A U.S.-born chip technology called RISC-V has become critical to China's ambitions. Washington is debating whether and how to limit the technology. From a report: It evolved from a university computer lab in California to a foundation for myriad chips that handle computing chores. RISC-V essentially provides a kind of common language for designing processors that are found in devices like smartphones, disk drives, Wi-Fi routers and tablets. RISC-V has ignited a new debate in Washington in recent months about how far the United States can or should go as it steadily expands restrictions on exporting technology to China that could help advance its military. That's because RISC-V, which can be downloaded from the internet for free, has become a central tool for Chinese companies and government institutions hoping to match U.S. prowess in designing semiconductors.

Last month, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party -- in an effort spearheaded by Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin -- recommended that an interagency government committee study potential risks of RISC-V. Congressional aides have met with members of the Biden administration about the technology, and lawmakers and their aides have discussed extending restrictions to stop U.S. citizens from aiding China on RISC-V, according to congressional staff members. The Chinese Communist Party is "already attempting to use RISC-V's design architecture to undermine our export controls," Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the House select committee, said in a statement. He added that RISC-V's participants should be focused on advancing technology and "not the geopolitical interests of the Chinese Communist Party."

Arm Holdings, a British company that sells competing chip technology, has also lobbied officials to consider restrictions on RISC-V, three people with knowledge of the situation said. Biden administration officials have concerns about China's use of RISC-V but are wary about potential complications with trying to regulate the technology, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The debate over RISC-V is complicated because the technology was patterned after open-source software, the free programs like Linux that allow any developer to view and modify the original code used to make them. Such programs have prompted multiple competitors to innovate and reduce the market power of any single vendor.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has banned the data broker X-Mode Social from sharing or selling users' sensitive location data, the federal regulator said Tuesday. From a report: The first of its kind settlement prohibits X-Mode, now known as Outlogic, from sharing and selling users' sensitive information to others. The settlement will also require the data broker to delete or destroy all the location data it previously collected, along with any products produced from this data, unless the company obtains consumer consent or ensures the data has been de-identified. X-Mode buys and sells access to the location data collected from ordinary phone apps. While just one of many organizations in the multibillion-dollar data broker industry, X-Mode faced scrutiny for selling access to the commercial location data of Americans' past movements to the U.S. government and military contractors. Soon after, Apple and Google told developers to remove X-Mode from their apps or face a ban from the app stores.

Jonathan Henry, a vice president at the University of Maine at Augusta, is hoping that an email will arrive this month. He is also sort of dreading it. The message, if it comes, will tell him that U.S. News & World Report has again ranked his university's online programs among the nation's best. History suggests the email will also prod the university toward paying U.S. News, through a licensing agent, thousands of dollars for the right to advertise its rankings. The New York Times: For more than a year, U.S. News has been embroiled in another caustic dispute about the worthiness of college rankings -- this time with dozens of law and medical schools vowing not to supply data to the publisher, saying that rankings sometimes unduly influence the priorities of universities. But school records and interviews show that colleges nevertheless feed the rankings industry, collectively pouring millions of dollars into it.

Many lower-profile colleges are straining to curb enrollment declines and counter shrinking budgets. And any endorsement that might attract students, administrators say, is enticing. Maine at Augusta spent $15,225 last year for the right to market U.S. News "badges" -- handsome seals with U.S. News's logo -- commemorating three honors: the 61st-ranked online bachelor's program for veterans, the 79th-ranked online bachelor's in business and the 104th-ranked online bachelor's. Mr. Henry, who oversees the school's enrollment management and marketing, said there was just too much of a risk of being outshined and out-marketed by competing schools that pay to flash their shiny badges. "If we could ignore them, wouldn't that be grand?" Mr. Henry said of U.S. News. "But you can't ignore the leviathan that they are."

