"Why do you wanna have a pep rally when people are hurting?"

That was the question Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III posed at a September food drive in South Dallas, where volunteers were collecting groceries for struggling families. Across town, Republicans were holding a midterm convention. Haynes, a longtime Baptist pastor and Democratic congressional nominee, was introducing James Talarico, the party's candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas.

A month later, speaking at a Dallas megachurch, Talarico offered his own interpretation of Christian duty.

"I try to love my neighbor through public policy," the Presbyterian seminarian told the congregation. "I'm trying to make my neighbor's life easier, better, less stressful."

Both men are making a deceptively simple argument in some of the staunchly staunch red-as-hell, Republican territory in America, one that might transcend the conventional wisdom about national campaigns and the millions poured into competing campaign war chests: When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?

Amid the big-ticket ad buys, fundraising appeals, and armies of political consultants, Talarico and Haynes are tapping into a political tradition that has long sustained communities across the South: showing up.

At Haynes's Friendship-West Baptist Church, the ministry extends to legal services, immigration advocacy, counseling, economic justice, and food policy. It is an example of how churches often form the connective tissue of communities suffering under economic and political strain.

When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?

That strain is measurable. Texas is home to four of the nation's 10 most financially distressed major cities, including Houston, which ranks second nationwide, according to a 2026 analysis. Feeding America estimates that nearly 1 in 5 Texans experienced food insecurity in 2024. Meanwhile, federal analysts project that changes to Medicaid eligibility enacted last year will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7.5 million by 2034. 

While Democratic Party leaders publicly debate how to punish Donald Trump politically, allege corruption, or navigate the ideological divide between moderates and democratic socialists, a different argument is emerging from Southern pulpits.

From Quaker abolitionists to the Social Gospel's challenge to industrial exploitation, progressive religious institutions have helped drive some of America's most consequential political transformations. Christian farmworker ministries supported migrant laborers before joining the United Farm Workers' California grape boycotts in the 1960s. And while Black churches overwhelmingly led, sustained, and suffered the brunt of violence in the fight for equal civil rights in this country, a handful of white denominations joined them. 

Of course, churches also defended slavery, segregation, and exploitation. The blunt reality is that throughout American history, Christianity has always been political and has been used to justify a wide variety of competing political ends.

Related Pete Hegseth's Unholy War

But Republicans have deftly exploited the perception that they alone speak for American Christians. The Trump administration has readily embraced religious iconography, from evangelical leaders praying over the president in the Oval Office to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's frequent invocations of the medieval Crusades.

There is no way around the fact that Republicans have built a formidable religious coalition, particularly among white evangelicals. Last year, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, found a majority of Republicans qualified as either Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers in 2025, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.

But Republicans don't have a monopoly on Christian voters. Pew Research Center polling this month found 73 percent of white evangelical Protestant registered voters preferred Republican House candidates, while 74 percent of Black Protestants and 59 percent of Hispanic Catholics preferred Democrats. None of that is particularly surprising on the surface.

Nor is this some newly discovered religious awakening. According to PRRI's Census of American Religion, which was published in April, 57 percent of Democrats identified as Christian in 2025, a significant drop from 70 percent in 2013. The white Christian left isn't necessarily growing, but it's far from insignificant. Much of it has simply been politically overlooked.

It's a perception the GOP has routinely capitalized on, often spending a great deal of their election campaigns attacking opponents on religious ground. 

On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cravenly tarred his Democratic gubernatorial challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, as supporting "Sharia law," citing an endorsement from a Muslim advocacy group's political affiliate.

Perhaps ironically, Hinojosa is, and has been on the record, a Catholic — same as Abbott.

"My faith is my moral compass," Hinojosa told the National Catholic Register in September. "It grounds me in purpose and gives me the courage to do what is right regardless of obstacles or consequences."

For those who have spent years watching their faith become synonymous with a politics they don't recognize, frustration may finally be giving way to something else: a determination to be heard.

There are signs that this long-overlooked religious tradition is finding a more public voice. An August study by PRRI documented progressive Christians organizing against Christian nationalism in eight states, including Texas and Louisiana, channeling local meetings, religious discussions, and community networks into political action. Elsewhere, hundreds of members of the clergy have joined protests against immigration enforcement, and some have been trained in direct action and civil resistance. While the movement may not be growing in numbers, its willingness to challenge political power is increasingly visible.

Related Apocalypse Now: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Investigate the End-Timers Alliance

As retired Texas Rev. Kathleene Card, who has thrown her support behind Talarico, told the Houston Chronicle, "faith should influence how people respond to poverty, human rights, the environment, and the well-being of their community."

