A Boeing quality manager for more than 30 years "learned of and exposed very serious safety problems with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner," according to his lawyers, "and was retaliated against and subjected to a hostile work environment."

After retiring in 2017 he'd filed a whistleblower retaliation case, and "was in the middle of giving deposition testimony... when he died, his lawyers, Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, told NPR." "He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on," the South Carolina-based attorneys said in a joint statement. "We didn't see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it."

Police said officers were sent to the hotel to conduct a welfare check after people were unable to contact Barnett, who had traveled to Charleston to testify in his lawsuit against Boeing. "Upon their arrival, officers discovered a male inside a vehicle suffering from a gunshot wound to the head," police said in a statement sent to NPR. "He was pronounced deceased at the scene...."

Barnett, who spent decades working for Boeing at its plants in Everett, Washington, and North Charleston, South Carolina, had repeatedly alleged that Boeing's manufacturing practices had declined — and that rather than improve them, he added, managers had pressured workers not to document potential defects and problems.

"We are saddened by Mr. Barnett's passing, and our thoughts are with his family and friends," Boeing said in a statement sent to NPR....

Barnett filed a whistleblower complaint against Boeing in early 2017; his case against the company was heading toward a trial this June, his family said. "He was looking forward to having his day in court and hoped that it would force Boeing to change its culture," the family said in a statement shared with NPR by his brother, Rodney Barnett. The family says Barnett's health declined because of the stresses of taking a stand against his longtime employer.

"He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing," they said, "which we believe led to his death."
"Two of his attorneys called on police to fully investigate how he had died," reports the BBC.

And for what it's worth, the New York Post says Barnett "made a grim prediction that he could potentially end up dead after raising safety concerns about the jetliner giant, allegedly telling a family friend: 'If anything happens, it's not suicide.'"

UPDATE: Fortune just published an article called "The last days of the Boeing whistleblower."

Thanks to Slashdot readers wgoodman and sinij for sharing the article.

America's National Transportation Safety Board "is investigating a fatal crash in San Antonio, Texas, involving a Ford electric vehicle that may have been using a partially automated driving system," reports the Associated Press: The NTSB said that preliminary information shows a Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV equipped with the company's partially automated driving system collided with the rear of a Honda CR-V that was stopped in one of the highway lanes.

Television station KSAT reported that the Mach-E driver told police the Honda was stopped in the middle lane with no lights on before the crash around 9:50 p.m. The 56-year-old driver of the CR-V was killed. "NTSB is investigating this fatal crash due to its continued interest in advanced driver assistance systems and how vehicle operators interact with these technologies," the agency statement said.

Ford's Blue Cruise system allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel while it handles steering, braking and acceleration on highways. The company says the system isn't fully autonomous and it monitors drivers to make sure they pay attention to the road. It operates on 97% of controlled access highways in the U.S. and Canada, Ford says.

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...

According to Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Canada-based AI startup DarwinAI for an undisclosed sum. Macworld reports: Apple has reportedly folded the DarwinAI staff into its own AI team, including DarwinAI co-founder Alexander Wong, an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo who "has published over 600 refereed journal and conference papers, as well as patents, in various fields such as computational imaging, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and multimedia systems."

According to its LinkedIn profile, DarwinAI is "a rapidly growing visual quality inspection company providing manufacturers an end-to-end solution to improve product quality and increase production efficiency." In layman's terms, that means Apple is likely interested in DarwinAI to streamline its manufacturing to be more efficient. That's something that could save Apple a ton of money in annual costs.

Far more interesting to our consumer devices, however, is Bloomberg's report that DarwinAI's tech can be used to make AI models more efficient in general. Apple has been said to want any generative AI features to run on the device rather than the cloud, so models will need to be as small as possible and DarwinAI could definitely help there. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone maker sees "incredible breakthrough potential for generative AI, which is why we're currently investing significantly in this area. We believe that will unlock transformative opportunities for users when it comes to productivity, problem solving and more."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: McDonald's restaurants are suffering global IT outages that prevent employees from taking orders and accepting payments, causing some stores to close for the day. The outages started overnight and are impacting restaurants globally, including those in the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, and the UK. "We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved," McDonald's said in a statement to BleepingComputer. "We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event." In an updated statement, McDonald's says that the outage was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change. "Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online. This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The polio survivor known as "the man in the iron lung" has died at the age of 78. Paul Alexander contracted polio in 1952 when he was six, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. The disease left him unable to breathe independently, leading doctors to place him in the metal cylinder, where he would spend the rest of his life. He would go on to earn a law degree -- and practice law -- as well as publish a memoir. [...] In 1952, when he became ill, doctors in his hometown of Dallas operated on him, saving his life. But polio meant his body was no longer able to breathe on his own. The answer was to place him in a so-called iron lung — a metal cylinder enclosing his body up to his neck.

