At its "Peek Performance" event, Apple today announced the third-generation iPhone SE, featuring the A15 Bionic chip, improved battery life, 5G connectivity, a new camera system, and more, all for a starting price of $429. MacRumors reports: The new iPhone SE features the same 4.7-inch display as the current model, but now offers the toughest glass in a smartphone on the front and back -- the same as on the back of the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro. The device's new 12MP Wide camera system offers a range of improvements and computational photography features including Deep Fusion, Photographic Styles, Portrait Mode, and Smart HDR 4.

The new iPhone SE contains the same A15 Bionic chip from the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro. [...] The A15 Bionic also gives the new iPhone SE longer battery life than the previous-generation and older 4.7-inch iPhone models despite having a compact form-factor and 5G connectivity. It continues to support fast charging and be compatible with Qi-certified chargers for wireless charging. Along with the new iPhone SE, Apple also unveiled the all-new Mac Studio and Studio Display, flagship M1 Ultra desktop processor, and updated iPad Air.

Laptops and smartphones made by Apple, Microsoft, and Google are considerably less repair-friendly than those made by competitors Asus, Dell, and Motorola, according to a new report. From a report: These findings may be unsurprising to people who like to fix gadgets, but the data to back them up comes from an unusual source: the companies themselves. The report, released today by the US Public Research Interest Group's Education Fund, draws on data companies are now releasing in France to comply with the government's world-first "repairability index" law, which went into effect last year. The law requires manufacturers of certain electronic devices, including cell phones and laptops, to score each of their products based on how easily repairable it is and make that score, along with the data that went into it, available to consumers at point-of-sale.

Google has confirmed plans to acquire cybersecurity company Mandiant in an all-cash deal worth $5.4 billion. From a report: The move comes exactly a month after reports emerged that Microsoft was in early discussions to buy Mandiant, meaning that Google is essentially getting one over its big cloud rival. Mandiant works with customers including InfoSys, OlyFed, and the Bank of Thailand, providing threat intelligence and consulting services, and automated tools for investigating security alerts. Mandiant is perhaps better known under its former name FireEye, a U.S. cybersecurity firm that shot to prominence for detecting major cyber attacks through the years. FireEye had acquired Mandiant for $1 billion in 2013, but last year it revealed plans to sell off the FireEye brand and products business and focus on its Mandiant cyber forensics business instead./i?

With sanctions against Russia starting to bite, the Kremlin is mulling ways to keep businesses and the government running. The latest is a creative twist on state asset seizures, only instead of the government taking over an oil refinery, for example, Russia is considering legalizing software piracy. Ars Technica reports: Russian law already allows for the government to authorize -- "without consent of the patent holder" -- the use of any intellectual property "in case of emergency related to ensuring the defense and security of the state." The government hasn't taken that step yet, but it may soon, according to a report from Russian business newspaper Kommersant, spotted and translated by Kyle Mitchell, an attorney who specializes in technology law. It's yet another sign of a Cyber Curtain that's increasingly separating Russia from the West.

The plan would create "a compulsory licensing mechanism for software, databases, and technology for integrated microcircuits," the Kommersant said. It would only apply to companies from countries that have imposed sanctions. While the article doesn't name names, many large Western firms -- some of which would be likely targets -- have drastically scaled back business in Russia. So far, Microsoft has suspended sales of new products and services in Russia, Apple has stopped selling devices, and Samsung has stopped selling both devices and chips. Presumably, any move by the Kremlin to "seize" IP would exempt Chinese companies, which are reportedly considering how to press their advantage. Smartphone-makers Xiaomi and Honor stand to gain, as do Chinese automakers. Still, any gains aren't guaranteed since doing business in Russia has become riddled with problems, spanning everything from logistics to finance.

A research center housing a nuclear neutron source facility held at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology in eastern Ukraine was hit by Russian forces on Sunday, per a report from the state nuclear inspectorate. Motherboard reports: In a release published Sunday evening, the inspectorate called the blast "nuclear terrorism," spelling out a list of damages: a substation, which connects the plant to the electrical grid, on which the plant runs; cables within the facility's cooling system, which effectively prevent the plant from a meltdown; a heating line between structures in the facility; surface damages to the building that houses the structure; and windows across a number of buildings within the installation. "This list of damages is not complete so far. Currently, information on the consequences of the damages is being specified by the personnel," the report reads. An updated report following further inspection located no additional damage this morning.

