The FBI says it is unable to find records related to its purchase of a series of hacking tools, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and those purchases initially being included in a public U.S. government procurement database before being quietly scrubbed from the internet. From a report: The news highlights the secrecy the FBI maintains around its use of hacking tools. The agency has previously used classified technology in ordinary criminal investigations, pushed back against demands to provide details of hacking operations to defendants, and purchased technology from surveillance vendors.

"Potentially responsive records were identified during the search," a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request I sent about a specific hacking tool contract says. "However, we were advised that they were not in their expected locations. An additional search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results. Since we were unable to review the records, we were unable to determine if they were responsive to your request." In other words, the FBI says it identified related records, then couldn't actually find them when it went looking.

In February tech journalist Nicholas Carr published Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.

A University of Virginia academic journal says the book "appraises the past and present" of information technology while issuing "a warning about its future." And specifically Carr argues that the government ignored historic precedents by not regulating the early internet sometime in the 1990s. But as he goes on to remind us, the early 1990s were also when the triumphalism of America's Cold War victory, combined with the utopianism of Silicon Valley, convinced a generation of decision-makers that "an unfettered market seemed the best guarantor of growth and prosperity" and "defending the public interest now meant little more than expanding consumer choice." So rather than try to anticipate the dangers and excesses of commercialized digital media, Congress gave it free rein in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which, as Carr explains,

"...erased the legal and ethical distinction between interpersonal communication and broadcast communications that had governed media in the twentieth century. When Google introduced its Gmail service in 2004, it announced, with an almost imperial air of entitlement, that it would scan the contents of all messages and use the resulting data for any purpose it wanted. Our new mailman would read all our mail."

As for the social-media platforms, Section 230 of the Act shields them from liability for all but the most egregiously illegal content posted by users, while explicitly encouraging them to censor any user-generated content they deem offensive, "whether or not such material is constitutionally protected" (emphasis added). Needless to say, this bizarre abdication of responsibility has led to countless problems, including what one observer calls a "sociopathic rendition of human sociability." For Carr, this is old news, but he warns us once again that the compulsion "to inscribe ourselves moment by moment on the screen, to reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image...[fosters] a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we're also at a further remove from those we interact with."
Carr's book suggests "frictional design" to slow posting (and reposting) on social media might "encourage civil behavior" — but then decides it's too little, too late, because our current frictionless efficiency "has burrowed its way too deeply into society and the social mind."

Based on all of this, the article's author looks ahead to the next revolution — AI — and concludes "I do not think it wise to wait until these kindly bots are in place before deciding how effective they are. Better to roll them off the nearest cliff today..."

Chad Anderson is the founder/managing partner of the early-stage VC Space Capital (and an investor in SpaceX, along with dozens of other space companies). Space Capital produces quarterly reports on the space economy, and he says today, unlike 2021, "the froth is gone. But so is the hype. What's left is a more grounded — and investable — space economy."

On Yahoo Finance he shares several of the report's insights — including the emergence of "investable opportunities across defense-oriented startups in space domain awareness, AI-driven command systems, and hardened infrastructure." The same geopolitical instability that's undermining public markets is driving national urgency around space resilience. China's simulated space "dogfights" prompted the US Department of Defense to double down on orbital supremacy, with the proposed "Golden Dome" missile shield potentially unleashing a new wave of federal spending...

Defense tech is on fire, but commercial location-based services and logistics are freezing over. Companies like Shield AI and Saronic raised monster rounds, while others are relying on bridge financings to stay afloat...

Q1 also saw a breakout quarter for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). Software developer Niantic launched a spatial computing platform. SkyWatch partnered with GIS software supplier Esri. Planet Labs collaborated with Anthropic. And Xona Space Systems inked a deal with Trimble to boost precision GPS. This is the next leg of the space economy, where massive volumes of satellite data is finally made useful through machine learning, semantic indexing, and real-time analytics.

Distribution-layer companies are doing more with less. They remain underfunded relative to infrastructure and applications but are quietly powering the most critical systems, such as resilient communications, battlefield networks, and edge-based geospatial analysis. Don't let the low round count fool you; innovation here is quietly outpacing capital.
The article includes several predictions, insights, and possible trends (going beyond the fact that defense spending "will carry the sector...")

• "AI's integration into space (across geospatial intelligence, satellite communications, and sensor fusion) is not a novelty. It's a competitive necessity."

• "Focusing solely on rockets and orbital assets misses where much of the innovation and disruption is occurring: the software-defined layers that sit atop the physical backbone..."

