The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting that Beijing was behind a widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring how hostilities between the two superpowers are continuing to escalate.

The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said.

The admission wasn’t explicit:...

The Biden EPA handed out billions of dollars to bring clean energy technologies to lower-income communities. The Trump administration is trying to take it back.

FEMA and NOAA officials are being forced to skip major hurricane and flood conferences ahead of disaster season.

The company's co-founder, KR Sridhar, said Bloom's fuel cells are meeting data center power demand with less climate pollution, and lower costs, than gas plants.

A youth group says it plans to try a different approach to advance the case in the Swedish legal system.

The young people are arguing that the federal agency discriminates against youth when it comes to setting pollution regulations.

The order, viewed by POLITICO, aims to “eliminate red tape, reform our agencies and reforge our efforts around the priority to address fighting fire fast.”

"The buses are here, they are in service and they are benefiting our students and community — but the lack of reimbursement has created unnecessary financial strain," said the transportation director of one school district affected by the freeze.

They argue that the insurance provider operated in bad faith and broke its contract by not fully investigating their claims of smoke damage or paying for repairs.

Eaton Fire Residents United hopes the data will help residents convince their insurers to cover testing and remediation.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02309-x

The authors assess the current and future burden of mental and behavioural disorders across Australia. They show that high temperatures contributed 1.8% of Australia’s mental and behavioural disorder burden in the 2010s with expected increases to 2.4–2.8% by the 2050s and highlight the need for both adaptation and mitigation.

Reindustrializing America will require action from not only businesses but also a new wave of people that have the skills, experience, and drive to make things. While many efforts in this area have focused on top-down education and manufacturing initiatives, an organic, grassroots movement has been inspiring a new generation of makers across America for the last 20 years.

The first fab lab was started in 2002 by MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). To teach students to use the digital fabrication research facility, CBA’s leaders began teaching a rapid-prototyping class called MAS.863 (How To Make (almost) Anything). In response to overwhelming demand, CBA collaborated with civil rights activist and MIT adjunct professor Mel King to create a community-scale version of the lab, integrating tools for 3D printing and scanning, laser cutting, precision and large-format machining, molding and casting, and surface-mount electronics, as well as design software.

That was supposed to be the end of the story; they didn’t expect a maker movement. Then another community reached out to get help building their own fab lab. Then another. Today there are hundreds of U.S. fab labs, in nearly every state, in locations ranging from community college campuses to Main Street. The fab labs offer open access to tools and software, as well as education, training, and community to people from all backgrounds.

“In the fab labs you can make almost anything,” says Professor and CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld. “That doesn’t mean everybody will make everything, but they can make things for themselves and their communities. The success of the fab labs suggests the real way to bring manufacturing back to America is not as it was. This is a different notion of agile, just-in-time manufacturing that’s personalized, distributed, and doesn’t have a sharp boundary between producer and consumer.”

Communities of makers

A fab lab opened at Florida A&M University about a year ago, but it didn’t take long for faculty and staff to notice its impact on their students. Denaria Pringley, an elementary education teacher with no experience in STEM, first came to the lab as part of a class requirement. That’s when she realized she could build her own guitar. In a pattern that has repeated itself across the country, Pringley began coming to the lab on nights and weekends, 3D-printing the body of the guitar, drilling together the neck, sanding and polishing the finish, laser engraving pick guards, and stringing everything together. Today, she works in the fab lab and knows how to run every machine in the space.

“Her entire disposition transformed through the fab lab,” says FAMU Dean of Education Sarah Price. “Every day, students make something new. There’s so much creativity going on in the lab it astounds me.”

Gershenfeld says describing how the fab labs work is a bit like describing how the internet works. At a high level, fab labs are spaces to play, create, learn, mentor, and invent. As they started replicating, Gershenfeld and his colleague Sherry Lassiter started the Fab Foundation, a nonprofit that provides operational, technical, and logistical assistance to labs. Last year, The Boston Globe called the global network of thousands of fab labs one of MIT’s most influential contributions of the last 25 years.

Some fab labs are housed in colleges. Others are funded by local governments, businesses, or through donations. Even fab labs operated in part by colleges can be open to anyone, and many of those fab labs partner with surrounding K-12 schools and continuing education programs.

Increasingly, corporate social responsibility programs are investing in fab labs, giving their communities spaces for STEM education, workforce development, and economic development. For instance, Chevron supported the startup of the fab lab at FAMU. Lassiter, the president of the Fab Foundation, notes, “Fab labs have evolved to become community anchor organizations, building strong social connections and resilience in addition to developing technical skills and providing public access to manufacturing capabilities.”

