syndication – Page 2

Right-wing political violence is more frequent, deadly than left-wing violence

hate speech, right-wing extremism, Science, Social science, syndication / 9u50fv / September 18, 2025

President Trump’s assertions about political violence ignore the facts.

After the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the US, and “they should be put in jail.”

“The radical left causes tremendous violence,” he said, asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than groups on the right.

Top presidential adviser Stephen Miller also weighed in after Kirk’s killing, saying that left-wing political organizations constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”

“We are going to use every resource we have… throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again,” Miller said.

But policymakers and the public need reliable evidence and actual data to understand the reality of politically motivated violence. From our research on extremism, it’s clear that the president’s and Miller’s assertions about political violence from the left are not based on actual facts.

Based on our own research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the US are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.

Political violence rising

The understanding of political violence is complicated by differences in definitions and the recent Department of Justice removal of an important government-sponsored study of domestic terrorists.

Political violence in the US has risen in recent months and takes forms that go unrecognized. During the 2024 election cycle, nearly half of all states reported threats against election workers, including social media death threats, intimidation, and doxing.

Kirk’s assassination illustrates the growing threat. The man charged with the murder, Tyler Robinson, allegedly planned the attack in writing and online.

This follows other politically motivated killings, including the June assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. and former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

These incidents reflect a normalization of political violence. Threats and violence are increasingly treated as acceptable for achieving political goals, posing serious risks to democracy and society.

Defining “political violence”

This article relies on some of our research on extremism, other academic research, federal reports, academic datasets, and other monitoring to assess what is known about political violence.

Support for political violence in the US is spreading from extremist fringes into the mainstream, making violent actions seem normal. Threats can move from online rhetoric to actual violence, posing serious risks to democratic practices.

But different agencies and researchers use different definitions of political violence, making comparisons difficult.

Domestic violent extremism is defined by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as violence or credible threats of violence intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes. This general framing, which includes diverse activities under a single category, guides investigations and prosecutions. The FBI and DHS do not investigate people in the US for constitutionally protected speech, activism, or ideological beliefs.

Datasets compiled by academic researchers use narrower and more operational definitions. The Global Terrorism Database counts incidents that involve intentional violence with political, social, or religious motivation.

These differences mean that the same incident may or may not appear in a dataset, depending on the rules applied.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security emphasize that these distinctions are not merely academic. Labeling an event “terrorism” rather than a “hate crime” can change who is responsible for investigating an incident and how many resources they have to investigate it.

For example, a politically motivated shooting might be coded as terrorism in federal reporting, cataloged as political violence by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and prosecuted as a homicide or a hate crime at the state level.

Patterns in incidents and fatalities

Despite differences in definitions, several consistent patterns emerge from available evidence.

Politically motivated violence is a small fraction of total violent crime, but its impact is magnified by symbolic targets, timing, and media coverage.

In the first half of 2025, 35 percent of violent events tracked by University of Maryland researchers targeted US government personnel or facilities—more than twice the rate in 2024.

Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years.

Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75 to 80 percent of US domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.

Illustrative cases include the 2015 Charleston church shooting, when white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine Black parishioners; the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, where 11 worshippers were murdered; the 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, in which an anti-immigrant gunman killed 23 people. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, an earlier but still notable example, killed 168 in the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history.

By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10 to 15 percent of incidents and less than 5 percent of fatalities.

Examples include the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front arson and vandalism campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s, which were more likely to target property rather than people.

Violence occurred during Seattle May Day protests in 2016, with anarchist groups and other demonstrators clashing with police. The clashes resulted in multiple injuries and arrests. In 2016, five Dallas police officers were murdered by a heavily armed sniper who was targeting white police officers.

Hard to count

There’s another reason it’s hard to account for and characterize certain kinds of political violence and those who perpetrate it.

The US focuses on prosecuting criminal acts rather than formally designating organizations as terrorist, relying on existing statutes such as conspiracy, weapons violations, RICO provisions, and hate crime laws to pursue individuals for specific acts of violence.

Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with domestic terrorism. That makes it difficult to characterize someone as a domestic terrorist.

The State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list applies only to groups outside of the United States. By contrast, US law bars the government from labeling domestic political organizations as terrorist entities because of First Amendment free speech protections.

Rhetoric is not evidence

Without harmonized reporting and uniform definitions, the data will not provide an accurate overview of political violence in the US.