• "For years, SpaceX faced little serious competition, but that's starting to change." [He cites Blue Origin's progress toward approval for launching U.S. military satellites, and how Rocket Lab and Stoke Space "have also joined the competition for lucrative government launch contracts." Even Relativity Space may make a comeback, with former GOogle CEO Eric Schmidt acquiring a controlling stake.]

• "An infrastructure reset is coming. The imminent ramp-up of SpaceX's Starship could collapse the cost structure for the infrastructure layer. When that happens, legacy providers with fixed-cost-heavy business models will be at risk. Conversely, capital-light innovators in station design, logistics, and in-orbit servicing could suddenly be massively undervalued."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal: Five years ago, Airbus made a bold bet: The plane maker would launch a zero-emissions, hydrogen-powered aircraft within 15 years that, if successful, would mark the biggest revolution in aviation technology since the jet engine. Now, Airbus is pulling the brakes. The company has cut the project's budget by a quarter, reallocated staff and sent remaining engineers back to the drawing board, delaying its plans by as much as a decade...

Airbus has spent more than $1.7 billion on the project, according to people familiar with the matter, but over the past year concluded that technical challenges and a slow uptake of hydrogen in the wider economy meant the jet wouldn't be ready by 2035... Airbus says the past five years of work and money haven't been wasted. The company has established that hydrogen is technically feasible and delaying the project will give it more time to fine-tune the technology, executives said...

Airbus shifted focus to hydrogen-fuel cells, which use a chemical reaction to generate energy for an electric motor. It would produce only water vapor, but would require a more radical redesign of the airframe and propulsion system. The plane would carry only 100 passengers about 1,000 nautical miles. Over time, even that proved challenging because of the extra weight of the fuel cells and their limited electricity generation. Instead of a short-haul narrow-body — the workhorse of the aviation industry — at best the aircraft would be more akin to a less appealing regional turboprop.
Airbus received a multi-billion Covid-era support package from the French government that "required Airbus to spend a portion of the money on bringing green aircraft to market by the 2030s," according to the article.

"The hydrogen project helped Airbus access additional government funding, as well as private green financing... Airbus ultimately assigned the project an annual budget of about €400 million, primarily funded through its own coffers, according to people familiar with its financing arrangements."

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe).

This week he contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek "may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development." Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek's success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek's open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting "the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems."

If that sounds cool to you, it didn't to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its "baddie" list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source... DeepSeek didn't just have a moment. It's now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger — and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.

For example, it's perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek's R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.

Hugging Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and accelerates cannot. Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others, variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and improvable by a global community.
"It's Linux all over again..." Asay writes at one point. "What started as the passion project of a lone developer quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by enterprises worldwide," winning out "precisely because it captivated developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential."

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source AI ecosystem, but this time it's happening much, much faster...

Organizations that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just swimming upstream — they're attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now started to talk up open source, but it's a long way from releasing a DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)

The Trump administration is "taking measures to restrict the sale of AI chips by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel," especially in China, reports the New York Times. But that's triggered a series of dominoes. "In the two days after the limits became public, shares of Nvidia, the world's leading AI chipmaker, fell 8.4%. AMD's shares dropped 7.4%, and Intel's were down 6.8%." (AMD expects up to $800 million in charges after the move, according to CNBC, while NVIDIA said it would take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion.)

The Times notes hopeful remarks Thursday from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a meeting with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. "We're going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant within the regulations and continue to serve China's market." But America's chipmakers also have a greater fear, according to the article: "that their retreat could turn the Chinese tech giant Huawei into a global chip-making powerhouse." "For the U.S. semiconductor industry, China is gone," said Handel Jones, a semiconductor consultant at International Business Strategies, which advises electronics companies. He projects that Chinese companies will have a majority share of chips in every major category in China by 2030... Huang's message spoke to one of his biggest fears. For years, he has worried that Huawei, China's telecommunications giant, will become a major competitor in AI. He has warned U.S. officials that blocking U.S. companies from competing in China would accelerate Huawei's rise, said three people familiar with those meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

If Huawei gains ground, Huang and others at Nvidia have painted a dark picture of a future in which China will use the company's chips to build AI data centers across the world for the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic effort to increase Beijing's influence by paying for infrastructure projects around the world, a person familiar with the company's thinking said...

