Top Tech 2023: A Special Report

Each January, the editors of IEEE Spectrum offer up some predictions about technical developments we expect to be in the news over the coming year. You’ll find a couple dozen of those described in the following special report. Of course, the number of things we could have written about is far higher, so we had to be selective in picking which projects to feature. And we’re not ashamed to admit, gee-whiz appeal often shaped our choices.

For example, this year’s survey includes an odd pair of new aircraft that will be taking to the skies. One, whose design was inspired by the giant airships of years past, is longer than a football field; the other, a futuristic single-seat vertical-takeoff craft powered by electricity, is about the length of a small car.

While some of the other stories might not light up your imagination as much, they highlight important technical issues the world faces—like the challenges of shifting from fossil fuels to a hydrogen-based energy economy or the threat that new plutonium breeder reactors in China might accelerate the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So whether you prefer reading about topics that are heavy or light (even lighter than air), you should find something here to get you warmed up for 2023.

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Google Changes Appeals Process for Suspected Child Abuse Images

People who upload images of children that Google flags as potentially illegal will be able to provide more context to appeal bans.

Always Break Yolks: The Joy of Microwave Cooking

As I write this month’s article, my house is a noisy, dusty construction zone. I am renovating my kitchen, which was originally built in 1964. Although I’m happy to be rid of some of the disastrous 1960s design missteps—seriously, only one electrical receptacle in the entire kitchen?—I was sad to part with a small piece of history: my Amana Touchmatic Radarange microwave oven, with its 700 watts of glorious electromagnetic cooking power.

The ever evolving and revolving microwave oven

My Radarange was installed by the previous homeowner in 1980 and had a decidedly vintage feel, but it was actually a third-generation model. The original Radarange came out in 1947 and was intended for commercial kitchens. Two years prior, Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer had filed a patent for a “Means for Treating Foodstuff,” and the company tested the oven in a Boston restaurant. This water-cooled model was the size of a modest refrigerator, standing approximately 1.7 meters tall and weighing 340 kilograms. It would take a while for the microwave oven to evolve into the countertop version we all know today.

Raytheon first entered the consumer market in 1955, but not with the Radarange. Instead, it licensed the technology to Tappan, a maker of conventional stoves that had pioneered the “see-through” glass oven door. Tappan produced the RL-1 microwave oven for home use with an initial retail price of $1,295 (about $14,400 today). With that price tag, it was obviously meant to impress.

The Tappan RL-1, introduced in 1955, was the first microwave oven intended for home use. Note the handy recipe drawer at the bottom.Division of Work and Industry/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution

I love the personal, homemaker feel of the built-in recipe card drawer in the bottom of this wall-mounted unit. Tappan produced only 34 microwaves in its first year, but it continued to have steady growth. It sold 1,396 units by the time production ceased in 1964.

Meanwhile, other companies were also testing the market. In April 1961, Sharp demonstrated a 2-kilowatt microwave prototype at the International Trade Fair in Tokyo. The following year the company released the R-10, a 1-KW model intended for restaurants and commercial use and priced at 540,000 yen (about $18,600 today). In 1966, Sharp introduced the R-600, the first microwave oven with a revolving turntable to help cook food more uniformly. The R-600 was compatible with standard household power sources and intended for home use, but at 200,000 yen ($5,600 today), it was still a luxury good. In the fall of 1967, Sharp debuted the R-1000, a commercial microwave with a new feature that’s still more or less with us: a bicycle bell that dinged when the cooking time ended.

To reenter the consumer market for microwave ovens, Raytheon in 1965 acquired Amana Corp., a manufacturer of home appliances based in Iowa. Two years later, Amana introduced the second generation of the Radarange, this one a compact model designed for the modern home kitchen. The price had fallen drastically, to $495 ($4,400 today)—still very expensive for the average household, but microwave ovens were gaining ground. In 1975 sales of microwave ovens in the United States outpaced those of conventional gas ovens for the first time. Consumers were sold on the convenience and futuristic power of quick cooking.

A case study in microwave cooking

The author’s Amana Touchmatic Radarange microwave oven dated from 1980. Its previous owner kept meticulous notes on how to use it. Allison Marsh

The technology at the heart of the microwave oven is the cavity magnetron, developed during World War II for radar detection. A 1958 article in Reader’s Digest popularized the story of Percy Spencer’s accidental discovery that the cavity magnetron could heat food. But abundant documentation in the form of lab notebooks, patent filings, government reports, and office memos indicates that a series of observations led to the concept of the microwave oven, not a single eureka moment.

As the microwave oven transitioned from the laboratory to modern life, one aspect was not well documented: How did consumers learn to use this new appliance? The lack of such a paper trail is not so surprising. Did you save any notes on how to use your first smartphone? For these types of stories, historians often look for microhistories or individual case studies to draw broader conclusions about society. Lucky for me, Marion Steen, the gentleman who sold me his house, was extraordinarily organized and detail oriented. When I bought the house, he handed over a bundle of documentation for all of the appliances, including a three-ring binder containing handwritten notes on how to use the microwave.

Here’s what I learned: On 15 July 1980, Steen attended a class hosted by Susan Ambrose at the Display Center in West Columbia, S.C., to learn how to use his newly purchased Amana Radarange. He noted that microwaves cook by reflection, absorption, and transmission. Steen didn’t elaborate but according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, that’s exactly right. The magnetron produces microwaves, which are reflected within the metal interior of the oven. The food absorbs the microwaves, causing the water molecules to vibrate and produce heat, which in turn cooks the food. But microwaves penetrate only 1 to 2 centimeters into food, so only the outer layers of thicker pieces get directly cooked by microwaves; the interiors are cooked through the conduction of heat from the outside. The water content may vary across a dish, so a sauce may be boiling hot while a piece of meat may still be cold. Steen’s notes emphasize “Give some ‘standing time’ after cooking!!” This allows the heat to disperse more uniformly throughout the food.