Nor can colleges ignore how families evaluate schools. "The Amazonification of how we judge a product's quality," he said, has infiltrated higher education, as consumers and prospective students alike seek order from chaos. The money flows from schools large and small. The University of Nebraska at Kearney, which has about 6,000 students, bought a U.S. News "digital marketing license" for $8,500 in September. The Citadel, South Carolina's military college, moved in August to spend $50,000 for the right to use its rankings online, in print and on television, among other places. In 2022, the University of Alabama shelled out $32,525 to promote its rankings in programs like engineering and nursing. Critics believe that the payments, from schools of any size and wealth, enable and incentivize a ranking system they see as harmful.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russian hackers were inside Ukrainian telecoms giant Kyivstar's system from at least May last year in a cyberattack that should serve as a "big warning" to the West, Ukraine's cyber spy chief told Reuters. The hack, one of the most dramatic since Russia's full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, knocked out services provided by Ukraine's biggest telecoms operator for some 24 million users for days from Dec. 12. In an interview, Illia Vitiuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) cybersecurity department, disclosed exclusive details about the hack, which he said caused "disastrous" destruction and aimed to land a psychological blow and gather intelligence. "This attack is a big message, a big warning, not only to Ukraine, but for the whole Western world to understand that no one is actually untouchable," he said. He noted Kyivstar was a wealthy, private company that invested a lot in cybersecurity.

The attack wiped "almost everything", including thousands of virtual servers and PCs, he said, describing it as probably the first example of a destructive cyberattack that "completely destroyed the core of a telecoms operator." During its investigation, the SBU found the hackers probably attempted to penetrate Kyivstar in March or earlier, he said in a Zoom interview on Dec. 27. "For now, we can say securely, that they were in the system at least since May 2023," he said. "I cannot say right now, since what time they had ... full access: probably at least since November." The SBU assessed the hackers would have been able to steal personal information, understand the locations of phones, intercept SMS-messages and perhaps steal Telegram accounts with the level of access they gained, he said. A Kyivstar spokesperson said the company was working closely with the SBU to investigate the attack and would take all necessary steps to eliminate future risks, adding: "No facts of leakage of personal and subscriber data have been revealed."

Investigating the attack is harder because of the wiping of Kyivstar's infrastructure. Vitiuk said he was "pretty sure" it was carried out by Sandworm, a Russian military intelligence cyberwarfare unit that has been linked to cyberattacks in Ukraine and elsewhere. A year ago, Sandworm penetrated a Ukrainian telecoms operator, but was detected by Kyiv because the SBU had itself been inside Russian systems, Vitiuk said, declining to identify the company. The earlier hack has not been previously reported. Vitiuk said SBU investigators were still working to establish how Kyivstar was penetrated or what type of trojan horse malware could have been used to break in, adding that it could have been phishing, someone helping on the inside or something else. If it was an inside job, the insider who helped the hackers did not have a high level of clearance in the company, as the hackers made use of malware used to steal hashes of passwords, he said. Samples of that malware have been recovered and are being analysed, he added.

China's top diplomat warned the US that decoupling would be "self defeating" as the country set out to implement a recent agreement made between their leaders. From a report: Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking on Friday at an event to mark the 45th anniversary of US-China diplomatic relations, cited a slew of initiatives that reflect improved ties including streamlined visas for US travelers, a counternarcotics working group to battle the flow of the synthetic fentanyl to the US, and the sending of pandas to the US by the end of the year. "Any decoupling attempt to stem the tide will only be counterproductive and self defeating," Wang said.

David Meale, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, joined Friday's event as charge d'affaires with Ambassador Nicholas Burns out of town. Tensions between China and the US started to ease after President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in November. The talks resulted in a resumption of high-level military-to-military ties, a promise to collaborate on the fentanyl problem and a commitment to boost interactions between people in the two countries.

Retired officers and departing defense officials are flocking to investment firms that are pushing the government to provide more money to defense-technology startups. The New York Times: When Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and other top officials assembled for an event this month at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, they walked into a lesson in how the high-stakes world of Pentagon lobbying is being altered by the rise of defense technology startups. Inside, at this elite gathering near Los Angeles of senior leaders from government and the arms industry, was a rapidly growing group of participants: former Pentagon officials and military officers who have joined venture capital firms and are trying to use their connections in Washington to cash in on the potential to sell a new generation of weapons.