Whether any of this will translate into winning on Tuesday is still an open question. An October Fox News poll put Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton at 49 percent apiece among likely voters, but newer polls show Talarico with a small lead. Abbott led Hinojosa by 5 percentage points in that Fox poll, and most polls in the race show the governor with a slim lead. 

No matter the result, the Texas campaigns offer a different, more nuanced way of understanding political persuasion. They also challenge a long-standing assumption among national Democrats: that their voters are a monolith, moved by the same issues, values, and appeals. 

Across rural America and the South, voters may be growing weary of manufactured arguments and hypothetical doomsday prophecies, with research showing that political advertising, as it stands, has little effect on changing minds at all.

There is something to be said for people willing to put boots on the ground, to do the work instead of endlessly debating how to begin and whether it matters, in the name of service. 

It's a moral code not too dissimilar to a Western: When confronted with injustice, you stand for what's right, even if you stand alone and are ridiculed for what you believe. It's a mode of Christianity that harkens back to Abraham Lincoln (and maybe even John Brown.)

That might be a more enduring political proposition than many Democrats' feigned, helpless aggrievance to the latest Republican spectacle. Campaigns come and go; so do their promises, if they existed in the first place. But the obligation to one's neighbors remains.

The post The Rise of the Christian Left in Texas appeared first on The Intercept.

Anthropic has denied allegations that a malicious version of the official Claude Code extension published to Cursor's marketplace was linked to any kind of compromise of its own systems.

The company was forced to issue a statement after prominent figures in the cybersecurity industry alleged that the extension, which infected up to 5,000 developers, was uploaded to Cursor's marketplace following a breach at Claudemaker Towers.

Felix Rieseberg, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, Xeeted today: "We're working with Cursor on this incident, but it wasn't a compromise of Anthropic's systems or employee laptops.

"A malicious actor used access to Cursor's marketplace to publish a tampered copy of the Claude Code extension, which we didn't build or publish. The versions on our official channels are not affected, and this only impacts Cursor users."

First spotted by EDR vendor Phorion, an unknown party pushed an update to Cursor's official Claude Code extension for Visual Studio Code that contained a persistent SSH backdoor written for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

According to Cursor, the extension - version 2.1.313 - was available to download for around 11 hours between 0227 and 1335 PT (0927 and 2035 UTC) on Thursday.

The vendors' analyses of the implant revealed that it collected information about the host machine and user, including usernames, configured Git emails, and public IP addresses, as well as attempting to open a reverse SSH tunnel.

Crucially, Cursor echoed Phorion's assessment that the package contained a critical flaw.

The script responsible for opening the SSH tunnel required admin rights on macOS and Windows to do so, and in the vast majority of cases it did not have these, resulting in failure.

Regardless, the extension still forwards the collected host and user data to the attacker, as well as dropping the attacker's SSH key and installing the persistence mechanism, so developers must go threat hunting in case their instance allows for the SSH tunnel to be created successfully.

Simply installing the latest version of the extension is not enough to clear the persistence mechanism, either.

The full details of how to remediate the issue, and links to download scripts to wipe the infection, are laid out in Cursor's account of the situation.

Aside from Rieseberg's statement today, neither Cursor nor Anthropic have commented on how the malicious package made its way to the official marketplace.

Anthropic's position is that a malicious actor uploaded the tampered copy to Cursor, but the latter has not outlined how it reached the marketpplace.

"[We] removed the malicious version from the marketplace immediately upon detection and blocked further distribution," Cursor said in the advisory. "We followed with a full shutdown of the VSCode Marketplace out of an abundance of caution."

It also ran checks to confirm no other extensions were compromised in the same way, rotated its own keys before restoring the marketplace, and worked with a cloud hosting provider to block the connection to the attacker's server, it said. ®

Get The Social Construction of Reality

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) argues that the social world around us, and our understanding of it, is something people fabricated together. Even though we made it, it feels as solid and real as nature, and we usually don't remember making it.

It reminds me of the "imagined orders" Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens. Enough people believe in money, nations, companies, and human rights that we treat them as real things instead of agreements. The International Sociological Association named it the fifth most influential sociology book of the century.

People make the social world, then experience it as a fact outside themselves, then absorb it.

"It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity. The process by which the externalized products of human activity attain the character of objectivity is objectivation. The institutional world is objectivated human activity, and so is every single institution."

"It is already possible, however, to see the fundamental relationship of these three dialectical moments in social reality. Each of them corresponds to an essential characterization of the social world. Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product. It may also already be evident that an analysis of the social world that leaves out any one of these three moments will be distortive."

It starts with routine.

"All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. … Even the solitary individual on the proverbial desert island habitualizes his activity. When he wakes up in the morning and resumes his attempts to construct a canoe out of matchsticks, he may mumble to himself, 'There I go again,' as he starts on step one of an operating procedure consisting of, say, ten steps. In other words, even solitary man has at least the company of his operating procedures."

