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An interesting piece on Construction Physics that examines how Japan transformed discarded American wartime shipbuilding techniques into a revolutionary manufacturing system that captured nearly half the global market by 1970. The story reveals the essential ingredients for industrial dominance: government backing, organizational alignment, relentless will to improve, and the systematic coordination needed to turn existing technologies into something entirely new. A few excerpts: During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany's u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US's most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business. Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that's what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world's ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%. But the lessons from the US's shipbuilding machine weren't forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world. [...] The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it's impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.

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From bit barn to algae farm?

Euro datacenter operator Data4 is trialling a project to reuse heat from its servers and captured carbon dioxide to grow algae that can then be used in the agri-food or pharmacology sectors.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Vietnam's technology ministry has instructed telecommunication service providers to block the messaging app Telegram for not cooperating in combating alleged crimes committed by its users, according to a government document reviewed by Reuters. The document, dated May 21 and signed by the deputy head of the telecom department at the technology ministry, ordered telecommunication companies to take measures to block Telegram and report on them to the ministry by June 2.

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Aircraft Hazard Area now stretches 1,600 nautical miles

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch Starship Flight 9, but has nearly doubled the size of the vehicle's Aircraft Hazard Area (AHA).…

AI-optimized CPUs promise 4.6GHz clocks, at least for one in eight cores

Computex When Nvidia first teased its Arm-based Grace CPU back in 2021, many saw it as a threat to Intel and AMD. Four years later, the Arm-based silicon is at the heart of the GPU giant's most powerful AI systems, but it has not yet replaced x86 entirely.…

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened Apple with a 25% tariff unless the company manufactures iPhones sold in America domestically rather than in India or other overseas locations. Trump posted on Truth Social that he had "long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple" about his expectation for US-based iPhone production, warning that failure to comply would trigger the substantial tariff penalty. The ultimatum follows Trump's expressed displeasure with Cook during his recent Middle East trip over Apple's plans to build iPhones at newly constructed Indian facilities. Apple has historically maintained that domestic iPhone manufacturing remains unfeasible due to insufficient skilled engineering talent and substantially higher production costs compared to Asian facilities.

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Worries about uncertainty, even as AI pushes revenue and profit higher

Chinese hardware giant Lenovo thought it had prepared for a trade war, but its plan proved insufficient once the US started to rapidly change its tax policies in imported goods.…

Europe has created just 14 companies worth more than $10 billion over the past 50 years compared to 241 in the United States, underscoring the continent's struggle to compete in the global technology race despite having a larger population and similar education levels. The productivity gap has widened dramatically since the digital revolution began. European workers produced 95% of what their American counterparts made per hour in the late 1990s, but that figure has dropped to less than 80% today. Only four of the world's top 50 technology companies are European, and none of the top 10 quantum computing investors operate from Europe. Several high-profile European entrepreneurs have relocated to Silicon Valley, including Thomas Odenwald, who quit German AI startup Aleph Alpha after two months, citing slow decision-making and lack of stock options for employees. "If I look at how quickly things change in Silicon Valley...it's happening so fast that I don't think Europe can keep up with that speed," Odenwald said. The challenges extend beyond individual companies. European businesses spend 40% of their IT budgets on regulatory compliance, according to Amazon surveys, while complex labor laws create three-month notice periods and lengthy noncompete clauses.

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It's not radical, but it is slim and pretty – usually a winning combination

AnduinOS, a one-man project from a Chinese Microsoft engineer, is quite a new Ubuntu remix that reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11.…

Care board defers decision to adopt national system

Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (ICB) has decided not to adopt a national data platform – prescribed by the UK government and run by Palantir – until it has more evidence of the benefits and risks.…

OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it was paying $6.5 billion to buy io, a one-year-old start-up created by Jony Ive. While the company remains tightlipped about the futuristic AI device(s) it has in the works, Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo shared some alleged details about its design. MacRumors reports: In a social media post today, Kuo said the device will be "slightly larger" than Humane's discontinued AI Pin. He said the device will look "as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle," which was Apple's lowest-priced, screen-less iPod. The design of the iPod shuffle varied over the years, going from a compact rectangle to a square. Like the iPod shuffle, Kuo said OpenAI's device will not have a screen, but it would connect to smartphones and computers. The device will be equipped with microphones for voice control, and it will have cameras that can analyze the user's surroundings. He said that users will be able to wear the device around their necks, like a necklace, whereas the AI Pin can be attached to clothing with a clip. Kuo expects OpenAI's device to enter mass production in 2027, and the final design and specifications might change before then. Kuo expects OpenAI's device to enter mass production in 2027, and the final design and specifications might change before then.

