An Australian Senate committee has recommended a ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from federal government devices be extended to China's most popular social media platform, WeChat. From a report: The Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media also recommended in a report late Tuesday that social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter should become more transparent or be fined. Committee chair James Paterson said on Wednesday the report's recommendations would make Australia a more difficult target for the serious foreign interference risks that the nation faced. "It tackles both the problems posed by authoritarian-headquartered social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat and Western-headquartered social media platforms being weaponized by the actions of authoritarian governments including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter," Paterson told reporters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: China will place export controls on drone and drone equipment in order to "safeguard national security and interests," its commerce ministry announced Monday, in a move that could impact the war in Ukraine. The restrictions on equipment will require vendors to seek permission to export certain drone engines, lasers, imaging, communications and radar gear, and anti-drone systems. Consumer-grade drones with certain specifications are also subject to the controls, which come into effect September 1. All civilian drones not included in the controls are prohibited from being exported for military purposes, an unidentified ministry spokesperson said in an online statement. "China's modest expansion of the scope of drone control this time is an important measure to demonstrate its commitment as a responsible major country to implement global security initiatives and maintain world peace," the statement said, adding that China has "consistently opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes."

More than 50% of drones sold in the US are made by Shenzhen-based DJI, the world's top drone manufacturer, with DJI models popular among US public safety agencies, according to two US lawmakers. They earlier this year introduced legislation that would restrict the company from operating on US communications infrastructure. The US last year placed sweeping controls banning Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. Beijing last month imposed export controls on two elements essential for manufacturing semiconductors. The controls go into effect August 1.

Drones have already figured into US-China tensions. The US added DJI to an investment blacklist in 2021, alleging that the firm played a role in facilitating human rights abuses against China's Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities in the far western region of Xinjiang. The company was already on the US entity list, barring it from buying American technology. DJI denied having done anything to justify being placed on the list. On Tuesday, following the ministry announcement, DJI released a statement on its website saying it has never designed or marketed equipment for military purposes and would "actively cooperate" with the new export control policy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: President Joe Biden has determined that Colorado Springs will be the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command, reversing a Trump administration decision to move the facility to Alabama, the Pentagon announced Monday. The decision will only intensify a bitter parochial battle on Capitol Hill, as members of the Colorado and Alabama delegations have spent months accusing each other of playing politics on the future of the four-star command.

The command was reestablished in 2019 and given temporary headquarters in Colorado while the Air Force evaluated a list of possible permanent sites. With an eye on Russia and China, its job is to oversee the military's operations of space assets and the defense of satellites. Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Biden notified the Department of Defense on Monday that he had made the decision, after speaking with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and weighing the input of senior military leaders. "Locating Headquarters U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs ultimately ensures peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period," Ryder said in a statement. "It will also enable the command to most effectively plan, execute and integrate military spacepower into multi-domain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests." Austin, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and U.S. Space Command chief Gen. James Dickinson all support Biden's decision, Ryder added.

The most significant factor Biden weighed in making the decision was the impact such a move would have on the military's ability to confront the changing threat from space, according to a senior administration official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. Keeping the headquarters at Colorado Springs "maintains operational readiness and ensures no disruption to its mission or to its personnel," according to the official. The command is set to achieve "full operational capability" this month, the official said. A move to Alabama, by contrast, would have forced the command to transition to a new headquarters in the mid-2020s, and the new site would not have been open until the early to mid-2030s, the official said. "The president found that risk unacceptable, especially given the challenges we may face in the space domain during this critical time period," according to the official.

Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, comments on the latest developments around last week's remarkable claim of a well-above-room-temperature superconducting material at ambient pressure, dubbed LK-99. Here's an excerpt from his post: As of this morning, there are (as yet not really verified) reports of replication from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. At least, a video has been posted showed what could be a sample of LK-99 levitating over a magnet due to the Meissner effect, and in different orientations relative to the magnet itself. That's important, because a (merely!) paramagnetic material can levitate in a sufficiently strong field (as can diamagnetic materials like water droplets and frogs), but these can come back to a particular orientation like a compass needle. Superconductors are "perfect diamagnets," excluding all magnetic fields, and that's a big difference. The "Meissner effect" that everyone has been hearing about so much is observed when a material first becomes superconductive at the right temperature and expels whatever magnetic fields were penetrating it at the time. All this said, we're having to take the video on the statements of whoever made/released it, and there are other possible explanations for the it that do not involve room-temperature superconductivity. I will be very happy if this is a real replication, but I'm not taking the day off yet to celebrate just based on this.

