America’s power grid consists of 3,000 public and private sector power companies, with 55,000 substations scattered across the country. On the CBS News show 60 Minutes, reporter Bill Whitaker notes that each grid hold grid-powering transformers — then tells the story of “the most serious attack on our power grid in history” on the night of April 16, 2013:

For 20 minutes, gunmen methodically fired at high voltage transformers at the Metcalf Power substation. Security cameras captured bullets hitting the chain link fence.

Jon Wellinghoff: They knew what they were doing. They had a specific objective. They wanted to knock out the substation.

At the time, Jon Wellinghoff was chairman of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a small government agency with jurisdiction over the U.S. high voltage transmission system…. [T]he attackers had reconnoitered the site and marked firing positions with piles of rocks. That night they broke into two underground vaults and cut off communications coming from the substation.
Jon Wellinghoff: Then they went from these vaults, across this road, over into a pasture area here. There were at least four or five different firing positions.

Bill Whitaker: No real security?

Jon Wellinghoff: There was no security at all, really.

They aimed at the narrow cooling fins, causing 17 of 21 large transformers to overheat and stop working.

Jon Wellinghoff: They hit them 90 times, so they were very accurate. And they were doing this at night, with muzzle flash in their face.

Someone outside the plant heard gunfire and called 911. The gunmen disappeared without a trace about a minute before a patrol car arrived. The substation was down for weeks, but fortunately PG&E had enough time to reroute power and avoid disaster.
Bill Whitaker: If they had succeeded, what would’ve happened?

Jon Wellinghoff: Could’ve brought down all of Silicon Valley.

Bill Whitaker: We’re talking Google, Apple; all these guys–

Jon Wellinghoff: Yes, yes. That’s correct.

Bill Whitaker: Who do you think this could have been?

Jon Wellinghoff: I don’t know. We don’t know if they were a nation state. We don’t know if they were domestic actors. But it was somebody who did have competent people who could in fact plan out this kind of a very sophisticated attack….

A few months before the assault on Metcalf, Jon Wellinghoff of FERC commissioned a study to see if a physical attack on critical transformers could trigger cascading blackouts… The report was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It found the U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine substations….

In 2016, an eco terrorist in Utah shot up a large transformer, triggering a blackout. He said he’d planned to hit five substations in one day to shut down the West Coast. In 2020, the FBI uncovered a white supremacist plot called “lights out” to simultaneously attack substations around the country.
While the threats can also come from the internet, America’s deputy national security advisor for cyber (formerly at the NSA) tells the reporter “We’ve taken any information we have about malicious software or tactics that the Russian government has used, shared that with the private sector with very practical advice of how to protect against it.”

The reporter later spoke to the president’s homeland security advisor, who points out there’s no specific national regulation for the power plants, arguing that one of the system’s strengths is “the resources for energy are different in different regions.”

But they also acknowledged the federal government is now setting standards “in a variety of arenas.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Vulnerable is the US Power Grid?

The creator of Apple’s Swift programming language stayed involved in the Swift core team and Evolution community… until this week. Though he’d left Apple more than five years ago, “Swift is important to me, so I’ve been happy to spend a significant amount of time to help improve and steer it,” Lattner wrote in an explanatory comment on the Swift community forum. “This included the ~weekly core team meetings (initially in person, then over WebEx)…”

The tech news site DevClass notes Lattner is also “the mind behind compiler infrastructure project LLVM,” but reports that “Apparently, Lattner hasn’t been part of the [Swift] core team since autumn 2021, when he tried discussing what he perceived as a toxic meeting environment with project leadership after an especially noteworthy call made him take a break in summer.”

“[…] after avoiding dealing with it, they made excuses, and made it clear they weren’t planning to do anything about it. As such, I decided not to return,” Lattner wrote in his explanation post. Back then, he planned to keep participating via the Swift Evolution community “but after several discussions generating more heat than light, when my formal proposal review comments and concerns were ignored by the unilateral accepts, and the general challenges with transparency working with core team, I decided that my effort was triggering the same friction with the same people, and thus I was just wasting my time.”

Lattner had been the steering force behind Swift since the language’s inception in 2010. However, after leaving Apple in 2017 and handing over his project lead role, design premises like “single things that compose” seem to have fallen by the wayside, making the decision to move on completely easier for language-creator Lattner.

The article points out Lattner’s latest endeavour is AI infrastructure company Modular.AI.

And Lattner wrote in his comment that Swift’s leadership “reassures me they ‘want to make sure things are better for others in the future based on what we talked about’ though….”
Swift has a ton of well meaning and super talented people involved in and driving it. They are trying to be doing the best they can with a complicated situation and many pressures (including lofty goals, fixed schedules, deep bug queues to clear, internal folks that want to review/design things before the public has access to them, and pressures outside their team) that induce odd interactions with the community. By the time things get out to us, the plans are already very far along and sometimes the individuals are attached to the designs they’ve put a lot of energy into. This leads to a challenging dynamic for everyone involved.

