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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A Louisiana launch site would offer several significant advantages:

SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month.

The deal would give SpaceX control of an 18-mile stretch of marshland southwest of Lafayette. The site, known as Pecan Island, became available as part of a legal settlement that resolves dozens of lawsuits that blame ExxonMobil for pollution and coastal land loss, the newspaper reports.

No Louisiana officials publicly commented on the deal. Nor did SpaceX. In May, however, the company said in response to rumors about the Louisiana site on X, "It's no secret that we intend to launch Starship a lot, targeting thousands of flights per year. That cadence will require the ability to launch from many different locations, so we are constantly exploring to find viable sites to expand Starship operations in the future, both domestically and internationally."

Adding fuel to the rumors was the passage of bills by the Louisiana Legislature earlier this year that included a package of incentives for aerospace companies, including liability protections and property tax breaks.

According to the Louisiana newspaper, the agreement with SpaceX will include provisions for coastal restoration and preservation of the sensitive marshland along the northern Gulf Coast, which is important for wildlife and also acts as a buffer for hurricanes that regularly impact the region.

So why would SpaceX be interested in a remote, marshy location in southern Louisiana?

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2026/08/04/cloud-giants-pour-nearly-600b-into-capex-as-ai-demand-surges/5282679

AI has turbocharged an already expanding cloud services market as organizations pour billions into online platforms offering the compute needed to train and run models, swelling the coffers of the established giants.

Their latest results show revenue surging alongside capital spending as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft race to add capacity – at least until the AI bubble eventually bursts, of course.

Biggest of them all, Amazon disclosed that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division took in $42.2 billion during its second quarter, ended June 30, 2026. This was an increase of 36.7 percent year-on-year and its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth.

It seems like even CEO Andy Jassy could scarcely believe the cloud operator's fortunes, boasting that "AWS is now a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate business, which, for perspective, would place it 24th on the Fortune 500 list if it was a standalone company."

Amazon is now upping its forecast for how much capex it will spend this year on expanding its infrastructure, including that needed for those AI workloads.

"Earlier this year, we said we plan to invest approximately $200 billion in cash capex in 2026, the majority of which to support AI and AWS," Jassy told analysts on a conference call about its financials.

"We now believe we will spend approximately $220 billion in cash capex in 2026, with the higher cost of memory pushing this number up from our prior estimate of about $200 billion. But even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too."

"We've done this before in the first era of cloud computing, just over a longer time horizon, where demand built more gradually than it has with AI. But we see the margins and returns in AI tracking what we saw with core at the same point of evolution," Jassy claimed.

Google is likewise upping its capex estimates for this year, coming close to Amazon's own massive investments.

"We are updating our full year 2026 capex guidance range to $195 to 205 billion, up from our previous estimate of $180 billion to $190 billion. The increase in the range is primarily due to an acceleration in the delivery of capacity to meet growing demand," said Google and Alphabet's chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, during its Q2 earnings call.

The company expects this figure to rise significantly again next year, although it declined to be more specific at this stage.

"In terms of expenses, the significant increase in our investments and technical infrastructure will continue to put pressure on profit and loss in the form of higher depreciation expense and related datacenter operations costs, such as energy. We also expect to continue hiring in key investment areas such as AI and cloud, and we are investing in marketing to support our AI products," Ashkenazi added.

Cloud revenues at the Chocolate Factory were up 82 percent to $24.8 billion for the quarter, driven primarily by GCP, which grew faster than cloud overall, with Core GCP, AI solutions, and AI infrastructure all proving important drivers of growth, according to Ashkenazi.

Despite the massive sums involved, she claimed in response to a question that Google just cannot add capacity fast enough.

"While we have increased our capacity quite significantly over the past three years, the demand still outpaces that investment. And we are, just like the rest of the industry, working in a supply‑constrained environment, so we're working hard to do this."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/07/31/uk-wants-datacenters-to-pay-a-fee-for-grid-connection-requests/5281248

Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection.

