China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said.

Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends.

"We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amid a flurry of lawsuits over AI models' training data, US Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has introduced (PDF) a bill that would require AI companies to disclose exactly which copyrighted works are included in datasets training AI systems. The Generative AI Disclosure Act "would require a notice to be submitted to the Register of Copyrights prior to the release of a new generative AI system with regard to all copyrighted works used in building or altering the training dataset for that system," Schiff said in a press release.

The bill is retroactive and would apply to all AI systems available today, as well as to all AI systems to come. It would take effect 180 days after it's enacted, requiring anyone who creates or alters a training set not only to list works referenced by the dataset, but also to provide a URL to the dataset within 30 days before the AI system is released to the public. That URL would presumably give creators a way to double-check if their materials have been used and seek any credit or compensation available before the AI tools are in use. All notices would be kept in a publicly available online database.

Currently, creators who don't have access to training datasets rely on AI models' outputs to figure out if their copyrighted works may have been included in training various AI systems. The New York Times, for example, prompted ChatGPT to spit out excerpts of its articles, relying on a tactic to identify training data by asking ChatGPT to produce lines from specific articles, which OpenAI has curiously described as "hacking." Under Schiff's law, The New York Times would need to consult the database to ID all articles used to train ChatGPT or any other AI system. Any AI maker who violates the act would risk a "civil penalty in an amount not less than $5,000," the proposed bill said. Schiff described the act as championing "innovation while safeguarding the rights and contributions of creators, ensuring they are aware when their work contributes to AI training datasets."

"This is about respecting creativity in the age of AI and marrying technological progress with fairness," Schiff said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Ministers are considering banning the sale of smartphones to children under the age of 16 after a number of polls have shown significant public support for such a curb. The government issued guidance on the use of mobile phones in English schools two months ago, but other curbs are said to have been considered to better protect children after a number of campaigns. [...] A March survey by Parentkind, of 2,496 parents of school-age children in England, found 58% of parents believe the government should ban smartphones for under-16s. It also found more than four in five parents said they felt smartphones were "harmful" to children and young people.

Another survey by More in Common revealed 64% of people thought that a ban on selling smartphones to under-16s would be a good idea, compared with 20% who said it was a bad idea. The curb was even popular among 2019 Tory voters, according to the thinktank, which found 72% backed a ban, as did 61% of Labour voters. But the thought of another ban has left some Conservatives uneasy. One Tory government source described the idea as "out of touch," noting: "It's not the government's role to step in and microparent; we're meant to make parents more aware of the powers they have like restrictions on websites, apps and even the use of parental control apps." They said only in extreme cases could the government "parent better than actual parents and guardians."

Rachel Treisman reports via NPR: Authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are banning music they consider either too fast or too slow, effectively criminalizing many genres. The Chechen Ministry of Culture announced the ban on its website last week, by the order of Culture Minister Musa Dadayev and with the agreement of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. "Musical, vocal and choreographic" works will be limited to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) to "conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm," said Dadayev, according to the Russian state-run news agency TASS.

"Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible," Dadayev said, per a translation by The Guardian. "We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens." Russian media report that artists have until June 1 to rewrite any music that doesn't conform to the new rule, though it's not clear how it will be enforced. [...]

The government's crackdown on certain musical tempos would silence most modern music genres. Electronic styles of music like house, techno and dubstep all tend to have BPMs of over 116, says the audio tech company Izotope, while the average tempo of 2020's best-selling pop songs was 122 BPM, according to the BBC. The independent Russian news outlet Meduza said the tempo of the Russian national anthem would be considered too slow under the new limit, reports RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. But it would seem to permit hip-hop music, which generally has a BPM of 85 to 95. "Chechnya is a roughly 6,700-square-mile autonomous republic situated in the North Caucasus of southern Russia and home to some 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom are Muslim," notes NPR. "The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has said Kadyrov's regime 'maintains hegemony through the imposition of a purported 'traditional' version of Islam, which falsely claims to defend local belief and culture, and combat violent extremism.'"

"'In reality, Kadyrov has [co-opted] Chechen religion and culture to support his brutal regime, which violates the secular constitution of the Russian Federation and international standards of freedom of religion or belief,' it added."

Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice told Yahoo Finance it plans to go public within the next 18 months at a valuation of $5.3 billion. Since being spun out of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation in 2021, the company has "placed its bets on building out the growing space economy, from developing rocket propulsion technology to a commercial space station with Blue Origin." From the report: Its ambitions have fueled the development of its cargo space plane, the Dream Chaser, set to have its inaugural mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in the second half of this year. Built to land on any commercial runway, the plane will lower the barrier to entry into low-earth orbit and open up business opportunities, Vice said. "Since the 1960s, every science experiment or human being that's come back to earth from space, even today, is still landing in a capsule in the ocean," he said. "We think changing and revolutionizing the way that we bring things back from space, both humans and cargo, and landing [the spacecraft] back at a commercial runway will completely accelerate the new space economy."

"We believe that the next big breakthrough products in oncology, longevity, and industrialized components like glass will be produced in low Earth orbit," Vice said, noting that many of those opportunities are likely to come from the development of commercial space stations to replace the decades-old ISS. Sierra Space has partnered with Blue Origin to build out the Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station, though recent reports have hinted at tension between the corporate partners. "We're transitioning from decades of government-run space stations with just a handful of government-trained astronauts to the full commercialization of low Earth orbit," Vice said. "We think that's going to create, we believe, probably the most profound industrial revolution and grow that space economy well over a trillion dollars by 2040."

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian, with the caption: "The UK is hyperventilating about stories of shoplifting; though standing outside a shop and watching as a guy calmly gets off his bike, parks it, walks in and walks out with a pack of beer and cycles off -- and then seeing staff members rushing out -- was striking. So now it's throwing technical solutions at the problem..." From the report: The government is investing more than 55 million pounds in expanding facial recognition systems -- including vans that will scan crowded high streets -- as part of a renewed crackdown on shoplifting. The scheme was announced alongside plans for tougher punishments for serial or abusive shoplifters in England and Wales, including being forced to wear a tag to ensure they do not revisit the scene of their crime, under a new standalone criminal offense of assaulting a retail worker.

The new law, under which perpetrators could be sent to prison for up to six months and receive unlimited fines, will be introduced via an amendment to the criminal justice bill that is working its way through parliament. The change could happen as early as the summer. The government said it would invest 55.5 million pounds over the next four years. The plan includes 4 million pounds for mobile units that can be deployed on high streets using live facial recognition in crowded areas to identify people wanted by the police -- including repeat shoplifters. "This Orwellian tech has no place in Britain," said Silkie Carlo, director of civil liberties at campaign group Big Brother Watch. "Criminals should be brought to justice, but papering over the cracks of broken policing with Orwellian tech is not the solution. It is completely absurd to inflict mass surveillance on the general public under the premise of fighting theft while police are failing to even turn up to 40% of violent shoplifting incidents or to properly investigate many more serious crimes."

A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force AI companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. From a report: The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.

The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies.

"AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections," Schiff said in a statement. Whether major AI companies worth billions have made illegal use of copyrighted works is increasingly the source of litigation and government investigation. Schiff's bill would not ban AI from training on copyrighted material, but would put a sizable onus on companies to list the massive swath of works that they use to build tools like ChatGPT -- data that is usually kept private.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, opines on the bill that seeks to ban TikTok or force its parent firm to divest the U.S. business: Even if one could argue that this bill strikes at the First Amendment, there is legal precedent for doing so. In 1981, Haig vs Agee established that there are circumstances under which the government can lawfully impinge upon an individual's First Amendment rights if it is necessary to protect national security and prevent substantial harm. TikTok and the AI that can be channelled through it are national and homeland security issues that meet these standards.

Should this bill turn into law, the president would have the power to force any foreign-owned social media to be sold if US intelligence agencies deem them a national security threat. This broader scope should protect against challenges that this is a bill of attainder. Similar language helped protect effective bans on Huawei and Kaspersky Lab. As for TikTok's value as a boon to consumers and businesses, there are many companies that could quickly replace it. In 2020, after India banned TikTok amid geopolitical tensions between Beijing and New Delhi, services including Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, MX TakaTak, Chingari and others filled the void.Â

Few appreciate that TikTok is not available in China. Instead, Chinese consumers use Douyin, the sister app that features educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to 40 minutes per day of total usage. Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl -- another chief export of China's -- for ours. Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.