But we can make some important conclusions.

Politically motivated violence in the US is rare compared with overall violent crime. Political violence has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy, and deepen societal polarization.

Right-wing extremist violence has been more frequent and more lethal than left-wing violence. The number of extremist groups is substantial and skewed toward the right, although a count of organizations does not necessarily reflect incidents of violence.

High-profile political violence often brings heightened rhetoric and pressure for sweeping responses. Yet the empirical record shows that political violence remains concentrated within specific movements and networks rather than spread evenly across the ideological spectrum. Distinguishing between rhetoric and evidence is essential for democracy.

Trump and members of his administration are threatening to target whole organizations and movements and the people who work in them with aggressive legal measures—to jail them or scrutinize their favorable tax status. But research shows that the majority of political violence comes from people following right-wing ideologies.

Art Jipson is associate professor of sociology at the University of Dayton, and Paul J. Becker is associate professor of sociology at University of Dayton.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. Our team of editors work with these experts to share their knowledge with the wider public. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and hopefully improve the quality of public discourse on them.

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China blocks sale of Nvidia AI chips

AI, china, NVIDIA, Policy, syndication, trump tariffs / Mike M. / September 17, 2025

“The message is now loud and clear,” said an executive at one of the tech companies. “Earlier, people had hopes of renewed Nvidia supply if the geopolitical situation improves. Now it’s all hands on deck to build the domestic system.”

Nvidia started producing chips tailored for the Chinese market after former US President Joe Biden banned the company from exporting its most powerful products to China, in an effort to rein in Beijing’s progress on AI.

Beijing’s regulators have recently summoned domestic chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon, as well as Alibaba and search engine giant Baidu, which also make their own semiconductors, to report how their products compare against Nvidia’s China chips, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter.

They concluded that China’s AI processors had reached a level comparable to or exceeding that of the Nvidia products allowed under export controls, the person added.

The Financial Times reported last month that China’s chipmakers were seeking to triple the country’s total output of AI processors next year.

“The top-level consensus now is there’s going to be enough domestic supply to meet demand without having to buy Nvidia chips,” said an industry insider.

Nvidia introduced the RTX Pro 6000D in July during Huang’s visit to Beijing, when the US company also said Washington was easing its previous ban on the H20 chip.

China’s regulators, including the CAC, have warned tech companies against buying Nvidia’s H20, asking them to justify having purchased them over domestic products, the FT reported last month.

The RTX Pro 6000D, which the company has said could be used in automated manufacturing, was the last product Nvidia was allowed to sell in China in significant volumes.

Alibaba, ByteDance, the CAC, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Additional reporting by Eleanor Olcott in Zhengzhou.

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When will Jaguar Land Rover restart production? “No one actually knows.”

Cars, Jaguar Land Rover, ransomware, syndication / DJ Henderson / September 16, 2025

Jaguar Land Rover’s dealers and suppliers fear the British carmaker’s operations will take another few months to normalize after a cyber attack that experts estimate could wipe more than £3.5 billion off its revenue.

JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Motors, had been forced to shut down its systems and halt production across its UK factories since August 31, wreaking havoc across the country’s vast supply chain involving roughly 200,000 workers.

JLR on Tuesday said it would extend its production halt until at least next Wednesday as it continued its investigation. In a statement, the company also cautioned that “the controlled restart of our global operations… will take time.”

If JLR cannot produce vehicles until November, David Bailey, professor at University of Birmingham, estimated that the group would suffer a revenue hit of more than £3.5 billion while it would lose about £250 million in profits, or about £72 million in revenue and £5 million in profits on a daily basis.

With annual revenues of £29 billion in 2024, JLR will be able to absorb the financial costs but Bailey warned the consequences would be bigger for the smaller sized companies in its supply chain. JLR declined to comment.

The cyber attack comes at a crucial period for the UK carmaker when it is going through a controversial rebranding of its Jaguar brand and an expensive shift to all-electric vehicles by the end of the decade. Even before the latest incident, people briefed on the matter have said the company was facing delays with launching its new electric models.

“They are clearly in chaos,” said one industry executive who works closely with JLR, while another warned that “no one actually knows” when production would resume.

“If there is a major financial hit, the CEO will look for significant cost savings to try and recover some of that, so that could hit both the production base in the UK but also its product development,” said Bailey.

