new nukes

“A sophisticated electronic sensor buried in hardened metal shells at the tip of a growing number of America’s ballistic missiles reflects a significant achievement in weapons engineering that experts say could help pave the way for reductions in the size of the country’s nuclear arsenal,” reports the Washington Post, “but also might create new security perils.”
The wires, sensors, batteries and computing gear now being installed on hundreds of the most powerful U.S. warheads give them an enhanced ability to detonate with what the military considers exquisite timing over some of the world’s most challenging targets, substantially increasing the probability that in the event of a major conflict, those targets would be destroyed in a radioactive rain of fire, heat and unearthly explosive pressures.

The new components — which determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast — are now being paired with other engineering enhancements that collectively increase what military planners refer to as the individual nuclear warheads’ “hard-target kill capability.” This gives them an improved ability to destroy Russian and Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles and command posts in hardened silos or mountain sanctuaries, or to obliterate military command and storage bunkers in North Korea, also considered a potential U.S. nuclear target.

The increased destructiveness of the warheads means that in some cases fewer weapons could be needed to ensure that all the objectives in the nation’s nuclear targeting plans are fully met, opening a path to future shrinkage of the overall arsenal, current and former U.S. officials said in a number of interviews, in which some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive technology.

Production of the first of many high-yield nuclear warheads containing the gear, developed over the past decade at a cost of billions of dollars, was completed in July for installation on missiles aboard Navy submarines, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced.

The Post notes that the U.S. has now installed the technology on hundreds of submarine-based warheads, doubling their destructive power (according to estimates by a Georgetown professor).

The acting administrator of America’s National Nuclear Security Administration called it “the culmination of over a decade of work.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The US Is Installing New Power- and Accuracy-Increasing Sensors on Its Nuclear Weapons

Phoronix ran some fun performance tests this week. “Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I’ve been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft’s latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions.”

First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system… The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including:

– Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
– Ubuntu 21.10
– Arch Linux (latest rolling)
– Fedora Workstation 35
– Clear Linux 35150

[…] Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro…

The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.

Out of 44 tests, here’s a breakdown of how many first-place wins were scored by each OS:

Clear Linux: 33 (75%)Fedora Workstation 35: 4 (9.1%)Windows 11 Pro: 3 (6.8%)Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS: 2 (4.5%)Arch Linux: 1 (2.3%)Ubuntu 21.10: 1 (2.3%)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Linux Distros Beat Windows 11 in Phoronix Performance Testing

“Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels,” reports the New York Times. “The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies.

“But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced,” they write — and sometimes, YouTube does end up making mistakes. (Alternate URL here…)

The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe claim that YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation… Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally in different languages. “It’s impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content,” said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook.”

In its email on Tuesday morning, YouTube said Novara Media [a left-leaning London news group] was guilty of “repeated violations” of YouTube’s community guidelines, without elaborating. Novara’s staff was left guessing what had caused the problem. YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before… Novara’s last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy, which hardly seemed worthy of YouTube’s attention. One of the organization’s few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers…

Staff members worried it had been a coordinated campaign by critics of their coverage to file complaints with YouTube, triggering its software to block their channel, a tactic sometimes used by right-wing groups to go after opponents…. An editor, Gary McQuiggin, filled out YouTube’s online appeal form. He then tried using YouTube’s online chat bot, speaking with a woman named “Rose,” who said, “I know this is important,” before the conversation crashed. Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. “We call on YouTube to immediately reinstate our account,” it said. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament.
Within a few hours, Novara’s channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail.

“We work quickly to review all flagged content,” YouTube said in a statement, “but with millions of hours of video uploaded on YouTube every day, on occasion we make the wrong call ”

But Ed Procter, chief executive of the Independent Monitor for the Press, told the Times that it was at least the fifth time that a news outlet had material deleted by YouTube, Facebook or Twitter without warning.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘A Mistake by YouTube Shows Its Power Over Media’