The Biden administration is set to unveil a national strategy that for the first time calls for comprehensive cybersecurity regulation of the nation's critical infrastructure, explicitly recognizing that years of a voluntary approach have failed to secure the nation against cyberattacks, according to senior administration officials. From a report: The strategy builds on the first-ever oil and gas pipeline regulations imposed last year by the administration after a hack of one of the country's largest pipelines led to a temporary shutdown, causing long lines at gas stations and fears of a fuel shortage. The attack on Colonial Pipeline by Russian-speaking criminals elevated ransomware to an issue of national security. The strategy, drawn up by the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), is moving through the final stages of interagency approval -- involving more than 20 departments and agencies -- and is expected to be signed by President Biden in the coming weeks, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the document is not yet public. "It's a break from the previous strategies, which focused on information sharing and public-private partnership as the solution," said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. "This goes well beyond that. It says things that others have been afraid to say." For instance, according to a draft copy of the strategy, one of the stated goals is: "Use Regulation to support National Security and Public Safety." Under that, it says that regulation "can level the playing field" to meet the needs of national security, according to two individuals familiar with the draft. It also states that "while voluntary approaches to critical infrastructure cybersecurity have produced meaningful improvements, the lack of mandatory requirements has too often resulted in inconsistent and, in many cases inadequate, outcomes."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A new law that went into effect this week requires most California employers to disclose salaries on job listings. The law affects every company with more than 15 employees looking to fill a job that could be performed from the state of California. It covers hourly and temporary work, all the way up to openings for highly paid technology executives. That means it's now possible to know the salaries top tech companies pay their workers. For example: A program manager in Apple's augmented reality group will receive base pay between $121,000 and $230,000 per year, according to an Apple posting Wednesday. A midcareer software engineer at Google Health can expect to make between $126,000 and $190,000 per year. A director of software engineering at Meta leading teams building network infrastructure will make at least $253,000 and as much as $327,000 in salary per year. Notably, these salary listings do not include any bonuses or equity grants, which many tech companies use to attract and retain employees. California's pay transparency law is intended to reduce gender and race pay gaps and help minorities and women better compete in the labor market. For example, people can compare their current pay with job listings with the same job title and see if they're being underpaid. [...] But the new disclosures under the law might not tell the whole story of what a job pays. Companies can choose to display wide pay ranges, violating the spirit of the law, and the law doesn't require companies to reveal bonuses or equity compensation. The law could also penalize ambitious workers who are gunning for more money because of their experience or skills, the California Chamber of Commerce said last year when opposing the bill. Some employers might be wary of posting pay to prevent bidding wars for top talent. There are two primary components to California Senate Bill No. 1162, which was passed in September and went into effect Jan. 1. First is the pay transparency component on job listings, which applies to any company with more than 15 employees if the job could be done in California. The second part requires companies with more than 100 employees to submit a pay data report to the state of California with detailed salary information broken down by race, sex and job category. Companies have to provide a similar report on the federal level, but California now requires more details. Employers are required to maintain detailed records of each job title and its wage history, and California's labor commissioner can inspect those records. California can enforce the law through fines and can investigate violations. The reports won't be published publicly under the new law.

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SonicSpike shares a report from Space.com: A giant cloud of magnetized plasma exploded from a sunspot hidden on the far side of the sun that might turn to face Earth only two days from now, so get ready for some solar fireworks. The explosion that erupted from behind the sun's eastern edge in the early morning of Tuesday (Jan. 3) was a so-called coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona. The CME was accompanied by a powerful solar flare that lasted an overwhelming six hours, solar scientist Keith Strong said on Twitter. Neither the flare nor the CME were directed at Earth, but experts warn that the hidden sunspot that produced them will soon be facing the planet as the sun rotates. Yesterday's flare and CME were detected by multiple sun-observing spacecraft including the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission (SOHO) and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The measurements helped scientists to determine that the sunspot, or active region, that produced the bursts, will move to the Earth-facing portion of the sun's disk within two days, according to Space Weather. [...] The British space weather forecaster Met Office predicts low solar activity in the next couple of days with a potential increase expected toward the end of this week as the mysterious sunspot emerges at the sun's eastern edge.