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China rules that Nvidia violated its antitrust laws

antitrust, china, NVIDIA, Policy, syndication, tarrifs, trade wars / Mike M. / September 15, 2025

A Chinese regulator has found Nvidia violated the country’s antitrust law, in a preliminary finding against the world’s most valuable chipmaker.

Nvidia had failed to fully comply with provisions outlined when it acquired Mellanox Technologies, an Israeli-US supplier of networking products, China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said on Monday. Beijing conditionally approved the US chipmaker’s acquisition of Mellanox in 2020.

Monday’s statement came as US and Chinese officials prepared for more talks in Madrid over trade, with a tariff truce between the world’s two largest economies set to expire in November.

SAMR reached its conclusion weeks before Monday’s announcement, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, adding that the regulator had released the statement now to give China greater leverage in the trade talks.

The regulator started the anti-monopoly investigation in December, a week after the US unveiled tougher export controls on advanced high-bandwidth memory chips and chipmaking equipment to the country.

SAMR then spent months interviewing relevant parties and gathering legal opinions to build the case, the people said.

Nvidia bought Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2020, and the acquisition helped the chipmaker to step up into the data center and high-performance computing market where it is now a dominant player.

The preliminary findings against the chipmaker could result in fines of between 1 percent and 10 percent of the company’s previous year’s sales. Regulators can also force the company to change business practices that are considered in violation of antitrust laws.

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The US is trying to kick-start a “nuclear energy renaissance”

climate change, Energy, nuclear energy, reactors, Science, syndication / Mike M. / September 13, 2025

Push to revive nuclear energy relies on deregulation; experts say strategy is misplaced.

In May, President Donald Trump signed four executive orders to facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors and the development of nuclear energy technology; the orders aim to cut red tape, ease approval processes, and reshape the role of the main regulatory agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. These moves, the administration said, were part of an effort to achieve American independence from foreign power providers by way of a “nuclear energy renaissance.”

Self-reliance isn’t the only factor motivating nuclear power proponents outside of the administration: Following a decades-long trend away from nuclear energy, in part due to safety concerns and high costs, the technology has emerged as a potential option to try to mitigate climate change. Through nuclear fission, in which atoms are split to release energy, reactors don’t emit any greenhouse gases.

The Trump administration wants to quadruple the nuclear sector’s domestic energy production, with the goal of producing 400 gigawatts by 2050. To help achieve that goal, scientific institutions like the Idaho National Laboratory, a leading research institute in nuclear energy, are pushing forward innovations such as more efficient types of fuel. Companies are also investing millions of dollars to develop their own nuclear reactor designs, a move from industry that was previously unheard of in the nuclear sector. For example, Westinghouse, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear power company, plans to build 10 new large reactors to help achieve the 2050 goal.

However, the road to renaissance is filled with familiar obstacles. Nuclear energy infrastructure is “too expensive to build, and it takes too long to build,” said Allison Macfarlane, a science and technology policy expert at the University of British Columbia who used to chair the NRC from 2012 to 2014.

And experts are divided on whether new nuclear technologies, such as small versions of reactors, are ready for primetime. The nuclear energy field is now “in a hype bubble that is driving unrealistic expectations,” said Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization that has long acted as a nuclear safety watchdog.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to advance nuclear energy by weakening the NRC, Lyman said. “The message is that it’s regulation that has been the obstacle to deploying nuclear power, and if we just get rid of all this red tape, then the industry is going to thrive,” he added. “I think that’s really misplaced.”

Although streamlining the approval process might accelerate development, the true problem lies in the high costs of nuclear, which would need to be significantly cheaper to compete with other sources of energy such as natural gas, said Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear science researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even the license-ready reactors are still not economical,” he said. If the newer reactor technologies do pan out, without government support and subsidies, Shirvan said, it is difficult to imagine them “coming online before 2035.”

It’s déjá vu all over again

Rumblings of a nuclear renaissance give experts a sense of déjà vu. The first resurgence in interest was around 2005, when many thought that nuclear energy could mitigate climate change and be an energy alternative to dwindling supply and rising prices of fossil fuels. But that enthusiasm slowed mainly after the Fukushima accident in 2011, in which a tsunami-triggered power outage—along with multiple safety failures—led to a nuclear meltdown at a facility in Japan. “So, the first nuclear renaissance fizzled out,” said Lyman.

