Celsius Network CEO Alex Mashinsky built his cryptocurrency lender into a giant on a pitch that it was less risky than a bank with better returns for customers. But investor documents show the lender carried far more risk than a traditional bank. From a report: The lender issued numerous large loans backed by little collateral, according to Celsius investor documents from 2021 reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The documents show that Celsius had little cushion in the event of a downturn, and made investments that would be difficult to quickly unwind if customers raced to withdraw their money. Celsius had $19 billion of assets and roughly $1 billion of equity as of last summer, before it raised new funds, according to Celsius investor documents from 2021 reviewed by the Journal. The median assets-to-equity ratio for all the North American banks in the S&P 1500 Composite index was about 9:1, or about half that of Celsius, according to data from FactSet.

For banks, that ratio is of great importance: Regulators look at it as an indicator of risk. For unregulated companies like Celsius, the ratio of 19-1 is particularly high given that some of its assets were investments in the extremely volatile crypto sector, said Eric Budish, an economist at the University of Chicago's business school who studies cryptocurrencies. Large banks often have ratios near Celsius's, but they hold much more stable assets and have access to central-bank loans for ready cash. [...] Founded in 2017 by Mr. Mashinsky, Celsius surged amid the crypto boom to become one of the biggest crypto lenders, with more than $12 billion in deposits. Customers, wooed by high interest rates, flooded in, while venture capitalists showered it with money. Contrasts with banks were at the center of Mr. Mashinsky's public persona. Mr. Mashinsky frequently said Celsius passed along 80% of its lending revenue to customers in the form of its high yields. He often wore a black T-shirt reading, "Banks are not your friends." Compared with banks, "we have much less risk, but we've managed to deliver high single-digit, low double-digit numbers," Mr. Mashinsky told the YouTube channel CTO Larsson in August. Mr. Mashinsky said on a podcast last month that while "normally in panic, everybody runs to the bank and withdraws their money because they're afraid the bank is going to fail," Celsius had proven different in crypto downturns, as its business increased.

Arm is announcing its new flagship Immortalis GPU today, its first to include hardware-based ray tracing on mobile. As PCs and the latest Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles are all gradually moving toward impressive ray-traced visuals, Immortalis-G715 is designed to be the Arm's first GPU to deliver the same on Android phones and tablets. From a report: Built on top of Mali, a GPU that's used by the likes of MediaTek and Samsung, Immortalis is designed with 10-16 cores in mind and promises a boost of 15 percent over the previous generation premium Mali GPUs. Arm sees Immortalis as the start of a transition to ray tracing on mobile following its success with the 8 billion Mali GPUs that have shipped to date.

"The challenge is that Ray Tracing techniques can use significant power, energy, and area across the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC)," explains Andy Craigen, director of product management at Arm. "However, Ray Tracing on Immortalis-G715 only uses 4 percent of the shader core area, while delivering more than 300 percent performance improvements through the hardware acceleration."

It's not clear if a 3x speedup over software-based ray tracing will be enough to tempt game developers, but when Nvidia introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in its RTX 2080, it advertised a 2x-3x boost at the time. "It's the right performance point for now to get this technology into the market," says Arm's Paul Williamson, adding that it may also come in handy in augmented reality applications where RT could be used to match virtual lighting to the real-world environment around you. Arm is already delivering software-based ray tracing in last year's Mali-G710, but the promise of hardware support means we will start to see flagship smartphones with this chip at the beginning of 2023. Samsung also announced its Exynos 2200 chip with hardware-based ray tracing earlier this year, so manufacturers are getting ready for the games to arrive.

"China's Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission," reports SpaceNews: Lifting off in late 2028... the complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites. However, if successful, it would deliver to Earth the first collected Martian samples; an objective widely noted as one of the major scientific goals of space exploration....