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Callous fraudster tricked elderly gents into smuggling meth hidden in chocolate truffles

A ruthless cyber conman who duped elderly pensioners – including an 80-year-old man – into smuggling deadly class A drugs was this week locked up.…

Annoyed at poor or missing salary increase offer as Brit telco pays out dividend

BT is facing a revolt over pay from its line managers, with unions complaining today about the telco giant dishing out increased dividends to shareholders from its fiscal 2025 earnings.…

For once, the IT department was rewarded for finding the fix, and the perfect-if-unexpected fixer

On Call Welcome to a fresh instalment of On-Call, The Register’s reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of tech support triumph, and we try to retell them in an amusing fashion.…

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a bizarre planet in the Nu Octantis binary star system that orbits in reverse between two stars -- one of which is now a white dwarf. This retrograde orbit, once thought impossible, defies traditional planetary formation models and may have resulted from dramatic shifts in the system's history. New Scientist reports: The key observation was that the Nu Octantis planet is retrograde -- the planet and one star both orbit the second star, but they do so in opposite directions, with the planet having the tighter orbit around the second star. [Man Hoi Lee at the University of Hong Kong] says this is unusual but makes the system's configuration stable -- even though it means that the planet repeatedly moves through the narrow space between the two stars. His team was able to determine this with lots of certainty thanks to improved measuring devices, such as the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-metre telescope in Chile. The fact that the planet's signal persisted through years of observation helped too. "We are pretty sure [the planet] is real, because if it was something like stellar activity, it shouldn't be so consistent in years of data," says Lee. But this backwards-moving planet isn't the only exotic feature of Nu Octantis. The researchers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, also in Chile, to determine that one of its stars is a white dwarf, which means that it has reached the end of its life cycle, becoming denser and smaller. Lee says this complicates the Nu Octantis threesome's history because mathematical models of its past show that the planet's current orbit was impossible when this star was younger, bigger and brighter. So, the planet either used to orbit both stars at once, but then radically shifted trajectory when one of the two stars became a white dwarf, or it was formed from the mass that the star ejected as it transformed into a white dwarf. Future observations, and a lot more mathematical modelling, may be able to pinpoint which of these scenarios is more likely to have occurred, but both are rather novel, says Lee. The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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Says it will serve half of humanity but testing that claim produced a hilarious ChatGPT fail

Stargate, the Open AI led consortium that aims to build giant AI datacenters, has picked the United Arab Emirates as its first non-US destination.…

Consumer affairs Minister is not happy with Uber for following local players with this scheme to encourage rapid pickups

India’s consumer affairs minister has criticized Uber for adding a feature that allows users to tip their driver before a trip as an incentive to take a job.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Neuroscientists and materials scientists have created contact lenses that enable infrared vision in both humans and mice by converting infrared light into visible light. Unlike infrared night vision goggles, the contact lenses, described in the journal Cell, do not require a power source -- and they enable the wearer to perceive multiple infrared wavelengths. Because they're transparent, users can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, though infrared vision was enhanced when participants had their eyes closed. [...] The contact lens technology uses nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into wavelengths that are visible to mammalian eyes (e.g., electromagnetic radiation in the 400-700 nm range). The nanoparticles specifically enable the detection of "near-infrared light," which is infrared light in the 800-1600 nm range, just beyond what humans can already see. The team previously showed that these nanoparticles enable infrared vision in mice when injected into the retina, but they wanted to design a less invasive option. To create the contact lenses, the team combined the nanoparticles with flexible, nontoxic polymers that are used in standard soft contact lenses. After showing that the contact lenses were nontoxic, they tested their function in both humans and mice. They found that contact lens-wearing mice displayed behaviors suggesting that they could see infrared wavelengths. For example, when the mice were given the choice of a dark box and an infrared-illuminated box, contact-wearing mice chose the dark box whereas contact-less mice showed no preference. The mice also showed physiological signals of infrared vision: the pupils of contact-wearing mice constricted in the presence of infrared light, and brain imaging revealed that infrared light caused their visual processing centers to light up. In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light. An additional tweak to the contact lenses allows users to differentiate between different spectra of infrared light by engineering the nanoparticles to color-code different infrared wavelengths. For example, infrared wavelengths of 980 nm were converted to blue light, wavelengths of 808 nm were converted to green light, and wavelengths of 1,532 nm were converted to red light. In addition to enabling wearers to perceive more detail within the infrared spectrum, these color-coding nanoparticles could be modified to help color-blind people see wavelengths that they would otherwise be unable to detect. [...] Because the contact lenses have limited ability to capture fine details (due to their close proximity to the retina, which causes the converted light particles to scatter), the team also developed a wearable glass system using the same nanoparticle technology, which enabled participants to perceive higher-resolution infrared information. Currently, the contact lenses are only able to detect infrared radiation projected from an LED light source, but the researchers are working to increase the nanoparticles' sensitivity so that they can detect lower levels of infrared light.

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The U.S. unsealed charges against 16 individuals behind DanaBot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for over $50 million in global losses. "The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware," reports KrebsOnSecurity. From the report: Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud. Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform. The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. "JimmBee," and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. "Onix," both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is "Maffiozi." According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot -- emerging in January 2021 -- was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia. The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds. "In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware," the criminal complaint reads. "In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent -- one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake." A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today's operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYRMU, and ZScaler.

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And the associated fraud'n'spy botnet is about to be shut down

The US Department of Justice has unsealed indictments against 16 people accused of spreading and using the DanaBot remote-control malware that infected more than 300,000 computers, plus operating a botnet of the same name, and appears set to shutter its operations.…