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Submission + - U.S. Supreme Court EPA Ruling Cited in Challenge to DOJ's OPT Authority

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a June 30th filing in a case challenging the U.S. Department of Justice's authority over Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs (e.g, see Bill Gates's Wish Is Homeland Security's Command), attorneys for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers advised the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the EPA lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution from existing power plants.

It's the latest salvo fired in tiny WashTech's ongoing OPT legal battle that pits it against the U.S. DOJ, an alliance of 60 businesses, trade associations, and organizations (led by Mark Zuckerberg's billionaire-backed FWD.us PAC), and 150+ U.S. universities and colleges whose attorneys have filed Amicus Briefs with the Court in support of Optional Practical Training. Attorneys for some of the nation's largest tech, trade, and manufacturing lobbying groups have also been granted leave by the Court to intervene as defendants in the case to help the DOJ quash WashTech. "Members of ITI would incur significant direct and indirect costs if the OPT program were declared unlawful," argued lawyers in 2019 on behalf of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Microsoft. "Member companies would lose thousands of employees who depend on OPT for employment authorization. Those businesses would face significant costs in hiring new workers to fill these critical jobs."

The July 15th DOJ response to the WashTech filing appeared to suggest (IANAL) to the Court that any comparisons to the EPA ruling should be ignored, since that was an "extraordinary case" involving a potentially huge economic impact. While the DOJ filing did not attempt to estimate the economic impact of filling the "773,844 active online job postings" for open computing jobs that was cited as important in the 2021 Amicus Brief in support of OPT signed by tech companies and others, the CEO of tech giant-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org estimated the value of filling just 500K tech jobs at $1.7 trillion in a 2017 pitch ("A trillion-dollar opportunity for America") for Federal support of K-12 computer science education to the incoming Trump administration (in 2012, Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith unveiled the company's National Talent Strategy, "a two-pronged approach that will couple long-term improvements in STEM education in the United States with targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms" to address tech workforce needs). The importance of OPT to the economy was also underscored in the Amicus Brief signed by the universities and colleges, which advised the Court that "the labor market would lose 443,000 jobs" even if OPT was not eliminated but just reduced to 40% of its current size.

Submission + - Blistering Data Transmission Record Clocks Over 1 Petabit Per Second (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission – a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will “only” get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.

The new record was set by researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores – the glass tubes that transmit the signals – instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands – the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.

Submission + - Linux Random Number Generator Sees Major Improvements (zx2c4.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Linux kernel's random number generator has seen its first set of major improvements in over a decade, improving everything from the cryptography to the interface used. Not only does it finally retire SHA-1 (in favor of BLAKE2s), but it also at long last unites `/dev/random` and `/dev/urandom`, finally ending years of Slashdot banter and debate:

The most significant outward-facing change is that /dev/random and /dev/urandom are now exactly the same thing, with no differences between them at all, thanks to their unification in random: block in /dev/urandom. This removes a significant age-old crypto footgun, already accomplished by other operating systems eons ago. [...] The upshot is that every Internet message board disagreement on /dev/random versus /dev/urandom has now been resolved by making everybody simultaneously right! Now, for the first time, these are both the right choice to make, in addition to getrandom(0); they all return the same bytes with the same semantics. There are only right choices.

Submission + - Installing a third party OS on M1 Macs just got easier

Submitted by mrwireless
mrwireless writes: The Asahi Linux team is very close to releasing an installer for their flavour of Linux that can run on Apple's M1 chip.

It once again seems Apple is informally supportive of these efforts, as the recent release of OS Monterey 12.3 makes the process even simpler. As Twitter user Matthew Garrett writes:

"People who hate UEFI should read https://github.com/AsahiLinux/... — Apple made deliberate design choices that allow third party OSes to run on M1 hardware without compromising security, and with much less closed code than on basically any modern x86."

Submission + - How a Russian cyberwar in Ukraine could ripple out globally (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The tools of cyber warfare may not know what computers and devices are where. In the event of hostilities breaking out in a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the tools used to disable Ukraine's infrastructure prior to an attack may have second and third order consequences in other countries.

Submission + - Corporations Aren't Going to Save America

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Across various segments of American life, the private sector has begun to take on tasks big and small that one might think should be tackled by the public sector," writes Vox's Emily Stewart in Corporations Aren't Going to Save America. "The private sector is increasingly encroaching on the government’s space because the government is leaving so much space to begin with. Corporations are swooping in with solutions because the solutions coming from public officials and entities aren’t working or are nonexistent."

"It's nice that rich guys are trying to have a positive influence on the world [as are rich women]," says Stewart of billionaire philanthropy. "It's also hard not to wonder whether said rich guys shouldn’t just be taxed more, or why the US and the world are in a spot where private entities, whether it be Bill Gates’s charity or his company, are filling in such obvious public spaces."

Submission + - IT Staff got infected with COVID-19 while working unvaccinated and w/o masks. (baynews9.com) 1

Submitted by luis_a_espinal
luis_a_espinal writes: In another case of "Floriduh" being "Floriduh", a government building in Manatee County had to shut down due to an outbreak. TL;DR; it could be the Delta Variant, and this incident saw a 40% fatality rate. The county doesn't require the use of masks, even among the unvaccinated, allowing unvaccinated people to work indoors and in proximity without any form of protection. From the story:

In all, five employees of the IT department contracted the virus. Of that group, four were hospitalized and two died last week. “That’s a 40% case fatality rate,” said Dr. Scott Hopes, the county administrator. “That’s a high fatality rate.”