The mission will build on the Mars entry, descent and landing technologies and techniques demonstrated by Tianwen-1 in May 2021, as well as the regolith sampling, automated lunar orbit rendezvous and docking, and high velocity atmospheric reentry success achieved by the 2020 Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission.... Landing on Mars would take place around September 2029. Sampling techniques will include surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot.

The ascent vehicle will consist of two stages, using either solid or liquid propulsion, and will be required to reach a speed of 4.5 kilometers per second, according to the presentation. After rendezvous and docking with the waiting orbiter, the spacecraft will depart Mars orbit in late October 2030 for a return to Earth in July 2031.

Sun Zezhou [chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission], added that the Tianwen-1 orbiter will conduct an aerobraking test in Mars orbit later this year as part of the sample return mission preparation.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the story!

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is "the first full-scale battle in which traditional and cyberweapons have been used side by side," reports the New York Times. But the biggest surprise is that "many of the attacks were thwarted, or there was enough redundancy built into the Ukrainian networks that the efforts did little damage... more than two-thirds of them failed, echoing its poor performance on the physical battlefield."

Microsoft president Brad Smith says the ultimate result is Russia's attempted cyberatacks get underreported, according to the Times: [A study published by Microsoft Wednesday] indicated that Ukraine was well prepared to fend off cyberattacks, after having endured them for many years. That was at least in part because of a well-established system of warnings from private-sector companies, including Microsoft and Google, and preparations that included moving much of Ukraine's most important systems to the cloud, onto servers outside Ukraine....

In many instances, Russia coordinated its use of cyberweapons with conventional attacks, including taking down the computer network of a nuclear power plant before moving in its troops to take it over, Mr. Smith said. Microsoft officials declined to identify which plant Mr. Smith was referring to. While much of Russia's cyberactivity has focused on Ukraine, Microsoft has detected 128 network intrusions in 42 countries. Of the 29 percent of Russian attacks that have successfully penetrated a network, Microsoft concluded, only a quarter of those resulted in data being stolen. Outside Ukraine, Russia has concentrated its attacks on the United States, Poland and two aspiring members of NATO, Sweden and Finland...

But Microsoft, other technology companies and government officials have said that Russia has paired those infiltration attempts with a broad effort to deliver propaganda around the world. Microsoft tracked the growth in consumption of Russian propaganda in the United States in the first weeks of the year. It peaked at 82 percent right before the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, with 60 million to 80 million monthly page views. That figure, Microsoft said, rivaled page views on the biggest traditional media sites in the United States. One example Mr. Smith cited was that of Russian propaganda inside Russia pushing its citizens to get vaccinated, while its English-language messaging spread anti-vaccine content. Microsoft also tracked the rise in Russian propaganda in Canada in the weeks before a trucker convoy protesting vaccine mandates tried to shut down Ottawa, and that in New Zealand before protests there against public health measures meant to fight the pandemic.
Russians successfully "sabotaged a satellite communications network called Viasat in the opening days of the war," notes the Washington Post, "with the damage spilling over into other European countries. But Ukraine, working with private tech companies, Western intelligence and its own expert software engineers, has quickly fixed most of the damage..."

"The close partnerships that have emerged between U.S. technology companies and Western cybersecurity agencies is one of the unheralded stories of the war...." "Cyber responses must rely on greater public and private collaboration," argues Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, in a new study... published Wednesday on Microsoft's "lessons learned" from cyber conflict in Ukraine. A White House cyber official explains the new cooperative approach this way: "Where companies see destructive attacks, that has driven partnerships with the intelligence community and other government agencies to see how best we can share information to protect infrastructure around the world." The tech world's sympathies lie with the underdog, Ukraine. That applies to giant firms such as Microsoft and Google....

Ukraine's cybersecurity defense benefited from an early start. U.S. Cyber Command experts went to Ukraine months before the war started, according to its commander, Gen. Paul Nakasone. Microsoft and Google became involved even earlier. Microsoft began monitoring Russian phishing attacks against Ukrainian military networks in early 2021, and through the rest of last year observed increasingly aggressive hacks by six different attackers linked to Russia's three intelligence services, the GRU, SVR and FSB, according to a Microsoft report released in April. Microsoft has spent a total of $239 million on financial and technical assistance to Ukraine, a company official said....

Google, a part of Alphabet, has also helped Ukraine fend off threats. Back in 2014, prompted by Russia's use of DDOS ("distributed denial-of-service") malware in its seizure of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Google began what it called "Project Shield." Software protected news sites, human rights groups and election sites against crippling DDOS floods of junk internet messages. Today, Project Shield is used by 200 sites in Ukraine and 2,300 others in 140 countries around the world, according to Jared Cohen, the chief executive of Google's Jigsaw unit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Investment product provider ProShares is set to list the U.S.'s first exchange-traded fund (ETF) allowing investors to bet against the price of bitcoin (BTC). The ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy (BITI), which is designed to deliver the inverse of bitcoin's performance, will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Tuesday, ProShares announced Monday. The ETF will allow investors to hedge their bitcoin exposure, which may prove particularly pertinent given the sharp downturn in crypto markets of late.

ProShares was the first firm to list a bitcoin futures ETF in October, a factor which saw the world's largest crypto hit an all-time high of around $68,900 in the subsequent weeks. Bitcoin investors will be hoping the listing of a short bitcoin futures ETF does not have a similar effect on the world's largest crypto in reverse. Bitcoin's price dropped below $20,000 for the first time since Dec. 20 on June 18, falling as low as $17,800 the following day.

"All appeared to be going smoothly," reports CBS News, "when, about a minute before the second stage engine was expected to shut down, an onboard 'rocketcam' showed a flash in the engine's exhaust plume.

"The camera view them showed what appeared to be a tumble before video from the rocket cut off...." California-based Astra on Sunday launched two shoebox-size NASA satellites from Cape Canaveral in a modest mission to improve hurricane forecasts, but the second stage of the company's low-cost booster malfunctioned before reaching orbit and the payloads were lost.

"The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit," Astra tweeted. "We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data analysis."

It was the seventh launch of Astra's small "Venture-class" rocket and the company's fifth failure. Sunday's launch was the first of three planned for NASA to launch six small CubeSats, two at a time, into three orbital planes. Given the somewhat risky nature of relying on tiny shoebox-size CubeSats and a rocket with a very short track record, the $40 million project requires just four satellites and two successful launches to meet mission objectives. The NASA contract calls for the final two flights by the end of July. Whether Astra can meet that schedule given Sunday's failure is not yet known.

"Although today's launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities," tweeted NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen.... After Sunday's failure, he tweeted: "Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead."

A panel at this week's RSA Conference argued that 90% of security buyers aren't getting the efficacy from their products that vendors claim they can deliver.

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: Joe Hubback of cyber risk management startup ISTARI led both the panel and the study, which was based on in-depth interviews with more than a hundred high-level security officials, including CISOs, CIOs, CEOs, security and tech vendors, evaluation organizations and government organizations.

Hubback said that "90% of the people that I spoke to said that the security technologies they were buying from the market are just not delivering the effect that the vendors claim they can deliver. Quite a shocking proportion of people are suffering from technology that doesn't deliver."

A number of reasons for that product failure came out in the panel discussion, according to eSecurity Planet, but they can be boiled down to some key points:

- Cybersecurity buyers are pressed for time and most don't test the products they buy. "They're basically just buying and hoping that the solutions they're buying are really going to work," Hubback said.

- Vendors are under pressure from investors to get products to market quickly and from sales and marketing teams to make aggressive claims.

- On top of those pressures, it's difficult to architect tools that are effective for a range of complex environments – and equally difficult for buyers to properly assess these "black box" solutions.


Those conditions create an information asymmetry, said Hubback: "A vendor knows a lot more about the quality of the product than the buyer so the vendor is not incentivized to bring high-quality products to market because buyers can't properly evaluate what they're buying."

Hubback and fellow panelists hope to create a GSMA-like process for evaluating security product abilities, and he invited RSA attendees to join the effort.

Google today announced a set of new and updated security features for Chrome, almost all of which rely on machine learning (ML) models, as well as a couple of nifty new ML-based features that aim to make browsing the web a bit easier, including a new feature that will suppress notification permission prompts when its algorithm thinks you're unlikely to accept them. From a report: Starting with the next version of Chrome, Google will introduce a new ML model that will silence many of these notification permission prompts. And the sooner the better. At this point, they have mostly become a nuisance. Even if there are some sites -- and those are mostly news sites -- that may offer some value in their notifications, I can't remember the last time I accepted one on purpose. Also, while legitimate sites love to push web notifications to remind readers of their existence, attackers can also use them to send phishing attacks or prompt users to download malware if they get users to give them permission. "On the one hand, page notifications help deliver updates from sites you care about; on the other hand, notification permission prompts can become a nuisance," Google admits in its blog post today. The company's new ML model will now look for prompts that users are likely to ignore and block them automatically. And as a bonus, all of that is happening on your local machine, so none of your browsing data makes it onto Google's servers.

China aims to double its wind and solar capacity by 2025, according to a new road map that also allows for more coal-fired power plants to bolster energy security. From a report: The world's biggest polluter earlier estimated it needs to double wind and solar use by 2030 to deliver on its pledges under the Paris climate accord. The latest plan -- if implemented -- means China might reach that goal earlier. But Beijing has also ramped up reliance on coal-fired power plants in recent months to support its ailing economy as the Ukraine war pushes up global energy prices. The country's central economic planner said 33 percent of power supply to the national grid will come from renewable sources by 2025, up from 29 percent in 2020, in a document released Wednesday. "In 2025, the annual power generation from renewable energy will reach about 3.3 trillion kilowatt-hours... and the wind power and solar power generation will double," the plan said. China, already the world's largest producer of renewable energy, has accelerated investment in solar and wind projects to tackle pollution at home, which researchers say kills millions every year. Beijing has pledged to peak emissions by 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060.

Facebook is in the early stages of developing a product that wouldn't rely on any anonymized personal info from users, two ad buyers from different ad agencies told Insider. From a report: "Basic ads," as Facebook engineers have been calling it, is aimed at brand advertisers that are trying to build awareness and shape perception of products. One of the buyers, who are known to Insider but spoke anonymously to preserve their relationship with Facebook, said it would be measured by basic metrics including engagement and video views. Vice reported in April that Meta was working on this product and planned to have it ready to test by January in Europe, home to the strict General Data Protection Regulation; the ad buyers said it hasn't been rolled out yet and that they're unclear when it will. It's expected to be tested in the US after an EU launch. The product would seem antithetical to the targeting tools that advertisers use Facebook for. "Their 'basic ads' does contrast one of the biggest attributes of Facebook's ad platform: the granular of targeting," the first ad buyer said. "But ads that can still deliver scale while also able to usurp data regulations like CCPA and GDPR would still get dollars invested into Facebook."

New spacesuits made by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace could be worn by astronauts that land on the moon later this decade through NASA's Artemis program, the agency announced Wednesday. The suits will also be worn by crew members living and working on the International Space Station. CNN reports: The contracts were awarded by NASA as part of its strategy of growing commercial partnerships. Both companies have been selected to move forward in developing the next generation of spacesuits. Depending on how the two companies deliver on the suits and their spacewalking capabilities, one company could prevail over the other. That flexibility has been built into the task awards as the two companies progress in product development.

The Artemis program seeks to land the first woman and the first person of color at the lunar south pole by 2025, and eventually prepare for landing crewed missions on Mars. Experts from NASA have developed the required safety and technical standards for the spacesuits. Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace will design, develop and potentially produce the suits and any necessary equipment for space station crew and Artemis astronauts. [...] The suits are expected to be ready by the mid-2020s.

