Thursday, May 30, 2019

humility is our best quality

ars technicaUS Department of Energy is now referring to fossil fuels as “freedom gas”

Call it a rebranding of "energy dominance."

In a press release published on Tuesday, two Department of Energy officials used the terms "freedom gas" and "molecules of US freedom" to replace your average, everyday term "natural gas."

The press release was fairly standard, announcing the expansion of a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at the Freeport facility on Quintana Island, Texas. It would have gone unnoticed had an E&E News reporter not noted the unique metonymy "molecules of US freedom."


DOE Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg is quoted as saying, "With the US in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of US freedom to be exported to the world.”

the empire, er, huawei, strikes back!

engadgetHuawei asks court to declare US government ban unconstitutional

Huawei is stepping up its fight against American bans. The tech giant has motioned for a summary judgment in its lawsuit to invalidate Section 889 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, arguing that it violates the "Bill of Attainder, Due Process and Vesting" clauses of the US Constitution. The law explicitly bans Huawei by name despite "no evidence" of a security risk, Huawei's Song Liuping said, and bans third-party contractors who buy from Huawei even when there's no link to the US government.

The company also preemptively tried to dismiss claims that there are facts up for dispute. This is a simple "matter of law," according to lead counsel Glen Nager.

A hearing on the motion is due September 19th.


This won't get Huawei off the Commerce Department's Entities List, which forced US companies to stop doing business with the Chinese firm. It would alleviate some of the pressure on the company, though, and would theoretically provide a route back to doing more business in the US if it's ever removed from the Entities List. It could also push the US to provide evidence (if there is any) to support the measure. If nothing else, it signals that Huawei won't take bans lying down.

wired daily posts 2019-05-30


Wednesday, May 29, 2019

this couldn't possibly have been a problem BEFORE the trade war

npr'We're Not Being Paranoid': U.S. Warns Of Spy Dangers Of Chinese-Made Drones

Drones have become an increasingly popular tool for industry and government.

Electric utilities use them to inspect transmission lines. Oil companies fly them over pipelines. The Interior Department even deployed them to track lava flows at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano.

But the Department of Homeland Security is warning that drones manufactured by Chinese companies could pose security risks, including that the data they gather could be stolen.

The department sent out an alert on the subject on May 20, and a video on its website notes that drones in general pose multiple threats, including "their potential use for terrorism, mass casualty incidents, interference with air traffic, as well as corporate espionage and invasions of privacy."

We could pull information down and upload information on a flying drone. You could also hijack the drone."

Lanier Watkins, cyber-research scientist at Johns Hopkins University

"We're not being paranoid," the video's narrator adds.


Most drones bought in the U.S. are manufactured in China, with most of those drones made by one company, DJI Technology. Lanier Watkins, a cyber-research scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Information Security Institute, said his team discovered vulnerabilities in DJI's drones.

'tis but a scratch

Nikkei Asian ReviewUndersea cables -- Huawei's ace in the hole

Huawei is said to be involved in some 30 undersea cable projects at the moment.

TOKYO -- While the U.S. is pressuring allies to help keep Huawei Technologies out of 5G cellular networks, the Chinese giant is quietly advancing in the global market for one of the most critical components of telecom infrastructure: undersea cables.

Virtually all of the world's data transmissions go through cables on the bottom of the oceans. Communications satellites are also used, but their share of the data amounts to just 1%. The U.S., Europe and Japan look like they have the cable market locked down, but their dominance may not be as secure as it seems.

Huawei put the industry on notice late last year, when it completed a cable between South America and Africa.

Right now, the world's attention is focused on Washington's drive to ban Huawei equipment from fifth-generation infrastructure, which will offer much faster wireless service than the current fourth-generation technology. Japan and Australia have essentially closed ranks with the U.S., and the Donald Trump administration is pressuring Britain, Germany and France to do the same -- reportedly going so far as to threaten to withhold important security information if they refuse.

