technocrit

Dubai has only ten days of fresh food left after the closure of the Straits of Hormuz has cut the United Arab Emirates (UAE) off from all its imports, including food. In Abu Dhabi, with the prospect of the region becoming unliveable, real estate prices are also collapsing.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the Hormuz chokepoint could kill Dubai, a hub of investment and business in the region. The Gulf countries don’t have any water and don’t produce much food for their combined population of around 60mn people. Fresh products in particular like vegetables and fruit are almost all imported. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) closed the Straits of Hormuz to oil exports on March 2, but the embargo also effectively blocked all food imports at the same time.

The Emirates imports between 80% and 90% of its food, with roughly 70% of food shipments to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries normally passing through the Strait of Hormuz on the 100- odd ships that traversed the Straits until a week ago.

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Israeli companies have developed and are selling advanced cyber tools that can hack into the tech of your car and use it to collect intelligence on you. These tools can also assist in a cross-referencing of data to identify an intelligence target among tens of thousands of cars on the road. This technology can track the vehicle’s movements in real time and potentially eavesdrop on the people inside. archive: archive.is/tDOFi

After successfully recuperating tiktok, politicians are going to once again exploit pseudo-science to outlaw the “infinite scroll.” Get ready for the comeback of the pager. Thanks libs!

If you are to believe the glossy marketing campaigns about ‘quantum computing’, then we are on the cusp of a computing revolution, yet back in the real world things look a lot less dire. At least if you’re worried about quantum computers (QCs) breaking every single conventional encryption algorithm in use today, because at this point they cannot even factor 21 yet without cheating. In the article by [Craig Gidney] the basic problem is explained, which comes down to simple exponentials. Specifically the number of quantum gates required to perform factoring increases exponentially, allowing QCs to factor 15 in 2001 with a total of 21 two-qubit entangling gates. Extrapolating from the used circuit, factoring 21 would require 2,405 gates, or 115 times more. underlying article: algassert.com/post/2500

As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption. “A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access – often without any scrutiny at all – and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.” “Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated – essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

The New York Stock Exchange is preparing for a future where Wall Street no longer closes. The exchange announced it is developing a tokenized securities platform that would enable round-the-clock trading, fractional share ownership, and immediate settlement of U.S. listed equities and ETFs. The project is being built by its parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, which owns and operates the NYSE and much of the infrastructure behind global financial markets. This new digital platform is designed to combine the NYSE’s existing Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. The goal is to preserve the regulatory protections investors expect while introducing features that traditional market plumbing has never supported. If approved by regulators, the platform would allow trading to continue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with transactions settling instantly instead of waiting days to clear. That change would mark a real shift in how markets work. Today’s equity trades still rely on multi-day settlement cycles that tie up capital and add risk during volatile market conditions. Tokenized capital allows trades to settle immediately, freeing up funds and reducing counterparty exposure. For everyday investors, the ability to buy shares in dollar amounts rather than full units could make expensive stocks more accessible and flexible to own.

For decades, section 401 has granted states and tribes the authority to approve, impose conditions on, or reject, federal permits for projects that they determine will pollute or damage local waterways. Now, the Trump administration aims to scale back that authority in order to expedite projects and “unleash energy dominance,”…

For years, the Food and Drug Administration provided an informational webpage for parents warning them of the dangers of bogus autism treatments, some promoted by anti-vaccine activists and “wellness” companies. The page cited specifics scams and the “significant health risks” they pose. But, under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has numerous ties to the wellness industry—that FDA information webpage is now gone. It was quietly deleted at the end of last year…

the EPA is changing its cost-benefit analysis process for common air pollutants. Instead of comparing the economic cost of a certain pollution limit to an estimate of the economic value of the resulting improvements in human health, the EPA will just qualitatively describe health benefits while carefully quantifying economic costs.

Bonds between same-sex individuals help apes and monkeys to manage conflict and strengthen alliances, especially in dry habitats and predator-rich landscapes.

The global semiconductor landscape has reached a historic inflection point as the open-source RISC-V architecture officially secured 25% market penetration this month, signaling the end of the long-standing architectural monopoly held by proprietary giants. This milestone, verified by industry analysts in late December 2025, marks a seismic shift in how the world’s most advanced hardware is designed, licensed, and deployed. Driven by a collective industry push for “architectural sovereignty,” RISC-V has evolved from an academic experiment into the cornerstone of the next generation of computing.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed S4505, a law that requires websites to display warnings claiming that features like algorithmic feeds, push notifications, infinite scroll, like counts, and autoplay cause addiction – despite, as TechDirt argues, the absence of scientific consensus supporting such claims.

Public safety rules should be dull in the best possible way. Clear. Predictable. Written by people who understand what actually causes harm in a crowd of thousands. New York City usually gets this right. It has decades of muscle memory for doing hard things in public, under pressure, without panicking. Which is why the prohibited items list for the January 1, 2026 NYC mayoral inauguration block party seemed… off

Data colonialism on the African continent has moved from abstraction into formal state policy through binding agreements signed without public consent, parliamentary scrutiny, or meaningful legal protection for citizens. Nigeria’s memorandum of understanding with France on tax administration data, alongside healthcare data-sharing agreements signed by Kenya and Rwanda with United States agencies, reflects a pattern of external control over sovereign information systems. These arrangements represent a transfer of strategic national assets rather than technical cooperation. Historical experience across former colonies shows that control over taxation, health records, and population data has always preceded deeper forms of domination, even when formal sovereignty remained intact.