The Security Service of Ukraine's Kharkiv branch said destruction of the facility could lead to "environmental disaster," the Kyiv Independent reported Sunday. Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported Sunday that the attacks were in fact brought on by Ukraine, a line that has since been debunked. The reactor, known as the NSA "Neutron Source" was built with support from the Illinois-based Argonne National Laboratory in service of an agreement signed between the U.S. and Ukraine at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. The U.S. invested $73 million in the project, which promised that the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology would be "given the opportunity to build state-of-the-art technology in nuclear research that will contribute to "solving problems of nuclear power industry and extending technical lifetime of nuclear power plants,'" according to a report from the European Union Non-Proliferation Consortium.

The British government has asked its nuclear regulator to start the process for approving Rolls-Royce's planned small- scale modular nuclear reactor, which policymakers hope will help cut dependence on fossil fuels and lower carbon emissions. From a report: Britain last year backed a $546 million funding round at the company to develop the country's first small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), part of its drive to reach net zero carbon emissions and promote new technology with export potential. Energy minister Kwasi Kwarteng has also said new nuclear projects will play an important part in Britain's efforts to reduce its reliance on expensive gas, which hit fresh record high prices on Monday amid the crisis in Ukraine. SMRs can be made in factories, with parts small enough to be transported on trucks and barges and assembled more quickly and cheaply than large-scale reactors. Each mini plant can power around one million homes and Rolls-Royce has forecast the SMR business could create up to 40,000 jobs based on British and export demand.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday said it was proposing new rules to cut smog-forming and greenhouse gas emissions from heavy duty vehicles. From a report: The agency is proposing to require cuts in nitrogen oxide emissions from heavy trucks of 47 percent to 60 percent by 2045. The new standards would begin in the 2027 model year. Separately, the Transportation Department is announcing nearly $1.5 billion in funding for 2022 to help state and local governments purchase U.S.-built electric transit buses and low-emission models. The department is also announcing $2.2 billion in funding to 35 transit agencies across 18 states. The EPA is also proposing stricter new greenhouse gas emissions standards for some types of heavy vehicles.

In mid-February, hackers gained access to computers belonging to current and former employees at nearly two dozen major natural gas suppliers and exporters, including Chevron, Cheniere Energy and Kinder Morgan, according to research shared exclusively with Bloomberg News. From the report: The attacks targeted companies involved with the production of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and they were the first stage in an effort to infiltrate an increasingly critical sector of the energy industry, according to Gene Yoo, chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Resecurity, which discovered the operation. They occurred on the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when energy markets were already roiled by tight supplies.

Resecurity's investigation began last month when the firm's researchers spotted a small number of hackers, including one linked to a wave of attacks in 2018 against European organizations that Microsoft attributed to Strontium, the company's nickname for a hacking group associated with Russia's GRU military intelligence service. The hackers were looking to pay top dollar on the dark web for access to personal computers belonging to workers at large natural gas companies in the U.S., which were used as a back door into company networks, Yoo said. The researchers located the hackers' servers and found a vulnerability in the software, which allowed them to obtain files from the machines and see what the attackers had already done, Yoo said.

Consumers will still be able to use Mastercard and Visa-branded cards for domestic transactions in Russia, the country's state-backed payments network has said, reducing the impact of the US firms' decision to pull services over the invasion of Ukraine. From a report: Russia's homegrown payments system Mir said the cardholders would still be able to access their funds, make withdrawals and domestic transfers -- at least until their bank cards expire. Mir has processed most domestic payments in Russia since 2015, while foreign operators such as Visa and Mastercard continued to run international transactions. The operator -- which is 100% owned by the country's central bank -- was established on government orders to protect the economy against sanctions imposed over Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014.

