Umar Shakir reports via The Verge: Amazon is fulfilling a small part of its promise to switch from using plastic bubble mailers and air pillows to all recyclable paper packaging for its shipments. The company announced that it has outfitted one facility in Euclid, Ohio, with an upgraded packaging machine that can automatically fold custom-fit boxes to wrap some products, use paper mailers for small items, and slide in paper fillers instead of plastic ones in standard boxes.

As Amazon transitions over to curbside recyclable packaging, it will "reduce the company's plastic waste and the amount of plastic pollution that can reach the seas," says Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president of Oceana, a conservation organization. However, Littlejohn questions Amazon's commitment to end plastic use in the US, its largest market, compared to the commitments it made for the UK, Germany, and other markets. Amazon says it'll be a "multiyear effort" to move US warehouses to recyclable paper. "Unfortunately, Amazon, in this announcement, did not make a clear, quantifiable, and time-bound commitment, so it is unclear when, where, and how much real plastic reduction there will be," Littlejohn says.

echo123 shares a report from the Associated Press: Thousands of information technology workers contracting with U.S. companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said. The Justice Department said Wednesday that IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get the jobs. The money they earned was funneled to the North Korean weapons program, FBI leaders said at a news conference in St. Louis.

Court documents allege that North Korea's government dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees. The workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the U.S., including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections, said Jay Greenberg, special agent in charge of the St. Louis FBI office. Greenberg said any company that hired freelance IT workers "more than likely" hired someone participating in the scheme. An FBI spokeswoman said Thursday that the North Koreans contracted with companies across the U.S. and in some other countries. "We can tell you that there are thousands of North Korea IT workers that are part of this," spokeswoman Rebecca Wu said. Federal authorities announced the seizure of $1.5 million and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is ongoing. FBI officials said the scheme is so prevalent that companies must be extra vigilant in verifying whom they are hiring, including requiring interviewees to at least be seen via video.

The IT workers generated millions of dollars a year in their wages to benefit North Korea's weapons programs. In some instances, the North Korean workers also infiltrated computer networks and stole information from the companies that hired them, the Justice Department said. They also maintained access for future hacking and extortion schemes, the agency said. Officials didn't name the companies that unknowingly hired North Korean workers, say when the practice began, or elaborate on how investigators became aware of it. But federal authorities have been aware of the scheme for some time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say. While Nvidia has historically been the leading provider of AI chips in China with a market share exceeding 90%, Chinese firms including Huawei have been developing their own versions of Nvidia's best-selling chips, including the A100 and the H100 graphics processing units (GPU).

Huawei's Ascend AI chips are comparable to Nvidia's in terms of raw computing power, analysts and some AI firms such as China's iFlyTek say, but they still lag behind in performance. Jiang Yifan, chief market analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities, said another key limiting factor for Chinese firms was the reliance of most projects on Nvidia's chips and software ecosystem, but that could change with the U.S. restrictions. "This U.S. move, in my opinion, is actually giving Huawei's Ascend chips a huge gift," Jiang said in a post on his social media Weibo account. This opportunity, however, comes with several challenges.

Many cutting edge AI projects are built with CUDA, a popular programming architecture Nvidia has pioneered, which has in turn given rise to a massive global ecosystem that has become capable of training highly sophisticated AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4. Huawei own version is called CANN, and analysts say it is much more limited in terms of the AI models it is capable of training, meaning that Huawei's chips are far from a plug-and-play substitute for Nvidia. Woz Ahmed, a former chip design executive turned consultant, said that for Huawei to win Chinese clients from Nvidia, it must replicate the ecosystem Nvidia created, including supporting clients to move their data and models to Huawei's own platform. Intellectual property rights are also a problem, as many U.S. firms already hold key patents for GPUs, Ahmed said. "To get something that's in the ballpark, it is 5 or 10 years," he added.

