British technology minister Michelle Donelan defended plans to require messaging apps to provide access to encrypted private messages when needed to protect children from abuse, which major platforms say would undermine the privacy of their users. From a report: Donelan told the BBC that the government was not against encryption, and the access would only be requested as a last resort, under Britain's Online Safety Bill which is expected to become law later this year. "I, like you, want my privacy because I don't want people reading my private messages. They'd be very bored but I don't want them to do it," said Donelan, minister for science, innovation and technology. "However, we do know that on some of these platforms, they are hotbeds sometimes for child abuse and sexual exploitation. And we have to be able access that information should that problem occur."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday to block and regulate high-tech U.S.-based investments going toward China -- a move the administration said was targeted but it also reflected an intensifying competition between the world's two biggest powers. The order covers advanced computer chips, micro electronics, quantum information technologies and artificial intelligence. Senior administration officials said that the effort stemmed from national security goals rather than economic interests, and that the categories it covered were intentionally narrow in scope. The order seeks to blunt China's ability to use U.S. investments in its technology companies to upgrade its military while also preserving broader levels of trade that are vital for both nations' economies.

The officials previewing the order said that China has exploited U.S. investments to support the development of weapons and modernize its military. The new limits were tailored not to disrupt China's economy, but they would complement the export controls on advanced computer chips from last year that led to pushback by Chinese officials. The Treasury Department, which would monitor the investments, will announce a proposed rulemaking with definitions that would conform to the presidential order and go through a public comment process. The goals of the order would be to have investors notify the U.S. government about certain types of transactions with China as well as to place prohibitions on some investments. Officials said the order is focused on areas such as private equity, venture capital and joint partnerships in which the investments could possibly give countries of concern such as China additional knowledge and military capabilities. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce responded in a statement early Thursday that it has "serious concern" about the order and "reserves the right to take measures."

"We hope the U.S. side respects the laws of the market economy and the principle of fair competition, does not artificially obstruct global economic and trade exchanges and cooperation and does not put up obstacles for the recovery and growth of the world economy."

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce also said the executive order "seriously deviates from the market economy and fair competition principles the United States has always advocated. It affects the normal business decisions of enterprises, disrupts the international economic and trade order and seriously disrupts the security of global industrial and supply chains."

A recent comprehensive study reveals that automated bots are substantially more efficient than humans at cracking Captcha tests, a widely used security measure on over 100 popular websites. The Independent reports: In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds -- varying in location, age, sex and educational level -- to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy.

Some Captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. "The bots' accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent)," scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots' solving times are "significantly lower" or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases.

According to Gizmodo, CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results. From the report: Archived copies of CNET's author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks. A CNET representative confirmed that the company was culling stories but declined to share exactly how many it has taken down. The move adds to recent controversies over CNET's editorial strategy, which has included layoffs and experiments with error-riddled articles written by AI chatbots.

"Removing content from our site is not a decision we take lightly. Our teams analyze many data points to determine whether there are pages on CNET that are not currently serving a meaningful audience. This is an industry-wide best practice for large sites like ours that are primarily driven by SEO traffic," said Taylor Canada, CNET's senior director of marketing and communications. "In an ideal world, we would leave all of our content on our site in perpetuity. Unfortunately, we are penalized by the modern internet for leaving all previously published content live on our site."

CNET shared an internal memo about the practice. Removing, redirecting, or refreshing irrelevant or unhelpful URLs "sends a signal to Google that says CNET is fresh, relevant and worthy of being placed higher than our competitors in search results," the document reads. According to the memo about the "content pruning" the company considers a number of factors before it "deprecates" an article, including SEO, the age and length of the story, traffic to the article, and how frequently Google crawls the page. The company says it weighs historical significance and other editorial factors before an article is taken down. When an article is slated for deletion, CNET says it maintains its own copy, and sends the story to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The company also says current staffers whose articles are deprecated will be alerted at least 10 days ahead of time. What does Google have to say about this? According to the company's Public Liaison for Google Search, Danny Sullivan, Google recommends against the practice. "Are you deleting content from your site because you somehow believe Google doesn't like 'old' content? That's not a thing! Our guidance doesn't encourage this," Sullivan said in a series of tweets.

