technology 24 for you: June 2026

Saturday, June 20, 2026

War Taught this Ukrainian Entrepreneur the Value of Resilience

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/photo-of-woman-sitting-with-her-face-turned-toward-the-camera.jpg?id=66957341&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C187%2C0%2C188"/> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikadzesalome" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Salome Mikadze-Struk</a> is no stranger to adversity. The daughter of refugees, she built a software-development business as an undergraduate at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and kept it running despite the outbreak of war in her native <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/ukraine" target="_blank">Ukraine</a>. Now, she’s drawing on her experiences to mentor tech-startup founders and speak publicly about the importance of resilience in <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/thinking-like-an-entrepreneur" target="_blank">entrepreneurship</a>.Mikadze-Struk was studying at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C., when COVID-19 struck. Classes went online, and she moved back to Ukraine. In the midst of that disruption she saw an opportunity to develop her business idea, called <a href="https://movadex.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Movadex</a>, by tapping Ukraine’s pool of talented young engineers. Then Russia invaded in early 2022, during her final semester. Taking online classes from bomb shelters and helping employees evacuate to safer parts of the country was surreal, she says, but the team kept the company afloat and she graduated later that year.In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took a hiatus from her business to pursue an MBA at Stanford University, which she completed this year. In her precious spare time she’s been advising startups and giving talks, using her unique perspective to promote the need for resilience in entrepreneurship—something she thinks is increasingly important in the software industry as <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/best-ai-coding-tools" target="_blank">AI coding tools</a> upend old business models.“You need to be okay with risk, you need to be resilient. You need to be okay with disruption and okay with uncertainty,” she says, “because this is inevitably going to be part of this industry for the foreseeable future.”<h2>An Early Focus on Education </h2>Mikadze-Struk’s parents had settled in Ukraine after fleeing conflict in the Abkhazia region of Georgia in the early 1990s. “They left everything behind,” she says. “You can look on Google Maps and zoom in on where their houses were and it’s all rubble.”Despite this backstory, Mikadze-Struk says she and her sister had a conventional middle-class upbringing in Kyiv. Her father ran a small shop and her mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her parents placed an emphasis on education and encouraged her to study hard and take part in extracurricular programs such as Ukraine’s <a href="https://man.gov.ua/en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Junior Academy of Sciences</a>, which introduces students to research.“They weren’t rich, so they knew that our way to make it in life was not through investments, but through merit-based accomplishments,” she says.<h3></h3> <div class="rblad-ieee_in_content"></div>When Mikadze-Struk was 14, her family discovered the newly launched <a href="https://www.ugs.foundation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ukraine Global Scholars</a> program, a nonprofit that helps talented students secure scholarships abroad. The program helped her win a full scholarship to the Emma Willard School, a private girl’s school in Troy, N.Y.<h2>Discovering Tech </h2>After graduating high school in 2018, Mikadze-Struk was accepted to Georgetown to study business administration. But it was outside the classroom that her career direction began to take shape. She won a startup competition with a medical device she had developed for a school project and, while the business idea didn’t go anywhere, it sparked an interest in entrepreneurship.Ukraine’s software industry was booming, and she began attending startup events and competitions in her home country the summer before starting college. There she met her eventual cofounder <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/norrr/?originalSubdomain=ua" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Nor Newman</a>.Despite both being just 18, they saw a gap in the market. The pair noticed many founders had strong ideas but lacked the technical expertise to realize them, while talented engineering students often struggled to <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/hands-on-projects-career-advice" target="_blank">gain real-world experience</a>. Newman had begun informally connecting startups with his college friends, but the pair soon saw commercial potential. “We realized we could actually create our own startup studio and help startups as a team, versus just connecting people,” says Mikadze-Struk.Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, halfway through her sophomore year, it brought both disruption and opportunity for Newman and Mikadze-Struk. While travel restrictions and lockdowns made life complicated, there was also a surge of companies looking to move their business online. “COVID really skyrocketed everything we were doing,” she says.Sensing an opportunity, Mikadze-Struk and Newman incorporated Movadex in Ukraine in early 2020. From the start, they decided to focus on not only providing engineering talent, but also helping startups with product development. Many times, says Mikadze-Struk, a founder’s vision for the software doesn’t line up with what users actually want. “What really helped us grow is not just the engineering or quality of code, but rather a holistic approach to creating a product and actually getting into the brain of the user,” she says.<h2>Navigating Adversity </h2>Back in Ukraine, Mikadze-Struk had to juggle this booming business with studying remotely—taking classes at night and working during the day. It was exhausting, she says, but it also allowed her to immediately apply what she learned in business classes to building her startup.Having successfully navigated the pandemic, Mikadze-Struk was dealt another wild card. In early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and her life was again turned upside down. It was particularly traumatic for her family, having already been forced from their home in Georgia once by war. <img alt="photo of woman in a light pink suit standing under an veranda with greenery" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ff5d8d6d9be15f786a57dfb2deadbc1e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="53b39" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/photo-of-woman-in-a-light-pink-suit-standing-under-an-veranda-with-greenery.jpg?id=66957358&width=980"/> In 2023, Mikadze-Struk took an extended leave from her company to pursue an MBA at Stanford.Christie Hemm Klok“For my parents to experience their daughters going through all the same things they had gone through was really heartbreaking,” she says. “But at the same time, because I’d heard so much about their story of resilience I had power in me to not fully break down.”On the day of the invasion the founders told employees to take the day off and emailed clients to warn of potential disruptions. The next couple of days were spent checking on staff and evacuating as many as possible to their headquarters in Lviv, in Western Ukraine.By the following Monday the business was back up and running. Soon afterward, they partnered with the <a href="https://itcluster.lviv.ua/en/" target="_blank">Lviv IT Cluster</a> business association’s nonprofit arm to help resettle refugees from the eastern part of Ukraine, where strikes were focused, and offer job placements. Throughout this period, Mikadze-Struk was also completing her final year at Georgetown remotely. “Half of my senior year was actually spent in bomb shelters,” she says.<h2>Promoting Resilience in Entrepreneurship </h2>That summer, Mikadze-Struk graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and learned she had been accepted onto Stanford University’s MBA program. In 2023, she took an extended leave from Movadex and moved to California. She also gave birth to her daughter in 2024.Balancing studies and parenthood was already a full-time job, but she continued to engage with the startup ecosystem by volunteering as a startup mentor and public speaker. Now, after graduating from Stanford, she is stepping back into a more active leadership role at Movadex, where she hopes to drive the company’s expansion into the United States. She also wants to develop a stronger focus on helping customers understand and implement AI in their businesses.While AI is undeniably disrupting the tech industry, Mikadze-Struk, now an IEEE Senior Member, is fundamentally optimistic about its impact. “The way AI democratized access to building software and to prototyping…is just mind blowing,” she says.But it will require a significant shift in mind-set for engineers, especially junior developers hunting for jobs. They need to “fall in love with AI” and embrace it as a powerful copilot, she says. As these tools increasingly take over the nuts-and-bolts work of coding, engineers also need to nurture higher-level skills like systems thinking and architectural design.Perhaps most importantly, given the rapid pace at which the technology is evolving, engineers need to nurture their adaptability and resilience. “It’s both exciting and scary, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.” Reference: https://ift.tt/2KNxuit

Friday, June 19, 2026

IEEE Rolls Out Large Language Models Virtual Training Course

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-middle-aged-black-man-taking-a-virtual-coding-class-in-his-home-office.jpg?id=66951841&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C729%2C0%2C730"/> <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/recursive-self-improvement" target="_self">Large language models</a> have moved out of the research lab and into engineers’ daily workflow. LLMs serve as reasoning engines that can orchestrate complex tasks including identifying vulnerabilities in source code and transforming fragmented project discussions into rigorous technical specifications.While the general public uses AI tools to write email and plan vacations, technical professionals use LLMs as core architectural elements that are fundamentally changing how digital infrastructures are built and maintained. As the AI models move into mainstream engineering practice, the demand for technical expertise is rising.The LLM technology market is expected to grow by <a href="https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/large-language-model-llm-market-102137956.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">about 33 percent every year through 2030</a>, according to <a href="https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/AboutUs-8.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MarketsandMarkets</a>. The rapid expansion suggests that proficiency in implementing and securing the models is transitioning from a niche into a core requirement for technologists.<h2>More than just a better search engine</h2>To use LLMs effectively, technical professionals must move beyond treating them as conversational robots. At a fundamental level, the AI systems are built on the <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10245906" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">transformer architecture</a>, a framework that replaced the older method of processing data in a fixed, sequential order. Unlike earlier models that analyzed information one step at a time, transformers use self-attention mechanisms to ingest vast datasets simultaneously.For technical professionals, LLMs are core architectural elements that are fundamentally changing how digital infrastructures are built and maintained.Relying on such LLMs without understanding their internal logic creates a significant reliability risk. To build tools that work consistently, developers must understand the core principles that govern how the models process information and generate results. By mastering how a model processes information and how its internal settings influence the result, developers can move away from a trial-and-error approach toward a more precise one to ensure the AI tool handles complex data reliably.<h2>Four ways LLMs are changing jobs</h2>Here are areas that integrate large language models.Moving past basic prompts. Developers are using application program interfaces (APIs) to connect LLMs directly to their databases and software tools. Employing the APIs allows AI to perform work such as executing code or searching through internal repositories.Fixing the “hallucination” problem. LLMs are at risk of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agent-benchmarks" target="_self">hallucinations</a>, which are generated facts or code that looks correct but actually is wrong or broken. To fix the problem, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) forces AI to look up information in a trusted source such as a company’s database.Prioritizing data security. When using AI with proprietary code, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/two-new-ai-ethics-certifications" target="_self">security</a> is a major concern. Engineers must learn how to set up “private” instances of the models to ensure that sensitive company data stays within a secure cloud environment and is not used to train public versions.The future of collaboration. By automating repetitive coding tasks and summarizing thousands of pages of documentation, LLMs let engineers spend more time on high-level designs and solving important issues.<h2>Online course program helps with mastering the tech</h2>The gap between people who use AI and those who understand how to build with it is growing wider. To help technical professionals stay ahead, IEEE offers a five-course online program, <a href="https://iln.ieee.org/public/contentdetails.aspx?id=B570F53B5DA44B258042A12AE5BD6846" target="_blank">Large Language Models Demystified</a>, available through the <a href="https://iln.ieee.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Learning Network</a>.The program, developed by <a href="https://ea.ieee.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Educational Activities</a> in partnership with the <a href="https://computer.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Computer Society</a>, is built for people who want to understand the “how” and the “why” behind the technology. Rather than just teaching basic prompting, the curriculum dives into the engineering behind generative AI, including:<ul><li>Evolution, impact, and hands-on exercises: the shift from statistical methods to modern transformers, including hands-on model optimization.</li><li>Understanding transformer architectures: the mathematical core of self-attention and positional encoding, implemented in <a href="https://numpy.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NumPy</a> and <a href="https://www.python.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Python</a>.</li><li>Architectural analysis and implementation: advanced LLM design with practical model-building exercises.</li><li>Training and modeling with PyTorch: end-to-end pipelines in <a href="https://pytorch.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PyTorch</a>, leveraging parameter-efficient techniques such as <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09685" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">low-rank adaptation</a> and quantization.</li><li>Optimization, alignment, and deployment: performance scaling, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)</a>, <a href="https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/grpo" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">group-relative policy optimization</a>, RAG, and agentic AI.</li></ul>Upon completion of the program, participants earn professional development credits and a digital badge from IEEE to verify their expertise.<a href="https://iln.ieee.org/public/contentdetails.aspx?id=B570F53B5DA44B258042A12AE5BD6846" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Enroll in the course program</a> on the IEEE Learning Network.Organizations looking to prepare their teams to work on LLMs can connect with an <a href="https://forms1.ieee.org/Large-Language-Models-Demystified.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE content specialist</a> to discuss group enrollment and tailored training paths. Reference: https://ift.tt/sa1lgiw

What Amazon’s Astro Taught Me About Giving Robots a Soul

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/cute-wheeled-home-robot-with-a-tablet-face-set-against-a-blue-heart-patterned-background.jpg?id=66906422&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C417%2C0%2C417"/> In 2018, Amazon brought me in as the lead UX Sound Designer for <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-astro-robot" target="_blank">Astro, their first consumer home robot</a>. Astro used cameras and other sensors to map and navigate your <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-robots" target="_blank">home and workplace</a>, and could proactively patrol, check up on loved ones, and transport small items using its built-in cargo bin. While there was a well-defined feature set and form factor, initially there was no character direction. In fact, even before <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Amazon-Astro/dp/B078NSDFSB" target="_blank">Astro</a> had a name, there were two main questions—was it simply Alexa on wheels, or was it a robot with its own character?The Astro team was divided. One option was to focus on Alexa, and treat the mobile robot simply as an added utility. I argued for Astro to not focus on Alexa, along with the majority of the UX team. Our belief was that a thing that moves through your home and turns toward you with intent can never be just an appliance. People would ascribe character to whether we wanted them to or not, and so the only question was whether we shaped that character or let it happen by accident.Ultimately, <a href="https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/meet-astro-a-home-robot-unlike-any-other" target="_blank">Astro became Astro rather than Alexa</a>, and user testing backed up our decision. People didn’t see the robot as Alexa. They saw it as its own character, and that’s what they wanted it to be. Alexa on the device felt somewhat strange and creepy, but building Astro its own voice was too slow and expensive in 2018. So, we settled on Alexa as a supporting character that handled any actual talking, while Astro was the main character, communicating as much as it could without words, through sound, motion, and facial expressions.I had been brought on to the Astro team to define the robot’s sound design language and voice. But there was no one to flesh out the robot’s actual character. You cannot make a single real decision about a character without defining it first. Every choice about how Astro moved, sounded, paused, or reacted was a character choice, and those choices required all disciplines working together. As Sound Lead, I was weaving together sound, motion, and character, and how they played together inside each story moment. The animators, who programmed Astro’s motion and facial expressions, were extraordinary at what they did, but the emotional arc they were animating came from the sound (and therefore character) work first. So I stepped into that role, which is where my real work started. What I learned about building character for robots applies to nearly everything being built in embodied AI right now.<h2>Character Is a Design System</h2>Developing a character for Astro meant answering questions that had never been asked about a product at Amazon: What is the emotional range of this robot’s baseline state? How does this robot communicate uncertainty without eroding trust? Where is the line between being expressive and annoying? What are the vulnerabilities of this device’s character?These are design questions. They have real answers, and every team working on the product has to build from them. For example, Astro’s emotional range was designed to be relatively small at first. We never wanted Astro to get too sad or too angry. It could play sad, but would snap out of it quickly and end the reaction on a high note to keep things positive. <iframe frameborder="0" height="auto" lazy-loadable="true" scrolling="no" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r1eS3TitrHc?rel=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" width="100%"></iframe>Character leaks out of every seam and can create a disjointed experience if not defined correctly. Even if it’s just animation timing that’s slightly off, or a response that’s technically correct but contextually tone-deaf, users feel every one of these inconsistencies, even if they can’t name them. Watch what happens at the beginning and end of this Sing sequence: <iframe frameborder="0" height="auto" lazy-loadable="true" scrolling="no" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HtePtQyiTDs?rel=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" width="100%"></iframe>Astro goes from nothing, into the emotional moment, and then lands back on nothing. No build up, no cool down, no sense that the feeling came from somewhere or had anywhere to go. I pushed hard for better character stitching, the transitions in and out of expressive moments that make a performance feel continuous rather than assembled, but it never got implemented. The moment itself works. But without the stitching, it reads as a clip playing on a robot rather than coming from within the robot character itself.<h2>Story and Sound at the Beginning</h2>We had decided that Astro would have no spoken dialogue, but it had something that functioned the same way: a vocabulary of sounds, tones, and rhythms that acted as its voice. This vocabulary became the leading output of the character’s personality. The robot’s motion and facial expressions were built around it.Astro’s wake-up sequence is a great example. Waking wasn’t just a boot animation on the screen; it was an entire performance. Slow and humble at first, the robot oriented itself quietly, then stretched its screen, checked its wheels, and finally, with an upward gesture toward its telescoping mast, it popped it up slightly, and did a little dance of joy. Sound, motion, and eyes hit every beat together in full choreography. <iframe frameborder="0" height="auto" lazy-loadable="true" scrolling="no" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/coPva7ltAgM?rel=0&start=261" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" width="100%"></iframe>The character’s output in that sequence was first written as a story. Astro is waking up in its new home for the first time. Its main aspiration is to be part of a family, so this is the moment it has been waiting for, this is its purpose. Being the responsible character that it is, it wants to make sure everything is good to go before it introduces itself and starts learning its new home.This narrative came first because it drove every other decision that we made. After the story was written, sound gave that story a metaphorical voice: the excited tones, the pacing as it checked its wheels, and the bright melodic phrase as Astro looked up at its new family for the first time and introduced itself. Once the sound was laid down, animation did their thing with motion and facial expressions, taking cues from the emotional arc the sound had established. Motion didn’t lead—it followed the feeling of the story and the sounds, the same way an animator follows a recorded vocal take.That wake up sequence became one of the most-discussed moments in early user testing. People described it as “alive.” What they were responding to wasn’t any single element. It was all three channels (sound, motion, and facial expressions) expressing the same defined character in harmony.<h2>Context Is Where Character Becomes Real</h2>The most compelling characters are defined not by a fixed disposition but by how they respond to their environments and the people in them. They’re still recognizably themselves even as they adapt. This is what I call contextual character. A robot living in a home doesn’t occupy a single emotional state. It moves through rooms with different energy, encounters people in different moods, operates at different times of day, and responds to an endless range of social situations it was never explicitly designed for.We got close to a contextual character output with Astro’s sound. When a specific piece of environmental context was fed in, the system adapted beautifully, and Astro felt completely alive. But every state like this was still a prediction we made by hand—a situation we had to imagine in advance and design a response for. A random home throws more situations at a robot than anyone can possibly predict, so there was always a longer tail of moments the system was never prepared for.The difference between a product people describe as “smart” and one they describe as “aware” often comes down to this. Smartness is capability. Awareness is context. Presence is character. And character is always in reaction to the people around it, to its environment, to its own evolving state. That’s what makes it feel like something is emotionally present with you.This is where AI changes the game for character design in ways that go well beyond what was possible with Astro. AI-driven adaptation doesn’t require the contextual predictions that we relied on. It learns the specific rhythms, preferences, and emotional context of the people it lives and works with. The character doesn’t just respond to context. It grows into it.<h2>What Industry Is Missing</h2>The character and soul of the impending wave of embodied AI products appears to almost always be an afterthought. And character defined late is character defined by default. It becomes the sum of a thousand small decisions made by different people thinking about anything but character. People project character onto devices whether you plan for it or not, especially if those devices move—a robot that moves is already a character. If nobody has designed this character, the result will be products that feel like nothing, or worse, feel confusing and not trustworthy. Technically impressive, but lifeless.We did not get this fully right with Astro. So many things were moving in parallel that character was rarely treated as a utility, and it made sense why. When you are building a first-of-its-kind product, the things that are the loudest are the ones that break, the deadlines, the costs, the features a customer can point to on a box. Character is quieter than all of that. It’s easy to assume it can come later. On a team as large as the Amazon Astro team, it’s lucky to get any idea onto the roadmap when it is competing with a hundred others that all feel more urgent in the moment. None of this came from people not caring. It came from character being the kind of thing that is hard to prioritize until you see what its absence costs you.<h2>My Asks to Product Leaders</h2>If you are building a product that will share physical or conversational space with people, three things are worth considering:Define character before you define interactions. You need a defensible character with enough emotional logic to answer hard questions consistently. Find answers to character questions early, and have every discipline build from the same foundation.Build story and sound into the character pipeline, not the production pipeline. Story and sound developed alongside character definition has the chance to inform motion, expression, and interaction logic. This requires a different kind of collaboration, and a different kind of hire.Design for adaptation, not just consistency. A consistent character is necessary, but the products that will matter most in people’s lives are the ones that deepen through use. The infrastructure to support that is more and more accessible, but the design thinking to take advantage of it is still rare.<div class="horizontal-rule"></div>An unabridged version of this story can be read on <a href="https://medium.com/@mikeforstmusic/what-amazons-astro-taught-me-about-giving-ai-a-soul-989fcd9c45f4" target="_blank">Medium</a>. Reference: https://ift.tt/SUGdfWR

Thursday, June 18, 2026

Microsoft discovers new lightweight backdoor that steals cryptocurrency

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers. The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period. Both the credentials and the screenshots are then sent to the attacker through Tor, a network protocol that provides anonymous routing by sending traffic through redundant nodes so logs can’t capture both the sending and receiving IP addresses. Crypto Clipper establishes the Tor connection by using a SOCKS5 proxy, a network protocol that sends traffic through a proxy server, which then forwards it to its final destination. <h2>A lightweight backdoor</h2> “The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure,” Microsoft <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/06/17/crypto-clipper-uses-tor-worm-like-propagation-for-persistence-control/">said</a> Thursday. “Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor.”<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/microsoft-spots-new-self-propagating-malware-for-stealing-cryptocurrency/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/microsoft-spots-new-self-propagating-malware-for-stealing-cryptocurrency/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/tXMK0SZ

