The Enhanced Games—the Olympics on Literal Steroids—Will Take Place in Vegas Next Year

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© Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The Enhanced Games, a bizarre, steroid-fueled Olympics knock-off that is being funded by wealthy MAGA types, is officially happening. The unconventional sports festival—which, as its name proudly suggests, will allow contestants to use performance-enhancing drugs—will take place in 2026 in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend, organizers announced on Wednesday.

The inaugural festival (which, depending on whether this one results in some sort of legal action, may also be the last) will involve competitions in swimming, weight lifting, and track and field, organizers have announced. So far, a small number of former Olympic swimmers have said they intend to participate. Other than that, it’s unclear exactly who will be competing in the tournament. The organization’s website currently includes a submission portal where interested athletes can apply to compete.

Enhanced Games describes itself as “the ultimate demonstration of what the human body is capable of,” though a more accurate description would probably be the “ultimate demonstration of what the human body is capable of when you shoot it full of drugs.” Enhanced claims that its openly drug-fueled approach will actually be safer than traditional sports festivals because, while doping often takes place in traditional competitions, it occurs secretly, perhaps increasing its risk. Enhanced’s approach will allow the doping to occur transparently, under the watchful eye of health professionals, making it safer, organizers reason.

“We aim to deliver the safest sporting event in history by setting a new industry gold standard for athlete health assessments,” the festival’s website claims. “In order to assess health risks, and give athletes an informed picture of their health, we are introducing a mandated state-of-the-art pre-competition full-system medical profiling, which will help monitor cardiac risks, among other key health markers.” Detailed information about what that profiling and monitoring will look like hasn’t been released by the organization yet.

When it comes to contestant compensation, Enhanced also differs from traditional competitions. While the Olympics generally only compensate the winners of certain events (in the U.S., medalists typically only get somewhere between $15k and $25k), Enhanced’s website claims that all “athletes competing in the Enhanced Games will be paid, with those who set new enhanced world records eligible for million-dollar prizes.” The site adds that “the first athletes to set new world records for the 100m Sprint and the 50m Freestyle will receive one million dollars (USD $1,000,000).” Given that this is a competition organized by mega-capitalists, this tracks.

Enhanced is largely being funded by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that was founded by Donald Trump Jr., as well as MAGA banking magnate Omeed Malick and tech accelerationist Chris Buskirk. However, original funding for Enhanced Games was provided by a number of wealthy donors, including tech magnate Peter Thiel and his acolyte former Andreessen Horowitz general partner and “Network State” prophet Balaji Srinivasan. Christian Angermayer, another venture capitalist, is also a pivotal funder.

“The Enhanced Games are challenging traditional sports paradigms by embracing science, innovation, and fairness, to create the Third Olympiad – a new era of athletic excellence,” a recent press release from the 1789 Capital claims. “This landmark funding injection underscores the momentum and global belief in the Enhanced Games’ vision.”

Aron D’Souza, the president and founder of Enhanced, also recently criticized the Olympics, claiming they were “a representation of the past” and were “rooted in ancient Greece.” He added: “They have this amateurish, natural ethos that is run by a bunch of European aristocrats. The Enhanced Games are very different. They’re run by capitalists, who believe in the future, believe in science and technology.”

Source: The Enhanced Games—the Olympics on Literal Steroids—Will Take Place in Vegas Next Year

Russia to enforce location tracking app on all foreigners in Moscow

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The Russian government has introduced a new law that makes installing a tracking app mandatory for all foreign nationals in the Moscow region.

The new proposal was announced by the chairman of the State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, who presented it as a measure to tackle migrant crimes.

“The adopted mechanism will allow, using modern technologies, to strengthen control in the field of migration and will also contribute to reducing the number of violations and crimes in this area,” stated Volodin.

Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information:

  • Residence location
  • Fingerprint
  • Face photograph
  • Real-time geo-location monitoring

“If migrants change their actual place of residence, they will be required to inform the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) within three working days,” the high-ranking politician explained.

The measures will not apply to diplomats of foreign countries or citizens of Belarus.

Foreigners attempting to avoid their obligation in relation to the new law will be added to a registry of monitored individuals and deported from Russia.

Russian internet freedom observatory Roskomsvoboda’s reactions to this proposal reflect skepticism and concern.

Lawyer Anna Minushkina noted that the proposal violates Articles 23 and 24 of the Russian Constitution, guaranteeing the right to privacy.

President of the Uzbek Community in Moscow, Viktor Teplyankov, characterized the initiative as “ill-conceived and difficult to implement,” expressing doubts about its feasibility.

Finally, PSP Foundation’s Andrey Yakimov warned that such aggressive measures are bound to deter potential labor migrants, creating a different problem in the country.

The proposal hasn’t reached its final form yet, and specifics like what happens in the case of device theft/loss or similar technical or practical obstacles are to be addressed in the upcoming period during meetings between the Ministry and regional authorities.

The mass-surveillance experiment will run until September 2029, and if deemed successful, the mechanism will extend to cover more parts of the country.

Source: Russia to enforce location tracking app on all foreigners in Moscow

Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs

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Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.

The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”

[…]

The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”

[…]

Source: Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs – Krebs on Security

Infrared contact lenses allow people to see in the dark, even with their eyes closed

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Neuroscientists and materials scientists have created contact lenses that enable infrared vision in both humans and mice by converting infrared light into visible light. Unlike infrared night vision goggles, the contact lenses, described in the journal Cell, do not require a power source—and they enable the wearer to perceive multiple infrared wavelengths. Because they’re transparent, users can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, though infrared vision was enhanced when participants had their eyes closed.

“Our research opens up the potential for noninvasive wearable devices to give people super-vision,” says senior author Tian Xue, a neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology of China. “There are many potential applications right away for this material. For example, flickering infrared light could be used to transmit information in security, rescue, encryption or anti-counterfeiting settings.”

The contact lens technology uses nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into wavelengths that are visible to mammalian eyes (e.g., in the 400–700 nm range). The nanoparticles specifically enable the detection of “near-infrared light,” which is infrared light in the 800–1600 nm range, just beyond what humans can already see.

The team previously showed that these nanoparticles enable infrared vision in mice when injected into the retina, but they wanted to design a less invasive option.

To create the contact lenses, the team combined the nanoparticles with flexible, nontoxic polymers that are used in standard soft contact lenses. After showing that the contact lenses were nontoxic, they tested their function in both humans and mice.

Preparation procedures for infrared contacts. Credit: Sheng Wang

[…]

In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light.