The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters.

The UK regulator for electricity and gas says connection applications for electrical supply have surged from 41 gigawatts (GW) to 125 GW in under a year, with datacenters accounting for at least 80 GW of the new demand.

Even before that happened, one of the UK's big developers complained that its build teams faced a wait of "a number of years" for work such as local substation upgrades to increase grid capacity.

Ofgem is proposing a Datacenter Commitment Fee paid by the developers of large server farm projects when accepting a grid connection offer. The fee would be refunded once the facility is drawing power, or forfeited if the project exits the queue early instead.

Alan Howard, Omdia principal analyst for Colocation and DC Building, told us previously that the power connection queue issue is a big problem, not just for the UK, but also in the US and other markets around the globe.

"The strategy for many datacenter operators is to secure multiple land parcel rights, request a grid load connection for each (often requiring a costly load study), and see what gets approved so they can build. The capital investment to take all these projects seriously is clearly untenable and a huge financial risk for the energy sector if the demand doesn't fully materialize," he said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/31/tech-buyers-are-baking-in-sovereignty-from-day-one-says-forrester/5281208

Geopolitical tensions, regulatory pressure, and growing awareness of risk are prompting organizations to build sovereignty requirements into new technology projects from day one, according to Forrester.

The research firm says organizations worldwide are specifying data residency and sovereign AI architecture requirements at the planning stage. European firms face greater pressure than their US peers because the region has fewer domestically developed hyperscale AI platforms.

The analysis comes as the EU launches a tender to establish up to seven AI gigafactories across Europe, its latest attempt to strengthen the bloc's technological sovereignty. The projects will receive up to €10 billion in EU and national funding, with at least another €20 billion expected from private investors.

Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester, said sovereignty was fast becoming an imperative for tech buyers.

"The organisations that succeed will treat sovereignty as an architectural principle from the start – establishing clear governance, maintaining control across the AI stack, and designing flexible operating models that can adapt to evolving regulatory and geopolitical conditions."

Pressure is greatest in Europe, where US tech giants dominate the market and domestic hyperscale AI platforms are scarce.

"Europe is becoming one of the most important testing grounds for sovereign AI," Maisto said. "Organisations increasingly want assurance that they maintain control over how AI systems are built, governed, and operated, while still benefiting from global innovation. The vendors that can deliver both trust and flexibility will be best positioned to win in the European market."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Behind the rogue agent's attack on Hugging Face was a particular sequence of human decisions. We all need to pay better attention - because threat actors are learning, too:

On July 16, the AI community website Hugging Face reported being targeted by "an autonomous AI agent system" of unknown origin that unleashed a torrent of traffic on its domain, flooding its security logs with more than 17,000 events, some of which ultimately succeeded in exfiltrating secret information stored in its databases. 

According to Hugging Face, the attacker gained "unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services" and appeared to be "run by an autonomous agent framework (appearing to be built on an agentic security-research harness - used LLM still not known)." My ZDNET colleague Charlie Osborne reported on the intrusion. 

Five days later, on July 21, OpenAI stepped forward to claim responsibility for the attack, and all hell broke loose (including reports of other organizations targeted as part of the incident). The media responded with a range of fear-mongering stories that essentially made it look as though ChatGPT went rogue and decided, of its own volition and malice, to attack Hugging Face's systems. 

Then yesterday, adding fuel to the fire, Anthropic made a similar disclosure about its models inadvertently attacking other organizations as a part of its ongoing safety testing. 

As I noted in my coverage of OpenAI's disclosure, Hugging Face was correct in that it was an agent under the direction of an autonomous security research framework. But, humans were unquestionably in the loop -- and at least some of the agent's behavior should have been anticipated.

Importantly, it wasn't ChatGPT itself that was responsible for the attack, as some commentators insinuated. Rather, the attack was attributable to an agent under the direction of OpenAI's AI safety researchers, who, in an environment supposedly isolated from the internet, deliberately provisioned it to attempt a series of exploits as part of an AI safety test. As often happens in the labs of various frontier models, AI safety researchers were attempting to gauge the capabilities of OpenAI's latest large language models (LLMs).