Apple patches high-severity eavesdropping vulnerability in Beats Studio Buds

Apple has updated its Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds to patch a high-severity vulnerability that could be exploited by nearby hackers to eavesdrop on users. The vulnerability, <a href="https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-20701">CVE-2025-20701</a>, allowed improper authentication in the firmware running on the Bluetooth-related chips, which made it possible for people within signal range to impersonate devices that had previously been paired with the earbuds. The researchers demonstrated this in a series of end-to-end attacks that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations or sounds within earshot of the phone microphone. <h2>Apple joins the patch party</h2> “Impact: An attacker within Bluetooth range may be able to listen through the microphone of a device which is not yet paired and actively seeking pair requests,” Apple said in a Tuesday security <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/127557">advisory</a>. The fix is contained in Beats Firmware Update 1B211, which is delivered automatically while headphones are paired with and within Bluetooth range of a user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Users can check their firmware version by going to Settings on their device, navigating to Bluetooth, and tapping the info button next to the headphones.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/06/apple-patches-high-severity-eavesdropping-vulnerability-in-beats-studio-buds/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/06/apple-patches-high-severity-eavesdropping-vulnerability-in-beats-studio-buds/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/CoadXKT

Before SpaceX IPO, investors in China secretly acquired stakes

A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake. The new details come from a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28232877-jx-537-r/">private investor list</a> obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated. In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-05/chinese-hk-investors-banned-from-spacex-ipo-on-security-grounds">Bloomberg reported</a>. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/before-spacex-ipo-investors-in-china-secretly-acquired-stakes/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/before-spacex-ipo-investors-in-china-secretly-acquired-stakes/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/TOsxqRX

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Tesco moving 40,000 server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's “abusive conduct”

Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim. Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from <a href="https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/09/03/supermarket-giant-tesco-sues-vmware-for-breach-of-contract/1420651">The Register</a>, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years. But when <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/broadcom-will-pay-61-billion-to-become-the-latest-company-to-acquire-vmware/">Broadcom took over VMware</a> in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, <a href="https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/09/03/supermarket-giant-tesco-sues-vmware-for-breach-of-contract/1420651">The Register reported</a> at the time.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/tesco-moving-40000-server-workloads-off-vmware-amid-broadcoms-abusive-conduct/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/tesco-moving-40000-server-workloads-off-vmware-amid-broadcoms-abusive-conduct/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/2XABILx

How Musicians Can Get Paid for Training AI

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/conceptual-illustration-of-two-quarter-note-stems-going-through-an-s-resembling-a-dollar-sign.jpg?id=66750724&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C417%2C0%2C417"/> Musicians are accustomed to getting paid each time their creative work is used. Across vinyl/CD sales, streams, radio, cover versions, and those numerous niches like karaoke, there are agreements in place about what “use” means. Underlying this is a simple economic principle: The more something is used, the more money it makes.Generative AI has <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-art-generator" target="_blank">complicated the definition of use</a>. On the one hand, you could argue that the use of a piece of musical training data happens just once, at the point of training. On the other hand, creators would be right to complain that the creative essence of their work lives on in the structure of the model, used every time the model produces an output.Now, companies like Sureel and SoundVerse are working to re-create the essential economic principle that motivates creativity in an era of AI. Such initiatives aim to turn the generative AI industry from one guilty of “the biggest act of copyright theft in history” into one that coexists harmoniously with hardworking artists.<h2>Music Royalties for the AI era </h2><a href="https://www.sureel.ai/" target="_blank">Sureel</a>, a startup Warner Music Group just <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/warner-music-group-acquires-sureel-ai-the-attribution-startup-that-traces-how-ai-models-use-artists-work/" target="_blank">acquired</a>, has partnered with the Swedish copyright agency <a href="https://www.stim.se/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">STIM</a> to explore the potential for<a href="https://www.stim.se/en/news/stim-launches-the-worlds-first-ai-license-for-music" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> music creators to get paid when their music is used to train generative AI tools</a>. Sureel’s software labels online media, such as a music file, with instructions determined by the owner. The instructions specify whether an AI company may use the media freely in training, limit its influence in any given training set, or avoid it altogether. The software then tracks how the AI company uses the media in training and sets licensing fees accordingly. Meanwhile, the founders of the AI music company SoundVerse “[reject] one-time royalty buyouts as insufficient and [advocate] for ongoing participation of artists in the AI lifecycle,” they wrote in a <a href="https://www.soundverse.ai/whitepaper.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2025 white paper</a>. They argue that each time a generative AI system produces an output, certain pieces of training data play a greater role than others. If the system outputs music resembling jazz, the jazz in the training set has arguably contributed more than, say, the folk music. You can therefore differentially reward each piece of training data for each output. Sureel’s Co-President Benji Rogers told me, “Attribution isn’t about re-creating the old economics. It’s about measuring, for the first time, the thing the old economics only approximated.”Such influence attribution needs to do more than superficially measure how similar a training data point is to the AI output. The challenge is to attribute causality, or a relationship between the training data and the trained AI, Sureel CEO Tamay Aykut says. Even if the AI industry achieved that, however, it might encourage people to create music designed to maximize training-data royalties. While all creative markets lead to new incentives (music streaming, for example, has driven songs to have shorter intros), the industry could do without another economic structure that is easily gamed, in which someone’s reverse-engineered pastiche diverts royalties away from original works of creative expression.RELATED: <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-copyright" target="_self">Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem</a>Inferring the influence of a particular piece of music on a generated piece of music, if a well-defined problem at all, may involve more advanced information theoretic principles, or modelling the actual historical role and impact of individual works. Aykut proposes that in carefully designed attribution systems, more unusual and unpolished musical works could even have more inherent value than radio standards. Simon Gozzi, Head of Business Development at STIM, says the company is in the process of seeing how Sureel’s attribution reports could underlie licensing agreements between musicians and AI companies. Could generative AI attribution strategies not only sustain the economic logic that “popularity pays,” but also motivate musical experimentation and diversity? It’s a compelling concept when public sentiment rightly fears generative AI’s threat to cultural vibrancy, pushing power towards tech companies, deskilling creative workers, shrinking revenue in the creative sector, and filling the internet with slop. “Attribution is one of the few credible tools we have,” Rogers says. There’s a window of opportunity to debate and establish approaches to paying for AI training data that serve a vibrant and sustainable creative sector.The technical problem of training data attribution is both complex and ill-defined. Just as a simplistic attribution strategy based on measuring similarity might motivate people to reverse-engineer the canonical works of a genre to capture royalties, a more complex attribution strategy based on some information theory of originality might be easily gamed or fail to reward human cultural production. For creative workers, there’s good reason to fear that even with the best intentions, AI attribution will only compound the baroque and opaque arms races that they are already weary of navigating. Some voices within the music AI sector are also skeptical. Drew Silverstein, president of SourceAudio, says, “Attribution would seem to be the obvious answer, but it’s flawed in AI, so we have to look at other models.” He advocates simple negotiated agreements with an agreed or annually recurring price at the point of training.Meanwhile, the copyright lawsuits that have dominated the generative AI revolution are beginning to give way to an increasing number of privately negotiated agreements, such as those between <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/790405/warner-universal-music-ai-deals" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Universal, Warner, and major AI companies</a> to work together on training models with copyright consent. Although <a href="https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sunos-licensing-talks-with-major-labels-in-limbo-with-no-path-forward-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">little is certain</a>, these agreements may have considerable influence over the industry norms that arise. Right now, there’s a window of opportunity to debate and establish approaches that pay for AI training data while also sustaining a vibrant creative sector. Sophisticated engineering solutions will have a role to play, but they need to take into account the cultural complexity of the challenge, and enable fairness and transparency through good design. <h2>Making AI training pay off </h2> It remains to be seen whether monolithic generative models such as Suno actually have as much credibility as first touted. In many creative applications of AI, there’s a renewed focus on smaller customized models that are tailored for specific human creative expressive needs such as <a href="https://forum.ircam.fr/projects/detail/rave/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IRCAM’s RAVE</a> model or <a href="https://www.jenmusic.ai/stylefilters" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Jen’s Style Filters</a>. Meanwhile, more mainstream “end user” creative applications may be shifting towards a focus on fan engagement. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/technology/openai-shutting-down-sora.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenAI’s sudden dropping of Sora</a>, despite being in negotiations with Disney and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XZQx4PFqvs" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Suno’s recent emphasis on building fan engagement experiences that draw directly on the work of artists</a>, following its deal with Universal, both point to teething troubles in the creative AI sector. A move to smaller, more targeted models and applications would give more room for creator alliances. For example, collectives of musicians might band together to provide the training data for a smaller custom model, for which revenue splits might be egalitarian or based on other principles of fairness.The same may possibly be true of hybrid model architectures and structured training regimes where different data sources are used at different points in the training process, as well as retrieval augmented generation, which mixes context-specific information with training data to improve results. An approach that produces worse results but enables fairer or more transparent paths of attribution may be more successful if it brings creators on board with more lucrative royalty flows and even clear credits. Also, no matter how sophisticated an attribution algorithm is, it will always be grounded in human decisions, ranging from the wise and the fair to the arbitrary and corrupt. Ask a music industry insider to explain how the percentage split between recording and songwriting royalties is determined, and you’re in for a long answer. At best, the machinery of training data attribution will enable open and informed discussion about what makes our creative and cultural sectors fair and vibrant. At worst, it will conceal already opaque private agreements in complex black boxes. This is where national policies are vital. Attribution must be “multi-layered and auditable, open to expert and regulatory scrutiny,” Rogers says. Crafting such policies will take expertise from computer science, musicology, law, and economics. AI-competitive governments will be able to boost their cultural and creative sectors by supporting institutions that fulfil this purpose. Even the most neoliberal economies look beyond markets to sustain cultural expression, whether through public arts funding or measures like local music quotas for radio. As the economic impact of generative AI in the creative sector takes form, taxation, redistribution, and active support of cultural infrastructures may still be the most effective way to support positive social outcomes. Taxing big AI and redistributing that revenue back to the creative workers that contributed to the industry’s wealth is, after all, another “AI attribution strategy.” Reference: https://ift.tt/zKUyo3j