"All cards of these payment systems already issued by Russian banks will continue to work within our country as before," Mir's operator said in the early hours of Sunday. "Until the expiration of their validity, Visa and Mastercard cardholders have access to all the funds on their accounts, as well as all the usual payment transactions -- paying for purchases, transferring funds from card to card, withdrawing cash, etc." Further reading: Visa Discloses Russia, Ukraine Exposure.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If blockchain technology is to reach true mass adoption, it will have to become cheaper and more efficient. Low transaction throughput on some of the most popular blockchains, most notably Ethereum, has kept gas fees high and hindered scalability. A host of new projects has cropped up to improve efficiency in the blockchain space, each with its own set of tradeoffs, including proof-of-capacity blockchain Subspace, which announced its $32.9 million Series A last week. Now, a team of researchers from Stanford University's applied cryptography research group has entered the fray. The team is coming out of stealth mode with Espresso, a new layer one blockchain they are building to allow for higher throughput and lower gas fees while prioritizing user privacy and decentralization. Espresso aims to optimize for both privacy and scalability by leveraging zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic tool that allows a party to prove a statement is true without revealing the evidence behind that statement, CEO Ben Fisch told TechCrunch in an interview.

Espresso Systems, the company behind the blockchain project, is led by Fisch, chief operating officer Charles Lu, and chief scientist Benedikt Banz, collaborators at Stanford who have each worked on other high-profile web3 projects, including the anonymity-focused Monero blockchain and BitTorrent co-founder Bram Cohen's Chia. They've teamed up with chief strategy officer Jill Gunter, a former crypto investor at Slow Ventures who is the fourth Espresso Systems co-founder, to take their blockchain and associated products to market. To achieve greater throughput, Espresso uses ZK-Rollups, a solution based on zero-knowledge proofs that allow transactions to be processed off-chain. ZK-Rollups consolidate multiple transactions into a single, easily-verifiable proof, thus reducing the bandwidth and computational load on the consensus protocol. The method has already gained popularity on the Ethereum blockchain through scaling solution providers like StarkWare and zkSync, according to Fisch.

Samsung on Monday confirmed that the company recently suffered a cyberattack, but said that it doesn't anticipate any impact on its business or customers. From a report: Last week, South American hacking group Lapsus$ claimed it had stolen 190GB of confidential data, including source code, from the South Korean tech giant's servers. The group also posted snapshots of the alleged data online. Samsung has now confirmed in a statement, without naming the hacking group, that there was a security breach, but it asserted that no personal information of customers was compromised.

CNBC reminds us that Ukraine is also home "to a massive community of software developers who work remotely for companies all over the U.S. and Europe.

"There were 200,000 Ukrainian developers in the country in 2020, according to Amsterdam-based software development outsourcing company Daxx, which says that 20% of Fortune 500 companies have their remote development teams in Ukraine." As major cities across Ukraine endure devastating attacks that have seen buildings reduced to rubble, company leaders in the U.S. and Europe have expressed awe at their Ukraine-based staff. Those developers, along with other Ukrainian civilians in the country, are now being forced to defend their homes and cities while sheltering from Russian bombs. But many are still continuing to remotely work for their employers, supporting the local defense effort by day while sending in their deliverables by night.

"Yes our teams are sending deliverables from a f — ing parking garage in Kharkiv under heavy shelling and gunfire in the area. Amazing humans," Logan Bender, chief financial officer at a San Francisco-based software licensing company, said in a story posted to Instagram on Tuesday by venture capital meme account PrayingforExits. "We of course told them all deliverables are off the table. Nothing of you expected other than to let us know how we can help other than wiring money and getting their visa process going," he said. Bender has been working to get a defense service to extract his employees from the conflict zone under armed guards....

"Our lead front-end developer fled to Lviv to his parents' rural house 40km outside the city and is still submitting pull requests," Eric Hovagim, CEO and founder of Los Angeles-based betting platform Pogbet, told CNBC. "He's returning to Lviv tomorrow morning to continue his work while helping with the fight."

"These Ukrainians are built different," Hovagim said. "No armed guard extraction necessary. These people are their own armed guards...."

Ukrainians in IT-related fields are also deploying their skills for the fight at home. Employees at a local digital marketing agency in Kyiv are helping carry out cyberattacks against Russian entities in collaboration with Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation. A local Telegram channel dedicated to crowd-sourcing programmers to carry out cyberattacks against Russia has nearly a million subscribers...

Alexandru Asimionese, co-founder of Moldova-based software developer Labs42, described one of his freelance designers based in the northwestern Ukrainian city of Lutsk. "In the morning goes to buy high-protein snacks to deliver to the local army. Late night, sends logo ideas. Always paid in crypto (via) Binance," he said. Another start-up manager said that his Ukrainian girlfriend was returning to Ukraine from overseas to fight, and plans to continue working for her tech company while not fighting invaders.