The "unprecedented cyber incident" (as OpenAI called it) has been widely described as an agent escaping its theoretically secure enclosure and wreaking havoc on Hugging Face's systems. Such enclosures are sometimes discussed in technical circles as "sandboxes" -- even OpenAI's disclosure makes reference to a "sandbox environment." However, in using that phrase, my sources have suggested that the environment may simply have been a firewall configured to emulate a sandbox rather than an actual third-party sandbox solution such as Blaxel, Daytona, E2B, or Modal. OpenAI has not yet disclosed the details of the solution it was using or its provider.

[...] It was unquestionably AI's version of a series of unfortunate events. Was it preventable? My short answer: Yes, the calamity was preventable by taking at least one single and reasonable precaution -- a precaution that the developers of ExploitGym apparently take themselves, but one that OpenAI may have overlooked.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines:

Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations.

In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.

[...] The plan is to move NOAA's Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, run by the National Weather Service (NWS) division, over to the cloud by December 2027, along with the software that generates NWS weather data for analysis.

The agency is hoping that the cloud will make model forecasting more nimble, resulting in earlier predictions and better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days. It was the in-house systems that were holding things back, evidently. 

"Cloud-based high-performance computing will accelerate the transition of research into operations by eliminating traditional bottlenecks of on-premise systems," said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs in a statement. 

Jacobs noted that the cloud's flexibility for providing large amounts of compute is advantageous: the agency can ramp up cycles during tropical storm season, then wind them down during calmer periods.

[...] For the job, Google plans to use Google Cloud H4D VMs, built on AMD Epyc processors. Google labels these instances as "virtual machines" because they run under a hypervisor that integrates Google's networking and orchestration tools. As a result, they can be synchronized to run large jobs the same way supercomputers do.  

According to Google, customers can access H4Ds for as low as 3 cents per core-hour without long-term commitments. For supercomputing jobs, they can also use Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director to maintain them. Google Cloud's Batch can handle the queuing, scheduling, and resource provisioning.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2228460/judge-refuses-xai-request-to-stop-minnesota-law-banning-nudify-apps/

The new Minnesota law that would ban apps and websites that can generate nonconsensual intimate imagery can take effect today, after xAI's last-minute effort to stop it from being enforced failed to convince a federal judge. According to NBC News, US District Judge Donovan Frank has refused to grant xAI's request to stop the new law from being enforced on August 1 in a complaint arguing that it violates the First Amendment.

Based on the judge's order, he wasn't persuaded by xAI's actions that the law's enforcement would cause immediate harm. He noted that xAI filed the lawsuit on July 29, 2026, almost three months after the law was signed and merely three days before it was set to take effect. "Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate," the judge wrote.

While Judge Frank didn't side with xAI this time around, the lawsuit will still push through. The court will hold a hearing for the case on August 19 to decide whether to grant xAI's request to put a preliminary injunction on the Minnesota law, which is the first of its kind in the country.

In addition to banning apps and websites that can generate adult AI deepfakes in the state, the law would also fine developers $500,000 every time a user generates a nonconsensual intimate image using their products. Under the law, a "nudified" image or video is something that has been "altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual." It will apply to instances wherein an altered image or video is "so realistic that a reasonable person would believe that the intimate part belongs to the identifiable individual."

However, xAI argued in its lawsuit that the law was an "overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit 'nudification.'" The company denied that it was contesting Minnesota's efforts to prevent the spread of artificially generated nude images of real people. However, it said the law "extends far beyond that goal, exposing a wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanction."

Grok gained infamy earlier this year for complying with people's requests to transform photos of real women and children into sexualized images. It implemented policy changes to address the situation by mid-January, but NBC News says Grok has still been undressing real people as recently as April.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/07/31/nasas-swift-rescue-slips-to-late-august-as-link-battles-its-spin/5281687

Katalyst Space has confirmed that problems with its LINK spacecraft have delayed its attempt to rescue NASA's Swift observatory, with rendezvous now targeted for the end of August.

Katalyst disclosed the delay in an update on the spinning spacecraft. Engineers used a thruster to cut LINK's rotation rate from 9 degrees per second to approximately 4 degrees per second, with further burns planned.

Katalyst and NASA are also developing a new attitude controller suited to the spacecraft's reduced capabilities. Engineers are determining which systems remain usable and testing their plans in a simulator before trying them on the vehicle in orbit.

The trouble has pushed the targeted rendezvous to the end of August. LINK is supposed to sidle up to Swift, survey it, grapple the observatory, and carry it to a higher orbit. For now, however, Katalyst says: "We're focused on stabilizing the spacecraft and restoring core system functionality." Any rendezvous attempt depends on that work succeeding.

LINK launched earlier this month, less than a year after NASA awarded Katalyst Space the contract for a rescue mission. The spacecraft encountered problems during commissioning before going into a spin over the weekend. Earlier this week, Katalyst reported that two of the three reaction wheels, used to control LINK's attitude, were inoperable, but the team was working to stabilize the vehicle using its electric propulsion thrusters.

Time is running short. Swift is expected to enter the Earth's atmosphere in the coming months. The observatory has enjoyed a prodigiously long life and far exceeded its primary mission, but its orbit is decaying and it cannot raise itself. LINK's success could add years to Swift's operational lifetime.

In January, almost all of NASA's models predicted that Swift would re-enter by the summer of 2026. Most science operations were paused in February to buy more time. More recent predictions indicate that it could dip below 300 km, the altitude beneath which raising its orbit becomes more difficult, around November.

Katalyst must now stabilize LINK, secure NASA's approval for its revised plans, and reach Swift before the observatory sinks too low for a practical rescue. ®

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/07/30/excuses-like-ai-did-it-dont-exist-in-the-eyes-of-the-law/5280767

The OpenAI rogue agent behind the Hugging Face hack accessed four accounts on four services, according to updated company disclosures about the intrusion.

One of those four accounts belonged to a Modal customer that had published an unauthenticated endpoint for running arbitrary code in a sandbox on the AI infrastructure provider, Hugging Face noted in its technical timeline and Modal later confirmed.

"We're aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution," Modal Chief Technology Officer Akshat Bubna told The Register. "This was used by the rogue agent. Modal's platform was not compromised in any way."

The other accounts included one used for data storage and two others "accessed by the models in a read-only manner, and were not used in furtherance of compromising Hugging Face," OpenAI disclosed on Tuesday.

"We'll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services," the AI giant added.

Also on Tuesday, we learned that the rogue agent broke out of its testing environment by exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog's universal binary repository manager Artifactory.

While both OpenAI and Hugging Face's updates and timeline provide defenders with useful details about how the attack worked and what the agent did - not to mention a lesson in security-incident transparency - they fail to answer one major question: Who is legally responsible when AI agents attack?

"If a human employee intentionally conducted unauthorized access to third-party systems, it's a much more clear path forward," Gabrielle Hempel, security operations strategist at Exabeam, told The Register, adding that depending on the facts and jurisdiction, the person could face criminal charges.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/reaction-wheel-failures-leave-swift-rescue-mission-spinning-in-orbit/

The Link satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies "experienced issues with attitude control" over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.

Reaction wheels work by discharging momentum to control the pointing, or attitude, of a spacecraft in orbit. They are standard components on many satellites. The Link servicing satellite's cold gas thruster system is used for finer control, particularly as it nears the mission's target: NASA's Swift observatory.

The Link mission began July 3 with a ride to orbit aboard an air-launched Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. NASA and Katalyst reported good progress in the first weeks of the mission, with successful deployment of the satellite's power-generating solar arrays and stable contact with ground controllers at Katalyst's operations center. The spacecraft's xenon-fueled electric thrusters also completed their first firings in orbit.