They represent a new path through the revolving door that has always connected the Defense Department and the military contracting business. Retiring generals and departing top Pentagon officials once migrated regularly to the big established weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Now they are increasingly flocking to venture capital firms that have collectively pumped billions of dollars into Silicon Valley-style startups offering the Pentagon new war-fighting tools like autonomous killer drones, hypersonic jets and space surveillance equipment.

This new route to the private sector is one indicator of the ways in which the United States is trying to become more agile in harnessing technological advances to maintain military superiority over China and other rivals. But the close ties between venture capital firms and Defense Department decision makers have also put a new twist on long-running questions about industry access and influence at a time when the Pentagon is under pressure to rethink how it allocates its huge procurement budget.

NBC News reports that the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. in February "used an American internet service provider to communicate, according to two current and one former U.S. official familiar with the assessment."

it used the American ISP connection "to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation." Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.

The Biden administration sought a highly secretive court order from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect intelligence about it while it was over the U.S., according to multiple current and former U.S. officials. How the court ruled has not been disclosed. Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon as it flew over the U.S. and as it sent and received messages to and from China, the officials said, including communications sent via the American internet service provider...

The previously unreported U.S. effort to monitor the balloon's communications could be one reason Biden administration officials have insisted that they got more intelligence out of the device than it got as it flew over the U.S. Senior administration officials have said the U.S. was able to protect sensitive sites on the ground because they closely tracked the balloon's projected flight path. The U.S. military moved or obscured sensitive equipment so the balloon could not collect images or video while it was overhead.
NBC News is not naming the internet service provider, but says it denied that the Chinese balloon had used its network, "a determination it said was based on its own investigation and discussions it had with U.S. officials." The balloon contained "multiple antennas, including an array most likely able to collect and geolocate communications," according to reports from a U.S. State Depratment official cited by NBC News in February. "It was also powered by enormous solar panels that generated enough power to operate intelligence collection sensors, the official said.

Reached for comment this week, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told NBC News that the balloon was just a weather balloon that had accidentally drifted into American airspace.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers have developed a new, lightweight foam made from carbon nanotubes that, when used as a helmet liner, absorbed the kinetic energy caused by an impact almost 30 times better than liners currently used in US military helmets. The foam could prevent or significantly reduce the likelihood of concussion in military personnel and sportspeople. Among sportspeople and military vets, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the major causes of permanent disability and death. Injury statistics show that the majority of TBIs, of which concussion is a subtype, are associated with oblique impacts, which subject the brain to a combination of linear and rotational kinetic energy forces and cause shearing of the delicate brain tissue.

To improve their effectiveness, helmets worn by military personnel and sportspeople must employ a liner material that limits both. This is where researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison come in. Determined to prevent -- or lessen the effect of -- TBIs caused by knocks to the body and head, they've developed a new lightweight foam material for use as a helmet liner. For the current study, Thevamaran built upon his previous research into vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) foams -- carefully arranged layers of carbon cylinders one atom thick -- and their exceptional shock-absorbing capabilities. Current helmets attempt to reduce rotational motion by allowing a sliding motion between the wearer's head and the helmet during impact. However, the researchers say this movement doesn't dissipate energy in shear and can jam when severely compressed following a blow. Instead, their novel foam doesn't rely on sliding layers.

VACNT foam sidesteps this shortcoming via its unique deformation mechanism. Under compression, the VACNTs undergo collective sequentially progressive buckling, from increased compliance at low shear strain levels to a stiffening response at high strain levels. The formed compression buckles unfold completely, enabling the VACNT foam to accommodate large shear strains before returning to a near initial state when the load is removed. The researchers found that at 25% precompression, the foam exhibited almost 30 times higher energy dissipation in shear -- up to 50% shear strain -- than polyurethane-based elastomeric foams of similar density. The study has been published in the journal Experimental Mechanics.