Steen must have gone all in on the specialty cookware for his new microwave. Included in his binder are pamphlets for the Amana Radarange Popcorn Popper, the Amana Browning Skillet, the three-piece Amana Radarware Cook Kit (which included a browning grill, a 3-quart casserole made of Pyrex, and a roasting rack that doubled as a serving dish), and the Corning Ware Micromate browners. Steen didn’t leave behind any of these items, but the descriptions of the browners intrigued me. Made by Corning Glass Works for Amana, they had browning surfaces coated with tin oxide. The dishes had to be preheated empty in the Radarange. The coating would absorb the microwaves, causing the surface to become hot and turn yellow. Food pressed onto these surfaces would brown in 1 to 2 minutes, and then you’d flip it to brown the other side. Sure, you could achieve the same results in a skillet on your stove, but you have to admire the ingenuity at work here.

Included in all the cookware booklets are recipes. I love experimenting with recipes from old cookbooks, but some of these seem like a stretch. Would you really use your Amana Radarange Popcorn Popper to make popcorn, which you then grind up and add to meatloaf, which you then cook in your Amana Radarange?

Microwave manufacturers weren’t the only ones trying to educate consumers on how to use the new appliance. Packaged food manufacturers and plastic-wrap makers saw a new market for their products and created special recipe booklets. In my fabulous three-ring binder, I have “Microwave Cooking with Kellogg’s,” “Basic Instructions for Making Pillsbury Plus Cake Mixes in the Microwave Oven,” and “Saran Wrap & Microwave…The Perfect Pair!” Swanson, a longtime maker of frozen dinners, changed its packaging from aluminum trays to a “heat ’n serve” tray that could be used in either microwave or conventional ovens.

The Introduction to Cooking with the Amana Radarange Cookbook promises home chefs that they can make almost anything in a microwave. In his handwritten notes, Steen included directions on how to cook a roast (“15 minutes on full power, add vegetables, then 45 minutes on level 5”), scramble eggs (“always break yolks”), and bake a cake (“must use the special Bundt pan”—underlined twice for emphasis). What is missing is the outcome of these recipes. Call me a skeptic, but these are three things I have never made successfully in a microwave.

Steen, a native southerner, must have been heartbroken to write down, “Don’t cook biscuits in microwave.” My colleague Carol Harrison has a similar vivid memory of biscuit failure. Learning to cook with a microwave as a teenager, she tried to make simple refrigerator biscuits, but they didn’t brown. She kept adding time, but they still didn’t seem done. When she finally took them out, the outside remained a pale white, but the inside had turned to inedible charcoal.

As the Amana cookbook noted, breads don’t brown in a microwave oven. The book suggested using toppings such as rye or whole wheat flour to supply color, which seems a bit disingenuous. The lack of browning didn’t stop Amana from listing almost 20 pages of bread and muffin recipes.

An avid cook myself, I like to annotate my cookbooks with who in the family liked what recipes, minor alterations in ingredients, and changes to the directions. Sadly, Marion Steen left no such notes behind. I do not know what he cooked in his Radarange or how it tasted, and so I am left with only half the story.

In my new kitchen, I have opted for a microwave drawer. This technology, developed by Sharp and brought to market in 2005, fits under the counter of the kitchen island. Although it has a lovely, sleek design, I chose it for practical reasons. The impetus for renovating came when my mother moved in with me last year. We are designing things to be as accessible as possible so that she can age in place. With a microwave drawer, she no longer has to lift plates above her head to reheat food, as she did with the over-the-stove Radarange. I only hope that Sharp can deliver 40-plus years of reliability like my Radarange did.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the January 2023 print issue as “The Microwave’s Slow Burn.”

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It Was a Bad Year for Stocks, and a Worse Year for Tesla

Investors blame Elon Musk and wonder how much more the stock will fall.

Librarians Are Meeting Younger Readers Where They Are: TikTok

The pandemic hurt children’s reading skills. Librarians are doing what it takes to connect them with books — including dance routines.

Video Friday: BRUCE

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDON

RoboCup 2023: 4–10 July 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCE

RSS 2023: 10–14 July 2023, DAEGU, KOREA

IEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, BUSAN, KOREA

Enjoy today’s videos!

Following the great success of the miniature humanoid robot DARwIn-OP we have developed, RoMeLa is proud to introduce the next generation humanoid robot for research and education, BRUCE (Bipedal Robot Unit with Compliance Enhanced.) BRUCE is an open-platform humanoid robot that utilizes the BEAR proprioceptive actuators, enabling it to have stunning dynamic performance capabilities never before seen in this class of robots. Originally developed at RoMeLa in joint effort with Westwood Robotics, BRUCE will be made open source to the robotics community and also be made available via Westwood Robotics.

BRUCE has a total 16 DoF, is 70cm in height and weights only 4.8kg. With a 3000mAh lithium battery it can lasts for about 20 minutes with continuous dynamic motions. Besides its excellent dynamic performance, BRUCE is very robust and user-friendly, along with great compatibility and expandability. BRUCE makes humanoid robotics research efficient, safe and fun.

[ Westwood Robotics ]

This video shows evoBOT, a dynamically stable and autonomous transport robot.

[ Fraunhofer IML ]

ASL Team wishes you all the best for 2023 :-)

[ ASL ]

Holidays are a magical time. But if you feel like our robot dog Marvin, the magic needs to catch up and find you. Keep your eyes and heart open for possibilities – jolliness is closer than you realize!

[ Accenture Baltics ]

In this Christmas clip, the robots of a swarm transport Christmas decorations and they cooperate to carry the decorated tree. Each robot has enough strength to carry the decorations itself, however, no robot can carry the tree on its own. The solution: they carry the tree by working together!

[ Demiurge ]

Thanks David!

Our VoloDrone team clearly got the holiday feels in snowy Germany while sling load testing cargo – definitely a new way of disposing of a Christmas tree before the New Year.

[ Volocopter ]

What if we race three commercially available quadruped robots for a bit of fun...? Out of the box configuration, ‘full sticks forward’ on the remotes on flat ground. Hope you enjoy the results ;-)

[ CSIRO Data61 ]

Happy Holidays From Veo!

[ Veo ]

In ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab, a white robot hand reaches for a beer can, lifts it up and moves it to a glass at the other end of the table. There, the hand carefully tilts the can to the right and pours the sparkling, gold-coloured liquid into the glass without spilling it. Cheers!

[ SRL ]

Bingo (aka Santa) found herself a new sleigh! All of us at CSIRO’s Data61 Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

[ CSIRO Data61 ]

From 2020, a horse-inspired walking robot.

