The FCC has banned approval of new foreign-made drones and components, citing "an unacceptable risk" to national security. The move will most heavily impact DJI but it "does not affect drones or drone components that are currently sold in the United States." Reuters reports: The tech was placed on the commission's "Covered List," barring DJI and other foreign drone manufacturers from receiving the FCC's approval to sell new drone models for import or sale in the U.S. In Monday's announcement, the agency said that the move "will reduce the risk of direct [drone] attacks and disruptions, unauthorized surveillance, sensitive data exfiltration and other [drone] threats to the homeland."

FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement that while drones offer the potential to boost public safety and the U.S.' posture on global innovation, "criminals, terrorists and hostile foreign actors have intensified their weaponization of these technologies, creating new and serious threats to our homeland."

The ruling comes as China hawks in Congress amplify warnings about the security risks of drones made by DJI, which accounts for more than 90% of the global market share. But efforts to crack down on Capitol Hill have been met with some pushback due to the potential impacts of curbing the drone usage on U.S. businesses and law enforcement. A wide variety of sectors, including construction, energy, agriculture and mining companies, as well as local police and fire departments across the country, deploy DJI-made drones.

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Alphabet is acquiring Intersect for $4.75 billion to accelerate data center and power-generation capacity as AI infrastructure demand surges. CNBC reports: Alphabet said Intersect's operations will remain independent, but that the acquisition will help bring more data center and generation capacity online faster. "Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive U.S. innovation and leadership," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a statement.

Google already had a minority stake in Intersect from a funding round that was announced last December. In a release at the time, Intersect said its strategic partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of data center capacity across the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade.

Alphabet said Monday that Intersect will work closely with Google's technical infrastructure team, including on the companies' co-located power site and data center in Haskell County, Texas. Google previously announced a $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027, which includes new data center campuses in the state's Haskell and Armstrong counties.

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Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. "My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases. Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.' To accomplish this previously unimaginable task, we've built a powerful code processing infrastructure. Our algorithmic infrastructure creates a scalable graph over source code at scale. Our AI processing infrastructure then enables us to apply AI agents, guided by algorithms, to make code modifications at scale. The core of this infrastructure is already operating at scale on problems such as code understanding."

Hunt says he's looking to hire a Principal Software Engineer to help with this effort. "The purpose of this Principal Software Engineer role is to help us evolve and augment our infrastructure to enable translating Microsoft's largest C and C++ systems to Rust," writes Hunt. "A critical requirement for this role is experience building production quality systems-level code in Rust -- preferably at least 3 years of experience writing systems-level code in Rust. Compiler, database, or OS implementation experience is highly desired. While compiler implementation experience is not required to apply, the willingness to acquire that experience in our team is required."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: With just three days to go before Christmas, a cyberattack knocked France's national postal service offline Monday, blocking and delaying package deliveries and online payments. The timing was miserable for millions of people at the height of the Christmas season, as frazzled postal workers fended off frustrated customers. No one immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicions abounded.

What the postal service La Poste called a ''major network incident'' remained unresolved by Monday evening, more than eight hours after it was first reported. For a company that delivered 2.6 billion packages last year and employs more than 200,000 people, that's a big hit. La Poste said in a statement that a distributed denial of service incident, or DDoS, "rendered its online services inaccessible." It said the incident had no impact on customer data, but disrupted package delivery. Letters, including holiday greeting cards, could still be mailed and delivered. But transactions requiring tracking or access to the postal service internal computer systems were impossible.

The cyberattack also hurt online banking. Customers of the company's banking arm, La Banque Postale, were blocked from using the application to approve payments or conduct other banking services. The bank redirected approvals to text messages instead. "Our teams are mobilized to resolve the situation quickly," the bank said in messages posted on social networks. The disruption came a week after France's government was targeted by a cyberattack that targeted the Interior Ministry, in charge of national security.

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ZALTBOMMEL (ANP) - In het Gelderse Zaltbommel is in de nacht van maandag op dinsdag rond 01.15 uur een overleden persoon aangetroffen, meldt de politie Gelderland op X. Het slachtoffer werd gevonden in een woning aan de Wichard van Pondlaan. "Hulp mocht helaas niet meer baten", aldus de politie.

Een persoon is aangehouden. De politie onderzoekt de identiteit van het slachtoffer en de toedracht van het incident.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het Integraal Kankercentrum Nederland (IKNL) waarschuwt voor veel meer kankerdiagnoses bij 80-plussers in de nabije toekomst. Onderzoek van het IKNL en het Erasmus MC voorspelt een jaarlijkse groei van 5 procent. Tussen 1989 en 2019 was dat nog 2,7 procent.

Volgens het onderzoek wordt momenteel een kwart van alle tumoren al ontdekt bij mensen van 80 jaar en ouder. In de periode 1989-2019 was dat nog 16 procent. Bij mannelijke 80-plussers komen huid-, prostaat-, long-, blaas- en darmkanker het meeste voor. Bij vrouwen gaat het met name om huid-, borst- en darmkanker.

Hoofdreden voor de toename is de vergrijzing van de Nederlandse bevolking. Als het aantal kankerdiagnoses in het voorspelde tempo doorzet, kan het aantal oplopen naar jaarlijks 32.600 vaststellingen bij 80-plussers in 2032. In 2019, het laatste meegenomen jaar in het onderzoek, lag dat aantal op ongeveer 18.700.

