The White House ordered restrictions on Starshield, SpaceX’s government-focused satellite communications system, that throttled or cut connectivity for terminals on fast-moving platforms. Ukrainian units reported lost links at speeds between 72 and 161 km/h, degrading guidance for interceptor drones, medium-range strike missions, reconnaissance, frontline logistics and communications relays. The limits slowed efforts to intercept Russian Shahed and jet-powered drones at scale, with Ukrainian officials seeking an operating speed of about 450 km/h to pursue faster threats. Connectivity was reported partially restored by Thursday morning, but Ukrainian leaders warned the slowdown allowed strikes to reach civilian targets and cost lives.
Pentagon leaders received the directive from within the White House, and a senior U.S. official denied President Trump personally issued the order. Elon Musk confirmed Starshield is owned and controlled by the U.S. government and that usage limits are set by the military and ultimately the president. The action followed U.S. pressure on Kyiv to stop strikes on Russian oil refineries during Miami talks involving envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and came amid controversy over a Trump administration diesel deal with Russia that prompted bipartisan congressional backlash and calls to restore full sanctions enforcement.
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Neuralwatt emphasizes that prompt caching significantly impacts energy efficiency in AI models, with cache misses roughly doubling energy use. Proper harness design can reduce unnecessary recomputation, saving both energy and computational costs. (neuralwatt.com)
An integration in Home Assistant scans secrets without user authorization, causing privacy concerns. The user warns that this mechanism could be abused, despite no consent given. (github.com)
Cloudera has been ordered to pay back wages and faces a two-year debarment for discriminating against US workers. The settlement was secured by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Labor. (justice.gov)
911 emergency response system in the US struggles to effectively address mental health crises and properly route emergency calls. This highlights the need for specialized response protocols to improve outcomes. (themarshallproject.org)
The seeds for the NIST elliptic curves were generated using the drand48 random number generator seeded with the current UNIX timestamp in 1997-98. A team from Anthropic discovered and claimed the bounty by revealing this cryptographic history, donating the prize to Let’s Encrypt. (words.filippo.io)
Claude revealed that the seeds for the widely used ECDSA elliptic curve standards were generated using a Unix time seed in the C library's random-number generator, not by hashing humorous phrases as previously thought. This discovery clarifies the long-standing mystery about the origins of these cryptographic parameters. (anthropic.com)
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