Huawei, for its part, is showing no signs of backing down. The smartphone maker is gearing up for fresh sales drives in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. So the stage is set for a drawn-out fight between the U.S. and China over telecom technology and control of data.


In the fog of this battle, the cable issue has yet to draw much public attention. But security policymakers in the U.S., Japan and Australia are increasingly alarmed.

wired posts 2019-05-29


Tuesday, May 28, 2019

translation: apple, this trade war will go badly for you

ReutersHuawei founder says he would oppose Chinese retaliation against Apple: Bloomberg

Huawei Technologies' founder and Chief Executive Ren Zhengfei told Bloomberg bloom.bg/2HT7DUY that retaliation by Beijing against Apple Inc was unlikely and that he would oppose any such move from China against the iPhone maker.


When asked about calls from some in China to retaliate against Apple, Ren said that he would “protest” against any such step if it were to be taken by Beijing.

how to build a better battery

Cornell ChronicleEngineered bacteria could be missing link in energy storage

Natural photosynthesis already offers an example for storing solar energy at a huge scale, and turning it into biofuels in a closed carbon loop. It captures about six times as much solar energy in a year as all civilization uses over the same time. But, photosynthesis is really inefficient at harvesting sunlight, absorbing less than one percent of the energy that hits photosynthesizing cells.

Electroactive microbes let us replace biological light harvesting with photovoltaics. These microbes can absorb electricity into their metabolism and use this energy to convert CO2 to biofuels. The approach shows a lot of promise for making biofuels at higher efficiencies.


Electroactive microbes also allow for the use of other types of renewable electricity, not just solar electricity, to power these conversions. Also, some species of engineered microbes may create bioplastics that could be buried, thereby removing carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) from the air and sequestering it in the ground. Bacteria could be engineered to reverse the process, by converting a bioplastic or biofuel back to electricity. These interactions can all occur at room temperature and pressure, which is important for efficiency.

shots fired back

Oil Price.comRare Earth Metals: China’s ‘Nuclear Option’ In The Trade War

A simple visit to an obscure factory by Chinese President Xi on Monday [ed: emphasis mine] is all it took to raise the specter that China could be contemplating cutting off supply of critical materials to the U.S. and potentially crippling large swathes of its industries. Also, fueled by political innuendo in Xi’s recent call for a new “Long March” in reference to a key founding tenet of the Chinese Communist Party, speculators are growing increasingly wary of Chinese export restrictions to the U.S., including rare earth minerals.

As the world’s largest producer, the Middle Kingdom has a vice-like grip on rare earths supply.

Rare earth minerals, also known as the “vitamins of chemistry”, are a group of elements used in the manufacture of a wide range of equipment in small doses to produce powerful salutary effects. These minerals are extensively used in smartphones, batteries, turbines, lasers, electromagnetic guns, missiles, advanced weapon sensors, stealth technology and jamming technology. For instance, lanthanum is used in lighting equipment and camera lenses; neodymium in hybrid vehicles; praseodymium in aircraft engines; europium in nuclear reactors and gadolinium in MRIs and X-rays. Oil refiners also use rare earth catalysts to process crude oil into gasoline and jet fuel.

China produced more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of these critical elements over the past decade, though its share was lower at 71.42 percent last year.

In 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey identified 35 minerals critical to the country’s economy and national security. America is heavily dependent on imports of these minerals, producing less than a tenth of the world’s supplies and importing half of what it consumes. It clearly highlights the U.S.’ soft underbelly.


Not surprisingly, rare earth minerals are some of the few products that escaped Trump’s latest tariffs.

foreign entities are gonna need boots on the ground

npr'American Soil' Is Increasingly Foreign Owned

American soil.

Those are two words that are commonly used to stir up patriotic feelings. They are also words that can't be taken for granted, because today nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.

