparatively, kerosene and hydrogen are known quantities.

For now, military officials are treating any methalox rocket with "100 percent TNT blast equivalency" and maintaining wide keep-out zones around their launch pads when the rockets are loaded with propellant. Their intention is to ensure the safety of the public and workers at the spaceport. With more data on how methane-fueled rockets explode, officials expect the keep-out zones to get smaller over time. To this end, NASA, the Space Force, the FAA, and SpaceX have conducted sub-scale ground tests to gather measurements on methane's explosive yield.

The 100 percent blast equivalency policy was in effect at Cape Canaveral last Thursday, when Blue Origin loaded its New Glenn booster full of methane and liquid oxygen at Launch Complex 36. The smaller second stage was filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as Blue Origin's launch team counted down to a brief test-firing of the rocket's seven BE-4 engines.

A fireball enveloped the rocket as the engines lit, destroying the launch vehicle and much of the launch pad. The explosion knocked Blue Origin's only launch facility out of commission. The company says it aims to repair the site and resume launching by the end of the year, but past launch pad rebuilds have taken at least twice as long. It took SpaceX about 15 months to return one of its launch pads to service after a Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a similar test in 2016. That event was not as powerful as the Blue Origin incident last week.

"New Glenn is the biggest rocket we've launched here off the Eastern Range, and with that, it had the most fuel," said Col. Brian Chatman, commander of the Space Force unit that operates the Cape Canaveral spaceport. "That makes it the largest explosion that we've had out here."

There were no injuries to any personnel. The explosion destroyed Blue Origin's transporter-erector that supports the rocket during horizontal rollout and raises it vertically on the pad. Blue Origin says it won't replace the transporter-erector and will instead employ an "alternative vertical conop" (concept of operations) when it resumes New Glenn operations at Launch Complex 36, which the company leases from the Space Force.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/the-floppy-disk-patent-was-granted-today-in-1972-when-80kb-took-up-8-inches-and-were-really-floppy

So, floppy disks are officially 54 years old, based on the patent application's grant and publication dates. However, work on this portable storage medium began in 1967 as part of IBM’s Project Minnow. This project proposed “a flexible Mylar disk coated with magnetic material that could be inserted through a slot into a disk drive mechanism and spun on a spindle” as a form of portable/removable media, instead of tape or punched cards. Big Blue was also targeting a device cost under $200 and a media cost under $5.

Despite its ungainly size, this first floppy disk format would be rather short on capacity, even compared to later, smaller form factors. IBM notes that it was first marketed to customers as capable of holding the same amount of data as 3,000 punched cards. That fits the era in which it was launched. However, other sources note this was equivalent to 80 kilobytes.

The next floppy disk milestone came in 1977, according to the IBM blog, when the Apple II was launched with 5.25-inch floppy drives. Steve Wozniak developed a recording scheme known as Group Coded Recording, which allowed 140 kilobytes of storage, quite a lot more than the standard single-density 90 kilobytes. Then Tandon introduced a double-sided drive in 1978, with DSDD-format floppies offering up to 360-kilobyte capacity.

In 1984, IBM would trump that with the high-density format with up to 1.2 megabytes of data storage on a 5.25-inch disk. In the same year, Apple launched the original Macintosh with a 400-kilobyte 3.5-inch floppy disk mechanism from Sony installed. IBM would refine this much more pocketable, rigid, portable disk with its 1.44 megabyte standard 3.5-inch floppy disks in 1986.

Floppies had a superb run, as far as computer technologies go. At their peak, “more than 5 billion floppy disks were sold annually,” notes IBM. Apple was again instrumental in change when, in 1998, it left tech journalists aghast by not equipping the new iMac with a built-in floppy drive.

In 2026, floppies are mere nostalgia for most computer enthusiasts. Though from time to time we still uncover surprising niches that time and new tech have forgotten, like the San Francisco Muni Metro, in New Jersey prisons, and the German Navy.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/industry-coalition-urges-trump-administration-to-take-urgent-action

The coalition warned that the AI data center expansion, which has consumed an unprecedented share of global memory capacity, has led to a memory chip shortage that could lead to higher prices for consumer electronics, increased costs for broadband and telecommunications infrastructure, disruptions to automobile and medical device production, and delays affecting federal contractors attempting to fulfill government procurement obligations. The letter argues that these risks are emerging despite billions of dollars of US investment intended to strengthen domestic semiconductor supply chains.