Once people share habits and pass them down, they become institutions.

"The institutions, as historical and objective facticities, confront the individual as undeniable facts. The institutions are there, external to him, persistent in their reality, whether he likes it or not. He cannot wish them away. They resist his attempts to change or evade them."

"In the early phases of socialization the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations. To take the most important item of socialization, language appears to the child as inherent in the nature of things, and he cannot grasp the notion of its conventionality. A thing is what it is called, and it could not be called anything else. All institutions appear in the same way, as given, unalterable and self-evident."

Teaching it to children makes it more real to the parents, too.

"The process of transmission simply strengthens the parents' sense of reality, if only because, to put it crudely, if one says, 'This is how these things are done,' often enough one believes it oneself."

"Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products—such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness."

"As soon as an objective social world is established, the possibility of reification is never far away. The objectivity of the social world means that it confronts man as something outside of himself. The decisive question is whether he still retains the awareness that, however objectivated, the social world was made by men—and, therefore, can be remade by them."

1. Pick a rule you follow without thinking, like a workplace habit or a family ritual. Trace where it came from and who started it. Could work another way?
2. Notice the labels you use today, like "busy person," "good neighborhood," or "real job." Try applying a different label. Does it feel different?
3. When someone says "that's just how it works," consider whether it's a law of nature or something people built. What would it take to change it?

"Social order is not part of the 'nature of things,' and it cannot be derived from the 'laws of nature.' Social order exists only as a product of human activity."

Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run Recomendo, the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar's Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What's in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, and Book Freak.

TL;DR: Get a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows for $27.97 through November 1, with no recurring subscription fees.

Microsoft 365 Personal costs $99.99 per year, even if you only use Word or Excel occasionally. Microsoft Office Professional 2021 gives you another option: pay once and keep the productivity software without annual renewals. — Read the rest

The post For only $28, get Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, and more without recurring subscription fees appeared first on Boing Boing.

Voyager 1 gave controllers the silent treatment for a few days this month before resuming communication weeks before the spacecraft reaches the one-light-day milestone.

The incident happened on October 18: NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) couldn't detect a signal from the probe. On October 19, on the next scheduled communication attempt, there was still nothing. Was this it? Had the decades-long galactic venture finally ended?

Things are operating on a knife's edge for the two veteran spacecraft, which will reach their half-century next year. Voyager 2 suffered an antenna pointing issue in 2023, and a low power condition caused Voyager 1 to unexpectedly turn off one of its two radio transmitters.

The good news is that on October 20, the signal reappeared, leaving engineers wondering why Voyager 1 temporarily went silent.

Thus far, it seems a group of thrusters went offline and their backups were turned on. This could indicate onboard computers detected a problem and put the spacecraft into a safe mode.

Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: "This is the first time we've seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected.

"We're relieved to be back in contact with Voyager 1 and are eager to understand what happened."

The Register spoke to Badaruddin in 2024, where he described the challenges of working with the veteran spacecraft, but he reckoned the work was the "best job at JPL."

The twin Voyager spacecraft have recently been through a procedure dubbed the "Big Bang," where controllers turned off onboard devices and switched to lower power alternatives. The result will extend the lifetime of the spacecraft by a few more years and postpone further instrument deactivation. It was completed first on Voyager 2, and then Voyager 1, six weeks later in September.

However, the brief lapse in communication highlights that despite the ingenuity of the team that keep the spacecraft running, the project must eventually come to an end. In 2026, Suzanne Dodd, Project Manager for the Voyager project, told The Register what the end would look like.

She said, "We're just going to one day not hear the signal from the DSN, and we're going to rush around and make sure that it's not something on the ground."

Months of listening will follow, before engineers throw in the towel and declare the mission over. And then? Maybe a farewell message sent to the last known location.

Thankfully, in this case, the signal returned, so no need for a goodbye transmission just yet.

In a few weeks, Voyager 1 will be so far away that it will take a full 24 hours for commands to reach it and another 24 hours for a response to reach Earth.

Communications blip notwithstanding, there is every chance both Voyager spacecraft will still be operational as they pass their half-century milestone next year and, technology and funding permitting, continue sending data to Earth for a good few years yet. ®

Steve "Fly" Pratt has released two music recordings that tie in to the ongoing Tales of Illuminatus comic book adaptation by Bobby Campbell: The First Trip and, this year, K9 Rapture by DJ Flai, which was made available as part of the Tales of Illuminatus 3 packages. So if you supported Bobby's project, you may have heard the music. I bought K9 Rapture as part of my package. I'm going to listen to it today as I run my errands. 

Steve made lots of music available at other places. Much of it can be streamed at SoundCloud.  See also his Deep Scratch website and his music at Bandcamp. He also has a Patreon site. 