SpaceX on Thursday launched two rockets into orbit, only three hours apart, bringing its total number of launches to 98 in 2023. Space.com reports: The first SpaceX mission to take to the skies Thursday (Dec. 28) was a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the U.S. military's secretive X-37B space plane, designed mission USSF-52. That blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT on Dec. 29). This marked the second Falcon Heavy flight of 2023. Second up on the launch docket for Thursday, hours later, was a Falcon 9 liftoff carrying 23 SpaceX Starlink units to low Earth orbit from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This launch took place at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 GMT on Dec. 29). This was SpaceX's 98th and final launch of 2023, and the 96th flight for a Falcon 9 rocket this year.

SpaceX's 97th launch overall for this year marked the seventh flight for X-37B, but the first time the space plane hitched a lift atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. The X-37B/Falcon Heavy launch had been scrubbed several times previously due to bad weather and an issue with ground equipment. The launch of 23 Starlink broadband satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida that capped off 2023 was also the 96th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket during this year. SpaceX's next launch is targeted for Jan. 2, 2024 and will see a further 21 Starlink satellites lift to orbit to join the over 5,500 internet supplying units currently orbiting Earth.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fast Company: Providers of critical infrastructure in the United States are doing a sloppy job of defending against cyber intrusions, the National Security Council tells Fast Company, pointing to recent Iran-linked attacks on U.S. water utilities that exploited basic security lapses [earlier this month]. The security council tells Fast Company it's also aware of recent intrusions by hackers linked to China's military at American infrastructure entities that include water and energy utilities in multiple states.

Neither the Iran-linked or China-linked attacks affected critical systems or caused disruptions, according to reports.

"We're seeing companies and critical services facing increased cyber threats from malicious criminals and countries," Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging tech, tells Fast Company. The White House had been urging infrastructure providers to upgrade their cyber defenses before these recent hacks, but "clearly, by the most recent success of the criminal cyberattacks, more work needs to be done," she says... The attacks hit at least 11 different entities using Unitronics devices across the United States, which included six local water facilities, a pharmacy, an aquatics center, and a brewery...

Some of the compromised devices had been connected to the open internet with a default password of "1111," federal authorities say, making it easy for hackers to find them and gain access. Fixing that "doesn't cost any money," Neuberger says, "and those are the kinds of basic things that we really want companies urgently to do." But cybersecurity experts say these attacks point to a larger issue: the general vulnerability of the technology that powers physical infrastructure. Much of the hardware was developed before the internet and, though they were retrofitted with digital capabilities, still "have insufficient security controls," says Gary Perkins, chief information security officer at cybersecurity firm CISO Global. Additionally, many infrastructure facilities prioritize "operational ease of use rather than security," since many vendors often need to access the same equipment, says Andy Thompson, an offensive cybersecurity expert at CyberArk. But that can make the systems equally easy for attackers to exploit: freely available web tools allow anyone to generate lists of hardware connected to the public internet, like the Unitronics devices used by water companies.

"Not making critical infrastructure easily accessible via the internet should be standard practice," Thompson says.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: In February, a Canadian cybersecurity firm delivered an ominous forecast to the U.S. Department of Defense. America's secrets — actually, everybody's secrets — are now at risk of exposure, warned the team from Quantum Defen5e (QD5). QD5's executive vice president, Tilo Kunz, told officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency that possibly as soon as 2025, the world would arrive at what has been dubbed "Q-day," the day when quantum computers make current encryption methods useless. Machines vastly more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers would be capable of cracking the codes that protect virtually all modern communication, he told the agency, which is tasked with safeguarding the U.S. military's communications.

In the meantime, Kunz told the panel, a global effort to plunder data is underway so that intercepted messages can be decoded after Q-day in what he described as "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, according to a recording of the session the agency later made public. Militaries would see their long-term plans and intelligence gathering exposed to enemies. Businesses could have their intellectual property swiped. People's health records would be laid bare... One challenge for the keepers of digital secrets is that whenever Q-day comes, quantum codebreakers are unlikely to announce their breakthrough. Instead, they're likely to keep quiet, so they can exploit the advantage as long as possible.
The article adds that "a scramble is on to protect critical data. Washington and its allies are working on new encryption standards known as post-quantum cryptography... Beijing is trying to pioneer quantum communications networks, a technology theoretically impossible to hack, according to researchers...