The U.S. government is receiving dozens of reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) each month. "The office has received approximately 800 reports of unidentified objects to investigate as of this past April, up from 650 reports in August 2022, Sean Kirkpatrick, who heads the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Pentagon told CNN." From the report: The vast majority are benign objects, such as balloons or drones, but some may be the result of America's adversaries trying to spy on the US, said Kirkpatrick. "There are some indicators that are concerning that may be attributed to foreign activity, and we are investigating those very hard," said Kirkpatrick, speaking exclusively to CNN ahead of the release of the annual report on unidentified aerial phenomena.

A portion of the increase in reports comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, which monitors airspace around US airports starting to provide information to the Pentagon. About half of the reports contain enough data that they can be ruled out as "mundane things," such as errant balloons or floating trash, Kirkpatrick said, but 2-4% are truly anomalous and require further investigation.

Asked if the Pentagon could definitively identify a sighting of an unidentified object as belonging to a foreign adversary, Kirkpatrick said that his office is "looking at some very interesting indicators of things, and that's about all I can tell you." But the office, which has more than 40 employees and is expected to grow, can't say that for sure yet. "There are ways to hide in our noise that always concern me," Kirkpatrick said, referring to the extraneous readings picked up by US radars and other sensors. "I am worried from a national security perspective." "The Pentagon is preparing for a flood of new reports as it readies two new portals for submissions: one for historical sightings from current or former government employees and contractors and a second for public submissions of new reports," notes CNN.

"It is the opening of the public portal, still several months away, that Kirkpatrick says could flood the system with 'hundreds, if not thousands' of new reports to sort through."

The bar for taking a sick day is getting lower, and some bosses say that's a problem. From a report: U.S. workers have long viewed an unwillingness to take sick days as a badge of honor. That's a laurel workers care much less about these days. The number of sick days Americans take annually has soared since the pandemic, employee payroll data show. Covid-19 and a rise in illnesses such as RSV, which can require days away from work, are one reason. Managers and human-resources executives also attribute the jump to a bigger shift in the way many Americans relate to their jobs.

For one, more workers are using up sick time often for reasons such as mental health. And unlike older workers, who might have been loath to call in sick for fear of seeming weak or unreliable, younger workers feel more entitled to take full advantage of the benefits they've been given, executives and recruiters say. That confidence has only grown as record low unemployment persists. So far this year, 30% of white-collar workers with access to paid leave have taken sick time, up from 21% in 2019, according to data from payroll and benefits software company Gusto. Employees between ages 25 and 34 are taking sick days most often, with their use rates jumping 45% from before the pandemic.

[...] Younger workers used to follow the example of their older peers and come in even when under the weather, says Crystal Williams, chief human resources officer at global business payments company Fleetcor, which has around 5,000 U.S. employees. She suspects early-career employees aren't taking cues from older co-workers in the same way now that five days a week at the office is no longer the norm. Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it's more like three to five.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Fewer than 26% of US households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week, a sharp decline from the early-2021 peak of 37%, according to the two latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Surveys. Only seven states plus Washington, DC, have a remote-work rate above 33%, the data shows, down from 31 states and DC mid-pandemic. [...] At the state level, the data shows all 50 have seen work-from-home rates drop from their pandemic highs. But the unevenness in their rates of decline suggests the trend doesn't have one cohesive explanation, and is instead the result of a hodgepodge of migration, socio-economic, gender and race factors, and possibly even politics -- Democratic states tend to have higher remote-work rates than Republican ones. Illustrating the complexity: States whose remote-work rates have fallen by as much as half to around post-pandemic lows include Mississippi and Louisiana, which weren't able to widely embrace remote work due to a reliance on in-person industries like manufacturing and oil and gas, but also more white-collar states that did welcome it, like California and Connecticut.

The latest Census data also underlines that employees' demand for remote jobs is outpacing the number of companies offering them. In 157 of the largest metro areas in the US, more than half of job applications were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, according to LinkedIn data generated for Bloomberg, but postings for those jobs have been falling since early 2022, data from Indeed Inc. shows. In Colorado -- widely seen as a work-from-home haven and one of the few states that has maintained a rate above one third -- 76% of job applications in Colorado Springs were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, the LinkedIn data showed.