"Staff at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are being told what to do by the Russian military commander who seized the site last week, in violation of international safety protocols," reports the Guardian: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expressed "grave concern" at the situation at the six-reactor plant, the largest in Europe. The agency was told by the Ukrainian nuclear regulator that "any action of plant management — including measures related to the technical operation of the six reactor units — requires prior approval by the Russian commander". The IAEA director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said on Sunday that the Russian military command over the nuclear plant "contravenes one of the seven indispensable pillars of nuclear safety and security" which states that the operating staff must be able to carry out their safety and security duties and be able to make decisions "free of undue pressure".

Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia plant in the early hours of Friday morning, damaging a walkway between two of the six reactors, and starting a fire in a nearby building used for training. As a result some of the reactors were shut down and others were put on low power. The reactors themselves are well protected by a thick concrete shell, but there is concern that more vulnerable spent fuel rods could be hit, or that the power and cooling systems could be affected, potentially triggering a meltdown....

The IAEA said that the operators at the plant were now being able to rotate between three shifts, relieving the operators who had been on duty at the time the plant was seized, but there were still "problems with availability and supply of food" which the Ukrainian regulator said was affecting morale on the plant.

"The events of recent days have taken us away from the stable and predictable development of mankind," argue two Moscow-based technology professors in Communications of the ACM, citing anticipated shortages of high-performance processors. But fortunately, they have a partial workarond...

One of the professors — Andrei Sukhov of HSE University in Moscow — explained their idea to the Register: In a timely piece Sukhov explains how Russian computer science teams are looking at building the next generation of clusters using older clustering technologies and a slew of open-source software for managing everything from code portability to parallelization as well as standards including PCIe 3.0, USB 4, and even existing Russian knock-off buses inspired by Infiniband (Angara ES8430).... While all the pieces might be in place, there is still the need to manufacture new boards, a problem Sukhov said can be routed around by using wireless protocols as the switching mechanism between processors, even though the network latency hit will be subpar, making it difficult to do any true tightly coupled, low-latency HPC simulations (which come in handy in areas like nuclear weapons simulations, as just one example).

"Given that the available mobile systems-on-chip are on the order of 100 Gflops, performance of several teraflops for small clusters of high-performance systems-on-chip is quite achievable," Sukhov added. "The use of standard open operating systems, such as Linux, will greatly facilitate the use of custom applications and allow such systems to run in the near future. It is possible that such clusters can be heterogeneous, including different systems-on-chip for different tasks (or, for example, FPGAs to create specialized on-the-fly configurable accelerators for specific tasks)...."

As he told The Register in a short exchange following the article, "Naturally, it will be impossible to make a new supercomputer in Russia in the coming years. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to close all the current needs in computing and data processing using the approach we have proposed. Especially if we apply hardware acceleration to tasks, depending on their type," he adds.... "During this implementation, software solutions and new protocols for data exchange, as well as computing technologies, will be worked out."
As for Russia's existing supercomputers, "no special problems are foreseen," Sukhov added. "These supercomputers are based on Linux and can continue to operate without the support of the companies that supplied the hardware and software."

Thanks to Slashdot reader katydid77 for sharing the article.

"In better times, Ukrainian drone enthusiasts flew their gadgets into the sky to photograph weddings, fertilize soybean fields or race other drones for fun," writes the Associated Press.

"Now some are risking their lives by forming a volunteer drone force to help their country repel the Russian invasion." "Kyiv needs you and your drone at this moment of fury!" read a Facebook post late last week from the Ukrainian military, calling for citizens to donate hobby drones and to volunteer as experienced pilots to operate them. One entrepreneur who runs a retail store selling consumer drones in the capital said its entire stock of some 300 drones made by Chinese company DJI has been dispersed for the cause. Others are working to get more drones across the border from friends and colleagues in Poland and elsewhere in Europe....

Unlike the much larger Turkish-built combat drones that Ukraine has in its arsenal, off-the-shelf consumer drones aren't much use as weapons — but they can be powerful reconnaissance tools. Civilians have been using the aerial cameras to track Russian convoys and then relay the images and GPS coordinates to Ukrainian troops. Some of the machines have night vision and heat sensors.... They can also be used to assist search-and-rescue operations....