If a website has an individual page with outdated content, that page "isn't likely to rank well. Removing it might mean, if you have a massive site, that we're better able to crawl other content on the site. But it doesn't mean we go, 'Oh, now the whole site is so much better' because of what happens with an individual page." Sullivan wrote. "Just don't assume that deleting something only because it's old will improve your site's SEO magically."

Universities in a southern Chinese region are not doing enough to turn academic research into market applications, and in maintaining large piles of idle funds, and the findings could raise questions about the nation's ambitious tech self-sufficiency drive. SCMP: According to a new audit report by the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region for 2022, nine universities in the region had extremely low conversion rates in bringing inventions to the market -- below 1 per cent -- from 2020 to 2022. Among them, one university saw no successful industrial applications out of 862 implemented research projects funded with a total of 131 million yuan (US$18.2 million). The findings spotlight a long-standing weak link in China's push to strengthen basic research, which it views as crucial to becoming a tech superpower by the middle of the century, and to breaking free US tech-containment measures. "Essentially, this reflects a nationwide issue," said Liu Ruiming, a professor with the National Development and Strategic Research Institute at Renmin University.

China will require all mobile app providers in the country to file business details with the government, its information ministry said, marking Beijing's latest effort to keep the industry on a tight leash. From a report: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said late on Tuesday that apps without proper filings will be punished after the grace period that will end in March next year, a move that experts say would potentially restrict the number of apps and hit small developers hard. You Yunting, a lawyer with Shanghai-based DeBund Law Offices, said the order is effectively requiring approvals from the ministry. The new rule is primarily aimed at combating online fraud but it will impact on all apps in China, he said.

Rich Bishop, co-founder of app publishing firm AppInChina, said the new rule is also likely to affect foreign-based developers which have been able to publish their apps easily through Apple's App Store without showing any documentation to the Chinese government. Bishop said that in order to comply with the new rules, app developers now must either have a company in China or work with a local publisher.

Google announced today that Chrome is now adopting weekly Stable channel updates in an effort to block major exploits quicker. 9to5Google reports: Google's browser gets major "milestone" updates every four (previously six) weeks, like going from version 100 to 101. In the past, Chrome would get a "Stable Refresh" update to "address security and other high impact bugs" in-between milestones every two weeks. This is now changing to occur weekly between milestones, starting with Google Chrome 116 on desktop and mobile, so that security updates get to end users much faster. Since Chromium is an open source project, "anyone can view the source code, submit changes for review, and see the changes made by anyone else, even security bug fixes." [...]

The current patch gap is around 15 days. It was previously 35 days before switching to patch updates every two weeks in 2020. Google expects weekly patch updates to result in security fixes shipping "3.5 days sooner on average, greatly reducing the already small window for n-day attackers to develop and use an exploit against potential victims and making their lives much more difficult." This new schedule will also result in fewer unplanned updates that occur when there are known in-the-wild exploits: "By now shipping stable updates weekly, we expect the number of unplanned updates to decrease since we'll be shipping updates more frequently."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue, and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works. Google did not build a new IDE (integrated development environment) when it created IDX. Instead, it is using Visual Studio Code -- Open Source as the basis of its project. This surely allowed the team to focus on the integration with Codey, Google's PaLM 2-based foundation model for programming tasks. Thanks to Codey, IDX supports smart code completion, a ChatGPT/Bard-like chatbot that can help developers with general coding questions as well as those related specifically to the code you are working on (including the ability to explain it) and the ability to add contextual code actions like "add comments."

"We spend a lot of time writing code, and recent advances in AI have created big opportunities to make that time more productive," the IDX team explains in today's announcement. "With Project IDX, we're exploring how Google's innovations in AI -- including the Codey and PaLM 2 models powering Studio Bot in Android Studio, Duet in Google Cloud and more -- can help you not only write code faster, but also write higher-quality code." As a cloud-based IDE, it's no surprise that Project IDX integrates with Google's own Firebase Hosting (and Google Cloud Functions) and allows developers to bring in existing code from the GitHub repository. Every workspace has access to a Linux-based VM (virtual machine) and, soon, embedded Android and iOS simulators right in the browser.