[ Ishikawa Minami Lab ]

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of the USV during touchdown. To tackle this, we propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) approach enabling a UAV to land autonomously on a USV in these harsh conditions.

[ MRS CTU ]

GITAI has a fancy new office in Los Angeles that they’re filling with space robots.

[ GITAI ]

This Maryland Robotics Center seminar is from CMU’s Vickie Webster-Wood: “It’s Alive! Bioinspired and biohybrid approaches towards life-like and living robots.”

In this talk, I will share efforts from my group in our two primary research thrusts: Bioinspired robotics, and biohybrid robotics. By using neuromechanical models and bioinspired robots as tools for basic research we are developing new models of how animals achieve multifunctional, adaptable behaviors. Building on our understanding of animal systems and living tissues, our research in biohybrid robotics is enabling new approaches toward the creation of autonomous biodegradable living robots. Such robotic systems have future applications in medicine, search and rescue, and environmental monitoring of sensitive environments (e.g., coral reefs).

[ UMD ]

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Elon Musk’s Cuts at Twitter? A Data Center, Janitors, Some Toilet Paper

Elon Musk has reduced the company to a bare-bones operation, and employees are under a “zero-based budgeting” mandate to justify any spending.

Notice to Membership

The IEEE Ethics and Member Conduct Committee (EMCC) received a complaint against Dr. Tao Li, a member in the grade of Fellow of the IEEE. Following an EMCC investigation, a hearing board appointed by the IEEE Board of Directors found cause that Dr. Li had violated Section II, Subsections 7 and 8 of the IEEE Code of Ethics. The IEEE Board of Directors sustained these findings and imposed the sanction of Expulsion from IEEE Membership on Dr. Li, in accordance with IEEE Bylaw I-110.5. The IEEE Board of Directors also determined that this notification to the IEEE membership should be made.

Reference: https://ift.tt/MSjQcmz

The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2023

Say hello to new-and-improved A.I. assistants, and move over to brands like Twitter and Tesla.

The Tech That Will Invade Our Lives in 2023

Say hello to new-and-improved A.I. assistants, and move over to brands like Twitter and Tesla. Reference :

Twitter Users Report Widespread Service Interruptions

The issues surfaced several days after Elon Musk said he had shut down one of the company’s major data centers.

Lawmakers Signal Inquiries Into U.S. Government’s Use of Foreign Spyware

The moves come as Congress passed a measure last week to try to reign in the proliferation of the hacking tools.

Former IEEE Chief Financial Officer Richard Schwartz Dies at 77

Richard D. Schwartz

Former IEEE chief financial officer

Life member, 77; died 22 October

Schwartz served as CFO of IEEE from 1993 to 2010. He touched the lives of his colleagues at the organization, many of whom wrote condolences in response to his obituary.

After serving in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, which specializes in air assault operations. He enjoyed a career as a business executive that spanned four decades.

Schwartz, an avid fan of the New York Yankees and Jets, loved to play golf.

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from Iona University, in New Rochelle, N.Y.

Vincent J. Mancino

Former manager of engineering reliability at RCA

Life senior member, 93; died 24 September

For most of his career, Mancino worked as an engineer at RCA, which was headquartered in New York City.

While serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he participated in an atomic bomb test in Nevada.

Mancino began his career at RCA in 1951 as an electromagnetic compatibility engineer in Camden, N.J. He briefly left the company in 1961 to join Cornell Dubilier of New Bedford, Mass., as chief engineer in its filter division. He returned to RCA two years later as a senior engineer at its Burlington, Mass., location. There he was responsible for designing and developing computer-controlled automated test equipment.

He later transferred to RCA’s astro electronics division in Hightstown, N.J. As a senior engineer, he worked on weather and communication satellites for the U.S. Air Force. He moved up the career ladder and served as manager of engineering reliability.

Mancino, a member of the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society, was inducted in 2007 into its Hall of Fame.

He volunteered for several nonprofits in his home state of New Jersey. He helped found the Multiple Sclerosis Society’s Monmouth County chapter and served as its first secretary. A member of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, he served as a financial officer in Sandy Hook and a flotilla commander in Monmouth Beach.

Mancino earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1951 from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. A decade later he earned a master’s degree in engineering from Drexel University, in Philadelphia.

Joel Moses

MIT professor emeritus

Life Fellow, 80; died 29 May

Moses taught electrical engineering and computer science at MIT for 50 years. He held several leadership positions at the institute and was named an institute professor emeritus in 1999. He probably was best known for developing Macsyma, MIT Project MAC’s symbolic manipulator. It was one of the first computer systems capable of manipulating complex mathematical expressions.

Moses earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 1967 from MIT. He conducted his dissertation research under the supervision of IEEE Fellow Marvin Minsky, an artificial intelligence pioneer. Moses’s graduate thesis laid the groundwork for Macsyma.

He joined MIT in 1968 as an assistant professor of computer science and was a member of the school’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), where he developed algorithms that could simplify and integrate mathematical expressions.

In 1970 Moses began focusing on Macsyma, which became faster and more accurate than its predecessors. He oversaw its development from 1971 until the system’s release in 1982.

“Problems in engineering or physics that would have taken six or seven months to calculate could be solved in under an hour by Macsyma,” according to Moses’s MIT News obituary. Now known as Maxima, it is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in use.

Moses was promoted in 1981 to head the electrical engineering and computer science department. That year, he launched a popular series, nicknamed the “Moses Seminar,” at which faculty from each MIT school discussed technology issues. The series led to the creation of a symposium that sought to build bridges between faculty in the humanities, engineering, and science.

Later, as dean of engineering, Moses launched Engineering With a Big E, a strategy to include concepts from the social sciences and management in the engineering curriculum.

He also oversaw the creation of MIT’s first five-year combined bachelor’s and master’s programs in engineering. As provost, he worked to increase the salaries for research and teaching assistants, and he tripled funding for student association activities.

Moses stepped down as provost in 1998 but remained a professor and continued to be active in MIT’s research and administrative programs.

In 2004 he founded the Stata Center for Computing, Information, and Intelligence Sciences. It houses the university’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and the linguistics and philosophy department.

He also helped create MIT’s systems design and management graduate program, which prepares students for leadership positions at engineering companies.

