Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents. From a report: The approvals, analysed by Greenpeace, reveal that between January and March this year, at least 20.45 gigawatts of coal power was approved, up from 8.63GW in the same period in 2022. In the whole of 2021, 18GW of coal was approved. A Chinese Communist party (CCP) five-year plan from 2016 had placed a heavy emphasis on reducing the use of coal and developing clean energy sources. In 2020 Xi Jinping, China's leader, pledged that the country would become carbon neutral by 2060. This prompted an era of reduced coal power approvals as local governments sought to keep their local economies in check with Beijing's priorities. A rise in coal power approvals came in 2020 when the five-year plan came to an end, as local governments anticipated even tighter restrictions on coal expansion in the next round. But in 2021, China suffered huge power outages, leading to a dramatic shift in the CCP's energy priorities. In September the price of electricity soared as factories reopened to service global demand as the rest of the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic. But the government had capped prices, so many power plants reduced output rather than operated at a loss.

The low-profile firm that has become crucial to a half-trillion-dollar global industry. From a report: In 1984, Martin van den Brink, a young Dutch engineer, joined a newly created venture in a quiet corner of the Netherlands. Little did he know then that about 40 years on the company would be so crucial to the $580 billion semiconductor industry that it would be the epicenter of a US-China chip war. ASML Holding NV, where Van den Brink is now the chief technology officer, practically owns the market for a critical piece of equipment needed to produce the brains of everything that makes modern life possible -- from cars and smartphones to computers, microwaves and airplanes. With the company's high-end machines churning out chips that can also go into state-of-the-art weapons and artificial intelligence devices, ASML is effectively being treated as critical infrastructure for US national security and has become a target of industrial espionage for China. "I never expected to be where we are today," said Van den Brink.

Over his nearly four decades at the company, ASML has gone from a bit player competing with the likes of Nikon, Canon and Ultratech to the world's only maker of very high-end semiconductor lithography equipment. Its ascent has made it Europe's most valuable technology company, with a market capitalization of over $247 billion -- more than twice that of its customer Intel. In an industry where devices typically cost $10 million, ASML commands about $180 million for its current top-end machine. And although the chip market has softened recently, ASML is still growing and its long-term outlook seems intact, thanks to the insatiable demand for computing power.

"This is a company that the world can't exist without," said Jon Bathgate, a fund manager at NZS Capital in Denver, which has about $2 billion under management, with ASML as one of its biggest holdings. "They've got a 20-year head start... Investors have clearly realized how important ASML is as a company and how difficult it would be to replicate. It's a natural monopoly with secular growth winds. That's unique." As chips become for geopolitics in the 21st century what oil was in the last one, ASML's singular success has thrust it squarely in the crosshairs of the intensifying tensions between the US and China. With the US focused on the strategic importance of semiconductors, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have done everything to ensure that China is a couple of generations behind in chips. No company is more critical to that effort than ASML.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The yuan became the most widely-used currency for cross-border transactions in China in March, overtaking the dollar for the first time, official data showed, reflecting efforts by Beijing to internationalize use of the yuan. Cross-border payments and receipts in yuan rose to a record $549.9 billion in March from $434.5 billion a month earlier, according to Reuters calculation based on data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. The yuan was used in 48.4% of all cross-border transactions, Reuters calculated, while the dollar's share declined to 46.7% from 48.6% a month earlier. The volume of cross-border transactions covers both the current and capital accounts. According to data from SWIFT, the yuan's share of global currency transactions for trade finance rose to 4.5% in March, while the dollar accounted for 83.71%.

Meta's head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, called into question the values of TikTok by invoking the anti-China rhetoric that's become a trademark of lawmakers that want to expel his company's rival from the US. From a report: "TikTok, a hugely successful, highly dynamic and innovative Chinese company, is able to operate in the United States, but companies like Meta are not able to operate our social media services in China," Clegg said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg TV. "So there is this issue of a kind of lack of a level playing field. And in the end, there's always an underlying issue of values: What values are the underpinning of new technologies?" TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has said it's not a Chinese company and is walling off sensitive US operations to house all data and employees in America. The app also isn't available in China. Still, it hasn't been able to shake concerns about its ownership and whether that opens up the app for influence or data collection by the Chinese government.