Een groeiend aantal oudere kankerpatiënten legt veel extra druk op de zorg. Daarom pleiten de onderzoekers voor een goede afstemming van reguliere zorg met de benodigde oncologische zorg. Ook wordt gevraagd om extra onderzoek om in de toekomst beter te kunnen voorspellen welke patiënt baat heeft bij welke behandeling.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De regering van de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft een onderzoek aangekondigd naar Brown University na de dodelijke schietpartij eerder deze maand. Het ministerie van Onderwijs gaat onderzoeken of Brown de Clery Act heeft overtreden. De wet uit 1990 verplicht hogescholen en universiteiten die federale financiering ontvangen om bepaalde veiligheids- en beveiligingsprocedures na te leven.

Bij de schietpartij kwamen twee studenten om het leven en raakten 9 anderen gewond. Als wordt vastgesteld dat Brown de wet heeft overtreden, kan de universiteit een boete krijgen of worden uitgesloten van toegang tot federale steun.

Volgens het ministerie van Onderwijs deed de berichtgeving na de schietpartij vermoeden dat de bewakings- en beveiligingssystemen van Brown niet aan de normen voldeden, waardoor de schutter kon ontsnappen. Ook zouden studenten en medewerkers van Brown hebben gemeld dat noodmeldingen over een actieve schutter vertraagd binnenkwamen, aldus het ministerie.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

contemplari1940 has added a photo to the pool:

The groundsmen at George Brown Botanic Gardens, Darwin, put this tree together while we watched.

Might be Le Grinch, or a DDoS, but it's taking a while to fix

La Poste, France’s postal service, is largely offline, possibly due to an unexplained incident.…

U-HWA transforms the long wait for emergence into an exciting journey, proposing new values in breeding through essence-focused product designs and witty solutions.

lioil has added a photo to the pool:

Sagano, Kyoto, Japan
トロッコ列車嵯峨野駅のラーメン店店頭のディスプレイ

Duca P has added a photo to the pool:

Kyoto, Japan

xthylacine has added a photo to the pool:

Statues hundreds of years old line the a cliffside wall at Nunobiki Kannon Shakusonji Temple near Komoro, Nagano, Japan

tl;dr PG&E has been a criminal enterprise operating illegally in San Francisco for well over a century. Eminent Domain PG&E.

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

The great PG&E debacle: A timeline 1898-1997: A deep dive into the scandalous history of the power company, including the Raker Act and Hetch Hetchy dam deal:

The more I got into the story, the more I wondered: How could this have happened? How could a private company, with the city's assent, break federal law for so long? So at one point, about 30 years ago, I flew to Washington DC and spent two weeks in the National Archives, reading and copying documents that relate to the PG&E Raker Act scandal. I carried home two big boxes full of records, and over the next few months, put together a detailed chronology of the Raker Act, the construction of the city's water and power dam at Hetch Hetchy, and the politics of how this all happened. [...]

1912: With Spring Valley's private water rates continuing to rise, and service as poor as ever, city officials press Congress to give San Francisco a radical and unprecedented federal grant: the right to construct a municipal water dam inside a national park. John Muir is furious, and rages: "Dam Hetch Hetchy? As well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches; for no holier temple has ever been consecrated to the heart of man." He has founded the Sierra Club to fight the proposal, and congressional preservationists line up against it. [...]

1925: Transmission lines are strung all the way to the South Bay, when suddenly the city announces that it has run out of money and can't do any more construction. The city's power line ends just a few hundred yards from a PG&E substation in Newark -- which conveniently connects to a new high-voltage cable PG&E has just completed from Newark to San Francisco.

On July 1, 1925, since the city lacks not only a final transmission line but the local facilities to distribute its own power, city officials agree, as another temporary measure, to sell the Hetch Hetchy electricity at wholesale rates to PG&E, which then sells it to local customers at retail. The city makes a few million dollars off the deal; PG&E makes a fortune. The remaining copper wire is stashed in a warehouse and eventually sold for scrap. Every supervisor who votes to approve the contract is thrown out of office in the next election. [...]

1935: Ickes issues a detailed opinion concluding that the city's contract with PG&E is a clear violation of the Raker Act. He urges the city to revoke the contract and move with all dispatch to establish a municipal power system. Mayor Rossi acknowledges receipt of the ruling and tells Ickes he's referring the matter to the city's Public Utilities Commission. [...]

1988: On New Year's Eve, the newly elected mayor, Art Agnos, is summoned to PG&E headquarters to meet with Dick Clarke, who tells him the facts of life: PG&E controls enough votes on the Board of Supervisors to block any effort at promoting public power. The contracts can't be changed and will never be stopped. And if Agnos doesn't want to play ball, PG&E will crush his political career. The city's budget analyst reports that the contracts are a bad deal and a violation of standard city procedures and takes the unusual step of recommending that the supervisors not approve the deal. A Guardian analysis shows that San Francisco is losing more than $150 million a year to PG&E by failing to comply with the Raker Act and establish a municipal utility. But the board votes 8-3 to go along with PG&E for another 37 and 1/2 years, and Agnos, the onetime public-power advocate who campaigned as an alternative to the pro-downtown politics of the Feinstein era, signs the contracts into law.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.