The organizations are asking the administration to work directly with memory suppliers and major chip buyers to address the imbalance. Their recommendations include accelerating expansion of memory manufacturing capacity in the United States and allied nations, using trade agreements to strengthen supply-chain resilience, ensuring adequate memory supply for non-AI industries, leveraging CHIPS Act programs where possible, and reducing regulatory barriers that may slow capacity growth.

"We urge the Administration to work with memory chipmakers and chip buyers to assess steps that can be taken to address this imbalance in the memory market and protect against harm to consumers, workers, and businesses of all sizes," the letter states.

The warning arrives as memory manufacturers increasingly prioritize high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized memory used in AI accelerators from companies such as Nvidia and AMD. Demand for HBM has surged over the past two years as hyperscalers race to deploy larger AI clusters, prompting memory suppliers to devote an increasing share of their production capacity to AI-oriented products.

Samsung and SK Hynix — which together with Micron control over 95% of global DRAM production — have been diverting wafer capacity toward high-margin HBM for AI accelerators, starving the commodity DRAM and NAND markets in the process. Both companies warned in April that significant shortages will continue through at least 2027. IDC, meanwhile, has already revised its 2026 PC market forecast downward by up to 9% as a direct consequence of memory scarcity and rising prices.

Industry analysts have repeatedly warned for months that AI demand is reshaping the economics of the memory market. While memory shortages have historically been cyclical, the coalition argues that AI infrastructure spending is creating a structural shift large enough to affect industries far removed from data centers. The letter marks the first coordinated, multi-industry push for federal intervention. Whether the administration will respond — and how — remains to be seen.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/after-11-years-at-mars-nasas-maven-spacecraft-went-out-with-a-whisper/

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn't hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth.

The loss of communication triggered contingency plans for engineers to try to restore a link with MAVEN, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. To no avail, they listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind. Hopes of saving the mission faded over time, and NASA officials announced Wednesday that they're giving up on it.

It will take some time for engineers to try to unravel what happened to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which launched from Earth in 2013 and arrived in orbit around Mars in 2014 to study the interaction between the Martian atmosphere and the solar wind. MAVEN was an unqualified success, lasting 11 years at Mars and far outliving its original prime mission. But the spacecraft's sudden failure was a surprise. Many of NASA's planetary exploration missions operate for decades.

With the scant information available, investigators may never determine exactly what went wrong with MAVEN. Investigators are combing through data the spacecraft transmitted before Mars blocked the signal, and engineers were able to recover fragments of telemetry from MAVEN after it reemerged from behind the planet.

"As part of this investigation, the team members at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were successful in recovering some fragments of telemetry and Doppler shift data from the spacecraft," Moreau said. "These data were extracted from recorded signals that were recovered during the hours following the loss of signal."

Ground controllers didn't see these faint signals in real time. They were recorded as part of a separate science campaign seeking to gather information about the density and dynamics of the upper Martian atmosphere, which can distort radio signals that pass through it.

"One of the bits of that we were able to confirm is an inertial rate measurement that told us the spacecraft was spinning at about 2.7 revolutions per minute," Moreau said. "We also confirmed that that was consistent with a Doppler signature that we saw in the data. That's faster than the spacecraft is expected to rotate, and that indicates a problem that the spacecraft probably couldn't recover from."

owl writes:

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/the-1n4148-the-signal-diode-that-ended-up-everywhere/

Texas Instruments announced the 1N914 silicon switching diode in 1960. Within a year of its JEDEC registration in 1961, 11 manufacturers were second-sourcing it. The 1N4148 followed in 1968 with a tighter leakage current specification aimed at military and industrial applications, and it gradually became the default part number.