TSMC is committing $3.8 billion to establish its first European factory in Germany, benefiting from significant state support for the $11 billion project as Europe aims to shorten supply chains. Reuters reports: The plant, which will be TSMC's third outside of traditional manufacturing bases Taiwan and China, is central to Berlin's ambition to foster the domestic semiconductor industry its car industry will need to remain globally competitive. Germany, which has been courting the world's largest contract chipmaker since 2021, will contribute up to 5 billion euros to the factory in Dresden, capital of the eastern state of Saxony, German officials said.

"Germany is now probably becoming the major location for semiconductor production in Europe," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, less than two months after Intel announced a 30 billion euro plan to build two chip-making plants in the country. "That is important for the resilience of production structures around the world, but it is also important for the future viability of our European continent, and it is of course particularly important for the future viability of Germany."

TSMC said it would invest up to 3.499 billion euros into a subsidiary, European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), of which it will own 70%. Germany's Bosch and Infineon and the Netherlands' NXP (NXPI.O) will each own 10% of the plant, which will make up to 40,000 wafers a month for cars and industrial and home products when it opens in 2017. The factory will cost around 10 billion euros in total.

Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs. From a report: This information comes from a report issued by Bernstein Research which estimates that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm processors, and 40 percent of those are located in China, as we reported earlier. But that total is beaten by just one company -- Amazon -- which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst.

Amazon currently uses its own Graviton family of chips, designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services and introduced to the world back in 2018, which are for its own internal use only. The latest iteration is the Graviton3E for high-performance computing applications, introduced towards the end of 2022. According to Bernstein, because these chips were optimized for the specific needs of AWS, the company is able to fit in more cores per socket or per rack and the chips consume less power, translating to lower spending on space and cooling.

A U.S. judge rejected Google's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of millions of people by secretly tracking their internet use. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Monday said she could not find that users consented to letting Google collect information about what they viewed online because the Alphabet unit never explicitly told them it would. David Boies, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the proposed $5 billion class action, called the decision "an important step in protecting the privacy interests of millions of Americans."

The plaintiffs alleged that Google's analytics, cookies and apps let the Mountain View, California-based company track their activity even when they set Google's Chrome browser to "Incognito" mode and other browsers to "private" browsing mode. They said this let Google learn enough about their friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and "potentially embarrassing things" they seek out online, becoming "an unaccountable trove of information so detailed and expansive that George Orwell could never have dreamed it."

Seven years after updating Messenger to allow it to serve as your default Android text messaging app, the company formerly known as Facebook is quietly abandoning the feature. From a report: According to a support page, the feature will disappear after September 28th. I don't know anyone that uses it, but at least it'll be nice to have one fewer screens to tap through during setup.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Rex Heuermann, the meticulous architectural consultant who the authorities say murdered three women and buried them on a Long Island beach more than a decade ago, may have been among the last of the dying breed of American serial killers. Even as serial killers came to inhabit a central place in the nation's imagination -- inspiring hit movies, television shows, books, podcasts and more -- their actual number was dwindling dramatically. There were once hundreds at large, and a spike in the 1970s and '80s terrified the country. Now only a handful at most are known to be active, researchers say. The techniques that led to the arrest of Mr. Heuermann, who has pleaded not guilty to the crimes, help explain the waning of serial killing, which the F.B.I. defines as the same person killing two or more victims in separate events at different times.

It is harder to hide. Rapid advances in investigative technology, video and other digital surveillance tools, as well as the ability to analyze mountains of information, quickly allow the authorities to find killers who before would have gone undetected. At the same time, Americans have adopted more cautious habits in their everyday lives -- hitchhiking, for example, is less common, and children are driven to and from school. That reduces easy targets. And, some theorize, those bent on killing now opt for spectacular mass murders. "The 'perfect crime' concept is more of a concept than it ever has been before," said Adam Scott Wandt, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. More than a decade ago, prosecutors said, Mr. Heuermann tried to cover his digital tracks by communicating with victims using so-called burner phones, prepaid units purchased anonymously for temporary use. But thanks to exponential progress in technology since 2010, investigators were able not only to chart Mr. Heuermann's decade-old movements; they could also monitor exactly what he was searching online in recent months. They saw that he was using an anonymous account for internet queries like "Why could law enforcement not trace the calls made by the long island serial killer," prosecutors said. He had also been visiting massage parlors and contacting women working as escorts, they said.