Small civilian drones are no match against Russian combat power but will likely become increasingly important in a protracted war...
The Associated Press points out there's now more than 15,000 members in one drone-focused Facebook group "who have been trading tips about how to assist Ukrainian troops." The operations chief for a Kyiv-based drone company tells the Associated Press, "Now in Ukraine no one remains indifferent. Everyone does what they can."

Cogent Communications, one of the world's largest internet intercontinental backbone providers, has cut ties with Russian customers over its invasion of Ukraine. The Verge reports: In a letter to Russian customers obtained by The Washington Post, Cogent cited "economic sanctions" and "the increasingly uncertain security situation" as the motives behind its total shutdown in the country. Cogent similarly told The Verge that it "terminated its contracts" with Russian customers in compliance with the European Union's move to ban Russian state-backed media outlets.

As Doug Madory, an internet analyst at network tracking company Kentik points out... unplugging Russia from Cogent's global network will likely result in slower connectivity, but won't completely disconnect Russians from the internet... Traffic from Cogent's former customers will instead fall back on other backbone providers in the country, potentially resulting in network congestion. There isn't any indication as to whether other internet backbone providers will also suspend services in Russia.

Digital rights activists have criticized Cogent's decision to disconnect itself from Russia, arguing that it could prevent Russian civilians from accessing credible information about the invasion. "Cutting Russians off from internet access cuts them off from sources of independent news and the ability to organize anti-war protests," Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said on Twitter....

Cogent's goal is to prevent the Russian government from using the company's networks for cyberattacks and propaganda, The Post reports.
The Post argues that on a larger scale,"these moves bring Russia closer to the day when its online networks face largely inward, their global connections weakened, if not cut off entirely." "I am very afraid of this," said Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, which advocates for digital freedoms in Russia. "I would like to convey to people all over the world that if you turn off the Internet in Russia, then this means cutting off 140 million people from at least some truthful information. As long as the Internet exists, people can find out the truth. There will be no Internet — all people in Russia will only listen to propaganda...."

[E]ven two weeks ago, Russia's Internet was comparatively free and integrated into the larger online world, allowing civil society to organize, opposition figures to deliver their messages and ordinary Russians to gain ready access to alternative sources of news in an era when Putin was strangling his nation's free newspapers and broadcast stations.... Patrick Boehler, head of digital strategy at Radio Free Europe, said CrowdTangle data showed that independent news stories in the Russian language worldwide were getting shared many more times on social media than stories from state-run media. He said that once the Kremlin lost control of the narrative, it would have been hard to regain.

Now the last independent journalistic outposts are gone, and the Internet options are increasingly constricted through a combination of forces — all spurred by war in Ukraine but coming from both within and outside Russia.... Government censors also blocked access to the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Deutsche Welle, as well as major Ukrainian websites. The BBC, CNN and other international news organizations said they were suspending reporting in Russia because of a new law that could result in 15 years of prison for publishing what government officials deem false news on the war.
Meanwhile, Politico reminds us that even Oracle has shut down its Russian cloud service operations. Laura Manley, the executive director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said Russia is creating a perfect situation to control its narrative and limit outside coverage of its Ukrainian invasion by Western social media sources. "You have the lack of eyewitness information because you have critical infrastructure being shut off," she said. "So it's sort of a worst case scenario in terms of getting real-time accurate information."

When Russia's invasion of Ukraine first began, Russian forces seized control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant — and then took its staff hostage.

A week later the Associated Press filed this update: The United Nations' atomic watchdog says Ukraine has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that staff who have been kept at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant since Russian troops took control of the site a week ago are facing "psychological pressure and moral exhaustion." IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Thursday that the staff must be allowed to rest and rotate so their crucial work can be carried out safely and securely.

Grossi received "a joint appeal from the Ukraine Government, regulatory authority and the national operator which added that personnel at the Chornobyl site 'have limited opportunities to communicate, move and carry out full-fledged maintenance and repair work,'" the IAEA said in a statement...

Ukraine has lost regulatory control over all the facilities in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to the Russians and asked the IAEA to undertake measures "in order to reestablish legal regulation of safety of nuclear facilities and installations" within the site, the statement added.
Their article quotes the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency as saying that "Any accident caused as a result of the military conflict could have extremely serious consequences for people and the environment, in Ukraine and beyond."