Clegg's comments echo the hawkish sentiments that have swirled around China and TikTok's connection to the country. In the US, where the social media platform has amassed 150 million users every month, the company is facing a national security review and legislation that could limit its availability in the country. There are "pretty profound differences in values" in how China views technology and individual privacy, Clegg said, including the country's willingness to seal off most of its internet from access by foreign companies. This has also expanded to discussions about new artificial intelligence technologies where, he said, "Chinese authorities are already rushing to insert their values and the way in which those AI systems are developed."

Public sector workers in an eastern Chinese city are set to be paid fully in digital yuan, as the country makes a significant push to popularize the currency. From a report: Changshu, located in the province of Jiangsu, will start the new payment process in May, according to an official document widely posted on government websites. This is the biggest rollout of the currency, also known as the e-CNY, in China so far, according to state media. Government employees as well as staff at state-owned companies and public institutions such as schools, hospitals, libraries, research institutes and media organizations in the city will be affected. Changshu, a city of 1.7 million residents, was already experimenting with the digital yuan, a form of money that exists only online and is managed and backed by China's central bank. Like cryptocurrency, the digital yuan incorporates some elements of blockchain technology: Every transaction is recorded and traceable in a digital ledger. Since last October, Changshu has been paying the transit subsidies for some government employees in digital yuan. China is already on the verge of becoming a cashless society, but the vast majority of electronic transactions happen on privately owned apps (Alipay and WeChat Pay), outside of the immediate purview of the state.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 spotted this story in today's New York Times. (Also re-published in the Seattle Times.) In early 2020 a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists "released critical data" on the speedy spread and lethality of the coronavirus, remembers Times, "cited in health warnings around the world... Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it...

"What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science."

It's not the only retraction. The Times also points out a paper published on March 9 of 2020 relying on patient samples from mid-December of 2019, which "added to evidence that the virus was spreading widely before the Chinese government took action." Two months later the journal that published an update that "said that the Wuhan samples were not collected in December after all, but weeks later, in January... After Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle tweeted about the discrepancy, the journal's editors posted a third version of the paper, adding yet another timeline. This revision says the samples were collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1." Beijing's stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found. Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.

This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded: The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus.
The article notes an international team's discovery last month of genetic sequence data collected in January of 2020 at Wuhan market, "withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that global health officials called 'inexcusable.'" The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, a finding consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals... Soon after the group alerted Chinese researchers to their findings, the genetic sequences temporarily disappeared from a global database. "It's just pathetic that we're in this stage where we're having cloak-and-dagger conversations about deleted data," said Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney biologist who was part of the group that analyzed the sequences containing raccoon dog DNA.
The Times cites retracted coronavirus papers flagged by Retraction Watch, which tracks withdrawn research. Amid tighting government censorship in 2020, Chinese researchers began asking journals to retract their work, the Times reports, and "a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad." Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government's demands. "Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests," he said...

The journal retractions continued, and for unusual reasons. One group of authors noted that "our data is not perfect enough." Another warned that its paper "cannot be used as the basis for the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2." A third said its findings were "incomplete and not ready for publication." Several scientists promised in retraction notices to update their findings but never did.

CNN reports on this year's "State of the Climate" report from the World Meteorological Organization (the UN agency promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science a d climatology).

The report "analyzes a series of global climate indicators — including levels of planet-heating pollution, sea level rise and ocean heat — to understand how the planet is responding to climate change and the impact it is having on people and nature."

CNN's conclusion? "The world just failed its annual health checkup."= - Oceans reached record high temperatures, with nearly 60% experiencing at least one marine heatwave.

- Global sea levels climbed to the highest on record due to melting glaciers and warming oceans, which expand as they heat up.

- Antarctica's sea ice dropped to 1.92 million square kilometers in February 2022, at the time the lowest level on record (the record was broken again this year).