And even though I'm usually more of an experimental-results guy than a theory guy, two other new preprints interest me greatly. One is from a team (PDF) at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, and the other (PDF) is from Sinead Griffin at Lawrence Berkeley. Both start from the reported X-ray structural data of LK-99 and look at its predicted behavior via density functional theory (DFT) calculations. And they come to very similar conclusions: it could work. This is quite important, because this could mean that we don't need to postulate completely new physics to explain something like LK-99 - if you'd given the starting data to someone as a blind test, they would have come back after the DFT runs saying "You know, this looks like it could be a really good superconductor..." [...]

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. The Shenyang and Lawrence Berkeley calculations are very positive developments, and take this well out of the cold-fusion "we can offer no explanation" territory. Not that there's anything wrong with new physics (!), but it sets a much, much higher bar if you have to invoke something in that range. I await more replication data, and with more than just social media videos backing them up. This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: U.S. and European officials are growing increasingly concerned about China's accelerated push into the production of older-generation semiconductors and are debating new strategies to contain the country's expansion. President Joe Biden implemented broad controls over China's ability to secure the kind of advanced chips that power artificial-intelligence models and military applications. But Beijing responded by pouring billions into factories for the so-called legacy chips that haven't been banned. Such chips are still essential throughout the global economy, critical components for everything from smartphones and electric vehicles to military hardware. That's sparked fresh fears about China's potential influence and triggered talks of further reining in the Asian nation, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The U.S. is determined to prevent chips from becoming a point of leverage for China, the people said.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo alluded to the problem during a panel discussion last week at the American Enterprise Institute. "The amount of money that China is pouring into subsidizing what will be an excess capacity of mature chips and legacy chips -- that's a problem that we need to be thinking about and working with our allies to get ahead of," she said. While there's no timeline for action to be taken and information is still being gathered, all options are on the table, according to a senior Biden administration official. The most advanced semiconductors are those produced using the thinnest etching technology, with 3-nanometers state of the art today. Legacy chips are typically considered those made with 28-nm equipment or above, technology introduced more than a decade ago.

Senior E.U. and U.S. officials are concerned about Beijing's drive to dominate this market for both economic and security reasons, the people said. They worry Chinese companies could dump their legacy chips on global markets in the future, driving foreign rivals out of business like in the solar industry, they said. Western companies may then become dependent on China for these semiconductors, the people said. Buying such critical tech components from China may create national security risks, especially if the silicon is needed in defense equipment. "The United States and its partners should be on guard to mitigate nonmarket behavior by China's emerging semiconductor firms," researchers Robert Daly and Matthew Turpin wrote in a recent essay for the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University. "Over time, it could create new U.S. or partner dependencies on China-based supply chains that do not exist today, impinging on U.S. strategic autonomy."

President Joe Biden is planning to sign an executive order to limit critical US technology investments in China by mid-August, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the internal deliberations. From the report: The order focuses on semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It won't affect any existing investments and will only prohibit certain transactions. Other deals will have to be disclosed to the government. The timing for the order, slated for the second week of August, has slipped many times before, and there is no guarantee it won't be delayed again. But internal discussions have already shifted from the substance of the measures to rolling out the order and accompanying rule, said the people familiar who spoke on condition of anonymity. The restrictions won't take effect until next year, and their scope will be laid out in a rulemaking process, involving a comment period so stakeholders can weigh in on the final version.

Record youth unemployment after Beijing clampdown on private sector, FDI slump. From a report: New graduate Glonee Zhang had high hopes when he landed a job at a lithium battery company in Shenzhen last summer. Now, like more than one in five young people in China, he's out of work. An English major entering a post-COVID working world, Zhang thought "the end of the pandemic would bring a bright future." Six months later, he and half of the firm's intake of 400 new grads were laid off when the company's sales slumped by 10% year-on-year. "Sometimes I feel my soul is being torn apart," said a downbeat Zhang, getting by in the meantime doing odd jobs.