He recently served as acting director of MIT’s engineering systems division. The group, which was disbanded in 2015, focused on developing and managing large, complex systems such as global manufacturing and supply chains, multimodal transportation systems, electrical power distribution networks, and health care systems.

Moses was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1986 for pioneering accomplishments in symbolic algebraic manipulations by computer, and for outstanding leadership in engineering education.

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Columbia.

Hiroshi Kondoh

Former chief operating officer of Centellax

Fellow, 71; died 15 January

Kondoh served as COO at Centellax (now Microsemi), a semiconductor manufacturer in Aliso Viejo, Calif.

After earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1984 from Cornell, Kondoh joined HP as a project manager in Santa Rosa, Calif. He left in 1994 to join Hitachi’s Central Research Laboratories, in Tokyo, as a senior researcher. There he worked on automotive radar and millimeter-wave sensors.

In 2009 he joined Centellax as COO and led the marketing and manufacturing departments. When the company was acquired by Microsemi in 2014, he left and began working as a consultant.

Kondoh was a member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society and advised Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

George J. Tahu Jr.

Sales engineer

Life member, 85; died 6 January

Tahu was a sales engineer for more than 40 years at HP and Agilent, an HP spinoff, in Cedar Creek, Texas.

He served in the U.S. Navy Air Systems Command Reserve Program for eight years before joining HP. He specialized in test and measurement systems before retiring in 2001.

Tahu enjoyed spending time with his children, serving as leader of his son’s Boy Scouts troop and filming his daughter’s ice skating competitions and dance performances. He was a longtime member of the Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church in Richardson, Texas.

He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Reference: https://ift.tt/QVEu6pK

Your Cellphone Will Be a Satphone

In 2023, you or someone you know will be able to send a text message through space. Late in 2022, hardware behemoths Huawei and Apple released cellular telephones capable of texting on traditional satellite-communications networks. A pair of ambitious startups, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global, also started building new low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks designed to reach conventional 5G cellphones outside terrestrial coverage.

“Offering direct satellite access to smartphones without modifications would allow access to billions of devices worldwide,” says Symeon Chatzinotas, the head of the University of Luxembourg’s SigCom research group.

---

Users looking to connect via satellite won’t need the bulky, expensive commercial satphones that have been available since the late 1990s—but they also won’t have conventional calling or high-bandwidth data streaming just yet. Satellite connections are still plenty useful, though. To begin with, people could use texting to signal for help if need be, no matter where they are, as long as they have a clear view of the sky. That is, their mobile phones will have capabilities similar to existing pocket devices like Garmin’s inReach communicator.

Huawei has not said when its service will begin working, but Apple’s partnership with Globalstar, dubbed Emergency SOS via satellite, has been operational since November 2022. As of this writing, Lynk Global has agreements with 23 telecom providers to begin commercial operations in 2023. AST SpaceMobile says it plans to launch its first five commercial satellites late in 2023, has agreements or understandings with more than 25 telecom providers around the world, and should begin commercial operations in 2024.

An AST SpaceMobile employee sets up a test unit of the BlueWalker 3 satellite’s modular antenna array; the final array includes 148 such units.AST SpaceMobile

Splashy announcements of satellite-cellular connectivity from Apple, Starlink, and T-Mobile in the third quarter of 2022 promoted the idea of anywhere, any-kind connectivity. The first services won’t be that slick, though. Apple and Huawei will both connect initially to older satellites in higher orbits, for which it could take more than 10 minutes to establish a connection. Even the newer LEO networks, such as Lynk Global’s, currently advertise satellite texting but are not yet promising the higher-capacity link that a voice or video call would require.

AST SpaceMobile says that as the company adds satellites, it will be up to its mobile-network-operator (MNO) partners to decide whether to market the bandwidth in small increments to many users for texting or voice-only calls or to offer data-heavy services to select users. Lynk doesn’t mind its competitors’ aspirational advertising campaigns, says Lynk Global CEO Charles Miller: “They educated the market. It’s only going to make people want more.”

The tech that’s moving cell towers into space

his mock-up shows the app for Apple’s Emergency SOS via satellite, which enables emergency texting in areas with no terrestrial coverage.Apple

These new offerings are possible thanks to a handful of advances that are now maturing. Advances include the declining cost of satellite manufacturing and the shrinking size of satellites themselves, making it affordable to build many more satellites than in the past. And with many more of them, it’s possible to put the satellites into lower orbits, between 300 to 600 kilometers above Earth, where each covers less ground. But closer satellites allow handsets with less power to reach them.

Another improvement is in software-defined radios—chips that can transmit and receive on different wavelengths modulated by software running aboard the satellite. In the past, sending and receiving such a wide range of different wavelengths required distinct hardware. Digital signal processing enables these chips to do the work of a complicated array of hardware. “Software-defined radio means the phased-array antennas can do frequency hopping as we switch from country to country,” Miller says. That technology makes it viable to pack more antenna capability into less space—Lynk will start with relatively small 1-square-meter antennas, but it plans to install bigger, more effective ones on its satellites in the future.

AST SpaceMobile chief strategy officer Scott Wisniewski says larger antennas are a big part of AST’s strategy: “We think that’s very important to communicate with low-power, low-signal-strength phones.” AST plans to deploy antennas up to around 400 m2, which would be the largest commercial telecom arrays in LEO.

	Satellites Deployed by End of 2023	Planned Constellation Size	Orbital Height of Constellation	Constellation Completion Date	Size of Individual Satellites
AST SpaceMobile	5 Block 1 Bluebirds	~170 satellites	550-700 km	First commercial service in 2024	Block 1 Bluebirds: 64 m2 antennas Block 2 Bluebirds: 128 m2 antennas
Lynk Global	12 satellites	5,110 satellites	500 km	2027	First generation: 1 m2 satellites Second generation: 4 m2 satellites

Even so, having phones communicate with satellites rather than cell towers is tricky because of the much larger signal delays. “Everything about a phone is built around time-synching on the order of 5 to 10 milliseconds,” Wisniewski says. “That works just fine with a tower that’s a quarter mile away, 3 miles away even, but not for orbit.” AST is developing hardware solutions with Nokia and Rakuten that tell the core network how to wait longer for satellite signals.