Some areas are capitalizing on that scarcity. Alabama, with a work-from-home rate of just 15% according to the Pulse data, offers $10,000 to remote workers who move to the state's northwest Shoals area. The program has attracted about the same number of applications so far this year as in all of 2021 and 2022 combined, about 3,400. All 50 states pale in comparison to their largest cities' metro areas. In Washington, DC, where government bureaucrats are loath to go back to their offices, the remote-work rate is above 50%, the data shows. Similarly, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco all had rates near or above 40%. Average office attendance across ten big US cities remains about 50% of pre-pandemic levels, according to security firm Kastle Systems International LLC, no higher than where it was early in 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google responded to congressional child online safety proposals with its own counteroffer for the first time Monday, urging lawmakers to drop problematic protections like age-verification tech. In a blog post, Google released its "Legislative Framework to Protect Children and Teens Online" (PDF). The framework comes as more lawmakers, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), are lining up behind the Kids Online Safety Act, a controversial bill intended to protect kids from dangerous content online.

In the framework, Google rejects state and federal attempts at requiring platforms to verify the age of users, like forcing users to upload copies of their government IDs to access an online service. Some states have recently gone as far as passing laws requiring platforms to obtain parental consent before anyone under 18 is allowed to use their services. Google dismisses these consent laws, arguing that they bar vulnerable teens from accessing helpful information. "Good legislative models -- like those based on age-appropriate design principles -- can help hold companies responsible for promoting safety and privacy, while enabling access to richer experiences for children and teens," Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, said in the blog post.

A new book by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton"feels like an existential crisis," writes Fast Company, "as he questions his own legacy — and wonders whether policies prescribed by economists over the years have unintentionally contributed to inequality" in America. Angus Deaton: People who have a four-year college degree are doing pretty well. But if you go to the people who don't have a college degree, horrible things are happening to them... The opportunities are getting bigger and bigger, but the safety net's falling further and further away. . . I think of it as much broader than income inequality: People without a BA are like an underclass. They're dispensable...

Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?

Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...

Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?

Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."

The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."

Devin Ulibarri, the Free Software Foundation's outreach and communications coordinator, writes up an event he describes as meeting with some old and new friends: On Sunday, October 1, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) hosted a hackday to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GNU Project. Folks came from both near and far to join in the festivities at FSF headquarters, Boston, MA... Sadi moma bela loza, the Bulgarian melody from which The Free Software Song is set, could be heard faintly playing in a nearby room, its distinctive odd-metered tune performed by a fully-liberated X200...

All in all, the event succeeded in our goal of welcoming both long-time members as well as introducing new people to free software and our cause. A few college students from local universities, for example, were able to ask questions seeking to better understand free software licenses and GNU Project history. We received multiple requests from attendees to host similar events again in the near future. And one parent, whose son played NetHack at the event, reported that, the following morning, his son asked to go to the FSF office after school to play it again. When playing he mastered the "vi" movement keys immediately. We hope they serve him well...!

Happy hacking and please stay tuned for more FSF-hosted events, including LibrePlanet 2024!

Due to an air traffic control mistake in February, a FedEx cargo plane flew within 100 feet of a Southwest Airlines flight in February. The New York Times reports that the flight's 128 passengers "were unaware that they had nearly died." In a year filled with close calls involving US airlines, this was the one that most unnerved federal aviation officials: A disaster had barely been averted, and multiple layers of the vaunted US air-safety system had failed... But the errors by the controller — who has continued to direct some plane traffic in Austin, Texas — were far from the whole story, according to 10 current and former controllers there, as well as internal Federal Aviation Administration documents reviewed by the Times. Austin-Bergstrom, like the vast majority of US airports, lacks technology that allows controllers to track planes on the ground and that warns of imminent collisions. The result is that on foggy days, controllers can't always see what is happening on runways and taxiways. Some have even resorted to using a public flight-tracking website in lieu of radar.

