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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: California Forever announced on Thursday plans to build a massive manufacturing park called Solano Foundry, the newest addition to its master-planned "utopian" city backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires. Solano Foundry is 2,100 acres that can host 40 million square feet of advanced tech manufacturing space. The manufacturing park will be built as part of its planned walkable city with over 175,000 homes, CEO Jan Sramek said at the Reindustrialize conference in Detroit. Sramek tweeted that U.S. manufacturers can't win by "building factories off of random freeway exits in the middle of nowhere. The best people don't want to work there." This site will offer expedited permitting, transportation for finished goods, and plenty of power from renewable energy, he said. The hope is that it will attract hardware, engineering, and AI talent from relatively nearby Silicon Valley. Solano County is about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco.

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OpenAI delayed its promised open-weights model since GPT-2, leaving the Middle Kingdom clearly in the lead

Comment OpenAI was supposed to make good on its name and release its first open-weights model since GPT-2 this week.…

Microsoft will stop using China-based engineers to support U.S. military cloud services after a ProPublica report revealed their involvement, prompting backlash from Senator Tom Cotton and a two-week Pentagon review ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In response, Hegseth announced an immediate ban on any Chinese involvement in Department of Defense cloud contracts. Reuters reports: The report detailed Microsoft's use of Chinese engineers to work on U.S. military cloud computing systems under the supervision of U.S. "digital escorts" hired through subcontractors who have security clearances but often lacked the technical skills to assess whether the work of the Chinese engineers posed a cybersecurity threat. [Microsoft] told ProPublica it disclosed its practices to the U.S. government during an authorization process. On Friday, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw said on social media website X the company changed how it supports U.S. government customers "in response to concerns raised earlier this week ... to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance" for services used by the Pentagon.

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Keep It Simple, Stupid

Interview Scattered Spider and Iranian government-backed cyber units have more in common than a recent uptick in hacking activity, according to Ariel Parnes, a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces' cyber unit 8200.…

At Sotheby's Geek Week auction, the largest known Martian meteorite on Earth sold for a record-breaking $5.3 million. The Associated Press reports: The 54-pound (25-kilogram) rock named NWA 16788 was discovered in the Sahara Desert in Niger by a meteorite hunter in November 2023, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike and traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) to Earth, according to Sotheby's. The estimated sale price before the auction was $2 million to $4 million. The identity of the buyer was not immediately disclosed. The final bid was $4.3 million. Adding various fees and costs, the official sale price was about $5.3 million, making it the most valuable meteorite ever sold at auction, Sotheby's said. The live bidding was slow, with the auctioneer trying to coax more offers and decreasing the minimum bid increases. [...] The bidding for the Mars meteorite began with two advance offers of $1.9 million and $2 million. The live bidding slowly proceeded with increases of $200,000 and $300,000 until $4 million, then continued with $100,000 increases until reaching $4.3 million. The red, brown and gray meteorite is about 70% larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7% of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby's says. It measures nearly 15 inches by 11 inches by 6 inches (375 millimeters by 279 millimeters by 152 millimeters). It was also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, the auction house says.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: In a world first, scientists have demonstrated an enigmatic phenomenon in quantum computing that could pave the way for fault-tolerant machines that are far more powerful than any supercomputer. The process, called "magic state distillation," was first proposed 20 years ago, but its use in logical qubits has eluded scientists ever since. It has long been considered crucial for producing the high-quality resources, known as "magic states," needed to fulfill the full potential of quantum computers. [...] Now, however, scientists with QuEra say they have demonstrated magic state distillation in practice for the first time on logical qubits. They outlined their findings in a new study published July 14 in the journal Nature. In the study, using the Gemini neutral-atom quantum computer, the scientists distilled five imperfect magic states into a single, cleaner magic state. They performed this separately on a Distance-3 and a Distance-5 logical qubit, demonstrating that it scales with the quality of the logical qubit. "A greater distance means better logical qubits. A Distance-2, for instance, means that you can detect an error but not correct it. Distance-3 means that you can detect and correct a single error. Distance-5 would mean that you can detect and correct up to two errors, and so on, and so on," [explained Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer at QuEra who was not personally involved in the research]. "So the greater the distance, the higher fidelity of the qubit is -- and we liken it to distilling crude oil into a jet fuel." As a result of the distillation process, the fidelity of the final magic state exceeded that of any input. This proved that fault-tolerant magic state distillation worked in practice, the scientists said. This means that a quantum computer that uses both logical qubits and high-quality magic states to run non-Clifford gates is now possible. "We're seeing sort of a shift from a few years ago," Boger said. "The challenge was: can quantum computers be built at all? Then it was: can errors be detected and corrected? Us and Google and others have shown that, yes, that can be done. Now it's about: can we make these computers truly useful? And to make one computer truly useful, other than making them larger, you want them to be able to run programs that cannot be simulated on classical computers."

