Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a rare event in an oddball place. NASA reports: It's called a fast radio burst (FRB), a fleeting blast of energy that can -- for a few milliseconds -- outshine an entire galaxy. Hundreds of FRBs have been detected over the past few years. They pop off all over the sky like camera flashes at a stadium event, but the sources behind these intense bursts of radiation remain uncertain. This new FRB is particularly weird because it erupted halfway across the universe, making it the farthest and most powerful example detected to date.

And if that's not strange enough, it just got weirder based on the follow-up Hubble observations made after its discovery. The FRB flashed in what seems like an unlikely place: a collection of galaxies that existed when the universe was only 5 billion years old. The large majority of previous FRBs have been found in isolated galaxies. FRB 20220610A was first detected on June 10, 2022, by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia. The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile confirmed that the FRB came from a distant place. The FRB was four times more energetic than closer FRBs.

"It required Hubble's keen sharpness and sensitivity to pinpoint exactly where the FRB came from," said lead author Alexa Gordon of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Without Hubble's imaging, it would still remain a mystery as to whether this was originating from one monolithic galaxy or from some type of interacting system. It's these types of environments -- these weird ones -- that are driving us toward better understanding the mystery of FRBs." Hubble's crisp images suggest this FRB originated in an environment where there may be as many as seven galaxies on a possible path to merging, which would also be very significant, researchers say.

Tuesday's launch was different. "SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites designed to connect directly to unmodified smartphones..." reports SpaceNews, "after getting a temporary experimental license to start testing the capability in the United States." Six of the 21 Starlink satellites that launched on a Falcon 9 rocket at 10:44 p.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carry a payload that the company said could provide connectivity for most 4G LTE devices when in range. SpaceX plans to start enabling texting from space this year in partnership with cellular operators, with voice and data connectivity coming in 2025, although the company still needs regulatory permission to provide the services commercially. Initial direct-to-smartphone tests would use cellular spectrum from SpaceX's U.S. mobile partner T-Mobile. SpaceX has also partnered with mobile operators in Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland....

Meanwhile, early-stage ventures AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are closing in on fundraising deals to expand their dedicated direct-to-device constellations. AST SpaceMobile said January 2 it is seeking to secure funds this month from "multiple parties" ahead of launching its first five commercial satellites early this year on a Falcon 9. Lynk Global, which is currently providing intermittent texting and other low-bandwidth services to phones outside cellular networks in parts of the Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, and Palau, plans to raise funds by merging with a shell company run by former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

SpaceX launched a total of 21 satellites on Tuesday night, including "the first six Starlink satellites with Direct to Cell capabilities that enable mobile network operators around the world to provide seamless global access to texting, calling, and browsing wherever you may be on land, lakes, or coastal waters without changing hardware or firmware. The enhanced Starlink satellites have an advanced modem that acts as a cellphone tower in space, eliminating dead zones with network integration similar to a standard roaming partner," the company said. Ars Technica reports: Besides T-Mobile in the US, several carriers in other countries have signed up to use the direct-to-cell satellites. SpaceX said the other carriers are Rogers in Canada, KDDI in Japan, Optus in Australia, One NZ in New Zealand, Salt in Switzerland, and Entel in Chile and Peru. While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote that the satellites will "allow for mobile phone connectivity anywhere on Earth," he also described a significant bandwidth limit. "Note, this only supports ~7Mb per beam and the beams are very big, so while this is a great solution for locations with no cellular connectivity, it is not meaningfully competitive with existing terrestrial cellular networks," Musk wrote.

Starlink's direct-to-cell website says the service will provide text messaging only when it becomes available in 2024, with voice and data service beginning sometime in 2025. Starlink's low Earth orbit satellites will work with standard LTE phones, unlike earlier services that required phones specifically built for satellite use. SpaceX's direct-to-cell satellites will also connect with Internet of Things (IoT) devices in 2025, the company says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A chief executive officer whose claimed qualifications appear to have no basis in fact was used to promote the HyperVerse crypto fund, alongside celebrity messages of support, as part of a push to recruit new investors into the scheme. A Guardian Australia investigation last month revealed thousands of people have lost millions of dollars to the HyperVerse crypto scheme, which was promoted by the Australian entrepreneur Sam Lee and his business partner, Ryan Xu, two of the founders of the collapsed Australian bitcoin company Blockchain Global. Blockchain Global owes creditors $58 million and its liquidator has referred Xu and Lee to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission for alleged possible breaches of the Corporations Act. Asic has said it does not intend to take action at this time. The HyperVerse investment scheme is among those that appear to have escaped scrutiny in Australia despite being flagged by regulators overseas, by one as a possible "scam" and another as a "suspected pyramid scheme." Lee has denied HyperVerse was a scam and disputes being its founder.