The electric thrusters are one of the most critical elements of the rescue mission. They are used for orbit raising to allow Link to rendezvous with the Swift satellite some 200 miles above Earth. Once Link attaches itself to Swift with a set of three robotic arms, the electric thrusters will turn on again to raise Swift's orbit and save it from destruction. Katalyst is now calling upon the electric thrusters to stabilize the Link spacecraft's attitude, something they were not intended to do.

Without a rescue, Swift is on track to reenter the atmosphere and burn up in the next few months. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is nearly 22 years old and is operating well beyond its originally intended lifetime. The spacecraft cannot save itself because it lacks its own propulsion system. NASA officials want to keep Swift going because it is one of the only missions in the agency's fleet tuned to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. NASA is paying Katalyst $30 million for the rescue service.

Extending Swift's scientific mission was not the only consideration when NASA officials selected Katalyst to build and launch a satellite to boost Swift's orbit. The space agency is using the rescue mission as a technology demonstration and as a way to test the mettle of the commercial satellite servicing industry.

With Swift's orbit rapidly decaying, NASA gave Katalyst nine months to build and launch the Link satellite, an unusually fast timeline for such a complex mission. Katalyst answered the call and delivered the Link satellite for integration with the Pegasus rocket in early June. Poor weather and a technical glitch with the rocket delayed the launch until July 3.

No matter the outcome of the Swift rescue attempt, NASA officials said last month they were already pleased with the results. "From a programmatics standpoint, I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we're even going to try this," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.

Katalyst's Link spacecraft is still generating sufficient electrical power in communication with ground teams, NASA said. That gives engineers time to develop a plan to address the reaction wheel problems.

Kieran Wilson, Link's principal investigator at Katalyst, talked about a scenario like this before the launch.

"Our previous programs had issues with power systems and communications," Wilson said. "Those are a lot of the basic things that most of the engineering team gets very concerned about because we're confident that as long as we have spacecraft that can function at a fundamental level, that gives us the freedom and flexibility to work through any issues we find during rendezvous and more challenging dynamical operations."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/29/iran-linked-cyberav3ngers-suspected-in-attacks-on-minnesota-water-systems/5280357

Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities.

Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew's previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) updated an advisory on Iran-linked attackers targeting programmable logic controllers (PLCs) across critical infrastructure on July 22, four days before Minnesota said the attacks targeted its systems.

The advisory warned that Iran-linked hackers were attempting to disrupt operations using tactics previously associated with CyberAv3ngers. Government facilities, water and wastewater systems, and energy providers were among those urged to remain on high alert.

On July 26 and 27, more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota were disrupted by what officials called "a coordinated cyberattack" targeting operational technology (OT).

Minnesota IT Services (MNIT), the state's IT agency, said the Department of Health is working with the affected water facilities to ensure public health is maintained. No cities have yet asked citizens to modify the amount of drinking water they consume, per MNIT's latest update.

The agency did not offer many other details about the attacks, other than to mention all the different agencies, organizations, and bodies it is working with as part of the investigation.

One of the first cities to report issues, Braham, warned that its water reserves were limited in its initial notice. Citizens were asked not to water their lawns or use water for recreational purposes, although the problems were resolved the same day. 

No such directives were issued in other affected cities. Maple Plain declared a state of emergency, allowing it greater flexibility to coordinate resources, but did not ask residents to adjust their consumption. 

The same was true in the Twin Cities suburb of Plymouth and in South St. Paul, which both confirmed cyber-related problems on July 27 but did not ask residents to curb water use.

"Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure require a coordinated, whole-of-government response," said John Israel, MNIT assistant commissioner and Minnesota CISO.

"MNIT is working side by side with our partners to share intelligence, support affected communities, and help utilities restore operations safely while strengthening defenses against future attacks. 

"This incident demonstrates why Minnesota has invested in strong cybersecurity capabilities and partnerships. Our response worked as intended, enabling agencies at every level of government to rapidly coordinate, contain the incident, and help prevent more serious impacts to critical services."