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BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Intel has quietly pulled the plug on Clear Linux OS, officially ending support for the once-promising Linux distribution that it had backed for nearly a decade. Effective immediately, the company says it will no longer provide any updates, security patches, or maintenance for the operating system. In a final blow, the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository is now archived in read-only mode. The move was announced with little fanfare, and for users still relying on Clear Linux OS, there's no sugarcoating it... you need to move on. Intel is urging everyone to migrate to an actively maintained Linux distribution as soon as possible to avoid running unpatched software. "Rest assured that Intel remains deeply invested in the Linux ecosystem, actively supporting and contributing to various open-source projects and Linux distributions to enable and optimize for Intel hardware," the company said in a statement. "A heartfelt thank you to every developer, user, and contributor who helped shape Clear Linux OS over the last 10 years. Your feedback and contributions have been invaluable."

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Moolenaar demands answers from Commerce Secretary

The Republican chair of the US House Select Committee on China has protested the Trump administration's decision this week to lift restrictions on the sale of Nvidia H20 GPUs and similar processors, warning the chips could be used to advance Chinese AI and military interests.…

GPAI code asks for transparency, copyright, and safety pledges

Two weeks before the EU AI Act takes effect, the European Commission issued voluntary guidelines for providers of general-purpose AI models. However, Meta refused to sign, arguing that the extra measures introduce "legal uncertainties" beyond the law's scope.…

That's just... checks notes... two years behind everyone else

Japanese foundry upstart Rapidus says it's on track to begin volume production of 2nm process tech after achieving a major milestone this week.…

And we’re the ones building it

Comment A tech executive's alleged affair exposed on a stadium jumbotron is ripe fodder for the gossip rags, but it exhibits something else: proof that we need not wait for an AI-fueled dystopian surveillance state to descend on us - we're perfectly able and willing to surveil ourselves.…

Jon Prosser and alleged accomplice accused of stealing trade secrets from development device

Apple has sued tech YouTuber Jon Prosser for allegedly leaking iOS 26 information to the public ahead of its reveal at WWDC in June.…

Big Red incentivizes perpetual licenses with 76% savings as it parks racks in hyperscaler datacenters

Oracle began incentivizing perpetual licenses in favor of subscription deals as it introduced its database systems via rival cloud vendors, say licensing experts.…

WeTransfer added the magic words "machine learning" to its ToS and users reacted predictably

Analysis WeTransfer this week denied claims it uses files uploaded to its ubiquitous cloud storage service to train AI, and rolled back changes it had introduced to its Terms of Service after they deeply upset users. The topic? Granting licensing permissions for an as-yet-unreleased LLM product.…

2.6.1 adds Plucky Puffin and Firefox actually works this time

Rescuezilla 2.6.1 has introduced a new version based on the latest interim Ubuntu release, while also updating its existing builds on older versions.…

With watchdog set to publish report into health of market next month, will it hold AWS and Microsoft's feet to the fire?

Comment The UK's ambition to become a global AI superpower hinges on a vibrant and competitive cloud market. The next few days will show if its competition regulator really appreciates both the pace of change and the scale of remedies needed to achieve both of these things.…

We spoke to the smoot's namesake

Interview On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process.…

This job was a car wreck in more than one way

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your terrifying tech support stories.…

Pay-as-you-go model, privacy protections agreed – ID management freedom not included

A trade group of European cloud providers has claimed a small victory in bringing lower prices and more flexibility in deploying Microsoft software on their infrastructure.…

Analysts have warned Broadcom may slow innovation

VMware on Wednesday announced it has extended the time between major releases from two years to three and extended support for those releases to six years.…