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Category: government – Page 70

The Hydrogen Stream: Construction begins on world’s largest integrated green hydrogen, ammonia plant

Solar energy and onshore wind are crucial to unlocking Africa’s hydrogen potential, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its Africa Energy Outlook 2022. “With further cost declines, Africa has the potential to produce 5 000 megatonnes of hydrogen per year at less than $2 per kilogram,” reads the report. The continent has 60% of the world’s best solar resources, but only 1% of its operational solar generation capacity.

Serbia and Hungary signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on renewable hydrogen. “The signed memorandum is the basis for exchanging documents in this area and discussing potential joint projects,” said the Serbian government.

A new law is putting astronomy back in the hands of Native Hawaiians

While the University of Hawai’i has until 2028 to officially hand off its management duties to the group, locals like native activist Noe Noe Wong-Wilson are optimistic about the change. She and others note that it feels like policy makers are finally listening to Native Hawaiians’ voices regarding the stewardship and care of their own community.

“This is the first time with the new authority that cultural practitioners and community members will actually have seats in the governing organization,” says Wong-Wilson, who is the executive director of the Lālākea Foundation, a nonprofit Native Hawaiian cultural organization. Wong-Wilson, who is a member of the working group that helped develop the bill proposal, says that the choice to bring in people and ideas from all over the community is what helped make the new law a reality.

She adds that the law’s mutual stewardship model takes into account all human activities on the mountain, and is designed to help “protect Mauna Kea for future generations,” as Native Hawaiians believe the mountain is a sacred place—a part of their spirituality as well as their culture. But years of mismanagement has created a mistrust in the state’s stakeholders, which included the University and Hawaiian government officials, and deepened a rift between Indigenous culture and western science.

Alarming Cyber Statistics For Mid-Year 2022 That You Need To Know

A couple of times per year, I take a deep dive on writing about the newly reported cybersecurity statistics and trends that are impacting the digital landscape. Unfortunately, despite global efforts, every subsequent year the numbers get worse and show that we are far from being able to mitigate and contain the numerous cyber-threats targeting both industry and government.

Below is a synopsis with links on some of the recent cyber developments and threats that CISOs need to key a close watch on (and that you need to know) for the remaining part of 2022 and beyond.

While many of the statistics seem dire, there is some positive aspect on the trends side as the cybersecurity community has been taking several initiatives to create both cyber awareness and action. And for those attending the 2022 RSA Conference in San Francisco, hopefully the backdrop of the following statistics and trends from mid-year 2022 can also be useful to analyze and match with product and services roadmaps for cybersecurity.

UK’s ‘plug-in-grant’ is no more — what happened to making EVs affordable for everyone?

View insights.

Since 2011, the UK government has been providing a tax-payer funded discount on the sale of battery electric vehicles. Known as the “plug-in car grant”, it was designed to help persuade motorists make the switch from diesel or petrol and commit to electric driving.

But last month the grant was scrapped with immediate effect. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, given that the amount buyers were able to claim back had gradually been whittled down from £5,000 to £1,500; or that it was recently available only for new vehicles costing less than £32,000 (the average cost of electric cars is around £43,000).

In fact, the government had been trying to scrap the grant completely for a while. Only a major backlash a couple of years ago forced the government to do a speedy handbrake turn and keep it going for a while longer.

The Time for Carbon Labelling is Now

Carbon labelling gives consumers a weapon to fight climate change at the cash register.

What’s Involved with Carbon Labelling

Today, nutritional and content labelling can be found on packaged foods. The Government recently announced plans to enhance those labels. Why, because of concerns that Canadians need to learn more about what they eat so that they can make healthier choices.

Carbon labelling would serve a similar purpose by allowing Canadians to make healthier choices about carbon emissions. A carbon label would let consumers understand the environmental impact of items they purchase and consume. The label would contain the total carbon footprint of the product.

U.S. government recovers nearly $500,000 from North Korean hack on Kansas medical facility

The U.S. Department of Justice seized roughly $500,000 in ransom payments that a medical center in Kansas paid to North Korean hackers last year, along with cryptocurrency used to launder the payments, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Tuesday.

The hospital quickly paid the attackers, but also notified the FBI, “which was the right thing to do for both themselves and for future victims,” Monaco said in a speech at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University in New York City.

The notification enabled the FBI to trace the payment through the blockchain, an immutable public record of cryptocurrency transactions.

Japan logs record 150,000 new COVID-19 cases as Tokyo and Osaka both top 20,000

Tokyo confirmed 20,401 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, topping 20,000 for the first time since Feb. 5, while Osaka Prefecture reported a record high 21,976 infections, contributing to an unprecedented nationwide daily total of over 150,000 new cases.

Asked earlier in the day about prefectures reporting high case counts, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno had reiterated that the central government would not be imposing any restrictions on people’s movements.

The FBI Forced A Suspect To Unlock Amazon’s Encrypted App Wickr With Their Face

In November last year, an undercover agent with the FBI was inside a group on Amazon-owned messaging app Wickr, with a name referencing young girls. The group was devoted to sharing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) within the protection of the encrypted app, which is also used by the U.S. government, journalists and activists for private communications. Encryption makes it almost impossible for law enforcement to intercept messages sent over Wickr, but this agent had found a way to infiltrate the chat, where they could start piecing together who was sharing the material.

As part of the investigation into the members of this Wickr group, the FBI used a previously unreported search warrant method to force one member to unlock the encrypted messaging app using his face. The FBI has previously forced users to unlock an iPhone with Face ID, but this search warrant, obtained by Forbes, represents the first known public record of a U.S. law enforcement agency getting a judge’s permission to unlock an encrypted messaging app with someone’s biometrics.

According to the warrant, the FBI first tracked down the suspect by sending a request for information, via an unnamed foreign law enforcement partner, to the cloud storage provider hosting the illegal images. That gave them the Gmail address the FBI said belonged to Christopher Terry, a 53-year-old Knoxville, Tennessee resident, who had prior convictions for possession of child exploitation material. It also provided IP addresses used to create the links to the CSAM. From there, investigators asked Google and Comcast via administrative subpoenas (data requests that don’t have the same level of legal requirements as search warrants) for more identifying information that helped them track down Terry and raid his home.

AI Would Run the World Better Than Humans, Google Research Claims

The bottomless bucket is Karl Marx’s utopian creed: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In this idyllic world, everyone works for the good of society, with the fruits of their labor distributed freely — everyone taking what they need, and only what they need. We know how that worked out. When rewards are unrelated to effort, being a slacker is more appealing than being a worker. With more slackers than workers, not nearly enough is produced to satisfy everyone’s needs. A common joke in the Soviet Union was, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

In addition to helping those who in the great lottery of life have drawn blanks, governments should adopt myriad policies that expand the economic pie, including education, infrastructure, and the enforcement of laws and contracts. Public safety, national defense, dealing with externalities are also important. There are many legitimate government activities and there are inevitably tradeoffs. Governing a country is completely different from playing a simple, rigged distribution game.

I love computers. I use them every day — not just for word processing but for mathematical calculations, statistical analyses, and Monte Carlo simulations that would literally take me several lifetimes to do by hand. Computers have benefited and entertained all of us. However, AI is nowhere near ready to rule the world because computer algorithms do not have the intelligence, wisdom, or commonsense required to make rational decisions.

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