More than 200 chemical plants across the country will be required to curb the toxic pollutants they release into the air [non-paywalled link] under a regulation announced by the Biden administration on Tuesday. From a report: The regulation is aimed at reducing the risk of cancer for people living near industrial sites. This is the first time in nearly two decades that the government has tightened limits on pollution from chemical plants. The new rule, from the Environmental Protection Agency, specifically targets ethylene oxide, which is used to sterilize medical devices, and chloroprene, which is used to make rubber in footwear.

The E.P.A. has classified the two chemicals as likely carcinogens. They are considered a top health concern in an area of Louisiana so dense with petrochemical and refinery plants that it is known as Cancer Alley. Most of the facilities affected by the rule are in Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast as well as in the Ohio River Valley and West Virginia. Communities in proximity to the plants are often disproportionately Black or Latino and have elevated rates of cancer, respiratory problems and premature deaths.

By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation's history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity. From a report: Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it's been more than just a place to take a break from her work as a digital archivist -- becoming wholly a part of that work.

A project Argondizzo galvanized comes to full fruition this week. The Internet Archive is now home to the Aruba Collection, which hosts digitized versions of Aruba's National Library, National Archives, and other institutions including an archaeology museum and the University of Aruba. The collection comprises 101,376 items so far -- roughly one for each person who lives on the Island -- including 40,000 documents, 60,000 images, and seven 3D objects.

The Internet Archive is mostly known for trying to back up online resources like websites that don't have a government body advocating for their posterity. Being tapped to back up an entire nation's history takes the nonprofit into new territory, and it is a striking endorsement of its mission to bring as much information online as possible. "What makes Aruba unique is they have cooperation from all the leading cultural heritage players in the country," says Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive's director of library services. "It's just an awesome statement." The project is funded wholly by the Internet Archive, in line with its policy of generally letting anyone upload content.

The Federal Communications Commission chair decided not to impose Universal Service fees on Internet service, rejecting arguments for new assessments to shore up an FCC fund that subsidizes broadband network expansions and provides discounts to low-income consumers. From a report: The $8 billion-a-year Universal Service Fund (USF) pays for FCC programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a "Universal Service" line item on telephone bills.

Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund's size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services. Some consumer advocates want the FCC to increase the fund in order to replace the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a different government program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes but is about to run out of money because of inaction by Congress. The Universal Service funding question is coming up now because, on April 25, the FCC is scheduled to vote on reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service in order to re-impose the net neutrality rules scrapped during the Trump era. Imposing Universal Service charges on broadband would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's net neutrality proposal takes the same stance against requiring Universal Service contributions that the FCC took in 2015 when it first imposed the net neutrality rules.

A jailed trader accused of stealing $110 million on the Mango Markets exchange faces a criminal trial this week that will test the reach of a US crackdown on cryptocurrencies. From a report: Prosecutors charged Avraham Eisenberg with manipulating Mango Markets futures contracts on Oct. 11, 2022, to boost the price of swaps by 1,300% in 20 minutes. He then "borrowed" from the exchange against the inflated value of those contracts, a move the government claims was a theft. Jury selection begins Monday in New York federal court, where groundbreaking crypto cases have played out. FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced there last month to 25 years in prison for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar scheme, while Terraform Labs Pte. and co-founder Do Kwon were found liable Friday for fraud in civil trial over the firm's 2022 collapse, which wiped out $40 billion in investor assets.