When the stock market tanked during the past recession, foreign investors began buying up big swaths of U.S. farmland. And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign owned, it's been left up to individual states to decide on any limitations.

It's likely that even more American land will end up in foreign hands, especially in states with no restrictions on ownership. With the median age of U.S. farmers at 55, many face retirement with no prospect of family members willing to take over. The National Young Farmers Coalition anticipates that two-thirds of the nation's farmland will change hands in the next few decades.


"Texas is kind of a free-for-all, so they don't have a limit on how much land can be owned," say's Ohio Farm Bureau's Ty Higgins. "You look at Iowa and they restrict it — no land in Iowa is owned by a foreign entity."

Ohio, like Texas, also has no restrictions, and nearly half a million acres of prime farmland are held by foreign-owned entities. In the northwestern corner of the state, below Toledo, companies from the Netherlands alone have purchased 64,000 acres for wind farms.

There are two counties in this region with the highest concentration of foreign-owned farmland — more than 41,000 acres each. One of those is Paulding County, where three wind farms straddle the Ohio-Indiana line.


Higgins says that this kind of consumption of farmland by foreign entities is starting to cause concern. "One of the main reasons that we're watching this ... is because once a foreign entity buys up however many acres they want, Americans might never be able to secure that land again. So, once we lose it, we may lose it for good."

control mechanisms can be gamed

The RegisterMaker of US border's license-plate scanning tech ransacked by hacker, blueprints and files dumped online

Exclusive The maker of vehicle license plate readers used extensively by the US government and cities to identify and track citizens and immigrants has been hacked. Its internal files were pilfered, and are presently being offered for free on the dark web to download.

Tennessee-based Perceptics prides itself as "the sole provider of stationary LPRs [license plate readers] installed at all land border crossing lanes for POV [privately owned vehicle] traffic in the United States, Canada, and for the most critical lanes in Mexico."

In fact, Perceptics recently announced, in a pact with Unisys Federal Systems, it had landed "a key contract by US Customs and Border Protection to replace existing LPR technology, and to install Perceptics next generation License Plate Readers (LPRs) at 43 US Border Patrol check point lanes in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California."


On Thursday this week, however, an individual using the pseudonym "Boris Bullet-Dodger" contacted The Register, alerting us to the hack, and provided a list of files exfiltrated from Perceptics' corporate network as proof. We're assuming this is the same "Boris" involved in the CityComp hack last month. Boris declined to answer our questions.

any other downsides?

c|netSamsung deepfake AI could fabricate a video of you from a single profile pic

Imagine someone creating a deepfake video of you simply by stealing your Facebook profile pic. The bad guys don't have their hands on that tech yet, but Samsung has figured out how to make it happen.  

Software for creating deepfakes -- fabricated clips that make people appear to do or say things they never did -- usually requires big data sets of images in order to create a realistic forgery. Now Samsung has developed a new artificial intelligence system that can generate a fake clip by feeding it as little as one photo. 

The technology, of course, can be used for fun, like bringing a classic portrait to life. The Mona Lisa, which exists solely as a single still image, is animated in three different clips to demonstrate the new technology. A Samsung artificial intelligence lab in Russia developed the technology, which was detailed in a paper earlier this week. 


Here's the downside: These kinds of techniques and their rapid development also create risks of misinformation, election tampering and fraud, according to Hany Farid, a Dartmouth researcher who specializes in media forensics to root out deepfakes. 

biggest issue? can these deviants be controlled

BloombergAn RV Camp Sprang Up Outside Google’s Headquarters. Now Mountain View Wants to Ban It

With house prices out of reach, where will the van dwellers go? 


In a quiet neighborhood near Google’s headquarters last month, rusty, oleaginous sewage was seeping from a parked RV onto the otherwise pristine street. Sergeant Wahed Magee, of the Mountain View Police Department, was furious.