The ubiquity of technology has made it harder to get away with murder, Mr. Wandt said. The amount of data people create in their daily lives is more than many can conceptualize, he said. Just by walking outside, people are now tracked by ever-present cameras, from Amazon's Ring units outside homes to surveillance at banks and retail stores, he said. Every use of a phone or computer creates streams of data that are collected directly on devices or immortalized on servers, he said. A concerted effort by the federal government to ensure that even the smallest police departments can use technology to their benefit has also helped give investigators an upper hand, Mr. Wandt said. In 1987, there were 198 known active serial killers -- people connected to at least two murders -- and 404 known victims across the United States, according to a report published three years ago by researchers who run Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University's Serial Killer Database. By 2018, there were only 12 known serial killers and 44 victims, according to the report. "The big question is: Are they going underground and finding other techniques?â said Terence Leary, an associate professor in the psychology department at Florida Gulf Coast University and the team leader for the database.

He said that some serial murderers have killed for discrete periods before taking prolonged breaks: "Maybe they decided to give it up. Who knows?"

In a period of less than nine months, Google received requests to remove over a billion links to pirate sites from its search engine. This is a significant increase compared to recent years, but not necessarily a new trend. More than a quarter of all reported links, relating to a single website, were sent by MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub. TorrentFreak reports: Google first started to keep track of these takedown notices at the beginning of the last decade. In the spring of 2012, Google launched its Transparency Report which publishes all DMCA requests the company receives, including the targeted links and their senders. This provided fuel for hundreds of news reports as well as academic research. A few days ago, Google reached a new milestone when it processed the seven billionth removal request. It's a mind-boggling number that comes less than a year after the six billionth takedown was recorded.

Looking more closely at the timeline, we see that a billion URLs were reported to Google search in less than nine months. For comparison, it took twice as long to go from five to six billion, suggesting that the takedown volume picked up again after a previously reported decline. There's no denying the recent surge in reported links but much of the increase was generated by a single rightsholder in an effort to remove a particular pirate operation from Google search.

Around the start of the year MG Premium began to increase its takedown efforts. The company is an intellectual property vehicle of the MindGeek conglomerate, known for popular adult sites such as PornHub. One of MG Premium's main goals is to shut down âunlicensed' sites or at least make when unfindable. [...] The surge is clearly visible in the graph above and at times the company was averaging more than two million takedown requests per day. More recently the volume has come down a bit, but it's been a major contributor to Google's takedown uptick.

When Spin ceased operations of its scooter rental service in Seattle, abandoned scooters were found throughout the city, each housing a Raspberry Pi 4B. Tom's Hardware reports: This discovery was recently shared to social media where Pi enthusiasts are simultaneously befuddled and ready to book their tickets to Seattle. Legally speaking, if the scooters are abandoned then snagging one for the Pi inside is fair game but it's currently not clear if Spin has plans to recover their remaining assets.

As of writing, it's not clear what the Raspberry Pi 4 Bs were actually used for inside the scooter. At first glance, it seems like an overpowered option for something like an electric scooter but without exact confirmation of its purpose, we can only speculate. No doubt it requires much more power than something smaller like a Raspberry Pi Zero. In the meantime, residents have taken to finding these scooters and exploring their insides for the hardware left behind. We can see the Pi 4 is attached to a HAT and has something resembling a NoIR connected to the camera module port. Again, the exact purpose of each component and how it was implemented is unclear.

Microsoft is bringing its AI-powered Bing Chat to all mobile browsers as part of the broader changes to stop blocking Bing Chat on third-party browsers. The Verge reports: Bing Chat first launched in February, but it was restricted to Microsoft's own Edge browser. Microsoft started opening up to Chrome and Safari desktop browsers in late July as part of testing for full third-party browser support. "With so many new, useful features now a part of Bing, we're excited to announce you can start experiencing the new AI-powered Bing in third-party browsers on web and mobile soon," says the Bing team in a blog post. "This next step in the journey allows Bing to showcase the incredible value of summarized answers, image creation and more, to a broader array of people."

