British soldiers are using computer games such as Call of Duty to sharpen their "war-fighting readiness," an Army chief has said. From a report: General Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, the deputy commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, said the war in Ukraine, where remote-operated drones have become crucial on the battlefield, proved the worth of having soldiers skilled in video gaming.

The Ministry of Defence on Friday announced the launch of the International Defence Esports Games (IDEG), a video gaming tournament that will pit the best of Britain's "future cyber warriors" against military teams from 40 other countries.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US crackdown on chip exports to China has continued with the arrests of four people accused of a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips. Two US citizens and two nationals of the People's Republic of China (PRC), all of whom live in the US, were charged in an indictment (PDF) unsealed on Wednesday in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The indictment alleges a scheme to send Nvidia "GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading US authorities," John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's National Security Division, said in a press release yesterday.

The four arrestees are Hon Ning Ho (aka Mathew Ho), a US citizen who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Tampa, Florida; Brian Curtis Raymond, a US citizen who lives in Huntsville, Alabama; Cham Li (aka Tony Li), a PRC national who lives in San Leandro, California; and Jing Chen (aka Harry Chen), a PRC national who lives in Tampa on an F-1 non-immigrant student visa. The suspects face a raft of charges for conspiracy to violate the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, smuggling, and money laundering. They could serve many decades in prison if convicted and given the maximum sentences and forfeit their financial gains. The indictment says that Chinese companies paid the conspirators nearly $3.9 million. One of the suspects was briefly the CTO of Corvex, a Virginia-based AI cloud computing company that is planning to go public. Corvex told CNBC yesterday that it "had no part in the activities cited in the Department of Justice's indictment," and that "the person in question is not an employee of Corvex. Previously a consultant to the company, he was transitioning into an employee role but that offer has been rescinded."

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Google's AI infrastructure chief told employees the company must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand. In a presentation earlier this month, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation titled "AI Infrastructure." It included a slide on "AI compute demand" that said: "Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years." CNBC reports: The presentation was delivered a week after Alphabet reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and raised its capital expenditures forecast for the second time this year, to a range of $91 billion to $93 billion, followed by a "significant increase" in 2026. Hyperscaler peers Microsoft, Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.

Google's "job is of course to build this infrastructure but it's not to outspend the competition, necessarily," Vahdat said. "We're going to spend a lot," he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far "more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what's available anywhere else." In addition to infrastructure build-outs, Vahdat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom silicon. Last week, Google announced the public launch of its seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit called Ironwood, which the company says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018.

Vahdat said the company has a big advantage with DeepMind, which has research on what AI models can look like in future years. Google needs to "be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," Vahdat said. "It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."

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The Japanese government said that the world's biggest nuclear plant would restart operations. Semafor: The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site closed in 2012, as Japan -- which previously generated 30% of its electricity from nuclear power -- shuttered most of its fleet in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown. But like much of the world, it is looking once again to nuclear power for reliable, low-carbon energy, especially in the face of high gas and oil prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It has restarted 14 out of 54 plants and announced plans for a first new reactor since the disaster.

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Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Diana Mini and some Fuji c400

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

St George’s Cathedral, Perth Wa

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

House being built on a bush block.

Photon Obsolescence has added a photo to the pool:

Tourism 101:
Bay of Fires- Binalong Bay,
Tasmania, Australia

Alan McIntosh Photography has added a photo to the pool:

I was just fixated on this small island in the bay, with the distant coastline in the background.

Brother & Sister Island, just off the coast of White Beach, Tasmania.

Om de vervilte ondervacht te verwijderen moeten onze katers Nikita en Vassili naar de trimster. De inbreuk op hun lichamelijke integriteit waarderen ze niet, daarom krijgen ze…

NRC maakt ieder weekend een selectie uit het media-aanbod. Meer kijk-, lees-, luister- en gametips zijn te vinden in de Slim Leven-gidsen op nrc.nl en in de cultuurnieuwsbrieven van NRC.

Tussen de oude muren van het Broederenklooster worden gulle en verfijnde gerechten geserveerd, schrijft Hassnae Bouazza. Alleen jammer van de ontsnapte zoutkorrels.

We zijn er helemaal aan gewend: planten- en diersoorten zijn makkelijk vele miljoenen jaren oud. Homo sapiens is relatief jong: de oudste échte mensenbotten zijn gedateerd op…

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on back of photograph, "American Border Line, 7-1961, Portal, North Dakota"

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Catch: you have to plug it into a computer first

If you’ve ever watched Mission Impossible, where Jim Phelps gets instructions from an audio tape that catches fire after five seconds, TeamGroup has an external SSD with your name on it. The T-Create Expert P35S is a portable USB-powered SSD that comes with a self-destruct button, which wipes all your data and physically renders the device useless.…

I did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called “Squid.”

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Hear from Cadillac Formula 1 Team CEO Dan Towriss as the squad prepare to enter F1.