The lung, which he called his "old iron horse," allowed him to breathe. Bellows sucked air out of the cylinder, forcing his lungs to expand and take in air. When the air was let back in, the same process in reverse made his lungs deflate. After years, Alexander eventually learned to breathe by himself so that he was able to leave the lung for short periods of time. Like most polio survivors placed in iron lungs, he was not expected to survive long. But he lived for decades, long after the invention of the polio vaccine in the 1950s all but eradicated the disease in the Western world. [...] Advances in medicine made iron lungs obsolete by the 1960s, replaced by ventilators. But Alexander kept living in the cylinder because, he said, he was used to it. He was recognized by Guinness World Records as the person who lived the longest in an iron lung.

A Toronto Sun columnist writes that two Canadian civil liberties groups are "sounding alarms" about the proposed new Online Harms Act (C-63): The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) say while the proposed legislation contains legitimate measures to protect children from online sexual abuse, cyber-bulling and self-harm, and to combat the spread of so-called "revenge porn," its provisions to prevent the expression of hate are draconian, vaguely worded and an attack on free speech... "[D]on't be fooled," said CCF executive director Joanna Baron. "Most of the bill is aimed at restricting freedom of expression. This heavy-handed bill needs to be severely pared down to comply with the constitution."

Both the CCLA and CCF warn the bill could lead to life imprisonment for someone convicted of "incitement to genocide" — a vague term only broadly defined in the bill — and up to five years in prison for other vaguely defined hate speech crimes. The legislation, for example, defines illegal hate speech as expressing "detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals," while legally protected speech, "expresses dislike or disdain, or ... discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends." The problem, critics warn, will be determining in advance which is which, with the inevitable result that people and organizations will self-censor themselves because of fear of being prosecuted criminally, or fined civilly, for what is actually legal speech.
"Both the CCLA and the CCF say the proposed legislation, known as Bill C-63, will require major amendments before becoming law to pass constitutional muster," according to the columnist.

Some specific complains:

• The CCF argues that the Bill "would allow judges to put prior restraints on people who they believe on reasonable grounds may commit speech crimes in the future."

• The CCLA adds that the proposed bill also grants authorities "sweeping new search powers of electronic data, with no warrant requirement," according to the Toronto Sun, and also warns about the creation of a government-appointed "digital safety commission" given "vast authority" and "sweeping powers" to "interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury, and executioner."

And in addition, the CCF points out under the proposed rules the Canadian Human Rights Commission "could order fines of up to $50,000, and awards of up to $20,000 paid to complainants, who in some cases would be anonymous."

"Findings would be based on a mere 'balance of probabilities' standard rather than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt... The mere threat of human rights complaints will chill large amounts of protected speech."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

Science magazine "has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene — our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age — and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene.

"Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity's influence on the planet became overwhelming." The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning — though not unexpected — rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade... [S]ome felt the proposed marker of the epoch — some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada's Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s — isn't definitive enough. Others questioned whether it's even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity's broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World?
Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, said "It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration." Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an "epoch" categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation.... The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again...

Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books... And others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the "Anthropocene event...."
From the New York Times: Geoscientists don't deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century. Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn't be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. "This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part," said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet," Dr. Ellis said. "The evidence just keeps growing."

Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch. "We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale," Dr. McCarthy said. "And behaving accordingly is our only path forward."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

It was an idea first proposed by Archimedes, reports CNN. But now, "Brenden Sener, 13, of London, Ontario, has won two gold medals and a London Public Library award for his minuscule version of the contraption — a supposed war weapon made up of a large array of mirrors designed to focus and aim sunlight on a target, such as a ship, and cause combustion — according to a paper published in the January issue of the Canadian Science Fair Journal." For his 2022 science project, Sener recreated the Archimedes screw, a device for raising and moving water. But he didn't stop there. Sener found the death ray to be one of the more intriguing devices — sometimes referred to as the heat ray. Historical writings suggested that Archimedes used "burning mirrors" to start anchored ships on fire during the siege of Syracuse from 214 to 212 BC...