Caught between a long-running regulatory crackdown by Beijing on private enterprise, and a slide in hiring by foreign firms in the country, young people now face a record jobless rate of 21.3%. Since the official number only includes people actively seeking work, some economists say the percentage of young people not in employment, education or training could be significantly higher. While the pandemic may have gone, its departure has unmasked a growing structural problem for President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The world's second-biggest economy is producing twice the number of graduates it did 10 years ago, with nearly 12 million this year - but not the jobs they're qualified to do.

"Over the years, China has expanded universities, but China is still a largely manufacturing [and services] based economy," Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, told Nikkei Asia. "This is structural, because the economy itself is big, it's gradually changing. But it takes time for China to become a more advanced economy like Japan, South Korea and the U.S., which have more professional services dominating job creation." In December 2019, before COVID struck, the youth jobless rate was 12.2%. Graduates like Zhang are now forced to consider continuing in higher education or trying for highly competitive but stable government jobs for which they are overqualified. Studying or working overseas is also an option for some.

"If the U.S. is to ease its dependence for lithium on other countries such as China, it may need this quiet corner of southwest Arkansas to lead the way," reports the Wall Street Journal, visiting the "thick-wooded back roads" and "crisscrossing fields where oil drillers gave up long ago" in Magnolia, Arkansas. (Population: 11,105) Exxon Mobil, a new player in the hunt for U.S. lithium, is planning to build one of the world's largest lithium processing facilities not far from Magnolia, with a capacity to produce 75,000 to 100,000 metric tons of lithium a year, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Exxon purchased 120,000 gross acres in the area for a price tag of more than $100 million. A consultant for the seller had estimated the prospect could have the equivalent of 4 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent, enough to power 50 million EVs... To push the project forward, Exxon will have to profitably scale up the technology used to siphon lithium from brine, which for years has been an elusive goal across the industry... Exxon believes it can leverage its engineering prowess to become a low-cost domestic supplier of lithium, and has had discussions with battery and EV manufacturers, people familiar with the matter said. The company would also benefit from green-energy subsidies included in the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows for tax credits of 10% of the cost of producing lithium.

Exxon, which is generally bullish about the future of oil and natural gas, is also preparing for a future less dependent on gasoline. Last year, it projected light-duty vehicle demand for internal combustion engine fuels could peak by 2025, while EVs, hybrids and vehicles powered by fuel cells could grow to more than 50% of new car sales by 2050.
"Other companies including Standard Lithium and Tetra Technologies are planning to build capacity in the area..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

The hack of Microsoft's cloud that resulted in the compromise of government emails was an example of a traditional espionage threat, a senior National Security Agency official said. From a report: Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the N.S.A., said the United States needed to protect its networks from such espionage, but that adversaries would continue to try to secretly extract information from each other. "It is China doing espionage," Mr. Joyce said. "It is what nation-states do. We have to defend against it, we need to push back against it. But that is something that happens."

The hackers took emails from senior State Department officials including Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China. The theft of Mr. Burns's emails was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. Daniel J. Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, also had his email hacked, a U.S. official said. The emails of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo were also obtained in the hack, which was discovered in June by State Department cybersecurity experts scouring user logs for unusual activity. Microsoft later determined that Chinese hackers had obtained access to email accounts a month earlier.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: Apple's processor manufacturer TSMC says that it can't find enough skilled workers to open its Arizona facility on time, and mass chip production will have to wait until 2025. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) began work on a first factory in Arizona in 2021. Since then, the plant has seen safety concerns, complaints from TSMC about US taxation, and a claim that US staff don't work hard enough. Most recently, the company announced that it was sending more Taiwanese workers to the US to manage the final stages of making the plant operational. Now according to Nikkei Asia, that move has proven insufficient.

"We are encountering certain challenges, as there is an insufficient amount of skilled workers with the specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility," said TSMC chair Mark Liu. "Consequently we expect the production schedule of N4 [4-nanometer] process technology to be pushed out to 2025," continued Liu. The news comes alongside TSMC's latest earnings report, which shows that the firm's profits have fallen, though they are expected to recover when the iPhone 15 range launches. TSMC blames the results on a slow economic recover in China, and a downturn in the consumer electronics market.

