Zuckerberg Launching Threads to Compete with Twitter
July 4th, 2023Via: AFP:
Elon Musk spent the weekend further alienating Twitter users with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.
Zuckerberg’s Meta group, which owns Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app”, available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is “expected” this Thursday.
Toyota Claims Solid State Battery Breakthrough
July 4th, 2023Via: Mining:
Toyota said on Tuesday it has made a technological breakthrough that will allow it to halve the weight, size, and cost of batteries.
“For both our liquid and solid-state batteries, we are aiming to drastically change the situation where current batteries are too big, heavy, and expensive,” said Keiji Kaita, president of Toyota’s research and development center for carbon neutrality.
“In terms of potential, we will aim to halve all of these factors.”
The automaker announced last month that it plans to commercialize its solid-state battery technology in EVs by 2027 at the earliest.
Industry experts have long heralded solid-state batteries as the most promising technology to solve EV battery problems such as charging time, capacity, and the risk of catching fire.
The technology replaces the liquid electrolyte with a solid one and uses lithium at the anode instead of graphite.
Secret Government Effort To Regulate Your Mind
July 3rd, 2023Via: Michael Shellenberger:
One of the big questions that those of us involved in exposing the secret U.S. government censorship effort have been asking ourselves over the last few months is: did the people involved know that they were breaking the law?
That question appears to have been answered with a resounding yes by the House Judiciary Committee. Yesterday it released its report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded with Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” on government censorship.
“It’s only a matter of time,” wrote a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”
The “we” in that sentence refers to the network of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that we and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex. That Complex includes the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Its leader, Kate Starbird, responded to the former CIA official, Susan Spaulding, by saying, “Yes. I agree. We have a couple of pretty obvious vulnerabilities.”
But one day later, Starbird dismissed the notion that she and her colleagues were doing anything wrong. The real problem was, she explained, that “current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms” and that CISA may face “bad faith criticism” for its censorship.
What is “malinformation”? It’s accurate information that might lead people to come to the wrong conclusions — or do things that Starbird, Spaulding, and their allies didn’t want them to do, like not getting vaccinated against Covid-19.
I’m Afraid We Have to Talk About “Her Penis”
July 3rd, 2023Via: Brendan O’Neill:
We need to talk about her penis. Not about any specific individual’s private parts. That would be weird. No, we need to talk about the union of those two words. The smashing together of the female pronoun and the noun for the male genital organ. Her penis. Nothing better captures the irrationalism of our age, and also the slippery authoritarianism of it, than the fact that this nonsensical phrase is frequently uttered, and as much in the respectable press as in the gender Bedlam of internet discussion forums. If anyone tries to tell you the culture war is a myth, show them her penis.
Her penis is everywhere.
New Research Paper: mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines Are Gene Therapy Products
July 3rd, 2023
Via: Epoch Times:
Now that the pandemic has ended, researchers are urging regulatory agencies to consider the safety issues associated with the rapid approval of COVID-19 vaccines—and to correctly classify messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines as gene therapy products (GTPs) to prevent pharmaceutical companies from bypassing regulatory standards.
Power Analysis of LEDs Can Reveal Encryption Keys
July 3rd, 2023If you thought TEMPEST/van Eck phreaking was interesting in the 1980s, check out what’s possible by monitoring power fluctuations on modern LED displays.
In case you’re a “normal” computer user and wondering if you should be concerned about this, the simple answer is no, not really. There are many, many, many other issues with our computers that are far more serious (and pretty much unfixable) than this clever trick with LEDs.
If, however, you were concerned about this, could you run some threads doing CRC or creating unrelated keys in the background to hide your actual encryption activities?
Via: Computerphile:
Claims That French Government Has Cut Off Internet Access in France Are False
July 3rd, 2023Update: Macron Accused of Authoritarianism After Threat to Cut Off Social Media
—
If you’re seeing messages on social media about the Internet being down in France: That’s false. As of 14:45 UTC, the Internet is working normally in France.
I’m able to browse the Internet though my VPN with an exit node in Paris. Both French sites and international sites look normal to me.
There is definitely no widespread Internet outage in France at this time.
But don’t take my word for it:
Cloudflare Outage Map
Thousand Eyes/Cisco
Dr. Suneel Dhand: Stay Away from Doctors
July 3rd, 2023Via: Dr. Suneel Dhand:
Gates Commits $400 Million to Test New TB Vaccine on 26,000 People in Africa and Southeast Asia
July 2nd, 2023Via: The Defender:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust on Wednesday announced plans to fund a phase 3 clinical trial for a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine that will be tested on 26,000 people at 50 sites in Africa and Southeast Asia over the next four to six years.
Gates committed $400 million to the trial and Wellcome — the largest funder of medical research in the U.K. and one of the largest in the world — committed an additional $150 million.
The trials will test the M72/AS01 vaccine, developed by pharmaceutical giant GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) with partial funding from the Gates Foundation.
Experts told The Washington Post the news was “huge.” The Guardian heralded the announcement as “gamechanging,” while STAT called it “promising.”
But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., senior director of science and research for Children’s Health Defense told The Defender that the planned trials for the TB vaccine raised red flags.
“I’m concerned that they’re planning on conducting the trial in underdeveloped nations,” Hooker said. “It seems almost prototypical that the underserved have to be guinea pigs for the rest of the world.”
He added, “Fifty percent is incredibly low efficacy for such an ‘important’ intervention to go to essentially everyone in the developing world.”
US Wants To Make More Stingers, But it Needs to Revive Production Technology Nearly from Scratch
July 1st, 2023
Via: Technology.org:
It is not easy to restart old production lines – after most of them have been disassembled and the technology itself was largely forgotten. Therefore, in order to make Stinger portable missile launchers (MANPADS) which became incredibly popular after their particularly effective use in Ukraine, the United States needs to find specialists who still know the essence of making this weapon.
…
To replenish its own stocks, the U.S. Army placed an order for 1700 new Stinger launcher units back in May 2022. However, the Pentagon reported that it would take as long as 30 months (or two and a half years) for the completed MANPADS to start rolling off the assembly line.
The reason behind this lengthy timeframe is quite straightforward—several components for these MANPADS are no longer in production, necessitating the exploration of new methods and possibly novel technological improvements to resume production and increase its rates in the nearest time.
As an example, American engineers have encountered difficulties in manufacturing the homing heads for these MANPADS, so this component will potentially require conducting research and developing replacement modules.