First identified around 2020, CyberAv3ngers is widely believed to be linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), specifically its Cyber-Electronic Command division (IRGC-CEC).

For the first two years, the group began as a "propaganda persona," as Tenable puts it, claiming disruptive attacks on Israeli infrastructure – claims that were later debunked as fabrications.

Its first sustained campaign came in November 2023, when it compromised PLCs at the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, defacing them anti-Israel messages.

Tenable said CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs across the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Ireland as part of the campaign. They did so by exploiting default passwords.

Between 2024 and 2025, the crew developed the IOCONTROL malware kit, built for attacks on OT and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. OpenAI said in 2024 that the group's members used ChatGPT in the development process.

CyberAv3ngers stepped up its activity in 2026, targeting US critical infrastructure through Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley PLCs from March onward. CISA's July 22 update added Schneider Electric and Siemens equipment to the list of potential targets.

In some cases, the attacks - which targeted multiple critical infrastructure sectors - disrupted operations at affected facilities, federal officials said, though they offered no specifics on what those disruptions entailed.

CyberAv3ngers is known for targeting small water and municipal facilities, which experts believe are among the lowest-hanging fruit in US critical infrastructure.

Many small and rural facilities lack dedicated cybersecurity resources. Tenable said some operators manage OT environments using remote-access software such as TeamViewer and AnyDesk or leave their PLCs exposed to the web.

"These access methods bypass enterprise security controls entirely, creating an attack surface that is invisible to conventional security monitoring," Tenable said.

Poor segmentation between IT and OT environments can also allow a single intrusion to spread across much of the network.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/29/america-bans-imported-robots-due-to-supply-chain-and-security-risks/5280145

The US government has decided to effectively ban the sale of advanced robots made in other nations.

The decision trickled out over two days with publication of a National Security Determination [PDF] and an update [PDF] to the list of banned devices set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The national security document observes "Advanced robotic devices will be critical to creating efficiencies in our economy, dominating on the battlefield, and securing our homeland" and notes that modern bots are now constantly connected to networks "which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates."

One example of those vulnerabilities mentioned in the document is the UniPwn flaws that made it possible for attackers to take over humanoid robots made by Chinese company Unitree.

"If the United States continues to rely on foreign sources of advanced robotic devices and critical components, it will subject the parts of the U.S. economy and national security enterprise that are reliant on these robots to the whims of foreign entities that could disrupt or degrade the supply chains at a time of their choosing," the document states.

To respond to those threats, the FCC decided the foreign-made advanced robotic devices belong on its Covered List of products for which imports are banned because they pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and its residents. The regulator offered a single exception: if the Department of War vouches for a device, it can have it.

Foreign-owned companies that make their bots in America are also exempt, an important exemption because one of the leading robot-makers is Boston Dynamics – a company backed by the USA's DARPA that is now majority-owned by South Korea's Hyundai, but continues to manufacture its machines stateside.

The decision does, however, apply to all future foreign-made devices. Vendors of clankers already approved for sale in the USA can continue to import them, and users are also free to use any bots they already own.

But the intent of the documents is clear: from now on, only robots made in America are welcome in America.

One entity that stands to benefit from this decision is Tesla, which Elon Musk claims will one day produce one million humanoid robots a year. In true Muskian style he has also said Tesla will go into "high production" of the bots in 2026, but there's no evidence of that happening although the occasional trillionaire did recently show off the production line for Tesla's "Optimus" bot.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/drones/three-us-states-to-deploy-60mph-drones-armed-with-pepper-spray-to-neutralize-school-shooters-campus-guardian-angel-drones-can-also-smash-windows-and-ram-attackers

'Campus Guardian Angel' Drones Can Also Smash Windows And Ram Attackers

This is how the Campus Guardian Angel drone system is designed to work:

The drone defense firm's CEO underlined that “the first 120 seconds are incredibly critical, because that’s when most of the shooting happens.” That implies that he thinks Campus Guardian Angel drones could be successfully deployed within that very narrow time window. But Uvalde was quite unusual, as responding law enforcement seemed paralyzed, waiting over an hour to enter the classroom.