After growing "increasingly frustrated" with the Google Maps experience, Fast Company's Michael Grothaus has highlighted five main reasons the app has "become a cluttered, frustrating mess" -- and why he finds himself turning to Apple Maps more often. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: ENOUGH WITH THE HOTEL AND BAR PINS: Whenever I'm in a major metropolitan area, Google Maps seems to have an obsession with displaying as many hotels, bars, and clubs on the map as it can. This happens even when I haven't searched for a single hotel or bar. And it happens not only when I'm on vacation in a new city, but when I'm in my home city. Google knows my home address. So, why on Earth does it default to showing me as many hotels as possible in the city where I live? The same is true of clubs and bars. I see pins for more dance clubs and bars in one small area shown on my smartphone's display than I've ever actually been to in my life. Google knows I'm middle-aged and get up early to work. When I'm just browsing the map, can it really think I might care about the nearest club where patrons normally don't leave until well past midnight? By displaying all these irrelevant hotels and bars, Google makes it much harder to browse and navigate the map, since frequently the pins' labels overlap or obscure more important elements, such as the shape and layout of streets.

TOO MANY ADS CLUTTER THE MAP: The square pins you see in Google Maps are ad pins. They represent a place of business (a hotel, spa, etc.) that is paying Google to make sure it's displayed on the map, despite the business's irrelevance to me. Again, ad pins for hotels dominate, but right behind them are ad pins for restaurants with small text underneath them imploring me to "Order Delivery with Uber Eats," which just further clutters the map. Google is, of course, first and foremost an advertising company. Data compiled by Oberlo showed that 78.2% of its Q1 2023 total revenue of $69.8 billion came from ads. But its enthusiasm for placing ads in every corner of Google Maps just makes it all the more cluttered and increasingly hard to read. And that's before we even get to

PHOTO PINS SIGNIFY WHAT, EXACTLY?: Google Maps identifies points of interest primarily by pin color and glyph: Hotels are represented by a pink pin with an image of a person sleeping in a bed, restaurants get an orange pin with a fork and knife, and so forth. Regular pins, denoting businesses or other points of interest, are reverse teardrop-shaped, while ad pins are square-shaped. But, since last year, there is also now a third form: the photo pin. As best as I can tell, a photo pin is a pin for a business, but instead of a typical category glyph, it shows a large photo ostensibly related to the establishment. These pins don't appear to signify that the business is notable in any way. (I mean, I'm sure I've seen photo pins for muffler repair shops -- not exactly a tourist attraction.) The photo pin might be the ultimate map monopolizer. It's bigger, and the photo, seemingly pulled from a business's Google Maps listing, doesn't always even represent the business well. One photo pin I came across, oddly, seemed to show a photo of the dumpsters behind a restaurant. This just adds to user confusion and more clutter. It isn't helping the business, either.

I HAVE NO INTEREST IN SOMEONE'S WORK-FROM-HOME BUSINESS: Another major contributor to Google Maps being an eyesore these days is a holdover from the pandemic when so many people were stuck working from home -- or decided to begin offering their services from home. It is not uncommon to be browsing a residential area on Google Maps and be faced with a sea of work-from-home business pins. The number of "consultant" businesses I've seen in residential areas on Google Maps has been shocking. The same goes for web designers, app programmers, and handymen -- all of whom operate out of their residential homes. These may all be legitimate businesses run by self-employed people, but why on earth does Google Maps surface their listings on maps if they never have a single client enter their doors and, more important, if I've not searched for a provider of any of these services? Clutter, clutter, clutter.

WHY WON'T YOU SHOW ME THE STREET NAME?: Finally, Google Maps seems more intent today on showing bars, restaurants, ads, and work-from-home businesses than useful map-related features. Sometimes it doesn't even show the most basic information anymore, including street names. Many times I just want to see the name of the street I'm standing on. So, I open Google Maps and zoom in on my current location. Yet no matter how far in I zoom in, Google Maps doesn't always apply a label to the street I'm standing on. It just remains blank. Of course, business pins I have no interest in are still prominently displayed. A workaround I've stumbled upon whenever this happens is to select a business pin on the next street over. When Google Maps centers on that, it for some reason will label the street I'm standing on. Among all the gripes on this list, I think this one is my biggest. If my ad-hoc workaround doesn't work, I often have to open Apple Maps just to look up the name of the street I'm on.