(October 30, Knoxville, Tennessee) - The American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association (AHRMA) 2027 National Roadracing series presented by VIB-ISO will unfold over 10 weekends at a variety of racetracks throughout the United States.

"AHRMA is ready to hit the gas in 2027 with a schedule that delivers a fantastic mix of iconic venues from coast to coast. While many of our favorite annual stops return, I'm especially excited to see AHRMA heading back to Inde Motorsports Ranch and making long-awaited returns to Thunderhill Raceway and West Desert, formerly Utah Motorsports Campus. These additions bring even more variety to an already strong lineup, creating a well-rounded season that racers and fans alike are going to love," said Leasha Overturf, AHRMA's Road Race Director.

The season kicks off on February 11 with an AHRMA-run track day open to members of all organizations at Roebling Road Raceway and moves into the race weekend from February 12-14, in Bloomingdale, GA and will conclude the weekend of October 7, during the 22nd Annual Barber Vintage Festival in Birmingham, AL.

This season includes a western back-to-back with a weekend at Thunderhill Raceway, CA, followed by West Desert Raceway, UT.

Mark your calendar now for some of the world's best classic motorcycle racing events with AHRMA.

2027 AHRMA National Roadracing Series Schedule*

2/11-14 Roebling Road Raceway; Bloomingdale, GA

3/26-28 Carolina Motorsports Park; Kershaw, SC

4/23-25 Inde Motorsports Ranch, Willcox AZ

5/21-23 Nelson Ledges Road Course; Garrettsville, OH

6/11-6/13 Autobahn, Joliet, IL (dates pending)

6/25-27 New Jersey Motorsports Park; Millville, NJ

7/30-8/1 Blackhawk Farms Raceway; South Beloit, IL

8/27-29 Thunderhill Raceway Park, Willows, CA

9/3-5 West Desert Raceway, Grantsville, UT

10/8-11 Barber Motorsports Park; Birmingham, AL**

*Preliminary Schedule as of 10/30/2026, subject to change

**The Barber Vintage Festival event is a no refund event. All road racers MUST BE FULL Members (no weekend memberships are available)

"I'm super excited about the 2027 AHRMA Road Racing schedule. We've got a terrific mix of venues that promise our racers a diverse and challenging season. Putting a schedule together is about more than selecting tracks, it's about creating a great experience for our members and giving them something to look forward to all season long, Leasha has nailed it! Before you know it, February will be here, and we'll be back on the grid. So, now's the time to get those machines ready," shared Greg "GT" Tomlinson, AHRMA Chairman of the Board.

The AHRMA Academy of Roadracing (AAR) and the Sidecar Racing School (SRS) will be held on Friday of most events except the Barber Vintage Festival. Pass the school on Friday and be eligible to race the weekend. Final school schedule will be announced at a later date.

Registration for these events will be opening soon at ahrma.motorsportreg.com.

About AHRMA:

The American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association (AHRMA) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to competing on fantastic classic and true vintage along with a wide range of modern motorcycles. With about 3,000 members, AHRMA is the largest vintage racing group in North America and one of the biggest in the world. The association has grown steadily over the years, reflecting the increasing interest in classic bikes.

The post AHRMA Announces 2027 Road Race Schedule appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Banan-a-Synth is just what it sounds like: a banana-sized, 20-note, capacitive touch keyboard that can mimic different instruments. And it sounds great.

The post Review: Banan-a-Synth Is an Adorable Yellow Synthesizer appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Back in February 2023 I launched Braggoscope, my unofficial spelunker for official best show ever, BBC Radio 4's In Our Time (write-up here).

You can listen to all 1,000+ episodes online for free (and see all books in the online reading lists). i.e. there's a lot so don't miss the visual explorer to find the good stuff.

("Spelunker" from George Oates' use of the term: "an interface to let you wander around a big dataset, and … to show relationships between things.")

Notturnometer, late night classical music and opera:

every piece played since July 2008 on BBC Radio 3's_Through the Night_, built from the BBC's own programme data. Discover the most popular works, composers, and individual performances across 6,644 episodes.

Built by Nick Sweeney.

As a classical music newb (but I know what I like when I hear it) I would love this site as an overlay on Apple Music to help me navigate. Help me see the well-trafficked roads.

The Gilbertoscope by Sameer Padania.

Need reading inspiration? Here are over 2,000 books chosen on BBC's A Good Read presented by Harriett Gilbert.

Note to self: here are all the times books by Graham Greene have been recommended and I really need to pick up Brighton Rock.

3books.net: books recommended on The Ezra Klein Show (New York Times).

1,680 books. More reading inspiration.

ALSO listening inspiration. e.g. here's the record for Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, which is a fave, and now I want to listen to the episode it is mentioned in.