- The European Alps saw a record year for glacier melt, with Switzerland particularly badly affected, losing 6% of its glacier volume between 2021 and 2022.

- Levels of planet warming pollution, including methane and carbon dioxide, reached record highs in 2021, the latest year for which there is global data...


Last year, climate change-fueled extreme weather "affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. In 2022, China had its most extensive and long-lasting drought on record. Droughts also affected East Africa, with more than 20 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia facing acute food insecurity as of January this year. Many western and southern US states experienced significant drought and Europe's punishing heatwave is estimated to have led to 15,000 excess deaths. In Pakistan, record-breaking rainfall left huge swaths of the country underwater, killing more than 1,700 people, with almost 8 million displaced, and causing $30 billion in damages...

Last year is unlikely to be an outlier, as temperatures continue their upwards trajectory. The past eight years were the hottest on record, despite three consecutive years of the La Niña climate phenomenon, which has a global cooling effect. The global average temperature last year climbed to about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the report, as the world continues its march towards breaching 1.5 degrees of warming for the first time. With the predicted arrival later in the year of El Niño, which brings warmer global temperatures, scientists are deeply concerned that 2023 and 2024 will continue to smash climate records. The hottest year on record, 2016, was the result of a strong El Niño and climate change, said Baddour. "It is only a matter of time before that record is broken...."

"The droughts and level of heatwaves that we saw throughout 2022 were quite remarkable," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told CNN. "This is really a wake up call that climate change isn't a future problem, it is a current problem. And we need to adapt as quickly as possible," she added.
Omar Baddour, head of the Climate Monitoring and Policy Division at the WMO, also told CNN that "Communities and countries which have contributed least to climate change suffer disproportionately."

And for more bad news, CNN notes a report from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service found Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, unprecedented marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean sea, and widespread wildfires.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: China is building sophisticated cyber weapons to "seize control" of enemy satellites, rendering them useless for data signals or surveillance during wartime, according to a leaked US intelligence report. The US assesses that China's push to develop capabilities to "deny, exploit or hijack" enemy satellites is a core part of its goal to control information, which Beijing considers to be a key "war-fighting domain." The CIA-marked document, which was issued this year and has been reviewed by the Financial Times, was one of dozens allegedly shared by a 21-year-old US Air Guardsman in the most significant American intelligence disclosures in more than a decade. A cyber capability of this nature would far exceed anything Russia has deployed in Ukraine, where electronic warfare teams have taken a brute-force approach with little effect.

These attacks, first developed in the 1980s, attempt to drown out signals between low-orbit SpaceX satellites and their on-ground terminals by broadcasting on similar frequencies from truck-borne jamming systems such as the Tirada-2. China's more ambitious cyber attacks aim to mimic the signals that enemy satellites receive from their operators, tricking them into either being taken over completely or malfunctioning during crucial moments in combat. The classified US document said this cyber capability would allow China "to seize control of a satellite, rendering it ineffective to support communications, weapons, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems." The US has never disclosed whether it has similar capabilities.

Taiwan, which has taken note of how indispensable satellite communications have been to the Ukrainian military, is seeking to build out communications infrastructure that can survive an attack from China. It is courting investors to establish its own satellite provider, while experimenting with non-geostationary satellite receivers in 700 locations around Taiwan to guarantee bandwidth in the event of war or disasters, the Financial Times reported in January. China's goals, according to the leaked assessment, [...] would seek to knock out the ability of satellites -- which tend to operate in interconnected clusters -- to communicate with each other, to relay signals and orders to weapons systems, or to send back visual and intercepted electronic data, according to experts. "China understands the superiority that the United States has in the space and cyber domains, so they are very interested in not only improving their own capabilities but in capitalizing on what we refer to as a first-mover advantage in both domains," said Moore, now a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

"They are working on all the capabilities that they want to have from a defensive and offensive standpoint, and from an ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] standpoint. They're firing on all cylinders," he said.