“It’s totally clear-cut: without the contact lenses, the subject cannot see anything, but when they put them on, they can clearly see the flickering of the infrared light,” said Xue.

“We also found that when the subject closes their eyes, they’re even better able to receive this flickering information, because near-infrared light penetrates the eyelid more effectively than , so there is less interference from visible light.”

An additional tweak to the contact lenses allows users to differentiate between different spectra of infrared light by engineering the nanoparticles to color-code different infrared wavelengths. For example, of 980 nm were converted to blue light, wavelengths of 808 nm were converted to , and wavelengths of 1,532 nm were converted to red light.

In addition to enabling wearers to perceive more detail within the , these color-coding nanoparticles could be modified to help color-blind people see wavelengths that they would otherwise be unable to detect.

“By converting red visible light into something like green visible light, this technology could make the invisible visible for color-blind people,” says Xue.

Because the contact lenses have limited ability to capture fine details (due to their close proximity to the retina, which causes the converted light particles to scatter), the team also developed a wearable glass system using the same nanoparticle technology, which enabled participants to perceive higher-resolution infrared information.

Currently, the are only able to detect infrared radiation projected from an LED light source, but the researchers are working to increase the nanoparticles’ sensitivity so that they can detect lower levels of .

“In the future, by working together with and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity,” says Xue.

More information: Near-Infrared Spatiotemporal Color Vision in Humans Enabled by Upconversion Contact Lenses, Cell (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.04.019. www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00454-4

Source: Infrared contact lenses allow people to see in the dark, even with their eyes closed

Microsoft’s Partners With Holocaust Denying, White Genocide Peddling Grok AI

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[…] On Monday, Microsoft announced that it will begin offering access to Grok AI, specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini, through its Azure AI Foundry. For the uninitiated, Grok AI is a product of xAI, which is owned by the same guy whose social media site, X, is reportedly taking money from terrorist groups—Elon Musk. The partnership, to be clear, is nowhere near the level of closeness we’ve seen between Microsoft and OpenAI, which is almost entirely powering the company’s push toward generative AI, but it’s still a step in a more, um, diverse direction.

And that partnership, however small, comes with some pretty awful timing. Just a few days prior to Microsoft’s announcement that it was starting to incorporate Grok into its Azure AI Foundry, Grok was at the center of some controversy after spiraling into Holocaust denial and peddling claims of “white genocide.” The worst part about all of that (outside of the, you know, Holocaust denial part) is that Musk’s AI might not have just randomly hallucinated all of that problematic misinformation.

As noted by the New York Times, Grok only started espousing claims of “white genocide” after an instance of the AI largely debunking a post from Musk himself suggesting white farmers are being targeted as part of a genocide in South Africa. A day after said debunk, Grok was seemingly obsessed with the idea of white genocide, bringing it up in relation to queries that had absolutely nothing to do with the idea at all. During the same time, Grok also started to cast doubt on the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust, stating it was “skeptical” about the figure. xAI has since blamed the Holocaust denialism on a “programming error,” but it’s hard not to greet that claim with some skepticism of my own.

[…]

Source: Microsoft’s Partnership With Elon Musk’s Grok AI Isn’t a Feature—It’s a Liability

Google found not compliant with AVG when registering new accounts – sends the data to 70 services without user knowledge

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According to a ruling by the Berlin Regional Court, Google must disclose to its users which of its more than 70 services process their data when they register for an account. The civil chamber thus upheld a lawsuit filed by the German Association of Consumer Organizations (vzbv). The consumer advocates had complained that neither the “express personalization” nor the alternative “manual personalization” complied with the legal requirements of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The ruling against Google Ireland Ltd. was handed down on March 25, 2025, but was only published on Friday (case number 15 O 472/22). The decision is not yet legally binding because the internet company has appealed the ruling. Google stated that it disagrees with the Regional Court’s decision.
What does Google process data for?
The consumer advocates argued that consumers must know what Google processes their data for when registering. Users must be able to freely decide how their data is processed. The judges at the Berlin Regional Court confirmed this legal opinion. The ruling states: “In this case, transparency is lacking simply because the defendant does not provide information about the individual Google services, Google apps, Google websites, or Google partners for which the data is to be used.” For this reason, the scope of consent is completely unknown to the user.
Google: Account creation has changed
Google stated that the ruling concerned an old account creation process that had since been changed. “What hasn’t changed is our commitment to enabling our users to use Google on their terms, with clear choices and control options based on extensive research, testing, and guidelines from European data protection authorities,” it stated. In the proceedings, Google argued that listing all services would result in excessively long text and harm transparency. This argument was rejected by the court. In the court’s view, information about the scope of consent is among the minimum details required by law. The regional court was particularly concerned that with “Express Personalization,” users only had the option of consenting to all data usage or canceling the process. A differentiated refusal was not possible. Even with “Manual Personalization,” consumers could not refuse the use of the German location.

Source: Landgericht Berlin: Google-Accounterstellung verletzte DSGVO | heise online

Upgrade now: OpenPGP.js bug enables encrypted message spoofing

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Security researchers are sounding the alarm over a fresh flaw in the JavaScript implementation of OpenPGP (OpenPGP.js) that allows both signed and encrypted messages to be spoofed.

Discovered by Codean Labs’ Edoardo Geraci and Thomas Rinsma, the vulnerability essentially undermines the core purpose of using public key cryptography to secure communications.

Tracked as CVE-2025-47934 (8.7 – high), the vulnerability stems from the openpgp.verify and openpgp.decrypt functions. The advisory posted to the library’s GitHub repo states that a maliciously modified message can be passed to one of these functions and return a result indicating a valid signature without actually being signed.

The researchers said a full write-up of the vulnerability, complete with a proof of concept (PoC) exploit, is “coming soon.” It’s common practice to delay disclosing PoCs to allow users time to patch affected products.

The affected versions are 5.0.1 to 5.11.2 and 6.0.0-alpha.0 to 6.1.0. Users are advised to upgrade to either 5.11.3 or 6.1.1 as soon as possible to fix the problem. Versions 4.x aren’t affected.

There is no PoC just yet, but the advisory offers up some details about how the attack, which affects both signed (inline) messages and signed-and-encrypted messages, could play out.

[…]

The most notable user of OpenPGP is encrypted email provider Proton Mail. The team behind it maintains the library, and the technology is used to offer end-to-end encryption for its users.

As of 2023, Proton Mail had more than 100 million accounts registered. It’s not known how many of these accounts are active, but the figure offers some sense of how many people rely on OpenPGP every day.