The Secret to Marathon-Winning Humanoid Robots

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-red-and-black-humanoid-runs-alone-through-a-marathon-course.jpg?id=66940897&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C295%2C0%2C296"/> On April 19, 2026, the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/19/china/china-robot-half-marathon-intl-hnk" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Honor Lightning humanoid robot ran a half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds</a>, beating the human world record by 7 minutes and the best robot time from 2025 by almost two hours.How did they do it? Is there some magical technology or technique that unlocked this performance? How did they beat the significantly better-known Unitree (who reportedly had to supply an ice backpack to try and complete the race without overheating)? My doctoral thesis involved <a href="https://www.avikde.me/p/phd-defense" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">building and controlling hopping and running robots</a>, and <a href="https://www.avikde.me/p/ghost-robotics-minitaur" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">since then I’ve tried to design and build efficient commercial legged robots</a>, giving me a decent idea of the constraints involved. In this article, we take a look at the fundamental underlying constraints to try and answer these questions.<hr/><h3>The Physics of Running</h3><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-institute" target="_blank">Running</a> consists of alternating phases of a leg pushing against the ground (“stance phase”) and the body flying through the air (“aerial phase”). In the aerial phase, the body falls due to gravity, losing vertical momentum. The leg in stance phase pushes against the ground to redirect the vertical momentum upward, while the other leg swings forward to reposition for the next foothold.<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-motor" target="_blank">Electric motors</a> use energy to produce torque- the higher the torque, the more energy lost as heat. Adding a geartrain after the motor amplifies its torque and reduces its speed. A large reduction helps with torque production, but since the rotor of the motor itself has to spin faster, it becomes very sluggish at accelerating its output. This is obviously bad for the swing phase described above. These competing effects mean that for a particular motor, there is usually a sweet spot for the gear ratio: <img alt="A graph showing the relationship between gearing and motor efficiency, with an optimal gearing ratio in the relationship between stance and swing." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4c2224acc293d6b3ce8b8b6553aa30f5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="10bd7" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-graph-showing-the-relationship-between-gearing-and-motor-efficiency-with-an-optimal-gearing-ratio-in-the-relationship-between.jpg?id=66940901&width=980"/> The power consumed by a robot leg is minimized at an optimal gear ratio (30:1 in this example).Avik De/Datawrapper<h3>How Honor Did It</h3>While the Lightning’s motor specifications are not published, the hip and knee motors roughly have a 110-150mm outer diameter. For an approximate set of motor parameters, I looked to the <a href="https://www.tq-group.com/en/products/tq-robodrive/servo-kits/ilm115x25/" target="_blank">ILM115x25 motor</a> due to its relevant size and detailed specifications.We can use a simple physics model to estimate the power consumption for running at 7 m/s (the Lightning’s average half marathon speed) as gear ratio varies: <img alt="A graph showing that optimal gearing for a robot\u2019s motor dissipates the amount of heat that the motor generates." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e04f969907417a25696dd3127e090008" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="185f3" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-graph-showing-that-optimal-gearing-for-a-robot-u2019s-motor-dissipates-the-amount-of-heat-that-the-motor-generates.jpg?id=66940912&width=980"/> The light blue curve shows how to pick the optimal gearing (45:1). The dark blue curve shows how much heat will be produced in the knee motor, ~150W for the optimal gearing.Avik De/DatawrapperWe see that the drivetrain is not magical: with a gear ratio chosen for this task (we’ll return to this below), the approximate robot power consumption would be a very reasonable 400W.However, the dissipated knee power ( typically the main thermal limiting factor) is ~150W. This is almost an unavoidable consequence — running at human speeds with a humanoid-sized robot will inevitably generate this amount of heat! Over a prolonged period, keeping the motor from overheating would be a challenge, but the Lightning has a <a href="https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3775418378027520" target="_blank">trick up its sleeve</a>:<blockquote>According to Honor, the liquid - cooling pipes penetrate deep into the motors like capillaries. The high - power liquid pump has a heat - exchange flow rate of more than 4 liters per minute. Each of the four drive motors in the lower limbs is equipped with an independent liquid - cooling circuit.</blockquote>Liquid cooling is not new, but it’s definitely not a commodity. It has shown up in research periodically, and on the commercial side <a href="https://apptronik.com/news-collection/apptronik-readies-its-humanoid-robot-for-a-summer-unveil" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Apptronik tried it for a few of their prototypes</a> but (to my knowledge) does not use it on their main <a href="https://apptronik.com/apollo" target="_blank">Apollo</a> platform. Basic air convection-based cooling would not continuously be able to extract 150W out of the knee motor, and so the cooling technology is a key enabler of this type of performance.<h3>Why Others Couldn’t Compete</h3>Why did Honor’s competitors, including more <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2026/01/09/top-10-humanoid-robot-companies-by-shipments-revealed/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">established and widely-shipped humanoids</a> such as from <a href="https://www.unitree.com/g1" target="_blank">Unitree</a> or <a href="https://www.agibot.com/" target="_blank">Agibot</a>, not compete as well?We can use the same model to generate an equivalent energetics plot for walking at 1.5 m/s, a much more modest but potentially more common activity for a commercial humanoid robot: <img alt="A graph showing that robots with gear ratios optimized for running or walking are inefficient when walking or running respectively." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5bbe64af17f8581b4106547f468728a4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="616f5" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-graph-showing-that-robots-with-gear-ratios-optimized-for-running-or-walking-are-inefficient-when-walking-or-running-respective.jpg?id=66940939&width=980"/> The solid and dashed light blue lines show a running-optimized design, while green lines show a walking-optimized design. The optimal ratio for walking is much lower (30:1 vs 45:1). However, the power dissipated in the knee motor while running (dark blue) is much higher at 30:1 vs 45:1—the price to pay for running with a walking-optimized design.Avik De/DatawrapperThe plot adds a new green curve for the walking power, and the optimal gearing is significantly different!Let’s say you design your robot to excel at the normal walking task and choose the green design with 30:1 gearing. The knee motor power to run a half marathon is over 300W (red arrow), more than 2x what we had with the running-optimized design. It wouldn’t be so surprising to need ice packs!Conversely, visually following the green curve shows that the running-optimized robot wastes more power for walking. Using larger motors sized for running increases the weight of the robot and wastes power when it is standing or walking. The larger motors also pose practical issues like bumping into objects while operating in homes or factories.<h3>Closing Thoughts</h3>Honor’s half marathon performance was an impressive engineering effort and result. It didn’t need any magical leaps in technology, but the deployment of the capillary motor cooling solution is a notable advance without which this running pace would have been unsustainable. The cooling, weight optimization, and robustness advances may well be useful for more practical purposes like carrying heavy payloads down the line. <img alt="A comparison showing two similar humanoid robots, but one has significantly smaller motors on its hips." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3ef7dc89b86a70493190325135f1f20f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="19121" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-comparison-showing-two-similar-humanoid-robots-but-one-has-significantly-smaller-motors-on-its-hips.jpg?id=66941011&width=980"/> The Honor Lighting robot [right] has much larger motors driving its legs than the Unitree H1 robot [left], making it a more efficient runner but a less efficient walker.Left: Wei Zhiyang/Zhejiang Daily Press Group/VCG/Getty Images; Right: VCG/Getty ImagesHowever, the Lightning is not as well-suited to other tasks as a robot designed for greater versatility. Engineering is always characterized by tradeoffs, and making the correct ones separates good products from great ones. With consistently improving AI language models, this very human skill is becoming the most valuable one an engineer can have.The news coverage seemed to overly focus on the fact that the human half-marathon record had been broken by a robot. Machines and humans have very different capabilities and constraints, so why should we ever have expected the half marathon time for a robot and human to be related? As in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Deep Blue’s 1997 defeat of Garry Kasparov in chess</a>, where it couldn’t physically move the pieces, the Honor robot’s capabilities are much narrower than a human running elbow-to-elbow with other runners while visually navigating the course without GPS. Comparing the robot runner to a human runner is just an apples-to-oranges comparison, and only risks diminishing Honor’s engineering achievement on one hand, and human athletic achievement on the other. Reference: https://ift.tt/MZjHF4n

Windows and Linux users: The deadline to update Secure Boot keys is near

The clock is ticking for Windows and Linux users to update cryptographic keys that protect their systems against firmware-based UEFI infections, a pernicious form of malware that loads before operating system and anti-malware protections start. Beginning June 24, three certificates that cryptographically verify that each piece of firmware and software that loads during system boot will expire. The Microsoft-signed certificates are the linchpins of Secure Boot, a Microsoft-designed chain of trust. Secure Boot checks the digital signatures of all code that loads during system startup to ensure it originates from a trusted provider, such as the manufacturer of the motherboard the system runs on. Secure Boot is designed to thwart bootkits, a form of malware that alters the systems responsible for loading firmware and software during the initial boot sequence. Because bootkits load before the OS and most other code, they can be difficult to detect. Once installed, they typically load malware onto the OS that steals credentials, backdoors the system, or performs other malicious actions. Even when the OS is disinfected, the bootkit can reinfect the system. Bootkits survive OS reinstallations as well.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/windows-and-linux-users-the-deadline-to-update-secure-boot-keys-is-near/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/windows-and-linux-users-the-deadline-to-update-secure-boot-keys-is-near/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/bwIAGhP

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

HPE tempts VMware users, partners with year of free virtualization software

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware. During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its “HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials” offering for free for “up to one year,” per a press release. <a href="https://www.hpe.com/us/en/morpheus-software/virtualization.html">HPE’s website</a> describes its virtualization platform as a “VMware alternative.” It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you’re ready,” HPE’s website says. “New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services,” HPE’s announcement reads, referring to HPE’s group for helping IT teams manage funding.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/hpe-tempts-vmware-users-partners-with-year-of-free-virtualization-software/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/06/hpe-tempts-vmware-users-partners-with-year-of-free-virtualization-software/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/oTxCaiA

Critical Copilot vulnerability allowed hackers to seal 2FA code from users

Last Tuesday, Microsoft patched a vulnerability it rated as max critical in its M365 Copilot AI platform. On Monday, the researchers who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Microsoft revealed how their proof-of-concept exploit could retrieve 2FA codes and other sensitive data from emails accessible to Copilot. Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility. <h2>Jumping over guardrails</h2> One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as <img> and <form>. In either case, a web request showing the data hits the attacker’s web server, where the secret information is captured in logs.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/critical-copilot-vulnerability-allowed-hackers-to-seal-2fa-code-from-users/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/critical-copilot-vulnerability-allowed-hackers-to-seal-2fa-code-from-users/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/akMBpOf