Billionaire Tencent co-founder Pony Ma has penned a lengthy op-ed backing Chinese pledges to resuscitate the private sector, becoming the most prominent entrepreneur to endorse Beijing's promises to unshackle a giant swath of the economy. From a report: China's third-wealthiest person echoed many of the sentiments in an official policy document published Wednesday that called for the revival of private businesses, at a time the world's No. 2 economy is struggling to gain momentum. He was joined by Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun, the smartphone mogul turned EV entrepreneur, who in a separate editorial likened the policies to a manifesto for quality growth and innovation.

Ma, who rarely voices his opinions but has publicly supported important policies in the past, penned an article for state-owned CCTV in which he called private enterprise pivotal to the nation, and explicitly referenced Chinese President Xi Jinping's previous proclamations on the matter. He talked about the advent of AI and how the country needed to embrace next-generation technology. Ma's comments are notable given Tencent was among the corporations targeted by a sweeping crackdown on the private sector that began in 2020 with the scrapping of Ant Group's IPO. "We must once again embrace the opportunities presented by the coming industrial revolution," Ma wrote in his op-ed carried on CCTV's website. Using the policies as a guide, "we will look ahead with confidence and redouble our efforts."

The U.S. has suspended federal funding to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for failing to provide documentation related to concerns over biosafety protocol violations at the facility that has faced questions for years over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a report: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also said it wants to bar the Chinese research body from participating in government procurement and non-procurement programs going forward. WIV has not received federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. medical research agency, since July 2020, according to an HHS statement on Wednesday.

Mary and Gary Freeman, founders of a Florida-based lab supplies company, discovered a rich lithium deposit in Maine while searching for tourmaline, a striking, multi-colored gemstone found in the region. The timing of their find is significant as it could provide the United States with a domestic source of lithium for the clean energy transition and potentially be worth $1.5 billion. However, there's strong opposition to developing a mine. "Maine has some of the strictest mining and water quality standards in the country, and prohibits digging for metals in open pits larger than three acres," reports TIME. "There have not been any active metal mines in the state for decades, and no company has applied for a permit since a particularly strict law passed in 2017." Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an excerpt from the report: "This is a story that has been played out in Maine for generations," says Bill Pluecker, a member of the state's House of Representatives, whose hometown of Warren -- a 45-minute drive from the capital city of Augusta -- recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of a temporary ban on industrial metal mining after a Canadian company came looking for minerals near a beloved local pond. "We build industries based on the needs of populations not living here and then the bottom drops out, leaving us struggling again to pick up the pieces." "Our gold rush mentality regarding oil has fueled the climate crisis," says State Rep. Margaret O'Neil, who presented a bill last session that would have halted lithium mining for five years while the state worked out rules (the legislation ultimately failed). "As we facilitate our transition away from fossil fuels, we must examine the risks of lithium mining and consider whether the benefits of mining here in Maine justify the harms."

The Freemans' point out that they plan to dig for the spodumene, then ship it out of state for processing, so there would be no chemical ponds or tailings piles. They liken the excavation of the minerals to quarrying for granite or limestone, which enjoys a long, rich history in Maine. Advocates for mining in the U.S. argue that, since the country outsources most of its mining to places with less strict environmental and labor regulations, those harms are currently being born by foreign residents, while putting U.S. manufacturers in the precarious position of depending on faraway sources for the minerals they need. Though there are more than 12,000 active mines in the U.S., the bulk of them are for stone, coal, sand, and gravel.