Built by Michael Sippey.

BBC Radio 1's Essential Mix: new DJ mixes every week since 1993, hosted by Pete Tong.

This is a genuine community labour of love, originally a massive spreadsheet: Essential Mix Index.

Mixes have a track listing, where available, and a link to a YouTube search.

I am delighted to discover this mix by Blu Peter from 1997. Music peaked with mid 90s trance.

More posts tagged: filtered-for (127).

Auto-detected kinda similar posts:

• Happy birthday to the BBC In Our Time podcast, 20 years old today (11 Nov 2024)

Ford says buh-bye to the Escape gasmobile, but reports of an all-electric replacement for the crossover SUV may be somewhat premature.

The post EVs Sales Are Rising And Another Gasmobile Bites The Dust appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Just days after Daemonarchy, there's another new OS in the BSD family - and one that is heading determinedly in almost the opposite direction.

AlpineBSD is so new that it barely exists yet. There are no installation media available, though it's possible to manually bootstrap an installation. What AlpineBSD does already have is an AI policy, and the plan is to avoid "the output of generative AI models (e.g. LLMs)" as far as possible:

"Any software whose code, documentation, binaries, or other assets include, in any part, the output of a generative AI tool such as an LLM, is considered 'tainted' for our purposes."

The core idea is to combine the kernel of NetBSD with "a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible."

Back in 2024, the NetBSD project made its position on AI plain. Its commit guidelines say that "code generated by a Large Language Model […] is presumed to be tainted code."

Back in July, Linus Torvalds stated that "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects". Since then, NetBSD has seen a spike in donations and interest.

For someone mainly used to Linux, trying to install NetBSD is a little like hopping in a time machine to 30 years ago, and we speak from personal experience of Linux in the mid-1990s. As we mentioned when Slackware turned 30 a few years ago, back in 1996, this vulture tried Slackware 3.0 on his own hardware, and we never did manage to install it.

We tried NetBSD 11 a couple of months ago, and despite considerable help from the folks on the NetBSD-users mailing list, we failed to get the CDE desktop to start.

As an example, installing software on NetBSD is not the easy, comfortable task it is on Linux. It does have a package manager for handling binary packages: it's called pkgin, but as the NetBSD FAQ mentions, it's an optional extra. You must manually tick a box in the setup program to install pkgin with the rest of the OS, and when we tried NetBSD 9.3 four years ago, we didn't know that, overlooked that checkbox, and had to find a way to add pkgin later. (It is quite tricky to install a package manager when you don't have a package manager to install it with.)

This time around, we discovered that pkgin sometimes doesn't complete the installation process for you - it just leaves a text file in a destination directory somewhere, and you're expected to know that, go there, read it, and do any further steps yourself.

The NetBSD community has been quietly going its own way since 1993. It has its own ideas about what is normal, and its users expect that. Some folks on the mailing list told us that they never use binary packages anyway - they compile what they need from source code.

AlpineBSD's ports repository and source code are hosted on Sourcehut, under the account of sircmpwn, better known as Drew DeVault. We have quoted DeVault a few times over the years: we've often found that his views align with our own in various ways… such as about the best laptops ever made, and on simplicity in Linux distro design, or even on dot-com billionaires at FOSDEM.

Alpine's tools are quite well-suited to being adapted to other systems. We have previously mentioned the use of its packaging tool, APK, in the GNU-free Chimera Linux, which uses much of the FreeBSD userland, and also in Adélie Linux.

We will follow AlpineBSD with interest. There's strong appeal in the plan of combining perhaps the best-known, longest-established AI-free Unix-like kernel with the user-facing parts of pretty much the smallest and cleanest Linux distro there is. The AI advocates often warn LLM skeptics that they risk being left behind. Well, here's an OS for those who don't want to surf the AI wave. ®

Your favorite cocktails in October got all dressed up (fitting, considering it's the eve of Halloweekend). From Crème de Noyaux in a Negroni to maple syrup in an Old-Fashioned, cozy ingredients in the most popular cocktails of October turn simple drinks into festive serves. This list is perfect for any Thanksgiving and holiday plans you have coming up in November—get all the recipes below.

The coming weeks will be crucial for the future of the EU's car and van CO₂ standards and Clean Corporate Vehicles Regulation — a choice that will shape Europe's car market for the next decade. European car industry at a crossroads Driving forward means a competitive, EU-made EV industry and ... [continued]

The post Drive Forward or Turn Back? Four Reasons to Vote for a Strong Automotive Package appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The Commission's ETS proposal is pragmatic and shows a willingness to improve the ETS for transport. The proposal's strengths should be protected, including extensions of scope and support for new technologies in both aviation and shipping that represent an industrial opportunity for the EU. Key improvements remain, including support for ... [continued]

The post T&E's Response to the European Commission's Review of the EU ETS and MSR appeared first on CleanTechnica.

