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Submission + - Bill Gates was given a seat at the NIH's Covid policy-setting table (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Gates had no official public health authority, yet he was given a seat at the table in high-level COVID briefings and played a direct role in shaping America’s pandemic response. Private billionaires should not be steering national policy behind closed doors.

Submission + - Trump administration drafting ban on Chinese data center devices (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the U.S. telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centers. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect.

The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at U.S. data centers, which house the chips to train and run AI models.

The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. But it is the latest example of the Trump administration trying to limit Chinese technological incursions into cutting-edge U.S. industries before they become embedded in the supply chain.

"Transceivers definitely pose a risk," said Divyansh Kaushik, an AI policy expert at Washington, D.C., advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies. "As the data center buildout scales up, you want to make sure the data center supply chain is secure from the get-go," he added.

A U.S. ban on new models of Chinese data center devices would likely hit China's Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added to the Pentagon's list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. Innolight did not respond to requests for comment.

A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as U.S.-based Coherent and Lumentum.

Submission + - Spain offers $1.14 Billion to get Thirty Meter Telescope moved to Canary Islands (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: TMT has been blocked because of local protesters in Hawaii — who apparently oppose the presence of whites in Hawaii as well as on the mountain Mauna Kea — and have been supported by the state government run by the Democrats. In response, the consortium building TMT had chosen the Canary Islands as its back-up location, but that choice meant that Japan pulled out of the partnership. In addition, the National Science Foundation has withdrawn all funding from the project. Thus, nothing could be built anywhere.

Since late last year TMT has been in serious negotiations with Spain. Apparently it wanted Spain to come up with more cash before committing to the move.

Spain has now done so. Whether TMT will accept remains uncertain. The Canary Islands is not as good a site for the telescope than Mauna Kea in Hawaii. And it appears there is also local opposition to the project. But considering TMT does not have the funding in Hawaii, it seems that either it accepts this offer or the telescope will never be built.

It seems a far better choice for TMT would be to get Spain to use that billion dollars to build a really good space telescope. The pay-off would be far better than building a ground-based telescope — no matter how large — that will have to look through both the atmosphere as well as the millions of satellites expected to be launched in the next decade.

Submission + - Six Months Post-Maduro, Venezuelan Recovery Defies Critics (archive.is)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Representative Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, drew the parallel directly. “This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan,” Himes said, “in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Qaddafi from power in Libya.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the architect of the administration’s Western Hemisphere strategy, was dismissive. “The whole foreign policy apparatus thinks everything is Libya, everything is Iraq, everything is Afghanistan,” he said. “This is not the Middle East, and our mission here is very different.”

Six months later, the chaos never came.

For nearly three decades, the scenario Hugo Chávez and Maduro invoked to justify their grip on the country was American boots on Venezuelan soil. Now they are there, and Venezuelans are lining up to meet them. Shell signed a gas development deal. SLB, the world’s largest oilfield services company, returned following a lapse in the license it operated under in May 2025. At least 670 political prisoners have been released since January, and political parties have resumed public activities across the country. In May, Venezuela freed three former police officers who had spent 23 uninterrupted years behind bars, the longest-held political prisoners in the country’s history.

“The most tangible change for Venezuelans is that repression has diminished,” Gaby Arellano, a Venezuelan opposition figure and former National Assembly member who has tracked the transition closely, told Newsweek. “It has not disappeared, but it has decreased.”

Exiled opposition leaders, including Voluntad Popular’s Lester Toledo and Yon Goicoechea and former Petare Mayor Carlos Ocariz, have also begun returning home. Open-air television channels now cover news beyond the official government narrative, including the activities of opposition leader María Corina Machado, something that had not happened in years.

“We have seen all political parties reactivate their organizations, hold public events, organize street activities and assemblies,” Arellano said. “We have to remember that in 2024, any activity that was not authorized by Miraflores [Caracas] was considered a conspiracy.”

Submission + - AI Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is no parallel in American history for the boom underway in the construction of data centers, fueled by companies with functionally unlimited cash that are racing to supply skyrocketing demand for their A.I. models. The explosion has offset flagging activity in other sectors, like office construction, which never recovered after the pandemic. Housing has been depressed by high interest rates, and offshore wind felled by political opposition. Still, competition for labor — never mind land and materials — is starting to weigh on other parts of the industry.