In 2023, Apple and Huawei will be testing how much use they can get from older communications satellites through their flagship handsets, equipped with new chips. Meanwhile, if things go according to Lynk Global’s plan, by spring of 2023 the company will be offering commercial service to its MNO partners. AST may have its first commercial satellites in space but would still be testing and configuring them.

Network operators “historically asked ‘How is this possible?’” Wisniewski says. “Lately it’s more about ‘How can we use this best, when can we use this, what’s the best market strategy for each market?’” For people living in certain countries, 2023 could be the year when they are no longer troubled by the words “No Service.”

Reference: https://ift.tt/Ybgr9qL

For Sale on eBay: A Military Database of Fingerprints and Iris Scans

German security researchers studying biometric capture devices popular with the U.S. military got more than they expected for $68 on eBay.

A New Treatment for Arthritis: Vagus-Nerve Stimulation

Monique Robroek once had such crippling arthritis that, even with the best available medications, she struggled to walk across a room. But thanks to an electronic implant fitted under her skin, she managed to wean herself off all her drugs and live pain-free for nearly a decade—until recently, when a viral illness made her rheumatoid arthritis (RA) flare up again.

Robroek’s long remission is “very impressive” and rare among patients with RA, says her doctor Frieda Koopman, a rheumatologist at Amsterdam UMC, in the Netherlands. Robroek’s experience highlights the immense potential of so-called bioelectronic medicine, also known as electroceuticals, an emerging field of treatment for diseases that have traditionally been managed with pharmaceuticals alone.

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Robroek is also an outlier, though. Koopman led a landmark 17-person trial that tested whether modulating the nervous system’s electrical-signaling patterns could tamp down inflammation and joint pain in RA. Robroek was one of only a handful who achieved appreciable and sustained reductions in disease severity, according to the 2016 paper.

The SetPoint implant is inserted beside the patient’s vagus nerve, which travels down from the brain to innervate the spleen and other vital organs.Chris Philpot

Pilot studies like Koopman’s are one thing, but scientific certainty demands randomized, sham-controlled trials. Doctors, neuroscientists, and bioengineers should soon get a better sense of the performance of electroceutical devices. In late 2023, SetPoint Medical, the Valencia, Calif., company that sponsored Koopman’s initial trial, will report preliminary findings from Reset-RA, the first large-scale examination of nerve stimulation for an autoimmune condition. Like the earlier trial, the Reset-RA study targets the vagus nerve, the main conduit of brain–body communication, in an attempt to fight inflammation.

Expectations are charged. Although devices that harness electrical impulses are already widespread in medicine, these platforms all tap into neural circuits that directly impact diseased tissues; for example, deep-brain stimulators help with symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by hacking the brain’s motor control center. None take aim at what Kevin Tracey, in an influential 2002 article, termed the “inflammatory reflex,” a neural network that indirectly regulates immune responses to infection and injury through the vagus nerve and its connected organs.

Tracey, a former neurosurgeon who leads the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y., was the first to show that vagus nerve stimulation in rats could suppress the release of immune-signaling molecules. He later linked the effect to vagus nerve signals running into the spleen, a fist-size organ in the abdomen where immune cells are activated. In 2007, Tracey cofounded SetPoint to bring the treatment to the clinic.

The company first repurposed an off-the-shelf implant used to control seizures in people with epilepsy. SetPoint optimized the stimulation parameters, using rodent studies for guidance, before giving the devices to patients like Robroek. She and the other recipients each had a cookie-size pulse generator surgically placed inside their chests. A wire snaked up the left side of the neck, where an electrode wrapped around the vagus nerve. It gave a gentle, 1-minute buzz of stimulation up to four times every day.

The study targets the vagus nerve, the main conduit of brain-body communication, in an attempt to fight inflammation.

Paul Peter Tak, an immunologist and biotech entrepreneur who led the trial with Koopman, was worried that patients with RA might not want to undergo surgery and have hardware implanted under their skin. But after publicizing the study on Dutch television, Tak was inundated with requests from patients who were sick of endless regimens of pills and injections. “This was my unplanned market research,” Tak says. “To my surprise, there are many patients who might prefer a one-and-done surgery.”

While the study’s results were promising, the device itself was cumbersome. So SetPoint overhauled the platform, shrinking it down to a peanut-size neurostimulator with integrated electrodes and a wirelessly rechargeable battery, all encased inside a silicone holding pod that sits directly atop the vagus nerve in the neck. “It’s like going from an old car to a Tesla—it’s completely redesigned,” says SetPoint’s chief medical officer, David Chernoff.

A small trial performed in 2018 demonstrated that this miniaturized device was safe. The 250-person Reset-RA study, in which half the participants receive no stimulation for the first 12 weeks after implantation, is now evaluating efficacy. If it works, trials for other autoimmune diseases could follow.

SetPoint shrank the vagus nerve stimulator so that it can be implanted in a patient’s neck instead of the chest.SetPoint Medical

Other companies, meanwhile, are testing devices that target nerves closer to the site of immune activation—“at the business end,” says Kristoffer Famm, president of the British company Galvani Bioelectronics. This end-organ approach to nerve zapping, argues Famm, should allow for more precise, disease-specific neuromodulation, without the off-target effects of shocking the vagus nerve, which is central to many bodily processes.

A joint venture between Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and the British pharmaceutical company GSK, Galvani is now evaluating its implantable splenic nerve stimulator in small numbers of patients with RA. Another company called SecondWave Systems, headquartered in Minneapolis, is also testing whether spleen-directed ultrasound waves can offer the same immune-quelling effects without the burden of invasive surgery. Both Galvani and SecondWave expect to announce first-in-human data within the next year.

“Neuromodulation is definitely having a moment,” says Gene Civillico, a neurotechnologist at Northeastern University, in Boston, who previously oversaw bioelectronics research efforts at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. “Controlling nervous tissue in a spatially and temporally precise way is going to be the way that we cure or modify a lot of disease states,” Civillico contends. In the coming year, SetPoint and other companies hope to prove him right.

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“Please slow down”—The 7 biggest AI stories of 2022

Enlarge / AI image synthesis advances in 2022 have made images like this one possible, which was created using Stable Diffusion, enhanced with GFPGAN, expanded with DALL-E, and then manually composited together. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

More than once this year, AI experts have repeated a familiar refrain: "Please slow down." AI news in 2022 has been rapid-fire and relentless; the moment you knew where things currently stood in AI, a new paper or discovery would make that understanding obsolete.

