I did multi-channel photometry of variable stars as an astrophysics student in early 1990s. We did not lead the scientific work, this was for actual scientists.

The measurements are time-consuming and tedious. You sit in an observatory and follow a protocol. Guide the telescope to a comparison star, guide it to the actual star to be measured, back and forth, for hours and hours, for nights and nights. The photometer takes the measurements, prints the graphs to long rolls of paper, that you will later measure by hand. The dome of the observatory was cold, often -10C and below (space around the telescope was kept to overall outdoor temperature), guiding the scope was fully manual work, you got to stay up all nights with no internet yet or social media to scroll. Perfect job for the students :)

The results were exactly what this article is about. Long time series (many years) of variable star brightness graphs in multiple channels, used to figure out the physics behind the brighness changes. Is this a cepheid where the star itself is pulsating? A rotating pair of stars? Something that we do not yet know and is new to science?

Nobody guessed or hoped that we might be able to detect actual planets at that time.

Their intent is to enrich alien civilizations with our tech and to imprint them with our services. MAVEN was (is?) running a Minecraft server and contains tokens for a Youtube family subscription.

Neither the summary nor the article bother to mention this.

... but alas. :(

I am sure a company like Jaguar has cybersecurity insurance. This service comes in many variations - it can cover direct costs of handling the incident (eg extra hours logged by your employees), third party costs (eg additional anti-ddos services purchased to mitigate the attack), post-incident cleanup costs, ransomware payments...

Would Jaguar file an insurance claim? Based on which policy? Would they get a payout? For what?

Would be insightful to learn about this, after the dust has settled.

"Acceleration is expanding" does not make sense.
Perhaps the expansion rate is accelerating?

I am an astrophysicist by education (although removed from science since I graduated long time ago), and the article as cited on Slashdot makes no sense to me. Is this just a small step in the understanding of dark energy and its impacts? Something totally new? A breakthrough of some sort? "We are in the process of getting new data and publishing more papers." Why is this news?

At the beginning of the war I hoped that all US software would stop working in Russia. Not just clouds but all Windows devices, Apple, Android could have been bricked at a snap. The war would have ended very fast. (Granted, Russia can make things work again, but it would take time and lots of engineering effort.)

I was so naive.

Five-day outage is in a domain of business continuity.

Deleting data - happens.
Did they have backups?
Did they have recovery plans and procedures?
Had they tested them?
What failed?

I have friends working as seamen both in the Baltic sea and at oceans. They say that the maritime community has no doubt whatsoever about the recent incidents. The only explanation is sabotage. It would be technically impossible to randomly damage the cables.

The explanations offered by the vessels may look OK to a journalist, but any seaman from sailor to captain just would not take it.

If you train your AI to persuade people to belive in conspiracies - does it work?

And does it work better than human propaganda channels?

In either way, the owners / trainers / operators of our new AI overlords yield horrible power.

It was more like managers at Redmond did not understand nor trust this "peer to peer thing" that was engineered by some hackers in Eastern Europe. Thus they wanted to replace it with a normal, server-based, invented-and-implemented in Redmond tech. Took them a few tries but the finally succeeded, and then failed again.

I don't think US government had much influence over that, just the standard Microsoft "not invented here" syndrome.

ESA is doing clean-up work for NASA, and EU is demoted to a role of a space janitor.

BSI is Germany. It largely disregards Brussels and does things on its own. Especially so on matters that relate to the national security of Germany. Their view on EU Commission is something of "bureaucratic clowns that we fund and tolerate, but can also ignore at will".

So there is no "mind" to be made up here. Europe or EU is not a single organization. It also has no reason or incentive to have a common opinion on issues like that.

BSI has serious influence over big cloud providers, so don't underestimate it. The current initative is probably a public policy stunt more than a real plan though.

This seems to be the Spanish implementation of EU eIDAS 2 digitial wallet standard.

eIDAS is an EU trust services framework. The first version is 10 years old now, and it failed miserably. There was no use cases for it, and Google / Facebook owned the identity management market with their simple OAuth based login.

Now EU is trying again... and harder.

So I drive a Russian car in US that connects to its Russian manufacturer for telemetry, updates and possibly remote control.
Or I drive a Chinese car in Israel.

Should US and all other countries firewall the connections from the cars to the OEM-s?
To be able to see the telemetry, block potential malicious updates, cut them off in case of problems?

I cannot see why the current situation is OK in any way.
"The cars driving on our roads are connected to their manufacturers, which may be under the control of enemy governments or malicious groups".