I think that Swift is a phenomenal language and has a long and successful future ahead, but it certainly isn’t a community designed language, and this isn’t ambiguous. The new ideas on how to improve things sounds promising — I hope they address the fundamental incentive system challenges that the engineers/leaders face that cause the symptoms we see. I think that a healthy and inclusive community will continue to benefit the design and evolution of Swift.

DevClass also reported on the aftermath:
Probably as a consequence of the move, the Swift core team is currently looking to restructure project leadership. According to Swift project lead Ted Kremenek… “The intent is to free the core team to invest more in overall project stewardship and create a larger language workgroup that can incorporate more community members in language decisions.”

Kremenek also used the announcement to thank Lattner for his leadership throughout the formative years of the project, writing “it has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with Chris on Swift.”

In 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot’s readers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Why Swift Creator Chris Lattner Stepped Down From Its Core Team This Week

Remember when Google threatened to leave Australia if the country implemented a “news media bargaining code” forcing social media platforms to pay news publishers?

Wired reports:
Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time. The code was formally approved on March 2, 2021… One year after the media code was introduced, Google has 19 content deals with news organizations and Facebook has 11, according to [Australia’s communications minister Paul] Fletcher. Now countries around the world are looking at Australia’s code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of “news deserts” — communities that no longer have a local newspaper.

Canada is expected to propose its own version in March. Media associations in both the U.S. and New Zealand are calling for similar policies. Reports suggest the UK culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, is also planning to require platforms to strike cash-for-content deals.

The international interest has prompted fierce debate about how well Australia’s code works.

“We know it works, we can see the evidence,” says Fletcher. He points to how the deals are funding journalism in rural areas. Broadcaster The ABC said its deals with Facebook and Google enabled it to hire 50 regional journalists. Google, however, disagrees. It has accused the media code of stifling media diversity by giving media giants a better deal than smaller publishers. “The primary benefactors of such a code would be a small number of incumbent media providers,” Google said in a submission to the U.S. Copyright Office, which is currently reviewing its own media laws….

The criticism of Australia’s system focuses on its lack of transparency, which means that media companies cannot compare notes on the deals they are offered and there is a lack of clarity on which outlets are entitled to negotiate…. Concerns about the code’s flaws are leaking into Canada, where Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is drafting its own Australia-style legislation. “We’re locking down the incumbent publishers, and we’re locking down Google and Facebook’s dominance as opposed to countering the dominance that exists on both sides,” says Dwayne Winseck, journalism professor at Canada’s Carleton University…. Yet Canada’s news industry is willing to overlook these limitations because it considers the cash as a lifeline, according to Paul Deegan, president and chief executive of News Media Canada…. They are running out of time to save some of the media landscape, he explains — 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic. “We’ve got a number of titles and even chains of titles that are quite literally teetering on the brink.”

Deegan agrees the code isn’t perfect. This is not a magic bullet, he says, “this is a badly needed Band-Aid.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Australia’s Standoff Against Google and Facebook Worked – Sort Of

Disney World’s “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser” hotel will be expensive and immersive, writes SFGate. (“For two adults, the starting price is about $5,000. For three adults and one child, it’s nearly $6,000.”)

And while the hotel doesn’t open to paid guests until Tuesday, free previews have already been given to online influencers:

Reviews so far are generally positive — particularly praised are the character actors who carry the experience — with a few caveats. Because the hotel itself, called the Halcyon, is supposed to be a luxury cruise ship in space, the biggest complaint is that rooms are small and cramped…

For some, the lack of windows may add to a sense of claustrophobia. Hotel rooms have a digital display showing outer space and no view of the real outside world. Folks needing some fresh air can, however, visit an outdoor communal space called a “climate simulator.” Reporters from the YouTube channel Disney Food Blog, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers, were invited to the media preview. In their review of the hotel, they put it thusly: “Disney went all-in on an experience that seemingly puts only the wealthiest guests inside a windowless bunker for two full days.”

But most reviewers agreed that guests will be spending minimal time in their room anyway. The two days are packed with lightsaber training, clandestine rendezvous, elaborate entertainment and exploration of the ship. Guests need to download an app for their smartphone to chat with characters on board, receive their missions and learn their storylines. This was the other major drawback: If you’re an introvert, this may be the wrong trip for you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘Windowless Bunker’: First Reviews Come In for Disney’s ,000 ‘Star Wars Hotel

SFGate reports:

The largest plane ever built has been destroyed at an airport outside Kyiv, Ukraine Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said Sunday….

The Antonov An-225 Mriya was built in Ukraine in 1985 when the nation was still controlled by the Soviet Union. It has six turbofan engines and is the heaviest aircraft ever built. It was created as a strategic airlift cargo craft, carrying Soviet space orbiters, but was later purchased by Antonov Airlines. It’s since been used to airlift oversized cargo and large loads of emergency aid during natural disasters….

Although Kuleba’s tweet confirmed the plane’s demise, Antonov says it is still gathering information on the massive plane’s fate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Largest Plane Ever Built May Have Been Destroyed, Ukraine Foreign Minister Says