“We’re a community resource,” says Eric Saliim, who serves as a program manager at the fab lab housed in North Carolina Central University. “We have no restrictions for how you can use our fab lab. People make everything from art to car parts, products for their home, fashion accessories, you name it.”

Many fab lab instructors say the labs are a powerful way to make abstract concepts real and spark student interest in STEM subjects.

“More schools should be using fab labs to get kids interested in computer science and coding,” says Scott Simenson, former director of the fab lab at Century College in Minnesota. “This world is going to get a lot more digitally sophisticated, and we need a workforce that’s not only highly trained but also educated around subjects like computer science and artificial intelligence.”

Minnesota’s Century College opened its fab lab in 2004 amid years of declining enrollment in its engineering and design programs.

“It’s a great bridge between the theoretical and the applied,” Simenson explains. “Frankly, it helped a lot of engineering students who were disgruntled because they felt like they didn’t get to make enough things with their hands.”

The fab lab has since helped support the creation of Century College programs in digital and additive manufacturing, welding, and bioprinting.

"Working in fab labs establishes a growth mindset for our community as well as our students,” says Kelly Zelesnik, the dean of Lorain County Community College in Ohio. “Students are so under-the-gun to get it right and the grade that they lose sight of the learning. But when they’re in the fab lab, they’re iterating, because nothing ever works the first time."

In addition to offering access to equipment and education, fab labs foster education, mentorship, and innovation. Businesses often use local fab labs to make prototypes or test new products. Students have started businesses around their art and fashion creations.

Rick Pollack was a software entrepreneur and frequent visitor to the fab lab at Lorain County Community College. Pollack became fascinated with 3D printers and eventually started the additive manufacturing company MakerGear after months of tinkering with the machines in the lab in 2009. MakerGear quickly became one of the most popular producers of 3D printers in the country.

“Everyone wants to talk about innovation with STEM education and business incubation,” Gershenfeld says. “This is delivering on that by filling in the missing scaffolding: the means of production.”

Manufacturing reimagined

Many fab labs begin with tiny spaces in forgotten corners of buildings and campuses. Over time, they attract a motley crew of people that have often struggled in structured, hierarchical classroom settings. Eventually, they become hubs for people of all backgrounds driven by making.

“Fab labs provide access to tools, but what’s really driving their success is the culture of peer-to-peer, project-based learning and production,” Gershenfeld says. “Fab labs don’t separate basic and applied work, short- and long-term goals, play and problem solving. The labs are a very bottom-up distribution of the culture at MIT.”

While the local maker movement won’t replace mass manufacturing, Gershenfeld says that mass manufacturing produces goods for consumers who all want the same thing, while local production can make more interesting things that differ for individuals.

Moreover, Gershenfeld doesn’t believe you can measure the impact of fab labs by looking only at the things produced.

“A significant part of the benefit of these labs is the act of making itself,” he says. “For instance, a fab lab in Detroit led by Blair Evans worked with at-risk youth, delivering better life outcomes than conventional social services. These labs attract interest and then build skills and communities, and so along with the things that get made, the community-building, the knowledge, the connecting, is all as important as the immediate economic impact.”

MIT Professors Andrew Vanderburg and Ariel White have been honored as Committed to Caring for their attentiveness to student needs and for creating a welcoming and inclusive culture. For MIT graduate students, the Committed to Caring program recognizes those who go above and beyond.

Professor Vanderburg “is incredibly generous with his time, resources, and passion for mentoring the next generation of astronomers,” praised one of his students. 

“Professor Ariel White has made my experience at MIT immeasurably better and I hope that one day I will be in a position to pay her kindness forward,” another student credited.

Andrew Vanderburg: Investing in student growth and development

Vanderburg is the Bruno B. Rossi Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics and is affiliated with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His research focuses on studying exoplanets. Vanderburg is interested in developing cutting-edge techniques and methods to discover new planets outside of our solar system, and studying these planets to learn their detailed properties.

Ever respectful of students’ boundaries between their research and personal life, Vanderburg leads by example in striking a healthy balance. A nominator commented that he has recently been working on his wildlife photography skills, and has even shared some of his photos at the group’s meetings.

Balancing personal and work life is something that almost everyone Vanderburg knows struggles with, from undergraduate students to faculty. “I encourage my group members to spend free time doing things they enjoy outside of work,” Vanderburg says, “and I try to model that balanced behavior myself.”

Vanderburg also understands and accepts that sometimes personal lives can completely overwhelm everything else and affect work and studies. He offers, “when times like these inevitably happen, I just have to acknowledge that life is unpredictable, family comes first, and that the astronomy can wait.”