NASA has posted a contract opportunity notice, also known as a request for information, from commercial space orgs who can service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble was always looked after by NASA astronauts flying on the Space Shuttle, yet the last Hubble Space Telescope (HST) servicing mission was the STS-125 Space Shuttle flight, launched on May 11, 2009. At the time, scientists hoped the mission would add another five years of operational life to the venerable spacecraft. Almost 17 years on, the HST (aka Hubble) is still delivering science.

However, time is running out for the observatory. NASA reckons there is a 10 percent chance it could reenter the Earth's atmosphere by September 2032, rising to 50 percent by December 2033. As the end of the Swift mission showed, increased solar activity can cause greater-than-anticipated atmospheric drag.

Also, like Swift, Hubble has no propulsion system, and so when it reenters (as it will, without intervention), the reentry will be uncontrolled. Hubble is sufficiently massive that there is a remote chance somebody on the ground could have a very bad day when that happens.

As such, one mission option suggested by NASA is a vehicle to grapple the observatory and perform a controlled reentry and disposal.

However, there are other options. Something to boost the telescope's orbit up to at least 600 km, or another to "enhance its ongoing performance and increase its resilience and expected on-orbit lifetime."

Both are intriguing options, and important since, as NASA acknowledges, no replacement for Hubble is expected before the 2040s, when the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) could become operational. Despite the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, Hubble remains in high demand, with NASA reporting a 7:1 oversubscription.

Before becoming NASA Administrator, Jared Isaacman advocated a SpaceX mission to boost the Hubble, but the idea was ultimately rejected. Similar plans could now be dusted off. NASA's requirement is for a mission to occur by 2032, and not harm the Hubble.

A soft-capture mechanism was fitted to Hubble during the STS-125 mission, which will mean docking with the spacecraft will be easier than the grappling planned for Swift. Then, the question is what to do with it. A controlled reentry is one option. The other options - boosting to a higher altitude or "enhance its ongoing performance and increase its resilience" are intriguing. Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV), for example, is capable of on-orbit servicing and extending the lifetime of satellites. The Hubble is an order of magnitude more challenging, but the technological hurdles can be overcome with time and funding.

Last year, The Register spoke with Dr John Grunsfeld, one of the astronauts (now retired) who worked on Hubble during the STS-125 mission. Grunsfeld told us that the veteran spacecraft faced death by a thousand cuts as its budget was whittled away. The observatory itself recently switched from three to one gyro mode (the telescope uses gyros to control where it is pointed) to eke out a few more years of operational life.

At this point, NASA is looking for information and comment - this isn't a request for proposals. There is no indication of how much the agency expects to pay. However, the timescale is immutable. Without intervention, Hubble will make an uncontrolled reentry in the coming years. ®

The University of Manchester is scrutinizing why growing adoption of AI tools has so far failed to translate into the forecast productivity gains, however, researchers are struggling to give easy answers to close the "AI ambition gap."

In a report, also called "The AI Ambition Gap," the UK university's Productivity Institute mulls over the advances that have been made in AI and the expanding adoption of it, and sets out what business leaders and policymakers can do to realize the potential benefits.

The report was commissioned by IT services biz Bytes Technology Group.

One reason for the lack of results is that organizations have invested heavily up front on retraining staff, reorganizing the way they work and other adjustments. Those costs show up straight away, yet the payback doesn't come until later.

Another reason, the report suggests, is that AI tools can raise productivity at the level of individual tasks, but these gains do not automatically translate into greater productivity across a worker's whole role or the entire organization.

It cites the example of software developers using GitHub Copilot who completed around 26 percent more tasks, and professionals using ChatGPT for routine writing and analysis that reduced task completion time by 40 percent while improving the quality of the output by 18 percent.

However, a study of AI dev tools found these have increased coding activity by approximately 240 percent, while the number of actual software releases has only grown by about 30 percent. The gap is due to humans still needing to check and test their work before release.

High task exposure to AI does not automatically make a worker more productive, the researchers say. Jobs typically combine automatable activities with tasks that require judgement, coordination, client interaction and critical thinking. As AI removes or accelerates some activities, those complementary human tasks become the constraint on time saving and the translation of task-level gains into greater productivity

Job outcomes therefore depend on task composition and complementary human expertise, the report continues. It suggests AI may in part displace labor from existing tasks, while also creating new tasks in which workers retain a comparative advantage.

This could be good news for the UK, the researchers state. Compared with five other nations (US, Brazil, Colombia, India and South Africa), Blighty has the highest share of workers in occupations with both high exposure to AI and "high complementarity," it claims. This is in part related to the country's large financial and professional business service sectors, which are characterized by a high share of cognitive occupations.