In 2022, we arguably hit the knee of the curve when it came to generative AI that can produce creative works made up of text, images, audio, and video. This year, deep-learning AI emerged from a decade of research and began making its way into commercial applications, allowing millions of people to try out the tech for the first time. AI creations inspired wonder, created controversies, prompted existential crises, and turned heads.

Here's a look back at the seven biggest AI news stories of the year. It was hard to choose only seven, but if we didn't cut it off somewhere, we'd still be writing about this year's events well into 2023 and beyond.

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Australia Goes All-in on Green Hydrogen

For several months now, 20 teams of Australian high-school students have been designing fuel-cell cars to compete in the country’s inaugural Hydrogen Grand Prix. They’ve been studying up on renewable energy, hydrogen power, and electric vehicles, preparing for the big day in April when their remote-controlled vehicles will rumble for 4 hours in Gladstone, a port city in Queensland. The task: make the most of a 30-watt fuel cell and 14 grams of hydrogen gas.

A few months later and some 800 kilometers up Queensland’s coast, Grand Prix corporate cosponsor Ark Energy aims to apply the same basic hydrogen and fuel-cell components—albeit scaled up more than 3,500 times. By 2023’s third quarter, Ark expects five of the world’s largest fuel-cell trucks to be hauling concentrated zinc ore and finished ingots between a zinc refinery and the nearby port of Townsville. The carbon-free rigs will pack 50 kilos of hydrogen zapped from water using electricity from the refinery’s dedicated solar power plant.

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Welcome to Australia, where a green-hydrogen boom is in full swing. Both the massive and the toy-size vehicles are about selling Australians on the transformative potential of green hydrogen—hydrogen gas produced from renewable energy—to decarbonize their fossil-fuel-based economy. And while coal plants still supplied over half of Australia’s power in 2021, change is afoot. The government elected last year passed the country’s first climate-action law in more than a decade. And green hydrogen is the centerpiece of its clean-economy growth plan.

Resource-poor Asian neighbors such as Japan and Korea are also counting on Aussie green hydrogen to help get them off fossil fuels in the decades ahead.

Add up the capacity figures in all of Australia’s current proposals to produce green hydrogen and the sum exceeds Australia’s power-generating capacity. It’s all part of a green-hydrogen wave that’s spreading worldwide.

Observers caution that some of these green-hydrogen projects will never produce a thimbleful of hydrogen—an echo of the hydrogen boom a generation ago that ultimately went bust. “It’s very easy in this current phase for two people you’ve never heard about to create a 30-gigawatt project and put out a press release,” says David Norman, CEO for the clean-energy research organization Future Fuels Cooperative Research Centre in Wollongong, New South Wales.

Phantom projects are not a problem confined to Australia. Only 10 percent of the US $240 billion worth of hydrogen projects announced worldwide are actually moving forward, according to a September 2022 study by consultancy McKinsey & Company. Yet many more are actually needed. Building every electrolyzer promised for 2030 would provide only about one-sixth of the green hydrogen required to meet climate targets, according to figures from the International Energy Agency in Paris.

Amid this noisy background, Queensland is home to the two projects most likely to boost the credibility of Australia’s green-hydrogen juggernaut in 2023. Ark Energy’s project is part of a clean-energy blitz in Australia by its parent company, Seoul-based metal-refining giant Korea Zinc. The other glimmer of reality is a project in Gladstone to build one of the world’s largest electrolyzer-manufacturing plants, which promises to provide a local source of equipment amid ongoing chaos in global supply chains.

Why a hydrogen truck?

The 124-megawatt solar plant adjacent to Korea Zinc’s Townsville refinery, completed in 2018, cut a quarter of the coal-heavy grid power it had been using to run its power-intensive electrolytic process. The coming fuel-cell trucks will trim its diesel consumption.

Ark Energy CEO Daniel Kim says Korea Zinc launched his firm in 2021 to help shift its Australian operations to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030 and, in the process, pave a path for 100 percent renewable energy group-wide by 2050. Kim says the 2050 goal requires green hydrogen—or a more exportable fuel made from it—because Korea Zinc does most of its refining in South Korea, where there’s limited space for solar and wind plants.

Ark’s first move was to access more renewable power in Australia by buying into a 923-MW wind farm that’s expected to spin up in 2024. Next it ordered equipment for the Townsville truck project to begin exploring green hydrogen’s capabilities and challenges. “To become a low-cost producer of green hydrogen, we first have to become an extreme user—to make it pervasive across our business. Diesel replacement for heavy trucks was the best prospective use,” Kim says.

Today, 28 heavy-duty diesel-powered trucks operate at the Townsville refinery. When ships arrive at port with zinc concentrate, or tie up to take on zinc ingots, the rigs haul triple-trailers and loop the 30 km from port to plant and back nonstop for as many as eight days. Time is money, says Kim, because occupying a berth in port can cost a whopping AUS $22,000 (US $13,800) a day. Even if a battery-powered truck could handle the refinery’s 140,000-tonne loads, Kim says his company couldn’t afford to wait for batteries to recharge.

Fortescue’s growth plan anticipates shipping most of its green hydrogen out of Australia to clean up heavy vehicles, industries, and power grids worldwide.

In 2021, Ark Energy took a stake in Hyzon Motors, one of the few firms working on ultraheavy trucks powered by fuel cells. Hyzon, based in Rochester, N.Y., agreed to equip some of its first extra-beefy fuel-cell rigs with the right-hand drive and wider carriage required in Australia—something other developers couldn’t offer until 2025 or 2026. “We’re bringing forward the transition of Australia’s ultraheavy transport sector by several years,” says Kim.

To fuel the trucks, Ark Energy ordered a 1-MW electrolyzer from Plug Power, based in Latham, N.Y. Kim anticipated that construction of the electrolyzer facility would start around the end of 2022, and vowed that five fuel-cell trucks would be looping to port and back on hydrogen gas in the third quarter of 2023 or sooner.

Kim says these vehicles will cost “a little over three times” that of an equivalent diesel-fueled hauler, up front, but the overall project should break even or even save money over the trucks’ projected 10-year operating life. Government grants and loans and high diesel prices help make hydrogen competitive. The trucks’ unchanging route was also a plus: The relatively flat loop enabled use of a smaller, cheaper, fuel cell. “This is a dedicated truck for a dedicated purpose,” Kim notes.