In addition, for years Austin has had a shortage of experienced controllers, even as traffic at the airport has surged to record levels. Nearly three-quarters of shifts have been understaffed. Managers and rank-and-file controllers have repeatedly warned that staffing levels pose a public danger. The controller on that February morning was working an overtime shift. In June, Stephen B. Martin, then Austin's top manager, and a local union representative wrote a memo pleading for more controllers. "Drastic steps are needed to allow the facility to adequately staff for existing traffic," they wrote to FAA and union officials.

Austin is a microcosm of a systemic crisis. The safety net that underpins air travel in America is fraying, exposing passengers to potential tragedies like the episode in February.
And yet the chair of America's National Transportation Safety Board calls the February incident "just one of seven serious close calls and near misses involving commercial airlines that we have initiated investigations on this year."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Yesterday America's Federal Trade Commission said it remained focused on its appeal opposing Microsoft's deal to buy Activision, reports Reuters.

Reuters notes that Microsoft and Activision closed their transaction Friday "after winning approval from Britain on condition that they sell the streaming rights to Activision's games to Ubisoft Entertainment." But the U.S. Federal Trade Commission "has also fought the deal, and has an argument scheduled before an appeals court on December 6. The agency said on Friday that it remained focused on that appeal." An FTC spokesperson had this comment for Reuters.

"The FTC continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Philadelphia on Friday to announce the recipients of $7 billion in federal grants across 16 states for the development of seven regional hydrogen hubs, advancing a key part of a plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy. The announcement of the funding to boost manufacturing and blue-collar jobs was held in Pennsylvania -- a state that could decide the 2024 presidential election -- underscoring the power Biden wields as he spends the upcoming months doling out money flowing from his landmark pieces of legislation that remain largely unknown to large swaths of the American public.

The seven proposed hubs involving companies ranging from Exxon Mobil to Amazon were selected, with their projects spanning 16 states from Pennsylvania to California. The program is intended to jump-start the production of "clean hydrogen" along with the infrastructure needed to get it to industrial users like steelmakers and cement plants. "I'm here to announce one of the largest advanced manufacturing investments in the history of this nation," Biden said," He noted that the total investment will reach $50 billion when taking into account additional investments from private companies.

The hub selections will now kick off a long process that includes multiple phases, from design and development to permitting, financing and construction. "It's not guaranteed that someone selected is even going to make it through negotiations and get awarded the money," said Jason Munster, who was involved in analyzing the projects for the Department of Energy and is now a hydrogen consultant at CleanEpic. The hubs selected will serve the Middle Atlantic, Appalachian, Midwest, Minnesota and Plains states, the Gulf Coast, Pacific Northwest and California. The two largest projects include $1.2 billion each for Texas and California -- the former an oil giant and the other a green energy leader.

According to the New York Times, Chinese-owned bitcoin mining operations in the United States are causing security concerns due to their proximity to important sites and the potential for cyber threats. The Crypto Times reports: There are some mining facilities close to critical sites such as Microsoft data center for Pentagon's Air Force nuclear's missile base in Wyoming USA. Officials in U.S. fear Chinese espionage activities at these places. These mining operations began after China banned bitcoin mining in 2021. These individuals sometimes maintain connections with the Chinese Communist Party or state-owned companies which may be kept concealed through multiple layers of companies.

Texas has turned out to be a haven for Chinese-linked Bitcoin mining, with some US states having restrictions but Texas offers incentives. This might pose a threat to the power grid or essential infrastructure. A new concern has recently been raised in a report related to a potential cyber strike on the US infrastructure by China in case a major conflict arose.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: High school students' scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest in more than three decades, showing a lack of student preparedness for college-level coursework, according to the nonprofit organization that administers the test. Scores have been falling for six consecutive years, but the trend accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students in the class of 2023 whose scores were reported Wednesday were in their first year of high school when the virus reached the U.S.