There is only one operational lithium mine in the U.S., in Nevada, and one operational rare earth element mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., meaning that the U.S. is dependent on other countries for the materials essential for clean energy technologies like batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. Even after they're mined, those materials currently have to be shipped to China for processing since the U.S. does not have any processing facilities. "If we're talking about critical metals and materials, we're so far behind that it's crazy," says Corby Anderson, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. "It's the dichotomy of the current administration -- they have incentives for electric vehicles and all these things, but they need materials like graphite, manganese, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and copper. The only one we mine and refine in this country is copper." Further reading: Federal Ruling Approves Construction of North America's Largest Lithium Mine

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear quotes the South China Morning Post: After a 13-year legal tussle, semiconductor equipment giant Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment of China (AMEC) has won an intellectual property infringement case against US competitor Lam Research Corp in a Shanghai court, as US-China technology rivalry in the semiconductor field rages on. The Shanghai People's High Court gave a final ruling requiring Lam Research to destroy "one technical document and two photographs" relating to an AMEC plasma etching machine that Lam illegally obtained, according to a statement by AMEC on Tuesday.

The court has also banned two individual defendants from Lam from using AMEC's proprietary trade secrets. The court ordered Lam Research to pay damages and legal fees to AMEC for the infringement.

Wikipedia notes that "Today, the Moon has no active volcanoes even though a significant amount of magma may persist under the lunar surface."

But this week the New York Times reports that "The rocks beneath an ancient volcano on the moon's far side remain surprisingly warm, scientists have revealed using data from orbiting Chinese spacecraft." The findings, which appeared last week in the journal Nature, help explain what happened long ago beneath an odd part of the moon. The study also highlights the scientific potential of data gathered by China's space program, and how researchers in the United States have to circumvent obstacles to use that data...

The Chinese orbiters both had microwave instruments, common on many Earth-orbiting weather satellites but rare on interplanetary spacecraft. The data from Chang'e-1 and Chang'e-2 thus provided a different view of the moon, measuring the flow of heat up to 15 feet below the surface — and proved ideal for investigating the oddity... At Compton-Belkovich, the heat flow was as high as 180 milliwatts per square meter, or about 20 times the average for the highlands of the moon's far side. That measure corresponds to a temperature of minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit about six feet below the surface, or about 90 degrees warmer than elsewhere. "This one stuck out, as it was just glowing hot compared to anywhere else on the moon," said Matthew Siegler, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., and who led the research...

"Now we need the geologists to figure out how you can produce that kind of feature on the moon without water, without plate tectonics," Dr. Siegler said.
Universe Today believes this could help scientists better understand the moon's past. "What makes this finding unique is the source of the hotspot isn't active volcanism, such as molten lava, but from radioactive elements within the now-solidified rock that was once molten lava billions of years ago."

Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the news.

An Indian spacecraft blazed its way to the far side of the moon Friday in a follow-up mission to its failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface, the country's space agency said. From a report: Chandrayaan-3, the word for "moon craft" in Sanskrit, took off from a launch pad in Sriharikota in southern India with an orbiter, a lander and a rover, in a demonstration of India's emerging space technology. The spacecraft is set to embark on a journey lasting slightly over a month before landing on the moon's surface later in August. Applause and cheers swept through mission control at Satish Dhawan Space Center, where the Indian Space Research Organization's engineers and scientists celebrated as they monitored the launch of the spacecraft. Thousands of Indians cheered outside the mission control center and waved the national flag as they watched the spacecraft rise into the sky.

"Congratulations India. Chandrayaan-3 has started its journey towards the moon," ISRO Director Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said shortly after the launch. A successful landing would make India the fourth country -- after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China -- to achieve the feat. The six-wheeled lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on the properties of lunar soil and rocks, including chemical and elemental compositions, said Dr. Jitendra Singh, junior minister for Science and Technology. India's previous attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon's little-explored south pole ended in failure in 2019. It entered the lunar orbit but lost touch with its lander that crashed while making its final descent to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.

Texas's ban on TikTok at state institutions violates the First Amendment, claims a lawsuit filed Thursday by a group of academics and civil society researchers. CNN reports: The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which works to study the impact of technology on society. The lawsuit specifically challenges Texas' TikTok ban in relation to public universities, saying it compromises academic freedom and impedes vital research. "The ban is not just ineffective but counterproductive. It's impeding researchers and scholars from studying the very things that Texas says it's concerned about -- like data-collection and disinformation," Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Institute, told CNN.

The lawsuit cites the example of a University of North Texas researcher who studies young people's use of social media, who has been forced to abandon research projects that rely on university computers and to remove material about TikTok from her courses. The Knight Institute lawsuit notes that Texas has not imposed a ban on other online platforms that collect similar user data, such as Meta and Google. It further argues that a ban doesn't "meaningfully" constrain China's ability to collect sensitive data about Americans, because this data is widely available from other data brokers.