“You guys need to take care of it, like ASAP,” he said, lecturing the young couple living in the vehicle. “I’m not going to tow it today, but tomorrow if I come out here and it’s like this, it’s getting towed!” As he delivered the ultimatum, a self-driving car rolled past.

Mountain View is a wealthy town that’s home to Alphabet Inc., the world’s fourth-most valuable public corporation and Google’s owner. Magee spends a lot of his time knocking on the doors of RVs parked on the city’s streets, logging license plates and marking rigs that haven’t moved for several days. 

This is the epicenter of a Silicon Valley tech boom that is minting millionaires but also fueling a homelessness crisis that the United Nations recently deemed a human rights violation. Thousands of people live in RVs across San Francisco and the broader Bay Area because they can’t afford to rent or buy homes. In December, Mountain View police logged almost 300 RVs that appeared to be used as primary residences. Palo Alto, Berkeley and other Bay Area towns have similar numbers.   



Some Silicon Valley towns have cracked down in recent months, creating an even more uncertain future for RV residents.  At a March city council meeting, Mountain View voted to ban RVs from parking overnight on public streets. The ban hasn’t taken effect yet, but soon, the town’s van dwellers will need to go elsewhere. The city council also declared a shelter crisis and passed a new ordinance to ticket vehicles that “discharge domestic sewage on the public right of way.” At the meeting, some people opposing the ban blamed Google for the housing crisis. 

don't forget about the recycling scam

Yale Environment 360Piling Up: How China’s Ban on Importing Waste Has Stalled Global Recycling

It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s “National Sword” policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem — and this one not of its own making.

In the year since, China’s plastics imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.

Globally more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. In England, more than half-a-million more tons of plastics and other household garbage were burned last year. Australia’s recycling industry is facing a crisis as the country struggles to handle the 1.3 million-ton stockpile of recyclable waste it had previously shipped to China.

Communities across the U.S. have curtailed collections or halted their recycling programs entirely.

Across the United States, local governments and recycling processors are scrambling to find new markets. Communities from Douglas County, Oregon to Hancock, Maine, have curtailed collections or halted their recycling programs entirely, which means that many residents are simply tossing plastic and paper into the trash. Some communities, like Minneapolis, stopped accepting black plastics and rigid #6 plastics like disposable cups. Others, like Philadelphia, are now burning the bulk of their recyclables at a waste-to-energy plant, raising concerns about air pollution.

wired posts from a long- long weekend 2019-05-28




Wednesday, May 22, 2019

wired daily posts 2019-05-22


that signpost up ahead, getting mighty close

NBC Los AngelesRotting Trash Piles Sky-High in LA, Attracting Rats and Raising Concerns of a New Epidemic

Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year's record number of flea-borne typhus cases.

Even the city's most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA's busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago. The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms.

The NBC4 I-Team first told Mayor Eric Garcetti's office about the piles of filth in the 700 block of Ceres Avenue in October. At the time, he promised to make sure trash doesn't pile up like that.


The garbage was cleaned after the interview, but conditions have worsened over the next seven months.

it is not uncommon for a trade war to spill over into conventional war, CHAMP

CNBCThe US is reportedly considering blacklisting Chinese surveillance tech firm Hikvision

The U.S. administration is considering limits to Chinese video surveillance firm Hikvision’s ability to buy U.S. technology, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, in a move that deepens worries about trade frictions between the world’s two top economies.

The move would effectively place Hikvision on a U.S. blacklist and U.S. companies may have to obtain government approval to supply components to Hikvision, the paper said.

The U.S. Commerce Department blocked Huawei Technologies from buying U.S. goods last week, effectively banning U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese firm, a major escalation in the trade war, saying Huawei was involved in activities contrary to national security.


The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

if you were to go looking for god, where might be a good place to start?

