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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The Dutch government suspended its powers over chipmaker Nexperia, restoring control to its Chinese owner (paywalled; alternative source) and defusing a standoff with Beijing that had begun to hamper automotive production around the world. The order that gave the Netherlands powers to block or revise decisions at Nexperia was dropped as "a show of goodwill," Economic Affairs Minister Vincent Karremans said Wednesday in a post on social media site X. Bloomberg had reported earlier this month that the Netherlands was prepared to take the step if chip deliveries from the company's site in China could be confirmed. The move marks a significant de-escalation of a dispute that underscored the global nature of supply chains and highlighted Beijing's growing leverage. Even though Nexperia's chips aren't advanced and the company only operates one facility in China, the spat disrupted automakers from Honda Motor Co. to Volkswagen AG. The reversal by the Dutch government was set in motion after a breakthrough in talks earlier that involved Chinese and Dutch officials, with input from Germany, the European Union as well as the US. To help resolve the stalemate, Beijing agreed to loosen export restrictions from Nexperia's Chinese plant, the largest of its kind in the world. The Dutch economic affairs ministry sent a delegation to Beijing this week to negotiate a "mutually agreeable solution," according to a ministry statement.

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The force-feeding will continue until morale improves

Some software developers complain that they're being required to use AI tools to the detriment of code quality and their own skills.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, Oslo's public-transport authority drove a Chinese electric bus deep into a decommissioned mine inside a nearby mountain to answer a question: Could it be hacked? Isolated by rock from digital interference, cybersecurity experts came back with a qualified yes: The bus could in theory be remotely disabled using the control system for the battery. The revelation, presented at a recent public-transport conference, has spurred officials in Denmark and the U.K. to start their own investigations into Chinese vehicles. It has also fed into broader security concerns across Europe about the growing prevalence of Chinese-made equipment in the region's energy and telecommunications infrastructure. The worry is the same for autos, solar panels and other connected devices: that mechanisms used for wirelessly delivering system updates could also be exploited by a hostile government or third-party hacker to compromise critical networks. [...] The Oslo transport authority, Ruter, said the bus's mobile-network connection via a Romanian SIM card gave manufacturer Yutong access to the control system for battery and power supply. Ruter said it is addressing the vulnerability by developing firewalls and delaying the signals sent to the vehicles, among other solutions.

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The latest attack on Section 230 is likely to face the same fate as many previous efforts

A pair of bipartisan senators wants to hold social media giants accountable for pushing content that radicalizes Americans.…

A new treatment for tuberculosis could boost cure rates and shorten the time needed to treat the disease by months, trial results suggest. The Guardian: Globally, an estimated 10.7 million people fell ill with TB last year and 1.23 million died from it. In its annual report on tuberculosis, launched last week, the World Health Organization said it remained a "major global public-health problem" and the leading infectious cause of death. [...] Sorfequiline, a new antibiotic, showed stronger action against the deadly bacteria than existing treatments, with a comparable safety profile, researchers from the TB Alliance told the Union Conference on Lung Health in Copenhagen on Wednesday. The trial involved 309 people across 22 sites in South Africa, the Philippines, Georgia, Tanzania and Uganda, with different dose regimens. All participants had "drug-sensitive" tuberculosis, meaning a standard cocktail of drugs can safely treat them but researchers believe TB infections that are resistant to standard treatment could also be helped. The trial suggested a sorfequiline-based regimen could be used for anyone testing positive, said Dr Maria Beumont, vice-president of TB Alliance.

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Action is needed now to reduce ultra-processed food (UPF) in diets worldwide because of their threat to health, say international experts in a global review of research. From a report: They say the way we eat is changing - with a move away from fresh, whole foods to cheap, highly-processed meals - which is increasing our risk of a range of chronic diseases, including obesity and depression. Writing in The Lancet, the researchers say governments need "to step up" and introduce warnings and higher taxes on UPF products, to help fund access to more nutritious foods. [...] This review of evidence on the impact of UPFs on health, carried out by 43 global experts and based on 104 long-term studies, suggests these foods are linked to a greater risk of 12 health conditions. These include type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, depression and dying prematurely from any cause.

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The EU's cookie consent policies have been an annoying and unavoidable part of browsing the web in Europe since their introduction in 2018. But the cookie nightmare is about to crumble thanks to some big proposed changes announced by the European Commission today. From a report: Instead of having to click accept or reject on a cookie pop-up for every website you visit in Europe, the EU is preparing to enforce rules that will allow users to set their preferences for cookies at the browser level. "People can set their privacy preferences centrally -- for example via the browser -- and websites must respect them," says the EU. "This will drastically simplify users' online experience." This key change is part of a new Digital Package of proposals to simplify the EU's digital rules, and will initially see cookie prompts change to be a simplified yes or no single-click prompt ahead of the "technological solutions" eventually coming to browsers. Websites will be required to respect cookie choices for at least six months, and the EU also wants website owners to not use cookie banners for "harmless uses" like counting website visits, to lessen the amount of pop-ups.