There is no archaeological evidence that the contraption existed, as Sener noted in his paper, but many have tried to recreate the mechanism to see if the ancient invention could be feasible. In Sener's attempt at the ray, he set up a heating lamp facing four small concave mirrors, each tilted to direct light at a piece of cardboard with an X marked at the focal point. In this project he designed for the 2023 Matthews Hall Annual Science Fair, Sener hypothesized that as the mirrors focused light energy onto the cardboard, the temperature of the target would increase with each mirror added.

In his experiment, Sener conducted three trials with two different light bulb wattages, 50 watts and 100 watts. Each additional mirror increased the temperature notably, he found... The temperature of the cardboard with just the heating lamp and the 100-watt light bulb and no mirrors was about 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27.2 degrees Celsius). After waiting for the cardboard to cool, Sener added one mirror and retested. The focal point's temperature increased to almost 95 F (34.9 C), he found. The greatest increase occurred with the addition of the fourth mirror. The temperature with three mirrors aimed at the target was almost 110 F (43.4 C), but the addition of a fourth mirror increased the temperature by about 18 F (10 C) to 128 F (53.5 C)...

Sener was not attempting to light anything on fire, as "a heating lamp does not generate anywhere near enough heat as the sun would," he said. But he believes that with the use of the sun's rays and a larger mirror, "the temperature would increase even more drastically and at a faster rate" and "would easily cause combustion."
The powerful weapon wouldn't work on cloudy days, Sener's paper points out, and even a moving ship might diminish its impact.

But in an interview with CNN, Sener calls Archimedes' death ray "a neat idea".

innocent_white_lamb shares a report from CBC News: In June, a Court of King's Bench judge ordered Swift Current farmer Chris Achter to pay more than $82,000 to a grain buyer with South West Terminal (SWT). The ruling stems from a text message when the buyer, Kent Mickleborough, asked Achter to confirm a flax contract that requested more than 85 tons of flax to be delivered in the fall at about $670 per ton. Achter responded with a thumbs-up emoji. The case hinges on whether the emoji confirmed the contract, or only confirmed receipt of it -- and whether an emoji can ever be used as a signature.

In his June decision ruling in SWT's favor, Justice Timothy Keene wrote, "This court readily acknowledges that a [thumbs-up] emoji is a non-traditional means to 'sign' a document but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a 'signature.'" Achter is now appealing that ruling.

"Our position is that the emoji cannot be a signature, basically because it does not convey the intention to be bound by an agreement the same as a normal signature would," said Jean-Pierre Jordaan, counsel for the defendant, in court on Tuesday. The counsel for SWT disputed that. "Can a text message chain, with a clear offer and -- in our submissions -- a clear acceptance by thumbs up emoji, constitute a note or memorandum signed by the party to be charged, pursuant to section six of the Sale of Goods Act?" counsel posed. "Our answer to that question is yes; there is no magic in a signature." The three appeal judges reserved their decision for an undetermined date.

Mexico is waiting for the United States to provide evidence that shows imported genetically modified corn is safe for human consumption. "In a written submission to a panel of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Mexico, the top buyer of U.S. corn, argued that science proves GM corn and the herbicide glyphosate are harmful to human health and its native varieties, and that its decree to ban GM corn for human consumption is within its right," reports Reuters. From the report: [Deputy Agriculture Secretary Victor Suarez] said the onus is now on the United States to show GM corn is not harming Mexico's population, which consumes a higher amount of corn than many countries through daily diet staples like nixtamalized dough and tortilla. The United States "argues that the decisions in Mexico are not based on science and that their decisions are," Suarez told Reuters in an interview. "But we still haven't seen the science of the United States or the companies. We are looking forward to that study with great pleasure."

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Mexico's approach to biotechnology runs counter to "decades' worth of evidence demonstrating its safety." A senior official for the U.S. Trade Representative said, "Scientific authorities, including in Mexico, have consistently found biotech products like corn to be safe over a period of decades." [...] Mexico's written response cited studies it said showed links between GM corn consumption and glyphosate exposure to liver inflammation in people and impacts to immune response in animals, saying it considers the risk to human health "extremely serious."