The average ACT composite score for U.S. students was 19.5 out of 36. Last year, the average score was 19.8. The average scores in reading, science and math all were below benchmarks the ACT says students must reach to have a high probability of success in first-year college courses. The average score in English was just above the benchmark but still declined compared to last year.

About 1.4 million students in the U.S. took the ACT this year, an increase from last year. However, the numbers have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. [Janet Godwin, chief executive officer for the nonprofit ACT] said she doesn't believe those numbers will ever fully recover, partly because of test-optional admission policies. Of students who were tested, only 21% met benchmarks for success in college-level classes in all subjects. Research from the nonprofit shows students who meet those benchmarks have a 50% chance of earning a B or better and nearly a 75% chance of earning a C or better in corresponding courses. Further reading: Accounting Graduates Drop By Highest Percentage in Years

Amanda Hoover reports via Wired: As few as 2 percent of New York City's previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself. The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city's short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating.

The crackdown in New York has created a "black market" for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she's seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. "People are going underground," she says. New York's crackdown on short-term rentals has dramatically reshaped the vacation rental market in the city. People are using sites like Craigslist, Facebook, Houfy, and others, where they can search for guests or places to book without the checks and balances of booking platforms like Airbnb. Hotel prices are expected to rise with more demand. After the rule change, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company would be shifting attention away from New York, which was once its biggest market.

"I was always hopeful that New York City would lead the way -- that we would find a solution in New York, and people would say, 'If they can make it in New York, they can make it anywhere,'" Chesky said during an event in September. "I think, unfortunately, New York is no longer leading the way -- it's probably a cautionary tale."

South Korea firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be allowed to supply U.S. chip equipment to their Chinese factories indefinitely without separate U.S. approvals. Reuters reports: "Uncertainties about South Korean semiconductor firms' operations and investments in China have been greatly eased; they will be able to calmly seek long-term global management strategies," said Choi Sang-mok, senior presidential secretary for economic affairs. The U.S. has already notified Samsung and SK Hynix of the decision, indicating that it is in effect, Choi said.

The U.S. Department of Commerce is updating its "validated end user" list, denoting which entities can receive exports of which technology, to allow Samsung and SK Hynix to keep supplying certain U.S. chipmaking tools to their China factories, the presidential office said. Once included in the list, there is no need to obtain permission for separate export cases. Samsung and SK Hynix, the world's largest and second-largest memory chipmakers, had invested billions of dollars in their chip production facilities in China and welcomed the move.

As the FCC leans towards reinstating net neutrality and regulating ISPs under Title II, the broadband sector is set to challenge the move. Previously, courts have upheld FCC's decisions. However, legal experts believe the Supreme Court's current stance may hinder the FCC's authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service. ArsTechnica: The major question here is whether the FCC has authority to decide that broadband is a telecommunications service, which is important because only telecommunications services can be regulated under Title II's common-carrier framework. "A Commission decision reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunications service will not survive a Supreme Court encounter with the major questions doctrine. It would be folly for the Commission and Congress to assume otherwise," two former Obama administration solicitors general, Donald Verrilli, Jr. and Ian Heath Gershengorn, argued in a white paper last month. According to Verrilli and Gershengorn, "There is every reason to think that a majority of the Supreme Court" would vote against the FCC.

Verrilli and Gershengorn express their view with a striking level of certainty given how difficult it usually is to predict a Supreme Court outcome -- particularly in a case like this, where the agency decision isn't even finalized. While litigation in lower courts is to be expected, it's not even clear that the Supreme Court will take up the case at all. The certainty expressed by Verrilli and Gershengorn is less surprising when you consider that their white paper was funded by USTelecom and NCTA -- The Internet & Television Association, two broadband industry trade groups that sued the Obama-era FCC in a failed attempt to overturn the net neutrality rules. The groups -- which represent firms like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter -- eventually got their way when then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal of the rules in 2017. But the industry-funded white paper has gotten plenty of attention, and the FCC is keenly aware of the so-called "major questions doctrine" that it describes. The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which is pending a commission vote, will seek public comment on how the major questions doctrine might affect Title II regulation and net neutrality rules that would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

"34% of Californians say they are considering moving out of the state due to housing costs," according to statistics from a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California.