Eisenberg, a self-described "applied game theorist," claims his actions weren't theft at all. Rather, he says, he legally exploited a weakness in the decentralized finance application. The trial will apparently be the first time a US criminal jury will weigh what type of "DeFi" transactions are legal. In the crypto world, where digital blockchains govern who owns what, the virtual ecosystem is built around the notion that "code is law." It means that if something isn't explicitly forbidden by terms of a crypto platform, then government can't intercede. But prosecutors say those rules can't protect traders against possible criminal charges for market manipulation or fraud.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday it would award Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's unit a $6.6 billion subsidy for advanced semiconductor production in Phoenix, Arizona and up to $5 billion in low-cost government loans. From a report: TSMC agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona fab by 2030, Commerce said in announcing the preliminary award. The Taiwanese company will produce the world's most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona fab expected to begin production in 2028, the department said.

"These are the chips that underpin all artificial intelligence, and they are the chips that are necessary components for the technologies that we need to underpin our economy, but frankly, a 21st century military and national security apparatus," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement. TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to Apple and Nvidia had previously announced plans to invest $40 billion in Arizona. TSMC expects to begin high-volume production in its first U.S. fab there by the first half of 2025, Commerce said. The $65 billion-plus investment by TSMC is the largest foreign direct investment in a completely new project in U.S. history, the department said.

The Seattle Times has a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist named Dominic Gates. Sunday he published an expose on "a yearslong decline of safety standards" at Boeing.

After a 1997 merger, its new executive leaders "treated experienced engineers and machinists as expendable, ignoring the potential damage to Boeing's essential mission of designing and building high-quality airplanes...." The arc of Boeing's fall can be traced back a quarter century, to when its leaders elevated the interests of shareholders above all others, said Richard Aboulafia, industry analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory. "Crush the workers. Share price. Share price. Share price. Financial moves and metrics come first," was Boeing's philosophy, he said. It was, he said, "a ruthless effort to cut costs without any realization of what it could do to capabilities...." Its leaders outsourced work, sold off whole divisions and discarded key capabilities such as developing avionics, machining parts and building fuselages. On the 787, they even outsourced the jet's wings to Japan. They moved work away from Boeing's highly skilled, unionized base in the Puget Sound region. They weakened unions and extorted state government with repeated threats to build future airplanes elsewhere. They squeezed suppliers by demanding price cuts every year that in turn forced the suppliers into ruinous cost-cutting and left them vulnerable to collapse during shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic....

Belatedly, Boeing's current leaders, overwhelmed by criticism, mockery and outrage since January, have finally admitted publicly that some key strategies they pursued for decades were flawed. "Boeing, more than 20 years ago, probably got a little too far ahead of itself on the topic of outsourcing," Chief Financial Officer Brian West said last month. And in January, on CNBC, Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun conceded: "Did it go too far? Yeah, probably did."

Both were speaking about major supplier Spirit AeroSystems of Wichita, Kan., part of Boeing until it was sold off two decades ago, part of a broad divestment of assets to please Wall Street and boost the stock. Following a litany of quality lapses in Wichita, Boeing is now admitting a mistake and trying to buy Spirit back — "for safety and for quality," said West. Another mistake belatedly recognized: With annual bonuses for Boeing's factory managers based largely on meeting cost and schedule targets, it was long a cardinal sin to stop the assembly line. That meant unfinished jobs piled up on aircraft as they moved forward down the line, what Boeing calls "traveled work." Done out of sequence, this work is more difficult and takes much longer. If too much traveled work piles up, it creates chaos. That's what happened in Renton on the 737 assembly line. "For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that's got to change," West said. "Once you reduce traveled work, your quality gets better...."

Speaking of how Spirit might be fixed, West said: "It's really about focus and running it, not as a business, as a factory. Run it as a factory and stay focused on safety and quality and stability."
Phil Chandler, a highly skilled Boeing machinist for more than 42 years (retiring in 2020), saw a "dictatorial" approach on the factory floor, according to the article. "Whereas in the past, first-level and even second-level managers in the factory had come up through the ranks as mechanics and had deep knowledge of the work, after [Boeing president Harry] Stonecipher came in those jobs shifted to white-collar people with degrees, often with MBAs."

And a former Boeing physicist also complains about the "shoot-the-messenger" management approach when developing their 787, according to the article: "Engineers who raised technical doubts were told: 'Follow the plan. If you can't do your job, I'll fire you and get someone who can.'"