"It's entirely legitimate for government officials to be concerned about social media platforms' data-collection practices, but Imposing broad bans on Americans' access to the platforms isn't a reasonable, effective, or constitutional response to those concerns," Jaffer told CNN. "Like it or not, TikTok is an immensely popular communications platform, and its policies and practices are influencing culture and politics around the world," said Dave Karpf, a Coalition for Independent Technology Research board member and associate professor in the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. "It's important that scholars and researchers be able to study the platform and illuminate the risks associated with it. Ironically, Texas's misguided ban is impeding our members from studying the very risks that Texas says it wants to address."

A private Chinese company launched into orbit on Wednesday the world's first methane-liquid oxygen rocket, beating U.S. rivals in sending what could become the next generation of launch vehicles into space. Reuters reports: The Zhuque-2 carrier rocket blasted off at 9 a.m. (0100 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China and completed its flight according to plan, state media reported. It was the second attempt by Beijing-based LandSpace, one of the earliest firms in China's commercial launch sector, to launch the Zhuque-2. A first attempt in December failed.

Wednesday's launch put China ahead of U.S. rivals, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, in the race to launch carrier vehicles fueled by methane, which is deemed less polluting, safer, cheaper and a suitable propellant in a reusable rocket. LandSpace also became the second private Chinese company to launch a liquid-propellent rocket. In April, Beijing Tianbing Technology successfully launched a kerosene-oxygen rocket, taking another step towards developing rockets that can be re-fueled and reused.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: One recent study found that the U.S. was currently ranked somewhere around 32nd globally, behind countries like Russia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria [on broadband affordability] (you can find the full breakdown here): "The United States and Canada both have one of the highest internet costs," Alex Tofts, the Broadband Expert for Broadband Genie, said in a summary. "It's driven by a lack of competition and bigger distances to connect, with lower population density than other developed countries. However, both have average wages in the top fifteen in the world, compensating for the high cost of internet."

For decades, people (mostly the industry) tried to suggest the problem was because America was just so gosh darn big. But you'll notice that China and Russia, (ranked 25th and 17th, respectively) still perform better. Data routinely shows that affordability is the key obstacle to access, yet it's only been in the last few years that you've started to see this reality reflected in U.S. policymaking. [...] But again, the cause of this problem is very clear: monopolization and consolidation, protected by corruption. Few U.S. markets have the choice of more than one broadband provider at next-generation speeds. And that's because federal and state lawmakers are so comically corrupt, they routinely let AT&T, Comcast, Charter, or Verizon lobbyists endlessly merge, crush all competition, then literally write state or federal legislation and policy over several decades.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Decades of federal policy corruption and dysfunction have created an extremely strong, local, bipartisan grassroots movement for better broadband access. In countless towns and cities, municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and creative new partnerships are building new, open access fiber networks with an eye on competition and cost. [...] Still, it's comical and grotesque that it's 2023 and a country that fancies itself a technology giant still can't meaningfully tackle equitable broadband access and affordability. And that telecom and media policy has basically become a boring afterthought in the era of "Big Tech." Ensuring equitable access to an essential utility is just too boring for most 2023 policy circles, much less the modern attention economy.

China's Huawei is plotting a return to the 5G smartphone industry by the end of this year, according to research firms, signalling a comeback after a U.S. ban on equipment sales decimated its consumer electronics business. From a report: Huawei should be able to procure 5G chips domestically using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC), three third-party technology research firms covering China's smartphone sector told Reuters.

The firms, citing industry sources including Huawei suppliers, spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with clients. A return to the 5G phone market would mark a victory for the company that for almost three years said it was in "survival" mode. Huawei's consumer business revenue peaked at 483 billion yuan ($67 billion) in 2020, before plummeting by almost 50% a year later. The Shenzhen-based tech giant once vied with Apple and Samsung to be the world's biggest handset maker until rounds of U.S. restrictions beginning in 2019 cut its access to chipmaking tools essential for producing its most advanced models.