Nvidia's previous generation of chips perform about 40% better than Huawei's best product, said Gregory C. Allen, who has written about Huawei in his role as director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But that gap could dwindle if Huawei scoops up the business of its American rivals, Allen said. Nvidia was expected to make more than $16 billion in sales this year from the H20 in China before the restriction. Huawei could use that money to hire more experienced engineers and make higher-quality chips. Allen said the U.S. government's restrictions also could help Huawei bring on customers like DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI startup. Working with those companies could help Huawei improve the software it develops to control its chips. Those kinds of tools have been one of Nvidia's strengths over the years.
TechRepublic identifies this key quote from an earlier article: "This kills NVIDIA's access to a key market, and they will lose traction in the country," Patrick Moorhead, a tech analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told The New York Times. He added that Chinese companies will buy from local rival Huawei instead.

"There has never been a consensus or a 'smoking gun' to explain what started the pandemic," writes ABC News.

Yet the Associated Press reports that "A federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak." (This despite the fact that "about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.") The covid.gov website shows a photo of President Donald Trump walking between the words "lab" and "leak" under a White House heading... The web page also accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of pushing a "preferred narrative" that COVID-19 originated in nature. The origins of COVID have never been proven. Scientists are unsure whether the virus jumped from an animal, as many other viruses have, or came from a laboratory accident. A U.S. intelligence analysis released in 2023 said there is insufficient evidence to prove either theory.
"Many scientists think it's more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan," reports NPR.

And even Jamie Metzl, a critic of the wildlife spillover theory, told NPR that while they appreciated "efforts to dig deeper... it would be a terrible shame if such efforts distracted from essential work to help prevent further infections and treat people suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID." (The federal website covidtests.gov now also redirects instead to the new page...) Some scientists were critical of the new site, which they say appears political in intent. "Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis ... is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way," [wrote Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada]. "But making evidence-based arguments in good faith about the pandemic's origin is not the purpose of this document. This is pure propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical research," Rasmussen added.

Other scientists said the web site doesn't follow the existing body of scientific evidence on the issue. That evidence does not support "any of the many, often contradictory, lab leak scenarios that have been proposed," Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to NPR. He argued that the evidence is consistent with "the less flashy hypothesis that bringing live animals infected with pathogens with pandemic potential into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world was how this pandemic started.... the next pathogen with pandemic potential will find us easy pickings if we don't appreciate how risky this sort of 'biosafety level zero' activity is."

Bruce66423 shares a report: Toothpaste can be widely contaminated with lead and other dangerous heavy metals, new research shows.

Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children or those marketed as green. The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.

About 90% of toothpastes contained lead, 65% contained arsenic, just under half contained mercury, and one-third had cadmium. Many brands contain a number of the toxins. The highest levels detected violated the state of Washington's limits, but not federal limits. The thresholds have been roundly criticized by public health advocates for not being protective -- no level of exposure to lead is safe, the federal government has found. Bruce66423 asks: "As ever the question that should be asked is: 'What level is worth worrying about and why?'"

A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England's south coast. From a report: The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change. [...] These projects, known as carbon capture, usually focus either on capturing emissions at source or pulling them from the air. What makes SeaCure interesting is that it is testing whether it might be more efficient to pull planet-warming carbon from the sea, since it is present in greater concentrations in water than in the air.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York's coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tweet yesterday: ".@Interior, in consultation with @HowardLutnick, is directing @BOEM to immediately halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis."

Burgum gave no indication of what insufficiencies there were in the approval process for the fully permitted offshore wind project, despite Trump's recent declaration of a national energy emergency that speeds up permitting processes. The commercial lease for the 810-megawatt (MW) Empire Wind 1's federal offshore wind area was signed in March 2017 during the first Trump administration. It was approved by the Biden administration in November 2023 and began construction in 2024. The project is being developed under contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Empire Wind 1, which was due to come online in 2027, has the potential to power 500,000 New York homes. Equinor says it's considering appealing the order.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul issued a statement: "Every single day, I'm working to make energy more affordable, reliable and abundant in New York and the federal government should be supporting those efforts rather than undermining them. Empire Wind 1 is already employing hundreds of New Yorkers, including 1,000 good-paying union jobs as part of a growing sector that has already spurred significant economic development and private investment throughout the state and beyond. As Governor, I will not allow this federal overreach to stand. I will fight this every step of the way to protect union jobs, affordable energy and New York's economic future."