This is just as well, as the government is pinning its hopes on using AI to drive economic recovery in a strategy outlined at the start of last year.

Britain's AI sector is relatively large by European standards, and the report cites recent OECD estimates that high-exposure economies such as the UK and the US could see annual labor productivity gains of between 0.4 and 1.3 percentage points.

Even an annual uplift of around 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points would represent a significant step change relative to the UK's stalled productivity performance over the past decade, it says, if this effect is sustained.

The Productivity Institute lists several "mutually reinforcing enablers" to help organizations close the ambition gap it identifies. None is particularly surprising, especially if you have read other reports advising on corporate success with AI adoption.

One is management setting strategic direction for the organization, another is strengthening worker capabilities through greater knowledge and data literacy to help organizations turn individual insight into shared learning. Others include implementing AI governance and focusing on applications that can create new products, improve core processes or solve previously intractable problems.

"AI's productivity potential becomes real when faster tasks lead to better performance across the business," said Bart van Ark, professor at The Productivity Institute and lead author on the report.

"The ambition gap lies between those individual efficiencies and sustained business results. Closing it requires firms to invest in management, skills and the redesign of workflows alongside the technology."

The conclusion is that companies must have faith and keep investing in AI, and eventually the benefits will come if you are doing the right things. These include focusing on high-value use cases linked to strategy, customer value and operational bottlenecks, plus treating AI as a workplace redesign.

Policymakers could help out businesses here by assisting identifying relevant opportunities, the report says, to reduce adoption risks and uncertainty.

Other reports published this week were more defined in their message: Gartner said 75 percent of corporate board members have yet to see any productivity gains or reduce costs from AI use, and private equity biz Apollo Global Management reckons only the biggest tech vendors are enjoying some sort of AI payoff. ®

The UK's top health quango has called on family doctors to figure out how to preserve health information and get in touch with patients after a website provider collapsed earlier this month.

NHS England has taken the unusual step of writing to GPs, warning them of the risks to patient information and continuity of service following the disruption to potentially hundreds of practices around the UK.

Silicon Practice Digital Health Solutions — owned by Schappit Ltd — has gone into administration. Reports suggest some GP websites have gone offline completely. Practice managers fear the extra workload and are struggling to stand up alternative forms of communication since the switch to digital channels.

NHS England is the government unit which runs the health service in England, but it is not directly responsible for GP practices, the vast majority of which are independent contractors.

Nonetheless, the quango's CTO, Kevin Humphries, wrote to practices and NHS organizations this week outlining his priorities in mitigating the impact of tech service collapse.

They include finding ways of preserving any historical patient information, particularly where it has not been moved to clinical systems, managing the online consultation backlog to make sure no additional requests are added, and identifying channels for patient access until new online systems are available.

Practices should also consider whether they have a legal obligation to tell the Information Commissioner's Office if the "availability, integrity, confidentiality or recoverability of personal data" is affected, according to the communication seen by The Register.

NHS management bodies called Integrated Care Boards are responsible for GP IT service arrangements, making sure they include "clinical safety, data security, cyber security and business continuity assurance across the GP IT supply chain," Humphries said.

They need to find someone to lead their recovery plan and contact affected practices and trusts. They should also "work with practices and other impacted organizations to support them in revisiting and assessing whether to enact business continuity and disaster recovery plans," Humphries said.

Questions over how an urgent NHS-wide response is required for the collapse of a relatively small supplier may come later. Among them will be the due diligence conducted before Schappit Ltd was added to a government framework in July.

GP and open-source tech campaigner Marcus Baw has published a free, open source template for an alternative website should practices want to bring systems in-house. He said the template is based on accessible NHS web standards, and has the same look-and-feel of common NHS websites.

"Practices can deploy it for free, and take back in-house control of their own website. It's a replacement website template which practices can set up using Claude Code in the web in an afternoon," he said. ®

Thousands of GCHQ storage drives containing sensitive data have been lost for years, and the British signals intelligence agency still cannot explain where they are.

According to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office's (IPCO) annual report, the missing storage drives have been known to officials for years, and may contain data related to the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA).

"I remain concerned that GCHQ has not yet established a sufficiently clear understanding of the scale, location, and recoverability of lost removable media that may contain IPA-related data, notwithstanding that the underlying issues were first drawn to my attention several years ago," wrote investigatory powers commissioner Lord Brian Leveson.

"While I recognize the technical and practical challenges involved, the passage of time without a comprehensive account heightens the importance of sustained senior focus and assured remediation. Given the potential sensitivity of the material involved, I will continue to monitor progress closely."

Described as "a very significant number," the report notes that GCHQ has scoped the maximum number of potentially lost drives, but is unaware of the exact scale of the issue.