Exporting green hydrogen

Ark Energy expects to start exporting renewable energy around 2030. In contrast, the team delivering Queensland’s second dose of green hydrogen realism this year could begin commercial-scale exports in 2025. The AUS $114 million (US $72 million) electrolyzer plant rising in Gladstone is the first brick-and-mortar green-hydrogen move by mining magnate Andrew Forrest, Australia’s boldest, and wealthiest, green-hydrogen proponent.

Forrest became the second-richest man in Australia running Perth-based Fortescue Metals Group, which disrupted the global iron-ore business through vertical integration and aggressive cost cutting.

Now Fortescue is applying the same strategy to green hydrogen. Forrest vows to invest US $6.2 billion to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year by 2030—50 percent more than what the European Union says it needs to import to get off Russian energy and to cut carbon emissions. Doing so will require about 150 GW of wind and solar generation—more than the total installed generating capacity of France. The move is projected to eliminate 3 million tonnes of carbon per year—slashing Fortescue’s emissions to zero and saving it US $818 million per year.

BloombergNEF predicts that the annual manufacturing capacity worldwide for hydrogen-producing electrolyzers will more than triple in the next two years.

Cameron Smith, head of manufacturing for Fortescue’s green-energy subsidiary, Fortescue Future Industries, says getting there means cutting costs until the company’s renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. “Our objective here is to make fossil fuels irrelevant,” Smith declares.

Fortescue is building its own electrolyzer production plant in spite of a global glut. Market analysts at BloombergNEF project that manufacturing capacity for electrolyzers will exceed demand 10- to 15-fold this year. Smith says that’s not a major concern for Fortescue, given the company’s imperative to cut costs and to quickly bring green-hydrogen production on line. “We don’t need to make everything, but we need a credible pathway to do so if we can’t get the equipment we need at the cost and quality we need to make all our projects viable,” he says.

The Gladstone plant’s 13,000-square-meter envelope is already in place, and Smith anticipates installation of one line’s robotic machines during the second quarter of 2023. He expects the plant will end the year as a “gigawatt-scale” electrolyzer factory: producing enough electrolyzers in a year to consume 1 GW of electricity. And he expects production capacity to double with a second line early in 2024.

The problem with shipping hydrogen

Fortescue expects green hydrogen to help its own operations reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. But its growth plan, like Ark Energy’s, anticipates exporting most of its green hydrogen to clean up heavy vehicles, industries, and power grids worldwide. First, though, they will have to make it shippable.

Shipping hydrogen is pricey. As either a gas or a liquid, it has relatively low volumetric energy density. So most of Australia’s prospective green-hydrogen mega-producers expect to move their energy overseas by converting green hydrogen to ammonia—a chemical precursor for nitrogen fertilizers that already ships worldwide. Ammonia is primarily produced from hydrogen, although today it’s typically done using hydrogen made with natural gas rather than electrolysis.

Exported ammonia made in Australia from green hydrogen could already outcompete ammonia produced in Europe with natural gas, according to calculations by BloombergNEF, and proposed projects are multiplying. Ark Energy recently formed an industrial consortium to use 3 GW of renewable power to produce “green ammonia” for export to Korea, although first shipments wouldn’t happen until after 2030.

Fortescue has even bigger long-term plans, and is already sizing up a way to jump-start ammonia exports. It is considering refitting a 54-year-old fertilizer plant in Brisbane, which was slated to shut down early this year due to skyrocketing natural-gas prices. Fortescue and the plant’s owner are considering installing 500 MW of electrolyzers so they can restart the plant on green hydrogen around 2025.

“It’s very easy in this current phase for two people you’ve never heard about to create a 30-gigawatt project and put out a press release,” says one observer.

Amid all of these grand plans, what remains to be seen, says hydrogen analyst Martin Tengler at BloombergNEF’s Tokyo office, is whether green-ammonia exports can truly meet people’s energy needs.

Ammonia doesn’t burn well on its own, he notes, and converting exported ammonia back to hydrogen for steel plants or fuel-cell vehicles requires a lot of energy. “You’re using energy to import energy. If you need green hydrogen in Europe, it’s probably cheaper to make green hydrogen in Europe,” Tengler concludes.

Some plans for green ammonia could actually extend fossil-fuel consumption and thus delay climate action. For example, some Japanese and Korean power producers have announced plans to burn green ammonia in coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions.

In September, BloombergNEF estimated that power from Japanese coal plants burning 50 percent green ammonia from Australia would cost US $136 per megawatt-hour in 2030—more than it projects for power from offshore wind and solar plants in Japan backed up with battery storage. “It’s not the most economical way to use ammonia,” Tengler says, “or the cheapest way for Japan and Korea to decarbonize.”

In other words, even if green hydrogen gets real this year, there’s much to learn about what it should be used for, and where.

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An IBM Quantum Computer Will Soon Pass the 1,000-Qubit Mark

IBM’s Condor, the world’s first universal quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits, is set to debut in 2023. The year is also expected to see IBM launch Heron, the first of a new flock of modular quantum processors that the company says may help it produce quantum computers with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.

While quantum computers can, in theory, quickly find answers to problems that classical computers would take eons to solve, today’s quantum hardware is still short on qubits, limiting its usefulness. Entanglement and other quantum states necessary for quantum computation are infamously fragile, being susceptible to heat and other disturbances, which makes scaling up the number of qubits a huge technical challenge.

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Nevertheless, IBM has steadily increased its qubit numbers. In 2016, it put the first quantum computer in the cloud anyone to experiment with—a device with 5 qubits, each a superconducting circuit cooled to near absolute zero. In 2019, the company created the 27-qubit Falcon; in 2020, the 65-qubit Hummingbird; in 2021, the 127-qubit Eagle, the first quantum processor with more than 100 qubits; and in 2022, the 433-qubit Osprey.

IBM expects to build quantum computers of increasing complexity over the next few years, starting with those that use the Condor processor or multiple Heron processors in parallel.Carl De Torres/IBM

Other quantum computers have more qubits than does IBM’s 1,121-qubit Condor processor—for instance, D-Wave Systems unveiled a 5,000-qubit system in 2020. But D-Wave’s computers are specialized machines for solving optimization problems, whereas Condor will be the world’s largest general-purpose quantum processor.