The next time you want a quick gut check on whether a sentence is grammatically accurate, Google Search might have the answer. From a report: 9to5Google has spotted a "grammar check" feature that will offer suggestions on whether a given phrase is grammatically accurate. For example, type "the quick brown fox jump over the lazy dog" into the search engine and Google will highlight that you probably meant "jumps" instead of "jump." Although most people probably don't care about the grammar of their search phrases, we suspect this tool is meant to be more general purpose. If one of your sentences looks off when you type it into a messaging app for example, Google's hope seems to be that you'll give it a check with Google Search -- because anything that encourages more searches and engagement is good for business.

The Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for $75 monthly subsidies to make broadband service more affordable for low-income households in certain "high-cost" areas. From a report: The $75 subsidy will be part of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that generally offers $30 monthly discounts to people with low incomes. The ACP was created by Congress in late 2021 and implemented by the FCC to replace a previous pandemic-related subsidy program. The ACP already provides $75 monthly subsidies for homes on tribal lands, but not in other areas. The US law that created the ACP lets the FCC make $75 subsidies available in areas where the costs of building broadband networks are higher than average.

That's what the FCC did in its action announced yesterday. "The Infrastructure Act specified that the $75 monthly benefit would support providers that can demonstrate that the standard $30 monthly benefit would cause them to experience 'particularized economic hardship' such that they would be unable to maintain part or all of their broadband network in a high-cost area," the FCC said. ACP subsidies are distributed to Internet service providers that enroll in the program and give customers discounts. Comcast, Charter Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and other ISPs last year agreed to make $30 plans with download speeds of at least 100Mbps available to eligible low-income households, essentially making the Internet service free when the $30 subsidy is applied.

After a hurricane hit Florida, 484 buildings just at the Tyndall Air Force base were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Five years later, it's part of a $5 billion, nine-year rebuilding effort the Washington Post describes as rare "blank slate." The plan is "not merely to rebuild it, but to construct what the U.S. military calls 'the installation of the future,' which will be able to withstand rising seas, stronger storms and other threats..." The rebuild at Tyndall, which is expected to continue into 2027, marks the largest military construction project undertaken by the Pentagon. "Think of it as the Air Force throwing its Costco card down on the table and buying buildings in bulk," said Michael Dwyer, deputy chief of the Natural Disaster Recovery Division. A dizzying array of new technologies and approaches have been incorporated into the effort, from semiautonomous robot dogs patrolling the grounds to artificial intelligence software designed to detect and deter any armed person who enters the base.

But the most robust funding is aimed at making Tyndall more efficient, connected and resilient in the face of a warming world. Structures under construction — from dormitory complexes to a child care center to hangars that will house three new squadrons of the F-35A Lightning II later this year — are being built to withstand winds in excess of 165 mph. Steel frames, high-impact windows, concrete facades and roofing with additional bracing are among the features meant to weather the stronger storms to come.

At nearby Panama City, sea level rise has accelerated in recent years, with federal data showing seas have risen there more than 4 inches since 2010. Planners factored in the potential for as much as 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and as a result placed the "vast majority" of new buildings at elevations that should be safe from storm surges for decades, Dwyer said. In addition, sensors placed near the low spots of buildings will send alerts the moment a flood threatens. The Air Force also has created a "digital twin" of Tyndall — essentially, a virtual duplicate of the base that allows officials to simulate how roads, buildings and other infrastructure would hold up in different scenarios, such as a hurricane or historic rainfall events.
Other efforts include restoring the beach's 10-foot sand dunes and its rocky shoreline, along with "the installation of submerged oyster reef breakwater that can reduce wave energy and erosion."

But the article points out that the Air Force also has a second hope for their base: "that the lessons unfolding here can be replicated at other bases around the world that will face — or already are facing — similar threats...