The Biden administration is beginning to plan for 6G wireless telecommunications, seeking to expand internet access while reasserting U.S. leadership in a sector where China has notched gains. WSJ: The White House on Friday will meet with corporate, government and academic experts to begin developing goals and strategies for the new 6G communications technology, which would have the ability to take cloud computing and the mobile internet to true global ubiquity, among other improvements. The next generation of telecom is still years away from deployment, but it could pave the way for global internet access still unavailable with the current 5G standard, which makes smartphone downloads and wireless hot-spot connections faster. Expanding access to the internet has been a priority for the Biden administration as part of its infrastructure initiatives. The 6G planning initiative also aims to reassert the leadership of the U.S. and its allies in telecommunications, where China has made gains thanks in part to careful nurturing of homegrown equipment manufacturing and increased participation in international standard-setting.

China's Huawei said on Thursday it is replacing internal software management systems it once sourced from U.S. vendors with its own in-house version, hailing it as a victory over U.S. curbs that once threatened its survival. From a report: Huawei held an internal ceremony to celebrate the switch to its own 'MetaERP' (enterprise resource planning system) in Dongguan, south China on Thursday, attended by the Huawei's rotating Chairperson Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company's founder Ren Zhengfei. ERP software is used by companies to manage key business operations ranging from accounting to supply chain management.

"We were cut off from the old ERP system and other core operation and management systems three years ago," said Tao Jingwen, a Huawei board member and president of its quality, business process and IT management department. "Today we are proud to announce that we have broken through that blockade, we have survived!" The in-house Meta-ERP has been rolled out across 80% of the company's business, Huawei said in a news release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Seagate has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty in a settlement with U.S. authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to China's Huawei in violation of U.S. export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. Seagate sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with U.S. technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a U.S. trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of U.S. goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

Seagate shipped 7.4 million drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei's sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said. The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital and Toshiba were the other two, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

From China to the U.S. to the European Union, rice production is falling and driving up prices for more than 3.5 billion people across the globe, particularly in Asia-Pacific -- which consumes 90% of the world's rice. From a report: The global rice market is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023, according to Fitch Solutions. And a deficit of this magnitude for one of the world's most cultivated grains will hurt major importers, analysts told CNBC. "At the global level, the most evident impact of the global rice deficit has been, and still is, decade-high rice prices," Fitch Solutions' commodities analyst Charles Hart said. Rice prices are expected to remain notched around current highs until 2024, stated a report by Fitch Solutions Country Risk & Industry Research dated April 4.

The price of rice averaged $17.30 per cwt through 2023 year-to-date, and will only ease to $14.50 per cwt in 2024, according to the report. Cwt is a unit of measurement for certain commodities such as rice. "Given that rice is the staple food commodity across multiple markets in Asia, prices are a major determinant of food price inflation and food security, particularly for the poorest households," Hart said. The global shortfall for 2022/2023 would come in at 8.7 million tonnes, the report forecast. That would mark the largest global rice deficit since 2003/2004, when the global rice markets generated a deficit of 18.6 million tonnes, said Hart. Further reading: There is a Global Rice Crisis.

India has overtaken China as the world's most populous nation, according to United Nations data released Wednesday. From a report: India's population surpassed 1.4286 billion, slightly higher than China's 1.4257 billion people, according to mid-2023 estimates by the UN's World Population dashboard. China's numbers do not include Hong Kong and Macau, Special Administrative Regions of China, and Taiwan, the data showed. The burgeoning population will add urgency for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government to create employment for the millions of people entering the workforce as the nation moves away from farm jobs. India, where half the population is under the age of 30, is set to be the world's fastest-growing major economy in the coming years.

Asia's third-largest economy is now home to nearly a fifth of humanity -- greater than the entire population of Europe or Africa or the Americas. While this is also true for China for now, that's expected to change as India's population is forecast to keep ticking up and touch 1.668 billion by 2050 when China's population is forecast to contract to about 1.317 billion. "India's story is a powerful one. It is a story of progress in education, public health and sanitation, economic development as well as technological advancements," said Andrea Wojnar, Representative United Nations Population Fund India and Country Director Bhutan on State of the World Population Report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Union on Tuesday agreed a 43 billion euro ($47 billion) plan for its semiconductor industry in an attempt to catch up with the United States and Asia and start a green industrial revolution. The EU Chips Act, proposed by the European Commission last year and confirmed by Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, aims to double the bloc's share of global chip output to 20% by 2030 and follows the U.S. CHIPS for America Act.