Scientists from the University of Michigan have "fabricated a nanoparticle to deliver an inhibitor to brain tumor in mouse models, where the drug successfully turned on the immune system to eliminate the cancer," reports ScienceDaily. "The process also triggered immune memory so that a reintroduced tumor was eliminated -- a sign that this potential new approach could not only treat brain tumors but prevent or delay recurrences." From the report: The small molecule inhibitor AMD3100 was developed to block the action of CXCR12, a cytokine released by the glioma cells that builds up a shield around the immune system, preventing it from firing up against the invading tumor. Researchers showed in mouse models of glioma that AMD3100 prevented CXCR12 from binding with immune-suppressive myeloid cells. By disarming these cells, the immune system remains intact and can attack the tumor cells. But AMD3100 was having trouble getting to the tumor. The drug did not travel well through the bloodstream, and it did not pass the blood brain barrier, a key issue with getting drugs into the brain.

The Castro-Lowenstein lab collaborated with Joerg Lahann, Ph.D., Wolfgang Pauli Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the U-M College of Engineering, to create protein-based nanoparticles to encapsulate the inhibitor, in the hopes of helping it pass through the bloodstream. Castro also connected with Anuska V. Andjelkovic, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology and research professor of neurosurgery at Michigan Medicine, whose research focuses on the blood brain barrier. They noted that glioma tumors create abnormal blood vessels, interfering with normal blood flow.

The researchers injected AMD3100-loaded nanoparticles into mice with gliomas. The nanoparticles contained a peptide on the surface that binds to a protein found mostly on the brain tumor cells. As the nanoparticles traveled through the bloodstream toward the tumor, they released AMD3100, which restored the integrity of the blood vessels. The nanoparticles could then reach their target, where they released the drug, thus blocking the entry of the immune-suppressive myeloid cells into the tumor mass. This allowed the immune cells to kill the tumor and delay its progression. [...] Among the mice whose tumors were eliminated, the researchers then reintroduced the tumor, simulating a recurrence. Without any additional therapy, 60% of mice remained cancer-free. The research has been published in the journal ACS Nano.

Broadcom has signaled its $61 billion acquisition of VMware will involve a "rapid transition from perpetual licenses to subscriptions." The Register reports: That's according to Tom Krause, president of the Broadcom Software Group, on Thursday's Broadcom earnings call. He was asked how the semiconductor giant plans to deliver on its guidance that VMware will add approximately $8.5 billion of pro forma EBITDA to Broadcom within three years of the deal closing -- significant growth given VMware currently produces about $4.7 billion. And subscriptions was the answer. Krause also repeatedly said Broadcom intends to invest in VMware's key product portfolio and is pleased to be acquiring a sales organization and channel relationships that give it reach Broadcom does not currently enjoy. [...]

Krause and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan both said Broadcom plans to nurture VMware's 300,000-plus customer base. The move to subscription-based licensing will apparently happen over the course of the next few years. [...] VMware may also experience slower growth in the short term due to the licensing shift. Krause said Broadcom is willing to live with lower margins for VMware than it expects from CA and Symantec, with R&D to benefit as a result. The software boss pledged ongoing investment and innovation for VMware's core infrastructure products, naming vSphere, VSAN, vRealize and NSX as the subjects of ongoing love and attention

In a new court filing, Epic Games challenges Apple's position that third-party app stores would compromise the iPhone's security. And it points to Apple's macOS as an example of how the process of "sideloading" apps -- installing apps outside of Apple's own App Store, that is -- doesn't have to be the threat Apple describes it to be. From a report: Apple's Mac, explains Epic, doesn't have the same constraints as found in the iPhone operating system, iOS, and yet Apple touts the operating system used in Mac computers, macOS, as secure. The Cary, N.C.-based Fortnite maker made these points in its latest brief, among several others, related to its ongoing legal battle with Apple over its control of the App Store. Epic Games wants to earn the right to deliver Fortnite to iPhone users outside the App Store, or at the very least, be able to use its own payment processing system so it can stop paying Apple commissions for the ability to deliver its software to iPhone users.

