Latest news with #Childs
Mint
33 minutes ago
- Politics
- Mint
Where There's Smoke, There's $244 Billion a Year in Damage
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If any Canadian import should be tariffed out of existence, it's one that President Donald Trump couldn't tax even if he wanted to: wildfire smoke. Unfortunately, it's a product in increasing and borderless abundance across North America and the world, endangering lives and inflicting billions of dollars in economic damage every year. In fact, a new study suggests wildfire smoke is a bigger threat to American health and prosperity than many other climate-change effects combined. In recent days — almost exactly two years after Canadian smoke made breathing difficult across a wide swath of the US from Chicago to New York — another huge cloud of the stuff has invaded the Lower 48, spoiling air quality from North Dakota to South Carolina — and, again, Chicago and New York. Some of it even crossed the Atlantic to Europe. The risk of more incursions will linger for several days, with 202 active fires stretching from British Columbia to Ontario as of this writing, 104 of which were out of control. It's no fluke this has happened in two of the past three years. The heat from a relentlessly warming planet has made wildfires more frequent and intense (and weird) around the world. Along with a century of wildfire suppression and increasing human incursions into the wildland-urban interface, this has turned wildfire season into a year-round event in the US, and no longer limited to the far West. 'It's remarkable how quickly this risk is changing and how many people are affected in places historically not affected by this risk,' Marshall Burke, an associate professor at Stanford University, told me in a Zoom call with Marissa Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. 'Ten years ago, it was only in the West. Now everyone is accustomed to it.' The acreage of US land burned by wildfires has doubled in the past 20 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. And in each of the past five years, Americans in the contiguous US have been exposed to at least twice as much wildfire smoke-related fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5) as they were between 2006 and 2019, according to a preprint study by Childs, Burke and other researchers. 'There's no part of the US that won't experience wildfire smoke eventually,' Childs said. 'Even if there are small parts of the country not impacted recently, they will be at some point.' All this smoke has undone decades of progress in cleaning the air Americans breathe by lowering pollution from factories, power plants and automobiles. Some researchers have suggested wildfire smoke is far more toxic than those other pollution sources. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lisa Jarvis has written, wildfire smoke hurts much more than just lungs, raising the risk of everything from dementia to premature births. Burke was involved in a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, led by Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University (who also worked on the PM2.5 preprint), trying to measure the economic damage of this novel and growing danger to human health. Their findings are alarming in at least a few ways. For one thing, they estimate that global heating of 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages — the path the world is currently traveling — will lead to 46,200 extra deaths from wildfire smoke every year in the US, doubling the rate from 2011 to 2020. And each of those deaths represents an economic loss. In yet another NBER paper last year, the prolific Qiu, Childs, Burke and other colleagues estimated those smoke deaths would cause $244 billion in annual US damage by 2050.(1) What's also surprising is that most economic models haven't yet incorporated the health risks of wildfire smoke into estimates of what's known as the 'social cost of carbon.' This is a dollar amount economists assign to the damage done by each additional ton of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, further warming the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency's social-cost-of-carbon model takes a stab at including smoke-related mortality, Qiu told me in a phone call, but uses antiquated wildfire data and so underestimates damage by a factor of seven. Each additional ton of carbon we pump into the atmosphere, thus warming the planet, will lead to enough wildfire smoke to do roughly $15.10 in US economic damage,(2)the new NBER paper suggests. This may not sound like a lot, but multiply that by roughly 40 billion tons of global CO2-emissions each year, and very quickly you're talking real money. In fact, deaths from wildfire smoke alone could be at least as economically destructive as every other factor cranked into most social-cost-of-carbon models, Qiu noted — suggesting most previous estimates of the damage of climate change have been too low by about 