Globally, the proportion of electricity provided by nuclear energy has been dwindling. Although there has been an increase in generation, nuclear energy has contributed less to the share of global electricity demand, dropping to 9 percent in 2024 from a peak of about 17 percent in 2001. In the US, 94 reactors generate about a fifth of the nation’s electricity, a proportion that has held steady since 1990s. But only two of those reactors have come online in the last nearly 30 years.

This renewed push is “a second bite at the apple, and we’ll have to see but it does seem to have a lot more of a headwind now,” said Lyman.

Much of that movement comes from the private sector, said Todd Allen, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. In the last couple of decades, dozens of nuclear energy companies have emerged, including TerraPower, co-founded by Bill Gates. “It feels more like normal capitalism than we ever had in nuclear,” Allen said. Those companies are working on developing the large reactors that have been the backbone of nuclear energy for decades, as well as newer technologies that can bolster the field.

Proponents say small modular reactors, or SMRs, and microreactors, which generate less than 300 megawatts and 20 megawatts, respectively, could offer safer, cheaper, and more flexible energy compared to their more traditional counterparts. (Large reactors have, on average, 900 megawatts of capacity.) One 2022 study found that modularization can reduce construction time by up to 60 percent.

These designs have taken the spotlight: In 2024, a report estimated that the SMR market would reach $295 billion by 2043. In June, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress that DOE will have at least three SMRs running by July of next year. And in July of this year, the Nuclear Energy Agency launched a dashboard to track SMR technologies around the world, which identified 74 SMR designs at different stages around the world. The first commercial SMR in North America is currently being constructed in Canada, with plans to be operational by 2030.

But whether SMRs and microreactors are actually safer and more cost-effective remains to be determined. A 2022 study found that SMRs would likely produce more leakage and nuclear waste than conventional reactors. Studying them, though, is difficult since so few are currently operational.

In part, that may be because of cost. Multiple analyses have concluded that, because of rising construction and operating costs, SMRs might not be financially viable enough to compete for the world’s energy markets, including in developing countries that lack affordable access to electricity.

And recent ventures have hit road bumps: For example, NuScale, the only SMR developer with a design approved by the NRC, had to shut down its operations in November 2023 due to increasingly high costs (though another uprated SMR design was approved earlier this year).

“Nothing is really commercialized yet,” said Macfarlane. Most of the tech companies haven’t figured out expenses, supply chains, the kind of waste they are going to produce or security at their reactors, she added.

Fuel supply is also a barrier since most plants use uranium enriched at low rates, but SMRs and microreactors use uranium enriched at higher levels, which is typically sourced from Russia and not commercially available in the US. So scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory are working to recover enriched uranium from existing reactors and developed new, more cost-effective fuels, said Jess Gehin, the associate laboratory director for the Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate at the INL. They are also using artificial intelligence and modeling simulation tools and capabilities to optimize nuclear energy systems, he added: “We got to reach 400 gigawatts, we need to accelerate all of this.”

Companies are determined to face and surpass these barriers. Some have begun pouring concrete, such as one nuclear company called Kairos Power that began building a demo of their SMR design in Tennessee; the plant is projected to be fully operational by 2027. “I would make the case that we’re moving faster than many in the field, if not the fastest,” Mike Laufer, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told Reuters last year.

Some experts think achieving nuclear expansion can be done—and revel in the progress so far: “I would have never thought we’d be in this position where we’re working so hard to expand nuclear, because for most of my career, it wasn’t that way,” said Gehin. “And I would say each month that goes by exceeds my expectations on the next bigger things that are coming.”

Doing more with less?

Although the Trump administration aims to accelerate nuclear energy through executive orders, in practice, it has not allocated new funding yet, said Matt Bowen, an expert on nuclear energy, waste, and nonproliferation at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. In fact, the initial White House budget proposed cutting $4.7 billion from the Department of Energy, including $408 million from the Office of Nuclear Energy allocated for nuclear research in the 2026 fiscal year.

“The administration was proposing cuts to Office of Nuclear Energy and DOE more broadly, and DOGE is pushing staff out,” said Bowen. “How do you do more with less? Less staff, less money.”