The United States in August requested a dispute settlement panel under the USMCA over Mexico's decree to ban GM corn for human consumption, specifically in the use of making flour for tortillas. The decree allows the use of GM yellow corn in animal feed, which accounts for the majority of Mexico's nearly $5.9 billion worth of U.S. corn imports annually. Washington argues Mexico's decree banning imports of GM corn used for tortillas is not based on science and violates its commitments under the USMCA, which has been in place since 2020. "There is no impact on trade," Suarez said of Mexico's decree. "The value and volume of exports of GM corn to Mexico has increased."

Mexico's decree also calls for the gradual substitution of GM corn, a point of contention highlighted by U.S. officials. In its written response, Mexico argued that no specific time frame has been established and therefore it has had no trade impact. "It is a strategic goal, like the United States would like to have energy sovereignty and energy self-sufficiency," Suarez said. The United States is expected to issue a rebuttal to Mexico's response.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Week Magazine: The advancement of new technologies appears to have given rise to a new problem across the United States: a crippling power shortage on the horizon. The advent of these technologies, such as eco-friendly factories and data centers, has renewed concerns that America could run out of electrical power. These worries also come at a time when the United States' aging power grid is in desperate need of repair. Heavily publicized incidents such as the 2021 Texas power outage, which was partially blamed on crypto-farming, exposed how vulnerable the nation's power supply is, especially during emergencies. There have also been warnings from tech moguls such as Elon Musk, who has stated that the United States is primed to run out of electricity and transformers for artificial intelligence in 2025. But the push to extend the life of the nation's power grid, while also maintaining eco-friendly sustainability, begs the question: Is the United States really at risk of going dark?

The emergence of new technologies means demand is soaring for power across the country; in Georgia, "demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently," Evan Halper said for The Washington Post. Northern Virginia "needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all [its] new data centers," Halper said, while Texas faces a similar problem. This demand is resulting in a "scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid." At the same time, companies are "pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants," Halper said. Much of this relates to the "rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure," Halper said. This infrastructure requires significantly more power than traditional data centers, with the aforementioned crypto farms also sucking up massive amounts of power.

Climate change is also hurting sustainability efforts. A recent report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation estimated that more than 300 million people in the U.S. and Canada could face power shortages in 2024. It also found that electricity demand is rising faster now than at any time in the past five years. This is partially because the "push for the electrification of heating and transportation systems -- including electric cars -- is also creating new winter peaks in electricity demand," Jeremy Hsu said for New Scientist. One of the main issues with these sustainability efforts is the push to move away from fossil fuels toward renewable power. Natural gas is often seen as a bridge between fossils and renewables, but this has also had unintended consequences for the power grid. The system delivering natural gas "doesn't have to meet the same reliability standards as the electric grid, and in many cases, there's no real way to guarantee that fuel is available for the gas plants in the winter," Thomas Rutigliano of the Natural Resources Defense Council said to New Scientist. As a result, the "North American electricity supply has become practically inseparable from the natural gas supply chain," John Moura of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said to New Scientist. As such, a "reliable electricity supply that lowers the risk of power outages depends on implementing reliability standards for the natural gas industry moving forward," but this may be easier said than done.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A group of US lawmakers has introduced a bill that would require Chinese tech giant ByteDance to sell off the popular video-sharing TikTok app within six months or face a ban. For years American officials have raised concerns that data from the app could fall into the hands of the Chinese government. A bipartisan set of 19 lawmakers introduced the legislation on Tuesday. TikTok called the bill a disguised "outright ban."

In a statement announcing the bill, the lawmakers said "applications like TikTok that are controlled by foreign adversaries pose an unacceptable risk to US national security." The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest, or it would be blocked from the app store and web hosting platforms in the US. TikTok has previously argued against divestment, saying a change in ownership would not impose new restrictions on data use. [...] The House Energy and Commerce Committee said it would consider the latest bill on Thursday. "This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs," TikTok said in a statement to the BBC.

Former President Donald Trump attempted to completely ban TikTok in 2020, but that was unsuccessful. More recently, a group of senators introduced legislation to block TikTok last year, but it was stalled due to lobbying from the company.