A man named Steven Reece Lewis was introduced as the chief executive officer of HyperVerse at an online global launch event in December 2021, with video messages of support from a clutch of celebrities released on Twitter the following month, including from the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and actor Chuck Norris. Promotional material released for HyperVerse, which was linked to a previous scheme called HyperFund, said Reece Lewis was a graduate of the University of Leeds and held a master's degree from the University of Cambridge. A brief career summary of Reece Lewis, which was presented in a video launch for potential investors, said he had worked for Goldman Sachs, sold a web development company to Adobe and launched an IT start-up firm, before being recruited to head up HyperVerse by the HyperTech group. This was the umbrella organization for a range of Hyper-branded crypto schemes.

Lee spoke at the launch event as "chairman" of the HyperTech group, while Xu was introduced as the group's "founder." The company praised Reece Lewis's "strong performance and drive," citing his credentials as the reason for his recruitment. Guardian Australia has confirmed that neither the University of Leeds nor the University of Cambridge has any record of someone by the name Steven Reece Lewis on their databases. No records exist of Steven Reece Lewis on the UK companies register, Companies House, or on the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Adobe, a publicly listed company since 1986, has no record of any acquisition of a company owned by a Steven Reece Lewis in any of its public SEC filings. It is understood that Goldman Sachs could find no record of Reece Lewis having worked for the company. Guardian Australia was unable to find a LinkedIn profile for Reece Lewis or any internet presence other than HyperVerse promotional material. A Twitter account in Reece Lewis's name was set up a month before he appeared in the HyperVerse video launch and was used to promote the scheme on the platform for just six months before the account became inactive.

The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is grappling with the imminent threats of climate change. Rising seas and increasing storms threaten the fragile coral atolls that are home to 11,000 people. A recent agreement allowing 280 Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia each year moved the nation closer to a managed retreat, but at that pace it would take decades to relocate everyone.

Tuvalu could be uninhabitable much sooner, according to projections. In parallel, the government is asserting it will maintain its statehood even without land. It also aims to digitally preserve Tuvalu's culture and history in the metaverse, as the physical place faces being drowned under rising waters. Tuvalu is strategizing for adaptation while also trying to drive global action on emissions reductions.

An international group of law enforcement agencies have seized the dark web leak site of the notorious ransomware gang known as ALPHV, or BlackCat. From a report: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation seized this site as part of a coordinated law enforcement action taken against ALPHV Blackcat Ransomware," a message on the gang's dark web leak site now reads, seen by TechCrunch. According to the splash, the takedown operation also involved law enforcement agencies from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Australia.

In a later announcement confirming the disruption, the U.S. Department of Justice said that the international takedown effort, led by the FBI, enabled U.S. authorities to gain visibility into the ransomware group's computer to seize "several websites" that ALPHV operated. The FBI also released a decryption tool that has already enabled more than 500 ALPHV ransomware victims to restore their systems. (The government's search warrant puts the number at 400 victims.) The FBI said it worked with dozens of victims in the United States, saving them from paying ransom demands totaling approximately $68 million.

Politico reports that the climate bill passed in America in 2022 "has ignited a new zeal among leaders around the world for the kind of winner-picking, subsidy-flush governing that has been out of fashion in many countries for the past 40 years."

The bill's "mix of lavish support for clean energy technologies and efforts to box out foreign competitors is also promoting a kind of green patriotism — and even some politicians on the right, at least outside the U.S., say that's a climate message they can sell." [The bill] is having a real-world impact as investors shift their money to the U.S. from abroad, hungry to take advantage of the tax breaks. In July, for example, Swiss solar manufacturer Meyer Burger canned plans to build a factory in Germany, choosing Arizona instead. That has left political leaders across the world with a choice: Grinch and grumble about the United States' sudden clean industry favoritism, or follow suit... Even the United States' favorite pals on the global stage have felt rattled by the sudden diversion from decades of free trading. But in the U.K., European Union and Australia, many leaders are now working on their own versions.
Some examples of upcoming climate actions:

- Australia's Labor party "has budgeted $1.3 billion in spending this year on green hydrogen projects and around $660 million on moving the economy toward electricity rather than fossil fuels."

- The EU will "start operating a border tariff on high-carbon products in 2026, which seeks to keep hold of its heavy industries even as they pay an increasingly punitive price for polluting to the EU Emissions Trading System."

- The UK Labour party plans messaging "that casts the green energy transition as a national mission which can create jobs in former industrial communities."

- In the U.S. the White House says its bill will spur closer to $700 billion — or even $1 trillion — in green incentives over 10 years. "As the White House sees it, the jump means the tax credits for priorities such as homegrown clean power and electric vehicles have proven more popular than initially anticipated."


Taken together, all the bills "reflect the urgency of the problem," Politico argues, "by aiming to transform the economy at a pace the market can't deliver on its own." "We are in the middle of a climate crisis because firms couldn't do the job of decarbonizing," said Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the progressive think tank Roosevelt Institute. "The climate crisis is the world's biggest market failure ever and it's going to take really strong public investment."

Record-breaking land and sea temperatures, driven by climate breakdown, will probably cause "unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality" throughout 2024, according to a pioneering coral scientist. From a report: The impact of climate change on coral reefs has reached "uncharted territory," said Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, Australia, leading to concerns that we could be at a "tipping point."

The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25.

Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.

Data breaches and ransomware attacks are getting worse. Some 2.6 billion personal records have been exposed in data breaches over the past two years and that number continues to grow, according to a new report commissioned by Apple. From a report: Apple says the escalating intrusions, combined with increases in ransomware means the tech industry needs to move toward greater use of encryption. According to the report, prepared by MIT professor emeritus Stuart E. Madnick:

1. Data breaches in the US through the first nine months of the year are already 20% higher than for all of 2022.
2. Nearly 70 percent more ransomware attacks were reported through September 2023, than in the first three quarters of 2022.
3. Americans and those in the UK topped the list of those most targeted in ransomware attacks in 2023, followed by Canada and Australia. Those four countries accounted for nearly 70% of reported ransomware attacks.
4. One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

India wants to be the voice of the global south in the negotiations. But can the world's most populous nation cut its massive coal use? From a report: India is pitching itself as a leader of the global south at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), under way in Dubai. During his opening speech at the meeting, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a sharp rebuke to wealthy nations: "A small section of mankind has exploited nature indiscriminately. But the whole of humanity is paying its price, especially the residents of the global south." But India -- now the world's most populous nation -- relies heavily on coal to meet its energy needs, and faces a difficult path to cutting its emissions to net zero. The country's priority remains reducing poverty -- which India says requires more energy use -- but more action on climate change is essential, say researchers.

"If we have to reach net-zero by 2050 collectively, then India's share in that collective goal should be a significant one," says Nandini Das, a climate researcher based in Perth, Australia, who works for the global research group Climate Action Tracker. But she adds that in terms of finance, "India requires substantial international support." India is the world's third biggest carbon producer, accounting for 7.3% of global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2022. But those emissions come from 1.43 billion people, accounting for 18% of the world's population. India's per capita emissions last year were equivalent to 2.76 tonnes of carbon dioxide, less than one-sixth of the per capita emissions of the United States and 24 times smaller than the figure for Qatar, the world's largest per capita emitter.
India's average standard of living is far below those of the United States and Qatar, with 210 million people living in poverty according to United Nations metrics. India has maintained that coal -- a cheap fossil fuel readily available in the country -- is required to power its economic development. Coal supplied 73% of India's electricity in 2022; and in November this year, the country announced that it would install 80 gigawatts of new coal-fired power-generation capacity by 2032. "We have to give a fair share to all developing countries in the global carbon budget," Modi said at COP28.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: As the host of global climate talks that begin this week, the United Arab Emirates is expected to play a central role in forging an agreement to move the world more rapidly away from coal, oil and gas. But behind the scenes, the Emirates has sought to use its position as host to pursue a contradictory goal: to lobby on oil and gas deals around the world, according to an internal document made public by a whistle-blower. In one example, the document offers guidance for Emirati climate officials to use meetings with Brazil's environment minister to enlist her help with a local petrochemical deal by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Emirates' state-run oil and gas company, known as Adnoc. Emirati officials should also inform their Chinese counterparts that Adnoc was "willing to jointly evaluate international LNG opportunities" in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, the document indicates. LNG stands for liquefied natural gas, which is a fossil fuel and a driver of global warming.