Today, the 1N4148 is manufactured by Onsemi, Vishay, Nexperia, Diodes Inc., and dozens of other vendors worldwide. It ships in the original glass DO-35 axial package and in every common surface-mount form factor. No end-of-life has been announced, and none is expected; it's still the most widely produced discrete switching diode in history.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The reactor, from a startup called Antares, isn't ready to generate power yet:

Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different—and typically smaller—reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.

The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three different reactor designs reach criticality in a bit over a year. On Thursday, a startup called Antares announced that a test reactor it had placed at the Idaho National Laboratory had reached criticality, making it the first new design to cross this threshold. Criticality means that the nuclear reactions inside the hardware had become self sustaining; it does not mean the reactor had started to generate power.

Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing its design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that's designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.

As long as your reactor can keep the TRISO pellets contained, then there should be no risk of meltdown or even the release of the most dangerous isotopes produced from the reactions. There are still some safety concerns, as neutrons will still escape and can potentially convert some of the surrounding material into unstable isotopes. But the Antares design surrounds the TRISO with a graphite sheath, which should slow most of these neutrons down.

To mitigate non-radioactive risks, the Antares design uses sodium to take heat from the reactor to a heat exchanger. The heat is transferred to pressurized nitrogen, which then drives a turbine in a closed Brayton cycle setup.

At the moment, Antares is just testing what it calls a Mark 0 reactor, which is not connected to the power-generation portion. Instead, it's being used to validate the company's modeling of the physical conditions in its reactors and generate safety data that can be used during licensing applications. Attempts to run the entire system, including electrical generation, are expected to happen next year.

While the work was done at a Department of Energy Lab, the company is working with the Department of Defense's Project Pele program for developing a mobile nuclear reactor. The company has also received support from NASA.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The Claude developer is one of a trio of tech firms expected to go public this year, alongside SpaceX and OpenAI:

The artificial intelligence developer Anthropic took a tentative first step Monday toward becoming a publicly traded company, a move that would give it access to a huge pool of investors' money while opening its books.

Anthropic said Monday in an announcement that it had confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which allows the company to go public after the SEC's review. Anthropic said it has not yet set the number of shares to be offered or what prices, and that the move will "depend on market conditions and other factors."

The Claude-maker is one of three big tech firms expected to have initial public offerings this year amid what some call an "AI gold rush." SpaceX, the Elon Musk-owned rocket company that also includes the Starlink ISP, the AI lab xAI, and the social network now known as X, filed for an IPO in May. Anthropic's major rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is expected to follow suit soon.

The frenzied IPO race reflects the market's eagerness to cash in on its trillion-dollar bets, as AI companies rush to secure the massive funding needed to survive. The AI industry is capital-intensive, driven by the immense costs of maintaining the computing power required to train large language models, as well as the data centers, silicon and energy grids to keep them running. 

[...] The AI industry has been a highly speculative landscape, where valuation is determined by a company's future potential rather than current profits. An online tracker of revenue and losses found that more than twice as much money has been spent on AI development as has been made back, pointing to billions of dollars in debt. The only major company to come out ahead is Nvidia, which makes the chips at the center of the AI gold rush. 

Critics point out that AI companies have raised capital through manipulated accounting, using "annualized" revenue spikes and ignoring core costs to hide poor margins, thereby misleading investors. 

"Their valuations are, at this point, so high that it's becoming increasingly impractical to raise more capital, and their investors are likely demanding some kind of liquidity event," said Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.slashgear.com/2184041/why-jets-use-generators-instead-of-alternators/

A modern jet is an engineering marvel that's very easy to take for granted. Consider the uniquely engineered Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for instance. Step aboard this jet, and one of the things that's often just accepted without a second thought is the sheer quantity of electronics on show. First there are the visible devices like lighting, entertainment systems, and galleys to consider. Dig just below the surface, and you have the fly-by-wire systems, sensors, and the cockpit controls & instruments, each of which needs to be reliably powered. All in all, a Boeing 787 is threaded with about 57 miles of electric cabling.

All these electronics require a lot of power, the vast majority of which is supplied by the engines. However, the eagle-eyed among you will notice a big problem here — jet engines produce mechanical energy, not electrical, and something is needed to convert an engine's output into usable electrical energy.

