An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The controversial EARN IT Act, first introduced in 2020, is returning to Congress after failing twice to land on the president's desk. The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act, (EARN IT) Act is intended to minimize the proliferation of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) throughout the web, but detractors say it goes too far and risks further eroding online privacy protections.

Here's how it would work, according to the language of the bill's reintroduction last year. Upon passing, EARN IT would create a national commission composed of politically-appointed law enforcement specialists. This body would be tasked with making a list of best practices to ostensibly curb the digital distribution of CSAM. If online service providers do not abide by these best practices, they would potentially lose blanket immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, opening them up to all kinds of legal hurdles -- including civil lawsuits and criminal charges. [...] The full text of H.R.2732 is not publicly available yet, so it's unclear if anything has changed since last year's attempt, though when reintroduced last year it was more of the same. (We've reached out to the offices of Reps. Wagner and Garcia for a copy of the bill's text.) A member of Senator Graham's office confirmed to Engadget that the companion bill will be introduced within the next week. It also remains to be seen if and when this will come up for a vote. Both prior versions of EARN IT died in committee before ever coming to a vote. The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Civil Liberties Union all oppose the bill.

Those defending it include the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), saying that it will "incentivize technology companies to proactively search for and remove" CSAM materials. "Tech companies have the technology to detect, remove, and stop the distribution of child sexual abuse material. However, there is no incentive to do so because they are subject to no consequences for their inaction."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: President Biden on Thursday will pledge $500 million over five years to fight deforestation in Brazil, a White House official said, in a move that would make the United States one of the largest donors to the global Amazon Fund. But the pledge would require approval from Congress, where Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed to international climate assistance and have made it difficult for President Biden to deliver on his promises to help poorer nations cope with climate change. Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has been working with the Biden administration on several issues, including climate change, despite Mr. Lula's criticism of U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

The Amazon Fund, a conservation program, was established by Brazil in 2008 and has bankrolled efforts to curb deforestation in the world's largest rainforest. Norway, the first and largest contributor to the fund, has donated more than $1.2 billion. Germany recently announced a $217 million donation. But the fund was suspended under Mr. Lula's far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who weakened environmental protections and saw annual average deforestation rates soar, reaching levels the country hadn't experienced in more than a decade.

Ivan Sutherland played a key role in foundational computer technologies. Now he sees a path for America to claim the mantle in "superconducting" chips. From a report: It has been six decades since Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, a software system that foretold the future of interactive and graphical computing. In the 1970s, he played a role in rallying the computer industry to build a new type of microchip with hundreds of thousands of circuits that would become the foundation of today's semiconductor industry. Now Dr. Sutherland, who is 84, believes the United States is failing at a crucial time to consider alternative chip-making technologies that would allow the country to reclaim the lead in building the most advanced computers.

By relying on supercooled electronic circuits that switch without electrical resistance and as a consequence generate no excess heat at higher speeds, computer designers will be able to circumvent the greatest technological barrier to faster machines, he claims. "The nation that best seizes the superconducting digital circuit opportunity will enjoy computing superiority for decades to come," he and a colleague recently wrote in an essay that circulated among technologists and government officials. Dr. Sutherland's insights are significant partly because decades ago he was instrumental in helping to create today's dominant approach to making computer chips.

In the 1970s, Dr. Sutherland, who was chairman of the computer science department at the California Institute of Technology, and his brother Bert Sutherland, then a research manager at a division of Xerox called the Palo Alto Research Center, introduced the computer scientist Lynn Conway to the physicist Carver Mead. They pioneered a design based on a type of transistor, known as complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, which was invented in the United States. It made it possible to manufacture the microchips used by personal computers, video games and the vast array of business, consumer and military products. Now Dr. Sutherland is arguing that an alternative technology that predates CMOS, and has had many false starts, should be given another look. Superconducting electronics was pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and then pursued by IBM in the 1970s before being largely abandoned. At one point, it even made an odd international detour before returning to the United States.

With Maximum PC and MacLife's abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century -- and was quite a run. Harry McCracken writes: The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you -- assuming there is a newsstand near you. They're the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only. But I'm not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I'm writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.

It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn't paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.) Still, I'm declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG's PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away.

