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Houston, we have a funding problem

The US administration appears set to slash NASA's science budget with cuts to spending in the order of almost 50 percent, according to a draft of the White House's proposal.…

Blue Origin's New Shepard completed its 31st mission Monday morning, carrying the first all-female crew to space since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 solo flight. The NS-31 mission lifted off from West Texas at 9:30 a.m. EDT, with hundreds of thousands watching via livestream as the autonomous vehicle crossed the Karman line 62 miles above Earth. The 10-minute suborbital journey carried six passengers: journalist and Bezos' fiancee Lauren SÃnchez, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen, CBS journalist Gayle King, pop star Katy Perry, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Bowe conducted three research experiments during the flight, while Nguyen became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space. The fully reusable New Shepard system features a pressurized capsule that separates from its booster before returning to Earth with three parachutes.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney for the Federal Trade Commission told a judge that Facebook, fearing the competitive threat of Instagram posted to their social media network, acquired both as a way to "neutralize" the rival. "They decided that competition was too hard," the FTC's attorney, Daniel Matheson, said in his opening statement in the government's antitrust case against the Meta Platforms social media empire. He argued that with Meta's monopoly in social media, "consumers do not have reasonable alternatives they can turn to," even as satisfaction has declined. At stake is the potential breakup of Facebook-parent Meta, as the government has zeroed in on the 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp.

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Safeguard hold finally lifted as Microsoft realizes animated backgrounds aren't the end of the world

The day before the release of Windows 11 24H2, Microsoft slapped a compatibility hold on devices using wallpaper customization applications. More than six months later, it is gradually removing the safeguard hold.…

Nvidia has announced plans to manufacture AI supercomputers entirely within the United States, commissioning over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. Production of Blackwell chips has begun at TSMC's Phoenix facilities, while supercomputer assembly will occur at new Foxconn and Wistron plants in Houston and Dallas respectively. "The engines of the world's AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO. "Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency." The company will deploy its own AI, robotics, and digital twin technologies in these facilities, using Nvidia Omniverse to create digital twins of factories and Isaac GR00T to build manufacturing automation robots. Nvidia projects an ambitious $500 billion in domestic AI infrastructure production over the next four years, with manufacturing expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

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Investment delays are inevitable as uncertainty clouds US trade policy, warns investment bank

World War Fee Trump administration tariffs are leaving the IT industry in "limbo", with CIOs hitting the pause button on new projects as they're unsure whether budgets set today will be disrupted by taxes tomorrow.…

Miyazaki, copyright protection and the 'insult to life itself' of AI images

Opinion Many people are having fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I see it as copy-and-paste intellectual property stealing on an industrial level.…

America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors. But it's now developed an AI-based tool that can "help operators run nuclear plants," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab's nuclear science and engineering division: Argonne's plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it's also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday. The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity for those data centers, the Wall Street Journal has reported. PRO-AID performs real-time monitoring and diagnostics using generative AI combined with large language models that notify and explain to staff when something seems amiss at a plant. It also uses a form of automated reasoning — which uses mathematical logic to encode knowledge in AI systems — to mimic the way a human operator asks questions and comes to understand how the plant is operating [according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab's nuclear science and engineering division]. The tool can also help improve the efficiency of the personnel needed to operate a nuclear plant, Vilim said. That's especially important as older employees leave the workforce. "If we can hand off some of these lower-level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don't need to replace him or her," he said... Part of the efficiency in updating technology will come from consolidating the monitoring staff at a utility's nuclear plants at a single, centralized location — much as gas-powered plants already do. It hasn't found its way into a commercial nuclear plant yet, the article acknowledges. But the senior nuclear engineer points out that America's newer gas-powered plants ended up being more automated with digital monitoring tools. Meanwhile the average age of America's 94 operating nuclear reactors is 42 years old, and "nearly all" of them have had their licenses extended, according to the article. (Those nuclear plants still provide almost 20% of America's electricity.)

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Royal McBee's desk-sized deskside early computer was the stuff of legend

In these days of multi-gig OSes, we cast our eyes back to something both much bigger and much smaller.…

Analysts say the bubble won't burst, but it is possible, admits world's largest colo provider

Interview Those who ignore history are destined to repeat mistakes of the past and, with signs of an inflating bit barn spending bubble, comparisons are being made with the infamous dotcom bust a quarter of a century ago.…

UK holds onto oversight by a whisker, but it's utterly barefaced on the other side of the pond

Opinion The UK government's attempts to worm into Apple's core end-to-end encryption were set back last week when the country's Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds.…

Brit retailer says troubled breakup with tech platform of former US owner nearing conclusion