These and other details in the nearly 50-page document -- obtained by the Centre for Climate Reportingand the BBC -- have cast a pall over the climate summit, which begins on Thursday. They are indications, experts said, that the U.A.E. is blurring the boundary between its powerful standing as host of the United Nations climate conference, and U.A.E.'s position as one of the world's largest oil and gas exporters. [...] In private, delegates preparing to travel to Dubai expressed concerns that the cloud surrounding the host nation threatened to discredit the talks themselves. The allegations, they said, risked undermining what many have hoped the negotiations will yield: a deal to replace polluting fossil fuels with clean energy such as wind and solar power. But many said they were reluctant to speak out publicly, for fear of jeopardizing their ability to negotiate.

India's government has granted its Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-In, immunity from Right To Information (RTI) requests, the nation's equivalent of the freedom of information queries in the US, UK, or Australia. From a report: Reasons for the exemption have not been explained, but The Register has reported on one case in which an RTI request embarrassed CERT-In. That case related to India's sudden decision, in April 2022, to require businesses of all sizes to report infosec incidents to CERT-in within six hours of detection. The rapid reporting requirement applied both to serious incidents like ransomware attacks, and less critical messes like the compromise of a social media account.

CERT-In justified the rules as necessary to defend the nation's cyberspace and gave just sixty days notice for implementation. The plan generated local and international criticism for being onerous and inconsistent with global reporting standards such as Europe's 72-hour deadline for notifying authorities of data breaches. The reporting requirements even applied to cloud operators, who were asked to report incidents on tenants' servers. Big Tech therefore opposed the plan.

A modern-day rush prospecting frenzy for lithium, a crucial battery metal, is unfolding across remote Western Australian deserts. The arid outback that previously supplied gold, nickel and iron now hosts fierce competition between miners racing to stake claims on lithium resources needed for the global green energy transition. Lithium giants U.S.'s Albemarle and Chile's SQM have sparred with Australian billionaires Gina Rinehart and Chris Ellison over contested acquisitions of unproven explorers there. With demand surging, the harsh outback has become the modern El Dorado as pioneers and corporations scramble to tap into lithium, the "white gold," before rivals beat them to the punch. The deal frenzy has also come at a time when the lithium price has crashed as much as 70% compared with highs seen last year, as expectations of electric vehicle demand in key markets such as China have been lowered, Financial Times adds. The report adds: Western Australia already supplies about half of the world's raw lithium and is seen as a stable place to invest compared with parts of Africa, where there has been political instability, and Chile, where the state has moved to take control of lithium projects. Local expectations are high. A report by Australia's chief economist said lithium product exports should exceed A$20bn in the year to June 2023, up from A$5bn in the previous year. The report added that by 2028, the value of lithium exports should exceed those of coal, a staple of Australia's economy for decades. Australia has ambitions to step up its efforts to refine spodumene to keep more of the value onshore rather than shipping all of its resources to China, which has a commanding share of the refining process.

Scientists have detected the most powerful cosmic ray seen in more than three decades. But the exact origin of this turbocharged particle from outer space remains a mystery, with some suggesting that it could have been generated by unknown physics. From a report: The puzzling cosmic ray had an estimated energy of 240 exa-electron volts (EeV; 10^18 volts), making it comparable to the most powerful cosmic ray ever detected, aptly named the Oh-My-God particle, which measured at around 320 EeV when it was discovered in 1991. The findings were published today in Science.