CISA says the U.S. government has extended funding to ensure no continuity issues with the critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program. From a report: "The CVE Program is invaluable to cyber community and a priority of CISA," the U.S. cybersecurity agency told BleepingComputer. "Last night, CISA executed the option period on the contract to ensure there will be no lapse in critical CVE services. We appreciate our partners' and stakeholders' patience."

The announcement follows a warning from MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum that government funding for the CVE and CWE programs was set to expire today, April 16, potentially leading to widespread disruption across the cybersecurity industry. "If a break in service were to occur, we anticipate multiple impacts to CVE, including deterioration of national vulnerability databases and advisories, tool vendors, incident response operations, and all manner of critical infrastructure," Barsoum said.

The CVE and CWE programs are at risk of shutdown as MITRE's DHS contract expires on April 16, 2025, with no confirmed renewal. Without continued funding, the ability to standardize, track, and respond to software vulnerabilities could collapse, leaving the cybersecurity community scrambling in a fragmented and dangerously opaque environment. Forbes reports: "Failure to renew MITRE's contract for the CVE program, seemingly set to expire on April 16, 2025, risks significant disruption," said Jason Soroko, Senior Fellow at Sectigo. "A service break would likely degrade national vulnerability databases and advisories. This lapse could negatively affect tool vendors, incident response operations, and critical infrastructure broadly. MITRE emphasizes its continued commitment but warns of these potential impacts if the contracting pathway is not maintained."

MITRE has indicated that historical CVE records will remain accessible via GitHub, but without continued funding, the operational side of the program -- including assignment of new CVEs -- will effectively go dark. That's not a minor inconvenience. It could upend how the global cybersecurity community identifies, communicates, and responds to new threats. [...] MITRE has said that discussions with the U.S. government are active and that it remains committed to the CVE mission. But with the expiration date looming, time is running short -- and the consequences of even a temporary gap are severe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Car rental giant Hertz has begun notifying its customers of a data breach that included their personal information and driver's licenses. The rental company, which also owns the Dollar and Thrifty brands, said in notices on its website that the breach relates to a cyberattack on one of its vendors between October 2024 and December 2024. The stolen data varies by region, but largely includes Hertz customer names, dates of birth, contact information, driver's licenses, payment card information, and workers' compensation claims. Hertz said a smaller number of customers had their Social Security numbers taken in the breach, along with other government-issued identification numbers.

Notices on Hertz's websites disclosed the breach to customers in Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Hertz also disclosed the breach with several U.S. states, including California and Maine. Hertz said at least 3,400 customers in Maine were affected but did not list the total number of affected individuals, which is likely to be significantly higher. Emily Spencer, a spokesperson for Hertz, would not provide TechCrunch with a specific number of individuals affected by the breach but said it would be "inaccurate to say millions" of customers are affected. The company attributed the breach to a vendor, software maker Cleo, which last year was at the center of a mass-hacking campaign by a prolific Russia-linked ransomware gang.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Robotaxi development is speeding at a fast pace in China, but we don't hear much about it in the USA, where the news focuses mostly on Waymo, with a bit about Zoox, Motional, May, trucking projects and other domestic players. China has 4 main players with robotaxi service, dominated by Baidu (the Chinese Google.) A recent session at last week's Ride AI conference in Los Angeles revealed some details about the different regulatory regime in China, and featured a report from a Chinese-American YouTuber who has taken on a mission to ride in the different vehicles.

Zion Maffeo, deputy general counsel for Pony.AI, provided some details on regulations in China. While Pony began with U.S. operations, its public operations are entirely in China, and it does only testing in the USA. Famously it was one of the few companies to get a California "no safety driver" test permit, but then lost it after a crash, and later regained it. Chinese authorities at many levels keep a close watch over Chinese robotaxi companies. They must get approval for all levels of operation which control where they can test and operate, and how much supervision is needed. Operation begins with testing with a safety driver behind the wheel (as almost everywhere in the world,) with eventual graduation to having the safety driver in the passenger seat but with an emergency stop. Then they move to having a supervisor in the back seat before they can test with nobody in the vehicle, usually limited to an area with simpler streets.