"We need chips to power digital and green transitions or healthcare systems," Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a tweet. Since the announcement of its chips subsidies plan last year, the EU has already attracted more than 100 billion euros in public and private investments, an EU official said. "The critical piece of the equation which the EU will need to get right, as for the U.S., is how much of the supply chains supporting the industry can be moved to the EU and at what cost," said [Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies]. While the Commission had originally proposed funding only cutting-edge chip plants, EU governments and lawmakers have widened the scope to cover the whole value chain, including older chips and research and design facilities.

Business is booming in India's $117 billion education industry and new colleges are popping up at breakneck speed. Yet thousands of young Indians are finding themselves graduating with limited or no skills, undercutting the economy at a pivotal moment of growth. From a report: Desperate to get ahead, some of these young people are paying for two or three degrees in the hopes of finally landing a job. They are drawn to colleges popping up inside small apartment buildings or inside shops in marketplaces. Highways are lined with billboards for institutions promising job placements. It's a strange paradox. India's top institutes of technology and management have churned out global business chiefs like Alphabet's Sundar Pichai and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. But at the other end of the spectrum are thousands of small private colleges that don't have regular classes, employ teachers with little training, use outdated curriculums, and offer no practical experience or job placements, according to more than two dozen students and experts who were interviewed by Bloomberg.

Around the world, students are increasingly pondering the returns on a degree versus the cost. Higher education has often sparked controversy globally, including in the US, where for-profit institutions have faced government investigations. Yet the complexities of education are acutely on show in India. It has the world's largest population by some estimates, and the government regularly highlights the benefits of having more young people than any other country. Yet half of all graduates in India are unemployable in the future due to problems in the education system, according to a study by talent assessment firm Wheebox. Many businesses say they struggle to hire because of the mixed quality of education. That's kept unemployment stubbornly high at more than 7% even though India is the world's fastest growing major economy. Education is also becoming an outsized problem for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he attempts to draw foreign manufacturers and investors from China. Modi had vowed to create millions of jobs in his campaign speeches, and the issue is likely to be hotly debated in the run up to national elections in 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the U.S. Department of Justice: Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) -- to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents' free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.

The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.

The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."

A New York Times opinion piece argues people in the AI industry "are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down." But how? What they tell me is obvious to anyone watching. Competition is forcing them to go too fast and cut too many corners. This technology is too important to be left to a race between Microsoft, Google, Meta and a few other firms. But no one company can slow down to a safe pace without risking irrelevancy. That's where the government comes in — or so they hope... [A]fter talking to a lot of people working on these problems and reading through a lot of policy papers imagining solutions, there are a few categories I'd prioritize.

The first is the question — and it is a question — of interpretability. As I said above, it's not clear that interpretability is achievable. But without it, we will be turning more and more of our society over to algorithms we do not understand... The second is security. For all the talk of an A.I. race with China, the easiest way for China — or any country for that matter, or even any hacker collective — to catch up on A.I. is to simply steal the work being done here. Any firm building A.I. systems above a certain scale should be operating with hardened cybersecurity. It's ridiculous to block the export of advanced semiconductors to China but to simply hope that every 26-year-old engineer at OpenAI is following appropriate security measures.

The third is evaluations and audits. This is how models will be evaluated for everything from bias to the ability to scam people to the tendency to replicate themselves across the internet. Right now, the testing done to make sure large models are safe is voluntary, opaque and inconsistent. No best practices have been accepted across the industry, and not nearly enough work has been done to build testing regimes in which the public can have confidence. That needs to change — and fast.
The piece also recommends that AI-design companies "bear at least some liability for what their models." But what legislation should we see — and what legislation will we see? "One thing regulators shouldn't fear is imperfect rules that slow a young industry," the piece argues.