Swiss-based encrypted email provider ProtonMail today announced a restructuring of its privacy-first services, bringing them under a new unifying brand name: Proton. "Today, we are undertaking our biggest step forward in the movement for an internet that respects your privacy. The new, updated Proton offers one account, many services, and one privacy-by-default ecosystem. You can now enjoy unified protection with a modernized look and feel. Evolving into a unified Proton reflects our growth from an end-to-end encrypted email provider to an entire privacy ecosystem, allowing us to deliver even more benefits to the Proton community and make privacy accessible to everyone," the company said. MacRumors adds: Previously, users could only subscribe to each service the company offered individually. Going forward, the new Proton offers one account to access all the services offered in the company's privacy-by-default ecosystem, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive, all of which can be accessed from proton.me. All Proton services remain available as a free tier, with more advanced features and more storage available via paid plans. The free Proton tier includes up to 1GB of storage and one Proton email address, as well as access to Proton's encrypted Calendar and VPN services. Further reading: Proton Is Trying to Become Google -- Without Your Data.

Grocery app Gorillas, which promises to deliver goods in as quickly as 10 minutes, is laying off half of its office staff. From a report: In a press release, the company said it was letting go of roughly 300 employees from a "global office workforce" of 600. (This workforce also includes roughly 14,400 staff working in warehouse and as delivery drivers.) The company is also planning to tighten its focus on five markets that account for 90 percent of its revenue: the UK, US, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. The company also operates in four other European markets -- Spain, Denmark, Italy, and Belgium -- where it says it is "looking at all possible strategic options for the Gorillas brand." That might mean pulling out of these markets, but Gorillas tells The Verge nothing has been decided yet.

A remarkably literary critique of the internet appeared recently in Damage magazine — a project of the nonprofit Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry funded by the American Psychoanalytic Foundation. "There are ways in which the internet really does seem to work like a possessing demon..." argues writer Sam Kriss.

"We tend to think that the internet is a communications network we use to speak to one another — but in a sense, we're not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken through." Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world, they'll say valid or based, or say y'all despite being British....

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech — not because someone might ban your account, but because there's a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it's not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels....

The internet is not a communications system. Instead of delivering messages between people, it simulates the experience of being among people, in a way that books or shopping lists or even the telephone do not. And there are things that a simulation will always fail to capture. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. "The face is what prohibits us from killing...." But Facebook is a world without faces. Only images of faces; selfies, avatars: dead things. Or the moving image in a FaceTime chat: a haunted puppet. There is always something in the way. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

As more and more of your social life takes place online, you're training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don't vanish once you look away from the screen.... many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don't like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.
The article revisits a 2011 meta-analysis that found massive declines in young people's capacity for empathy, which the authors directly associated with the spread of social media. But then Kriss argues that "We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all.

"For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm..."

So while recent books look for historical antecedents, "I still think that the internet is a serious break from what we had before," Kriss argues. "And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison."

Chinese engineers will take the ideas of a research paper and turn it into the world's largest 3D-printed project. Popular Mechanics: Within two years, officials behind this project want to fully automate the unmanned construction of a 590-foot-tall dam on the Tibetan Plateau to build the Yangqu hydropower plant -- completely with robots. The paper, published last month in the Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology), laid out the plans for the dam, as first reported in the South China Morning Post. Researchers from the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing explain the backbone of automation for the planned Yellow River dam that will eventually offer nearly five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. (It's worth noting that China's Three Gorges Dam -- a hydroelectric gravity dam spanning the Yangtze River -- is the world's largest power station in terms of energy output.) But it's hard to tell what's more ambitious: the fact that the researchers plan to turn a dam site into effectively a massive 3D-printing project, or that through every step of the process the project eliminates human workers as they go fully robotic.