Submission + - Texas gov knew of natural gas shortages days before blackout, blamed wind anyway (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott’s office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor’s office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state’s electrical grid. The PUC chair’s diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

Submission + - 6th Grader Expelled for 3 Months after Zoom provided inaccurate IP address info (ajc.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: On one day in February, 11-year-old Malachi Battle was not feeling well, so he stayed home sick and attended his 6th grade classes virtually via Zoom. Strange things started happening. In one class, Malachi said he heard an unknown person yell a racial slur. Teachers said other unidentified people were trying to get into their virtual classrooms. Two days later, Malachi was suspended, accused of repeatedly trying to log into Zoom classes with threatening phrases and racial slurs in lieu of his name

Malachi’s lawyers say Gwinnett County Public Schools accused him based on an inaccurate list of students’ Internet Protocol addresses from Zoom, a problem that could repeat elsewhere since the company’s online sessions are replacing classrooms for millions of students amid the coronavirus pandemic. Chris Gilliard, a fellow with the Technology and Social Change Project of the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, had not heard of a situation similar to Malachi’s but said “it’s hugely unlikely that this is the first time” a student had been disciplined based on questionable data from Zoom.

During the “Zoom bombing” attempts, Malachi had already logged into the classes under his regular name, according to his appeal.

The school district retrieved from Zoom a list of the names and IP addresses in each waiting room, Malachi’s legal team said. The Zoom bombers’ public IP addresses matched Malachi’s — but four other students who did not appear to be Zoom bombers were also listed as having Malachi’s public IP address, an impossibility since they were not in the same house, said Scott Moulton, a Woodstock-based forensics expert hired by the attorney working on Malachi’s case.

Moulton said the school district’s technology employee who investigated should have been able to tell that many of the IP addresses in the Zoom report were wrong.

“I would have at least picked up the phone and called Zoom before hanging the life of an 11-year-old kid based on a log that looks like an error,” Moulton said.

The Zoom bombers’ local IP addresses, which identify the exact device being used, did not match Malachi’s, according to the log his attorneys provided. Nor did the local IP addresses match any of the possible sequences available under the configuration of the router in Malachi’s house, Moulton said. There were no other routers or devices in the house that could have used those local IP addresses, Moulton said.

Submission + - Antibodies to South Africa Covid Variant are Backwards Compatible (nature.com)

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: Penny Moore hoped that B.1.351 infection would trigger strong immune responses, but she was open to the possibility that this variant might be less visible to the immune system than are other strains. To find out, her team analysed antibodies from 89 people who had been hospitalized with B.1.351 infections. The researchers used a ‘pseudovirus’ — a modified form of HIV that infects cells using the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein — to measure the capacity of the antibodies to block infection.

Reassuringly, people who recovered from B.1.351 infection made as many antibodies as did those infected with earlier circulating variants. Those antibodies did a good job of blocking pseudoviruses with B.1.351 mutations. To Moore’s surprise, the antibodies also blocked other strains. These included some that were similar to the ones that B.1.351 displaced, and an immune-evading variant called P.1, identified in Brazil, that shares several mutations in common with B.1.351.

The results are a boost to nascent efforts to develop vaccines able to cope with variants such as B.1.351. Last week, updated versions of Moderna’s vaccine, based on the genetic sequence of the B.1.351 variant, were given to trial participants for the first time. Other developers, including Pfizer–BioNTech, also plan to trial vaccines based on B.1.351’s genetic sequence. “I think there’s a good possibility those vaccines might perform slightly better,” Moore says.

Submission + - Amazon's K-12 CSback Reward Program

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "A cashback reward program," Wikipedia explains, "is an incentive program operated by credit card companies where a percentage of the amount spent is paid back to the card holder." So one might argue that Amazon is operating a K-12 CSback reward program of sorts, announcing this week that it was rewarding Onondaga County with $1.75 million to fund robotics and computer science initiatives at a new STEAM high school, which comes after Amazon scored a behind-closed-doors $71 million tax break for locating a mega-size distribution center in Onondaga County. In another similarity, Wikipedia notes that "cash back reward programs result in a monetary transfer from low-income to high-income households."

Reminding communities how fortunate they are to have the company help fund CS education for their children has become a staple of Amazon's public policy PR playbook. Amazon also this week pledged to do better on diversity, equity, and inclusion, including setting a 2021 goal to "reach 1.6 million underrepresented students globally through Amazon Future Engineer with real world-inspired virtual and hands-on computer science project learning."

Submission + - Ingenuity to take first Mars flight on Monday (cnn.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: Assuming no last minute glitches, the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is scheduled to take its first flight at 3:30 AM ET on Monday, April 19th.

Ingenuity's initial flight test was cancelled when the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a "watchdog" timer expiration. This occurred as it was trying to transition the flight computer from 'Pre-Flight' to 'Flight' mode.

Results of the flight won't be known right away. Instead, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will analyze the results and have a briefing at 2 PM ET on Monday.

Submission + - SPAM: New Tech Challenges Iran's 1,000-Year Monopoly on $1B Saffron Market

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

Saffron Tech, an Israeli wholly owned subsidiary of Seedo Corp., announced its technology for automated, year-round saffron growing, is challenging the global Iranian monopoly on saffron supply of 90-95% of world demand, which has been in place for the past 1,000 years!

The reason Iran was the dominant player in supplying 90-95% of world demand for Saffron lies in the fact it has natural conditions fit for the growing and production of saffron in traditional, labor intensive methods.

Saffron Tech, from Seedo Corp., is developing a technology that hopes to provide turnkey automated growing solutions for high-quality, high-yield saffron all year round. The company is in advanced stages of developing and testing its automated vertical farm for saffron growing, based on the company’s knowledge in plant biology and providing optimal conditions for each stage of the plant’s development to reach optimal product quality.

Saffron is usually sold by the gram because a pound of it can go for $1,500 or more.
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