Boots & Sabers

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Category: Technology

Massive Chinese Hack of Networks Threatens National Security

by | 1622, 23 Nov 24 | , , | 1 Comment

We shouldn’t have to say it, but China is not our friend.

(CNN) — Top telecom executives met with US national security officials at the White House on Friday as concerns mount over a long-running Chinese cyber-espionage campaign that has targeted some of the most senior US political figures in the country.

The hackers burrowed deep into some major US telecom providers to spy on phone calls and text messages and have proved difficult to kick out of some networks, people briefed on the matter said.

[…]

The hack is shaping up to be one of the biggest cyber and national security challenges facing the incoming Trump administration.

It is “by far” the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history,” Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chairman of the intelligence committee, told CNN.

But the full scope of the hack, who it affects and its impact on national security are still being investigated.

The FBI has notified fewer than 150 victims, most in the Washington, DC, area, according to Warner. But all of those victims have likely called or sent texts to numerous people, meaning the number of records accessed by the hackers is likely far greater. The hackers could listen to the calls of specific targets for certain periods of time, according to Warner.

US officials and private cyber experts are keeping a running tally of the number of telecom firms breached. US broadband and internet providers AT&T, Verizon and Lumen have all been targeted in the hacking effort, CNN previously reported.

But Who Will Pick the Crops?

by | 2255, 28 Oct 24 | , | 0 Comments

American farmers are, and have been, some of the most innovative, creative, and aggressive group of early adopters in the world.

A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture. It could ease the sector’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world.

 

But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they’d replace. Some of those same workers wonder what this trend might mean for them, and whether machines will lead to exploitation.

SpaceX Catches Booster with Tower

by | 1432, 13 Oct 24 | | 2 Comments

This is an absolutely amazing feat of imagination and engineering. America is still capable of great things – as long as we keep government out of it.

U.S. to Ban Russian and Chinese Parts in Cars

by | 2035, 23 Sep 24 | , | 1 Comment

There are many lessons to be learned from the beeper and radio explosions in Lebanon. One of them is that it is possible – probable – that hostile foreign actors are willing and able to infiltrate tech on a widescale basis for evil intent.

The US is planning to ban certain hardware and software made in China and Russia from cars, trucks and buses in the US due to security risks.

 

Officials said they were worried that the technology in question, used for autonomous driving and to connect cars to other networks, could allow enemies to “remotely manipulate cars on American roads”.

 

There is currently minimal use of Chinese or Russia-made software in American cars.

Losing Our Digital History

by | 0745, 16 Sep 24 | , | 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.

It’s possible, thanks to surviving fragments of papyrus, mosaics and wax tablets, to learn what Pompeiians ate for breakfast 2,000 years ago. Understand enough Medieval Latin, and you can learn how many livestock were reared at farms in Northumberland in 11th Century England – thanks to the Domesday Book, the oldest document held in the UK National Archives. Through letters and novels, the social lives of the Victorian era – and who they loved and hated – come into view.

But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That’s because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world’s information as it’s produced these days.

It’s not just what gets lost. It’s how things get changed. We have already seen media outlets and others go back years to change the wording or content of old writings. Unless someone printed it out, there is no contemporary record to challenge it.

People who are writing wonderful things with great insight; technical documents that explain how things work; court records; etc… if they are exclusively in a digital format, they are subject to be lost or altered in an instant.

That’s not to say that physical writings can’t be lost too. They can, and have been, for millennia. But while they can be lost, it is not easy to change them.

All that to say, buy books. Print out your important stuff. The digital world is fragile.

Iran Hacked Trump Campaign

by | 2157, 19 Aug 24 | , , | 26 Comments

Clearly, Iran has a favorite in this race and a vested interest in the outcome.

Iran was behind the recent hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, US intelligence officials have confirmed.

 

The FBI and other federal agencies said in a joint statement that Iran had chosen to interfere in the US election “to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions”.

 

The Trump campaign pointed the finger at Iran on 10 August for hacking its internal messages. Iranian officials denied it.

 

Sources familiar with the investigation told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they suspect Iranian hackers also targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris.

Notice how the story is written… we confirm that Iran hacked Trump, but to give the appearance that Iran hates Harris just as much, we get unnamed “sources familiar with the investigation” saying that they “suspect” that Iran “targeted” Harris too. There is no evidence or named sources to back it up, but the FBI and media have to run cover for Harris.

Biden Promotes Nuclear Power

by | 1923, 29 May 24 | , | 0 Comments

This is the way. I hope that it leads to some real nuclear power development.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday plans to announce new measures to support the development of new U.S. nuclear power plants, a large potential source of carbon-free electricity the government says is needed to combat climate change.

 

The suite of actions, which weren’t previously reported, are aimed at helping the nuclear power industry combat rising security costs and competition from cheaper plants powered by natural gas, wind and solar.

Nuclear proponents say the technology is critical to providing large, uninterrupted supplies of emissions-free power to serve soaring electricity demand from data centers and electric vehicles and still meet President Joe Biden‘s goal of decarbonizing the U.S. economy by 2050.