In the dam-"printing" process, machinery will deliver construction materials to the worksite -- the exact location needed, eliminating human error, they say -- and then unmanned bulldozers, pavers, and rollers will form the dam layer by layer. Sensors on the rollers will keep the artificial intelligence (AI) system informed about the firmness and stability of each of the 3D-printed layers until it reaches 590 feet in height, about the same height as the Shasta Dam in California and shorter than the Hoover Dam's 726 feet. With the largest existing 3D-printed structures rising about 20 feet tall -- from houses in China to an office building in Dubai -- the exploration of 3D-printed projects continues to expand. Already we've seen a 1,640-foot-long retention wall in China, housing and office buildings across the globe, and now the U.S. Army has plans for barracks at Fort Bliss in Texas.

Amazon.com is testing a service that uses the company's sprawling network of gig drivers to fetch packages from mall-based retailers and deliver them to customers. From a report: The program, should it become a permanent part of the e-commerce giant's delivery options, could help Amazon expand the variety of goods it has available for fast shipment. Shoppers who want same-day or quicker shipping could be shown products stocked by a local mall store. They order the item from the retailer on Amazon.com, and one of the Seattle-based company's contract drivers delivers it. The service was up and running by last year and relies on Amazon Flex drivers, who use their own vehicles to deliver packages. The geographic range of the pilot is unclear, but communications with drivers reviewed by Bloomberg reference malls with participating retailers in Chandler, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Paul Sawers writes via VentureBeat: It has been a frosty few years for Elastic and Amazon's AWS cloud computing arm, with the duo frequently locking horns over various issues relating to Elastic's ex-open-source database search engine -- Elasticsearch. To cut a War and Peace-esque story short, Amazon had introduced its own managed Elasticsearch service called Amazon Elasticsearch Service way back in 2015, and in the intervening years the "confusion" this (among other shenanigans) caused in the cloud sphere ultimately led Elastic to transition Elasticsearch from open source to "free and open" (i.e., a less permissive license), exerting more control over how the cloud giants of the world could use the product and Elasticsearch name. In response, Amazon launched an Elasticsearch "fork" called OpenSearch, and the two companies finally settled a long-standing trademark dispute, which effectively meant that Amazon would stop associating the Elasticsearch brand with Amazon's own products. This was an important final piece of the kiss-and-make-up puzzle, as it meant that customers searching for Elastic's fully-managed Elasticsearch service (Elastic Cloud) in the AWS Marketplace, wouldn't also stumble upon Amazon's incarnation and wonder which one they were actually looking for.

Fast-forward to today, and you would hardly know that the two companies were once at loggerheads. Over the past year, Elastic and Amazon have partnered to bring all manner of technologies and integrations to market, and they've worked to ensure that their shared customers can more easily onboard to Elastic Cloud within Amazon's infrastructure. Building on a commitment last month to make AWS and Elastic work even better together, Elastic and AWS today announced an even deeper collaboration, to "build, market and deliver" frictionless access to Elastic Cloud on AWS. In essence, this means that the two companies will go full-throttle on their "go-to-market" sales and marketing strategies -- this includes a new free 7-day trial for customers wanting to test-drive Elastic Cloud directly from the AWS Marketplace.

On top of that, AWS has committed to working with Elastic to generate new business across Amazon's various cloud-focused sales organizations -- this is a direct result of Elastic joining the AWS ISV Accelerate program. All of this has been made possible because of the clear and distinct products that now exist -- Amazon has OpenSearch, and Elastic has Elasticsearch, which makes collaboration that much easier. What does Amazon get for all of this? "Put simply, companies accessing Elastic's services on AWS infrastructure drive a lot of cloud consumption -- which translates into ka-ching for Amazon," adds Sawers.