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Air-launched antique picked for tricky low-inclination orbit job

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, facing the risk of an uncontrolled dive back to Earth, is set for a rescue ride on a Pegasus XL, the air-dropped rocket that hasn't flown since 2021.…

Linus Torvalds is "fairly positive" about vibe coding as a way for people to get computers to do things they otherwise could not. The Linux kernel maintainer made the comments during an interview at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul earlier this month. But he cautioned that vibe coding would be a "horrible, horrible idea from a maintenance standpoint" for production code. Torvalds told Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, that computers have become more complicated than when he learned to code by typing in programs from computer magazines. He said vibe coding offers a path into computing for newcomers. The kernel maintainer is not using AI-assisted coding himself. He said his role has shifted from rejecting new ideas to sometimes pushing for them against opposition from longstanding maintainers who "kind of get stuck in a rut." Rust is "actually becoming a real part of the kernel instead of being this experimental thing," he said. Torvalds said AI crawlers have been "very disruptive to a lot of our infrastructure" because they gather data from kernel.org source code. Kernel maintainers receive bugs and security notices that are "made up by people who misuse AI," though the problem is smaller than for other projects such as curl.

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And companies are getting caught in the crossfire

interview Warfare has become a joint cyber-kinetic endeavor, with nations using cyber operations to scope out targets before launching missiles. And private companies, including shipping, transportation, and electronics manufacturers, are getting caught in the crossfire, according to Amazon.…

Skim the atmosphere and air-breathing VLEO sats can theoretically maintain orbit

DARPA is on the verge of reaching a new low - an orbital one - as the Defense Department's research arm moves its Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) Otter satellite program into the production phase. …

Britain said on Wednesday it would ban the resale of tickets to concerts, sport and other live events for profit, disrupting ticket touts and the platforms that benefit from their activities. From a report: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said touts were ripping off fans by using bots to snap up batches of tickets for coveted shows and reselling them at sky-high prices. "Our new proposals will shut down the touts' racket and make world-class music, comedy, theatre and sport affordable for everyone," she said, after the government had promised action.

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Massive jump in spending shows the Great White North isn’t betting everything on NASA

Canada will boost its investment in European Space Agency (ESA) programs by CA$528.5 million ($376 million USD), a tenfold increase, according to the Canadian Space Agency.…

Chinese economist Gao Shanwen told a Washington panel in December that China's real GDP growth might be around 2% rather than the official figure near 5%. By January, Gao was no longer chief economist at SDIC Securities and went silent for almost a year. As FT points out in a long piece, China does not publish quarterly GDP breakdowns showing consumption, investment and net exports. Every other major economy produces these figures. The IMF in 2024 gave China a C grade for national accounts. The rating puts China on par with India and below Vietnam. Fixed asset investment data showed negative growth in 2025 for only the second time in decades. Property investment has fallen consistently since 2022. But official GDP investment data shows no signs of declining. The National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing sectoral breakdowns of fixed asset investment in 2018. It discontinued a price series in 2021 and a land sales series in 2023. Beijing has restricted researcher access rather than addressing longstanding questions about data quality. China says it disagrees with the IMF's C rating. The government argued its production-side GDP approach is appropriate. Why does it matter? China is too large and too interconnected with the global economy for unreliable data to be a purely domestic issue. The lack of transparency creates problems for everyone trying to make decisions based on understanding China's economic trajectory. As Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF official, told FT: China is one of the two biggest economies in the world. "It would be nice to know what is really going on."

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Version 4.21 also brings advances in the datacenter, on ARM, and RISC-V

The Xen Project today delivered a major release of its hypervisor and associated tools, including contributions from automaker Ford, which quietly joined the project in June.…

Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is now deployed by more than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada. The 75-pound four-legged machine starts at around $100,000 and has been used in armed standoffs, hostage rescues and hazardous materials incidents since its commercial debut five years ago. The Massachusetts State Police operates two Spot units purchased in 2020 and 2022. Each cost about $250,000 including add-ons funded through state grants. Last year one of the robots helped corner a suspect who had taken his mother hostage at knifepoint in Hyannis. Houston operates three units and Las Vegas has one. ICE recently spent around $78,000 on a similar robot from Canadian manufacturer Icor Technology that can also deploy smoke bombs. Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about normalizing militarized policing. The NYPD suspended its limited Spot program in 2021 after public backlash over cost and surveillance concerns before later reinstating it and purchasing two units. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says there should be state and federal laws providing guidance on appropriate use of such technology. About 2,000 Spot units now operate globally.

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A reactor at the site suffered a partial meltdown in 1979

The Trump administration is so eager to get extra power into the grid that it is offering a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to help it restart the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear facility.…

Digital rights groups argue cameras used to unconstitutionally surveil locals

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) are suing the City of San Jose and its police department over alleged abuses of automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Federal health officials have linked two massive US measles outbreaks, confirming that the country is about two months away from losing its measles elimination status, according to a report by The New York Times. The Times obtained a recording of a call during which officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas that began in mid- to late-January. That is, the two massive outbreaks are being caused by the same subtype of measles virus. This is a significant link that hasn't previously been reported despite persistent questions from journalists and concerns from health experts, particularly in light of Canada losing its elimination status last week. The loss of an elimination status means that measles will once again be considered endemic to the US, an embarrassing public health backslide for a vaccine-preventable disease.

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Tsinghua University collected 4,986 AI and machine learning patents between 2005 and the end of 2024. The Beijing institution has received more than 900 patents last year alone. The total exceeds the combined patent count from MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard during the same period. China now accounts for more than half of all active patent families globally in AI and machine learning fields, according to data analytics service LexisNexis. The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

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