Two of the top team behind Asda's £1 billion ($1.31 billion) tech divorce from US retail giant Walmart — which has seen a number of setbacks — are departing the company.…

Formula One cars, the world's fastest racecars, need to grip the track for speed and safety on the curves — leading engineers to design cars that create downforce. And racing fans are even told that "a Formula 1 racecar generates enough downforce above a certain speed that it could theoretically drive upside down," writes the automotive site Jalopnik. "McMurtry Automotive turned this theory into reality after having its Spéirling hypercar complete the impressive feat..." Admittedly, the Spéirling's success can be solely attributed to its proprietary 'Downforce-on-Demand' fan system that produces 4,400 pounds of downforce at the push of a button... For those looking to do the math, Spéirling weighs 2,200 pounds. With the stopped car's fan whirling at 23,000 rpm, the rig was rotated to invert the road deck... Then, the hypercar rolled forward a few feet before stopping while inverted. The rig rotated the road deck back down, and the Spéirling drove off like nothing happened. The McMurtry Spéirling, as a 1,000-hp twin-motor electric hypercar, didn't have to clear the other hurdles that an F1 car would have clear to drive upside down. Dry-sump combustion engines aren't designed to run inverted and would eventually fail catastrophically. Oil wouldn't be able to cycle through and keep the engine lubricated. The car is "an electric monster purpose-built to destroy track records," Jalopnik wrote in 2022 when the car shaved more than two seconds off a long-standing record. The "Downforce-on-Demand" feature gives it tremendous acceleration — in nine seconds it can go from 0 to 186.4 mph (300 km/h), according to Jalopnik. "McMurtry is working towards finalizing a production version of its hypercar, called the Spéirling PURE. Only 100 will be produced."

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If this techie had been older and slower, this never would have happened

Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday often imparts a rude shock, which is why The Register opens the week with a new instalment of Who, Me? It’s the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your worst moments at work and explain how you survived them.…

Home Labs and bare bones test rigs matter and Broadcom’s back in the game

VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor.…

PLUS: Chinese robodogs include backdoor; OpenAI helps spammer; A Dutch data disaster; And more!

Infosec In Brief Fortinet last week admitted that attackers have found new ways to exploit three flaws it thought it had fixed last year.…

10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started issuing 90-day TLS certificates for websites, "it was considered a bold move, that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times." And then this January Let's Encrypt announced new six-day certificates... This week saw a related announcement from the EFF engineering director. More than 31 million web sites maintain their HTTPS certificates using the EFF's Certbot tool (which automatically fetches free HTTPS certificates forever) — and Certbot is now supporting Let's Encrypt's six-day certificates. (It's accomplished through ACME profiles with dynamic renewal at 1/3rd of lifetime left or 1/2 of lifetime left, if the lifetime is shorter than 10 days): There is debate on how short these lifetimes should be, but with ACME profiles you can have the default or "classic" Let's Encrypt experience (90 days) or start actively using other profile types through Certbot with the --preferred-profile and --required-profile flags. For six day certificates, you can choose the "shortlived" profile. Why shorter lifetimes are better (according to the EFF's engineering director): If a certificate's private key is compromised, that compromise can't last as long. With shorter life spans for the certificates, automation is encouraged. Which facilitates robust security of web servers. Certificate revocation is historically flaky. Lifetimes 10 days and under prevent the need to invoke the revocation process and deal with continued usage of a compromised key.

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PLUS: India's new electronics subsidies; Philippines unplugs a mobile carrier; Alibaba Cloud expands

Asia In Brief Chinese officials admitted to directing cyberattacks on US infrastructure at a meeting with their American counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal.…

Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, reports ABC News. President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.... This is not like a permanent sort of exemption." The Wall Street Journal notes that Sunday the president himself posted on social media that "NOBODY is getting 'off the hook' for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers... There was no Tariff 'exception' announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff 'bucket.'" "The administration is expected to take the first step toward enacting the new tariffs as soon as next week," reports the New York Times, "opening an investigation to determine the effects of semiconductor imports on national security." More from ABC News: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration's decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve.. Lutnick said on "This Week" that the White House will implement "a tariff model in order to encourage" the semiconductor industry, as well as the pharmaceutical industry, to move its business to the United States. "We can't be beholden and rely upon foreign countries for fundamental things that we need," he said.... "These are things that are national security that we need to be made in America."

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Beijing tries to find an off-ramp but also fights back with export bans

World War Fee The Trump administration’s strategy for the use of tariffs to bring tech manufacturing to American shores took a new turn over the weekend after it announced tariff exemptions for some goods, denied the exemptions, then said it plans further tariffs on high-tech goods.…