There are several ways of converting mechanical energy into electrical power, but step aboard any modern jet, and it's going to be a generator that lets you watch the in-flight movie. While alternators are still used in smaller piston-engined aircraft, and the car in your driveway, the electrical demands of a modern jet are a different beast altogether.

Going back to the Boeing 787 and its 57 miles of wiring, the wiring schematic of this plane includes six generators, which supply power to 17 electrical substations. Modern aviation alternators are efficient, reliable, and lightweight. This begs the question, if alternators are so good, why don't jets use them? The short answer is scale. Electrically speaking, modern jets are ravenous machines — avionics, engines, climate control systems, and flight controls are all needed to keep the plane in the air and the passengers and crew comfortable. This requires far more power than a compact alternator can supply.

jelizondo writes:

CNN published a very interesting article:

German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler set up a famous experiment more than 100 years ago that changed how scientists understand animal intelligence and the power of insight — or spontaneous problem-solving.

Köhler made what he described as a playground for a group of chimpanzees with a banana hanging out of reach and various items — boxes, poles and sticks — lying around. The strewn objects offered opportunities for the animals to explore, and the food presented a challenge for them to unlock. After fruitlessly trying to snatch the banana, the chimps quickly started rearranging the items. The apes eventually stacked the boxes and easily grabbed the reward.

The experiment demonstrated that chimps were capable of insight. While most animals can do basic problem-solving, insight is a step up because it's an understanding of cause and effect that does not rely on trial and error, copying others, or previous knowledge. Scientists have observed this cognitive ability in only a handful of species: great apes, elephants and some birds. There is an ongoing scientific debate over whether even more species — invertebrates such as octopuses and certain spiders — should also join the ranks of the spontaneous problem solvers.

Now, a study published Thursday in the journal Science suggests that bumblebees possess insight. In a lab experiment, the insects were able to roll a plastic foam ball underneath an artificial blue flower, climb over the ball and use it to reach the flower, obtaining a sugary reward. "We showed for the first time that bumblebees can solve a completely novel object-manipulation task, spontaneously and without being trained to do so, or without any trial and error," said lead author Akshaye Bhambore, a doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland.

Bumblebees can use socially learned behaviors and logical reasoning to solve puzzles, previous studies have shown. In the new experiment, however, the researchers exposed the insects to the separate elements of the task but never trained them on the solution itself.

This result suggests that a tiny insect brain can support surprisingly flexible behavior, according to James Nieh, a professor in the department of ecology, behavior and evolution at the University of California San Diego, who was not involved with the study. "Bees do not normally move objects around to make platforms, so this is not a natural bumble bee behavior," he wrote in an email. "But the experiment shows that they can remember a hidden goal location and manipulate an object in relation to that goal."

This exciting new study shows that insects can learn and change their behavior in ways scientists are only just starting to understand, Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, an associate professor of neuroethology at the University of Exeter in England, said in an email. Hempel de Ibarra was not part of the research. This flexibility could shape how bees and other pollinators interact with flowers, helping them cope with challenges as environments and landscapes change, she added.

Journal Reference: Akshaye A. Bhambore et al., Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees, Science, 4 Jun 2026, Vol 392, Issue 6802, pp. 1046-1049 DOI: 10.1126/science.ady1618

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

China's support is greater relative to semiconductor industry revenue:

A report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that semiconductor firms based in the United States received more government support than those based in any other region.

However, support for China's chip industry was larger relative to the revenue generated by Chinese semiconductor firms, reaching close to 10 percent of sales in the early 2020s.

The OECD - a forum for members espousing the market economy and democracy - said the global semiconductor market was worth $631 billion in 2024. It expected continued growth on the back of investment in datacenters, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving. Its measure of the market includes chip design, manufacturing, testing and packaging, but not manufacturing equipment such as photolithography machines.

Firms based in the United States and Asia (eg Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) have long been the key players in the semiconductor sector, with Asia's role growing in importance as part of the supply chain was relocated there. Asia has, over the last two decades, become a global center for chip manufacturing and trade, although the United States maintains an important role in high-value segments of the supply chain, including in chip design. The sample of firms covered by the OECD MAGIC database thus includes a relatively large number of firms based in Asia and the United States, as well as large actors based in Europe, which largely serve the automotive industry. The sample is estimated to cover between 64 percent and 83 percent of global sales, depending on the year and how the sector's scope is defined.