"For once, much of that industry is desperate for someone to help slow it down."

The Washington Post found a new tranche of "top-secret intelligence documents" on Discord, and based on them reported Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of at least two additional Chinese spy balloons.

Based on the classified documents, the Post also reports that "questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February." The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year, called Killeen-23 by U.S. intelligence agencies, carried a raft of sensors and antennas the U.S. government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to a document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

Another balloon flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in a previously unreported incident, and a third crashed in the South China Sea, a second top-secret document stated, though it did not provide specific information for launch dates.... [Chinese spy balloon] Bulger-21 carried sophisticated surveillance equipment and circumnavigated the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, the NGA document states. Accardo-21 carried similar equipment as well as a "foil-lined gimbaled" sensor, it says....

Annotating what appear to be detailed photos of the balloon that flew over the United States, presumably taken from a U-2 spy plane, intelligence analysts assessed that it could generate enough power to operate "any" surveillance and reconnaissance technology, including a type of radar that can see at night and through clouds and thin materials [including tarps].... China's military has operated a vast surveillance balloon project for several years, partly out of Hainan province off China's south coast, U.S. officials have previously told The Post.

But the NGA document is notable as much for what it doesn't say, reflecting the government's possible lack of insight, at least in mid-February, into the balloons' capabilities... The lack of detailed conclusions about the balloon's surveillance capabilities raises questions about the decision to let it fly over the United States before shooting it down, an action the Defense Department justified at the time as an opportunity to collect additional intelligence.
The Post also reports that another leaked document (relying on intercepted communications) assessed that within the Chinese military the balloon surveillance program lacked "strong leadership" oversight.

Global sales of semiconductor fab equipment grew by 5 percent during 2022 to hit an all-time high, with China the largest buyer despite a fall in its investment amid the standoff with the US over access to chips and other technology. The Register reports: The figures come from SEMI, the industry body for electronics manufacturing and supply chain, in a new Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (WWSEMS) report. According to the report, sales of chipmaking kit hit $107.6 billion last year, up from $102.6 billion in 2021, as semiconductor companies invested to add more capacity, despite the downturn that took hold in the latter half of last year as inflation gripped many economies.

"The record high for semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales in 2022 stems from the industry's drive to add the fab capacity required to support long-term growth and innovations in key end markets including high-performance computing and automotive," claimed SEMI president and CEO Ajit Manocha. These results also reflect a desire by chipmakers in multiple regions to avoid any repetition of the supply chain issues that surfaced during the pandemic, he added. Many companies cut investment then, in response to falling orders, leading to shortages when demand picked up again.

China remained the largest market for semiconductor equipment despite seeing a 5 percent slowdown in investments compared with the previous year, according to SEMI. This drop is likely caused by US moves to curtail China's ability to make advanced chips, which has now extended beyond American companies such as Applied Materials to include others such as Dutch photolithography giant ASML, as Washington has browbeaten allied nations including the Netherlands and Japan to join its sanctions.

Sea levels on China's coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average and posing a serious threat to coastal cities such as the financial hub of Shanghai. From a report: In 2022, China's coastal sea levels were 94 millimeters (3.7 inch) higher than "normal," defined as the average over the 1993-2011 period, making it the highest since records began in 1980, an official at the Ministry of Natural Resources said Wednesday at a news conference. The swell was 10 mm higher than in 2021, when the previous record was reached. The temperature of China's coastal waters has increased significantly due to global warming, and the rise in sea levels has accelerated, said Wang Hua, head of the marine forecasting and monitoring department at the ministry.

China's sea levels have increased by an average of 3.5 mm per year since 1980, and an average of 4.0 mm per year since 1993 -- higher than the global rate over the same periods, Wang said. The global mean sea level has risen 3.4 mm a year over the past three decades, according to NASA. "In the last 11 years, from 2012 to 2022, China's coastal sea levels were the highest since observations were first recorded," Wang said at the news conference, which released the latest annual report on China's sea levels.