In addition, Vanderburg organizes group outings, such as hiking, apple picking, and Red Sox games, and occasionally hosts group gatherings at his home. An advisee noted that “these efforts make our group feel incredibly welcoming, and fosters friendship between all our team members.”

Vanderburg has provided individualized guidance and support to over a dozen students in his first two years as faculty at MIT. His students credit him with “meeting them where they are,” and say that he candidly addresses themes like imposter syndrome and student feelings of belonging in astronomy. Vanderburg is always ready to offer his fresh perspective and unwavering support to his students.

“I try to treat everyone in my group with kindness and support,” Vanderburg says, allowing his students to trust that he has their best interest at heart. Students feel this way as well; another nominator exclaimed that Vanderburg “genuinely and truly is one of the kindest humans I know.” 

Vanderburg went above and beyond in offering his students support and insisting that his advisees will accomplish their goals. One nominator said, “his support meant the world to me at a time where I doubted my own abilities and potential.”

The Committed to Caring honor recognizes Vanderburg’s seemingly endless capacity to share his knowledge, support his students through difficult times, and invest in his mentees’ personal growth and development.

Ariel White: Student well-being and advocacy

White is an associate professor of political science who studies voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior. Her research uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people's everyday interactions with government. Her recent work investigates how potential voters react to experiences with punitive government policies, such as incarceration and immigration enforcement, and how people can make their way back into political life after these experiences.

She cares deeply about student well-being and departmental culture. One of her nominators shared a personal story describing that they were frequently belittled and insulted early in their graduate school journey. They had battled with whether this hurtful treatment was part of a typical grad school journey. The experience was negatively impacting their academic performance and feeling of belonging in the department. 

When she learned of it, White immediately expressed concern and reinforced that the student deserved an environment that was conducive to learning and well-being, and then quickly took steps to talk to the peer to ensure their interactions improved. 

“She wants me to feel valued, and is dedicated to both my growth as a scholar and my well-being as a person,” the nominator expressed. “This has been especially valuable as I found the adjustment to the department difficult and isolating.”

Another student commended, “I am constantly in awe of the time and effort that Ariel puts into leading by example, actively fostering an inclusive learning environment, and ensuring students feel heard and empowered.”

White is a radiant example of a professor who can have an outstanding publishing record while still treating graduate students with kindness and respect. She shows compassion and support to students, even those she does not advise. In the words of one nominator, “Ariel is the most caring person in this department.”

White has consistently expressed her desire to support her students and advocate for them. “I think one of the hardest transitions to make is the one from being a consumer of research to a producer of it.” Students work on the rather daunting prospect of developing an idea on their own for a solo project, and it can be hard to know where to start or how to keep going.

To address this, White says that she talks with advisees about what she’s seen work for her and for other students. She also encourages them to talk with their peers for advice and try out different ways of structuring their time or plan out goals.

“I try to help by explicitly highlighting these challenges and validating them: These are difficult things for nearly everyone who goes through the PhD program,” White adds.

One student reflected, “Ariel is the type of advisor that everyone should aspire to be, and that anyone would be lucky to have.” 

At least Florida’s SB 868/HB 743, “Social Media Use By Minors” bill isn’t beating around the bush when it states that it would require “social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena.” Usually these sorts of sweeping mandates are hidden behind smoke and mirrors, but this time it’s out in the open: Florida wants a backdoor into any end-to-end encrypted social media platforms that allow accounts for minors. This would likely lead to companies not offering end-to-end encryption to minors at all, making them less safe online.

Encryption is the best tool we have to protect our communication online. It’s just as important for young people as it is for everyone else, and the idea that Florida can “protect” minors by making them less safe is dangerous and dumb.

The bill is not only privacy-invasive, it’s also asking for the impossible. As breaches like Salt Typhoon demonstrate, you cannot provide a backdoor for just the “good guys,” and you certainly cannot do so for just a subset of users under a specific age. After all, minors are likely speaking to their parents and other family members and friends, and they deserve the same sorts of privacy for those conversations as anyone else. Whether social media companies provide “a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption” or choose not to provide end-to-end encryption to minors at all, there’s no way that doesn’t harm the privacy of everyone.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because we saw a similar attempt from an Attorney General in Nevada last year. Then, like now, the reasoning is that law enforcement needs access to these messages during criminal investigations. But this doesn’t hold true in practice.

In our amicus brief in Nevada, we point out that there are solid arguments that “content oblivious” investigation methods—like user reporting— are “considered more useful than monitoring the contents of users’ communications when it comes to detecting nearly every kind of online abuse.” That remains just as true in Florida today.