Various other email services support the OpenPGP standard either natively or with a little extra software tacked on.

Microsoft Outlook supports it, for example, provided users install an add-in such as gpg4o or Gpg4win, although Outlook has its own encryption capabilities via S/MIME or Microsoft Purview Message Encryption.

Many others, most of them open source and a little niche, however, support the standard straight out of the box.

Source: OpenPGP.js bug enables encrypted message spoofing • The Register

Trump’s Golden Dome Missile Shield: What We Just Learned And Its Implications

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The Golden Dome missile defense system will cost about $175 billion and be operational “in less than three years” with “a success rate close to 100%,” President Donald Trump declared Tuesday afternoon as he shared new details about his ambitious, very expensive, and controversial missile defense shield for the U.S. homeland. It follows one of the president’s first official acts of his second term, ordering the U.S. military to move forward with plans for a massively enlarged architecture for defeating high-end missile threats.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space, and we will have the best system ever built,” Trump stated. His price tag stands in stark contrast to projections of more than half a trillion dollars and raises concerns about the weaponization of space and nuclear proliferation, which you can read more about later in this piece.

The system will be designed to “protect the homeland” from “cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, drones, whether they’re conventional or nuclear,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained during the White House briefing.

The first tranche of funding, $25 billion, will be contained in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a wide-ranging bill to enact his taxation and immigration priorities, Trump noted.

[…]

There were scant details during the briefing about how Golden Dome will actually work.

“We’re the only ones that have this – we call it super technology,” Trump posited. “Golden Dome will integrate with our existing defense capabilities and should be fully operational before the end of my term.”

In our earlier reporting about Golden Dome, we pointed out that this effort will take place in orbital space, at least in part, with the goal of shooting down incoming threats before they reach the homeland, and preferably while still in the boost phase not far from their launch point.

“It’s not just that we want space-based interceptors, we want them in [the] boost phase,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman said in March during an interview broadcast online as part of Defense One‘s State of Defense 2025: Air Force and Space Force virtual conference.

[…]

Golden Dome is not the U.S. military’s first effort to develop and field space-based anti-missile capabilities. However, multiple previous attempts have been abandoned due to technical complexities and high costs. Space-based weapons were a particularly key element of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), infamously dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, and which never came close to achieving its ambitious goals.

An artist’s conception of a space-based particle beam missile defense system from the Star Wars era., Los Alamos National Laboratory via Aerospace Projects Review

Saltzman in March acknowledged those challenges, but also made clear that he felt they were surmountable.

“I think there’s a lot of technical challenges,” he said. “I am so impressed by the innovative spirit of the American space industry. I’m pretty convinced that we will be able to technically solve those challenges.”

Saltzman recently suggested that Golden Dome could cost in excess of half a trillion dollars.

He made that prediction during a POLITICO event last week when asked if the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) $542 billion estimate for the largely space-based air and missile defense system was too high.

“I’m 34 years in this business; I’ve never seen an early estimate that was too high,” Saltzman replied. “My gut tells me there’s going to be some additional funding that’s necessary.”

[…]

The price to develop, procure, and field Golden Dome will be just one part of the larger financial picture. Once deployed, the system will need to be maintained, staffed, and constantly evolved as technology moves forward along with the threats it is meant to confront. This is coming at a time when there are competing priorities that the U.S. military does not have the money to pay for, even though they are considered critical, without sacrificing other important programs. Nuclear modernization is among the largest costs the services are struggling to pay for today. So even with an injection of cash to jump-start Golden Dome — which should come in the form of a whopping $25 billion in the 2026 Fiscal Year — and pay for other competing programs, sustaining that funding over many years after a transient ‘sugar high’ is questionable, especially in an era of soaring deficits.

[…]

Source: Trump’s Golden Dome Missile Shield: What We Just Learned And Its Implications

Respond to the EU on allowing corporations to shut down sections of the internet with no recourse before 28th May

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After LaLiga accidentally shut down Cloudflare and Vercel in Spain (LaLiga Piracy Blocks Randomly Take Down huge innocent segments of internet with no recourse or warning, slammed as “Unaccountable Internet Censorship”) and the Italian Privacy Shield shut down Google Drive in Italy (Massive expansion of Italy’s Piracy Shield underway despite growing criticism of its flaws and EU illegality) as well as many other innocent IP addresses in the name of combating illegal online streaming, the EU has launched a feedback initiative. Considering how the DMCA in the US has been weaponised, leading to all kinds of non-valid takedowns that are very hard to fight (see here for examples) I really don’t want to see the EU take the path of being in the pocket of big corporations with unchecked powers to censor the internet. Take the time to respond to this!

The Commission Recommendation of 4 May 2023 on combating online piracy of sports and other live events encourages Member States and relevant stakeholders to take effective, appropriate and proportionate measures to combat unauthorised retransmissions of such events.

Source: Combating online piracy of sports and other live events – assessment of the May 2023 Commission Recommendation

Three Steps Coinbase Users Should Take After a Hack (bribe of support agents) Compromised One Million Accounts

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Data breaches are most often the work of external bad actors, but sometimes the call comes from inside the house. Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has disclosed that hackers paid off support agents—both employees and contractors located outside the U.S.—who had access to company systems to provide customer data and then demanded a $20 million ransom not to leak the information.

Coinbase was notified of the ransom demand on May 11, just a few days before reporting the incident to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company has said the staff involved were fired and reported to law enforcement when their unauthorized access was detected, but they were still able to provide information to attackers.

What happened with Coinbase?

The threat actors, with the help of insiders with access to Coinbase systems, were able to collect personally identifiable information on roughly one million individuals (just 1% of Coinbase customers). According to a Coinbase blog post detailing the incident, the compromised data included the following:

  • Names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails
  • Last four digits of Social Security numbers
  • Masked bank account numbers and identifiers
  • Government ID images, such as driver’s licenses and passports
  • Account data, such as balance snapshots and transaction history
  • Corporate data available to support agents

The breach did not include login credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, or private keys, and hackers do not have access to customer funds, Coinbase Prime accounts, or customer hot or cold wallets.

Coinbase has said they are not paying the $20 million ransom and instead are offering those funds as a reward for information about the attack. The company is also expanding its U.S.-based support to monitor and manage the impact on customer accounts.

What Coinbase customers need to do

Coinbase sent email notifications from the address no-reply@info.coinbase.com to all affected customers—these messages went out at 7:20 a.m. on May 15. Flagged accounts will have to go through several ID checks to make large withdrawals, so you may experience delays with transactions.