US to Pay For Internet for Africa

by | 0727, 24 May 24 | , | 0 Comments

It may be a worthy goal, but why is this a goal for the American taxpayers? We’re broke.

WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is announcing the formation of a new partnership to help provide internet access to 80% of Africa by 2030, up from roughly 40% now.

 

[…]

 

Harris, the first female U.S. vice president, is also announcing that the Women in the Digital Economy efforts to address the gender divide in technology access have now generated more than $1 billion in public and private commitments, with some U.S. commitments pending congressional approval.

Retail Stores Ditching Self-Checkout Due to Theft

by | 0736, 24 Apr 24 | , , | 1 Comment

Shift.

Walmart is continuing to remove self-checkout machines from its stores in what it claims is an effort to improve the ‘in-store experience’ for customers.

 

In two stores – in Shrewsbury, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio – the retailer said it would replace kiosks with staffed checkout lanes which will ‘give our associates the chance to provide more personalized and efficient service.’

 

In reality, many retailers are ditching self-checkout kiosks because they are especially vulnerable to shoplifters – and the biggest retailer in the world’s U-turn could be a landmark moment.

In a related note:

Although the company is ditching the cashier-less checkout system at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, it plans to sell the technology to more than 120 third-party businesses by the end of the year. Reaching that goal would double the number of non-Amazon enterprises that use Just Walk Out compared to last year.

The cashier-less system is the perfect antidote to the theft problem of self-checkout. I used the automated system in the San Francisco airport a while ago. It’s really simple. You scan your card when walking into the store. You can’t get into the store without scanning your card. When you have what you want, you just leave. The products all have RFID chips and are scanned on the way out with no effort. Theft is near impossible without an RFID blocker big enough for the products. I suppose you could bring in a lead-lined tote, but that’s a lot of effort for your average shoplifter.

The problem is cultural. I don’t want to scan my card before I know if I’m going to actually buy anything. Also, there is no “appeal process” if the price is wrong or it scanned wrong or whatever. I don’t want to have to call some number to resolve a $2 mistake.

With labor rates continuing to rise, retailers will continue to seek ways to reduce labor spend and expensive automated technologies will continue to evolve.

 

Google Fires Protestors

by | 1856, 18 Apr 24 | , | 0 Comments

Google is as lefty an organization as exists, but never mess with their money.

Google terminated 28 employees Wednesday, according to an internal memo viewed by CNBC, after a series of protests against labor conditions and the company’s contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.

 

The news comes one day after nine Google workers were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night after staging a sit-in at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, including a protest in Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office.

 

[…]

 

The New York sit-in started at noon ET and ended around 9:30 p.m. ET. Security asked workers to remove their banner, which spanned two floors, about an hour into the protest, according to Hasan Ibraheem, a Google software engineer based in New York City and one of the arrested workers.

 

“I realized, ‘Oh, the place that I work at is very complicit and aiding in this genocide — I have a responsibility to act against it,’” Ibraheem told CNBC earlier Wednesday. Ibraheem added, “The fact that I am receiving money from Google and Israel is paying Google — I am receiving part of that money, and that weighed very heavily on me.”

Ford Drops Prices to Lure EV Buyers

by | 2015, 11 Apr 24 | , , | 2 Comments

Market working.

DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford Motor is lowering the starting prices of some all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup trucks as it prepares to resume shipping the vehicles after quality issues.

 

[…]

 

The cost reductions are the latest electric vehicle price changes for the broader automotive industry amid slower-than-expected consumer adoption. Ford’s cuts come three months after it adjusted Lightning prices, including increasing some model prices.

Aramco CEO Says We Should Abandon Fantasy Energy Goals

by | 0801, 20 Mar 24 | , , | 0 Comments

Yes. This has been obvious for a while, but what is different here is that there is a major energy company CEO saying it so forcefully. Major energy companies have been unwilling to voice these views for fear of regulatory punishment and because they wanted a slice of the taxpayer pie being doled out for alternative energy schemes. Nasser’s comments mark a break in the SOP.

HOUSTON — Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.

 

“In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts as it collides with five hard realities,” Nasser said during a panel interview at the CERAWeek by S&P Global energy conference in Houston, Texas.

“A transition strategy reset is urgently needed and my proposal is this: We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions,” the CEO said to applause from the audience.

 

[…]

 

Nasser said the world should focus more on reducing emissions from oil and gas in addition to renewables. The CEO said efficiency improvements alone over the past 15 years have reduced global energy demand by almost 90 million barrels per day oil equivalent. Wind and solar, meanwhile, have substituted only 15 million barrels over the same period, he said.

 

“We should phase in new energy sources and technologies when they are genuinely ready, economically competitive and with the right infrastructure,” Nasser said.