Across the software development field, founders are experiencing an income tax season that has become an existential threat to their company's survival. Software startups say they were blindsided by shocking tax bills as a result of a change in law related to research and development costs, and if Congress does not provide a retroactive fix, business failures will spread throughout the industry. From a report: The root of the issue is the inability of lawmakers to extend a key tax provision that had bipartisan support at the end of last year that allows for full expensing of research and development costs under Section 174 of the tax code. That did not come out of nowhere, and was a big disappointment to major corporations that had lobbied for the measure. But for many small business owners who often wear multiple hats, don't have lobbying arms or relationships with big four CPA firms, the change to require R&D amortization over a period of five years first became known this spring when accountants showed them the massive tax bills they owed the government. As word has spread throughout the software community, some owners remain too afraid to look at the full tax cost as they file for tax extensions and accountants revise their returns.

The pain is being felt from the smallest software developers of a dozen or less employees to large venture-backed companies sitting on pre-2022 frothy valuations, with tax bills rising to a level where cash flow is being drained, forcing painful financial decisions. Startups need to take out loans or extend lines of credit at a time of tighter bank lending and higher rates, ask VCs for more money during the worst fundraising environment in over a decade, freeze hiring and contemplate layoffs -- if they have not started making them already within a sector leading the economy in job losses and running at a rate higher than the worst layoffs of the dotcom bubble. Many software firms will make it through this year, but if R&D full expensing treatment is not brought back, they say survival will become an issue. The software development field is the starkest example of the fallout from the R&D tax change because its biggest expense is software development talent. Developers don't come cheap, and until tax year 2022, these companies could fully expense those costs as R&D rather than having to amortize them over multiple years. Industry success relies on the contribution of software talent, but when that cost overwhelms cash flow and profits, it potentially makes the business model untenable.

US tech giants, grappling with a post-pandemic slowdown, have already laid off tens of thousands of workers. Now they're dumping millions of square feet of office space, pushing vacancies in city centers to record highs and ratcheting up pressure on the commercial real estate industry. From a report:No sector is looking to sublease more office space than Big Tech, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Amazon.com have all announced plans to reduce their office footprint. Amazon has paused construction at a new campus near Washington, DC, and Microsoft is reevaluating plans for a project in Atlanta.

Some 174 million square feet of office space -- double San Francisco's entire inventory -- is available for sublease across the US, according to real estate brokerage firm Savills. That's almost twice what was available pre-pandemic, Savills said. Companies looking to sublease space are still on the hook for rent for the entirety of the lease. But the retrenchment shows how the tech downturn, which contributed to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and turmoil in financial markets, is spilling into the broader economy. San Francisco, Seattle and New York are bearing the brunt of the pullback. While New York can count on office demand from financial services and legal firms, tech-centric San Francisco has no such cushion. Seattle business groups, meanwhile, are calling for a tax holiday to keep tenants downtown.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the U.S. Department of Justice: Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) -- to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents' free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.

The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.

The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."

Bank of England Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe said regulators may need to impose a limit on using so-called stablecoins for payments as policy makers try to balance the need for innovation with its accompanying concerns. From a report: Cunliffe raised the prospect that rapid innovation in payment systems could bring new risks for customers and financial markets as a whole. "While, from a public policy perspective, we want competition and innovation in payments we need to guard against rapid, disruptive change that does not allow the financial system time to adjust and could therefore threaten financial stability," Cunliffe said Monday in a text of remarks at an event hosted by fintech industry body Innovate Finance. Regulators would need to decide "whether there should be limits, initially at any rate, on stablecoins used for payments." Stablecoins, which are currently issued by non-bank businesses, are pegged to the value of an asset. They are designed to maintain a stable value, unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, while using ledger technology to record and transfer ownership. Cunliffe noted that "so far their use has been confined to facilitating trading and other transactions in the world of crypto assets," but that there were proposals to use them for other, broader payment purposes. "Stablecoins offer the possibility of greater efficiency and functionality in payments," Cunliffe said. But they currently do not fit into any regulatory framework, unlike the existing payments systems and money issued by commercial banks.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex and its former CEO William Shihara with operating an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. From a report: The SEC alleged in its complaint, which was filed in a U.S. district court in Washington, that Shihara coordinated with crypto asset issuers seeking to make their tokens available for trading on Bittrex's platform to delete public statements that Shihara believed would lead regulators to investigate those token offerings as securities. The SEC also charged Bittrex's foreign affiliate, Bittrex Global GmbH, for failing to register as a national securities exchange in connection with its operation of a single shared order book along with Bittrex. Seattle-based Bittrex had previously announced it would shutter its U.S. operations effective April 30 due to "continued regulatory uncertainty." The company's non-U.S. operations are based in Liechtenstein.