Science‘Wood wide web’—the underground network of microbes that connects trees—mapped for first time

Trees, from the mighty redwoods to slender dogwoods, would be nothing without their microbial sidekicks. Millions of species of fungi and bacteria swap nutrients between soil and the roots of trees, forming a vast, interconnected web of organisms throughout the woods. Now, for the first time, scientists have mapped this “wood wide web” on a global scale, using a database of more than 28,000 tree species living in more than 70 countries.

“I haven’t seen anybody do anything like that before,” says Kathleen Treseder, an ecologist at the University of California, Irvine. “I wish I had thought of it.”


Before scientists could map the forest’s underground ecosystem, they needed to know something more basic: where trees live. Ecologist Thomas Crowther, now at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, gathered vast amounts of data on this starting in 2012, from government agencies and individual scientists who had identified trees and measured their sizes around the world. In 2015, he mapped trees’ global distribution and reported that Earth has about 3 trillion trees.

Inspired by that paper, Kabir Peay, a biologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, emailed Crowther and suggested doing the same for the web of underground organisms that connects forest trees. Each tree in Crowther’s database is closely associated with certain types of microbes. For example, oak and pine tree roots are surrounded by ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi that can build vast underground networks in their search for nutrients. Maple and cedar trees, by contrast, prefer arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM), which burrow directly into trees’ root cells but form smaller soil webs. Still other trees, mainly in the legume family (related to crop plants such as soybeans and peanuts), associate with bacteria that turn nitrogen from the atmosphere into usable plant food, a process known as “fixing” nitrogen.

wired daily posts 2019-05-21


Monday, May 20, 2019

we will not find god in AI

Design NewsAutomakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars

The popular notion of the go-anywhere, go-anytime, sleep-in-the-back autonomous car crumbled a bit in the last few weeks, as automakers admitted that the development of full self-driving technology is more difficult than expected.

Questions about the technology’s future reached full public view in April, when Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Hackett acknowledged what had already become painfully obvious to much of the engineering community. “We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” Hackett was quoted as saying by numerous news outlets. “Its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.”

The admission came as a shocker to many in the public and in the media, essentially because it flew in the face of a growing belief that shiny new autonomous vehicles would soon be landing in dealerships.

wired posts from the weekend 2019-05-20



Saturday, May 18, 2019

north korea or iran? nah, that's not who these are for

The Daily MailEXCLUSIVE: U.S. Air Force has deployed 20 missiles that could zap the military electronics of North Korea or Iran with super powerful microwaves, rendering their military capabilities virtually useless with NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  • Known as the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), the missiles were built by Boeing's Phantom Works for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory
  • The microwave weapons can be launched into enemy airspace at low altitude and emit sharp pulses of high power microwave energy that disable any electronic devices targeted 
  • Mary Lou Robinson, the chief of the High Power Microwave Division of the Air Force Research Lab has confirmed to DailyMail.com that the missiles are now operational and ready to take out any target
  • While North Korea or Iran may attempt to shield their equipment, U.S. officials doubt that would be effective against CHAMP.
  • The project has been advancing secretly ever since the Air Force successfully tested a missile equipped with high-powered microwave energy in 2012

Friday, May 17, 2019

repairing broken machines

Nature Communications | A strongly adhesive hemostatic hydrogel for the repair of arterial and heart bleeds

Uncontrollable bleeding is a major problem in surgical procedures and after major trauma. Existing hemostatic agents poorly control hemorrhaging from traumatic arterial and cardiac wounds because of their weak adhesion to wet and mobile tissues. Here we design a photo-reactive adhesive that mimics the extracellular matrix (ECM) composition. This biomacromolecule-based matrix hydrogel can undergo rapid gelling and fixation to adhere and seal bleeding arteries and cardiac walls after UV light irradiation. These repairs can withstand up to 290 mm Hg blood pressure, significantly higher than blood pressures in most clinical settings (systolic BP 60–160 mm Hg). Most importantly, the hydrogel can stop high-pressure bleeding from pig carotid arteries with 4~ 5 mm-long incision wounds and from pig hearts with 6 mm diameter cardiac penetration holes. Treated pigs survived after hemostatic treatments with this hydrogel, which is well-tolerated and appears to offer significant clinical advantage as a traumatic wound sealant.

wired posts 2019-05-17


Thursday, May 16, 2019

our quest for god continues apace

The GuardianCambridge scientists create world’s first living organism with fully redesigned DNA

Scientists have created the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code.