"In absolute terms, firms based in the United States were the largest beneficiaries of government support, which notably includes the support these firms received in other jurisdictions in which they operate (eg in Asia), as well as the introduction of new subsidy programs in the United States. Subsidies to firms based in the OECD Asia-Pacific region also expanded steadily throughout the period for similar reasons. While subsidies to semiconductor manufacturers based in China have been modest in absolute terms, they represented a significant amount relative to their sales, reaching close to 10 percent of revenue in the early 2020s," the report said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves:

Typos are a sign of a human writer… for now

Recently, a friend told me over coffee about some disheartening feedback she had received. “They said it was good,” she said, “but that it read like it was written by AI.” Knowing her, I understood immediately what had happened. Her credibility was being questioned not because her work was poor, but because it was too good – too clear, too fluent, too polished.

The rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence tools is changing how we think about good writing. In the digital age, it is increasingly important to signal that an actual person – not a faceless large language model – is behind the words. One paradoxical way of doing this is, surprisingly, to damage the quality of your own writing.

Alan Turing even made such a suggestion in the 1950s: sprinkle in a few deliberate typographical errors to appear more convincingly human. The irony, of course, is that Turing was addressing that advice to machines.

My friend’s experience isn’t an isolated one. Writing well, once a mark of skill, has become, for a growing number of readers, reviewers and hiring managers, a source of moral suspicion. The skills we once used to signal intelligence and effort – clarity, precision, a well-turned sentence – are starting to lose their meaning.

The problem lies in our inability to easily detect AI-written content, making false positives (that is, wrongly accusing someone of using AI tools) a serious concern. Studies have shown that neither humans nor AIs can reliably distinguish between human- and machine-generated writing. When human- and AI-generated writing is intermixed, performance becomes even worse. As a result, many universities that had been using plagiarism-detection tools for AI detection have stopped due to concerns about their reliability.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

But NASA's Jared Isaacman believes the launchpad, which exploded on May 28, may not be fixed until 2028:

Blue Origin may or may not have to sit out the most immediate moon-bound missions for NASA — it depends on who you ask. The agency's administrator, Jared Isaacman, told CNBC that it will "take some serious time" for Blue Origin to restore its New Glenn launchpad, which exploded on May 28, and that a 2028 timeframe is "within the realm" of possibility. However, Blue Origin's CEO believes his company can repair it much, much sooner. "We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter," Dave Limp wrote on X.

If you'll recall, Blue Origin's Cape Canaveral launchpad exploded with the heavy-lift rocket while the company was conducting a hotfire test to prepare New Glenn for its fourth mission. Isaacman toured the facility, known as Launch Complex 36, on May 29 to see the damage firsthand and to talk to the team. The company had only just started testing the rocket after it was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), following its third mission wherein it failed to put its payload into orbit. It was given permission to launch New Glenn again after closing an investigation that found a "cryogenic leak" to be the cause of the incident.

It's still unclear what caused the explosion on May 28. Limp made the claim that New Glenn will fly again before the end of this year after Blue Origin regained access to the launchpad and was able to start its investigation. He said that the rocket's fuel tanks were in good shape and that the "support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced."

It's definitely in Blue Origin's best interests to get Launch Complex 36 repaired soon. The company is one of NASA's main launch providers for the Artemis and Moon Base programs, with New Glenn being instrumental in achieving the agency's goals. NASA even chose Blue Origin for the Moon Base I mission that's launching this fall. In addition, its fellow Jeff Bezos-owned company Amazon is depending on Blue Origin to launch Leo satellites for the broadband service that it was planning to launch later this year. New Glenn's fourth mission was supposed to carry 48 Leo satellites to orbit.

The company is developing another launchpad inside the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but it's far from ready. It just recently negotiated a lease for Space Launch Complex (SLC)-14 with the US government. However, it will take around two years to prepare the facility for launch, which means the Vandenberg launchpad will not be ready until 2028, as well.

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