"In a quantum communications network, users exchange a secret key or code on subatomic particles called photons, allowing them to encrypt and decrypt data. This is called quantum key distribution, or QKD."

Of the 15,000 satellites humans have sent into space, "just over half are still functioning," reports CNN. "The rest, after running out of fuel and ending their serviceable life, have either burned up in the atmosphere or are still orbiting the planet as useless hunks of metal" — scattering "an aura of space junk around the planet."

"One way to start tackling the problem would be to stop producing more junk — by refueling satellites rather than decommissioning them once they run out of power." "Right now you can't refuel a satellite on orbit," says Daniel Faber, CEO of Orbit Fab. But his Colorado-based company wants to change that... "The lack of fuel creates a whole paradigm where people design their spacecraft missions around moving as little as possible. That means that we can't have tow trucks in orbit to get rid of any debris that happens to be left. We can't have repairs and maintenance, we can't upgrade anything. We can't inspect anything if it breaks. There are so many things we can't do and we operate in a very constrained way. That's the solution we're trying to deliver...."

Orbit Fab has no plans to address the existing fleet of satellites. Instead, it wants to focus on those that have yet to launch, and equip them with a standardized port — called RAFTI, for Rapid Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface — which would dramatically simplify the refueling operation, keeping the price tag down. "What we're looking at doing is creating a low-cost architecture," says Faber. "There's no commercially available fuel port for refueling a satellite in orbit yet. For all the big aspirations we have about a bustling space economy, really, what we're working on is the gas cap — we are a gas cap company." Orbit Fab, which advertises itself with the tagline "gas stations in space," is working on a system that includes the fuel port, refueling shuttles — which would deliver the fuel to a satellite in need — and refueling tankers, or orbital gas stations, which the shuttles could pick up the fuel from. It has advertised a price of $20 million for on-orbit delivery of hydrazine, the most common satellite propellant.

In 2018, the company launched two testbeds to the International Space Station to test the interfaces, the pumps and the plumbing. In 2021 it launched Tanker-001 Tenzing, a fuel depot demonstrator that informed the design of the current hardware. The next launch is now scheduled for 2024. "We are delivering fuel in geostationary orbit for a mission that is being undertaken by the Air Force Research Lab," says Faber. "At the moment, they're treating it as a demonstration, but it's getting a lot of interest from across the US government, from people that realize the value of refueling." Orbit Fab's first private customer will be Astroscale, a Japanese satellite servicing company that has developed the first satellite designed for refueling. Called LEXI, it will mount RAFTI ports and is currently scheduled to launch in 2026.

According to Simone D'Amico, an associate professor of astronautics at Stanford University, who's not affiliated with Orbit Fab, on-orbit servicing is one of the keys to ensuring a safe and sustainable development of space... "The development of space infrastructure and the proliferation of space assets is reaching a critical volume that is not sustainable anymore without a change of paradigm."
"In 10 or 15 years, we'd like to be building refineries in orbit," CEO Faber tells CNN, "processing material that is launched from the ground into a range of chemicals that people want to buy: air and water for commercial space stations, 3D printer feedstock minerals to grow plants. We want to be the industrial chemical supplier to the emerging commercial space industry."

Alex Williams reports via The New York Times: Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99. Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is scheduled to present a major exhibition of her work in February. Ms. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947. While her computer-aided paintings and drawings, which drew inspiration from geometric works by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, were eventually exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, her work was not always embraced early in her career.

Ms. Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer. In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called "Machine Imaginaire" -- imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper. She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and '60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was "very complicated and expensive," she once said, adding, "They were selling calculation time in seconds." [...]

Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer. One early series, "Interruptions," involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: "She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines." Another series, "(Des)Ordres" (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating.

Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing "1% of Disorder," another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. "I love order, but I can't stand it," she told Mr. Obrist. "I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words." And so, she concluded, "chaos, perhaps, came from this." [...] Her career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. She began using computers with screens, which allowed her to instantly assess the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens, it was "like a conversation, like a real pictorial process," she said in a recent interview with the generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. "You move the 'brush' and you see immediately if it suits you or not." [...] Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with "Themes and Variations," a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with the artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby's. The series fetched $1.2 million in sales.