It's a nonprofit think tank founded in 1994 "to inform and improve public policy in California through independent, objective, nonpartisan research." (Founded with a grant from Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, it also gets funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation). The report's startling conclusion? "After a century of explosive growth, California is likely to become a slow-growing state." After the year 2030 California's seniors (older than 65) are expected to outnumber its children. "In 2020, California had nearly four residents ages 18-64 for every adult 65 and older. This ratio is expected to drop to 2.8 by 2030 and 2.2 by 2060, if current trends continue."

Births are outpacing deaths by over 106,000 people a year. (Even during the pandemic California had a lower COVID mortality rate than most states.) And international immigration remained a net positive with a 90,000-person increase in 2022. Yet all of this was offset in 2022 by a net loss of 407,000 people migrating out of the state.

California already has a population of 39 million — but the full report cites July 2023 projections from the state's Department of Finance that now "suggest that the state population will plateau between 39 and 40 million residents in the long term."

The caption on one graph notes that California "is losing households at all income levels." [W]hile the majority of domestic outmigrants are lower- and middle-income, an increasing proportion of higher-income Californians are also exiting the state. The "new normal" of remote work in many white-collar professions has enabled some higher-income workers to move. Politics might also play a role, as conservatives are much more likely than liberals to say they have considered leaving the state.
One other factor: Declining birth and fertility rates are a nationwide, even a global, phenomenon as economic and social events have changed the status of women and their access to educational and job opportunities. Total fertility rates — the number of births the average woman will have in her lifetime — have fallen across the U.S. in recent decades. No state has a rate at or above 2.1, the level necessary to maintain a population's current size (not taking immigration and migration into account), but California's fertility rate has fallen faster than most. In 2008 its rate was above the national average (2.15); by 2020 it fell to the seventh-lowest (1.52).

The declining birth rate among young adults in their 20s is the biggest driver of the fertility rate decline. One major factor is that 20-somethings are now less likely to get married, which can affect decisions to have children... In the past, higher birth rates among immigrants also helped offset lower birth rates among US-born Californians, though more recently birth rates among immigrants have declined, reflecting patterns in sending countries.

Since 2004 October has been designated "Cybersecurity Awareness Month" in America, "a collaborative effort between government and industry to enhance cybersecurity awareness, encourage actions by the public to reduce online risk and generate discussion on cyber threats on a national and global scale."

That's according to America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (or CISA), the operational lead for federal cybersecurity and national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience (specifically designed for collaboration and partnership). It's why the NSA is publicizing the ten most common cybersecurity misconfigurations in large organizations.

But in addition, for consumers CISA is introducing a new program this year that "promotes behavioral change across the Nation, with a particular focus on how individuals, families and small to medium-sized businesses can Secure Our World by focusing on the four critical actions..." In a video the director of America's cyberdefense agency calls them steps "that everyone can take to stay safe online."

• Use Strong Passwords, "meaning long, random, and unique to each account. And use a password manager to generate and to save them."

• Turn on Multi-Factor Authentication on All Accounts That Offer It. "You need more than a password on your most important accounts, like email, social media, and financial accounts."

• Recognize and Report Phishing. "Be cautious of unsolicited emails, texts, or calls asking you for personal information, and don't click on links or open attachments from unknown sources.

• Update Your Software. "In fact, enable automatic updates on your software, so the latest security patches just keep your devices continuously up-to-date."

The video ends by noting CISA is asking tech companies and software developers to create products that are "secure by design."

"And let's secure our families by ensuring that our loved ones know what to look for and how to stay safe online."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders...

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence... The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V...

Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."
One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.

"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."