This morning CNN shared this update: The growing exhaustion of staffers confined for "10 days" at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is not only "difficult," but could pose "a danger to the world," Yuriy Fomichev, the mayor of Slavutych, told CNN in a telephone interview on Saturday. "People are tired; they are exhausted, both mentally and emotionally, but mainly physically," Fomichev said, adding that more than 100 people in the plant are shift personnel who should have been handed over after 12 hours. "A nuclear facility run by the same shift of 100 people without a break for 10 days in a row means their concentration levels are too low ... the main thing we want to convey is that it is very dangerous," Fomichev said.

Staffers in the plant only eat one meal per day and have limited amount of time to contact their families, Fomichev said.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk yesterday warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions. Ars Technica reports: "Important warning: Starlink is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution," Musk tweeted. When asked for specific advice, Musk said people in Ukraine should turn Starlink on only when it's needed, place the antenna "as far away from people as possible," and "place light camouflage over [the] antenna to avoid visual detection." A thin layer of spray paint would work if there are no metal particles in the paint, he wrote. One Twitter user asked Musk if Starlink could face a cyberattack from Russia similar to the one that affected Viasat satellite service. Musk responded, "Almost all Viasat Ukraine user terminals were rendered permanently unusable by a Russian cyberattack on day of invasion, so... yes."

As previously reported, Ukraine Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov asked Musk to activate Starlink in Ukraine shortly after Russia's invasion of the country disrupted Internet service. Musk responded in the affirmative, and two days later, Fedorov tweeted a photo of a truck full of newly arrived Starlink terminals. It's not clear exactly how many Starlink terminals are available in Ukraine, but Fedorov tweeted to Musk, "We will keep you posted as we roll out more Starlinks across the country." In another tweet, he said, "SpaceX reprioritized to cyber defense and overcoming signal jamming. Will cause slight delays in Starship and Starlink V2."

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on Monday issued permits to self-driving units of General Motors and Alphabet to allow for passenger service in autonomous vehicles with safety drivers present. Reuters reports: CPUC said the GM unit Cruise and Alphabet's Waymo are under Drivered Deployment permits authorized to collect fares from passengers and may offer shared rides. Prior to the announcement Cruise and Waymo had been permitted to provide passenger service only on a testing basis with no fare collection permitted.

Starting Monday, Cruise is allowed to provide the "Drivered Deployment" service on some public roads in San Francisco between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour, while Waymo can offer service in parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour, CPUC said. Neither company is allowed to operate during heavy fog or heavy rain. [...] Waymo said it has tens of thousands of riders on a waitlst in California after it launched a tester program in August. "We'll begin offering paid trips through the program in the coming weeks," the company said.

A leading American Internet service provider, Cogent Communications, said it was severing relations with Russian customers on Friday, a move that gives Ukrainian officials another victory in their campaign to isolate Russia online. The Washington Post reports: Cogent chief executive Dave Schaeffer said the company did not want to keep ordinary Russians off the Internet but did want to prevent the Russian government from using Cogent's networks to launch cyberattacks or deliver propaganda targeting Ukraine at a time of war. "Our goal is not to hurt anyone. It's just to not empower the Russian government to have another tool in their war chest," Schaeffer said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Cogent, based in Washington, D.C., is one of the world's largest providers of what's known as Internet backbone -- roughly comparable to the interstate highway system, providing the primary conduit for data flows that local companies then route to individual domains. Schaeffer said Cogent's networks carry about one-quarter of the world's Internet traffic. Cogent has several dozen customers in Russia, with many of them, such as state-owned telecommunications giant Rostelecom, being close to the government.

Russia, like most nations, is connected to the world by several backbone providers, but Cogent is among its largest. The company began terminating its Russian companies at noon Friday but was doing so gradually. Some customers asked for a delay of up to several days while they found other Internet sources, Schaeffer said, and the company is trying to accommodate those requests. "We're pretty confident that we're not interfering with anyone's ability to get some information," he said, though he acknowledged the likelihood of slowdowns and other disruptions with Russia. "In light of the unwarranted and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Cogent is terminating all of your services effective at 5 p.m. GMT on March 4, 2022," wrote Cogent in a letter to one of their Russian customers. "The economic sanctions put in place as a result of the invasion and the increasingly uncertain security situation make it impossible for Cogent to continue to provide you with service. All Cogent-provided ports and IP address space will be reclaimed as of the termination date."