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Submission + - DOJ Arrests U.S. Citizens and Chinese Nationals for Exporting AI Tech to China (pjmedia.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced in a statement that it has arrested two U.S. citizens and two Chinese nationals and charged them with conspiracy to illegally export to China advanced NVIDIA microchips called Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). GPUs are used in a wide range of critical artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

The two American citizens who were arrested are Hon Ning Ho, also known as “Mathew Ho,” a Tampa resident who was born in Hong Kong, and Brian Curtis Raymond from Huntsville, Alabama. The two Chinese nationals arrested by the DOJ are Cham Li, also known as “Tony Li,” a resident of San Leandro, California, and Jing Chen, also known as “Harry Chen,” a 45-year-old who was living in Tampa under an F-1 nonimmigrant student visa.

All four were arrested and appeared in courtrooms in their respective jurisdictions on Nov. 19.

“The indictment unsealed yesterday alleges a deliberate and deceptive effort to transship controlled NVIDIA GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading U.S. authorities,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “The National Security Division is committed to disrupting these kinds of black markets of sensitive U.S. technologies and holding accountable those who participate in this illicit trade.”

The charges the defendants face include multiple counts of conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act (ECRA); ECRA violations; smuggling; conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering. Each defendant faces a possible 20-year prison sentence for each ECRA violation, 10 years per smuggling count, and 20 years per money laundering count. Given the number of counts they face, it’s possible they could spend the rest of their lives in prison.

The defendants will be tried in federal court in Florida.

Earlier this year, a report from the Financial Times revealed that at least $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s chips were shipped to China after the Trump administration began to intensify the restrictions on microchips to China.

Submission + - Newest Starship booster is significantly damaged during testing early Friday (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.

The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site, a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.

Post-incident images showed significant damage, perhaps a crumpling of sorts, to the lower half of the booster where the vehicle’s large liquid oxygen tank is housed. Neither SpaceX, nor company founder Elon Musk, had commented on the failure within a couple of hours of its occurrence on Friday morning.

The likely loss of this vehicle, “Booster 18,” is significant for SpaceX. Although the company is hardware rich—indeed it has built a massive factory in South Texas to churn out such vehicles—it nonetheless had a lot riding on this rocket. This is the first Starship Version 3, which was intended to have many design fixes and upgrades from the previous iterations of Starship vehicles to improve the reliability and performance of the massive rocket.

Submission + - Border Patrol monitors drivers, detains those with 'suspicious' travel patterns (apnews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.

The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.

Suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over — often for reasons cited such as speeding, failure to signal, the wrong window tint or even a dangling air freshener blocking the view. They are then aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.

Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.

Comment The US needs this to compete with China (Score 1) 74

by schwit1 (#65806703) Attached to: White House Prepares Executive Order To Block State AI Laws

We don't need a patchwork of 50+ regimes creating compliance nightmares. It burdens startups and kills innovation in the cradle.

Inconsistent laws will favor incumbents, harm small firms, and benefit China.

Imagine when the internet was getting started if every state was regulating content in a different way? Numerous startups would have never gotten off the ground.

BTW, this should come from Congress and not an EO.

Submission + - Owning a Cat Could Double Your Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Having a cat as a pet could potentially double a person's risk of schizophrenia-related conditions, according to an analysis of 17 studies.

Psychiatrist John McGrath and colleagues at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Australia looked at papers published over the last 44 years in 11 countries, including the US and the UK.

Their 2023 review found "a significant positive association between broadly defined cat ownership and an increased risk of schizophrenia-related disorders."

T. gondii is a mostly harmless parasite that can be transmitted through undercooked meat or contaminated water. It can also be transmitted through an infected cat's feces.

Estimates suggest that T. gondii infects about 40 million people in the US, typically without any symptoms. Meanwhile, researchers keep finding more strange effects that infections may have.

Once inside our bodies, T. gondii can infiltrate the central nervous system and influence neurotransmitters. The parasite has been linked to personality changes, the emergence of psychotic symptoms, and some neurological disorders, including schizophrenia.

Submission + - How to Not Get Kidnapped for Your Bitcoin (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain’s Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October.

"Just bite your way out," he told them.

It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border. A small group of investors had lined up in a conference room to have their hands bound with plastic zipties. Now they were learning how to get them off.

"Your teeth will get through anything," Mr. Kayll advised. "But it will bloody well hurt."

Most people don’t go to an international crypto conference expecting to learn how to gnaw through plastic. But after hours of panels devoted to topics like Bitcoin-collateralized loans, these investors were looking for something more practical. They wanted to know what to do if they were grabbed on the street and thrown into the back of a van.

Already paranoid about scams, hacks and market turmoil, wealthy crypto investors have lately become terrified about a much graver threat: torture and kidnapping.

Submission + - GM wants parts makers to pull supply chains from China (businesstimes.com.sg)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: General Motors (GM) has directed several thousand of its suppliers to scrub their supply chains of parts from China, four people familiar with the matter said, reflecting automakers’ growing frustration over geopolitical disruptions to their operations.

GM executives have been telling suppliers they should find alternatives to China for their raw materials and parts, with the goal of eventually moving their supply chains out of the country entirely, the people said.

The automaker has set a 2027 deadline for some suppliers to dissolve their China sourcing ties, some of the sources said.

GM approached some suppliers with the directive in late 2024, but the effort took on fresh urgency this past spring, during the early days of an escalating US-China trade battle, the sources said.

Submission + - A potential quantum leap (harvard.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Harvard physicists unveil system to solve long-standing barrier to new generation of supercomputers

The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction.

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers demonstrated a new system capable of detecting and removing errors below a key performance threshold, potentially providing a workable solution to the problem.

"For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture," said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. "These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation."

In the new paper, the team demonstrated a "fault tolerant" system using 448 atomic quantum bits manipulated with an intricate sequence of techniques to detect and correct errors.

The key mechanisms include physical entanglement, logical entanglement, logical magic, and entropy removal. For example, the system employs the trick of "quantum teleportation" — transferring the quantum state of one particle to another elsewhere without physical contact.

"There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable," said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. '25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. "It's going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it's becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers."

Submission + - Singapore scammers get the canning treatment (mha.gov.sg) 1

Submitted by D,Petkow
D,Petkow writes: Singapore is often hailed as one of the world’s most ultra-modern hubs — a place of gleaming skyscrapers, cutting-edge fintech, and futuristic urban planning. Yet, beneath the polished surface, the city-state still enforces some of the strictest old-school punishments imaginable.

In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.

It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.

https://says.com/my/news/singa...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...

Submission + - Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa (substack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: You know that feeling when you’re waiting for the cable guy, and they said ‘between 8am and 6pm, and you waste your entire day, and they never show up?

Now imagine that, except the cable guy is ‘electricity,’ the day is ‘50 years,’ and you’re one of 600 million people. At some point, you stop waiting and figure it out yourself.

What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.

Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day.

And if you understand what’s happening in Africa, you understand the template for how infrastructure will get built everywhere else for the next 50 years.

Submission + - Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.

“Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests,” Reuters reported.

Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.

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