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The US has approved use of the world's first vaccine for honey bees. The BBC reports: The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved a conditional license for the vaccine this week, according to the biotech firm behind its development. It was engineered to prevent fatalities from American foulbrood disease, a bacterial condition known to weaken colonies by attacking bee larvae. [...] American foulbrood disease poses a challenge for beekeepers as it is highly contagious and has no cure. The only treatment method requires burning the colony of infected bees along with the hives and equipment and treating nearby colonies with antibiotics. The new vaccine contains an inactive version of the bacteria that causes American foulbrood disease, Paenibacillus larvae, according to Dalan Animal health. The bacteria are incorporated into royal jelly feed given by worker bees to the queen bee, which then ingests the feed and keeps some of the vaccine in her ovaries, according to the biotech firm, which specializes in insect health and immunology. It says this gives bee larvae immunity to the disease as they hatch and reduces death from the illness. [...] Dalan plans to distribute the vaccine "on a limited basis" to commercial beekeepers and said the product would probably be available for purchase in the US this year.

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schwit1 shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: Some renters may savor the convenience of "smart home" technologies like keyless entry and internet-connected doorbell cameras. But tech companies are increasingly selling these solutions to landlords for a more nefarious purpose: spying on tenants in order to evict them or raise their rent. "You CAN raise rents in NYC!" reads the headline of one promotional email sent to landlords. It was a sales pitch from Teman, a tech company that makes surveillance systems for apartment buildings. Teman's sales pitch proposes a solution to a frustration for many New York City landlords, who have tenants living in older apartments that are protected by a myriad of rent control and stabilization laws. The company's email suggests a workaround: "3 Simple Steps to Re-Regulate a Unit." First, use one of Teman's automated products to catch a tenant breaking a law or violating their lease, such as by having unapproved subletters or loud parties. Then, "vacate" them and merge their former apartment with one next door or above or below, creating a "new" unit that's not eligible for rent protections. "Combine a $950/mo studio and $1400/mo one-bedroom into a $4200/mo DEREGULATED two-bedroom," the email enticed. Teman's surveillance systems can even "help you identify which units are most-likely open to moving out (or being evicted!)." [...] Erin McElroy, a professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin who tracks eviction trends, also says that digital surveillance of residential buildings is increasing, particularly in New York City, which she calls the "landlord tech epicenter." Any camera system can document possibly eviction-worthy behavior, but McElroy identified two companies, Teman and Reliant Safety, that use the biometrics of tenants with the explicit goal of facilitating evictions. These companies are part of an expanding industry known as "proptech," encompassing all the technology used for acquiring and managing real estate. A report by Future Market Insights predicts that proptech will quadruple its current value, becoming a $86.5 billion industry by 2023. It is also sprouting start-ups to ease all aspects of the business -- including the unsavory ones. [...] Reliant Safety, which claims to watch over 20,000 apartment units nationwide, has a less colorful corporate pedigree. It is owned by the Omni Organization, a private developer founded in 2004 that "acquires, rehabilitates, builds and manages quality affordable housing throughout the United States," according to its website. The company claims it has acquired and managed more than 17,000 affordable housing units. Many of the properties it lists are in New York City. Omni's website features spotless apartment complexes under blue skies and boasts about sponsorship of after-school programs, food giveaways, and homeless transition programs. Reliant's website features videos that depict various violations detected by its surveillance cameras. The website has a page of "Lease Violations" it says its system has detected, which include things such as "pet urination in hallway," "hallway fistfight," "improper mattress disposal," "tenant slips in hallway," as well as several alleged assaults, videos of fistfights in hallways, drug sales at doorways and break-ins through smashed windows. Almost all of them show Black or brown people and almost all are labeled as being from The Bronx -- where, in 2016, Omni opened a 140-unit affordable housing building at 655 Morris Avenue that boasted about "state-of-the-art facial recognition building access" running on ubiquitous cameras in common areas. Reliant presents these as "case studies" and lists outcomes that include arrest and eviction. Part of its package of services is "illegal sublet detection" using biometrics submitted by tenants to suss out anyone not authorized to be there. While Reliant claims its products are rooting out illegal and dangerous activity, the use of surveillance and biometrics to further extend policing into minority communities are a major cause for concern to privacy advocates.

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Saudi Arabia has infiltrated Wikipedia and jailed two administrators in a bid to control content on the website, weeks after a former Twitter worker was jailed in the US for spying for the Saudis. The Guardian reports: One administrator was jailed for 32 years, and another was sentenced to eight years, the activists said. An investigation by parent body Wikimedia found the Saudi government had penetrated Wikipedia's senior ranks in the region, with Saudi citizens acting or forced to act as agents, two rights groups said. "Wikimedia's investigation revealed that the Saudi government had infiltrated the highest ranks in Wikipedia's team in the region," Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) and Beirut-based Smex said in a joint statement. Dawn, which is based in Washington DC and was founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Smex, which promotes digital rights in the Arab world, cited "whistleblowers and trusted sources" for the information. There was no immediate comment from the Saudi government or from Wikimedia, which puts free educational content online through initiatives like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and Wiktionary. Dawn and Smex's statement comes after Wikimedia last month announced global bans for 16 users "who were engaging in conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects in the Mena [Middle East and North Africa] region." Two high-ranking "admins" -- volunteer administrators with privileged access to Wikipedia, including the ability to edit fully protected pages -- have been imprisoned since they were arrested on the same day in September 2020, the two bodies added. The arrests appeared to be part of a "crackdown on Wikipedia admins in the country," Dawn and Smex said, naming the two people imprisoned as Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani. Abdullah Alaoudh, Dawn's director of research for the Gulf, said Khalid was jailed for 32 years and Sofiani received an eight-year sentence. "The arrests of Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani on one hand, and the infiltration of Wikipedia on the other hand, show a horrifying aspect of how the Saudi government wants to control the narrative and Wikipedia," Alaoudh told AFP.

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Salesforce division Tableau was hit harder than other units in the company's largest-ever round of jobs cuts this week, adding to a major reorganization that signals the $15.7 billion acquisition hasn't lived up to expectations. Bloomberg reports: Chief Executive Officer Mark Nelson was ousted from the data analytics division in late December and more senior staff were axed Wednesday as part of Salesforce's announcement that it would eliminate 10% of its workforce. Job reductions at Tableau were greater, proportionally, than the company at large thus far. After a half-decade of fast hiring and large acquisitions, Salesforce is trying to cut costs and better integrate the companies it has purchased. The software maker, which lost almost half of its value in 2022, has been pressured by investors to improve profit. The job cuts made public Wednesday -- about 8,000 workers -- are less than half of the number of employees hired in the pandemic and followed the announced exit in December of co-CEO Bret Taylor and the elimination of hundreds of sales positions in November. Acquisitions fueled the company's headcount growth. Tableau, then Salesforce's most expensive deal when it was bought in 2019, came with 4,200 employees while Slack, purchased in 2021, and Mulesoft, acquired in 2018, together brought another 3,700, according to company filings. The three deals combined cost almost $50 billion with the estimated $27.7 billion for Slack leading the way. Workers across these acquired divisions were pummeled by the job reductions, particularly in recruiting and customer success roles, according to company employees. Tableau is increasingly being treated as a visualization tool for data contained in Salesforce's other services rather than a standalone program -- co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff highlighted the new integrations in a December keynote speech. The division has trailed the rest of the company in sales growth since the acquisition. Salesforce also plans to pare back its office footprint. The company currently has four offices in the Seattle area, more than any other city, according to the company website. Three were inherited in the Tableau deal. Salesforce declined to comment on whether it would be reducing space in the Seattle area. Asked about the effect of Wednesday's job cuts on Tableau, a Salesforce spokesperson said the unit "is a vital part of our product strategy." Tableau contributes to a product that "processes over 100 billion customer records, and helps our customers understand and act on their data," the spokesperson said.

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Qualcomm has announced that its new processors and modems will allow phones to communicate with the Iridium satellite network, letting users send and receive messages even in areas without cell coverage. The Verge reports: The feature, called Snapdragon Satellite, will be available in phones that have both Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and its X70 Modem system, along with some additional radios. Phones that support it should be "launched in select regions starting in the second half of 2023," according to the company's press release, and there are several manufacturers working on designs, according to Francesco Grilli, a Qualcomm spokesperson who helped conduct a briefing for journalists. For now, the feature will likely only be available in flagship Android phones, as Qualcomm's only including the tech in its premium chips. Companies that want to add it to their phones will work directly with Qualcomm to figure out the software and hardware, but they shouldn't have to build new relationships with Iridium, according to Grilli. To the satellites, phones with the tech will look like any other Iridium-enabled devices. As for who will pay for the messages, "the cost of the satellite-based messaging service and dependent services will depend on OEMs and service providers and how they choose to offer the service," according to Grilli. At first, Snapdragon Satellite will be limited to use in emergency situations, letting you contact someone for help even if you're in a remote area without cell service. According to Grilli, "Snapdragon Satellite leverages Garmin Response." When you send an SOS, "response coordinators immediately see the customer's Latitude/Longitude in their proprietary mapping and response coordination software to determine the appropriate agency to coordinate the rescue." Qualcomm says that, eventually, it'll support "premium messaging," which will likely cost extra and will have to be implemented by OEMs, cell carriers, or other over-the-top service providers. So far, this isn't something Apple offers; you can only send texts via satellite using its SOS feature. While Qualcomm says the emergency service will be free or very cheap, it hasn't provided details yet on how much it'll cost you if you just want to be able to text your friends from remote areas, like a hiking trail, ski lift, or even a boat in the middle of the ocean. Once that service becomes available, however, Qualcomm says you'll be able to use it with your regular phone number. (That likely won't be the case for emergency use, but it matters less there.) [...] While details are sparse on what it'll be like to actually send and receive satellite messages, it sounds like the experience will be similar to Apple's in that you'll have to follow instructions on your phone to point it toward a satellite. According to Grilli, your phone will be able to predict where Iridium's satellites are months in advance thanks to the way its constellation orbits the Earth. When you go to connect to one, it'll use GPS and other measurements to determine where you need to be facing...

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Mercedes-Benz announced that it is entering the DC fast-charging arena for electric vehicles. The German automaker is in the midst of an electrification push and a plan to be carbon-neutral by 2039, and it evidently doesn't believe that the current charging infrastructure is as good as its new EVs, so it's doing something about the situation. Mercedes says it plans to deploy more than 10,000 fast chargers around the world, starting in North America. The new network is separate from and independent of Ionity, the European fast-charging network backed by Mercedes, BMW, Ford, and Volkswagen. Here in the US, Mercedes is partnering with the charging company ChargePoint and MN8 Energy, a solar and battery-storage company. Together, they will deploy more than 2,500 DC fast chargers at more than 400 sites around the US by 2027. The chargers will feature plug-and-charge compatibility and won't be restricted to Mercedes' EVs. Mercedes also says the locations and surroundings will be carefully chosen -- all too often, banks of DC chargers are located in desolate and lonely corners of mall parking lots that can make charging at night a stressful experience for some drivers. So the OEM plans to build the chargers "with food outlets and restrooms situated nearby." It also says there will be surveillance cameras and other security in place to provide "a safe and secure charging environment." Expect a minimum of four DC chargers at each hub, similar to an Electrify America charging location. But some hubs will have as many as 12 chargers, and there are plans for as many as 30 in some locations. The hubs will use ChargePoint's modular Express Plus system, which is capable of up to 500 kW per charging port, although Mercedes says that chargers will be "up to 350 kW" in power. And load management will ensure that if multiple EVs are charging at the same time, one charger doesn't end up throttling the rest. In keeping with the company's 2039 sustainability goals, the electricity it uses will come from green energy suppliers or come with renewable energy certificates. Some hubs will use solar to power the lighting and security cameras. None of this will be particularly cheap. In fact, the initiative will cost more than $1.1 billion (1 billion euro) over the next six or seven years, with the costs split evenly between Mercedes and MN8 Energy. And this is just the start -- plans for more charger deployment in Europe and China will be announced in the future.

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Artificial-intelligence research company OpenAI is in discussions over potentially selling at least $300 million in shares in a tender offer that would give it a roughly $29 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. From a report: The offering of shares of OpenAI -- known for AI programs like the chatbot ChatGPT and the image-generator Dall-E 2 would make it among the most highly-valued startups in the U.S., the Journal said. The valuation would be more than twice its valuation of $14 billion in 2021, according to the Journal. Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are in discussions to invest in the offering, under which existing shareholders would sell their shares to other investors, according to the Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter. The deal terms could change and have not been finalized. Further reading: Microsoft and OpenAI Working On ChatGPT-Powered Bing In Challenge To Google

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At CES this week, AMD announced a suite of new chips for notebooks and desktop computers, with one notable announcement being the company's new AMD Ryzen 7040 series of processors for ultrathin notebooks that will compete with Apple's M1 Pro and M2 chips. MacRumors reports: The AMD Ryzen 7040 series of chips are "ultrathin" processors based on the 4nm process, and the highest-end chip part of the family is the Ryzen 9 7940HS. The Ryzen 9 7940HS has eight cores, 16 threads, and 5.2GHz boost speeds. Announcing the new chip, AMD CEO Lisa Su made bold claims about its performance, saying it's up to 30% faster than Apple's M1 Pro chip. In specific tasks, AMD claims the chip is 34% faster in multiprocessing workloads than the M1 Pro and 20% faster than the M2 in AI tasks. One cornerstone of Apple silicon is energy efficiency, and in that area, AMD claims the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series will offer 30+ hours of video playback in ultrathin notebooks. Built directly into the series of chips is Ryzen AI, a dedicated AI engine embedded in the processor. AMD chips configured with Ryzen AI are 20% faster in AI tasks than Apple's M2 chip while being 50% more energy efficient, according to the company. To showcase the new chip's performance, AMD compared the performance of a high-end Intel chip, the M1 Pro, and its new Ryzen 9 7940HS processor rendering an object in the popular application Blender. In the time-lapsed video shown on stage, the M1 Pro lags behind the Ryzen 9 7940HS in rendering the object. AMD says it made its performance claims against a MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, 32GB of unified memory, and 1TB of SSD storage running macOS Monterey. The M1 Pro is not Apple's highest-end and most powerful chip for laptops, which is the M1 Max, and AMD did not compare its chip to the M1 Max. After roasting the M1 Pro, Ian Zelbo from FrontPageTech noticed AMD running their CES keynote on multiple 14-inch MacBook Pros. "Obviously these are contracted employees, and it means nothing," he tweeted. "I just always find stuff like this hilarious." We do too... It's akin to the "Twitter for iPhone" line on tweets that have gotten Android promoters in hot water multiple times over the past several years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Slack suffered a security incident over the holidays affecting some of its private GitHub code repositories. The immensely popular Salesforce-owned IM app is used by an estimated 18 million users at workplaces and digital communities around the world. BleepingComputer has come across a security incident notice issued by Slack on December 31st, 2022. The incident involves threat actors gaining access to Slack's externally hosted GitHub repositories via a "limited" number of Slack employee tokens that were stolen. While some of Slack's private code repositories were breached, Slack's primary codebase and customer data remain unaffected, according to the company. The wording from the notice [1, 2] published on New Year's eve is as follows: "On December 29, 2022, we were notified of suspicious activity on our GitHub account. Upon investigation, we discovered that a limited number of Slack employee tokens were stolen and misused to gain access to our externally hosted GitHub repository. Our investigation also revealed that the threat actor downloaded private code repositories on December 27. No downloaded repositories contained customer data, means to access customer data, or Slack's primary codebase." Slack has since invalidated the stolen tokens and says it is investigating "potential impact" to customers. At this time, there is no indication that sensitive areas of Slack's environment, including production, were accessed. Out of caution, however, the company has rotated the relevant secrets. "Based on currently available information, the unauthorized access did not result from a vulnerability inherent to Slack. We will continue to investigate and monitor for further exposure," states Slack's security team. The good news, with regards to the most recent security update is that no action needs to be taken by customers, for now.

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CircleCI, a company whose development products are popular with software engineers, has urged users to rotate their secrets following a breach of the company's systems. From a report: The San Francisco-headquartered DevOps company said in an advisory published late Wednesday it is currently investigating the security incident -- its most recent in recent years. "We wanted to make you aware that we are currently investigating a security incident, and that our investigation is ongoing," CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber. "At this point, we are confident that there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems; however, out of an abundance of caution, we want to ensure that all customers take certain preventative measures to protect your data as well." CircleCI, which claims its technology is used by more than a million software engineers, is advising users to rotate "any and all secrets" stored in CircleCI, including those stored in project environment variables or in contexts. Secrets are passwords or private keys that are used to connect and authenticate servers together. For projects using API tokens, CircleCI said it has invalidated these tokens and users will be required to replace them.

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India has taken a step toward allowing leading foreign universities such as Yale, Oxford and Stanford to set up campuses and award degrees as part of an overhaul of the South Asian nation's higher education. From a report: Regulator the University Grants Commission on Thursday unveiled a draft legislation for public feedback that seeks to facilitate entry and operation of overseas institutions in the country for the first time. The local campus can decide on admission criteria for domestic and foreign students, fee structure and scholarship, according to the draft. The institutions will have the autonomy to recruit faculty and staff. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is pushing to overhaul the country's heavily-regulated education sector to enable Indian students to obtain foreign qualifications at an affordable cost and make India an attractive global study destination. The move will also help overseas institutions to tap the nation's young population. Even as India's universities and colleges have produced chief executive officers at companies from Microsoft to Alphabet, many fare poorly in global rankings. The country needs to boost its education sector to become more competitive and close the growing gap between college curricula and market demand. It's currently ranked 101 among 133 nations in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index of 2022 that measures a nation's ability to grow, attract and retain talent.

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Parts made by more than a dozen US and Western companies were found inside a single Iranian drone downed in Ukraine last fall, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment obtained exclusively by CNN. From the report: The assessment, which was shared with US government officials late last year, illustrates the extent of the problem facing the Biden administration, which has vowed to shut down Iran's production of drones that Russia is launching by the hundreds into Ukraine. CNN reported last month that the White House has created an administration-wide task force to investigate how US and Western-made technology -- ranging from smaller equipment like semiconductors and GPS modules to larger parts like engines -- has ended up in Iranian drones. Of the 52 components Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies, according to the assessment. The remaining 12 components were manufactured by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, and China, according to the assessment. The options for combating the issue are limited. The US has for years imposed tough export control restrictions and sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining high-end materials. Now US officials are looking at enhanced enforcement of those sanctions, encouraging companies to better monitor their own supply chains and, perhaps most importantly, trying to identify the third-party distributors taking these products and re-selling them to bad actors.