100%. Even these larger estimates are still undercounting. They don't measure the hit to labor productivity when people struggle to breathe, along with the medical costs of asthma, heart attacks, strokes, premature births and more. A 2024 working paper from the Dallas and Philadelphia Federal Reserve banks and the UCLA Anderson School of Management found wildfires drive up credit-card debt for people living many miles from the flames, thanks to higher health costs. And, of course, we haven't even mentioned the damage wildfires keep inflicting on the struggling home-insurance industry, as the Los Angeles fires exposed this winter. A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School used the EPA's social-cost-of-carbon measure to suggest US corporate emissions will do $87 trillion in economic damage by 2050. In light of this new paper, maybe corporate America actually owes us $174 trillion. While we wait for those checks, we'll have to be smarter about wildfires and smoke. We could start by quitting fossil fuels. A tariff of sorts to recoup some of this damage, in the form of a carbon tax, would be helpful. But even if we did all that tomorrow, fire risk would keep increasing for decades because of the heat already in the system. Better forest management, including controlled burns, can help mitigate that risk, as can moving humans out of the wildland-urban interface. Meanwhile, public officials must do a better job of warning people of the dangers of smoke and make breathing centers, high-quality face masks and HEPA filters available to everyone who needs them. The Canadian smoke that invaded the US two years ago caught everybody by surprise. We're not in much better shape today. 'Not enough has been done to prepare,' Childs said. 'While in the longer term we need to think about how to manage forests and climate change, in the short term we need to protect people from exposure. That includes not relying on people to protect themselves.' We literally can't afford to be so unprepared anymore. — 'It's Become Harder to Breathe' graphic by Carolyn Silverman More From Bloomberg Opinion: (1) In 2019 dollars; in 2025 dollars, that would be more than $300 billion. But such specificity isn't helpful; there's a lot of uncertainty built into these numbers. (2) In 2020 dollars; in 2025 dollars, that would be closer to $19. Again, remember all the uncertainty. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. More stories like this are available on
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
BBCNOW/MacMillan/Childs review – James MacMillan's nostalgic celebration of the euphonium
Named for the sweet euphony of its tone, the euphonium is proving itself outside the brass band world and coming into its own in contemporary repertoire. Much music for euphonium is commissioned by David Childs, one of the instrument's strongest and most gifted advocates – his whole family veritable champions – the latest being James MacMillan's new concertante work for euphonium and string orchestra. Its title, Where the Lugar Meets the Glaisnock, refers to the confluence of river and tributary in the Ayrshire town of the Cumnock where MacMillan spent his early years. It is dedicated to Childs and to the composer's euphonium-playing grandfather, George Loy; an element of nostalgia is thus imbued in the piece's character, evident from the opening solo statement – slow, lyrical and reflective. Yet the fast scale passages that emerged from the strings like eddying ripples and were quickly taken up by Childs signalled the soloist's virtuosity immediately. It was this balance of arching melody and increasing rhythmic vitality that drove the performance, the absence of other wind instruments ensuring the soloist never risked being compromised. Only a long, expansive phrase with euphonium and strings in unison was curious for being undeniably rich but somehow not entirely convincing. The piece had its premiere the previous night in Cardiff's Hoddinott Hall, but the Swansea audience surely got the better experience, the warmth and finesse of Childs' playing and the burnished strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales wonderfully resonant in the Brangwyn Hall. MacMillan conducted with a composer's authority, and it was with a composer's sympathy that he approached the other works in this wide-ranging programme, ostensibly embracing folk inflections. In the case of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, those inflections are imagined rather than authentic but evocative nevertheless, and eloquently realised by the BBCNOW winds. Stravinsky's later Symphony in Three Movements, with its mix of strident energy and longing for his Russian past, had great verve. But the threads of melancholy in Gustav Holst's Capriccio, and then in Vaughan Williams's early tone-poem In the Fen Country, also had their own impact. So this was quite a workout for the emotions, all told. The Cardiff performance is available on BBC Sounds until 2 June.
