Manufacturers Have Less Than Five Days’ Supply of Some Computer Chips, Commerce Department Says

Manufacturers and other buyers of computer chips had less than five days’ supply of some chips on hand late last year, leaving them vulnerable to any disruptions in deliveries, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday as it pushed Congress to endorse federal aid for chip makers. The Washington Post reports: Manufacturers’ median chip inventory levels have plummeted from about 40 days’ supply in 2019 to less than five days, according to a survey of 150 companies worldwide that the Commerce Department conducted in September. “This means a disruption overseas, which might shut down a semiconductor plant for 2-3 weeks, has the potential to disable a manufacturing facility and furlough workers in the United States if that facility only has 3-5 days of inventory,” the Commerce Department concluded in a six-page summary of its findings.

The lack of chip inventory leaves auto manufacturers and other chip users with “no room for error,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Tuesday as she presented the findings. “A covid outbreak, a storm, a natural disaster, political instability, problem with equipment — really anything that disrupts a [chip-making] facility anywhere in the world, we will feel the ramifications here in the United States of America,” she said. “A covid outbreak in Malaysia has the potential to shut down a manufacturing facility in America.”

“The reality is Congress must act,” Raimondo added, urging lawmakers to pass a proposal for $52 billion in federal subsidies to incentivize construction of chip factories. “Every day we wait, we fall further behind.” The Senate passed the measure last year. The legislation has been tied up for months in the House, though House Democrats are expected to introduce their version of the legislation as soon as this week. Industry executives say federal funding is likely to create more long-term supply of chips but not to alleviate the short-term shortages because chip factories take years to build.

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Quantum Computers Are a Million Times Too Small To Hack Bitcoin

MattSparkes shares a report from New Scientist: Quantum computers would need to become around one million times larger than they are today in order to break the SHA-256 algorithm that secures bitcoin, which would put the cryptocurrency at risk from hackers. Breaking this impenetrable code is essentially impossible for ordinary computers, but quantum computers, which can exploit the properties of quantum physics to speed up some calculations, could theoretically crack it open.
[Mark Webber at the University of Sussex, UK, and his colleagues] calculated that breaking bitcoin’s encryption in this 10 minute window would require a quantum computer with 1.9 billion qubits, while cracking it in an hour would require a machine with 317 million qubits. Even allowing for a whole day, this figure only drops to 13 million qubits. This is reassuring news for bitcoin owners because current machines have only a tiny fraction of this — IBM’s record-breaking superconducting quantum computer has only 127 qubits, so devices would need to become a million times larger to threaten the cryptocurrency, something Webber says is unlikely to happen for a decade. The study has been published in the journal AVS Quantum Science.

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Twitter Suspends Wordle-Ruining Bot

DHS Warns of Russian Cyberattack On US If It Responds To Ukraine Invasion

As tensions rise in the standoff over Ukraine, the Department of Homeland Security has warned that the U.S. response to a possible Russian invasion could result in a cyberattack launched against the U.S. by the Russian government or its proxies. ABC News reports: “We assess that Russia would consider initiating a cyber attack against the Homeland if it perceived a US or NATO response to a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine threatened its long-term national security,” a DHS Intelligence and Analysis bulletin sent to law enforcement agencies around the country and obtained by ABC News said. The bulletin was dated Jan. 23, 2022.

Russia, DHS said, has a “range of offensive cyber tools that it could employ against US networks,” and the attacks could range from a low level denial of service attack, to “destructive” attacks targeting critical infrastructure. “We assess that Russia’s threshold for conducting disruptive or destructive cyber attacks in the Homeland probably remains very high and we have not observed Moscow directly employ these types of cyber attacks against US critical infrastructure — notwithstanding cyber espionage and potential prepositioning operations in the past,” the bulletin said. Last year, Russian cybercriminals launched a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, shutting down operations and causing widespread outages across the country. Meat supplier JBS also had its operations shutdown due to Russian based hackers.