Trust in AI technology and the companies that develop it is dropping, in both the U.S. and around the world, according to new data from Edelman shared first with Axios. Axios reports: Globally, trust in AI companies has dropped to 53%, down from 61% five years ago. In the U.S., trust has dropped 15 percentage points (from 50% to 35%) over the same period. Trust in AI is low across political lines. Democrats trust in AI companies is 38%, independents are at 25% and Republicans at 24%. Tech is losing its lead as the most trusted sector. Eight years ago, technology was the leading industry in trust in 90% of the countries Edelman studies. Today, it is the most trusted in only half of countries.

People in developing countries are more likely to embrace AI than those in developed ones. Respondents in France, Canada, Ireland, UK, U.S., Germany, Australia, the Netherlands and Sweden reject the growing use of AI by a three-to-one margin, Edelman said. By contrast, acceptance outpaces resistance by a wide margin in developing markets such as Saudi Arabia, India, China, Kenya, Nigeria and Thailand. "When it comes to AI regulation, the public's response is pretty clear: 'What regulation?'," said Edelman global technology chair Justin Westcott. "There's a clear and urgent call for regulators to meet the public's expectations head on."

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that police must now have a warrant or court order to obtain a person or organization's IP address. CBC News reports: The top court was asked to consider whether an IP address alone, without any of the personal information attached to it, was protected by an expectation of privacy under the Charter. In a five-four split decision, the court said a reasonable expectation of privacy is attached to the numbers making up a person's IP address, and just getting those numbers alone constitutes a search. Writing for the majority, Justice Andromache Karakatsanis wrote that an IP address is "the crucial link between an internet user and their online activity." "Thus, the subject matter of this search was the information these IP addresses could reveal about specific internet users including, ultimately, their identity." Writing for the four dissenting judges, Justice Suzanne Cote disagreed with that central point, saying there should be no expectation of privacy around an IP address alone. [...]

In the Supreme Court majority decision, Karakatsanis said that only considering the information associated with an IP address to be protected by the Charter and not the IP address itself "reflects piecemeal reasoning" that ignores the broad purpose of the Charter. The ruling said the privacy interests cannot be limited to what the IP address can reveal on its own "without consideration of what it can reveal in combination with other available information, particularly from third-party websites." It went on to say that because an IP address unlocks a user's identity, it comes with a reasonable expectation of privacy and is therefore protected by the Charter. "If [the Charter] is to meaningfully protect the online privacy of Canadians in today's overwhelmingly digital world, it must protect their IP addresses," the ruling said.

Justice Cote, writing on behalf of justices Richard Wagner, Malcolm Rowe and Michelle O'Bonsawin, acknowledged that IP addresses "are not sought for their own sake" but are "sought for the information they reveal." "However, the evidentiary record in this case establishes that an IP address, on its own, reveals only limited information," she wrote. Cote said the biographical personal information the law was designed to protect are not revealed through having access to an IP address. Police must use that IP address to access personal information that is held by an ISP or a website that tracks customers' IP addresses to determine their habits. "On its own, an IP address does not even reveal browsing habits," Cote wrote. "What it reveals is a user's ISP -- hardly a more private piece of information than electricity usage or heat emissions." Cote said placing a reasonable expectation of privacy on an IP address alone upsets the careful balance the Supreme Court has struck between Canadians' privacy interests and the needs of law enforcement. "It would be inconsistent with a functional approach to defining the subject matter of the search to effectively hold that any step taken in an investigation engages a reasonable expectation of privacy," the dissenting opinion said.

Starting today, Ford electric vehicle owners can use one of Tesla's 2,400+ superchargers, but there's a hitch. "They'll need to get an adapter that Ford will provide for free, although the company won't start shipping those until the end of March," notes the Associated Press. Product Reviewer MKBHD also notes that non-Teslas will need to park in a spot that blocks 2 spots where a Tesla would take up one. "If the charge station fills up the remaining spots with Teslas, the app will show 1 charger as available but the parking spot is blocked by the Mach-E," adds MKBHD. From the report: Last May, Ford became the first automaker to reach an agreement with the Austin, Texas-based Tesla to charge on its network, which is the largest and most well-placed in the U.S. Tesla has more than 26,000 plugs and nearly 2,400 Supercharger stations across the U.S. and Canada. Ford said its owners will have access to about 15,000 Tesla fast-charging plugs that are located strategically along travel corridors. Ford owners won't be able to use some older Tesla plugs.