It's the world's most widely used vulnerability database, reports SC Magazine, offering standards-based data on CVSS severity scores, impacted software and platforms, contributing weaknesses, and links to patches and additional resources.

But "there is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities" submitted to America's National Vulnerability Database and "requiring analysis", according to a new announcement from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards. "This is based on a variety of factors, including an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support." From SC Magazine: According to NIST's website, the institute analyzed only 199 of 3370 CVEs it received last month. [And this month another 677 came in — of which 24 have been analyzed.]

Other than a short notice advising it was working to establish a new consortium to improve the NVD, NIST had not provided a public explanation for the problems prior to a statement published [April 2]... "Currently, we are prioritizing analysis of the most significant vulnerabilities. In addition, we are working with our agency partners to bring on more support for analyzing vulnerabilities and have reassigned additional NIST staff to this task as well."

NIST, which had its budget cut by almost 12% this year by lawmakers, said it was committed to continuing to support and manage the NVD, which it described as "a key piece of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure... We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD," the statement said. "We will provide more information as these plans develop..."

A group of cybersecurity professionals have signed an open letter to Congress and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in which they say the enrichment issue is the result of a recent 20% cut in NVD funding.
The article also cites remarks from NVD program manager Tanya Brewer (reported by Infosecurity Magazine) from last week's VulnCon conference on plans to establish a NVD consortium. "We're not going to shut down the NVD; we're in the process of fixing the current problem. And then, we're going to make the NVD robust again and we'll make it grow."

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

This week America's Department of Energy announced "a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings by 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050." The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led the Blueprint's development in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies. The Blueprint is the first sector-wide strategy for building decarbonization developed by the federal government... "America's building sector accounts for more than a third of the harmful emissions jeopardizing our air and health..." said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "As part of a whole-of-government approach, the Department of Energy is outlining for the first time ever a comprehensive federal plan to reduce energy in our homes, schools, and workplaces — lowering utility bills and creating healthier communities while combating the climate crisis."

Buildings account for more than one third of domestic climate pollution and $370 billion in annual energy costs... The Blueprint projects reductions of 90% of total greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings sector, which will save consumers more than $100 billion in annual energy costs and avoid $17 billion in annual health costs.
Just for example, the Department of Energy's Affordable Home Energy Shot program "aims to reduce the upfront cost of upgrading a home by at least 50% and reduce energy bills by 20% within a decade." (Meanwhile, the federal government's role in making more change happen faster includes financing, funding R&D on lower-cost technologies, expanding markets, and "supporting the development and implementation of emissions-reducing building codes and appliance standards.")

Besides the national blueprint, the Department also announced an expansion of its Better Buildings Commercial Building Heat Pump Accelerator initiative. In this program, "manufacturers will produce higher efficiency and life cycle cost-effective heat pump rooftop units and commercial organizations will evaluate and adopt next-generation heat pump technology."

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said the program "builds on more than a decade of public-private partnerships to get cutting edge clean technologies from lab to market, helping to slash harmful carbon emissions throughout our economy." On average, between 20% and 30% of the nation's energy is wasted, presenting a significant opportunity to increase energy efficiency. Through the Better Buildings Initiative, DOE partners with public and private sector stakeholders to pursue ambitious portfolio-wide energy, waste, water, and/or emissions reduction goals and publicly share solutions. By improving building design, materials, equipment, and operations, energy efficiency gains can be achieved across broad segments of the nation's economy.

The Accelerator initiative was developed with commercial end users like Amazon, IKEA, and Target, and already includes manufacturers AAON, Carrier Global Corp., Lennox International, Rheem Manufacturing Co., Trane Technologies, and York International Corp. The Accelerator aims to bring more efficient, affordable next-generation heat pump rooftop units to market as soon as 2027 — which will slash both emissions and energy costs in half compared to natural gas-fueled heat pumps. If deployed at scale, they could save American businesses and commercial entities $5 billion on utility bills every year.

While the European Parliament passed a wide-ranging "AI Act" in March, "Leaders from Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI have all called for AI regulations in the U.S.," writes CIO magazine. Even the Chamber of Commerce, "often opposed to business regulation, has called on Congress to protect human rights and national security as AI use expands," according to the article, while the White House has released a blueprint for an AI bill of rights.