First, if you were impacted by the breach, be on the lookout for impersonation scams. The aim of the attack, according to Coinbase, was to acquire customer information, reach out pretending to be from Coinbase, and use social engineering tactics to trick targets into transferring their money. Know that Coinbase will never ask for your credentials (including passwords and 2FA codes) or request that you transfer assets to another “safe” account, vault, or wallet, and they will never call or text you to give you a seed phrase or wallet address. They also will not ask you to contact an unknown number for customer support.

Second, you can also take steps to secure your account, like enabling 2FA using a hardware key and turning on withdrawal allow-listing, which limits transfers to accounts in your address book that you know and trust. If you believe your account has been compromised, lock it down and contact security@coinbase.com.

Finally, take steps to be reimbursed. Coinbase says it intends to reimburse customers who were tricked into sending funds to the attackers. You’ll find more information in the notification email.

Source: Three Steps Coinbase Users Should Take After a Hack Compromised One Million Accounts

Really good response by Coinbase – quick to report to the SEC and offering help to their customers. Unlike some companies who pretend it’s not important (Dell hack but who Dell didn’t think it was a big deal now includes customer phone numbers) or who blame the victims (23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached. DNA data, it turns out, is extremely sensitive!) or even change their TOS after they have been hacked (23andMe frantically changed its terms of service to prevent 6.9m hacked customers from suing about losing their (and their entire family’s) DNA)

Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app

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[…] Andy Schertzinger, Director of Engineering at Nextcloud, told The Register: “Google has decided to restore the permissions to our Android app so we can bring back the full file syncing functionality.”

Nextcloud expects to release an update to the app shortly, and Schertzinger paid tribute to the broader community for its support.

Nextcloud’s problem was a decision made in late 2024 to revoke its app’s “All files access” permission on Android devices. Because the permission gives apps broad access to files on a device, Google is understandably cautious about granting it, preferring developers to use more privacy-friendly access tools, such as the Storage Access Framework (SAF).

However, for a file synchronization app like Nextcloud’s, the “All files access” permission was required. And it had been granted for years until, quite suddenly, it wasn’t anymore. The result was a crippled app in the Play Store, and Google appeared to ignore repeated requests for an explanation.

Nextcloud went public with its woes earlier this week and in an unexpected turn of events, Google offered to restore the permission it had previously revoked.

In a world where words like “anti-competitive” are frequently thrown around with regard to the tech giants, Google’s action demonstrates that there are still humans in the organization capable of changing course when required. We asked the ad slinger what happened – was the original revocation the result of an automated process gone awry or an overzealous reviewer? We have yet to receive a response. […]

Source: Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app • The Register

Researchers Finally Link Long Covid ‘Brain Fog’ to Inflammation

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hill: A new study indicates the debilitating “brain fog” suffered by millions of long COVID patients is linked to changes in the brain, including inflammation and an impaired ability to rewire itself following COVID-19 infection. United Press International reported this week that the small-scale study, conducted by researchers at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Michigan State University, shows that altered levels of a pair of key brain chemicals could be the culprit.

The study marks the first time doctors have been able to provide scientific proof that validates the experiences of the approximately 12 million COVID “long-haulers” in the U.S. who have reported neurological symptoms. Researchers looked at biomarkers in study participants and found that those complaining of brain fog had higher levels of an anti-inflammatory protein that is crucial to regulating a person’s immune system, UPI reported. They also showed lower serum levels of nerve growth factor, a protein vital to the brain’s plasticity…

One of the biggest issues involving long COVID has been doctors’ inability to find physical proof of the symptoms described by patients. The study has changed that, according to co-author Dr. Bengt Arnetz.

Source: Researchers Finally Link Long Covid ‘Brain Fog’ to Inflammation

First successful demonstration of quantum error correction of qudits for quantum computers

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In the world of quantum computing, the Hilbert space dimension—the measure of the number of quantum states that a quantum computer can access—is a prized possession. Having a larger Hilbert space allows for more complex quantum operations and plays a crucial role in enabling quantum error correction (QEC), essential for protecting quantum information from noise and errors.

A recent study by researchers from Yale University published in Nature created qudits—a that holds and can exist in more than two states. Using a qutrit (3-level quantum system) and a ququart (4-level quantum system), the researchers demonstrated the first-ever experimental for higher-dimensional quantum units using the Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill (GKP) bosonic code.

Most quantum computers on the market usually process information using quantum states called qubits—fundamental units similar to a bit in a regular computer that can exist in two well-defined states, up (1) and down (0) and also both 0 and 1 at the same time, due to quantum superposition. The Hilbert space of a single qubit is a two-dimensional complex vector space.

Since bigger is better, in the case of Hilbert space, the use of qudits instead of qubits is gaining a lot of scientific interest.

Qudits could make demanding tasks such as building quantum gates, running algorithms, creating special “magic” states, and simulating complex quantum systems easier than ever. To harness these powers, researchers have spent years building qudit-based quantum computers with the help of photons, ultracold atoms and molecules and superconducting circuits.

Stabilizing GKP qudits. Credit: Nature (2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08899-y

The reliability of quantum computing is heavily dependent on QEC, which safeguards fragile quantum information from noise and imperfections. Yet, most experimental efforts in QEC are focused exclusively on qubits, and so qudits took a backseat.

The researchers on this study presented the first ever experimental demonstration of error correction for a qutrit and a ququart, using the Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill (GKP) bosonic code. To optimize the systems as ternary and quaternary quantum memories, the researchers opted for a reinforcement learning algorithm, a type of machine learning that utilizes a trial and error method to find the best way to correct errors or operate quantum gates.

The experiment pushed past the break-even point for error correction, showcasing a more practical and hardware-efficient method for QEC by harnessing the power of a larger Hilbert space.

The researchers note that the increased photon loss and dephasing rates of GKP qudit states can lead to a modest reduction in the lifetime of the quantum information encoded in logical qudits, but in return, it provides access to more logical quantum states in a single physical system.

The findings demonstrate the promise of realizing robust and scalable quantum computers and could lead to breakthroughs in cryptography, materials science, and drug discovery.

More information: Benjamin L. Brock et al, Quantum error correction of qudits beyond break-even, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08899-y

Source: First successful demonstration of quantum error correction of qudits for quantum computers

House of Lords shows they are in pocket of big copyright and pushes back against government’s AI plans

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The government has suffered another setback in the House of Lords over its plans to let artificial intelligence firms use copyright-protected work without permission.