“There’s no question the resources are very limited, so decisions to build one thing kind of drag from another,” said Mario Iacobacci, who runs the construction and infrastructure advisory practice at Oxford Economics. Developers are paying a premium for workers, especially in the rural areas where they are building data centers. According to an analysis by Indeed, the job listings website, hourly installation and maintenance jobs at data centers pay 42 percent more than similar jobs in other fields. Behind that inflated pay is a bidding war. In markets with a lot of data center construction, like Dallas and Northern Virginia, workers can jump ship for bonuses or higher per diem rates. The competition has driven contractors to staffing services like Aerotek.

“It is creating a labor tension that is really delicate,” said Marty Schager, Aerotek’s director of data center market development. “You’ve got a passive job-seeker community out there right now that I think is looking to potentially capture opportunity with this once-in-a-generation data center gold rush.” [...] The question looms over the apprentices who will become journeymen as the build-out reaches fever pitch. Fully trained electricians could shift to nuclear plants, apartment buildings or pharmaceutical factories. But it’s hard to imagine anything on the scale of what’s underway.

“The best-case scenario would be you train all these skilled workers up and right when the data centers start to become less popular is we’d have a housing boom,” said Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “That’s probably not likely.” Joe Ottenbacher already switched careers, leaving early childhood education because of its bureaucracy and underfunding. He worries that an exodus of electricians from their $200,000-a-year data center jobs could depress wages for everybody else. “If we have an influx of workers at this point with the data centers being built, what happens when they’re done? Where do those workers go?” he said. “How many people does it take to run a data center after taking up all this property and all this land that could have been used for something else?”

Submission + - ICE Dismantles SIM Farms in Nationwide Operation (ice.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) Homeland Security Investigations carried out a nationwide operation between June 22 and July 10 that dismantled “SIM farms” run by transnational criminal organizations.

SIM (subscriber identity module) farms are systems containing large numbers of SIM cards from different wireless carriers, often housed in banks of cellphones, modems, or specialized devices known as SIM boxes.

These can be used to send and receive bulk messages or calls and often exploit voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology to do so. Initially developed for legitimate purposes, the technology has become prominent among organized fraudsters targeting mass audiences through phishing texts, scam calls, and fraudulent online accounts.

The recent nationwide operation, dubbed Operation Signal Break, “dismantled critical command-and-control infrastructure used to perpetrate large-scale telecommunications fraud across the United States,” ICE said in a July 24 statement.

Authorities will now analyze the seized SIM data to identify victims and assess losses caused by such fraud. The illicit proceeds from the fraud, which are suspected to be linked to Chinese transnational criminal organizations and distribution networks, will be traced.

This is expected to support criminal indictments, sanctions targeting national and international infrastructure used in criminal activity, and asset seizures. SIM box operations are estimated to result in losses worth $15 million annually to Americans, according to ICE.

SIM box fraud, “also known as interconnect bypass fraud, is a scheme in which fraudsters reroute international calls to appear as local ones,” a Nov. 8, 2025, post from IT services provider Synaptique said.

For instance, when a foreign national calls someone in the United States, the call is diverted through VOIP to a SIM box in America instead of passing through a legitimate international call gateway. The SIM box then uses one of the local SIM cards to place a new local call to the recipient.

Submission + - AI Co's bulk-buying rare books, remove spine, high speed scan and shredding them (x.com) 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

This is irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.

"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026.

Submission + - Elon Musk's Boring Company reportedly raising funding at a $20 billion valuation (wsj.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Elon Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company is in talks to raise a $4 billion funding round at a valuation of $20 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The deal hasn’t closed and the terms could change, the WSJ says. At $20 billion, the valuation would be a significant increase from The Boring Company’s $5.7 billion valuation in 2022.

The startup has already built a network of tunnels under Las Vegas, through which Teslas shuttle customers to different stations.

The Boring Company has announced plans to build tunnel networks under Nashville and Dubai. The WSJ says the startup has also pitched projects in Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

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