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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.

Comment Giving your bot an allowance... (Score 1) 28

This reminds me of microtransactions.

We're 50 years overdue for an alternate payment clearing system that doesn't take more to process than the payment is worth. Most of the enshittification we've seen due to an eyeball (now attention) based economy could have been sidestepped if we built a system for people to pay on a transactional basis for compute and content.

Funny how the wave of autonomous agents is once again driving people to revisit this stuff.

https://spellboundproductions....

"Thirty years ago, General Magicâ(TM)s Telescript established a foundation for autonomous agents. The vision behind it sounds like today's promises of Agentic AIââ but in fact was actually enabled by the technology from the outset. Telescript didn't ask users to just trust it. Instead, it built deterministic safety into the system itselfâ"Permits that limited resource consumption, Authorities that enforced accountability, an Engine that prevented agents from touching host resources directly."

There's no reason you can't pay in tenths, or hundredths of a cent. It's the same idea as a cryptocurrency ledger, minus the ridiculous overhead of the blockchain. Building out the infrastructure to do that is beneficial to both humans and autonomous agents.

https://x402.org/

So... yay?

Comment Re:From the article it's just browser fingerprinti (Score 2) 82

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 120

by silentbozo (#66233934) Attached to: Orbital Datacenter Plans Need an Environmental Review, FCC Told

This is all about leverage.

You don't wait until your one and only supplier of land decides you need to tithe 50% of your earnings for the privilege of setting up your business before you diversify.

Look at the Strait of Hormuz. The countries with the backup plan (rail built years ago) have an option other than dealing with Iran. The ones that don't suddenly have a problem - a big one.

Datacenters can indeed be built more cheaply on earth... for now. In the event that changes... you want to already have your alternatives tested and ready to be scaled up. Maybe this will all turn out to be just a waste of money that historians will later chalk up to ego.

To put it another way... if you wanted to test an untried technology and attempt to scale it up, would you rather do it while people are throwing buckets of money at you, or would you rather do it when your cash flow is under threat and investors are getting cold feet?

Comment Re:The death of homework (Score 1) 109

AI is too easy to use, when the work is done at home. And I say, good riddance. Homework has for decades been a substitute for learning. AP classes aren't actually "advanced" they just require more homework. If AI kills all those extra hours of busywork, that's a good thing.

The historically-bad results of the final at least suggest that doing out-of-class work themselves actually helps students.

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