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40 People Arrested For Alleged Twitch Money Laundering Scheme

On Tuesday, Turkish police in eleven different provinces took forty suspects into custody for an alleged money laundering scam perpetrated using the Twitch streaming platform. Kotaku reports: According to Demiroren News Agency (via Daily Sabah and Dexerto), the suspects are accused of using stolen credit cards to buy Bits, which are essentially the platform’s virtual currency. Those Bits were then allegedly sent to streamers, who then paid the scammers real money through a 70 to 80 percent refund. So, if the scammers bought 1,000 Bits for $10, this could be a way for them to make $7 or $8 from a stolen credit card, and streamers to pick up the difference. Compound more stolen credit cards and much higher dollar amounts, and you end up with a scam that could total an estimated $9.8 million. This appears to be a long-running operation, with an email paper trail going back two years.

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Vice Mocks GIFs as ‘For Boomers Now, Sorry’. (And For Low-Effort Millennials)

“GIF folders were used by ancient civilisations as a way to store and catalogue animated pictures that were once employed to convey emotion,” Vice writes:

Okay, you probably know what a GIF folder is — but the concept of a special folder needed to store and save GIFs is increasingly alien in an era where every messaging app has its own in-built GIF library you can access with a single tap. And to many youngsters, GIFs themselves are increasingly alien too — or at least, okay, increasingly uncool. “Who uses gifs in 2020 grandma,” one Twitter user speedily responded to Taylor Swift in August that year when the singer-songwriter opted for an image of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson mouthing the words “oh my god” to convey her excitement at reaching yet another career milestone.

You don’t have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people — which, yes, now means millennials. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge…?

Gen Z might think GIFs are beloved by millennials, but at the same time, many millennials are starting to see GIFs as a boomer plaything. And this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. “That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders,” Phillips explains. “That’s been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point….”

In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. “The more GIFs there are, maybe the less they’re regarded as being special treasures or gifts that you’re giving people,” Phillips says. “Rather than looking far and wide to find a GIF to send you, it’s clicking the search button and typing a word. The gift economy around GIFs has shifted….”

Linda Kaye, a cyberpsychology professor at Edge Hill University, hasn’t done direct research in this area but theorises that the ever-growing popularity of video-sharing on TikTok means younger generations are more used to “personalised content creation”, and GIFs can seem comparatively lazy.

The GIF was invented in 1987 “and it’s important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before,” the article points out. It cites Jason Eppink, an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014, who highlighted how GIFs were popular with GeoCities users in the 90s, “so when Facebook launched, they didn’t support GIFs…. They were like, ‘We don’t want this ugly symbol of amateur web to clutter our neat and uniform cool new website.” But then GIFs had a resurgence on Tumblr.

Vice concludes that while even Eppink no longer uses GIFs any more, “Perhaps the waxing and waning popularity of the GIF is an ironic mirror of the format itself — destined to repeat endlessly, looping over and over again.”

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Israel Says Fourth Vaccine Dose Brings 2X Protection Against Omicron Infection, 3X Against Serious Illness – For Those Over 60

Friday the results of several large studies showed that getting a third Covid vaccine “booster shot” dramatically decreased infections from the Omicron variant.

And now the Times of Israel reports that the country’s Health Ministry “said on Sunday that the fourth vaccine dose for those aged 60 and up offers a threefold protection against serious illness and twofold protection against infection in the current wave driven by the Omicron variant.”

The ministry said the figures are the result of initial analysis by experts from various leading academic and health institutions, and compares the fourth vaccine with those who received three doses at least four months ago.
The figures are based on 400,000 Israelis who received the fourth vaccine and 600,000 who received three doses, with the ministry stressing that the methodology is similar to previous papers the experts have published in the peer-reviewed New England Journal of Medicine.

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This 22-Year-Old Builds Semiconductors in His Parents Garage

Wired reports on 22-year-old Sam Zeloof, who builds semiconductors in his family’s New Jersey garage, “about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.”

With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. “Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer,” he says… His chips lag Intel’s by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he’s making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore’s law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel’s breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition….