The big jump can then come to allow testing with nobody in the vehicle, but with full time monitoring by a remote employee who can stop the vehicle. From there they can graduate to taking passengers, and then expanding the service to more complex areas. Later they can go further, and not have full time remote monitoring, though there do need to be remote employees able to monitor and assist part time. Pony has a permit allowing it to have 3 vehicles per remote operator, and has one for 15 vehicles in process, but they declined comment on just how many vehicles they actually have per operator. Baidu also did not respond to queries on this. [...] In addition, Chinese jurisdictions require that the system in a car independently log any "interventions" by safety drivers in a sort of "black box" system. These reports are regularly given to regulators, though they are not made public. In California, companies must file an annual disengagement report, but they have considerable leeway on what they consider a disengagement so the numbers can't be readily compared. Chinese companies have no discretion on what is reported, and they may notify authorities of a specific objection if they wish to declare that an intervention logged in their black box should not be counted. On her first trip, YouTuber Sophia Tung found Baidu's 5th generation robotaxi to offer a poor experience in ride quality, wait time, and overall service. However, during a return trip she tried Baidu's 6th generation vehicle in Wuhan and rated it as the best among Chinese robotaxis, approaching the quality of Waymo.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: British laws restricting what the police can say about criminal cases are "not fit for the social media age (source paywalled; alternative source)," a government committee said in a report released Monday in Britain that highlighted how unchecked misinformation stoked riots last summer. Violent disorder, fueled by the far right, affected several towns and cities for days after a teenager killed three girls on July 29 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England. In the hours after the stabbings, false claims that the attacker was an undocumented Muslim immigrant spread rapidly online. In a report looking into the riots, a parliamentary committee said a lack of information from the authorities after the attack "created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow." The report blamed decades-old British laws, aimed at preventing jury bias, that stopped the police from correcting false claims. By the time the police announced the suspect was British-born, those false claims had reached millions.

The Home Affairs Committee, which brings together lawmakers from across the political spectrum, published its report after questioning police chiefs, government officials and emergency workers over four months of hearings. Axel Rudakubana, who was sentenced to life in prison for the attack, was born and raised in Britain by a Christian family from Rwanda. A judge later found there was no evidence he was driven by a single political or religious ideology, but was obsessed with violence. [...] The committee's report acknowledged that it was impossible to determine "whether the disorder could have been prevented had more information been published." But it concluded that the lack of information after the stabbing "created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow, further undermining public confidence," and that the law on contempt was not "fit for the social media age."

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.

Somewhere in Montana sits the only coal-fired power plant in America that hasn't installed modern pollution controls to limit particulate matter, according to the Environmental Protecction Agency. Mining.com notes that it has the highest emission rate of fine particulate matter out of any U.S. coal-burning power plant. When inhaled, the finest particles are able to penetrate deep into the lungs and even potentially the bloodstream, exacerbating heart and lung disease, causing asthma attacks and even sometimes leading to premature death.
Yet America's dirtiest coal-fired power plant — and dozens of others — "are being exempted from stringent air pollution mandates," reports Bloomberg, "as part of US. President Donald Trump's bid to revitalize the industry: Talen Energy Corp.'s Colstrip in Montana is among 47 plants receiving two-year waivers from rules to control mercury and other pollutants as part of a White House effort to ease regulation on coal-fired sites, according to a list seen by Bloomberg News. The exemptions were among a slew of actions announced by the White House Tuesday to expand the mining and use of coal. The Trump administration has argued coal is a vital part of the mix to ensure sufficient energy supply to meet booming demand for AI data centers. The carve-out, which begins in July 2027, lasts until July 2029, according to the proclamation.
In an email to Bloomberg, a White House spokesperson said the move meant that America "will produce beautiful, clean coal" while addressing "necessary electrical demand from emerging technologies such as AI."

"A modern free society has an obligation to offer electronic tax filing that respects user freedom," says a Free Software Foundation blog post, "and the United States is not excluded from this responsibility."

"Governments, and/or the companies that they partner with, are responsible for providing free as in freedom software for necessary operations, and tax filing is no exception." For many years now, a large portion of [U.S.] taxpayers have filed their taxes electronically through proprietary programs like TurboTax. Millions of taxpayers are led to believe that they have no other option than to use nonfree software or Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS), giving up their freedom as well as their most private financial information to a third-party company, in order to file their taxes...

While the options for taxpayers have improved slightly with the IRS's implementation of the IRS Direct File program [in 25 states], this program unfortunately does require users to hand over their freedom when filing taxes.... Taxpayers shouldn't have to use a program that violates their individual freedoms to file legally required taxes. While Direct File is a step in the right direction as the program isn't in the hands of a third-party entity, it is still nonfree software. Because Direct File is a US government-operated program, and ongoing in the process of being deployed to twenty-five states, it's not too late to call on the IRS to make Direct File free software.

