Technology

On the more compelling side, we have a video reportedly from a research group that synthesized some LK-99 (it appears to be from the people who posted this report) and showed that it rejects magnetic fields strongly enough to levitate away from them—a hallmark of the Meissner effect. With a strong enough magnet, it's possible to get nearly anything to levitate (including, apparently, mice), but this is done with not especially strong magnets, and clearly at room temperature. And the small chunk of material isn't lifted evenly, consistent with only a small crystal within the sample actually superconducting.

On the less compelling side, a different group has apparently synthesized the material but only finds that it superconducts up to about 110 K—nowhere near room temperature. Whatever was made here also doesn't seem to have a critical temperature, instead seeing a gradual increase in resistance above that point, and the Meissner effect tests came up negative. That's pretty inconsistent with the original results and suggests that what they have isn't a typical superconductor at all.

In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list. Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools.

While motivated by a legitimate concern, this move to block websites directly within the browser would be disastrous for the open internet and disproportionate to the goals of the legal proposal – fighting fraud. It will also set a worrying precedent and create technical capabilities that other regimes will leverage for far more nefarious purposes. Leveraging existing malware and phishing protection offerings rather than replacing them with government provided, device level block-lists is a far better route to achieve the goals of the legislation.

Meta has officially launched its surprisingly popular Twitter alternative, Threads—shocking even Mark Zuckerberg as sign-ups hit 30 million within the first 24 hours. Though a separate app, Threads is built as a convenient extension of Instagram, requiring an Instagram account to join and allowing users to port their entire Instagram following over in one click. That has clearly made Threads appealing to a huge chunk of Instagram users.

"We didn't expect tens of millions of people to sign up in one day, but supporting that is a champagne problem," Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said in a cheery update on Thursday.

Chipmaker TSMC said on Friday that one of its hardware suppliers experienced a “security incident” that allowed the attackers to obtain configurations and settings for some of the servers the company uses in its corporate network. The disclosure came a day after the LockBit ransomware crime syndicate listed TSMC on its extortion site and threatened to publish the data unless it received a payment of $70 million.

The hardware supplier, Kinmax Technology, confirmed that one of its test environments had been attacked by an external group, which was then able to retrieve configuration files and other parameter information. The company said it learned of the breach on Thursday and immediately shut down the compromised systems and notified the affected customer.