David Shepardson reports via Reuters: U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she expects to make around a dozen semiconductor chips funding awards within the next year, including multi-billion dollar announcements that could drastically reshape U.S. chip production. She announced the first award on Monday -- $35 million to a BAE Systems facility in Hampshire to produce chips for fighter planes from the "Chips for America" semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program approved by Congress in August 2022.

"Next year we'll get into some of the bigger ones with leading-edge fabs," Raimondo told reporters. "A year from now I think we will have made 10 or 12 similar announcements, some of them multi-billion dollar announcements." In an interview with Reuters, Raimondo said that the number of awards could go higher than 12. She said she wants the percentage of semiconductors produced in the United States to rise from about 12% to closer to 20% -- though that is still down from 40% in 1990 -- and to have at least two "leading-edge" U.S. manufacturing clusters. In addition, she wants the U.S. to have cutting-edge memory and packaging production and to "meet the military's needs for current and mature" chips. Raimondo noted that the U.S. currently does not have any cutting-edge manufacturing production and wants to get that to about 10%.

According to Reuters, Ukraine's biggest mobile network was hit by "what appeared to be the largest cyber attack of the war with Russia so far," severing mobile and internet services for millions of people and knocking out the air raid alert system in parts of Kyiv. From the report: Kyivstar has 24.3 million mobile subscribers - more than half of Ukraine's population - as well as over 1.1 million home internet subscribers. Its CEO Oleksandr Komarov said the attack was "a result of" the war with Russia, although he did not say which Russian body he believed to be responsible, and that the company's IT infrastructure had been "partially destroyed." "(The attack) significantly damaged (our) infrastructure, limited access, we could not counter it at the virtual level, so we shut down Kyivstar physically to limit the enemy's access," Komarov said.

A source close to Ukraine's cyber defense also said that Russia was suspected to be the source of the attack, but no specific group had been identified. "It's definitely a state actor," said the source, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue, adding that data cable interception showed "a lot of Russian controlled traffic directed at these networks." "There's no ransom. It's all destruction. So it's not a financially motivated attack," said the source. Ukrainian officials said that air raid alert systems in more than 75 settlements in the central Kyiv region were affected by the cyber attack.

Komarov said two databases containing customer data had been damaged and were currently locked. "The most important thing is that the personal data of users has not been compromised," Kyivstar said in its statement, promising to compensate customers for loss of access to services. Meanwhile, Ukraine's defense intelligence director (GUR) said it infected thousands of servers belonging to Russia's state tax service with malware, and destroyed databases and backups. "According to GUR's statement published Tuesday, the attack led to the 'complete destruction' of the agency's infrastructure," reports The Record. "GUR claimed they destroyed configuration files 'which for years ensured the functioning of Russia's tax system.'"

"The United States military is preparing to launch its secretive X-37B space plane on a seventh mission in orbit," reports NBC News.

Shaped like a small space shuttle, "It's an itty-bitty spaceplane, not quite 30 feet long and under 10 feet tall," writes the Washington Post, "with a pair of stubby wings and a rounded, bulldog-like nose." Space.com says the launch window for the uncrewed vehicle opens Monday at 8:14 p.m. EST.

From NBC News: For the first time, the X-37B will ride into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Since its debut more than a decade ago, the X-37B has been a source of intrigue within the space community, mostly owing to the mysterious nature of its activities in low Earth orbit. Despite not knowing its true purpose or location, skywatchers have occasionally spotted and photographed the space plane in the night sky using telescopes... The military is tight-lipped about such operations, but the Space Force said the X-37B missions "are key to ensuring safe and responsible operations in space for all users of the space domain..."
The "U.S. Space Force says that launching on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket will allow testing "in new orbital regimes, experimenting with space domain awareness technologies and investigating the radiation effects to NASA materials."