Monday, June 15, 2026

Engineering Is Critical to Boosting Food Security

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/illustration-of-a-drone-being-used-to-collect-crop-data-on-a-wheat-farm.jpg?id=66888131&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C157"/> Nearly 750 million people face hunger today, according to the <a href="https://www.wfp.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">U.N. World Food Program</a>. And by 2050, global demand for food is expected to <a href="https://research.wri.org/wrr-food" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">increase by 50 percent from 2010 levels</a>, the <a href="https://www.wri.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">World Resources Institute</a> says.A <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/precision-agriculture" target="_self">smart agriculture</a> special-issue report recently released by the IEEE <a href="https://smartag.ieee.org/about/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Agri-Food Initiative</a> says meeting the demand will require technology to expand food production. The report highlights research, case studies, and new ways of applying technology to inform farmers, engineers, and policymakers.Leading the initiative is IEEE Fellow <a href="https://engineering.msu.edu/directory/faculty/johnv" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">John Verboncoeur</a>, chair of the smart-food program and professor of electrical and computer engineering at <a href="https://msu.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Michigan State University</a>, in East Lansing.“Food security is becoming a systems-engineering problem,” Verboncoeur says. “We’re no longer talking only about tractors and irrigation. We’re talking about sensing, communications, computation, automation, and sustainability all working together.”Although not formally trained as an agriculture scientist, Verboncoeur’s first involvement with smart agriculture was as an undergraduate at <a href="https://www.ufl.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Florida</a> in 1985-86, where he helped develop an SmartAg aeroponics system for <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NASA</a> for the <a href="https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/international-space-station" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">International Space Station</a>. It used mist to spray the plants’ roots and lightweight pneumatic structures to hold the vegetation in place.He has also chaired the executive committee of Michigan State’s <a href="https://engineering.msu.edu/news/smartag-initiative" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">SmartAg Initiative</a> since it launched in 2017. He chaired the program’s leading interdisciplinary efforts to apply engineering and digital technologies to farming and food systems.Verboncoeur connects the shift of using engineering as a force multiplier for farming to lessons learned from <a href="https://smartvillage.ieee.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the IEEE Smart Village</a> program, which supports projects and organizations bringing electricity and educational and employment opportunities to remote communities. Agriculture, he argues, requires the same systems-level mindset.“The challenge isn’t just inventing technology,” he says. “It’s making systems practical, affordable, and deployable.”<h2>From digital twins to autonomous harvesting</h2>A central theme across the Smart Agri-Food Systems report is the convergence of <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/automation" target="_self">automation</a>, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/data-analytics" target="_self">data analytics</a>, and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/sustainability" target="_self">sustainability</a>.One paper, “<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10757158" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Agriculture, Precision Agriculture, Digital Twins in Agriculture: Similarities and Differences</a>,” addresses the confusion regarding how researchers and practitioners define and apply the technologies to farming.The paper was written by <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=g4uefZ8AAAAJ&hl=tr" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Dilan Onat Alakuş</a>, a research assistant in the software engineering department at <a href="https://www.klu.edu.tr/dil/en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kırklareli University</a>, in Türkiye, and <a href="https://abs.firat.edu.tr/en/iturkoglu" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ibrahim Türkoğlu</a>, a software engineering professor at <a href="https://www.firat.edu.tr/en" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Fırat University</a>, in Elazığ, Türkiye.Unclear terminology can lead to inefficient investment and poor adoption of the technologies, the two authors say. They note that agricultural methods based on traditional practices and intuition lack a thorough analysis of their environmental and economic impacts.They describe how three technologies can benefit farmers:• <a href="https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/smart-farming" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart agriculture</a> systems integrate sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, and analytics to improve efficiency and sustainability at scale.• <a href="https://www.nifa.usda.gov/grants/programs/precision-geospatial-sensor-technologies-programs/precision-agriculture-crop-production" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Precision agriculture</a> focuses on location-specific decisions. Farmers use GPS-guided equipment to map fields, deploy drones to monitor crop health, and install field sensors that track soil moisture and nutrient levels in targeted zones. The tools allow farmers to apply water, fertilizer, and pesticides only where needed—which can reduce waste and lessen environmental impact.• <a href="https://stories.tamu.edu/stories/revolutionizing-farming-with-digital-twin-technology/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Digital twins</a> create virtual replicas of an agricultural area. The resulting models simulate the farmstead, crops, and irrigation systems, allowing growers to test scenarios and predict outcomes before implementing changes.The authors emphasize that the categories overlap in practice. A digital twin might draw data from precision agriculture systems and feed recommendations into smart agriculture platforms.Clearer distinctions help farmers select appropriate tools and avoid unnecessary complexity and costs, they say.“This study contributed to conscious agricultural practices by differentiating agricultural technologies,” they wrote, adding that clearer definitions can increase productivity.<h2>Smart farming in practice</h2>The report shifts from theory to application in a paper describing bustani, which means my garden in Arabic. The <a href="https://www.siemens.com/en-us/company/insights/bustanica-smart-sustainable-food-production/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bustanica</a> project in Saudi Arabia is an automated <a href="https://naes.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=2756" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hydroponic</a> vertical farming system developed by researchers at the <a href="https://www.pmu.edu.sa/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University</a>, in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia. The “<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10262605" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bustani: A Microcontroller-Based Automated Hydroponic Vertical Farming Solution</a>” paper was written by Hussah Alotaibi, a computer engineer at <a href="https://www.aramco.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Saudi Aramco</a>, the country’s national oil company; <a href="https://faculty.pmu.edu.sa/PMUFaculties/Details/abashar" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Abul Bashar</a>, Widad Karsou, and Shehvar Khan, researchers in the university’s computer engineering and computer science department; and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/salahudeantohmeh/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Salahudean Tohmeh</a> from the university’s robotics laboratory.The Bustanica system combines hydroponics with <a href="https://modernfarmer.com/2018/07/how-does-aeroponics-work/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">aeroponics</a>, in which plant roots hang in the air and receive nutrients through a misting system. Together, the approaches allow crops to grow in compact indoor environments, using far less water than traditional methods.The method integrates IoT sensors that continuously monitor water chemistry and reservoir conditions.The system grows crops in controlled indoor environments. A closed-loop design recirculates water to reduce waste. Sensors measure pH levels, nutrient concentration, and water levels. An <a href="https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/arduino-mega-2560-rev3?srsltid=AfmBOoo0R26HAmA6wzpWcLox4xblaJMN5pJd3LrQ9-WxRSNeOFexbpg_" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Arduino Mega</a> processes the sensor data. A <a href="https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/nodemcu-esp8266?srsltid=AfmBOooGec0X-8y74JWHtORpxFCN-kITJ_YiiUZfFC8_GcmiBYh0RlwV" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NodeMCU</a> <a href="https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/nodemcu-esp8266?srsltid=AfmBOooGec0X-8y74JWHtORpxFCN-kITJ_YiiUZfFC8_GcmiBYh0RlwV" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ESP8266</a>—a low-cost, open-source IoT platform—handles Wi-Fi communication and cloud connectivity.The system sends the data through Google’s <a href="https://firebase.google.com/firebase-and-gcp" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Firebase cloud platform</a>, which acts as a real-time bridge between sensors and control systems.A mobile app lets users monitor and control the system remotely. It displays real-time data on lighting, nutrient levels, and water pump activity. When conditions move outside optimal ranges, automated dosing pumps adjust the levels as needed.Engineering can’t solve all the world’s problems. But it absolutely has a role to play in helping the world feed itself.” —<a href="https://engineering.msu.edu/directory/faculty/johnv" target="_blank">John Verboncoeur</a>, chair of the IEEE Smart Agri-Food initiativeThe system operates as a feedback loop, collecting data, transmitting it to the cloud, analyzing the conditions, and automatically triggering adjustments.LEDs simulate sunlight. Ultrasonic sensors measure water levels. Electrical conductivity sensors track nutrient concentration. During testing, the system maintained stable environmental conditions and adjusted dosing dynamically as readings changed.The authors describe the outcome as “a fully functional and automated vertical sustainable farm that creates desirable growing conditions, along with an <a href="https://developer.android.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Android application</a> that provides real-time monitoring and notifications.”Beyond automation, bustani reflects a broader shift toward merging agriculture with consumer technology and smart-home systems. Future plans include integrating the <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amazon-alexa/id944011620" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amazon Alexa</a> virtual assistant and machine learning tools for plant disease detection and growth analysis.<h2>Robotics and labor challenges</h2>The “<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9328092" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Toward an Efficient Tomato Harvesting Robot</a>” paper addresses autonomous harvesting, a long-standing challenge in agricultural robotics. Tomatoes in the field vary widely in size, shape, and ripeness, and they can bruise during handling. The paper was written by IEEE Senior Member <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hyoung-Son" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hyoung Il Son</a>—a professor of biosystems engineering and robotics at <a href="https://global.jnu.ac.kr/jnumain_en.aspx" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chonnam National University</a> in Gwangju, South Korea—and his graduate students Jongpyo Jun, Jeongin Kim, and Jaehwi Seol.The paper describes how robotics is increasingly being used to target crops once considered too delicate or variable for automation.The researcher combined <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/machine-vision" target="_self">3D machine vision</a>,<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/robots-getting-a-grip-on-general-manipulation" target="_self"> </a><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/robotic-arm" target="_self">robotic arms</a>, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/robots-getting-a-grip-on-general-manipulation" target="_self">suction-based grippers</a>, and rotating cutting tools to build a harvesting machine capable of operating in unstructured outdoor environments. The system aims to reduce reliance on manual labor while improving harvesting efficiency and consistency.<h2>Agriculture as a systems problem</h2>Verboncoeur says the developments highlighted in the papers reflect a broad transformation in how engineers view the agricultural industry.“Agriculture used to be seen primarily as managing the challenges of planting, watering, and fertilizing plants, and using machines to make the process less labor-intensive,” he says. “Now it’s also a data problem, a communications problem, an energy problem, and a resilience problem.”Another featured paper, “<a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9823634" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sustainable and Smart Agriculture: A Holistic Approach</a>,” examines how technology can address environmental and demographic pressures. The paper was written by Surender Singh and Sannihit , researchers at the computer science and engineering and the civil engineering departments at <a href="https://www.cuchd.in/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chandigarh University</a>, in Mohali, India.Farmers must increase food production while reducing environmental damage from depleting water resources, overapplication of fertilizer, deforestation, and greenhouse gas emissions, the authors say. They describe smart farming as “a revolution in food production” that can allow farmers to generate higher yields from existing resources through connected technologies and data systems.The authors highlighted the issue of rapid urbanization. By 2050, they report, nearly 70 percent of the global population will live in cities, increasing pressure on food supply chains and distribution systems.<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/wireless-networks" target="_self">Wireless sensor networks</a> will play a central role in the transformation, the researchers say. The networks use small, connected devices to monitor soil moisture, temperature, humidity, light intensity, and crop conditions. The system transmits the data to cloud platforms, where <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667318521000106" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">machine learning models</a> analyze trends and recommend actions.The authors emphasize that decision support, not automation alone, drives the greatest value of crop harvest. Farmers can integrate the information into crop management strategies to improve productivity while reducing their environmental impact.They also note increasing collaboration between industry leaders such as <a href="https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/agriculture.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Caterpillar</a>, <a href="https://www.cnh.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CNH</a>, <a href="https://www.deere.com/en/attachments-accessories-and-implements/riding-mower-attachments/?CID=PPC_MDS_RLE_enUS_r00203_6750007&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23567875588&gbraid=0AAAAADJlG2AVOkwf8jCPTL3Is7RpWpuxP&gclid=CjwKCAjwwpDQBhAuEiwAa-4WowUzQ4o3w2BdVyCxuJfxtXaK9rQw8pBa5ZteOqvaNPIr9M_v55wKNxoCqmAQAvD_BwE" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">John Deere</a>, and <a href="https://www.kubota.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kubota</a> and technology companies including <a href="https://www.bosch.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bosch</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/homepage.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Intel</a>, and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Microsoft</a>. Challenges remain, however, in communication reliability, sensor cost, and scalable data infrastructure, the authors say.<h2>SmartAg beyond the farm</h2>The implications of the tech advances that make farming more efficient extend beyond agriculture. Many of the same technologies—remote sensing, wireless sensor networks, AI analytics, and cloud platforms—support <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/transportation/" target="_self">transportation</a>, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/energy/" target="_self">energy</a>, and industrial systems.The convergence explains IEEE’s growing involvement. Modern agriculture now combines electronics, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/communications" target="_self">communications</a>, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/computing/" target="_self">computing</a>, and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/control-systems" target="_self">control systems</a>.Agriculture requires that integration, Verboncoeur says: “The challenge isn’t just inventing technology. It’s making systems practical, affordable, and deployable.”<h2>What’s next for smart agriculture?</h2>The special issue marks an early stage for the IEEE Smart Agri-Food initiative, which plans to develop <a href="https://www.osha.gov/agricultural-operations/standards" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">standards</a>; create structured ways for farmers, researchers, governments, and agribusinesses to work together; and devise deployment strategies for smart systems.Future research is likely to focus on interoperability between platforms, data sharing, and scalable deployment models. Digital twins are expected to play a larger role as computing power and sensor density increase. Simulating agricultural systems before applying changes in the field will become commonplace, experts predict.Adoption depends on more than technical capability, though. The central tension moving forward lies between innovation and practicality.“Farmers face challenges in adopting such technology due to cost, electricity availability, communication infrastructure, and vulnerability of connected devices,” Singh and Sannihit wrote.Smart agriculture offers improved efficiency, in addition to reducing the inputs of water, fertilizer, and time that would otherwise be spent on tasks machines can handle autonomously. But the benefits matter only if systems function reliably across diverse environments—from industrial farms to small, family-run operations in food-insecure regions.For IEEE, agriculture now sits within core engineering domains. The stakes extend beyond technology itself, Verboncoeur says.He adds that: “Food insecurity affects stability, health, education, and economic development. Engineering can’t solve all the world’s problems, but it absolutely has a role to play in helping the world feed itself.” Reference: https://ift.tt/RFz4Gvy

Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs

A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack">cold boot</a> attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers. Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux. <h2>Now you see it, now you don't</h2> AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/users-cry-foul-after-amd-stripped-memory-crypto-from-its-consumer-cpus/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/users-cry-foul-after-amd-stripped-memory-crypto-from-its-consumer-cpus/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/BLUmyS6

This 1976 University Experiment Spun Up the U.S. Wind Industry

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-and-a-woman-wearing-dressy-winter-coats-watch-a-crew-of-informally-dressed-men-working-on-the-construction-of-a-wind-turbi.jpg?id=66894045&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/> A half century ago, a scrappy crew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst erected a wind turbine on Orchard Hill, the highest point on campus. It was a frugal production, cobbled together from the rear axle of a Ford truck, a donated generator and microcontroller, a steam pipe, and various handcrafted steel and fiberglass parts, including its 4.5-meter blades.<div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe height="110px" id="noa-web-audio-player" src="https://embed-player.newsoveraudio.com/v4?key=q5m19e&id=https://spectrum.ieee.org/william-heronemus-wind-energy&bgColor=F5F5F5&color=1b1b1c&playColor=1b1b1c&progressBgColor=F5F5F5&progressBorderColor=bdbbbb&titleColor=1b1b1c&timeColor=1b1b1c&speedColor=1b1b1c&noaLinkColor=556B7D&noaLinkHighlightColor=FF4B00&feedbackButton=false" style="border: none" width="100%"></iframe></div>The team of <a href="https://www.umass.edu/" target="_blank">UMass</a> engineering grad students, faculty advisors, and one precocious undergrad built it to prove that wind energy could keep rural homes toasty in New England’s frigid winters, as a way of trimming U.S. oil dependence—a national imperative in the aftermath of the 1973–1974 energy crisis. To illustrate the point, they also assembled a modular home there on Orchard Hill, and outfitted it with heaters that would be powered by the turbine. <img alt="Nine men standing and sitting on scaffolding that holds up the rotor and blades of a wind turbine" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2fe8307b7317d6799f5adc56fd1fa009" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="e44af" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/nine-men-standing-and-sitting-on-scaffolding-that-holds-up-the-rotor-and-blades-of-a-wind-turbine.jpg?id=66893951&width=980"/> In 1975 and 1976, a crew from the University of Massachusetts Amherst designed and constructed the 25-kilowatt wind turbine that kick-started the U.S. wind industry. Sandy Butterfield It worked—too well. “We had to open up the doors in the dead of winter. It was just too damn hot,” recalls <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/medds/" target="_blank">Michael Edds</a>, who designed the turbine’s electrical system and served as the project’s first resident engineer. Fittingly, they dubbed the turbine the “Wind Furnace.”The turbine maxed out at 25 kilowatts—puny compared to modern machines that generate up to 26 megawatts, but more than most energy experts expected from wind technology in November 1976. Back then, wind power still conjured up images of quaint Dutch mills and creaky prairie water pumpers. Crafty engineers would soon show that wind power could be so much more. And it all began with the brilliant, commanding, and often polarizing UMass professor leading the Wind Furnace project: William Heronemus.A retired U.S. Navy captain, Heronemus had joined the UMass faculty in 1967. He’d earned Bronze Stars for valor in World War II, designed and built nuclear submarines, and liaised with the British Royal Navy on the Polaris missile. UMass had recruited Heronemus to do ocean engineering, but the energy crisis and his growing misgivings about nuclear power shifted his attention to renewable energy. <img alt="A man in a suit jacket leaning over a map that\u2019s rolled out on a table " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ac598e732203be24bce9d209cc12f7e3" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="6061c" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-in-a-suit-jacket-leaning-over-a-map-that-u2019s-rolled-out-on-a-table.jpg?id=66894051&width=980"/> Heronemus, photographed circa 1973, publicly advocated for the buildout of wind turbines, both onshore and off, at immense scale. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries By 1972, Heronemus was advancing detailed designs to deploy wind turbines at immense scale. That year, at the Marine Technology Society’s annual gathering in Washington, D.C., he presented schemes for building thousands of them across the Great Plains as well as a vast grid of massive floating turbines transecting New England’s continental shelf. Wind power, he contended, could generate nearly a fifth of U.S. electricity needs by the year 2000. Never mind that the technology for such an enormous buildout had yet to be commercialized. Espousing grand schemes made Heronemus a quixotic figure.He also vigorously attacked the commercialization of nuclear power, creating enemies within electric utilities and U.S. government agencies that saw nuclear technology as the future. They didn’t appreciate his claims that a cleaner energy future via wind was ready to be tapped, and that the push for nuclear power and its radiological risks was unnecessary. As author and energy analyst <a href="https://www.peterasmus.com/" target="_blank">Peter Asmus</a> put it in his 2000 book, Reaping the Wind: “<a href="https://www.umass.edu/windenergy/about/history/heronemus/index.html" target="_blank">William Heronemus</a> was a dangerous man suggesting an audacious departure from the status quo.” <img alt="Modular home and wind turbine on a grassy hill on a sunny day " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="361cf08fb708d083a8bb3d373f3ccf4a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="0c4bb" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/modular-home-and-wind-turbine-on-a-grassy-hill-on-a-sunny-day.jpg?id=66894076&width=980"/> The UMass Amherst wind turbine generated most of the energy to heat a modular home through the cold, windy winters on Orchard Hill. Solar thermal panels provided some heat during windless periods. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst LibrariesWhat happened on Orchard Hill in 1976 marked Heronemus’s turn from provocateur to changemaker. The success of the experimental turbine set off waves of technological and industrial developments that forever changed the energy landscape. Within a few years, the students he trained and the entrepreneurs he inspired were building the world’s first modern wind farms and leading the Great California Wind Rush—the market that turned wind craft into an industry that’s still growing fast half a century later.Globally, annual wind generation more than tripled between 2015 and 2025, according to data from <a href="https://ember-energy.org/" target="_blank">Ember Energy</a>, a think tank based in London. It will best nuclear’s global output by the end of this year, Ember predicts. And it all started with Heronemus, says <a href="https://research-hub.nlr.gov/en/persons/robert-thresher/" target="_blank">Robert Thresher</a>, longtime former director of wind research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. (a U.S. Department of Energy lab rebranded late last year as the <a href="https://research-hub.nlr.gov/en/persons/robert-thresher/" target="_blank">National Laboratory of the Rockies</a>). “In my mind he was the father of the people that went out and really made the industry what it is today,” he says.<h2>William Heronemus and the History of Wind Power</h2>I got to know Captain Heronemus posthumously, interviewing his contemporaries and sifting through boxes delivered to the UMass Amherst archival research center’s 25th-floor reading room. During three visits there since 2023, I have discovered clues to his life, thinking, and research process amid the writings where he pitched his big ideas to the world. His papers include proposals to governments, utilities, and deep-pocketed philanthropists and investors, including Jane Fonda and Goldman-Sachs. Papers reveal the internationalism and commitment to service that took Heronemus on renewable-energy consulting trips to Pakistan, Cuba, Côte d’Ivoire, and beyond. Records show meetings with corporate powerhouses like Boeing and Grumman Aerospace and calls on politicians, including the senator and presidential hopeful Ted Kennedy. Postcards from former students exude gratitude. <img alt="Man sits in a chair at his desk, leaning back and holding his eye glasses " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="29d1d2c5d9c9df57024f6f25ff3ca227" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="af5ec" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/man-sits-in-a-chair-at-his-desk-leaning-back-and-holding-his-eye-glasses.jpg?id=66894082&width=980"/> Heronemus sits with a mock-up of a multirotor turbine in his cramped office in Marston Hall, UMass Amherst’s main engineering building. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries I learned that Heronemus turned his attention from ocean engineering to energy a few years after arriving at UMass, when he saw the growing string of nuclear power plants going up along the Connecticut River, which flows past Amherst en route to Long Island Sound. The U.S. government had picked nuclear power as an antidote to the 1970s oil crises, and Northeast utilities had jumped in big. But Heronemus and other UMass engineers worried that the riverside reactors’ waste heat would threaten the river’s ecosystem and bounty.The advent of cooling towers to blow off heat into the air addressed the thermal pollution concern but created another: water depletion. (Nuclear plants consume about 60 million gallons of water per day, per reactor, on average.) And Heronemus perceived other nuclear power liabilities, stemming from his experience with nuclear propulsion on Navy ships. As a design engineer and head of construction and repair for a shipyard, he valued the military’s zero-accident standard for reactors but also knew the high cost of adhering to it. He argued that building expanded versions of the Navy’s pressurized water reactors to power cities and factories couldn’t be both safe and economical. <img alt="Hand-drawn sketch of three wind turbine rotors mounted on a single freestanding pole" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b15b340ec25c8a3cf286b93fe970327d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="13605" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/hand-drawn-sketch-of-three-wind-turbine-rotors-mounted-on-a-single-freestanding-pole.jpg?id=66894094&width=980"/> In 1971, Heronemus designed an offshore turbine with three rotors, but the first big multirotor prototype wouldn’t be built for another four decades. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries He predicted—accurately, as it turned out—that costs would rise sharply as the nuclear industry addressed safety and environmental concerns. “Each plant costs more than its predecessor. The shipyards involved with nuclear reactors came to that conclusion years ago,” he wrote in a 1973 research proposal. He also argued that the risks inherent in nuclear reactors and their radioactive waste were unnecessary given Earth’s abundant solar and wind energy resources. He broadcast those views wherever and whenever he could: before congressional committees, at U.S. Atomic Energy Commission hearings, at academic conferences, in media interviews, and even at Rotary Club luncheons.At a 1973 licensing hearing for the proposed 820-MW <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant" target="_blank">Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant</a> on Long Island, N.Y., for example, Heronemus called affordable nuclear energy a “myth.” He detailed, in its stead, a floating wind power system that could be moored off Long Island and sized to deliver more than four times as much electricity as the Shoreham plant. Each of the 640 floating platforms would carry six rotors and crank out up to 12 MW, some of which would power electrolyzers to generate hydrogen. The hydrogen would be fed to power plants or fuel cells to produce electricity when the wind wasn’t blowing. This seemingly futuristic idea drew on his Navy experience with water-splitting electrolyzers, which supplied the oxygen that enabled subs to remain submerged for months at a time, and NASA’s use of hydrogen fuel cells to power the Apollo missions.More than five decades later, his vision for offshore wind power is big business. Floating platforms are now widely accepted as the future of offshore wind, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/floating-offshore-wind-turbine" target="_self">as necessity pushes the industry to build in deeper waters</a>. Testing began on <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-hydrogen-offshore-wind" target="_self">the first floating electrolysis platforms</a> in 2023, and multirotor turbine prototypes are in development in China, Norway and Scotland.<h2>The UMass Amherst Wind Turbine Legacy</h2>Photos in the UMass archives invariably capture Heronemus in jacket and tie, usually standing bolt straight. That commanding affect, plus his World War II veteran pedigree, Cold War engineering credentials, and his informed, pugnacious attacks made him a hard target for his adversaries in the nuclear establishment. He certainly wasn’t your typical antinuclear activist. <img alt="A man in a suit standing very straight outsider a modular home" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="96d2b39c565092306041f3fd581d2638" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="fd9ad" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-in-a-suit-standing-very-straight-outsider-a-modular-home.jpg?id=66894100&width=980"/> Wielding his Cold War engineering credentials and often dressed in a suit and tie, Heronemus fought hard against nuclear energy, arguing that wind was a far safer and cost-competitive resource.Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries But brutal candor in public settings probably won him as many enemies as friends. Consider his presentation at the <a href="https://ieee-pes.org/" target="_blank">IEEE Power and Energy Society</a>’s 1974 winter meeting, where Heronemus suggested scrapping the utilities’ then nuclear-focused research arm, the <a href="https://www.epri.com/" target="_blank">Electric Power Research Institute</a>. That stance no doubt created discomfort for the engineers in attendance who were involved in EPRI projects, or who aspired to be.It’s hard to say whether Heronemus’s campaign slowed nuclear development. The industry was already struggling with cost overruns when, in 1979, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/three-mile-island" target="_self">a reactor at Three Mile Island</a> in Pennsylvania partially melted down and slammed the brakes on further expansion.What is certain is that Heronemus spurred investment in wind power. When he started talking up wind in the early ’70s, even fellow travelers in the fledgling renewable energy movement were writing it off. As future White House science advisor <a href="https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/john-holdren" target="_blank">John Holdren</a> opined in a 1971 <a href="https://www.sierraclub.org/" target="_blank">Sierra Club</a> book: “There are few places in the world where the wind is strong enough and steady enough to make harnessing it for the large-scale production of power at all interesting.” <img alt="Hand-drawn sketch of a bridge-like structure across a highway containing five wind turbines that resemble giant fans" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="115d1e5e5724981c6df541b570415e05" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="0ea43" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/hand-drawn-sketch-of-a-bridge-like-structure-across-a-highway-containing-five-wind-turbines-that-resemble-giant-fans.jpg?id=66894107&width=980"/> Heronemus dreamed up networks of wind turbines over and along highways after driving down the Garden State Parkway to a conference in Cape May, New Jersey. Ellen Heronemus Heronemus countered the naysayers by quickly forging expert consensus around wind power’s immense potential, playing a key role as the sole wind expert on a <a href="https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730018091/downloads/19730018091.pdf" target="_blank">1972 federal panel on renewable energy</a>. That joint National Science Foundation–NASA panel concluded that, in fact, wind could meet up to 19 percent of projected U.S. power demand by the year 2000.Congress listened, sort of. After most Persian Gulf states restricted oil shipments to the United States in 1973, congressional appropriators dedicated US $1.8 million to wind-power research and development for 1974—up from zero—and by 1976 it had bumped that to $22 million. (For comparison, Congress gave nuclear power $714 million in 1976.) <img alt="Hand-drawn sketch of a massive structure built over the length of a highway holding wind turbines that resemble giant fans " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5dfe81607ae07e27818ac2c6cb26ddec" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="9b105" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/hand-drawn-sketch-of-a-massive-structure-built-over-the-length-of-a-highway-holding-wind-turbines-that-resemble-giant-fans.jpg?id=66894112&width=980"/> Heronemus’s vision for a massive highway wind-power scheme was inspired in part by the wind-power advocate Percy Thomas, who in the 1940s and 1950s “talked a lot about how fresh New Jersey winds are,” he told the New York Times in 1974. “I got to thinking about what Thomas had said and how wind energy could be captured there.” Ellen Heronemus The bulk of the funding for wind power flowed to big aerospace firms and to NASA, financing an ultimately fruitless attempt to leap straight to megawatt-scale wind turbines. UMass struggled to grab a slice of the leftovers to pursue Heronemus’s offshore wind system. Professors and students who worked with Heronemus told me they felt they’d been blackballed as payback for his activism and antagonism. UMass finally caught a funding break when Heronemus dialed back his ambitions and proposed the 25-kW unit for Orchard Hill. A $130,000 federal grant landed in early 1975, and $150,000 more the following year. It was a “trivial” sum, according to team member <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-butterfield-24b38513/" target="_blank">Sandy </a><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandy-butterfield-24b38513/" target="_blank">Butterfield</a>, who would later become chief engineer for wind-turbine testing at NREL. “They gave us just enough to fail,” says Butterfield. <img alt="A crane in the midst of vertically erecting a wind turbine on a single pole " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="30e3242484b0502fe0192acbf79d476e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="53850" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-crane-in-the-midst-of-vertically-erecting-a-wind-turbine-on-a-single-pole.jpg?id=66894118&width=980"/> A crane erects the “Wind Furnace” in November 1976. Sandy Butterfield But the project triumphed, resulting in Wind Furnace 1, or WF-1 (pronounced “woof one”). The young engineers behind it credit their success to the confidence, sense of mission, and structure that Heronemus gave them. The self-described “hippies” called Heronemus “the Captain” out of both affection and respect.As team member Edds puts it: “What showed in his demeanor and his actions was discipline, and it sort of rubbed off on us. We didn’t always dress like the Captain, but we knew we had to be disciplined, to be prepared, and just do the job.”<h2>From Helicopter Rotor to Wind Turbine</h2>Team WF-1 got a quick start, thanks to earlier, privately financed work by a couple of doctoral students, including <a href="https://scua.library.umass.edu/stoddard-forrest-s-1944/" target="_blank">Forrest “Woody” Stoddard</a>. Stoddard had been designing helicopter rotors for the U.S. Air Force when Heronemus invited him to come work on wind power in 1972. Stoddard set about adapting helicopter-rotor theory to the closely related wind rotors, and his aerodynamics modeling proved essential to the engineering of the entire machine. <img alt="Six men squat around a turbine blade that\u2019s wrapped in plastic" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4c5d3e60133bdecbe820fc563784772d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="2001a" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/six-men-squat-around-a-turbine-blade-that-u2019s-wrapped-in-plastic.jpg?id=66894134&width=980"/> Woody Stoddard [far right, in hat] designed the fiberglass blades. The team assembled the blades in a campus shop, and when it was time to squeegee epoxy from the blades, it was all hands on deck. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries As WF-1’s de facto chief designer, Stoddard likely supported the team’s early choice to mimic a helicopter’s ability to “pitch” its blades. To fly forward, a helicopter continuously adjusts the lift created by each blade, turning the airfoil on its long axis to reduce lift as it swings past the front of the aircraft. Doing so tilts the nose down and moves the vehicle forward. In WF-1’s case, blades pitched to regulate torque, helping get the rotor spinning in low winds and then easing off to protect the machine in dangerously high winds.Repurposing a truck axle to mechanically couple WF-1’s rotor and generator was one of several design elements borrowed from engineers at <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/" target="_blank">McGill University</a> in Montreal. Production of WF-1’s fiberglass blades got started at UMass in 1974 under the direction of doctoral student <a href="https://composite-eng.com/" target="_blank">Ted Van Dusen</a>. A competitive rower, he had a side hustle making ultralight composite boats—a trade that had stalled his doctoral work at MIT but was an accelerant for WF-1.The federal funds in 1975 allowed Heronemus to really spin up the project and recruit a squad of students to engineer the balance of WF-1’s components. They made good use of the UMass engineering machine shop and received guidance from faculty, including mechanical engineering professors <a href="https://prabook.com/web/duane_ellis.cromack/230343" target="_blank">Duane Cromack</a> and <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=NmB8VIwAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra" target="_blank">Jon McGowan</a>. But it was the dozen or so students who really cranked out the parts.Most were master’s students, like Butterfield, who designed the blade-pitching mechanics. Edds, the team’s only electrical engineer, had come to UMass to learn ocean engineering, only to be diverted into handling WF-1’s generator. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/louismanfredi" target="_blank">Louis Manfredi</a>, another ocean engineering student, teamed up with master’s student <a href="https://scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/publication/0fe58480-7291-449b-ad9e-9b04625a2132" target="_blank">Jim Sexton</a> on the nacelle housing the generator and drivetrain. <a href="https://scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/publication/40f08f39-f951-46ba-9d92-89865a0fe8bb" target="_blank">Fred Antoon</a> adapted the truck axle. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-kuhn-18616228/" target="_blank">Brian Kuhn</a> did drawings. <img alt="Chains and moving parts inside the rotor of a wind turbine" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b4a8763fd385fece03dbb82995f21441" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="ef40f" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/chains-and-moving-parts-inside-the-rotor-of-a-wind-turbine.jpg?id=66894144&width=980"/> WF-1 contained a mechanism that pitched its blades to regulate torque in response to wind speed, a feature that became an industry standard.Sandy Butterfield An 18-year-old freshman, <a href="https://patents.justia.com/inventor/daniel-f-handman" target="_blank">Dan Handman</a>, came aboard and soon made himself indispensable. When he approached Heronemus to introduce himself, Heronemus handed him three months’ worth of anemometer readings punched into recording paper, and told him to turn it into 15-minute averages. Figuring there had to be a more efficient method for analyzing wind speeds, Handman asked around and found a wind-averaging machine from an earlier student project. A month or so later, he’d installed it in a cabinet near Heronemus’s office and wired it to an anemometer on Orchard Hill.Handman’s primary role on WF-1 was setting up its computerized control system, which tracked wind speed and sent commands to Butterfield’s pitch mechanism. The controls also tracked the generator’s speed and adjusted the current to its rotor windings, in accordance with calculations by Edds. Tweaking the current ensured that power demand from the electric heaters installed in the home below didn’t stop the rotor in weak winds. <img alt="A man in a harness standing at the top of a wind turbine on a single pole, high in the air" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="ba216463bf2eea813371abf85a3350bc" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="a4a0a" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-man-in-a-harness-standing-at-the-top-of-a-wind-turbine-on-a-single-pole-high-in-the-air.jpg?id=66894172&width=980"/> Sandy Butterfield, part of the 1970s “UMass Mafia” team that built WF-1, became a wind-power entrepreneur and a top engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. Sandy Butterfield The finished WF-1 really cranked up the heat, some of which was stored by heating water in tanks in the modular house’s basement, to be circulated through baseboards in windless periods. It turned out WF-1 was unusually efficient at capturing wind energy because its rotor could change speed with the wind, keeping the blades close to an aerodynamic optimum.This varying rotor speed meant that the frequency of the electric power WF-1 produced also varied. Turbines linked to power lines must strive for the opposite—a steady output that synchronizes with the grid’s frequency—primarily 50 or 60 hertz. But it suited the home’s low-tech heating scheme just fine. (Electronic converters let today’s turbines have it all by ingesting a variable wave and outputting a new wave that’s synced to the grid.)<h2>The Great California Wind Rush</h2>In 1977, with WF-1’s success in hand, Heronemus projected that 3 million homes like the one on Orchard Hill could soon slash U.S. heating oil demand by 90 million barrels a year. That never happened, but an industry was born, starting with a Burlington, Mass. startup called US Windpower—the first “credible” U.S. turbine manufacturer, according to Thresher, who is now an emeritus researcher at the National Laboratory of the Rockies. <img alt="Five wind turbines mounted on freestanding poles on farmland" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="9f626997386d9dfcafbcb2d7ade6875d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="06407" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/five-wind-turbines-mounted-on-freestanding-poles-on-farmland.jpg?id=66894183&width=980"/> Belgian-made WindMaster turbines erected at Altamont Pass signaled the coming of the California wind rush. UMass team member Woody Stoddard conducted engineering analyses of many early designs deployed there.Bettman/Getty Images Boston-area entrepreneurs Russell Wolfe and Stanley Charren launched US Windpower with Stoddard and Van Dusen after visiting Heronemus in 1974 and liking what they heard. They adapted WF-1’s design to make it suitable for grid-connected operation, building and breaking prototypes before erecting the world’s first grid-connected wind farm in 1980—<a href="https://granitegeek.concordmonitor.com/2017/11/29/nations-first-real-wind-farm-new-hampshire/" target="_blank">20 turbines on a mountain in New Hampshire</a>. California’s water authority placed an order for 100 MW of wind power, and in 1981 US Windpower began <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/14/us/private-investors-selling-wind-power-to-utilities.html" target="_blank">installing hundreds of turbines in Altamont Pass</a>, east of San Francisco.As more firms jumped to California, drawn by state government incentives, WF-1’s creators and the next cohort of UMass grads assumed important roles in the nascent market. Seven joined Energy Sciences, a startup cofounded by Butterfield. More joined U.S. Windpower. Stoddard left that company to start a consulting firm and ended up advising some of Denmark’s modern wind pioneers, which rapidly expanded thanks to the California market. Those early Danish firms made relatively simple, sturdy machines that subsequently scaled up and dominated globally for several decades — until China embraced wind power.The California wind power boom peaked in 1986, after which energy prices collapsed and incentives faded. Most manufacturers were bankrupted by equipment failures and financial challenges, making the 1990s a tough time for wind power’s pioneers. Many UMass wind engineers, like Butterfield, joined Thresher’s operation at NREL, culling everything they could from the California experience.<h3></h3> “An entire generation of U.S. wind engineers got their graduate training, at least in part, using the Wind Furnace.”—Harold WallaceThere, Heronemus’s protégés became known as the “UMass Mafia.” Thresher says it attests to the crew’s impact: “There were others. But that UMass Mafia were really leaders in the field. I think that’s the heritage we got from Bill Heronemus. Those people were so impactful and the education they got [with Heronemus] was the key.” What Heronemus began at the university became the <a href="https://www.umass.edu/windenergy/home/index.html" target="_blank">UMass Wind Energy Center</a>, which has awarded over 300 graduate degrees.WF-1 now rests in the <a href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1389175" target="_blank">Smithsonian Institution’s collections</a> in Washington, D.C. It earned its place there, as Smithsonian’s only modern wind turbine, because it represents wind energy’s revival, according to <a href="https://profiles.si.edu/display/nwallaceh1102006" target="_blank">Harold Wallace</a>, Smithsonian’s curator for electricity collections. “An entire generation of U.S. wind engineers got their graduate training, at least in part, using the Wind Furnace,” he says.Heronemus didn’t get to witness the production of the massive offshore machines that he foresaw. He lost his long fight with cancer in November 2002, at the age of 82, even as former students and family members were racing to patent his multirotor and floating turbine designs.Had he lived longer, the Captain would almost certainly have railed against current U.S. energy policy. The U.S. government has never backed wind power as generously as he’d hoped. Wind supplied 10 percent of U.S. generation last year—that’s half the share in Europe—with offshore turbines providing only a tiny sliver. Federal support for wind power has been in a stop-go cycle since Ronald Reagan’s administration, and it’s hit a low again under President Donald Trump, who has vowed to stop wind power cold. As <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/01/09/trump-assails-windmills-and-wind-energy-as-junk-theyre-losers/88108694007/" target="_blank">Trump boasted to oil executives</a> in January: “We have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office, and we’re going to keep it that way.”Under Trump, stop-work orders have disrupted offshore projects from Massachusetts to Virginia, contributing to a nearly <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/28/business/ge-vernova-offshore-wind-losses/" target="_blank">$600 million loss in 2025 for GE Vernova’s wind business</a>. GE Vernova is the only major wind turbine manufacturer remaining in the United States, and it too can be <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US5083039A/en" target="_blank">traced back to Heronemus via a US Windpower patent</a>.In stark contrast, European and Asian countries have been going big on offshore wind and are now developing floating wind farms to push into deeper waters. China might be the one to finally conjure up Heronemus’s favored wind design: floating platforms bearing massive multirotor machines. In 2024, Zhongshan-based turbine maker <a href="https://en.myse.com.cn/" target="_blank">Ming Yang Smart Energy Group</a> deployed a two-rotor offshore prototype. The company says <a href="https://www.rechargenews.com/technology/mingyang-building-50mw-offshore-wind-turbine/2-1-1888862" target="_blank">its next iteration will generate a whopping 50 MW</a>—a twin-headed beast that would be the world’s most powerful wind machine.That will be a bittersweet moment for the U.S. wind industry and Captain William Heronemus’s UMass Mafia, for whom such massive machines are a dream come true. Joanne Carroll, a retired member of the UMass Mafia, says she remembers the very moment, her freshman year, when Heronemus’s dream became hers. While he was lecturing in Introduction to Engineering about the hidden costs of coal-fired power, Heronemus walked to the window and said: “‘But out there there’s wind, and you can harvest that energy,’” Carroll recalled. “And I remember thinking: That’s what I want to do with my life.” The author would like to give special thanks to UMass professor emeritus James Manwell for his assistance with this story. Reference: https://ift.tt/N78Kc02