The Trump administration places the blame for the nuclear sector’s stagnation on the NRC, which oversees licensing and recertification processes that cost the industry millions of dollars each year in compliance. In his executive orders, Trump called for a major reorganization of the NRC. Some of the proposed changes, like streamlining the approval process (which can take years for new plants), may be welcomed because “for a long time, they were very, very, very slow,” said Charles Forsberg, a nuclear chemical engineer at MIT. But there are worries that the executive orders could do more than cut red tape.

“Every word in those orders is of concern, because the thrust of those orders is to essentially strip the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its independence from the executive branch, essentially nullifying the original purpose,” said Lyman.

Some experts fear that with these new constraints, NRC staff will have less time and fewer resources to do their jobs, which could impact power plant safety in the future. Bowen said: “This notion that the problem for nuclear energy is regulation, and so all we need to do is deregulate, is both wrong and also really problematic.”

The next few decades will tell whether nuclear, especially SMRs, can overcome economic and technical challenges to safely contribute to decarbonization efforts. Some, like Gehin, are optimistic. “I think we’re going to accelerate,” he said. “We certainly can achieve a dramatic deployment if we put our mindset to it.”

But making nuclear financially competitive will take serious commitment from the government and the dozens of companies, with many still skeptical, Shirvan said. “I am quite, I would say, on the pessimistic scale when it comes to the future of nuclear energy in the US.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Microsoft dodges EU fine by unbundling Teams from Office

competition, EU, microsoft, Microsoft Teams, Policy, syndication / Shannon Garcia / September 12, 2025

Microsoft has avoided an EU fine after the US tech group offered concessions on how it packages together its Teams and Office products, ending a long-running antitrust investigation by the bloc’s regulators.

The probe, which began after a 2020 complaint from Slack, now part of Salesforce, accused Microsoft of abusing its market dominance by tying its video conferencing tool to its widely used suite of productivity applications.

Since the initial complaint, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from Office 365 in the EU, but critics said the changes were too narrow.

In May, the $3.7 trillion software giant promised concessions, such as continuing the Teams and Office separation for seven years.

After a market test, Microsoft has since made additional commitments, such as publishing more information on so-called “interoperability” or the ability to use its products with others made by rivals.

These new pledges have satisfied the EU’s regulator, which said on Friday that it helped to restore fair competition and open the market to other providers.

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The US is now the largest investor in commercial spyware

commercial spyware, national security, Security, spyware, syndication / Kelly Newman / September 11, 2025

Paragon, responding to the committee’s findings, accused Italian authorities of refusing to conduct a thorough technical verification—an assessment it argued could have resolved the issue.

Apart from focusing on investment, the Atlantic Council notes that the global spyware market is “growing and evolving,” with its dataset expanded to include four new vendors, seven new resellers or brokers, 10 new suppliers, and 55 new individuals linked to the industry.

Newly identified vendors include Israel’s Bindecy and Italy’s SIO. Among the resellers are front companies connected to NSO products, such as Panama’s KBH and Mexico’s Comercializadora de Soluciones Integrales Mecale, as highlighted by the Mexican government. New suppliers named include the UK’s Coretech Security and UAE’s ZeroZenX.

The report highlights the central role that these resellers and brokers play, stating that it is “a notably under-researched set of actors.” According to the report, “These entities act as intermediaries, obscuring the connections between vendors, suppliers, and buyers. Oftentimes, intermediaries connect vendors to new regional markets.”

“This creates an expanded and opaque spyware supply chain, which makes corporate structures, jurisdictional arbitrage, and ultimately accountability measures a challenge to disentangle,” Sarah Graham, who coauthored the report, tells WIRED.

“Despite this, resellers and brokers are not a current feature of policy responses,” she says.

The study reveals the addition of three new countries linked to spyware activity—Japan, Malaysia, and Panama. Japan in particular is a signatory to international efforts to curb spyware abuse, including the Joint Statement on Efforts to Counter the Proliferation and Misuse of Commercial Spyware and the Pall Mall Process Code of Practice for States.

“The discovery of entities operating in new jurisdictions, like Japan, highlights potential conflicts of interest between international commitments and market dynamics,” Graham says.

Despite efforts by the Biden administration to constrain the spyware market through its executive order, trade and visa restrictions, and sanctions, the industry has continued to operate largely without restraint.

