New executive order puts all grants under political control

All new funding on hold until Trump administration can cancel any previously funded grants.

On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and "must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities."

The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they're considered to "no longer advance agency priorities." Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs.

In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years.

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StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite is a cheap(er) RISC-V single-board computer (crowdfunding)

The VisionFive 2 Lite is a credit card-sized single-board computer (SBC) that looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi. But it’s actually a smaller, cheaper, and less powerful version of the VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC that launched a few years ago. The new m…

The VisionFive 2 Lite is a credit card-sized single-board computer (SBC) that looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi. But it’s actually a smaller, cheaper, and less powerful version of the VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC that launched a few years ago. The new model has a slower version of the same processor and loses a few […]

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FCC Democrat: Trump admin is declaring “Mission Accomplished” on broadband

FCC studies broadband “with one eye closed and the other half-open,” Democrat says.

The Federal Communications Commission is hamstringing its upcoming review of broadband availability by ignoring the prices consumers must pay for Internet service, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said in a statement yesterday.

"Some point to existing law to argue that availability is the only metric Congress allows to measure broadband deployment success. But the law does not require this agency to view broadband availability with one eye closed and the other one half-open," said Gomez, the only Democrat on the Republican-majority commission.

The FCC said on Tuesday that it voted to kick off the next annual review with a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) that "reorients the Commission's approach to the Section 706 Report by adhering more closely to the plain language of the statute and takes a fresh look at this question of whether broadband 'is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.'" That would remove affordability as a factor in the review.

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Stone tools may hint at ancestors of Homo floresiensis

The stone flakes don’t look like much, but they’re a clue in an ancient cold case.

Some stone tools found near a river on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that the first hominins had reached the islands by at least 1.04 million years ago. That's around the same time that the ancestors of the infamously diminutive “Hobbits” may have reached the island of Flores.

Archaeologist Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and his colleagues were the ones who recently unearthed the tools from a site on Sulawesi. Although a handful of stone flakes from that island don't tell us who the ancestors of the small species were or how they reached remote islands like Flores and Luzon, the tools are one more piece in the puzzle. And this handful of stone flakes may eventually play a role in helping us understand how other hominin species conquered most of the world long before we came along. 

Crossing the ocean a million years ago

Sometimes the deep past leaves the smallest traces. At the Calio site, a sandstone outcrop in what's now a cornfield outside the village of Ujung in southern Sulawesi, people left behind just a handful of sharp stone flakes roughly a million years ago. There are seven of them, ranging from 22 to 60 millimeters long, and they're scratched, worn, and chipped from tumbling around at the bottom of a river. But it's still clear that they were once shaped by skilled human—or at least human-like—hands that used hard stones as hammers to make sharp-edged chert flakes for cutting and scraping.

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Google discovered a new scam—and also fell victim to it

Disclosure comes two months after Google warned the world of ongoing spree.

In June, Google said it unearthed a campaign that was mass-compromising accounts belonging to customers of Salesforce. The means: an attacker pretending to be someone in the customer's IT department feigning some sort of problem that required immediate access to the account. Two months later, Google has disclosed that it, too, was a victim.

The series of hacks are being carried out by financially motivated threat actors out to steal data in hopes of selling it back to the targets at sky-high prices. Rather than exploiting software or website vulnerabilities, they take a much simpler approach: calling the target and asking for access. The technique has proven remarkably successful. Companies whose Salesforce instances have been breached in the campaign, Bleeping Computer reported, include Adidas, Qantas, Allianz Life, Cisco, and the LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.

Better late than never

The attackers abuse a Salesforce feature that allows customers to link their accounts to third-party apps that integrate data with in-house systems for blogging, mapping tools, and similar resources. The attackers in the campaign contact employees and instruct them to connect an external app to their Salesforce instance. As the employee complies, the attackers ask the employee for an eight-digit security code that the Salesforce interface requires before a connection is made. The attackers then use this number to gain access to the instance and all data stored in it.

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Xyber Hydra NAS is basically a GMK NucBox G9 with more RAM and better cooling (tiny NAS with four M.2 slots and Intel N150)

The GMK NucBox G9 is an impressively compact computer that’s designed for use as a network-attached storage device, thanks to its M.2 2280 slots for PCIe 3.0 x2 storage and dual 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports. When Ian reviewed the mini PC earlier this ye…

The GMK NucBox G9 is an impressively compact computer that’s designed for use as a network-attached storage device, thanks to its M.2 2280 slots for PCIe 3.0 x2 storage and dual 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports. When Ian reviewed the mini PC earlier this year he found that it offered decent performance, but that it could get […]

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