The agency has embarked on "a program of further work" to locate as many of the lost devices as possible, which includes implementing an automated asset-tracking system by the end of the year. After this is up and running, it said it will be able to provide a more precise number of lost drives.

A GCHQ spokesperson told The Register: "As IPCO have reported, our management system for removable media was previously not sufficiently robust to effectively track the items that were registered for use. IPCO are right to note the flaws in the data the system produced, and we have taken action against all their recommendations.

"We recognize the importance of security of removable media in our systems, and have a range of measures to mitigate the risks posed by these items. The findings in the report have been addressed comprehensively, and all necessary steps to correct this issue have been taken."

Peter Sommer, digital forensics expert and visiting professor at de Montfort and Birmingham City universities, told us:

"Bearing in mind the sort of highly sensitive data collected and processed by GCHQ IPCO is right to be very concerned, the more so as the issue is already several years old. Vast quantities of data can be stored on the cheapest lowest cost hard disks and cards. At a much more modest level as an expert witness I know how important it is to keep careful track of the data entrusted to me."

Losing important devices is not an achievement that's exclusive to GCHQ. Myriad stories like this have emerged from all corners of the public sector over the years, such as the British Minidstry of Defence misplacing USB drives containing secret information in the mid-noughties, civil servants routinely losing their BlackBerry handsets, and UK police losing thousands of devices, too.

The missing storage drives comprise just one of the agency's various transgressions highlighted by IPCO in its report.

There are also "significant concerns" over the lax safeguards used to restrict the UK's overseas partners when accessing bulk-intercepted data collected by GCHQ.

IPCO was satisfied at how GCHQ ensured its own analysts remained compliant with safeguards around accessing confidential material related to journalism, journalistic sources, and privileged legal information.

However, there were concerns around how these same safeguards were applied to its international partners, which have access to its so-called bulk data interception "product."

The report notes that most partners were properly restricted from accessing such material, although an internal probe found that there were inadequate arrangements in respect to one partner and their access to journalistic material.

Both GCHQ and the overseas agency committed to rectifying the situation.

GCHQ was also questioned after a software bug in a web app "used by a relatively small section of the public" misidentified individuals thought to be participating in terrorist activities.

The agency identified and reported the flaw in the software, which it used for "target discovery work," and although it only affected a small number of individuals, the errors led to five port stops made under the Terrorism Act and caused "serious prejudice" to the victims.

A port stop, for the uninitiated, involves law enforcement detaining a suspect at a UK port, airport, train station, or within one mile of the Northern Ireland border, and can be carried out without suspicion.

Once detained, individuals have a legal responsibility to provide passwords to their electronic devices, which can be seized for up to seven days, and in some cases have their biometric markers taken.

Failure to comply can lead to a three-month prison term.

IPCO ruled, however, that there was ultimately no error made as defined by the IPA.

"This is because the activity was lawfully authorised under an interception warrant and the adoption of an unintentionally and unforeseeably imperfect target discovery methodology did not constitute such an error," the report stated.

Despite the agency's vast technical expertise, IPCO said that the issue affecting the software was not foreseeable.

GCHQ was not the only offender among the UK intelligence community (UKIC), with MI5's mishandling of the infamous Agent X case taking center stage in the report. Agent X was an anonymous MI5 informant whose real identity has never been publicly released.

A secret inquiry by IPCO as well as the report revealed that MI5 managed Agent X despite knowing he was a violent misogynist obsessed with extreme violence.

Lord Leveson said "the case of Agent X is as serious as anything I have dealt with as Commissioner," after MI5 gave false evidence to the High Court and Investigatory Powers Tribunal to protect a foreign neo-Nazi informant who was under police investigation for abusing his partner, referred to publicly as "Beth." ®

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The thrill of an event like Halloween doesn't come from a brand new costume or "two pillowcases' worth of sweets", says play specialist Cat Sewell.

The fun comes from carving out the time to play, making ridiculous outfits, and the terror and delight of haunting the neighbourhood, says the artistic director and co-CEO of Polyglot Theatre, a company that creates participatory, immersive, child-led theatre.

Congress must act to ensure that families are able to heat their homes before the start of the season

Heating oil may be the clearest warning yet of how the war in Iran is deepening the US's energy affordability crisis. Families who heat their homes with oil are facing bills that could be 50% higher this winter, adding nearly $900 to the cost of keeping their homes warm. These families were already struggling before the war began.

As the Guardian recently reported, research by my organization found that electricity shutoffs in 10 states had increased 28% over the past two years. Millions of Americans were already falling behind on their utility bills, forced to choose between paying for energy, food, medicine and rent. Now they face another round of increases in gasoline, electricity and home heating costs.