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AI vs. MAGA: Populists alarmed by Trump’s embrace of AI, Big Tech

AI, AI regulation, big tech, MAGA, Policy, syndication / Shannon Garcia / September 10, 2025

Some Republicans are still angry over the deplatforming of Trump by tech executives once known for their progressive politics. They had been joined by a “vocal and growing group of conservatives who are fundamentally suspicious of the benefits of technological innovation,” Thierer said.

With MAGA skeptics on one side and Big Tech allies of the president on the other, a “battle for the soul of the conservative movement” is under way.

Popular resentment is now a threat to Trump’s Republican Party, warn some of its biggest supporters—especially if AI begins displacing jobs as many of its exponents suggest.

“You can displace farm workers—what are they going to do about it? You can displace factory workers—they will just kill themselves with drugs and fast food,” Tucker Carlson, one of the MAGA movement’s most prominent media figures, told a tech conference on Monday.

“If you do that to lawyers and non-profit sector employees, you will get a revolution.”

It made Trump’s embrace of Silicon Valley bosses a “significant risk” for his administration ahead of next year’s midterm elections, a leading Republican strategist said.

“It’s a real double-edged sword—the administration is forced to embrace [AI] because if the US is not the leader in AI, China will be,” the strategist said, echoing the kind of argument made by Sacks and fellow Trump adviser Michael Kratsios for their AI policy platform.

“But you could see unemployment spiking over the next year,” the strategist said.

Other MAGA supporters are urging Trump to tone down at least his public cheerleading for an AI sector so many of them consider a threat.

“The pressure that is being placed on conservatives to fall in line… is a recipe for discontent,” said Toscano.

By courting AI bosses, the Republican Party, which claims to represent the pro-family movement, religious communities, and American workers, appeared to be embracing those who are antithetical to all of those groups, he warned.

“The current view of things suggests that the most important members of the party are those that are from Silicon Valley,” Toscano said.

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in San Francisco.

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Geoengineering will not save humankind from climate change

climate change, Geoengineering, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / September 9, 2025

A team of the world’s best ice and climate researchers studied a handful of recently publicized engineering concepts for protecting Earth’s polar ice caps and found that none of them are likely to work.

Their peer-reviewed research, published Tuesday, shows some of the untested ideas, such as dispersing particles in the atmosphere to dim sunlight or trying to refreeze ice sheets with pumped water, could have unintended and dangerous consequences.

The various speculative notions that have been floated, mainly via public relations efforts, include things such as spreading reflective particles over newly formed sea ice to promote its persistence and growth; building giant ocean-bottom sea walls or curtains to deflect warmer streams of water away from ice shelves; pumping water from the base of glaciers to the surface to refreeze it, and even intentionally polluting the upper atmosphere with sulfur-based or other reflective particles to dim sunlight.

Research shows the particle-based sunlight-dimming concept could shift rainfall patterns like seasonal monsoons critical for agriculture in some areas, and also intensify regional heat, precipitation, and drought extremes. And the authors of the new paper wrote that some of the mechanical interventions to preserve ice would likely disrupt regional ocean ecosystems, including the marine food chain, from tiny krill to giant whales.

Lead author Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Exeter, said that to provide a comprehensive view of the challenges, the new paper included 40 authors with expertise in fields including oceanography, marine biology, glaciology, and atmospheric science.

The paper counters a promotional geo-engineering narrative with science-based evidence showing the difficulties and unintended consequences of some of the aspirational ventures, he said. Most geoengineering ideas are climate Band-Aids at best. They only address symptoms, he added, but don’t tackle the root cause of the problem—greenhouse gas emissions.

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OpenAI links up with Broadcom to produce its own AI chips

AI, AI chips, AI GPU, Broadcom, GPU, NVIDIA, openai, syndication / 9u50fv / September 5, 2025

OpenAI is set to produce its own artificial intelligence chip for the first time next year, as the ChatGPT maker attempts to address insatiable demand for computing power and reduce its reliance on chip giant Nvidia.

The chip, co-designed with US semiconductor giant Broadcom, would ship next year, according to multiple people familiar with the partnership.

Broadcom’s chief executive Hock Tan on Thursday referred to a mystery new customer committing to $10 billion in orders.

OpenAI’s move follows the strategy of tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Meta, which have designed their own specialised chips to run AI workloads. The industry has seen huge demand for the computing power to train and run AI models.