“A thousand qubits really pushes the envelope in terms of what we can really integrate,” says Jerry Chow, IBM’s director of quantum infrastructure. By separating the wires and other components needed for readout and control onto their own layers, a strategy that began with Eagle, the researchers say they can better protect qubits from disruption and incorporate larger numbers of them. “As we scale upwards, we’re learning design rules like ‘This can go over this; this can’t go over this; this space can be used for this task,’” Chow says.

Other quantum computers with more qubits exist, but Condor will be the world’s largest general-purpose quantum processor.

With only 133 qubits, Heron, the other quantum processor IBM plans for 2023, may seem modest compared with Condor. But IBM says its upgraded architecture and modular design herald a new strategy for developing powerful quantum computers. Whereas Condor uses a fixed-coupling architecture to connect its qubits, Heron will use a tunable-coupling architecture, which adds Josephson junctions between the superconducting loops that carry the qubits. This strategy reduces crosstalk between qubits, boosting processing speed and reducing errors. (Google is already using such an architecture with its 53-qubit Sycamore processor.)

In addition, Heron processors are designed for real-time classical communication with one another. The classical nature of these links means their qubits cannot entangle across Heron chips for the kind of boosts in computing power for which quantum processors are known. Still, these classical links enable “circuit knitting” techniques in which quantum computers can get assistance from classical computers.

For example, using a technique known as “entanglement forging,” IBM researchers found they could simulate quantum systems such as molecules using only half as many qubits as is typically needed. This approach divides a quantum system into two halves, models each half separately on a quantum computer, and then uses classical computing to calculate the entanglement between both halves and knit the models together.

IBM Quantum State of the Union 2022

While these classical links between processors are helpful, IBM intends eventually to replace them. In 2024, the company aims to launch Crossbill, a 408-qubit processor made from three microchips coupled together by short-range quantum communication links, and Flamingo, a 462-qubit module it plans on uniting by roughly 1-meter-long quantum communication links into a 1,386-qubit system. If these experiments in connectivity succeed, IBM aims to unveil its 1,386-qubit Kookaburra module in 2025, with short- and long-range quantum communication links combining three such modules into a 4,158-qubit system.

IBM’s methodical strategy of “aiming at step-by-step improvements is very reasonable, and it will likely lead to success over the long term,” says Franco Nori, chief scientist at the Theoretical Quantum Physics Laboratory at the Riken research institute in Japan.

IBM’s quantum leaps in software

In 2023, IBM also plans to improve its core software to help developers use quantum and classical computing in unison over the cloud. “We’re laying the groundwork for what a quantum-centric supercomputer looks like,” Chow says. “We don’t see quantum processors as fully integrated but as loosely aggregated.” This kind of framework will grant the flexibility needed to accommodate the constant upgrades that quantum hardware and software will likely experience, he explains.

In 2023, IBM plans to begin prototyping quantum software applications. By 2025, the company expects to introduce such applications in machine learning, optimization problems, the natural sciences, and beyond.

Researchers hope ultimately to use quantum error correction to compensate for the mistakes quantum processors are prone to make. These schemes spread quantum data across redundant qubits, requiring multiple physical qubits for each single useful logical qubit. Instead, IBM plans to incorporate error-mitigation schemes into its platform starting in 2024, to prevent these mistakes in the first place. But even if wrangling errors ends up demanding many more qubits, IBM should be in a good position with the likes of its 1,121-qubit Condor.

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What Happened to Bright Starts Beaming Buggie Take-Along Toy?

The life cycle of a magical baby-soothing toy.

LastPass says hackers have obtained vault data and a wealth of customer info

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

LastPass, one of the leading password managers, said that hackers obtained a wealth of personal information belonging to its customers as well as encrypted and cryptographically hashed passwords and other data stored in customer vaults.

The revelation, posted on Thursday, represents a dramatic update to a breach LastPass disclosed in August. At the time, the company said that a threat actor gained unauthorized access through a single compromised developer account to portions of the password manager's development environment and "took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information." The company said at the time that customers’ master passwords, encrypted passwords, personal information, and other data stored in customer accounts weren't affected.

Sensitive data, both encrypted and not, copied

In Thursday’s update, the company said hackers accessed personal information and related metadata, including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses customers used to access LastPass services. The hackers also copied a backup of customer vault data that included unencrypted data such as website URLs and encrypted data fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

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Twitter Is Said to Have Struggled Over Revealing US Influence Campaign

Internal emails showed the company’s communications with the Pentagon over a network of military-run accounts.

Microsoft Gambles on ‘Nice Guy’ Strategy to Close Activision Megadeal

Federal regulators have sued to block the $69 billion acquisition, but the company has settled on a path forward and is preparing to force the issue.

Two Executives in Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Plead Guilty to Fraud

Caroline Ellison, the former chief executive of Alameda Research, and Gary Wang, a founder of FTX, are cooperating in the federal criminal case against Mr. Bankman-Fried.

Okta says source code for Workforce Identity Cloud service was copied

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Single sign-on provider Okta said on Wednesday that software code for its Okta Workforce Identity Cloud service was copied after intruders gained access to the company’s private repository on GitHub.

“Our investigation concluded that there was no unauthorized access to the Okta service, and no unauthorized access to customer data,” company officials said in a statement. “Okta does not rely on the confidentiality of its source code for the security of its services. The Okta service remains fully operational and secure.”

The statement said that copied source code pertains only to the Okta Workforce Identity Cloud and doesn’t pertain to any Auth0 products used with the company’s Customer Identity Cloud. Officials also said that upon learning of the breach, Okta placed temporary restrictions on access to the company’s GitHub repositories and suspended GitHub integrations with third-party apps.

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Electric Cars Are Taking Off, but When Will Battery Recycling Follow?

Many companies and investors are eager to recycle batteries but it could take a decade or more before enough used lithium-ion batteries become available.

How to Use ChatGPT and Still Be a Good Person

It’s a turning point for artificial intelligence, and we need to take advantage of these tools without causing harm to ourselves or others.

TikTok Class Is in Session

Those who can go viral do. And they may also teach a class or two while they’re at it.

A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business

A new wave of chat bots like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine.