A physicist from the University of Portsmouth has explored whether a new law of physics could support the theory that we’re living in a computer simulation. Phys.Org reports: Dr. Melvin Vopson has previously published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles — the smallest known building blocks of the universe — store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. In 2022, he discovered a new law of physics that could predict genetic mutations in organisms, including viruses, and help judge their potential consequences. It is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy — a measure of disorder in an isolated system — can only increase or stay the same. Dr. Vopson had expected that the entropy in information systems would also increase over time, but on examining the evolution of these systems he realized it remains constant or decreases. That’s when he established the second law of information dynamics, or infodynamics, which could significantly impact genetics research and evolution theory.

A new paper, published in AIP Advances, examines the scientific implications of the new law on a number of other physical systems and environments, including biological, atomic physics, and cosmology. Key findings include:

– Biological systems: The second law of infodynamics challenges the conventional understanding of genetic mutations, suggesting that they follow a pattern governed by information entropy. This discovery has profound implications for fields such as genetic research, evolutionary biology, genetic therapies, pharmacology, virology, and pandemic monitoring.

– Atomic physics: The paper explains the behavior of electrons in multi-electron atoms, providing insights into phenomena like Hund’s rule; which states that the term with maximum multiplicity lies lowest in energy. Electrons arrange themselves in a way that minimizes their information entropy, shedding light on atomic physics and stability of chemicals.

– Cosmology: The second law of infodynamics is shown to be a cosmological necessity, with thermodynamic considerations applied to an adiabatically expanding universe supporting its validity. “The paper also provides an explanation for the prevalence of symmetry in the universe,” added Dr. Vopson. “Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be. My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature’s inclination towards it.”

“This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.”

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Source: Slashdot – A New Law of Physics Could Support the Idea We’re Living In a Simulation

Federal regulators have issued a preliminary “yellow” warning to Dominion Energy after cracks were discovered again in a backup emergency fuel line at their South Carolina nuclear plant. ABC News reports: Small cracks have been found a half-dozen times in the past 20 years in pipes that carry fuel to emergency generators that provide cooling water for a reactor if electricity fails at the V.C. Summer plant near Columbia, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is the second most serious category and only seven similar warnings have been issued across the country since 2009, nuclear power expert David Lochbaum told The State newspaper after reviewing records from federal regulators.

A crack first appeared on a diesel fuel pipe in 2003, and similar pipes have had other cracks since then. During a 24-hour test of the system in November, a small diesel fuel leak grew larger, according to NRC records. The agency issued the preliminary yellow warning because of the repeated problems.

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Source: Slashdot – SC Nuclear Plant Gets Yellow Warning Over Another Cracked Emergency Fuel Pipe

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity. The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants. The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses — would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own. “Call us the un-utility,” Mari McClure, Green Mountain’s chief executive, said in an interview before the company’s filing. “We’re completely flipping the model, decentralizing it.”

Green Mountain’s plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years — money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity. Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.

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Source: Slashdot – Vermont Utility Plans To End Outages By Giving Customers Batteries

South Korea firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be allowed to supply U.S. chip equipment to their Chinese factories indefinitely without separate U.S. approvals. Reuters reports: “Uncertainties about South Korean semiconductor firms’ operations and investments in China have been greatly eased; they will be able to calmly seek long-term global management strategies,” said Choi Sang-mok, senior presidential secretary for economic affairs. The U.S. has already notified Samsung and SK Hynix of the decision, indicating that it is in effect, Choi said.

The U.S. Department of Commerce is updating its “validated end user” list, denoting which entities can receive exports of which technology, to allow Samsung and SK Hynix to keep supplying certain U.S. chipmaking tools to their China factories, the presidential office said. Once included in the list, there is no need to obtain permission for separate export cases. Samsung and SK Hynix, the world’s largest and second-largest memory chipmakers, had invested billions of dollars in their chip production facilities in China and welcomed the move.

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Source: Slashdot – South Korea Firms Get Indefinite Waiver On US Chip Gear Supplies To China

A network connectivity error caused Mastodon to severely undercount its users. According to founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the decentralized social network actually has 407,814 more monthly active users than it had been reporting previously. “The adjustment also included a gain of 2.34 million registered users across an additional 727 servers that had not been counted due to the error,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: The issue was impacting the metrics reported on Mastodon’s statistics aggregator on its joinmastodon.org/servers page, which had been undercounting users between October 2 and October 8. This issue has now been resolved, Rochko said. That leaves Mastodon with a total of 1.8 million monthly active users at present, an increase of 5% month-over-month and 10,000 servers, up 12% — a testament to Mastodon’s current upward swing at a time when the nature of X continues to remain in flux.

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Source: Slashdot – Mastodon Actually Has 407K+ More Monthly Users Than It Thought

Amy Hawkins reports via The Guardian: A programmer in northern China has been ordered to pay more than 1 million yuan to the authorities for using a virtual private network (VPN), in what is thought to be the most severe individual financial penalty ever issued for circumventing China’s “great firewall.” The programmer, surnamed Ma, was issued with a penalty notice by the public security bureau of Chengde, a city in Hebei province, on August 18. The notice said Ma had used “unauthorised channels” to connect to international networks to work for a Turkish company. The police confiscated the 1.058m yuan ($145,092) Ma had earned as a software developer between September 2019 and November 2022, describing it as “illegal income,” as well as fining him 200 yuan ($27). Charlie Smith (a pseudonym), the co-founder of GreatFire.org, a website that tracks internet censorship in China, said: “Even if this decision is overturned in court, a message has been sent and damage has been done. Is doing business outside of China now subject to penalties?”

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Source: Slashdot – Chinese Programmer Ordered To Pay 1 Million Yuan For Using VPN

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers will soon be online in Europe, but it’s not just the raw speed that will make the Jupiter supercomputer special. Unlike most of the Top 500 list, the exascale Jupiter system will rely on ARM cores instead of x86 parts. Intel and AMD might be disappointed, but Nvidia will get a piece of the Jupiter action. […] Jupiter is a project of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which is working with computing firms Eviden and ParTec to assemble the machine. Europe’s first exascale computer will be installed at the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, and assembly could start as soon as early 2024.

EuroHPC has opted to go with SiPearl’s Rhea processor, which is based on ARM architecture. Most of the top 10 supercomputers in the world are running x86 chips, and only one is running on ARM. While ARM designs were initially popular in mobile devices, the compact, efficient cores have found use in more powerful systems. Apple has recently finished moving all its desktop and laptop computers to the ARM platform, and Qualcomm has new desktop-class chips on its roadmap. Rhea is based on ARM’s Neoverse V1 CPU design, which was developed specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) applications with 72 cores. It supports HBM2e high-bandwidth memory, as well as DDR5, and the cache tops out at an impressive 160MB. The report says the Jupiter system “will have Nvidia’s Booster Module, which includes GPUs and Mellanox ultra-high bandwidth interconnects,” and will likely include the current-gen H100 chips. “When complete, Jupiter will be near the very top of the supercomputer list.”

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Source: Slashdot – Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputer Will Run On ARM Instead of X86

Dean Takahashi reports via VentureBeat: John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, has resigned from the company in the wake of a pricing controversy that left developers in open revolt. Unity said in a press release that James M. Whitehurst has been appointed interim CEO and president of the company. Meanwhile, hoping to avoid a stock panic, Unity said that it is reaffirming its previous guidance for its fiscal third quarter financial results, which will be reported on November 9.

Roelof Botha, lead independent director of the Unity board, has been appointed chairman. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition, the company said. The news isn’t a surprise as Unity angered a lot of its loyal game developers a few weeks ago after pushing through a price increase based on numbers of downloads — and then retracted it after an uproar. Unity said the board will initiate a comprehensive search process, with the assistance of a leading executive search firm, to identify a permanent CEO. “It’s been a privilege to lead Unity for nearly a decade and serve our employees, customers, developers and partners, all of whom have been instrumental to the company’s growth,” Riccitiello said in a statement. “I look forward to supporting Unity through this transition and following the company’s future success.”

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Source: Slashdot – John Riccitiello Steps Down As CEO of Unity After Pricing Battle

Adi Robertson reports via The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1394, a law that would punish web services for “knowingly facilitating, aiding, or abetting commercial sexual exploitation” of children. It’s one of several online regulations that California has passed in recent years, some of which have been challenged as unconstitutional. Newsom’s office indicated in a press release yesterday that he had signed AB 1394, which passed California’s legislature in late September.

The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2025. It adds new rules and liabilities aimed at making social media services crack down on child sexual abuse material, adding punishments for sites that “knowingly” leave reported material online. More broadly, it defines “aiding or abetting” to include “deploy[ing] a system, design, feature, or affordance that is a substantial factor in causing minor users to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation.” Services can limit their risks by conducting regular audits of their systems. As motivation, the bill text cites whistleblower complaints that Facebook responded inadequately to child abuse on the platform and a 2022 Forbes article alleging that TikTok Live had become a haven for adults to prey on teenage users.

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Source: Slashdot – California Governor Signs Ban On Social Media ‘Aiding or Abetting’ Child Abuse

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several groups of hacktivists have targeted Israeli websites with floods of malicious traffic following a surprise land, sea and air attack launched against Israel by militant group Hamas on Saturday, which prompted Israel to declare war and retaliate. Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post reported Monday that since Saturday morning its website was down “due to a series of cyberattacks initiated against us.” At the time of writing, the paper’s website still appeared down.

Rob Joyce, director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, reportedly said at a conference on Monday that there have been denial of service (DDoS) attacks and defacements of websites, without attributing the cyberattacks to particular groups. “But we’re not yet seeing real [nation] state malicious actors,” Joyce reportedly said. […] Joyce’s remarks appear to confirm findings of security researcher Will Thomas, who told TechCrunch that he has seen more than 60 websites taken down with DDoS attacks, and more than five websites that were defaced as of Monday.

It is common for hacktivist groups to launch cyberattacks during armed conflict, similar to what happened in Ukraine. These hackers are often not affiliated with any governments but rather a decentralized group of politically motivated hackers. Their activities can disrupt websites and services, but are far more limited compared to the activities of nation-state hacking groups. Researchers and government agencies like the NSA say they have only seen activity by hacktivists so far in this Hamas-Israel conflict. “The thing that has surprised me about the hacktivism surrounding this conflict is the amount of international groups involved, such as those allegedly from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Morocco all also targeting Israel in support of Palestine,” said Thomas. “We also seen long-time threat actors returning who have participated in attacks and spread them using the hashtag #OpIsrael for years.”

“I have seen several posts of cybercriminal service operators such as DDoS-for-Hire or Initial Access Brokers offering their services to those wanting to target Israel or Palestine,” he added.

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Source: Slashdot – Hacktivism Erupts In Response To Hamas-Israel War

Still using Python 3.7? Even Microsoft thinks it is time to move on after the Windows behemoth finally deprecated support for the language in the October 2023 release of its extension for Visual Studio Code. From a report: Python 3.7 reached its end of life in June but remains popular. According to some statistics, many sites use version 3.7 — 17.2 percent of those using Python 3.x by some estimates. Python 3.6, which reached the end of life in 2021, accounts for 28.9 percent and is still the most popular. Python 3.8 sits between the two, accounting for 23.3 percent.

Doubtless mindful of its popularity, Microsoft confirmed there were no plans to strip the code from the Visual Studio Code extension deliberately, saying: “We expect the extension will continue to work unofficially with Python 3.7 for the foreseeable future.” However, there are no guarantees that something won’t go wrong without official support. Python has moved to an annual cadence for end of life. Python 3.8 is due to reach end of life in October 2024, meaning that official support in Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code extension will end with the first release of 2025, and so on. According to Microsoft, the Python extension for Visual Studio works with all actively supported versions of Python. 3.12 is the latest version and, unsurprisingly, has yet to influence the statistics too much. 3.13 is penciled in for release next year.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Drops Official Support for Python 3.7 in Visual Studio Code

Nature’s global survey finds that postdoctoral researchers still feel as though they are academia’s drudge labourers, but have more confidence about job prospects in a post-pandemic world. Nature: In 2020, respondents to Nature’s first global survey of postdoctoral researchers feared that COVID-19 would jeopardize their work. Eighty per cent said the pandemic had hindered their ability to carry out experiments or collect data, more than half (59%) found it harder to discuss their research with colleagues than before the crisis, and nearly two-thirds (61%) thought that the pandemic was hampering their career prospects.

That outlook has changed, according to Nature’s second global postdoc survey, carried out in June and July this year. Now only 8% of the respondents say the economic impacts of COVID-19 are their biggest concern (down from 40% in 2020). Instead, they are back to worrying about the usual things: competition for funding, not finding jobs in their fields of interest or feeling pressure to sacrifice personal time for work. Overall, 55% say they are satisfied in their current postdoc, a slide from 60% in 2020. This varies by geography, age and subject area. Postdocs aged 30 and younger are more likely to be satisfied (64%) than are those aged 31-40 (53%). Biomedical postdocs — who make up slightly more than half of the respondents — pull the average down, because only 51% say they are satisfied with their jobs.

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Source: Slashdot – Postdoc Career Optimism On the Rise

AI startup Anthropic, writing in a blog post: Neural networks are trained on data, not programmed to follow rules. With each step of training, millions or billions of parameters are updated to make the model better at tasks, and by the end, the model is capable of a dizzying array of behaviors. We understand the math of the trained network exactly — each neuron in a neural network performs simple arithmetic — but we don’t understand why those mathematical operations result in the behaviors we see. This makes it hard to diagnose failure modes, hard to know how to fix them, and hard to certify that a model is truly safe. Neuroscientists face a similar problem with understanding the biological basis for human behavior. The neurons firing in a person’s brain must somehow implement their thoughts, feelings, and decision-making. Decades of neuroscience research has revealed a lot about how the brain works, and enabled targeted treatments for diseases such as epilepsy, but much remains mysterious. Luckily for those of us trying to understand artificial neural networks, experiments are much, much easier to run. We can simultaneously record the activation of every neuron in the network, intervene by silencing or stimulating them, and test the network’s response to any possible input.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the individual neurons do not have consistent relationships to network behavior. For example, a single neuron in a small language model is active in many unrelated contexts, including: academic citations, English dialogue, HTTP requests, and Korean text. In a classic vision model, a single neuron responds to faces of cats and fronts of cars. The activation of one neuron can mean different things in different contexts. In our latest paper, Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models With Dictionary Learning , we outline evidence that there are better units of analysis than individual neurons, and we have built machinery that lets us find these units in small transformer models. These units, called features, correspond to patterns (linear combinations) of neuron activations. This provides a path to breaking down complex neural networks into parts we can understand, and builds on previous efforts to interpret high-dimensional systems in neuroscience, machine learning, and statistics. In a transformer language model, we decompose a layer with 512 neurons into more than 4000 features which separately represent things like DNA sequences, legal language, HTTP requests, Hebrew text, nutrition statements, and much, much more. Most of these model properties are invisible when looking at the activations of individual neurons in isolation.

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Source: Slashdot – Decomposing Language Models Into Understandable Components

Microplastics have been found everywhere from the oceans’ depths to the Antarctic ice, and now new research has detected it in an alarming new location — clouds hanging atop two Japanese mountains. From a report: The clouds around Japan’s Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama contain concerning levels of the tiny plastic bits, and highlight how the pollution can be spread long distances, contaminating the planet’s crops and water via “plastic rainfall.” The plastic was so concentrated in the samples researchers collected that it is thought to be causing clouds to form while giving off greenhouse gasses.

“If the issue of ‘plastic air pollution’ is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future,” the study’s lead author, Hiroshi Okochi, a professor at Waseda University, said in a statement. The peer-reviewed paper was published in Environmental Chemistry Letters, and the authors believe it is the first to check clouds for microplastics. The pollution is made up of plastic particles smaller than five millimeters that are released from larger pieces of plastic during degradation. They are also intentionally added to some products, or discharged in industrial effluent. Tires are thought to be among the main sources, as are plastic beads used in personal care products. Recent research has found them to be widely accumulating across the globe — as much as 10m tons are estimated to end up in the oceans annually.

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Source: Slashdot – Microplastics Detected in Clouds Hanging Atop Two Japanese Mountains

Venture capitalists have been under fresh scrutiny for their role hyping up the crypto industry during the criminal trial of FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, but new data shows that those investors have pulled back sharply from the industry they once helped build and promote. From a report: Global venture funding for crypto startups plunged to its lowest level since 2020 during the third quarter, tumbling 63% from the same period last year, according to data from research firm PitchBook. VCs invested just $2 billion in crypto worldwide during the quarter, a fraction of the funds they invested during happier times in the crypto world. “We aren’t seeing the big deals anymore,” PitchBook analyst Robert Le said. “That’s one of the drivers of the decline — deals are smaller.”

Mega fundraises during the crypto bull market once benefited companies like exchange FTX, nonfungible token marketplace OpenSea and NFT creator Yuga Labs. Now, the VC pullback could force difficult choices for companies already cutting costs and enacting layoffs. “If they’re not able to raise a round, even a down round, they’re either going to go out of business or get acquired at a valuation that’s much, much lower,” Le said. While crypto deals might still be happening for early-stage companies, Le said, many late-stage tech investors have exited the space completely.

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Source: Slashdot – Crypto Venture Funding Drops 63%

EU antitrust regulators are asking Microsoft’s users and rivals whether Bing should comply with new tough tech rules and also whether that should be the case for Apple’s iMessage, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The European Commission in September opened investigations to assess whether Microsoft’s Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising as well as Apple’s iMessage should be subject to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The probes came after the companies contested the EU competition regulator labelling these services as core platform services under the DMA.

The DMA requires Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Meta Platforms and ByteDance to allow for third-party apps or app stores on their platforms and to make it easier for users to switch from default apps to rivals, among other obligations. The Commission sent out questionnaires earlier this month, asking rivals and users to rate the importance of Microsoft’s three services and Apple’s iMessage versus competing services.

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Source: Slashdot – Should New Tech Rules Apply To Microsoft’s Bing, Apple’s iMessage, EU Asks

Microsoft, Google and others experiment with how to produce, market and charge for new tools. From a report: Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. “A lot of the customers I’ve talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models,” said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. It will take time for companies and consumers to understand how they want to use AI and what they are willing to pay for it, said Chris Young, Microsoft’s head of corporate strategy.

“We’re clearly at a place where now we’ve got to translate the excitement and the interest level into true adoption,” he said. Building and training AI products can take years and hundreds of millions of dollars, more than with other types of software. AI often doesn’t have the economies of scale of standard software because it can require intense new calculations for each query. The more customers use the products, the more expensive it is to cover the infrastructure bills. These running costs expose companies charging flat fees for AI to potential losses.

Microsoft used AI from its partner OpenAI to launch GitHub Copilot, a service that helps programmers create, fix and translate code. It has been popular with coders — more than 1.5 million people have used it and it is helping build nearly half of Copilot users’ code — because it slashes the time and effort needed to program. It has also been a money loser because it is so expensive to run. Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

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Source: Slashdot – AI’s Costly Buildup Could Make Early Products a Hard Sell

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna appears to be in a state of damage control following recent controversial comments on AI-related job losses. From a report: Speaking at an event in the US this week, Krishna said IBM has no intention of laying off tech staff, such as developers or programmers, and instead plans to ramp up hiring for roles in these areas. “I don’t intend to get rid of a single one,” he said. “I’ll get more.” Krishna added that the company aims to increase the number of software engineering and sales staff over the next four years to accommodate for its heightened focus on generative AI. Instead, the hammer will fall largely on staff working in back-office operations, aligning closely with what we’ve heard previously from the exec.

Earlier this year, IBM announced plans to cut nearly 8,000 staff working in positions spanning human resources in a bid to automate roles. The move means that anywhere up to 7,800 jobs at the tech giant’s HR division could be cut, equivalent to around 30% of the overall workforce in the unit. IBM also said at the time that it would halt hiring for roles in the division on account of positions being automated.

Krishna has been among the most outspoken big tech executives on the topic of AI job losses in recent months. While industry figureheads have repeatedly shirked the topic, Krishna, to his credit, has been candid on the subject. In an interview with CNBC in August, Krishna suggested “we should all feel better” about the influx of generative AI tools, much to the ire of critics worried about its impact on the labor market. Krishna also told the broadcaster that organizations can deliver marked improvements to productivity through generative AI, but that will come at the expense of human roles.

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Source: Slashdot – IBM CEO in Damage Control Mode After AI Job Loss Comments

As the FCC leans towards reinstating net neutrality and regulating ISPs under Title II, the broadband sector is set to challenge the move. Previously, courts have upheld FCC’s decisions. However, legal experts believe the Supreme Court’s current stance may hinder the FCC’s authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service. ArsTechnica: The major question here is whether the FCC has authority to decide that broadband is a telecommunications service, which is important because only telecommunications services can be regulated under Title II’s common-carrier framework. “A Commission decision reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunications service will not survive a Supreme Court encounter with the major questions doctrine. It would be folly for the Commission and Congress to assume otherwise,” two former Obama administration solicitors general, Donald Verrilli, Jr. and Ian Heath Gershengorn, argued in a white paper last month. According to Verrilli and Gershengorn, “There is every reason to think that a majority of the Supreme Court” would vote against the FCC.

Verrilli and Gershengorn express their view with a striking level of certainty given how difficult it usually is to predict a Supreme Court outcome — particularly in a case like this, where the agency decision isn’t even finalized. While litigation in lower courts is to be expected, it’s not even clear that the Supreme Court will take up the case at all. The certainty expressed by Verrilli and Gershengorn is less surprising when you consider that their white paper was funded by USTelecom and NCTA — The Internet & Television Association, two broadband industry trade groups that sued the Obama-era FCC in a failed attempt to overturn the net neutrality rules. The groups — which represent firms like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter — eventually got their way when then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal of the rules in 2017. But the industry-funded white paper has gotten plenty of attention, and the FCC is keenly aware of the so-called “major questions doctrine” that it describes. The FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which is pending a commission vote, will seek public comment on how the major questions doctrine might affect Title II regulation and net neutrality rules that would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

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Source: Slashdot – Net Neutrality’s Court Fate Depends on Whether Broadband is ‘Telecommunications’

China aims to grow the country’s computing power by more than a third in less than three years, a move set to benefit local suppliers and boost technology self-reliance as US sanctions pressure domestic industry. From a report: The world’s second-largest economy is targeting more than 300 exaflops of computing capacity across its tech sector by 2025 from 220 this year, according to a joint statement from several agencies including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The goal marks Beijing’s latest attempt to construct digital infrastructure to spur a sluggish economy. China also plans to build an additional 20 smart computing centers in two years. Bigger optical networks and more advanced data storage will be installed in the years until 2025, the regulators said. The additional computational power will support manufacturing, education, finance, transportation, healthcare and energy, they added.

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Source: Slashdot – China Plans Big AI and Computing Buildup