An amendment to the data bill requiring AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material is used in their models was backed by peers, despite government opposition.

It is the second time parliament’s upper house has demanded tech companies make clear whether they have used copyright-protected content.

The vote came days after hundreds of artists and organisations including Paul McCartney, Jeanette Winterson, Dua Lipa and the Royal Shakespeare Company urged the prime minister not to “give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies”.

The amendment was tabled by crossbench peer Beeban Kidron and was passed by 272 votes to 125.

The bill will now return to the House of Commons. If the government removes the Kidron amendment, it will set the scene for another confrontation in the Lords next week.

Lady Kidron said: “I want to reject the notion that those of us who are against government plans are against technology. Creators do not deny the creative and economic value of AI, but we do deny the assertion that we should have to build AI for free with our work, and then rent it back from those who stole it.

“My lords, it is an assault on the British economy and it is happening at scale to a sector worth £120bn to the UK, an industry that is central to the industrial strategy and of enormous cultural import.”

The government’s copyright proposals are the subject of a consultation due to report back this year, but opponents of the plans have used the data bill as a vehicle for registering their disapproval.

The main government proposal is to let AI firms use copyright-protected work to build their models without permission, unless the copyright holders signal they do not want their work to be used in that process – a solution that critics say is impractical and unworkable.

Source: House of Lords pushes back against government’s AI plans | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian

The problem is that the actual creators never see much of the money from copyright income – that all goes to the giant copyright holding behemoths who keep it for themselves.

And considering the way that AI systems are trained, they do not keep a copy of the work ingested, just like a human doesn’t keep a copy. So to say that a system can only ingest a work if permission is given is just like saying a specific person can only read that without permission.

So anything that is freely available is fair game. If an AI wants to read a book, they should buy that book. Once.

CISA changes vulnerabilities updates, shifts to defunct website X(twitter) as do NTSB, SSA

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The US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced Monday that going forward, only urgent alerts tied to emerging threats or major cyber activity will appear on its website. Routine updates, guidance, and other notifications will instead be shared via email, RSS, and X.

Up until now, its Cybersecurity Alerts and Advisories website has been posting a variety of bulletins, including known vulnerabilities under attack, flaws found in everything from industrial control systems to smart TVs, and warnings about specific products.

[…]

IT admins and others who want to know are advised to sign up for CISA’s email notifications to stay informed. Some updates will still be available via RSS, though users tracking the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog must subscribe to that topic through the GovDelivery email service. X will also carry general cybersecurity updates. We’ve asked CISA for further comment.

One has to wonder if this policy shift is linked to staff cuts at the agency, which began in March under the direction of Musk’s DOGE – a Trump-blessed project to trim costs at various federal agencies that oversee the Tesla tycoon’s businesses.

While some CISA workers have left, more layoffs are expected, as President Trump’s wish-list budget for 2026 proposes slashing CISA’s funding by about 17 percent. Former agency chief Jen Easterly has publicly criticized the recommendation, and described it as harmful to America.

“In a world where we are facing more serious, more complex, more dynamic threats, in a world where cyber crime damages are expected to cost the world $10.5 trillion by the end of this year, in a world where actors from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army are burrowed into our most sensitive critical infrastructure, that is a real loss for America to see the capability and capacity of America’s cyber defense agency being undermined,” she told the RSA Conference last month.

At the same time, US government bodies are increasingly moving more of their communications to Elon Musk’s social network. In February, following two major aviation accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it would no longer distribute updates about press conferences or investigations via email, and would instead post all such information to its X account.

Then in April, the Social Security Administration began cutting staff from its communications office and told regional offices they would no longer issue press releases or “Dear Colleague” letters. Instead, agency updates will now be posted on X.

“If you’re used to getting press releases and Dear Colleague letters, you might want to subscribe to the official SSA X account, so you can stay up to date with agency news,” said SSA Midwest-West (MWW) Regional Commissioner Linda Kerr-Davis said at the time. “I know this probably sounds very foreign to you — it did to me as well — and not what we are used to, but we are in different times now.”

[…]

280 characters isn’t a lot of space to convey information, but maybe these agencies will get a group discount on X Premium for longer tweets. Either way, it’s good news for one of Trump’s more-favored billionaires. ®

Updated to add on May 13

Just a day after announcing it was changing the way it sent out alerts, CISA has changed its mind and reverted back to its old system of putting everything on its website.

“We recognize this has caused some confusion in the cyber community,” the site now reads. “As such, we have paused immediate changes while we re-assess the best approach to sharing with our stakeholders.”

While the infosec world has been rather peeved about the surprise overhaul by CISA, there may be another reason for the latest shift in policy. CISA intended to place more reliance on the GovDelivery email service – which had earlier been compromised, TechCrunch pointed out today.

It appears a contractor working for the state of Indiana had their credentials stolen, leading to GovDelivery sending out scam messages requesting money for unpaid toll fees. Maybe CISA figured there ought to be other ways to reach people, just in case.

Source: CISA changes vulnerabilities updates, shifts to X and emails • The Register

Scientists find lead really can be turned into gold (with help from the Large Hadron Collider)

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One of the ultimate goals of medieval alchemy has been realized, but only for a fraction of a second. Scientists with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, were able to convert lead into gold using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Unlike the examples of transmutation we see in pop culture, these experiments with the LHC involve smashing subatomic particles together at ridiculously high speeds to manipulate lead’s physical properties to become gold.

The LHC is often used to smash lead ions together to create extremely hot and dense matter similar to what was observed in the universe following the Big Bang. While conducting this analysis, the CERN scientists took note of the near-misses that caused a lead nucleus to drop its neutrons or protons. Lead atoms only have three more protons than gold atoms, meaning that in certain cases the LHC causes the lead atoms to drop just enough protons to become a gold atom for a fraction of a second — before immediately fragmenting into a bunch of particles.

Alchemists back in the day may be astonished by this achievement, but the experiments conducted between 2015 and 2018 only produced about 29 picograms of gold, according to CERN. The organization added that the latest trials produced almost double that amount thanks to regular upgrades to the LHC, but the mass made is still trillions of times less than what’s necessary for a piece of jewelry. Instead of trying to chase riches, the organization’s scientists are more interested in studying the interaction that leads to this transmutation.

[…]

Source: Scientists find lead really can be turned into gold (with help from the Large Hadron Collider)

Garmin CEO Hints More Paywalls And Enshittification Are Coming, Falsely Claims Users Love It after paywalling existing features and pissing off actual users

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We recently noted how device maker Garmin had decided to follow in the footsteps of Google’s Fitbit, and begin putting basic features behind an annoying subscription paywall to goose revenues. Garmin’s new “premium” Garmin+ tier takes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation.