Garage-built chips aren’t about to power your PlayStation, but Zeloof says his unusual hobby has convinced him that society would benefit from chipmaking being more accessible to inventors without multimillion-dollar budgets. “That really high barrier to entry will make you super risk-averse, and that’s bad for innovation,” Zeloof says.

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Ask Slashdot: Do We Need Better Computer Programming Courses For Visual Learners?

Two-thirds of technology firms are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers, reports the BBC (citing a recent report from recruitment firm Harvey Nash).

But what’s the solution? In an article shared by Chrisq, the BBC’s business technology reporter field-tested some computer programming training:
I attended Teach the Nation to Code, a free one-day Python coding workshop run by UK training firm, QA… But when it works, there’s not much pay-off — just some lines on a screen. I also took classes with Cypher Coders and Creator Academy to teach me Scratch — a coding language for children with a simple visual interface… [I] found the step change from learning Scratch to Python similarly jarring in the children’s toys — you suddenly go from colourful blocks to an empty screen with no handholding. What could help bridge this gap from fun games for kids, to more professional level complex coding?

Garry Law, founder of Australian coding training firm, Creator Academy, says IT education needs to be better. “We need to teach kids coding with visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning styles, and we need to adapt this learning method for adults, to attract more people to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM),” he says….

Cost is also a big problem. According to Anna Brailsford, chief executive of social enterprise Code First: Girls, it typically costs £10,000 to learn coding and often there isn’t a clear link between what is taught and the jobs available.
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo remembers that “the way I got started was by borrowing books from the library that contained example programs.”
Back then there were loads of books that were nothing but little BASIC apps for various machines. That got me started with a program that worked and often did something quite interesting or useful, like a graphical effect. Then I could tinker with it and learn that way.
But is that enough of a reward to attract new programmers — or should beginning courses target more learning styles? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Do we need better computer programming courses for visual learners?

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In High-Tech San Francisco, a Pilot Program Tries Guaranteed Incomes for Artists

In 2015 the San Francisco Arts Commission surveyed nearly 600 local artists. “More than 70% of them had either already left San Francisco or were about to be displaced from their work, home or both,” reports SFGate.com, adding “The pandemic has only intensified these problems. A report by Americans for the Arts found that 53% of artists have no savings whatsoever as a result of the pandemic.”

Would it help to give over 100 artists their own Universal Basic Income?

In an effort to mitigate what appears to be an existential threat to the arts, in March 2021, the city of San Francisco partnered with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts [YBCA] to launch a guaranteed income pilot, called the SF Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists, or SF-GIPA, that gives 130 local low-income artists who have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic $1,000 a month, no strings attached, for 18 months…. At the time, YBCA was planning to launch its own guaranteed income project for artists, and this allowed it to combine forces and take both projects further. The first six months of funding for the SF-GIPA project came from the Arts Impact Endowment, which is funded by San Francisco’s hotel tax and designated for underserved communities. YBCA extended the project by an additional 12 months with private funding from the Start Small Foundation, a philanthropic initiative by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey….

Though the additional income from SF-GIPA is a welcome relief, as the project moves past its halfway point, the question remains: Will 18 months be enough time to truly make a difference in these artists’ lives? YBCA is currently scrambling to find a way to continue supporting guaranteed income recipients after the project’s scheduled end in October 2023…. “It’s just so sad; people come to San Francisco because of the art and culture, but the art and culture makers can’t afford to live here,” says Stephanie Imah, who is leading YBCA’s pilot. “This is very much a rental problem. It’s really hard for artists living in San Francisco unless they work in tech. It’s clear we need long-term solutions.” For YBCA, that means advocating for big policy changes down the line.

“Our eyes are on the federal government,” YBCA CEO Deborah Cullinan explains in an interview with Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre. “We’d like to see guaranteed income programs across the country for all people.” For now, the organization is focused on collecting “university standard research” in order to make an irrefutable case for universal basic income as a viable long-term solution to poverty.

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