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A top World Health Organization (WHO) official has said China is underreporting deaths from COVID-19 and called for more transparency about the scope of the country's outbreak. From a report: "We believe the current numbers being published from China underrepresent the true impact of the disease in terms of hospital admissions, in terms of ICU admissions, and particularly in terms of death," said Mike Ryan, head of the WHO's health emergencies program. Ryan said China is using too narrow a definition of death attributable to COVID-19. According to WHO guidelines, COVID-19 should be listed if the disease "caused, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death." "We still do not have complete data," Ryan said. "We do not discourage doctors and nurses reporting these deaths or these cases." Ryan added that even though there don't appear to be any new variants circulating in the country, poor surveillance and poor vaccine coverage will lead to missed cases and more deaths. During the same briefing, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reiterated calls for more data transparency from Chinese authorities.

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Dell looks set to stop using chips from China in its products by 2024, according to reports. The move appears to be part of a wider effort to shift its supply chains away from the country in response to the ongoing tensions between China and the US. From a report: The PC and tech infrastructure maker has told suppliers to significantly reduce the volume of components sourced from China in its products, including those made in the country by non-Chinese manufacturers, according to a report in Nikkei Asia, which cites anonymous sources "with direct knowledge of the matter." Those sources claim that Dell is aiming to eliminate all chips manufactured inside China from its products by the close of next year. The move could be seen as a direct result of growing concerns in the industry over Washington's policies regarding China and access to advanced computer technology, which it says it wants to keep out of the hands of the Chinese military.

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One of the world's most prestigious machine learning conferences has banned authors from using AI tools like ChatGPT to write scientific papers, triggering a debate about the role of AI-generated text in academia. From a report: The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, "Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper's experimental analysis." The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference's organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking. According to the ICML, the rise of publicly accessible AI language models like ChatGPT -- a general purpose AI chatbot that launched on the web last November -- represents an "exciting" development that nevertheless comes with "unanticipated consequences [and] unanswered questions." The ICML says these include questions about who owns the output of such systems (they are trained on public data, which is usually collected without consent and sometimes regurgitate this information verbatim) and whether text and images generated by AI should be "considered novel or mere derivatives of existing work."

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Computer security experts were struggling this week to assess a startling claim by Chinese researchers that they have found a way to break the most common form of online encryption [the link may be paywalled] using the current generation of quantum computers, years before the technology was expected to pose a threat. Financial Times: The method, outlined in a scientific paper [PDF] published in late December, could be used to break the RSA algorithm that underpins most online encryption using a quantum machine with only 372 qubits -- or quantum bits, a basic unit of quantum computing -- according to the claims from 24 researchers from a number of academic bodies and state laboratories. IBM has already said that its 433 qubit Osprey system, the most powerful quantum computer to have been publicly unveiled, will be made available to its customers early this year. If correct, the research would mark a significant moment in the history of computer security, said Roger Grimes, a computer security expert and author. "It's a huge claim," he said. "It would mean that governments could crack other governments secrets. If it's true -- a big if -- it would be a secret like out of the movies, and one of the biggest things ever in computer science." Other experts said that while the theory outlined in the research paper appeared sound, trying to apply it in practice could well be beyond the reach of today's quantum technology. "As far as I can tell, the paper isn't wrong," said Peter Shor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist whose 1994 algorithm proving that a quantum machine could defeat online encryption helped to trigger a research boom in quantum computing. Shor's method requires machines with many hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of qubits, something that many experts believe is a decade or more away.

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WhatsApp is launching proxy support for its users all over the world, the company announced on Thursday. The support will allow users to maintain access to WhatsApp if their connection is blocked or disrupted. From a report: Choosing a proxy enables users to connect to WhatsApp through servers set up by volunteers and organizations around the world dedicated to helping people communicate freely. WhatsApp says connecting via proxy maintains the same level of privacy and security the app provides, and that personal messages will still be protected by end-to-end encryption. The company says messages will not be visible to anyone in between, not the proxy servers, WhatsApp or Meta. "Our wish for 2023 is that these internet shutdowns never occur," WhatsApp wrote in a blog post. "Disruptions like we've seen in Iran for months on end deny people's human rights and cut people off from receiving urgent help. Though in case these shutdowns continue, we hope this solution helps people wherever there is a need for secure and reliable communication."

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