House Overwhelmingly Votes to Prohibit TikTok if Chinese Refuse to Divest

by | 1136, 13 Mar 24 | , | 1 Comment

While I agree with the action, I do think it is somewhat naive. All social media apps spy on us. The only difference here is that it is a foreign actor instead of our own government.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app TikTok if its China-based owner doesn’t sell, as lawmakers acted on concerns that the company’s current ownership structure is a national security threat.

 

The bill, passed by a vote of 352-65, now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are unclear.

 

TikTok, which has more than 150 million American users, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese technology firm ByteDance Ltd.

 

The lawmakers contend that ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese government, which could demand access to the data of TikTok’s consumers in the U.S. any time it wants. The worry stems from a set of Chinese national security laws that compel organizations to assist with intelligence gathering.

 

“We have given TikTok a clear choice,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. “Separate from your parent company ByteDance, which is beholden to the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), and remain operational in the United States, or side with the CCP and face the consequences. The choice is TikTok’s.”

Google CEO Calls Gemini Debacle “Unacceptable”

by | 1854, 28 Feb 24 | , | 8 Comments

Not a bad statement. I hope the reality matches the sentiment. I’m pessimistic that it will.

In a memo Tuesday evening, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s artificial intelligence mistakes, which led to Google taking its Gemini image-generation feature offline for further testing.

 

“I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias – to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.”

 

“Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

 

“Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging AI products.”

 

“We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.”

 

“Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in AI over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.”

 

“We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the AI wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.”

Google to Relaunch Gemini AI

by | 1925, 26 Feb 24 | , | 0 Comments

I can see the memo now… “keep it racist and woke, but a bit less obvious.”

After pulling its artificial intelligence image generation tool on Thursday due to a string of controversies, Google plans to relaunch the product soon, according to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.

 

Google introduced the image generator earlier this month through Gemini, the company’s main suite of AI models. The tool allows users to enter prompts to create an image. Over the past week, users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses, which have circulated widely on social media.

“We have taken the feature offline while we fix that,” Hassabis said Monday during a panel at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. “We are hoping to have that back online very shortly in the next couple of weeks, few weeks.” He added that the product was not “working the way we intended.”

 

[…]

When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots show. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.

Make no mistake. It wasn’t a mistake.

EV Sales Rising, But Still Small Fraction of Sales

by | 1131, 4 Jan 24 | , | 28 Comments

Interesting stats in this story.

Ford’s overall 2023 sales are lower than the industry’s sales growth, which auto data firm Motor Intelligence reports topped 15.6 million last year — marking a 12.3% increase from 2022 and the segment’s best performance since more than 17 million vehicles in 2019.

 

“In a year of challenges, from a labor strike to supply issues, our amazing lineup of gas, electric and hybrid vehicles and our fantastic dealers delivered solid growth and momentum. We have the products that customers want,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a release.

 

Electric vehicle sales came in at 72,608 for the year, up 18% from 2022 and boosted by nearly 26,000 EVs sold during the fourth quarter.

EV sales are increasing at a faster rate than overall sales, but percentages are deceptive when being based on such a small number. Overall, EV sales were still only about 3.6% of Ford’s sales despite them pushing it hard. It’s telling that the quote from Ford’s CEO leads with “GAS, electric and hybrid…”

AVs “unlikely to be profitable anytime in the foreseeable future”

by | 2158, 15 Dec 23 | , | 9 Comments

Innovation is hard and expensive. This is the trial and error of capitalism. When government decides to weigh in and force something that is economically unviable, it retards the system’s ability to innovate.

But there’s growing concern across the industry, not just with GM and Cruise, about the viability of autonomous vehicles, or AVs, as a business instead of as a niche science project.

 

“AV technology, while they’ve made a lot of progress with it, is unlikely to be profitable anytime in the foreseeable future, certainly not this decade,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Guidehouse Insights. “If they need to make cuts, robotaxis seem like the obvious place to do that.”

 

Some Wall Street analysts are holding out hope that GM and Barra can turn Cruise around and eventually refocus on growing the business, as the Detroit automaker takes a more hands-on approach with the company. Several are expecting updates at an investor event in March.

 

“The plan to pause Cruise operations and reduce spending on Cruise in 2024 are only first steps. Once again, we expect these concerns to be addressed and cured at the capital markets day in early 2024 but expect skepticism to remain in the interim,” Morgan Stanley analyst John Murphy said in a Nov. 29 investor note.

 

If GM can’t turn the operations around, Cruise would join a list of its past defunct growth businesses, partnerships and investments since 2016.

EV Solution? Carry a Generator.

by | 0713, 7 Nov 23 | | 1 Comment

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

DETROIT (AP) — One of the biggest reasons people cite when saying they won’t buy an electric vehicle is range anxiety, the fear of running out of juice on the road with nowhere to recharge.

 

Stellantis’ Ram brand may have an answer for that, especially for people who need a truck to haul or tow things. It’s called the Ramcharger, a pickup that can travel 145 miles (235 kilometers) on electricity, with a 3.6-liter V6 gas-powered engine linked to a generator that can recharge the battery while the truck is moving.

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