The Washington Post notes that "The reference about 'space domain awareness' could mean that it will be keeping an eye on other satellites, potentially watching for threats": At least one part of the mission is known. The vehicle will "expose plant seeds to the harsh radiation environment of long-duration spaceflight" in an experiment for NASA. In the past, the Pentagon has also used the X-37B to test some of its cutting edge technologies, including a small solar panel designed to transform solar energy into microwaves, a technology that one day could allow energy harnessed in space to be beamed back to Earth...

If Sunday's X-37B mission is like previous ones, the spaceplane could be in space for a while. Its first flight, which launched in 2010, lasted 224 days.

After billionaire Bill Ackman demanded three college presidents "resign in disgrace," that post on X — excerpting their testimony before a U.S. Congressional committee — has now been viewed more than 104 million times, provoking a variety of reactions.

Saturday afternoon, one of the three college presidents resigned — University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.

Politico reports that the Republican-led Committee now "will be investigating Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania after their institutions' leaders failed to sufficiently condemn student protests calling for 'Jewish genocide.'" The BBC reports a wealthy UPenn donor reportedly withdrew a stock grant worth $100 million.

But after watching the entire Congressional hearing, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that she'd seen a "more understandable" context: In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap [Congresswoman Elise] Stefanik laid. "You understand that the use of the term 'intifada' in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?" she asked Claudine Gay of Harvard. Gay responded that such language was "abhorrent."

Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard's code of conduct. "Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, 'From the river to the sea' or 'intifada,' advocating for the murder of Jews?" Gay repeated that such "hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me," but said action would be taken only "when speech crosses into conduct." So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you're disgusted by slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," their meaning is contested...
Liberal blogger Josh Marshall argues that "While groups like Hamas certainly use the word [intifada] with a strong eliminationist meaning it is simply not the case that the term consistently or usually or mostly refers to genocide. It's just not. Stefanik's basic equation was and is simply false and the university presidents were maladroit enough to fall into her trap."

The Wall Street Journal published an investigation the day after the hearing. A political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley hired a survey firm to poll 250 students across the U.S. from "a variety of backgrounds" — and the results were surprising: A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported "definitely" supporting "from the river to the sea" because "Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side." Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to "probably not." Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view... In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting "from the river to the sea" to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region's geography, history, or demography.
More about the phrase from the Associated Press: Many Palestinian activists say it's a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel's destruction... By 2012, it was clear that Hamas had claimed the slogan in its drive to claim land spanning Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank... The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter... [Since 1997 the U.S. government has considered Hamas a terrorist organization.]

"A Palestine between the river to the sea leaves not a single inch for Israel," read an open letter signed by 30 Jewish news outlets around the world and released on Wednesday... Last month, Vienna police banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration, citing the fact that the phrase "from the river to the sea" was mentioned in invitations and characterizing it as a call to violence. And in Britain, the Labour party issued a temporary punishment to a member of Parliament, Andy McDonald, for using the phrase during a rally at which he called for a stop to bombardment.
As the controversy rages on, Ackman's X timeline now includes an official response reposted from a college that wasn't called to testify — Stanford University: In the context of the national discourse, Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples. That statement would clearly violate Stanford's Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.
Ackman also retweeted this response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong. i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it. but it is so fucked.
Wednesday UPenn's president announced they'd immediately consider a new change in policy," in an X post viewed 38.7 million times: For decades under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn's policies have been guided by the [U.S.] Constitution and the law. In today's world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated. Penn must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies, and provost Jackson and I will immediately convene a process to do so. As president, I'm committed to a safe, secure, and supportive environment so all members of our community can thrive. We can and we will get this right. Thank you.
The next day the university's business school called on Magill to resign. And Saturday afternoon, Magill resigned.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Wednesday, a group of military and military-adjacent scientists gathered at a conference to discuss the possibility of creating a super soldier. They discussed breeding programs, Marvel movies, The Matrix, and the various technologies the Pentagon is researching with the goal of creating a real life super soldier complete with cybernetic implants and thorny ethical issues surrounding bodily autonomy. The talk happened at the The Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference, or I/ITSEC, an annual conference where military leaders come to talk shop and simulation corporations gather to demo new products. It's the kind of place where execs and generals don virtual reality helmets and talk about the virtues of VR sims. You could even catch members of congress talking about the importance of simulations and war. "Winning the war of cognition by pushing readiness and lethality boundaries," reads the official poster for the 2019 I/ITSEC.

