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Comment Re:China will beat the US (Score 2) 165

by Aviation Pete (#66293052) Attached to: China's Moon-landing Plans And Why the US Is So Worried

Worth also noting that they are using a different mission profile to Apollo, which the US has now also adopted for Artemis, where they send the lander unmanned to lunar orbit and and then send a crewed vehicle to meet it.

Actually, that was also the Soviet plan for landing on the moon. Their N1 was not powerful enough to lift a return-capable lander and crew in one go, so they decided to first land an unmanned return vehicle, then, a few weeks later, the manned lander (without the ability to take off again) and let the crew ferry over to the return vehicle once their mission was over.

The design for the crew ferry later became the Lunokhod programme.

Submission + - Small Hidden Chip Could Let Someone Manipulate Boeing 737â(TM)s Flight Comp (studyfinds.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Researchers built a tiny device that fits inside an existing maintenance port in the belly of a Boeing 737 and demonstrated, on a genuine Boeing 737 test setup, that it could alter the flight management computerâ(TM)s route and performance data, the inputs that tell the autopilot where to fly, while hiding those changes from pilots in that test environment.

Submission + - Reddit Bans 11-Year Account For Announcing a GPL Game, stress testing EU DSA (reddit.com) 3

Submitted by DF5JT
DF5JT writes: On July 26 I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit's spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account — the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To this day Reddit has given no reason whatsoever, although Article 17 of the EU's Digital Services Act makes a statement of reasons mandatory. The only appeal channel is a 250-character web form that sends no confirmation and never answered; Reddit's own help text admits: "you may not have received a message to your inbox." A GDPR export of 11 years of data came to 7.2 MB, every post truncated after a few lines, with zero data about the ban decision. So I spent one day escalating through every mechanism the EU provides: certified out-of-court dispute settlement at Austria's RTR, complaints with the Austrian and Dutch Digital Services Coordinators, the data protection authority (citing the ECJ's SCHUFA ruling on automated decisions), noyb, and Austria's consumer association. Bonus finding: the European Commission's DSA Transparency Database contains 14,067 Reddit statements of reasons for that week — none for my ban — and the Commission's own feedback form limits reports to 500 characters and crashed with a 500 Server Error. Is the DSA enforceable for ordinary users, or just paperwork?

Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)

Submitted by hwstar
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are: Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.

All Clad

A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

Pyrex

Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.

The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.

In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.

Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"

The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."

Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.

The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.

Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.

Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.

Comment So, only six months ... (Score 2) 75

by Aviation Pete (#66242116) Attached to: EU Won't Require User-Replaceable Batteries for Wearables

... before the regulation comes into force, and the pencil pushers in Brussels do a U-turn?

Any respectable company with a battery-powered product has already spent two years on designing a replaceable alternative. Now all that effort is for nothing. Whoever argues that replaceability by itself will be a selling argument: If that were true, this regulation would not be needed.

When the regulation was published first in 2024, I drafted a polite letter inquiring how conformity can be achieved for products that are too small to accommodate any of the commercially available plugs (full disclosure: I happen to develop such products). In response, I got back an unspeakably arrogant note that I only need to read the text of the law, and all would be clear. As if!

My respect for these aloof, out of touch trolls is below zero. Next time, their nonsense will be ignored. Will save me a lot of work!

Submission + - Physicists create first room-temperature quantum material (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.

Submission + - How Microsoft's "Little Workaround" Created a Major Pentagon Threat (propublica.org)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: ProPublica Reporter Renee Dudley heard Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary.

The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.

Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

National security and cybersecurity experts in the Trump administration contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an arrangement was in place, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital prowess as a top threat to the country.

Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.

“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica in an email. That said, he maintained that the “scope of systems they could disrupt” is limited.

In an emailed statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said that cloud service providers “are required to establish and maintain controls for vetting and using qualified specialists,” but the agency did not respond to ProPublica’s questions regarding the digital escorts’ qualifications.

It’s unclear whether other cloud providers to the federal government use digital escorts as part of their tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the inspector general — whose office is supposed to operate independently in order to investigate potential waste, fraud and abuse — told ProPublica they were not authorized to speak about the issue and directed questions to DISA public affairs.

Submission + - The Mind-Bending Company That Gets a Million Job Applications—and Rejects (archive.ph) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Getting an offer from Bending Spoons, which owns AOL, has become harder than getting into Harvard

It’s a mind-bending number. The most cutthroat banks and consulting firms brag about hiring rates of 1%. Citadel and Citadel Securities took 0.36% of the quants who applied for internships this summer. NASA lets in 0.1% of those who want to be astronauts. But 0.04%? It means that getting a job at Bending Spoons is 100 times harder than getting into Harvard.

The company is run by executives in their 30s and early 40s. The employees are mostly in their 20s and 30s and have never worked anywhere else. Many are younger than the brands they take over.
“Being able to spot people who are unusually talented and motivated very early in their careers, then giving them unusually high levels of responsibility and coaching, has been an absolutely key advantage for us,” said Ferrari, who is 41.

It’s a key part of the business model, too. When Bending Spoons buys a company, it begins each radical transformation by slashing most of the acquired employees—and replacing them with the much leaner team of Spooners.

There are now about 700 people who made it through the notorious hiring process and now work in technical, product and growth roles across the organization. They move from one Bending Spoons acquisition to the next, making what Ferrari calls “very deep changes”—rewriting the code, rebuilding the infrastructure, redesigning the user interface. And they are “held to particularly demanding performance standards,” the company promises.

In fact, an entire team of Spooners does nothing but evaluate other Spooners and potential Spooners.

Submission + - China Recovers Orbital Rocket with Net Capturing System (spacenews.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: The first Long March 10B rocket lifted off at 12:15 a.m. Eastern (0415 UTC) July 10 from Hainan Commercial Space Launch Site on the southern island province of Hainan. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) confirmed the successful recovery of the rocket’s first stage 11 minutes later, using a sea platform equipped with a net capture system, a world first. Videos emerging in the minutes following showed a controlled, powered descent with black smoke billowing from the top of the first stage, followed by capture by the Linghang Zhe (“navigator”) sea recovery vessel, with hooks deployed from the booster caught by a tensioned net. The recovery occurred six minutes after separation of the first and second stages. The full success of the flight with insertion of an unnamed satellite into orbit was confirmed by CASC more than 90 minutes after liftoff, representing a huge boost to both China’s desire to develop reusable rocket capabilities, and for its crewed lunar program. The five-meter-diameter, two-stage Long March 10B is 63 meters long, with a mass of 760,000 kilograms at liftoff and has a low Earth orbit payload capacity of 16,000 kg in reusable mode. The full, tri-core Long March 10 will be used to launch astronauts and a landing stack to the moon, with China committed to landing a pair of astronauts on the lunar surface before 2030.

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