"It's amazing because you have to think of what could produce such high energy," says Clancy James, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. A cosmic ray, despite its name, is actually a high-energy subatomic particle -- often a proton -- that zips through space at close to the speed of light. In their ultra-high energy form, cosmic rays have energy levels that exceed one EeV, which is around one million times greater than those reached by the most powerful human-made particle accelerators. Cosmic rays with energies of more than 100 EeV are rarely spotted -- fewer than one of these particles arrive on each square kilometre of Earth each century.

Australia will give cyber health checks for small businesses, increase cyber law enforcement funding and introduce mandatory reporting of ransomware attacks under a security overhaul announced on Wednesday after a spate of attacks. From a report: The federal government said it will also subject telecommunications firms to tougher cyber reporting rules which apply to critical infrastructure, seek migrants to build up the cyber security workforce and set limits on inter-agency data sharing to encourage people to report incidents. The A$587 million ($382 million) plan shows the centre-left Labor government trying to get on the front foot after a year in which nearly half the country's 26 million population had personal information stolen in just two data breaches at companies, while a cyber attack at its biggest port operator this month brought supply chains to a standstill.

Earlier this month, the entire Optus mobile network went offline nationwide following a "routine software upgrade." According to Reuters, "More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout [...], triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure." Now, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned in the wake of the outage. From the report: She said it "had been an honour to serve" but that "now was an appropriate time to step down." During Friday's Senate hearing into the outage, Ms Bayer Rosmarin rebuffed suggestions she was under pressure to step down. "On Friday, I had the opportunity to appear before the Senate to expand on the cause of the network outage and how Optus recovered and responded," she said in a statement on Monday. "I was also able to communicate Optus's commitment to restore trust and continue to serve customers. Having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward."

Ms Bayer Rosmarin will be replaced in the interim by chief financial officer Michael Venter. Yuen Kuan Moon, the chief executive of Optus's Singaporean parent company Singtel Group, said the company understood her decision to resign. Mr Yuen said Singtel recognised "the need for Optus to regain customer trust and confidence as the team works through the impact and consequences of the recent outage and continues to improve." He said Optus's priority was about "setting on a path of renewal for the benefit of the community and customers." Singtel said Optus had also created a new chief operating officer position, which would be carried out by former Optus Business Managing Director Peter Kaliaropoulos.

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the governance structure of OpenAI needs to change after the AI company's sudden firing of CEO Sam Altman. "At this point, I think it's very clear that something has to change around the governance," Nadella said. He added that Microsoft would have "a good dialogue with their board on that."

Unlike traditional private company boards, OpenAI's board consists mostly of outsiders and isn't tasked with maximizing shareholder value. "[N]one of them hold equity in OpenAI," notes The Verge. "Instead, their stated mission is to ensure the creation of 'broadly beneficial' artificial general intelligence, or AGI." From the report: In his first press interview since Altman's ouster, Nadella dismissed concerns of long-term damage at OpenAI and said that the critical artificial intelligence research continues as does the partnership with Microsoft. But his comments didn't clear up confusion surrounding where Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who was the company's chairman, will ultimately end up. Early Monday morning Nadella said that Altman, Brockman and their colleagues would join Microsoft as part of a new AI research group. That post followed news that ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear had been named OpenAI interim head as Altman looked to depart. Over the course of Monday, it became less evident that Altman and Brockman would actually be joining Microsoft.

Hundreds of OpenAI employees signed a letter to the company's board demanding that they resign or else the staffers may choose to leave and join their former boss at Microsoft. Nadella said it's the choice of OpenAI employees whether they stay in their current roles or move to Microsoft, adding that his company has what it needs to keep innovating on its own. "I'm open to both options," he said. Nadella told Fortt that Microsoft respects OpenAI's nonprofit roots and shares its belief that AI needs to be developed and rolled out in a safe manner. "We want to make sure that we're dealing with not only the benefits of technology, but the unintended consequences of the technology from day one, as opposed to waiting for things to happen," Nadella said. Stay tuned: Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher is releasing a 30 minute interview with Nadella in which he says, among other things, that he felt he should have been informed earlier as a partner of OpenAI and that will change in the future. "Also lots of deets about new hire [Sam Altman], safety in AGI and even India's loss to Australia in that cricket match," says Swisher in a post on X.