The Washington Post found a new tranche of "top-secret intelligence documents" on Discord, and based on them reported Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of at least two additional Chinese spy balloons.

Based on the classified documents, the Post also reports that "questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February." The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year, called Killeen-23 by U.S. intelligence agencies, carried a raft of sensors and antennas the U.S. government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to a document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

Another balloon flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in a previously unreported incident, and a third crashed in the South China Sea, a second top-secret document stated, though it did not provide specific information for launch dates.... [Chinese spy balloon] Bulger-21 carried sophisticated surveillance equipment and circumnavigated the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, the NGA document states. Accardo-21 carried similar equipment as well as a "foil-lined gimbaled" sensor, it says....

Annotating what appear to be detailed photos of the balloon that flew over the United States, presumably taken from a U-2 spy plane, intelligence analysts assessed that it could generate enough power to operate "any" surveillance and reconnaissance technology, including a type of radar that can see at night and through clouds and thin materials [including tarps].... China's military has operated a vast surveillance balloon project for several years, partly out of Hainan province off China's south coast, U.S. officials have previously told The Post.

But the NGA document is notable as much for what it doesn't say, reflecting the government's possible lack of insight, at least in mid-February, into the balloons' capabilities... The lack of detailed conclusions about the balloon's surveillance capabilities raises questions about the decision to let it fly over the United States before shooting it down, an action the Defense Department justified at the time as an opportunity to collect additional intelligence.
The Post also reports that another leaked document (relying on intercepted communications) assessed that within the Chinese military the balloon surveillance program lacked "strong leadership" oversight.

The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth. Politico reports: In a draft paper dated March 7 (PDF), Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be "probes" from an extraterrestrial "parent craft." It's unusual for government officials, especially those involved in the nascent effort to collect intelligence on recent sightings, to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, although top agency officials don't rule it out when asked. After Loeb posted it online, the paper gained notoriety from a post on Military Times and has also circulated among science-focused news outlets.

More than half of the five-page paper is devoted to discussing the possibility that the unexplained objects DoD is studying could be the "probes" in the mothership scenario, including most of the page-long introduction. One section is titled: "The Extraterrestrial Possibility" and another "Propulsion Methods." Kirkpatrick's involvement in the academic paper demonstrates that the Pentagon is open to scientific debate of the origins of UFOs, an important signal to send to the academic world, experts said. But they add that his decision to attach his name to a theory considered in most academic circles to be highly unsubstantiated also raises questions about AARO's credibility.

The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth." The paper goes on to compare the probes to "dandelion seeds" that could be separated from the parent craft by the sun's gravitational force. It examines the physics of how the smaller craft could move through the Earth's atmosphere to reach the surface, where they could be spotted by humans. The paper notes that the "probes" could use starlight to "charge their batteries" and the Earth's water as fuel. It also speculates on the motive for aliens to send exploratory probes to Earth. "What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders," the authors write. "As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet's surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration."

rmdingler writes: Montana lawmakers have moved one step closer to passing a bill to ban TikTok from operating in the state, a move that's bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned. Montana's proposal, which has backing from the state's GOP-controlled legislature, is more sweeping than bans in place in nearly half the states and the U.S. federal government that prohibit TikTok on government devices. The House endorsed the bill 60-39 on Thursday. A final House vote will likely take place Friday before the bill goes to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte. He has banned TikTok on government devices in Montana. The Senate passed the bill 30-20 in March.

TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has been under intense scrutiny over concerns it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on the platform. Leaders at the FBI, CIA and numerous lawmakers of both parties have raised those concerns but haven't presented any evidence to prove it has happened. Supporters of a ban point to two Chinese laws that compel companies in the country to cooperate with the government on state intelligence work. They also point out other troubling episodes, such as a disclosure by ByteDance in December that it fired four employees who accessed the IP addresses and other data of two journalists while attempting to uncover the source of a leaked report about the company.

The SEC is considering reopening the comment period for its proposal last year to re-define the definition of "exchange." From a report: The small proposed change would have sweeping implications for traditional financial firms and crypto -- and specifically decentralized finance (DeFi). The SEC's proposed change to Rule 3b-16 of the Securities Exchange Act would apply the definition of exchange more broadly -- with the Commission arguing that the rule as originally envisioned would've otherwise covered systems like DeFi.