The lab-made microbe, a strain of bacteria that is normally found in soil and the human gut, is similar to its natural cousins but survives on a smaller set of genetic instructions.

The bug’s existence proves life can exist with a restricted genetic code and paves the way for organisms whose biological machinery is commandeered to make drugs and useful materials, or to add new features such as virus resistance.

In a two-year effort, researchers at the laboratory of molecular biology, at Cambridge University, read and redesigned the DNA of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E coli), before creating cells with a synthetic version of the altered genome.

The artificial genome holds 4m base pairs, the units of the genetic code spelled out by the letters G, A, T and C. Printed in full on A4 sheets, it runs to 970 pages, making the genome the largest by far that scientists have ever built.

“It was completely unclear whether it was possible to make a genome this large and whether it was possible to change it so much,” said Jason Chin, an expert in synthetic biology who led the project.

The DNA coiled up inside a cell holds the instructions it needs to function. When the cell needs more protein to grow, for example, it reads the DNA that encodes the right protein. The DNA letters are read in trios called codons, such as TCG and TCA.

Nearly all life, from jellyfish to humans, uses 64 codons. But many of them do the same job. In total, 61 codons make 20 natural amino acids, which can be strung together like beads on a string to build any protein in nature. Three more codons are in effect stop signs: they tell the cell when the protein is done, like the full stop marking the end of this sentence.

The Cambridge team set out to redesign the E coli genome by removing some of its superfluous codons. Working on a computer, the scientists went through the bug’s DNA. Whenever they came across TCG, a codon that makes an amino acid called serine, they rewrote it as AGC, which does the same job. They replaced two more codons in a similar way.
Yahoo NewsLED light can damage eyes, health authority warns

Maisons-Alfort (France) (AFP) - The "blue light" in LED lighting can damage the eye's retina and disturb natural sleep rhythms, France's government-run health watchdog said this week.

New findings confirm earlier concerns that "exposure to an intense and powerful [LED] light is 'photo-toxic' and can lead to irreversible loss of retinal cells and diminished sharpness of vision," the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) warned in a statement.

The agency recommended in a 400-page report that the maximum limit for acute exposure be revised, even if such levels are rarely met in home or work environments.

The report distinguished between acute exposure of high-intensity LED light, and "chronic exposure" to lower intensity sources.


While less dangerous, even chronic exposure can "accelerate the ageing of retinal tissue, contributing to a decline in visual acuity and certain degenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration," the agency concluded.

what about overcrowding?

Popular ScienceUrban dwellers are particularly at risk from the impacts of air pollution and other hazards on mental health.

Urban dwellers are particularly at risk from the impacts of air pollution and other hazards on mental health.

We’ve long known that the environments we live and work in impact our physical health—and that we can be harmed by things we may not even realize we’re being exposed to, like lead or air pollution.


It’s also not a new idea that our physical surroundings may weigh on our mental health as well. Back in the 1930s, two sociologists noticed a striking pattern amongst the people being admitted to Chicago’s asylums. Rates of schizophrenia, they reported, were unusually high in those born to inner-city neighborhoods. Since then, researchers have discovered that mental illnesses of all kinds are more common in densely populated cities than in greener and more rural areas. In fact, the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health estimates that city dwellers face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people living in rural areas.

elon musk is a genius... swindler

ReutersExclusive: Tesla's solar factory is exporting most of its cells - document

The “great majority” of solar cells being produced at Tesla Inc’s factory in upstate New York are being sold overseas instead of being used in the company’s trademark “Solar Roof” as originally intended, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

The exporting underscores the depth of Tesla’s troubles in the U.S. solar business, which the electric car maker entered in 2016 with its controversial $2.6 billion purchase of SolarCity.