But even though the U.S. Congress hasn't passed AI legislation — 16 different U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023." Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board."
There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias, requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues."

One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical harms."

Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment "underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent framework for AI usage."

Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

Thursday America's Environmental Protection Agency "awarded $20 billion to help finance clean-energy projects across the country," reports the Washington Post. The money comes from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established by President Biden's signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The fund seeks to leverage public and private dollars to invest in clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and more.

The program is potentially one of the most consequential — yet least understood — parts of the climate law...

Simply put, the program allows people to access low-interest loans for clean-energy projects that they might not otherwise have received. Imagine a community group that wants to install electric vehicle charging stations at its neighborhood recreation center but can't get a loan from a bank or a lender. As is often the case, potential lenders say they're hesitant to support a novel green technology or a business without a track record of success. Low-income and minority communities have long encountered such obstacles in trying to attract private capital. The program aims to overcome this problem by providing a huge influx of federal cash — $27 billion in total — for nonprofit organizations to dole out to clean-energy projects nationwide. Each nonprofit will serve as a "green bank" that offers more favorable lending rates than commercial banks. "It's just really hard to get banks to bring capital into low-income communities, especially for these new projects that they're not used to financing," said Adrian Deveny, the founder of the firm Climate Vision and the former director of energy and environmental policy for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the Inflation Reduction Act....

The EPA is awarding money to eight nonprofits, which have committed to leverage nearly $7 in private capital for every $1 of federal investment. The nonprofits have also pledged to ensure that at least 70 percent of the funds will benefit disadvantaged communities, and that the financed projects will reduce up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 9 million gasoline-powered cars... [The nonprofit] Coalition for Green Capital, will use a $5 billion award to establish a "national green bank," co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt said. "We're going to be able to cause about $100 billion of total additional investment over a seven-year time period with that number, because we can leverage it," Hundt said.

Leaders from two key committees in the U.S. Congress "are nearing an agreement on a national framework aimed at protecting Americans' personal data online," reports the Washington Post.

They call the move "a significant milestone that could put lawmakers closer than ever to passing legislation that has eluded them for decades, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the talks." The tentative deal is expected to broker a compromise between congressional Democrats and Republicans by preempting state data protection laws and creating a mechanism to let individuals sue companies that violate their privacy, the person said. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairs of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively, are expected to announce the deal next week...

Lawmakers have tried to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law for more than two decades, but negotiations in both chambers have repeatedly broken down amid partisan disputes over the scope of the protections. Those divides have created a vacuum that states have increasingly looked to fill, with more than a dozen passing their own privacy laws... [T]heir expected deal would mark the first time the heads of the two powerful commerce committees, which oversee a broad swath of internet policy, have come to terms on a major consumer privacy bill...

The federal government already has laws safeguarding people's health and financial data, in addition to protections for children's personal data, but there's no overarching standard to regulate the vast majority of the collection, use and sale of data that companies engage in online.

Longtime Slashdot reader DrunkenTerror shares a report from AnandTech: SK hynix this week announced plans to build its advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana. The move can be considered as a milestone both for the memory maker and the U.S., as this is the first advanced memory packaging facility in the country and the company's first significant manufacturing operation in America. The facility will be used to build next-generation types of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks when it begins operations in 2028. Also, SK hynix agreed to work on R&D projects with Purdue University.

The facility will handle assembly of HBM known good stacked dies (KGSDs), which consist of multiple memory devices stacked on a base die. Furthermore, it will be used to develop next-generations of HBM and will therefore house a packaging R&D line. However, the plant will not make DRAM dies themselves, and will likely source them from SK hynix's fabs in South Korea. The plant will require SK hynix to invest $3.87 billion, which will make it one of the most advanced semiconductor packaging facilities in the world. Meanwhile, SK hynix held the investment agreement ceremony with representatives from Indiana State, Purdue University, and the U.S. government, which indicates parties financially involved in the project, but this week's event did not disclose whether SK hynix will receive any money from the U.S. government under the CHIPS Act or other funding initiatives.