OpenAI planned to put the chip to use internally, according to one person close to the project, rather than make them available to external customers.

Last year it began an initial collaboration with Broadcom, according to reports at the time, but the timeline for mass production of a successful chip design had previously been unclear.

On a call with analysts, Tan announced that Broadcom had secured a fourth major customer for its custom AI chip business, as it reported earnings that topped Wall Street estimates.

Broadcom does not disclose the names of these customers, but people familiar with the matter confirmed OpenAI was the new client. Broadcom and OpenAI declined to comment.

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Sextortion with a twist: Spyware takes webcam pics of users watching porn

Security, spyware, Stealerium, syndicated, syndication / Shannon Garcia / September 5, 2025

“How you use this program is your responsibility,” the page reads. “I will not be held accountable for any illegal activities. Nor do i give a shit how u use it.”

In the hacking campaigns Proofpoint analyzed, cybercriminals attempted to trick users into downloading and installing Stealerium as an attachment or a web link, luring victims with typical bait like a fake payment or invoice. The emails targeted victims inside companies in the hospitality industry, as well as in education and finance, though Proofpoint notes that users outside of companies were also likely targeted but wouldn’t be seen by its monitoring tools.

Once it’s installed, Stealerium is designed to steal a wide variety of data and send it to the hacker via services like Telegram, Discord, or the SMTP protocol in some variants of the spyware, all of which is relatively standard in infostealers. The researchers were more surprised to see the automated sextortion feature, which monitors browser URLs for a list of pornography-related terms such as “sex” and “porn,” which can be customized by the hacker and trigger simultaneous image captures from the user’s webcam and browser. Proofpoint notes that it hasn’t identified any specific victims of that sextortion function, but suggests that the existence of the feature means it has likely been used.

More hands-on sextortion methods are a common blackmail tactic among cybercriminals, and scam campaigns in which hackers claim to have obtained webcam pics of victims looking at pornography have also plagued inboxes in recent years—including some that even try to bolster their credibility with pictures of the victim’s home pulled from Google Maps. But actual, automated webcam pics of users browsing porn is “pretty much unheard of,” says Proofpoint researcher Kyle Cucci. The only similar known example, he says, was a malware campaign that targeted French-speaking users in 2019, discovered by the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET.

The pivot to targeting individual users with automated sextortion features may be part of a larger trend of some cybercriminals—particularly lower-tier groups—turning away from high-visibility, large-scale ransomware campaigns and botnets that tend to attract the attention of law enforcement, says Proofpoint’s Larson.

“For a hacker, it’s not like you’re taking down a multimillion-dollar company that is going to make waves and have a lot of follow-on impacts,” Larson says, contrasting the sextortion tactics to ransomware operations that attempt to extort seven-figure sums from companies. “They’re trying to monetize people one at a time. And maybe people who might be ashamed about reporting something like this.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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“Mockery of science”: Climate scientists tear into new US climate report

clean air act, climate change, department of energy, EPA, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / September 3, 2025

While it is not uncommon for scientists to disagree, many of the review’s authors feel what the DOE produced isn’t science at all. “Trying to circumvent, bypass, undermine decades of the government’s own work with the nation’s top scientists to generate definitive information about climate science to use in policymaking—that’s what’s different here,” said Kim Cobb, a professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Cobb co-authored two sections of the review.

Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is reconsidering the 2009 endangerment finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In its proposal to rescind the finding, the EPA cited the DOE’s climate report as one of many that led the agency to develop “serious concerns” with how the US regulates greenhouse gases.

“It’s really important that we stand up for the integrity of [climate science] when it matters the most,” Cobb said. “And this may very well be when it mattered the most.”

Roger Pielke Jr., a science policy analyst and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is cited in the DOE report, doesn’t believe the push to overturn the endangerment finding will come down to that report. In his view, the administration’s arguments are mostly legal, not scientific. “I think that given the composition of the Supreme Court, the endangerment finding might be in danger. But it’s not going to be because of the science,” he said.

But as more communities grapple with the fallout of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, Cobb fears the federal government is turning away from the best tool it has to help people across the US adapt to a warming planet.

“Science is a tool for prosperity and safety,” she said. “And when you turn your back on it in general—it’s not just going to be climate science, it’s going to be many other aspects of science and technology that are going to be forsaken—that will have grave costs.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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