An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Tesla's use of in-car cameras to record and transmit video footage of passengers to develop self-driving technology raises privacy concerns, influential U.S. magazine Consumer Reports said on Tuesday. Consumer Reports said the usage potentially undermines the safety benefits of driver monitoring, which is to alert drivers when they are not paying attention to the road.

"If Tesla has the ability to determine if the driver isn't paying attention, it needs to warn the driver in the moment, like other automakers already do," said Jake Fisher, senior director of Consumer Reports' auto test center. Automakers such as Ford Motor and General Motors, whose monitoring systems do not record or transmit data or video, use infrared technology to identify drivers' eye movements or head position to warn them if they are exhibiting signs of impairment or distraction, the magazine said. Last week, the Chinese government restricted the use of Tesla's vehicles by military staff and employees of key state-owned companies, citing concerns that the data collected by the cars could be a source of national security leaks.

Elon Musk responded by saying that Tesla would be shut down if its cars were used to spy.

Prince Harry will become chief impact officer of BetterUp Inc., a professional coaching platform based in Silicon Valley with a goal to "fuel whole person growth through individual coaching and custom support." CBS News reports: "As a true citizen of the world, he has dedicated his life's work to bringing attention to the diverse needs of people everywhere and advocating for mental health initiatives: from founding the Invictus Games, a platform for service personnel to use sport as part of their psychological and physical rehabilitation, to launching Sentebale, which supports the mental health and wellbeing of young people affected by HIV in Lesotho and Botswana," [CEO Alexi Roubichaux said in a blog post].

In his own blog post, Harry said he joined BetterUp because he believes "that focusing on and prioritizing our mental fitness unlocks potential and opportunity that we never knew we had inside of us." "As the Royal Marine Commandos say, 'It's a state of mind.' We all have it in us," he continued. He said during his decade in the military, he learned that "we don't just need to build physical resilience, but also mental resilience." "And in the years since, my understanding of what resilience means -- and how we can build it -- has been shaped by the thousands of people and experts I've been fortunate to meet and learn from," Harry said. Harry revealed he has worked with a BetterUp coach, which he found "invaluable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: U.S. military pilots and satellites have recorded "a lot more" sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, than have been made public, Donald Trump's former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said. Asked on Fox News about a forthcoming government report on "unidentified aerial phenomena," Ratcliffe said the report would document previously unknown sightings from "all over the world." "Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public," he said. "Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have been seen by navy or air force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."

The UFO report must be published by early June, pursuant to a clause in a Covid relief and spending package signed by Trump before he left office. [...] The forthcoming report is to be issued by the defense department and intelligence agencies. When an unidentified aerial phenomena is identified, Ratcliffe said, analysts try to explain it as a potential weather disturbance or other routine spectacle.

"We always look for a plausible application," he said. "Sometimes we wonder whether our adversaries have technologies that are a little but farther down the road than we thought or that we realized. But there are instances where we don't have good explanations. So in short, things that we are observing that are difficult to explain -- and so there's actually quite a few of those, and I think that that info has been gathered and will be put out in a way the American people can see." Asked by Bartiromo where the unidentified phenomena were sighted, Ratcliffe replied, "actually all over the world, there have been sightings all over the world. "Multiple sensors that are picking up these things. They're unexplained phenomenon, and there's actually quite a few more than have been made public."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The size of the Army is to be reduced to 72,500 soldiers by 2025 as part of a move towards drones and cyber warfare. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said "increased deployability and technological advantage" meant greater effect could be delivered by fewer people. He set out plans for new capabilities such as electronic warfare and drones in a command paper in the Commons. Labour has warned that "size matters" when it comes to defence.