It would touch so-called alternative trading systems, request-for-quote platforms and indication-of-interest platforms, as well as other sorts of messaging ones. "Make no mistake: many crypto-trading platforms already come under the current definition of an exchange and thus have an existing duty to comply with the securities laws," Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement. "These platforms match orders of multiple buyers and sellers of crypto securities using established, non-discretionary methods. That's the definition of an exchange -- and today, most crypto trading platforms meet it."

Motherboard has discovered a swatting-as-a-service account on Telegram that uses computer generated voices to issue bomb and mass shooting threats against highschools and other locations across the country. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Known as "Torswats" on the messaging app Telegram, the swatter has been calling in bomb and mass shooting threats against highschools and other locations across the country. Torswat's connection to these wide ranging swatting incidents has not been previously reported. The further automation of swatting techniques threatens to make an already dangerous harassment technique more prevalent. Swatting is when someone calls in a bogus threat in an attempt to direct law enforcement resources to a particular home, school, or other location. Often, swatting calls result in heavily armed police raiding an innocent victim's home. At least one case has resulted in police killing the unsuspecting occupant.

Torswats carries out these threatening calls as part of a paid service they offer. For $75, Torswats says they will close down a school. For $50, Torswats says customers can buy "extreme swattings," in which authorities will handcuff the victim and search the house. Torswats says they offer discounts to returning customers, and can negotiate prices for "famous people and targets such as Twitch streamers." Torswats says on their Telegram channel that they take payment in cryptocurrency. [...] On their Telegram channel, Torswats has uploaded at least 35 distinct recordings of calls they appear to have made. Torswats may have made many more swatting calls on others' behalf, though: each filename includes a number, with the most recent going up to 170. Torswats also recently shuttered their channel before reappearing on Telegram in February.

In all of those 35 recordings except two, Torswats appears to have used a synthesized voice. The majority of the calls are made with a fake male sounding voice; several include a woman which also appears to be computer generated. Torswats is seemingly able to change what the voice is saying in something close to real-time in order to respond to the operator's questions. These sometimes include "where are you located," "what happened," and "what is your name?" [...] Earlier this month, Torswats allegedly changed their tactics: they claimed to have made a swatting call using their own voice. In the subsequent recording, they start with much the same script as their automated voice. "I've done something really bad and want to kill myself," they tell the operator. They then claim they came out to their parents as a transgender woman, that they have an AR-15, and will shoot any police who respond. "Forgot to cut off my laugh at the end," Torswats wrote on Telegram.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. The National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games. On Thursday afternoon, about a half-dozen F.B.I. agents pushed into a residence in North Dighton, Mass. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland later said in a short statement that Airman Teixeira had been arrested "without incident." Federal investigators had been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online.

Starting months ago, one of the users uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events. [...] The Times spoke with four members of Thug Shaker Central, one of whom said he had known the person who leaked for at least three years, had met him in person and referred to him as the O.G. The friends described him as older than most of the group members, who were in their teens, and the undisputed leader. One of the friends said the O.G. had access to intelligence documents through his job. While the gaming friends would not identify the group's leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira. The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of Thug Shaker Central through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira's childhood home -- posted on social media in family photographs -- also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative. While many pertained to the war in Ukraine, the members said they took no side in the conflict. The documents, they said, started to get wider attention only when one of the teenage members of the group took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. From there they were picked up by Russian-language Telegram channels and then The Times, which first reported on them. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet. "This guy was a Christian, antiwar, just wanted to inform some of his friends about what's going on," said one of the person's friends from the community, a 17-year-old recent high school graduate. "We have some people in our group who are in Ukraine. We like fighting games; we like war games."

The White House said Thursday that data does not indicate a US recession is on the horizon, rebuffing Federal Reserve staff economists who forecast a minor contraction starting later this year. From a report: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said job numbers and consumer spending are strong and chalked it up to President Joe Biden's economic plans, waving off a recession risk. "We're seeing the success of his plans, and recent economic indicators are not consistent with a recession or even a pre-recession," Jean-Pierre said Thursday when asked about the Fed forecast. Federal Reserve minutes published Wednesday indicated that "the staff's projection at the time of the March meeting included a mild recession starting later this year, with a recovery over the subsequent two years."