Tesla has only sporadically purchased solar cells produced by its partner in the factory, Panasonic Corp, according to a Buffalo solar factory employee speaking on condition of anonymity. The rest are going largely to foreign buyers, according to a Panasonic letter to U.S. Customs officials reviewed by Reuters.

When the two firms announced the partnership in 2016, the companies said they would collaborate on cell and module production and Tesla would make a long-term commitment to buy the cells from Panasonic. Cells are components that convert the sun’s light into electricity; they are combined to make solar panels.

Tesla planned to use them in its Solar Roof, a system meant to look like normal roof tiles. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk billed the product as a cornerstone of the strategy behind the acquisition - selling a low-carbon lifestyle to eco-conscious consumers who could use the power from their Solar Roof to charge their Tesla electric vehicle.

But the company has installed them on just a handful of rooftops nationwide so far after production line troubles and a gutting of Tesla’s solar sales team.

what fourth amendment, this is in the uk

Daily MailBig Brother Britain: Extraordinary moment police FINE pedestrian £90 for disorderly behaviour after he tries to cover his face from facial recognition camera on the streets of London

Police fined a pedestrian £90 for disorderly behaviour after he tried to cover his face when he saw a controversial facial recognition camera on a street in London.
Officers set up the camera on a van in Romford, East London, which then cross-checked photos of faces of passers-by against a database of wanted criminals.
But one man was unimpressed about being filmed and covered his face with his hat and jacket, before being stopped by officers who took his picture anyway.
After being pulled aside, the man told police: 'If I want to cover me face, I'll cover me face. Don't push me over when I'm walking down the street.'
It comes just weeks after it was claimed the new technology incorrectly identified members of the public in 96 per cent of matches made between 2016 and 2018.

wired posts 2019-05-16


Wednesday, May 15, 2019

peak oil/resources continues apace

Ars TechnicaFourth-largest coal producer in the US files for bankruptcy

Cloud Peak Energy, the US' fourth-largest coal mining company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy late last week as the company missed an extension deadline to make a $1.8 million loan payment.

In a statement, Cloud Peak said it will continue to operate its three massive coal mines in Wyoming and Montana while it goes through the restructuring process. Colin Marshall, the president and CEO of the company, said that he believed a sale of the company's assets "will provide the best opportunity to maximize value for Cloud Peak Energy."

Cloud Peak was one of the few major coal producers who escaped the significant coal industry downturn between 2015 and 2016. That bought it a reputation for prudence and business acumen [emphasis mine].

wired posts 2019-05-15


Tuesday, May 14, 2019

and who, exactly, will pay for this? probably not the dems...

BloombergMaking America Carbon Neutral Could Cost $1 Trillion a Year


  • Democrats are going all in on green initiatives, but they won’t be easy to pull off.

Democrats from Capitol Hill to the presidential campaign trail see climate change as a winning political issue, and they’re competing to outdo one another with ambitious plans to halt the rise in planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over as small as a 10-year period.

But is that even possible?


We’ll have to stop using vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, abandon most electricity produced by coal, and retrofit buildings that use natural gas for cooking and heating. New bio-based fuels for aviation and carbon capture technology for cement factories and chemical refineries will be required. And we’ll probably be eating a lot more vegetarian hamburgers.

wired posts 2019-05-14


Friday, May 10, 2019

Dentists doing vaccinations?

Oregon State Legislature | HB2220

The following summary is not prepared by the sponsors of the measure and is not a part of the body thereof subject to consideration by the Legislative Assembly. It is an editor’s brief statement of the essential features of the measure as introduced.

Authorizes trained and certified dentists to prescribe and administer vaccines. Directs Oregon Board of Dentistry to adopt rules related to prescription and administration of vaccines by dentists.