Announcing a major overhaul of the armed forces, Mr Wallace said it marked a shift from "mass mobilization to information age speed," insisting they must be able to "seek out and understand" new threats to the country's security. A cut to the size of the Army had been anticipated -- with a reduction of 10,000 widely trailed. What Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced was a cut to the target for the number of fully trained people in the Army, from 82,040 today to 72,500 in 2025. The changes set out in the paper -- titled Defence in a Competitive Age -- include 3 billion pounds for new vehicles, long-range rocket systems, drones, electronic warfare and cyber capabilities. The UK is putting more resources into cyber warfare via the creation of the National Cyber Force based in the North West of England. It's also putting more resources ($6.6 billion for research and development) into space that may function similarly to the U.S. Space Force.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a discussion between a 77-year-old "father of the internet" and a 75-year-old "father of public key cryptography". Long before Vinton Cerf and Martin Hellman changed the world with their inventions, they were young assistant professors at Stanford University who became fast friends... More than 50 years and two technological revolutions later, the friendship between Vint and Marty — as they know each other — endures. This is despite, or perhaps because of, their sometimes different views. You see, while they do not always agree, they both enjoy a good intellectual debate, especially when the humans they sought to bring together with their inventions face existential threats.

Not long after giving the world public key cryptography, Hellman switched his focus from encryption to efforts that might avoid nuclear war. "What's the point of developing new algorithms if there's not likely to be anybody around in 50-100 years?" Hellman recalls thinking at the time... On a recent private phone call with each other, the two friends discussed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's project seeking to answer the question, "Should the U.S. use quantitative methods to assess the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism?"

While both agree that the US needs to understand the risk of nuclear war, they disagree about whether a quantitative analysis is necessary.
"Quantitative estimates run either the real or perceived risk of being twisted to support whatever conclusion is desired," Cerf argues — while sharing instead an analogy he believes illustrates the risks of the 13,410 nuclear weapons currently in the world (91% divided between Russia and the U.S.)

But Hellman counters that "When the risk is highly uncertain, how do you determine who's right?" He ultimately suggests quantifying the risks would make society more fully aware of the stakes.

"I hope you will agree with either my quantitative approach or Vint's qualitative approach," Hellman concludes, "both of which conclude that the risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high and risk reduction measures are urgently needed." But for those who accept neither approach, Hellman adds two questions:

• What evidence supports the belief that the risk of nuclear deterrence failing is currently at an acceptable level?
• Can we responsibly bet humanity's existence on a strategy for which the risk of failure is totally unknown?

If you were on the call — what would you say?

For 30 years David E. Sanger has been covering foreign policy and nuclear proliferation for The New York Times — twice working on Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. But now as American and Chinese officials meet in Alaska, Sanger argues that China's power doesn't come from weapons — nuclear or otherwise: Instead, it arises from their expanding economic might and how they use their government-subsidized technology to wire nations be it Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe, with 5G wireless networks intended to tie them ever closer to Beijing. It comes from the undersea cables they are spooling around the world so that those networks run on Chinese-owned circuits. Ultimately, it will come from how they use those networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism by, for example, selling other nations facial recognition software that has enabled them to clamp down on dissent at home.

Which is why Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden's national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, warned in a series of writings in recent years that it could be a mistake to assume that China plans to prevail by directly taking on the United States military in the Pacific. "The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership," he wrote, "and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a necessary precondition for sustaining such leadership...."

Part of the goal of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden administration is determined to compete with Beijing across the board to offer competitive technology, like semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, even if that means spending billions on government-led research and development projects, and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia... But it will take months, at best, to publish a broad new strategy, and it is unclear whether corporate America or major allies will get behind it.

hackingbear writes: The Wall Street Journal reports that China's government is restricting the use of Tesla's vehicles by military staff and employees of key state-owned companies (Source paywalled; alternative source), citing concerns that the data collected by the cars could be a source of national security leaks. "The move follows a government security review of Tesla's vehicles, which Chinese officials said raised concerns because the cars' cameras can constantly record images, the people said, as well as obtain various data such as when, how and where the cars are being used, and the contact list of mobile phones that are synced to the cars," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The government is concerned that some data could be sent back to the U.S., the people said."

The move appears to be a retaliation against U.S. restrictions on the use of communications equipment made by a slate of Chinese companies including Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that Washington has labeled a national security threat over fears it could spy for Beijing -- allegations which Huawei denies and which base more on overheating US-China rivalry than actual evidences.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard. "Ulysses can provide our clients with the ability to remotely geolocate vehicles in nearly every country except for North Korea and Cuba on a near real time basis," the document, written by contractor The Ulysses Group, reads. "Currently, we can access over 15 billion vehicle locations around the world every month," the document adds.