Still, Fed officials appear on track to extend their run of interest-rate hikes, shrugging off the warning. Jean-Pierre pointed to job gains, the unemployment rate and consumer spending as indicators. She also said that inflation has been falling, though it remains well above target and may spur more Fed hikes, raising the chance of a recession. Still, the spokeswoman contradicted the warning of the Fed staff. "Those are the indicators that show us that we are not headed to a recession or a pre-recession," she said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday proposed sweeping emissions cuts for new cars and trucks through 2032, a move it says could mean two out of every three new vehicles automakers sell will be electric within a decade. From a report: The proposal, if finalized, represents the most aggressive U.S. vehicle emissions reduction plan to date, requiring 13% annual average pollution cuts and a 56% reduction in projected fleet average emissions over 2026 requirements. The EPA is also proposing new stricter emissions standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks through 2032.

The EPA projects the 2027-2032 model year rules would cut more than 9 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055 - equivalent to more than twice total U.S. CO2 emissions last year. Automakers and environmentalists say the administration is moving quickly in order to finalize new rules by early 2024 to make it much harder for a future Congress or president to reverse them. Then President Donald Trump rolled back tough emissions limits through 2025 set under Barack Obama but the Biden administration reversed the rollback. The agency estimates net benefits through 2055 from the proposal range from $850 billion to $1.6 trillion. By 2032 the proposal would cost about $1,200 per vehicle per manufacturer, but save an owner more than $9,000 on average on fuel, maintenance, and repair costs over an eight-year period.

If reactors are retired, polluting energy sources that fill the gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths, researchers estimate. The findings appear in the journal Nature Energy. MIT News reports: They lay out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year. Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power's absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year.

If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year. When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities -- a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants -- experienced the greatest exposure. "They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power's absence," adds the report. "The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century."

Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said: "We need to be thoughtful about how we're retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn't have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond."

Denver legislators have just passed the first-ever agricultural Right to Repair bill. Today's landslide 44-16 vote in the House follows a successful vote in the Senate last month. iFixit reports: Once the Agricultural Right to Repair bill passes, manufacturers will be required to share all the parts, embedded software, firmware, tools, and documentation necessary for repair. One critical step remains: a signature by Governor Polis, who has signaled that he supports the legislation.

To support Right to Repair legislation near you, find your state on Repair.org -- or, if you're outside the US, look for your country's advocacy network here. The summary of HB23-1011 reads: "Starting January 1, 2024, the bill requires a manufacturer to provide parts, embedded software, firmware, tools, or documentation, such as diagnostic, maintenance, or repair manuals, diagrams, or similar information (resources), to independent repair providers and owners of the manufacturer's agricultural equipment to allow an independent repair provider or owner to conduct diagnostic, maintenance, or repair services on the owner's agricultural equipment.

The bill folds agricultural equipment into the existing consumer right-to-repair statutes, which statutes provide the following:

- A manufacturer's failure to comply with the requirement to provide resources is a deceptive trade practice;
- In complying with the requirement to provide resources, a manufacturer need not divulge any trade secrets to independent repair providers and owners; and
- Any new contractual provision or other arrangement that a manufacturer enters into that would remove or limit the manufacturer's obligation to provide resources to independent repair providers and owners is void and unenforceable; and
- An independent repair provider or owner is not authorized to make modifications to agricultural equipment that permanently deactivate any safety notification system or bring the equipment out of compliance with safety or emissions laws or to engage in any conduct that would evade emissions, copyright, trademark, or patent laws."

The federal government is taking what could be the first steps toward requiring safer, more transparent AI systems as a Commerce Department agency invited public comment to help shape specific policy recommendations. From a report: The move is far short of the comprehensive AI legislation critics have advocated. But with the frenzy over generative AI continuing to grow, the Biden administration is trying to get a head start on a government response to the fast-moving industry. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking the public to weigh in on what role the federal government can play to ensure AI algorithms are acting as claimed and not causing harm.

"We really believe in the promise of AI," Assistant Commerce Secretary Alan Davidson, who runs NTIA, tells Axios. "We do believe it needs to be implanted safely and we're concerned that's not happening right now." Davidson said that the government could take a range of actions to shape AI that don't require new legislation -- including mandating audits as part of its procurement standards or offering prizes or bounties to those who find bias within algorithms. "We need to start the hard work of actually putting in place processes that are going to make people feel like the (AI) tools are doing what they say they are going to do, that models are behaving," Davidson said.