Declares emergency, effective on passage.

wired posts 2019-05-10


Thursday, May 9, 2019

wired daily posts 2019-05-09


trump leaks ev deal

Robotics and Automation NewsWorkhorse might be taking over GM’s massive facility in Ohio

Workhorse, the electric vehicle developer, could be about to take over General Motors’ Lordstown, Ohio facility in a deal which may see the two companies form a joint venture.

This is according to a tweet by US President Donald Trump, whose comments appear to have pre-empted the deal and caught the two companies by surprise.

Trump tweeted: “GREAT NEWS FOR OHIO! Just spoke to Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, who informed me that, subject to a UAW agreement etc., GM will be selling their beautiful Lordstown Plant to Workhorse, where they plan to build Electric Trucks. GM will also be spending $700,000,000 in Ohio…

“…in 3 separate locations, creating another 450 jobs. I have been working nicely with GM to get this done. Thank you to Mary B, your GREAT Governor, and Senator Rob Portman. With all the car companies coming back, and much more, THE USA IS BOOMING!”

Monday, May 6, 2019

game of pinball, anyone?

MIT NewsA sustainability rating for space debris

Teams from the MIT Media Lab, the European Space Agency, and the World Economic Forum have been chosen to create a rating system and global standards for space waste mitigation.

Space is becoming increasingly congested, even as our societal dependence on space technology is greater than ever before.
With over 20,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters, including inactive satellites and discarded rocket parts hurtling around in Earth’s orbit, the risk of damaging collisions increases every year.
In a bid to address this issue, and to foster global standards in waste mitigation, the World Economic Forum has chosen a team led by the Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, together with a team from the European Space Agency (ESA), to launch the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), a concept developed by the Forum’s Global Future Council on Space Technologies.
Similar to rating systems such as the LEED certification used by the construction industry, the SSR is designed to ensure long-term sustainability by encouraging more responsible behavior among countries and companies participating in space.

the us should follow suit and bomb the russian election hackers

ZDNetIn a first, Israel responds to Hamas hackers with an air strike

For the first time, Israel has used brute military force to respond to a Hamas cyberattack, three years after NATO proclaimed "cyber" an official battlefield in modern warfare.

The "bomb-back" response took place on Saturday when Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched an air strike against a building in the Gaza Strip. They claimed it housed Hamas cyber operatives, which had been engaging in a cyberattack against Israel's "cyberspace."

"We were ahead of them all the time," said Brigadier General D., the head of the IDF's cyber defense division. "The moment they tried to do something, they failed."

Israeli officials did not disclose any details about the Hamas cyberattack; however, they said they first stopped the attack online, and only then responded with an air strike.

test for cfs

Standford Medicine News CenterBiomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

People suffering from a debilitating and often discounted disease known as chronic fatigue syndrome may soon have something they’ve been seeking for decades: scientific proof of their ailment.

the weekend in wired posts 2019-05-06

Condé Nast has an agenda. I'm going to post the last day's headlines as a regular feature for reference and discussion to bring their liminal messages to the forefront.


Saturday, May 4, 2019

wired posts for the day

Condé Nast has an agenda. I'm going to post the last day's headlines as a regular feature for reference and discussion to bring their liminal messages to the forefront.



Friday, May 3, 2019

another day in wired posts 2019-05-03

Condé Nast has an agenda. I'm going to post the last day's headlines as a regular feature for reference and discussion to bring their liminal messages to the forefront.



Thursday, May 2, 2019

wired posts for the day 2019-05-01

Condé Nast has an agenda. I'm going to post the last day's headlines as a regular feature for reference and discussion to bring their liminal messages to the forefront.



Wednesday, May 1, 2019

wired posts for the day 2019-04-30

Condé Nast has an agenda. I'm going to post the last day's headlines as a regular feature for reference and discussion to bring their liminal messages to the forefront.