Users are pretty broadly pissed about it. In part because Garmin smartwatches are already significantly more expensive than many brands. And because they’re now paying more money for the same services. And the new services Garmin has added to justify a “premium price” — like a new “AI” assistant — suck.

Speaking on the company’s latest earnings call, Garmin CEO Cliff Pemble responded to questions about the backlash by first lying and claiming that Garmin customers really like the direction Garmin is heading (a five second tour of the Garmin subreddit makes it very clear that’s not true). He then promised that more of this kind of enshittification was definitely coming:

“I think we’ve been saying for a while that we are evaluating opportunities to have a premium offering on Garmin Connect,” Pemble responded. “I think the developments of AI and particularly around AI-based insights for our users was one of those things that we felt was important to recognize the value for the investment that it takes to do.”

Again though, reviews of the “AI” features they’re adding are extremely bad, aren’t as good as other devices or fitness apps, and are often subject to basic math mistakes. Again it appears we’ve taken software and some light LLM automation, thrown the “AI” tag on it, and demanded that consumers both be stunned by the innovation and accept higher prices for existing services.

For a while Garmin differentiated itself from competitors like Fitbit for not doing this kind of predatory bullshit. If you dig through Reddit comments, it’s clear that a lack of subscription paywall is what drew a ton of customers to the brand in the first place.

But now that Garmin has decided to hop on this treadmill of goosing earnings by sucking value out of the free tier, it will never end. Company execs have deluded themselves into thinking this kind of paywalling is innovation, when it’s just mindless extraction and gatekeeping that harms customer loyalty.

Pemble, of course, can’t admit any of this to investors keen on improved quarterly returns at any cost, so it creates both a weird anti-consumer slippery slope, and a sort of willful delusion to prop it up. It also creates a new opportunity for future smart device competitors to make market inroads by not being nickel-and-diming assholes keen on insulting their customers’ intelligence.

Source: Garmin CEO Hints More Paywalls And Enshittification Are Coming, Falsely Claims Users Love It | Techdirt

Moderna’s Vaccine for both Flu and Covid Works—Now Politics Could Sink It

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Moderna’s mRNA-based flu and covid-19 vaccine could provide the best of both worlds—if it’s actually ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

This week, scientists at Moderna published data from a Phase III trial testing the company’s combination vaccine, codenamed mRNA-1083. Individuals given mRNA-1083 appeared to generate the same or even greater immune response compared to those given separate vaccines, the researchers found. But the FDA’s recent policy change on vaccine approvals, orchestrated by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, could imperil the development of this and other future vaccines.

The trial involved 8,000 people split into two age groups: those between the ages of 50 and 64, and those over 65. People were randomly given mRNA-1083 (plus a placebo) or two already approved flu and covid-19 vaccines.

The vaccine seemed effective across both age groups, with mRNA-1083 participants showing at least the same level of humoral immune response (antibody-based) to circulating flu and covid-19 strains as participants who were given the separate vaccines. On average, this response was actually higher to the flu strains in particular among those given mRNA-1083. The experimental vaccine also appeared to be safe and well-tolerated, as the authors explained in their paper, published Wednesday in JAMA.

The study results are certainly encouraging, and typically they would pave the way toward a surefire FDA approval. But the political situation has changed for the worse. The Department of Health and Human Services recently mandated an overhaul of the vaccine approval process, one that will require all new vaccines to undergo placebo-controlled trials to receive approval.

While many experimental vaccines today are placebo-tested (including the original covid-19 vaccines), it’s unclear whether this order will also apply to vaccines that can be compared to existing vaccines, like the combination mRNA-1083 vaccine, or to vaccines that have to be regularly updated to match fast-evolving viruses like the flu and covid-19.

Some vaccine experts have said that these changes are unnecessary and potentially unethical, since it could leave some people vulnerable to an infection that already has a vaccine. The new rule also might delay the availability of upcoming seasonal vaccines, particularly the current covid-19 shots.

A potentially important wrinkle for the mRNA-1083 vaccine is that no mRNA-based vaccine for the flu is currently approved. That reality could very well be all that the FDA needs to demand further placebo-controlled trials. RFK Jr. and other recent Trump appointees have also been highly skeptical of mRNA-based vaccines in general, despite no strong evidence that these vaccines are significantly less safe than other types. Kennedy, who has a long history of supporting the anti-vaccination movement, has even wrongly declared that the mRNA covid-19 vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Moderna stated last week it doesn’t expect its mRNA-1083 vaccine to be approved before 2026, following the FDA’s request for late-stage data showing the vaccine’s effectiveness against flu specifically. But it’s worth wondering if even that timeline is now in jeopardy under the current public health regime.

Source: Moderna’s Super-Vaccine for Flu and Covid Works—Now Politics Could Sink It

Charter airline helping Trump’s deportation campaign pwned

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GlobalX, a charter airline used for deportations by the US government, has admitted someone broke into its network infrastructure.

“On May 5, 2025, Global Crossing Airlines Group learned of unauthorized activity within its computer networks and systems supporting portions of its business applications, which the company determined to be the result of a cybersecurity incident,” an SEC filing from May 9 reads.

“Upon learning of this activity, the company immediately activated its incident response protocols and third-party cybersecurity experts to assist with containment and mitigation activities and to investigate the nature and scope of the incident, and took actions to contain and isolate the affected servers and prevent further intrusion.”

GlobalX is one of the small airlines contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out the President’s mass deportation campaign of “illegal aliens.”

[…]

The disclosure, however vague, lends credence to reports that those responsible had stolen flight records and passenger manifests, including ones related to deportation flights, dating back to January.

The alleged perpetrators pitched the news to various outlets, and while the word of a cybercriminal should not be taken as gospel, the timing of the disclosure and its ambiguous wording suggest there is at least some truth to the story.

[…]

GlobalX was quickly identified as one of the main small airlines whose services were called upon by ICE within days of Trump taking office for the second time, although the company doesn’t openly advertise this.

Bloomberg reported that some of the earliest flights it was tasked with making from the US to South American countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Honduras were mired in technical difficulties.

The airline, which operates a fleet of 19 Airbus planes (A320, A321, and A321F), reportedly tackled various issues ranging from aborted landings, broken air conditioning leading to deportees fainting from high temperatures, to not being able to start engines for hours.

