The FBI's executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has gone on the record in various news outlets telling Americans that "encryption is your friend, whether it's on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible" - in the wake of Salt Typhoon, "one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history". T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and other telcos had Chinese hackers living in their networks for months who were able to exfiltrate data using wiretap backdoors put there by the NSA/FBI/CIA/etc. First of all, wow, what a hack from the Chinese, congrats to everyone involved! Second, lol at the FBI for telling us encryption is awesome while going behind our backs begging politicians for backdoors into that encryption ya fucken hypocrites.
Meta joins Amazon, Google and Microsoft in throwing money at nuclear power to fuel the incredible demand for electricity generated by their data centres. In a press release, Meta said that "our aim is to add 1-4 GW of new nuclear generation capacity in the U.S. to be delivered starting in the early 2030s. We are looking to identify developers that can help accelerate the availability of new nuclear generators and create sufficient scale to achieve material cost reductions by deploying multiple units, both to provide for Meta's future energy needs and to advance broader industry decarbonization". They haven't said how much they'll invest, but as we know, nuclear power isn't cheap.
Good news for you freaks hanging out on Threads - you can follow Mastodon users now. Adam Mosseri, Instagram boss, posted this on Threads a few hours ago: "Exciting update for those of you following our fediverse journey – starting today, you can follow people from other fediverse servers who have interacted with federated users or posts on Threads. You can see their posts by navigating to their profile, and you can also choose to be notified when they post on their server. More interop features are on the way, stay tuned", along with a video of what the process looks like. The Verge notes that "new Threads features have picked up the pace in recent weeks. Maybe that’s got something to do with all the attention Bluesky’s been getting lately?". Mmmhmmmm.
The ABC has a detailed story about Redflow's demise. They were an Australian company manufacturing innovative batteries using technology researched in Australian universities, with loads of orders from overseas businesses. You'd think it's a recipe for success, but what the ABC article outlines is a typical story of Aussie investors not having deep enough pockets (or guts) to ride out the bumps. The batteries had a massive failure rate that ended up costing more to replace than they got in revenue. They thought they could eventually iron out all the manufacturing process defects as they got more experience and bigger scales, but it just didn't happen. They join Tritium on the heap of "well, we tried!" Aussie clean-tech businesses.
Protesters gather outside the Leichhardt town hall to demonstrate against the construction of a Telstra mobile phone tower, New South Wales, May 2004 (Karl Sharp / National Library of Australia)
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