These school-based drone systems are not without their critics. Some say that the funds may be better spent on prevention than cure. Even Mithril’s founder and CEO’s opinion seems to be that if these drones aren’t prompted into action within two minutes, they aren’t living up to their promise.

There is also the concern that drones could misidentify students or protection officers when controllers are under pressure. Others say that military-style drone systems aren’t appropriate for schools, and will cost a lot more than simple measures and routines regarding locked doors.

With the three states proceeding with pilot programs this year, we may see the true value and capabilities of the Campus Guardian Angel drones. If these drone-protected schools don’t suffer any terrible shooting incidents, then it may be claimed that the drones are at least a deterrent.

Original Submission

Your_Mom writes:

Did you hear it was just a ban on Chinese humanoid robots? It's not:

When the Trump administration announced yesterday that it was banning "advanced robotic devices" from entering the United States, the headlines were all about humanoids. But spying doesn't require legs — and neither does the FCC's robot ban.

The robot ban will sweep up robot vacuum cleaners too, FCC media relations director Katie Gorscak confirms to The Verge.

It's not coming for your existing Roomba, and companies can keep importing and selling already approved ones. But the government claims that future foreign robots pose a national security risk, and even robovac companies are suddenly being asked to commit to US manufacturing.

While the government did include "humanoid robots" and "quadrupeds" among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.

It was already clear from the government's ban announcement that it was thinking about robot vacuums. In the National Security Determination that the FCC is using to justify the ban, the government explicitly calls out my reporting on the incredibly poor security that let one man access 7,000 DJI robovacs around the world.

But like the consumer router ban, the FCC isn't actually targeting companies with poor security. It's targeting basically every robovac company, regardless of their security practices — because basically every robovac is manufactured outside the US.

[...] But again, the government isn't asking these companies any questions about security — not one — to get the waiver that lets them through. The FCC only wants to know where they're designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead.

Even then, it appears the FCC will simply preference US companies without any new commitments to security or US manufacturing, like it did when it almost immediately let Netgear off the hook — even though Netgear's routers were among those targeted in the Volt Typhoon incident that helped justify the router ban to begin with. Four unnamed sources told Reuters that "the FCC is expected to exempt many non-Chinese suppliers from the restrictions."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Optimus remains 'very complex' and Robotaxis will try not to flatten your cat:

Tesla's investment bill ballooned in calendar Q2 as Elon Musk's biz entered what it calls its "largest and most exciting period of investment.

The company has poured resources into AI silicon and robotics, with capex [PDF] more than doubling from $2.5 billion in the previous quarter to $5.8 billion.

That left Tesla with negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion, down 848 percent year-on-year. It expects spending to keep rising and exceed $25 billion for the year.

During the earnings call, Musk talked up Tesla's Terafab ambitions but gave little detail other than calling it an "amazing initiative" and confirming that equipment orders had been placed for the development fab in Austin.

"It's intended to have lithography mask production, and then logic, memory and packaging, and chip testing all under one roof," he said. "So you can have a very fast iterative cycle." Musk acknowledged it was a "high-risk, high-payoff bet on AI chips."

Musk said Terafab was essential to scaling Optimus because Tesla would otherwise be unable to secure enough AI chips, hence the prodigious expenditure.

As for Tesla's automaker business, vehicle deliveries were up 25 percent year-on-year in Q2 to 480,126, and total automotive revenues surpassed $20 billion. However, operating margin fell to 1.4 percent from 4.1 percent a year ago.

According to Tesla, it is "in its largest and most exciting period of investment" as it builds out the infrastructure needed to make good on Musk's many promises.

"I think Optimus [Tesla's humanoid robot] will be the biggest product," Musk reiterated during the earnings call, before cautioning that "it is a very complex problem to solve."