According to its investor presentation [PDF], GlobalX is the fastest-growing charter airline in America, but up-to-date filings show it has yet to turn a profit since being founded in 2018.

[…]

Source: Charter airline helping Trump’s deportation campaign pwned • The Register

Volvo EX90’s Lidar Sensor Will Fry Your Phone’s Camera

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[…] That pod on the roof of Volvo’s new electric SUV is essentially just shooting out a bunch of high-powered infrared beams, determining the distance of the vehicle’s surroundings by measuring the time taken for reflected light to return to the sensor. If you point your phone’s camera directly at those beams, you’ll observe some strange phenomena, like what’s happening in the image above. What you’re seeing is a laser frying pixels on one of the device’s image sensors.

Credit to Reddit user Jeguetelli, who broke their smartphone for science, so the rest of us know what not to do. The constellation of artifacts disappears because the person filming zooms out, prompting the phone to switch to a shorter lens backed by a separate, healthy image sensor. To assuage the fears of some concerned redditors, this is presumably why lidar doesn’t pose the same threat to backup cameras on other vehicles, which also typically use ultra-wide-angle lenses.

Never film the new Ex90 because you will break your cell camera.Lidar lasers burn your camera.
byu/Jeguetelli inVolvo

It should be said that the risk here is inherent to lidar technology, and has nothing to do with Volvo’s specific implementation on the EX90. In fact, earlier this year, the automaker even issued a warning against directing external cameras at the vehicle’s lidar pod for the very reasons discussed. “Do not point a camera directly at the lidar,” one support page admonishes in no uncertain terms. Unfortunately, while that sort of information might be clear to owners (the ones who crack open their vehicles’ manuals, anyway), this is something the entire public ought to be aware of, especially as semi-autonomous cars with lidar systems become more common on our streets.

The Drive reached out to Volvo for a little more insight into the issue, as well as any other recommendations. “It’s generally advised to avoid pointing a camera directly at a lidar sensor,” a representative responded over email. “The laser light emitted by the lidar can potentially damage the camera’s sensor or affect its performance.”

[…]

Source: Volvo EX90’s Lidar Sensor Will Fry Your Phone’s Camera

Which kind of makes you wonder, what else does this LIDAR fry?

Google will pay Texas $1.4B to settle claims the company collected users’ data without permission

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[…] “For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services. I fought back and won.”

The agreement settles several claims Texas made against the search giant in 2022 related to geolocation, incognito searches and biometric data. The state argued Google was “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data.”

Paxton claimed, for example, that Google collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through such products and services as Google Photos and Google Assistant.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the agreement settles an array of “old claims,” some of which relate to product policies the company has already changed.

[…]

Texas previously reached two other key settlements with Google within the last two years, including one in December 2023 in which the company agreed to pay $700 million and make several other concessions to settle allegations that it had been stifling competition against its Android app store.

Meta has also agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas in a privacy lawsuit over allegations that the tech giant used users’ biometric data without their permission.

Source: Google will pay Texas $1.4B to settle claims the company collected users’ data without permission | AP News

Study Uncovers the One Thing That Cuts Through Climate Apathy: Loss – use clear binary data

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[…]“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”

When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?

That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change.

Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: The lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes.

Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking people,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study who’s now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”

The climate binary

Both charts demonstrate the same warming trend, but the gradual temperature data is less striking than the binary lake data.

The climate binary.
Source: Liu et al., 2025 Chart: Clayton Aldern/Grist

The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true over a series of experiments, even one where a trend line was placed over the scatter plot of temperatures to make the warming super clear. To ensure the results translated to the wider world, researchers also looked at how people reacted to actual data of lake freezing and temperature increases from towns in the U.S. and Europe and got the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” said Dubey, who’s researched cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we’ve ever seen.”

The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.

The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. […] eople mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”

[…]

“Tragedies will keep on escalating in the background, but it’s not happening fast enough for us to think, ‘OK, this is it. We need to just decisively stop everything we’re doing,’” Dubey said. “I think that’s an even bigger danger that we’re facing with climate change — that it never becomes the problem.”

One graph about lake-freezing data isn’t going to lead people to rank climate change as their top issue, of course. But Dubey thinks that if people see compelling visuals more often, it could help keep the problem of climate change from fading out of their minds. Dubey’s study shows that there’s a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: It creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly, when it has actually changed gradually.

[…]

Climate Stripes
The climate stripes visual was recently updated to reflect that 2024 was the hottest year on record. © Professor Ed Hawkins / University of Reading

The study’s findings don’t just apply to freezing lakes — global temperatures can be communicated in more stark ways. The popular “climate stripes” visual developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where blue indicates cold years and red indicates warm ones. As the chart switches from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the warming trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend into a binary-style image that makes it easier to grasp. “Our study explains why the climate stripes is actually so popular and resonates with people,” Dubey said.

Source: Study Uncovers the One Thing That Cuts Through Climate Apathy: Loss

US senator introduces bill calling for location-tracking on AI chips to limit China access

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A U.S. senator introduced a bill on Friday that would direct the Commerce Department to require location verification mechanisms for export-controlled AI chips, in an effort to curb China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology.
Called the “Chip Security Act,” the bill calls for AI chips under export regulations, and products containing those chips, to be fitted with location-tracking systems to help detect diversion, smuggling or other unauthorized use of the product.
“With these enhanced security measures, we can continue to expand access to U.S. technology without compromising our national security,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said.
The bill also calls for companies exporting the AI chips to report to the Bureau of Industry and Security if their products have been diverted away from their intended location or subject to tampering attempts.
The move comes days after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would rescind and modify a Biden-era rule that curbed the export of sophisticated AI chips with the goal of protecting U.S. leadership in AI and blocking China’s access.
U.S. Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois, also plans to introduce a bill on similar lines in the coming weeks, Reuters reported on Monday.
Restricting China’s access to AI technology that could enhance its military capabilities has been a key focus for U.S. lawmakers and reports of widespread smuggling of Nvidia’s (NVDA.O)

Source: US senator introduces bill calling for location-tracking on AI chips to limit China access | Reuters

Of course it adds another layer of the US government spying on you if you want to buy a graphics card too. I’m not sure how anyone being able to track all your PCs does not compromise national security.

EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users

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At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the dispiriting saga of how the EU Copyright Directive came into being. It began in early 2013 with the usual “stakeholder dialogue”, in which the European Commission sought the views of the various constituencies affected. It generated an unprecedentedly large response that was surprising given the dry and dusty nature of copyright law. As the European Commission’s Report on the consultation noted:

The public consultation generated broad interest with more than 9,500 replies to the consultation document and a total of more than 11,000 messages, including questions and comments, sent to the Commission’s dedicated email address. A number of initiatives were also launched by organized stakeholders that nurtured the debate around the public consultation and drew attention to it.

Some 5,600 citizens took the trouble to respond, despite the lack of an easy online interface to do so: responses required a document to be completed then emailed. Numerous problems with the existing copyright system were raised, particularly in the light of the shift from analogue to digital technologies. Despite that welcome engagement, and the many substantive issues that were raised, the public’s comments and concerns were almost entirely ignored in the final result of the legisltative process. Instead, the EU Copyright Directive gave yet more rights to copyright holders, and undermined the freedom of speech and privacy rights of ordinary people.

[…]

The standard mechanism for giving the copyright world what it wants, while pretending to respect democratic processes, has been set in motion again. The European Commission has just launched a “Call for Evidence in view of the assessment of the Recommendation on combatting online piracy of sports and other live events”. The Recommendation referred to there was published two years ago. It explores the unauthorised retransmissions of live sports and other live events online, the next battleground for the copyright world, ever-keen to expand its rights and powers.

[…]

Those further measures are likely to involve yet more one-sided legislation in favour of the copyright world, as with the EU Copyright Directive. Such laws are already being discussed in the US. But there is a significant difference between what happened back in 2013, and the latest call for evidence. In 2013, people were warning about the possible effects of various bad policy options that might be adopted. The copyright world naturally dismissed those concerns as fear mongering, which allowed its allies within the European Parliament to push through precisely those bad policy options in the final text of the Directive.

But when it comes to unauthorised retransmissions of live events, we already have a wealth of evidence of how disproportionate attempts to rein in such streams can be harmful. The main example of what not to do comes from Italy, whose Piracy Shield is shaping up to be the worst copyright enforcement scheme since France’s Hadopi (also discussed in detail in Walled Culture the book).

The central problem is overblocking. For example, back in March last year, Walled Culture reported that one of Cloudflare’s Internet addresses had been blocked by Piracy Shield. There were over 40 million domains associated with the blocked address. Compounding the problem is a lack of transparency about which sites are being blocked, and the failure to provide a rigorous and rapid complaint procedure for fixing such far-reaching blunders. […] the damage could easily go well beyond the inconvenience of millions of people being blocked from accessing their files on Google Drive, as happened last year.

[…]

Despite these serious issues, Italy seems determined to make Piracy Shield even worse by building it out in a number of ill-advised ways, including the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers, and the obligation for search engines to de-index sites. Worryingly, a new “Study on the Effectiveness and the Legal and Technical Means of Implementing Website-Blocking Orders” from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) holds up Italy’s approach as an example of a “well-functioning site-blocking system”.

Nor is Italy alone in demonstrating the harms this approach to dealing with unauthorised rebroadcasts of sports events gives rise to. In Spain, attempts by La Liga, the country’s top professional football league, to tackle the problem have also led to overblocking,

[…]

German ISPs have been implementing a secret block list of allegedly infringing sites, including those offering streams, for years, and without any court oversight. The lack of transparency of this approach was underlined when the list was accidentally exposed before being hidden away once more.

As the above makes clear, the blocking of allegedly infringing streaming sites is already happening across the EU in an uncontrolled way, and with little to no effective judicial oversight. The copyright industry can present this as a kind of fait accompli, and ask the EU to bring in laws to formalise the situation. In doing so, they will skirt over the numerous and deep-seated problems with this approach, not least overblocking, which shuts down entirely innocent sites and offers little or no redress for the harm this causes.

The latest Call for Evidence on this important area is open until 28 May 2025. It would be good if companies, organisations and individuals could use this opportunity to alert the European Commission to the evident dangers of Piracy Shield and similar approaches, in the hope that existing implementations might be dismantled, or at least reined in, and new ones restricted.

[…]

French courts too are ordering Cloudflare to block streaming sites, […]

Source: EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users – Walled Culture

ispace’s RESILIENCE Enters Lunar Orbit. It’ll Try to Land in Early June

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Headquartered in Japan, the commercial space company ispace is dedicated to creating robotic spacecraft and other technology to support the discovery, mapping, and harvesting of natural resources on the Moon. One of the main tools in their arsenal is the RESILIENCE lander, a small, lightweight uncrewed spacecraft designed for low-cost, high-frequency transportation of instruments and other supplies to the lunar surface. Earlier today, the company announced that their second mission with the RESILIENCE lander (SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon) entered lunar orbit.

According to a company statement, the orbital injection maneuver was completed by 5:41 a.m. JST (1:41 p.m. PST; 4:41 p.m. EST) on May 7th, 2025. This marks the successful completion of the mission’s seventh Mission Milestone, which included completing the first lunar orbit insertion maneuver and reaffirming “the ability of space to deliver spacecraft and payloads into stable lunar orbits.” The orbital maneuver consisted of the longest thruster burn during Mission 2, lasting approximately 9 minutes. The team at the Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, confirmed that RESILIENCE is now maintaining a stable attitude above the lunar surface.

On April 24th, 2025, RESILIENCE completed the maneuvers to transition the lander from deep space and closer to the Moon to complete the orbital injection. Before that, RESILIENCE completed a lunar flyby that verified the spacecraft’s propulsion, guidance, control, and navigation systems. Following the flyby, the lander spent about two months in a low-energy transfer orbit. Mission specialists are now preparing for the final orbit maneuvers in preparation for a lunar landing, which is scheduled to take place no earlier than June 5th, 2025.

Credit: ispaceRESILIENCE was launched on January 15th, 2025, at 12:44 p.m. PST (03:44 p.m. EST)

[…]

For this mission, the RESILIENCE is transporting several payloads for commercial customers.

These include the TENACIOUS micro rover by ispace-EUROPE, which will be deployed on the surface to explore the landing site, collect lunar regolith, and relay data back to the lander. Other payloads include a water electrolyzer, a food production experiment, a deep space radiation probe, a commemorative alloy plate, and a “Moonhouse,” a model house created by Swedish artists to be placed on the surface. The mission also carries a UNESCO memory disk, a cultural artifact containing data on humanity’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

As UNESCO describes it, the disk “serves as a repository of cultural heritage,” which will be preserved for millions of years in case human civilization collapses someday:

[…]

Source: ispace’s RESILIENCE Enters Lunar Orbit. It’ll Try to Land in Early June – Universe Today