Further reading: Some investors in OpenAI are considering suing the board. "Sources said investors are working with legal advisors to study their options," reports Reuters. "Investors worry that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector."

Python "come with downsides," argues a new article in Communications of the ACM. "Its programs tend to run slowly, and because it is inefficient at running processes in parallel, it is not well suited to some of the latest AI programming."

"Hoping to overcome those difficulties, computer scientist Chris Lattner set out to create a new language, Mojo, which offers the ease of use of Python, but the performance of more complex languages such as C++ or Rust." Lattner tells the site "we don't want to break Python, we want to make Python better," while software architect Doug Meil says Mojo is essentially "Python for AI... and it's going to be way faster in scale across multiple hardware platforms." Lattner teamed up with Tim Davis, whom he had met when they both worked for Google, to form Modular in January 2022. The company, where Lattner is chief executive officer and Davis chief product officer, provides support for companies working on AI and is developing Mojo.

A modern AI programming stack generally has Python on top, Lattner says, but because that is an inefficient language, it has C++ underneath to handle the implementation. The C++ then must communicate with performance accelerators or GPUs, so developers add a platform such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) to make efficient use of those GPUs. "Mojo came from the need to unify these three different parts of the stack so that we could build a unified solution that can scale up and down," Lattner says. The result is a language with the same syntax as Python, so people used to programming in Python can adopt it with little difficulty, but which, by some measures, can run up to 35,000 times faster. For AI, Mojo is especially fast at performing the matrix multiplications used in many neural networks because it compiles the multiplication code to run directly on the GPU, bypassing CUDA...

"Increasingly, code is not being written by computer programmers. It's being written by doctors and journalists and chemists and gamers," says Jeremy Howard, an honorary professor of computer science at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a co-founder of fast.ai, a. "All data scientists write code, but very few data scientists would consider themselves professional computer programmers." Mojo attempts to fill that need by being a superset of Python. A program written in Python can be copied into Mojo and will immediately run faster, the company says. The speedup comes from a variety of factors. For instance, Mojo, like other modern languages, enables threads, small tasks that can be run simultaneously, rather than in sequence. Instead of using an interpreter to execute code as Python does, Mojo uses a compiler to turn the code into assembly language.

Mojo also gives developers the option of using static typing, which defines data elements and reduces the number of errors... "Static behavior is good because it leads to performance," Lattner says. "Static behavior is also good because it leads to more correctness and safety guarantees."
Python creator Guido van Rossum "says he is interested to watch how Mojo develops and whether it can hit the lofty goals Lattner is setting for it..." according to the article, " but he emphasizes that the language is in its early stages and, as of July 2023, Mojo had not yet been made available for download."


In June, Lattner did an hour-long interview with the TWIML AI podcast. And in 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Nicola Davis reports via The Guardian: A new study has found people are more likely to think pictures of white faces generated by AI are human than photographs of real individuals. "Remarkably, white AI faces can convincingly pass as more real than human faces -- and people do not realize they are being fooled," the researchers report. The team, which includes researchers from Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, said their findings had important implications in the real world, including in identity theft, with the possibility that people could end up being duped by digital impostors.

However, the team said the results did not hold for images of people of color, possibly because the algorithm used to generate AI faces was largely trained on images of white people. Dr Zak Witkower, a co-author of the research from the University of Amsterdam, said that could have ramifications for areas ranging from online therapy to robots. "It's going to produce more realistic situations for white faces than other race faces," he said. The team caution such a situation could also mean perceptions of race end up being confounded with perceptions of being "human," adding it could also perpetuate social biases, including in finding missing children, given this can depend on AI-generated faces. The findings have been published in the journal Psychological Science.

Australian telecoms provider Optus said on Monday that a massive outage which effectively cut off 40% of the country's population and triggered a political firestorm was caused by "changes to routing information" after a "routine software upgrade." From a report: More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout at the Singapore Telecommunications-owned telco on Nov. 8, triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure.

Optus said in a statement that an initial investigation found the company's network was affected by "changes to routing information from an international peering network" early that morning, "following a routine software upgrade." It added: "These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these. This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves." The project to reconnect the routers was so large that "in some cases (it) required Optus to reconnect or reboot routers physically, requiring the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia", it added.