In the meantime, if you need to file US taxes and are yet to file, we suggest filing your taxes in a way that respects your user freedom as much as possible, such as through mailing tax forms. Like with other government interactions that snatch away user freedom, choose the path that most respects your freedom.
Free-as-in-freedom software would decrease the chance of user lock-in, the FSF points out. But they list several other advantages, including:

• Repairability: With free software, there is no uncertain wait period or reliance on a proprietary provider to make any needed bug or security fixes.

• Transparency: Unless you can check what a program really does (or ask someone in the free software community to check for you), there is no way to know that the program isn't doing things you don't consent to it doing.

• Cybersecurity: While free software isn't inherently more secure than nonfree software, it does have a tendency to be more secure because many developers can continuously improve the program and search for errors that can be exploited. With proprietary programs like TurboTax, taxpayers and the U.S. government are dependent on TurboTax to protect the sensitive financial and personal information of millions with few (if any) outside checks and balances...

• Taxpayer dollars spent should actually benefit the taxpayers: Taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund third-party programs that seek to control users and force them to use their programs through lobbying....

"We don't have to accept this unjust reality: we can work for a better future, together," the blog post concludes (offering a "sample message" U.S. taxpayers could send to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel).

"Take action today and help make electronic tax filing free as in freedom for everyone."

Here's an update from the Wall Street Journal about a "widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure."

China was behind it, "Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting... according to people familiar with the matter..." The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said... U.S. officials went public last year with unusually dire warnings about the uncovered Volt Typhoon effort. They publicly attributed it to Beijing trying to get a foothold in U.S. computer networks so its army could quickly detonate damaging cyberattacks during a future conflict. [American officials at the meeting perceived the remarks as "intended to scare the U.S. from involving itself if a conflict erupts in the Taiwan Strait."]

The Chinese official's remarks at the December meeting were indirect and somewhat ambiguous, but most of the American delegation in the room interpreted it as a tacit admission and a warning to the U.S. about Taiwan, a former U.S. official familiar with the meeting said... In a statement, the State Department didn't comment on the meeting but said the U.S. had made clear to Beijing it will "take actions in response to Chinese malicious cyber activity," describing the hacking as "some of the gravest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security...."

A Chinese official would likely only acknowledge the intrusions even in a private setting if instructed to do so by the top levels of Xi's government, said Dakota Cary, a China expert at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. The tacit admission is significant, he said, because it may reflect a view in Beijing that the likeliest military conflict with the U.S. would be over Taiwan and that a more direct signal about the stakes of involvement needed to be sent to the Trump administration. "China wants U.S. officials to know that, yes, they do have this capability, and they are willing to use it," Cary said.
The article notes that top U.S. officials have said America's Defense Department "will pursue more offensive cyber strikes against China."

But it adds that the administration "also plans to dismiss hundreds of cybersecurity workers in sweeping job cuts and last week fired the director of the National Security Agency and his deputy, fanning concerns from some intelligence officials and lawmakers that the government would be weakened in defending against the attacks."

A former Facebook employee/whistleblower alleges Meta's AI model Lllama was used to help DeepSeek.

The whistleblower — former Facebook director of global policy Sarah Wynn-Williams — testified before U.S. Senators on Wednesday. CBS News found this earlier response from Meta: In a statement last year on Llama, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote, "The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over 1T to surpass the US technologically, and Chinese tech companies are releasing their own open AI models as fast, or faster, than US ones."

Wynn-Williams encouraged senators to continue investigating Meta's role in the development of artificial intelligence in China, as they continue their probe into the social media company founded by Zuckerberg. "The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn't offer services in China, while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there," she said.
The testimony also left some of the lawmakers skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech after the whistleblower also alleged Facebook worked "hand in glove" with the Chinese government to censor its platforms: In her almost seven years with the company, Wynn-Williams told the panel she witnessed the company provide "custom built censorship tools" for the Chinese Communist Party. She said a Chinese dissident living in the United States was removed from Facebook in 2017 after pressure from Chinese officials. Facebook said at the time it took action against the regime critic, Guo Wengui, for sharing someone else's personal information. Wynn-Williams described the use of a "virality counter" that flagged posts with over 10,000 views for review by a "chief editor," which Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut called "an Orwellian censor." These "virality counters" were used not only in Mainland China, but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to Wynn-Williams's testimony.

Wynn-Williams also told senators Chinese officials could "potentially access" the data of American users.