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Submission + - Chinese passive switch spying on you (pilulerouge.ca)

antatack writes: Canadian company find affordable network hardware could secretly enable large-scale espionage, creating serious risks for privacy and national security.
From the original article in french.

Submission + - Palantir posts Bond villain manifesto on X

DeanonymizedCoward writes: Engadget reports that Palantir has posted to X a summary of CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, which reads like a utopian idealist doodled on a Bond villain's whiteboard. While the post makes some decent points, it also highlights the Big-AI attitude that the AI surveillance state is in fact a good thing, and strongly implies that the Good Guys need to do war crimes before the Bad Guys get around to it.

Submission + - Trump Administration to Begin Refunding $166 Billion in Tariffs 1

hcs_$reboot writes: After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal, because the president overstepped his authority.
As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers.
On April 20, 2026, the administration launched a system/portal (run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection) so companies can start filing claims to get their money back.

Who gets the money?
— Primarily importers and companies, since they were the ones who directly paid the tariffs.
— Consumers generally won’t get refunds, even though they often bore the cost through higher prices.

How it will work
— Claims are submitted electronically.
— Refunds (with interest) could take 60–90 days per claim, but the overall process may take much longer due to scale and complexity.

Challenges and uncertainties
— The process is logistically huge (hundreds of thousands of importers, millions of shipments).
— There are legal disputes over whether companies must pass refunds on to consumers.
— Delays and administrative issues are expected, possibly stretching the process over years.

Comment Re:Monkey See, Monkey Buy Other Monkey's Copy (Score 2) 31

They would have got more value out of a version of VNC.

Perhaps, but PCoIP was a specialized protocol aimed mostly at niche markets. Graphics production for Hollywood movies was one, where leaks of pre-released materials could sink the whole project. With PCoIP, you can distribute your graphics work across multiple independent studios, and none of them actually keeps any of the assets on their own machines. They're essentially doing their high-res graphics work on thin clients.

Another market was testing for higher education, for similar security reasons. People try to cheat on tests all kinds of ways.

Teradici always kind of struggled to market PCoIP, though, because their primary "product" was really just a protocol. Their model was to license it to other companies, who then used it to build bespoke solutions for clients. There was a bunch of intellectual property behind it, but not everybody could see the value. They even considered open-sourcing it, but I don't think they were ever serious enough to get someone to consult them on how they could do that and still preserve the licensing revenue.

(Full disclosure: I spent about a year helping Teradici with PR.)

Submission + - Two new studies about how many birds die from wind turbines (euronews.com)

ZipNada writes: The energy company Vattenfall and the tech company Spoor have analysed the extent to which wind turbines endanger birds at the offshore wind farm in Aberdeen. Over a period of 19 months — from June 2023 to December 2024 — video recordings of a wind turbine were made with the help of AI-supported analyses. A total of 2,007 bird flight paths near the monitored turbine were examined.

"By combining AI-powered detection and detailed expert analysis, we can replace assumptions with concrete observations and measure actual behaviour in the immediate vicinity of wind turbines," says Ask Helseth, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Spoor.

The study found that there was not a single collision

A study by the German Offshore Wind Energy Association (BWO) also shows that migratory birds almost completely avoid wind turbines.

For one and a half years, researchers analysed over four million bird movements with the help of radar and AI-based cameras. The result showed that over 99.8 per cent of migratory birds reliably avoided the wind turbines.

Submission + - Government Workers Say They're Getting Inundated With Religion (wired.com)

joshuark writes: Federal workers across multiple U.S. agencies are complaining that Christianity is flooding into their workplaces in ways they've never seen before—and they feel powerless to speak up.

It started after President Trump returned to office and signed an executive order in February 2025 creating a White House Faith Office and similar offices inside federal agencies. Since then, religion has crept into everyday government life in a big way...Secretary Brooke Rollins sent an agency-wide Easter email titled "He has risen!" with explicitly Christian messaging. One employee called it "grotesque" and suspected AI wrote it. A formal complaint was filed with the Office of Special Counsel.

Department of Labor hosts monthly worship services with pastors and political figures. One speaker, Alveda King, said she was "more concerned about" nonreligious employees—a comment that rattled staffers who felt it implied atheists were going to hell.

Health and Human Services, under vaccine denier RFK Jr., expanded funding for faith-based addiction treatment and gave workers the afternoon off for Good Friday.

Department of Defense has seen the most dramatic shift, with Secretary Pete Hegseth hosting monthly prayer services featuring high-profile Christian nationalist figures like Doug Wilson, who has advocated for a theocracy and argued women shouldn't vote. Hegseth himself has called the U.S. war with Iran a "holy war."
Employees are afraid to push back—only 22.5% of federal workers in 2025 say they could report wrongdoing without retaliation, down from nearly 72% in 2024.

The government's position: these events are voluntary and legally permitted. A public policy professor quoted in the piece put it plainly: "The Trump administration has opened a new chapter in the integration of Christianity into the daily work of government."

Technology

Researchers Induce Smells With Ultrasound, No Chemical Cartridges Required (uploadvr.com) 51

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise.

Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb.

To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized.

Comment Re:it's literally the law to. so yes. (Score 1) 114

all you people cant tell if slaughtering 30,000 of your own people is good or bad?

So... Should we attack every country that slaughters its own people?

couldn't hurt.

What? You're not going to advocate for it??? I thought you were invoking some kind of principle or something.

You're down with Russia killing far more Ukrainians, whom they claim are their own people?

You're down with what China's doing to the Uyghurs, whom they claim are their own people?

And while we're on the topic, how many Iranians should we be willing to kill to save them from their leaders? Nuclear extermination would surely do it... do you advocate that?

But maybe it won't take that much. Regime change in Afghanistan only cost 2000 American lives, 175,000 Afghan lives, and 2,000,000,000,000 dollars, but we sure got rid of those sorry... What? They're back in power?

Only the simplest minds think intervention automagically yields the intended result. In fact the current sorry situation in Iran is a direct result of us trying to "fix" things more to our liking in the middle of last century.

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