It was here, in Orlando, Florida, where five illustrious members of the military-industrial complex gathered to discuss super soldiers at the "Black Swan -- Dawn of the Super Soldier" panel. Lauren Reinerman-Jones, an analyst from Defense Acquisition University, moderated a panel that included U.S. Army Developmental Command representatives George Matook and Irwin Hudson, research scientist J.J. Walcutt, and Richard McKinley, who works on "non-invasive brain stimulation" for the Air Force. I/TSEC advertised the panel in its program with a picture of the experts next to a posing Master Chief, the genetically enhanced super soldier from the Halo video game franchise. Throughout the conversation, which covered the nuts and bolts of what's possible now and what's about to be possible along with various ethical concerns, references to science fiction and fantasy stories were common. Some of the ideas discussed include synthetic blood, pain-numbing stimulants, limb regeneration, and non-invasive brain stimulation. The discussion references the John Scalzi book about a near future where Earth wages war by offering the elderly new youthful bodies in exchange for military service.

They also discuss the ethical and legal concerns surrounding the creation of super soldiers, as well as the societal norms and potential risks. "What risks are we willing to take? There's all these wonderful things we can do," Matook said. "We don't want a fair fight. We really don't, this is not an honorable thing. We want our guys to be over-matching any possible enemies, right? So why aren't we giving them pharmaceutical enhancements? Why are we making them run all week when we could just be giving them steroids? There's all these other things you could do if you change societal norms and ethics. And laws, in some cases."

The discussion concludes with considerations about the long-term effects, reversibility of enhancements, and the potential ownership of enhanced individuals by the government. "So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up? What happens? Or are they just literally owned by the government for life," asks Reinerman-Jones. Hudson replied with a grim joke: "Termination."

Traumatic memories had their own neural mechanism, brain scans showed, which may help explain their vivid and intrusive nature. From a report: At the root of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a memory that cannot be controlled. It may intrude on everyday activity, thrusting a person into the middle of a horrifying event, or surface as night terrors or flashbacks. Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories. A group of researchers at Yale University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai set out to find empirical evidence of those differences.

The team conducted brain scans of 28 people with PTSD while they listened to recorded narrations of their own memories. Some of the recorded memories were neutral, some were simply "sad," and some were traumatic. The brain scans found clear differences, the researchers reported in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories. When the same people listened to their traumatic memories -- of sexual assaults, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks -- the hippocampus was not involved.

[...] Indeed, the authors conclude in the paper, "traumatic memories are not experienced as memories as such," but as "fragments of prior events, subjugating the present moment." The traumatic memories appeared to engage a different area of the brain -- the posterior cingulate cortex, or P.C.C., which is usually involved in internally directed thought, like introspection or daydreaming. The more severe the person's PTSD symptoms were, the more activity appeared in the P.C.C. What is striking about this finding is that the P.C.C. is not known as a memory region, but one that is engaged with "processing of internal experience," Dr. Schiller said.

China is waging a growing number of cyberattacks on neighboring Taiwan, according to cybersecurity experts at Alphabet's Google. From a report: Google has observed a "massive increase" in Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan in the last six months or so, said Kate Morgan, a senior engineering manager in Google's threat analysis division, which monitors government-sponsored hacking campaigns. Morgan warned that Chinese hackers are employing tactics that make their work difficult to track, such as breaking into small home and office internet routers and repurposing them to wage attacks while masking their true origin.

"The number of groups in China that are performing hacking and trying to get into technology companies or get into cloud customers is huge," Morgan said. "I don't have the exact number, but it is probably over 100 groups that we are tracking just out of China alone." The hackers are going "after everything," including defense sector, government and private industry on the island, she said. Google's findings come as concerns have grown over the prospect of a conflict in Taiwan. The relationship between the US -- Taiwan's top military backer -- and China has deteriorated in recent years over a wide range of issues including Taiwan, human rights and a race to dominate advanced technologies such as chips, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.