Although the company told Motherboard it has not sold the product to the U.S. government at this time, the news highlights the scale and reach of car-tracking technology, and the fact that car location data is of interest not just to insurance companies and the finance sector, but to government contractors who explicitly say they want to source the data for intelligence and surveillance purposes. [...] Included in the document is a map showing apparent vehicle locations spread across Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, including along the border with Syria. A section of text next to the map says Ulysses' data access lets clients analyze targets "whether you want to geo-locate one vehicle or 25,000,000 as shown here." An image on the company's LinkedIn page appears to show data related to Bulgaria. [...] The document does not explain exactly how Ulysses sources its data, be that directly from automakers or OEMs, or via an aggregator company. But there are plenty of companies that could be contributing. Andrew Lewis, president of The Ulysses Group, told Motherboard in an email that "any proprietary promotional material we may have produced is aspirational and developed based on publicly available information about modern telematics equipment." Lewis added: "We do not have any contracts with the government or any of its agencies related to our work in the field and we have never received any funding whatsoever from the government related to telematics."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Live Science: A U.S. Air Force base in Texas has taken the first steps to guard against an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. But what, exactly, is an EMP, and how big is the threat...? An EMP is a massive burst of electromagnetic energy that can occur naturally or be generated deliberately using nuclear weapons. While many experts don't think EMPs pose a big threat, some people argue that these types of weapons could be used to cause widespread disruption to electricity-dependent societies.

"You can use a single weapon to collapse the entire North American power grid," said defense analyst Peter Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Commission, which was set up to assess the threat of EMP attacks but shut down in 2017. "Once the electric grid goes down, everything would collapse," Pry told Live Science. "Everything depends on electricity: telecommunications, transportation, even water.... We've arrived at a place where a single individual can topple the technological pillars of civilization for a major metropolitan area all by himself armed with some device like this," he said...

The threat posed by EMPs is far from settled, though. A 2019 report by the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by utility companies, found that such an attack would probably cause regional blackouts but not a nationwide grid failure and that recovery times would be similar to those of other large-scale outages... "There are other ways that adversaries can achieve some of the same outcomes, some of which would be cheaper and some of which would be less discernible," Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security, told Live Science. Such alternatives might include cyberattacks to take out critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, or even efforts to disrupt space-based communications or the GPS system that modern society is so reliant on.

Work to protect against EMPs makes sense... but these upgrades shouldn't distract from efforts to shore up defenses against more probable lines of attack, Cilluffo said.

"A federal judge in Washington blocked the Defense Department from restricting U.S. investment in the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi Corp," reports Bloomberg: In the final days of the Trump administration, the Defense Department placed Xiaomi on a list of companies with alleged links to the Chinese military, triggering financial restrictions that were scheduled to go into effect next week. But on Friday, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras put a temporary halt to the ban, siding with Xiaomi in a lawsuit that argued that the move was "arbitrary and capricious" and deprived the company of its due process rights. Contreras said Xiaomi was likely to win a full reversal of the ban as the litigation unfolds and issued an initial injunction to prevent the company from suffering "irreparable harm." After the ban was announced, the smartphone manufacturer faced the prospect of being de-listed from U.S. exchanges and deleted from global benchmark indexes.

Xiaomi is the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world by volume. In the third quarter, it surpassed Apple Inc. in smartphone sales, according to the International Data Corporation.

Adrian Cho writes via Science Magazine: From 1966 to 1974, France blew up 41 nuclear weapons in above-ground tests in French Polynesia, the collection of 118 islands and atolls that is part of France. The French government has long contended that the testing was done safely. But a new analysis of hundreds of documents declassified in 2013 suggests the tests exposed 90% of the 125,000 people living in French Polynesia to radioactive fallout -- roughly 10 times as many people as the French government has estimated.

The findings come from a 2-year collaboration, dubbed the Moruroa Files, between Disclose, a French nonprofit that supports investigative journalism; Interprt, a collective of researchers, architects, and spatial designers affiliated with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who focus on environmental issues; and the Science & Global Security program at Princeton. The findings were presented on 9 March on the project's website, in a book, and in a technical paper posted to the arXiv preprint server. Most French Polynesians were exposed to a relatively small amount of radiation, and the central issue is who is eligible for compensation under French law.

