Congress’s Big Tech Stock Stakes Make Regulation Awkward

A proposed antitrust bill has cast a spotlight on the immense portfolios of dozens of lawmakers. From a report: At a December press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked her opinion of proposed restrictions on stock trading by members of Congress. Her response was quick and clear: She hated the idea. “We are a free-market economy,” Pelosi, whose family’s shareholdings exceed $100 million, shot back. “They should be able to participate in that.” Growing numbers of legislators from both sides of the aisle disagree. Following a series of recent abuses, at least five bills making their way through Congress would forbid lawmakers from owning individual stocks or force them to move their assets into a blind trust. One would make violators turn over any profits they earn to the U.S. Treasury Department. Another would extend the ban to family members. A third would also encompass top staffers.

[…] The fight over the measure highlights the potential conflicts of interest in lawmakers’ shareholdings. A Bloomberg Businessweek examination of financial filings found that at least 18 senators and 77 House members report owning shares of one or more of the companies, and the law could have a significant effect on the value of their portfolios. Pelosi disclosed that her husband has as much as $25.5 million in Apple stock alone. Republican Representative Mike McCaul of Texas reported that his family holds shares of all four tech giants, with a collective value topping $8 million. Last year members of Congress filed more than 4,000 trading disclosures involving more than $315 million of stock and bond transactions, according to Tim Carambat, a researcher who maintains databases of lawmakers’ financial trades.

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Kombucha Cultures Make Excellent Sustainable Water Filters, Study Finds

Long-time Slashdot reader shoor shares a report from Ars Technica: The refreshing kombucha tea that’s all the rage these days among certain global demographics might also hold the key to affordable, environmentally sustainable living membranes for water filtration, according to a recent paper published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS ES&T Water. Experiments by researchers at Montana Technological University (MTU) and Arizona State University (ASU) showed that membranes grown from kombucha cultures were better at preventing the formation of biofilms — a significant challenge in water filtration — than current commercial membranes.

Co-author Katherine Zodrow, an environmental engineer at MTU, led an earlier 2020 study demonstrating the feasibility of making sustainable living filtration membranes (LFMs) out of a bacterial cellulose network and the native microorganisms of a kombucha SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) culture. Zodrow and her new collaborators made their membranes for this latest round of experiments the same way: by placing a SCOBY in a growth solution of sugar, black tea, and distilled white vinegar dissolved in deionized water. The researchers then placed the mixture in a temperature-controlled room for 10-12 days until a thick membrane formed on the mixture’s surface. The grown membranes were stored in deionized water and used in experiments within eight days. The 20 liters of raw water samples for the experiments were taken from the three drinking water treatment plants in Butte, Montana: Basin Creek Reservoir, Moulton Reservoir, and Big Hole River. The water samples were then pretreated in accordance with standard practices at each plant.

Both the LFMs and polymer-based filters, the researchers discovered, became clogged over time, causing them to flow and filter more slowly. The LFMs used in the experiments, however, showed between 19 and 40 percent better performance than their commercial counterparts on that score. The SCOBY-based LFMs were also more resistant to befouling. While biofilms eventually formed, fewer microorganisms were found in those films. Zodrow et al. sequenced the DNA of any bacteria and fungi in the SCOBY-based membrane and found that 97 percent of the bacteria present belonged to the genus Acetobacter. This is not surprising, since it’s also the dominant bacteria in kombucha, but it may explain why the LFMs performed so well with regard to biofilms. As the name implies, a defining characteristic of this genus is the ability to oxidize organic carbon sources like sucrose, glucose, and ethanol into acetic acid, which is known for its antimicrobial properties. Acetobacter has also been shown to reduce or even remove biofilms, in keeping with the results of Zodrow et al.’s experiments.

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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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