Law enforcement can and does already conduct plenty of investigations involving encrypted messages, and even with end-to-end encryption, law enforcement can potentially access the contents of most messages on the sender or receiver’s devices, particularly when they have access to the physical device. The bill also includes measures prohibiting minors from accessing any sort of ephemeral messaging features, like view once options or disappearing messages. But even with those features, users can still report messages or save them. Targeting specific features does nothing to protect the security of minors, but it would potentially harm the privacy of everyone.

SB 868/HB 743 radically expands the scope of Florida’s social media law HB 3, which passed last year and itself has not yet been fully implemented as it currently faces lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. The state was immediately sued after the law’s passage, with challengers arguing the law is an unconstitutional restriction of protected free speech. That lawsuit is ongoing—and it should be a warning sign. Florida should stop coming up with bad ideas that can't be implemented.

Weakening encryption to the point of being useless is not an option. Minors, as well as those around them, deserve the right to speak privately without law enforcement listening in. Florida lawmakers must reject this bill. Instead of playing politics with kids' privacy, they should focus on real, workable protections—like improving consumer privacy laws to protect young people and adults alike, and improving digital literacy in schools.

Cybersecurity professionals and the infosec community have essential roles to play in protecting our democracy, securing our elections, and building, testing, and safeguarding government infrastructure. It is critically important for us to speak up to ensure that essential work continues and that those engaged in these good faith efforts are not maligned by an administration that has tried to make examples of its enemies in many other fields. 

President Trump has targeted the former Director of the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, with an executive order cancelling the security clearances of employees at SentinelOne, where Krebs is now the CIO, and launching a probe of his work in the White House. President Trump had previously fired Krebs in 2020 when, in his capacity as CISA Director, Krebs released a statement calling that election, which Trump lost, "the most secure in American history.” 

The executive order directed a review to “identify any instances where Krebs’ or CISA’s conduct appears to be contrary to the administration’s commitment to free speech and ending federal censorship, including whether Krebs’ conduct was contrary to suitability standards for federal employees or involved the unauthorized dissemination of classified information.” Krebs was, in fact, fired for his public stance. 

We’ve seen this playbook before: In March, Trump targeted law firm Perkins Coie for its past work on voting rights lawsuits and its representation of the President’s prior political opponents in a shocking, vindictive, and unconstitutional executive order. After that order, many in the legal profession, including EFF, pushed back, issuing public statements and filing friend of the court briefs in support of Perkins Coie, and other law firms challenging executive orders against them. This public support was especially important in light of the fact that a few large firms capitulated to Trump rather than fight the orders against them.

It is critical that the cybersecurity community now join together to denounce this chilling attack on free speech and rally behind Krebs and SentinelOne rather than cowering because they fear they will be next. 

The White House must not be given free reign to turn cybersecurity professionals into political scapegoats. EFF regularly defends the infosec community, protecting researchers through education, legal defense, amicus briefs, and involvement in the community with the goal of promoting innovation and safeguarding their rights, and we call on its ranks to join us in defending Chris Krebs and SentinelOne. An independent infosec community is fundamental to protecting our democracy, and to the profession itself.

Tropical cyclones are hurricanes that brew over the tropical ocean and can travel over land, inundating coastal regions. The most extreme cyclones can generate devastating storm tides — seawater that is heightened by the tides and swells onto land, causing catastrophic flood events in coastal regions. A new study by MIT scientists finds that, as the planet warms, the recurrence of destructive storm tides will increase tenfold for one of the hardest-hit regions of the world.

In a study appearing today in One Earth, the scientists report that, for the highly populated coastal country of Bangladesh, what was once a 100-year event could now strike every 10 years — or more often — by the end of the century. 

In a future where fossil fuels continue to burn as they do today, what was once considered a catastrophic, once-in-a-century storm tide will hit Bangladesh, on average, once per decade. And the kind of storm tides that have occurred every decade or so will likely batter the country’s coast more frequently, every few years.

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with more than 171 million people living in a region roughly the size of New York state. The country has been historically vulnerable to tropical cyclones, as it is a low-lying delta that is easily flooded by storms and experiences a seasonal monsoon. Some of the most destructive floods in the world have occurred in Bangladesh, where it’s been increasingly difficult for agricultural economies to recover.

The study also finds that Bangladesh will likely experience tropical cyclones that overlap with the months-long monsoon season. Until now, cyclones and the monsoon have occurred at separate times during the year. But as the planet warms, the scientists’ modeling shows that cyclones will push into the monsoon season, causing back-to-back flooding events across the country.