Myanmar's first satellite is being held on board the International Space Station following the Myanmar coup, while Japan's space agency and a Japanese university decide what to do with it, two Japanese university officials said. Reuters: The $15 million satellite was built by Japan's Hokkaido University in a joint project with Myanmar's government-funded Myanmar Aerospace Engineering University (MAEU). It is the first of a set of two 50 kg microsatellites equipped with cameras designed to monitor agriculture and fisheries. Human rights activists and some officials in Japan worry that those cameras could be used for military purposes by the junta that seized power in Myanmar on Feb. 1. That has put the deployment on hold, as Hokkaido University holds discussions with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the two Hokkaido University officials said.

China is freeing up tens of billions of dollars for its tech industry to borrow. It is cataloging the sectors where the United States or others could cut off access to crucial technologies. And when its leaders released their most important economic plans last week, they laid out their ambitions to become an innovation superpower beholden to none. From a report: Anticipating efforts by the Biden administration to continue to challenge China's technological rise, the country's leaders are accelerating plans to go it alone, seeking to address vulnerabilities in the country's economy that could thwart its ambitions in a wide range of industries, from smartphones to jet engines.

China has made audacious and ambitious plans before -- in 2015 -- but is falling short of its goals. With more countries becoming wary of China's behavior and its growing economic might, Beijing's drive for technological independence has taken on a new urgency. The country's new five-year plan, made public on Friday, called tech development a matter of national security, not just economic development, a break from the previous plan. The plan pledged to increase spending on research and development by 7 percent annually, including the public and private sectors. That figure was higher than budget increases for China's military, which is slated to grow 6.8 percent next year, raising the prospect of an era of looming Cold War-like competition with the United States.

France concealed the true impact of its nuclear tests in the Pacific from the 1960s to the 1990s, a study has said. From a report: Researchers used declassified French military documents, calculations and testimonies to reconstruct the impact of a number of the tests. They estimated that around 110,000 people in French Polynesia were affected by the radioactive fallout. The number represented "almost the entire" population at the time, the researchers found. French Polynesia, a French territory made up of hundreds of islands and atolls including Tahiti, was the site of dozens of nuclear tests over 30 years. Over the course of two years, researchers analysed around 2,000 documents released by the French military and recreated the impact of "the most contaminating" of France's nuclear tests carried out between 1966 and 1974.

The study was carried out in collaboration between French news website Disclose, researchers from Princeton University and British firm Interprt. The 41st test took place over Mururoa Atoll on 17 July 1974, when the atomic cloud took a different trajectory than planned. Some 42 hours after the test codenamed Centaur, "the inhabitants of Tahiti and the surrounding islands of the Windward group were subjected to significant amounts of ionising radiation", the report says. The area was home to 110,000 people and Tahiti's main city, Papeete, alone had a population of 80,000.

The proliferation of cyberattacks by rivals is presenting a challenge to the Biden administration as it seeks to deter intrusions on government and corporate systems. From a report: Just as it plans to begin retaliating against Russia for the large-scale hacking of American government agencies and corporations discovered late last year, the Biden administration faces a new cyberattack that raises the question of whether it will have to strike back at another major adversary: China. Taken together, the responses will start to define how President Biden fashions his new administration's response to escalating cyberconflict and whether he can find a way to impose a steeper penalty on rivals who regularly exploit vulnerabilities in government and corporate defenses to spy, steal information and potentially damage critical components of the nation's infrastructure. The first major move is expected over the next three weeks, officials said, with a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir V. Putin and his intelligence services and military but not to the wider world.

The officials said the actions would be combined with some kind of economic sanctions -- though there are few truly effective sanctions left to impose -- and an executive order from Mr. Biden to accelerate the hardening of federal government networks after the Russian hacking, which went undetected for months until it was discovered by a private cybersecurity firm. The issue has taken on added urgency at the White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in recent days after the public exposure of a major breach in Microsoft email systems used by small businesses, local governments and, by some accounts, key military contractors. Microsoft identified the intruders as a state-sponsored Chinese group and moved quickly to issue a patch to allow users of its software to close off the vulnerability. But that touched off a race between those responsible for patching the systems and a raft of new attackers -- including multiple other Chinese hacking groups, according to Microsoft -- who started using the same exploit this week.

schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX...

Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla.

The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law.
Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".)

Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Drive: In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country's industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force's B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government's contracting website beta.SAM.gov. Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B-2's Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft's many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling...

While it's hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists... Indeed, as the average age of the Air Force fleet continues to increase, there are only likely to be more such requirements for parts that are long out of production. Before he stood down, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Will Roper, told Air Force Magazine of his desire for a "digital representation of every part in the Air Force inventory...."

All in all, the search for reverse-engineered components for the B-2 fleet is keeping with the Air Force's current trend of moving toward the latest digital engineering and manufacturing techniques to help ensure its aircraft can be sustained not just easier and more cheaply, but in some cases, possibly at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: U.S. officials blacklisted Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi Corp. as a company with military ties partly due to an award given to the company's founder for his service to the state, the U.S. Department of Defense said in a legal filing. Lei Jun, the chief executive officer and founder of Xiaomi, received the award of "Outstanding Builder of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" in 2019 from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Xiaomi touts the award -- given to 100 Chinese executives that year -- on Mr. Lei's biography page on the company's website and in its annual report.

The award -- coupled with Xiaomi's ambitious investment plans in advanced technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence -- was enough for the Defense Department in January to add Xiaomi to a list of companies that support China's military, according to the filing. The designation prohibits Americans from investing in the company, the world's third-largest smartphone seller. The U.S. rationale for adding Xiaomi to its list was laid out in a court filing by the Defense Department in response to a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., by the Chinese company seeking to overturn the military designation. The filing, which appeared last week but hasn't previously been reported, for the first time shed light on the department's reasoning in adding a company to the list.

Microsoft is in danger of losing a contract to provide $10 billion of cloud computing services to the Pentagon, a deal the government has threatened to scrap altogether after years of legal squabbling. From a report: The U.S. Defense Department said it will reconsider the controversial procurement if a federal judge declines to dismiss Amazon's allegations that former President Donald Trump's meddling cost the company the winner-take-all contract. That means the fate of a cloud project the Pentagon considers critical for its war fighters may rest in the hands of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which could soon issue a ruling on Amazon's accusations. The Pentagon said last month it would take too long to prove in court that its decision to award Microsoft the lucrative cloud deal wasn't unduly influenced by the White House. If the judge allows Amazon to argue its bias claims in the case, the government may decide to stop fighting.

"If the court denies the government's motion we will most likely be facing an even longer litigation process," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at a press conference late last month. "The DOD Chief Information Officer will reassess the strategy going forward." The warning is another twist in a contentious process that has involved years of legal challenges, behind-the-scenes lobbying and a public relations campaign by technology rivals to unseat Amazon as the original front-runner for the cloud contract when it was unveiled in 2018. More than a year after Microsoft was named the winner, the Defense Department is still fighting to execute the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud -- or JEDI, an acronym intended to evoke "Star Wars" imagery -- to serve as the primary data repository for military services worldwide. The deal is worth $10 billion over a decade. There are signs the Pentagon is already moving on. The Defense Department is talking up its other cloud contracts beyond JEDI, and some of the program's biggest cheerleaders have left the department, leaving new leaders to make decisions on a procurement they inherited from the Trump administration. Even Microsoft executives are trumpeting all the other work the company plans to keep doing for the Defense Department, in the event that its image-boosting JEDI deal goes south.

The U.S., which once had a dominant head start in artificial intelligence, now has just a few years' lead on China and risks being overtaken unless government steps in, according to a new report to Congress and the White House. From a report: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who chaired the committee that issued the report, tells Axios that the U.S. risks dire consequences if it fails to both invest in key technologies and fully integrate AI into the military. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence approved its 750-page report on Monday, following a 2-year effort. Schmidt chaired the 15-member commission, which also included Oracle's Safra Catz, Microsoft's Eric Horvitz and Amazon's Andy Jassy.

On both the economic and military fronts, the biggest risk comes from China. "China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world's leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change," the report states. And It's not just AI technology that the U.S. needs to maintain a lead in. The report mentions a number of key technologies, including quantum computing, robotics, 3D printing and 5G. "We don't have to go to war with China," Schmidt said. "We don't have to have a cold war. We do need to be competitive."