Most other automakers followed Ford in joining Tesla's network and agreeing to switch to Tesla's plug, called the North American Charging Standard, which is smaller and easier to use than the current plugs on most other EVs sold in the two countries. Ford said adding the Tesla plugs will double the size of the network that can be used by Ford EV owners. There are nearly 166,000 Ford EVs in the U.S.

Ford is offering the adapters for free to the owners, who can sign up on the Ford.com website to reserve them between Thursday and June 30. The company will provide one free adapter per vehicle. Tesla's network was turned on Wednesday morning, and software enabling the Ford vehicles to charge at Tesla stations was to be sent out around the same time. Ford will switch to Tesla's charging connector with its second-generation EVs starting next year.

A B.C. lawyer has been ordered to pay costs for opposing counsel for the time they took to discover that two cases she cited as precedent were created by ChatGPT. CBC News reports: The cases would have provided compelling precedent for a divorced dad to take his children to China -- had they been real. But instead of savouring courtroom victory, the Vancouver lawyer for a millionaire embroiled in an acrimonious split has been told to personally compensate her client's ex-wife's lawyers for the time it took them to learn the cases she hoped to cite were conjured up by ChatGPT. In a decision released Monday, a B.C. Supreme Court judge reprimanded lawyer Chong Ke for including two AI "hallucinations" in an application filed last December. The cases never made it into Ke's arguments; they were withdrawn once she learned they were non-existent.

Justice David Masuhara said he didn't think the lawyer intended to deceive the court -- but he was troubled all the same. "As this case has unfortunately made clear, generative AI is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers," Masuhara wrote in a "final comment" appended to his ruling. "Competence in the selection and use of any technology tools, including those powered by AI, is critical."

The U.S. and several international partners endorsed shared principles for developing 6G wireless communication systems, the White House said Monday. From a report: A battle is underway to influence the standards of 6G amid concerns by Western countries and their allies that authoritarian regimes could gain further control over Internet in their countries. Policies around wireless communications influence economic-growth and national security, fueling the race between the U.S. and China -- which claimed earlier this month that it had launched the world's first satellite "to test 6G architecture," per state media.

The governments of the U.S., Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the U.K. released a joint statement saying that by working together, "we can support open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, resilient, and secure connectivity." They laid out principles including using systematic approaches to cybersecurity, being protective of privacy and creating technologies that are widely available and accessible to developing nations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A global coalition of democracies is being formed to protect their societies from disinformation campaigns by foreign governments, the US special envoy on the issue has said. James Rubin, the special envoy for non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts at the US state department's global engagement centre (GEC), said the coalition hoped to agree on "definitions for information manipulation versus plain old opinions that other governments are entitled to have even if we disagree with them." The US, UK and Canada have already signed up to a formal framework agreement, and Washington hopes more countries will join.

The GEC focuses solely on disinformation by foreign powers. Apart from trying to develop global strategies, it works to expose specific covert disinformation operations, such as a Russian operation in Africa to discredit US health services. The US, UK and Canada signed the framework to counter foreign state manipulation this month with the aim of addressing disinformation as a national security threat that requires coordinated government and civil society responses. "Now is the time for a collective approach to the foreign information manipulation threat that builds a coalition of like-minded countries committed to strengthening resilience and response to information manipulation," the framework says. It also encourages information-sharing and joint data analysis tools to identify covert foreign disinformation.

A hugely experienced US official and journalist who has worked with diplomats such as Madeleine Albright in the past, Rubin admitted his first year as special envoy had been one of his most intellectually taxing because of the complex definitions surrounding disinformation. In the continuum between hostile opinion and disinformation, he has tried to identify where and how governments can intervene without limiting free speech. The principle on which he has alighted is deception by foreign powers. "In principle every government should be free to convey their views, but they should have to admit who they are," he said an interview. "We want to promote more fact-based information, but at the same time find ways to label those information operations that are generated by the Chinese government or the Kremlin but to which they don't admit. "In the end that is all I know we can do right now without interfering with a free press. We are not asking for such covert disinformation to be taken down but a way to be found for the source to be labelled."