“Bangladesh is very active in preparing for climate hazards and risks, but the problem is, everything they’re doing is more or less based on what they’re seeing in the present climate,” says study co-author Sai Ravela, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “We are now seeing an almost tenfold rise in the recurrence of destructive storm tides almost anywhere you look in Bangladesh. This cannot be ignored. So, we think this is timely, to say they have to pause and revisit how they protect against these storms.”

Ravela’s co-authors are Jiangchao Qiu, a postdoc in EAPS, and Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT.

Height of tides

In recent years, Bangladesh has invested significantly in storm preparedness, for instance in improving its early-warning system, fortifying village embankments, and increasing access to community shelters. But such preparations have generally been based on the current frequency of storms.

In this new study, the MIT team aimed to provide detailed projections of extreme storm tide hazards, which are flooding events where tidal effects amplify cyclone-induced storm surge, in Bangladesh under various climate-warming scenarios and sea-level rise projections.

“A lot of these events happen at night, so tides play a really strong role in how much additional water you might get, depending on what the tide is,” Ravela explains.

To evaluate the risk of storm tide, the team first applied a method of physics-based downscaling, which Emanuel’s group first developed over 20 years ago and has been using since to study hurricane activity in different parts of the world. The technique involves a low-resolution model of the global ocean and atmosphere that is embedded with a finer-resolution model that simulates weather patterns as detailed as a single hurricane. The researchers then scatter hurricane “seeds” in a region of interest and run the model forward to observe which seeds grow and make landfall over time.

To the downscaled model, the researchers incorporated a hydrodynamical model, which simulates the height of a storm surge, given the pattern and strength of winds at the time of a given storm. For any given simulated storm, the team also tracked the tides, as well as effects of sea level rise, and incorporated this information into a numerical model that calculated the storm tide, or the height of the water, with tidal effects as a storm makes landfall.

Extreme overlap

With this framework, the scientists simulated tens of thousands of potential tropical cyclones near Bangladesh, under several future climate scenarios, ranging from one that resembles the current day to one in which the world experiences further warming as a result of continued fossil fuel burning. For each simulation, they recorded the maximum storm tides along the coast of Bangladesh and noted the frequency of storm tides of various heights in a given climate scenario.

“We can look at the entire bucket of simulations and see, for this storm tide of say, 3 meters, we saw this many storms, and from that you can figure out the relative frequency of that kind of storm,” Qiu says. “You can then invert that number to a return period.”

A return period is the time it takes for a storm of a particular type to make landfall again. A storm that is considered a “100-year event” is typically more powerful and destructive, and in this case, creates more extreme storm tides, and therefore more catastrophic flooding, compared to a 10-year event.

From their modeling, Ravela and his colleagues found that under a scenario of increased global warming, the storms that previously were considered 100-year events, producing the highest storm tide values, can recur every decade or less by late-century. They also observed that, toward the end of this century, tropical cyclones in Bangladesh will occur across a broader seasonal window, potentially overlapping in certain years with the seasonal monsoon season.

“If the monsoon rain has come in and saturated the soil, a cyclone then comes in and it makes the problem much worse,” Ravela says. “People won’t have any reprieve between the extreme storm and the monsoon. There are so many compound and cascading effects between the two. And this only emerges because warming happens.”

Ravela and his colleagues are using their modeling to help experts in Bangladesh better evaluate and prepare for a future of increasing storm risk. And he says that the climate future for Bangladesh is in some ways not unique to this part of the world.

“This climate change story that is playing out in Bangladesh in a certain way will be playing out in a different way elsewhere,” Ravela notes. “Maybe where you are, the story is about heat stress, or amplifying droughts, or wildfires. The peril is different. But the underlying catastrophe story is not that different.”

This research is supported in part by the MIT Climate Resilience Early Warning Systems Climate Grand Challenges project, the Jameel Observatory JO-CREWSNet project; MIT Weather and Climate Extremes Climate Grand Challenges project; and Schmidt Sciences, LLC. 

Researchers are trying to use squid color-changing biochemistry for solar tech.

This appears to be new and related research to a 2019 squid post.

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

Microsoft is reporting that its AI systems are able to find new vulnerabilities in source code:

Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in filesystem parsers, command flaws, and a side-channel in cryptographic comparison.

Additionally, 9 buffer overflows in parsing SquashFS, EXT4, CramFS, JFFS2, and symlinks were discovered in U-Boot and Barebox, which require physical access to exploit.

The newly discovered flaws impact devices relying on UEFI Secure Boot, and if the right conditions are met, attackers can bypass security protections to execute arbitrary code on the device...

Analysts say power companies are unlikely to build new coal plants, even when offered federal loans and favorable regulations.

The administration’s attempt to derail international talks on shipping emissions could reveal a more aggressive approach at undermining climate negotiations.