The Star
02-05-2025
- The Star
Hacking tourneys fuel China's cyber ambitions
DUSTIN CHILDS can still describe the best demonstration of a winning hack at an international tournament he's ever seen. It happened almost a decade ago. The participants had to find a way to break into a Windows workstation that was hardened with firewalls and up-to-date software to make it more secure. One member of a team from China typed an Internet Protocol address into the Windows browser, he said, 'and took their hands off the keyboard and that was it'. The address triggered computer code that turned the Chinese team's access from 'guest' to 'host,' giving them administrator rights and the ability to install whatever code or software – or malware – they wanted. That was in 2017 at Pwn2Own, a hacking competition that drew entrants from around the world – analysts and researchers from cybersecurity firms, primarily – to find new ways to exploit popular software and mobile devices. By then, teams from China had been competing for years, and dominating. They came from universities, companies and elsewhere, said Childs, the head of threat awareness at the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro Inc. The top title at the tournament was called 'Master of Pwn', said Childs, who has been affiliated with the tournament since 2009 and is part of the Zero Day Initiative that runs it. 'We implemented that title in 2016. The Chinese companies won it at every competition until they stopped participating,' he said. That international acclaim also drew the attention of critical eyes back home. In 2017, the billionaire founder of Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, Zhou Hongyi, publicly criticised Chinese participation in overseas hackathons, arguing that vulnerabilities discovered by Chinese experts should remain within that country's borders. The criticism from Zhou, a member of a political advisory board to the Communist Party government, did not go unnoticed. The following year, there were no Chinese teams competing at Pwn2Own. Instead, China started its own hacking tournament, called the Tianfu Cup. Participants were encouraged to hack into Apple operating systems, Google phones and Microsoft networks, according to media reports. But there was a difference. At Pwn2Own and other hacking competitions, the findings are reported to the companies that make the software or devices so they can fix them before hackers take advantage. Participants in Chinese hacking competitions are required to report them to the government first, according to a 2018 regulation. 'In practice, this meant vulnerabilities were passed to the state for use in operations,' said Dakota Cary, a China-focused consultant at the United States cybersecurity company SentinelOne. One example, cybersecurity experts said, occurred in 2019, when Google reported that a flaw uncovered at the inaugural Tianfu Cup bore striking similarities with a hacking campaign targeting China's persecuted Uyghur ethnic communities. Political connections More recently, files attributed to a Chinese cybersecurity firm called i-Soon were posted on the code-sharing site GitHub, a purported data leak that suggested the contests, the government, and the cyber firms that were given access to those vulnerabilities were all connected. Among the chat records was a discussion between i-Soon employees noting a request to China's Public Security Ministry, the country's main police agency, for zero-day vulnerabilities discovered at Tianfu Cup. The documents indicated that the Tianfu Cup was a 'likely vulnerability feeder system' for the ministry, said Winnona DeSombre Bernsen, a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, who studied the logs. In March, several employees of i-Soon were charged by US authorities for carrying out cyberattacks at the direction of Chinese intelligence agencies. China rejects the allegations. I-Soon has not responded to the charges and did not respond to requests for comment. Asked about vulnerability disclosures, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the reporting regulations 'aim to prevent the leakage and unauthorised disclosure of vulnerable information'. The regulations 'explicitly support the direct provision of security vulnerability information to network product providers, including foreign organisations and individuals', the spokesperson told Bloomberg reporters in Beijing. Representatives for the Tianfu Cup could not be located for comment. Flaws in computer software and mobile devices are relatively common, prompting periodic patches to the software and updates to the devices to fix them. For criminal hackers and cyber spies, flaws that aren't previously known to the developers – known as zero days – are particularly valuable because no fix is immediately available, leaving systems exposed. Security flaws Some companies specialise in finding zero days and selling them to government intelligence agencies. Pwn2Own was created in 2007 to investigate potential security flaws in Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Since then, winners have been paid cash prizes for finding vulnerabilities, which are then shared with the software company or device maker to fix. All the participants, including those from China, adhered to those rules. But the first year they were gone from Pwn2Own, in 2018, Beijing stated that vulnerabilities discovered at Chinese hacking competitions must be reported to the government, said Sentinel One's Cary. Three years later, data security laws that went into effect required that vulnerabilities discovered by Chinese researchers – whether they were found in contests or in the course of their work – went straight to the Chinese Industry and Information Technology Ministry. The laws also restrict companies from sharing vulnerability information with anyone before the Chinese government has had a chance to address them – with a 48-hour reporting deadline. There are stiff financial penalties and potential legal action for anyone who doesn't comply. China's policy of requiring researchers to disclose computer bugs they find to the government distinguishes it from the United States and other Western countries, experts said. 'The National Security Agency (NSA) doesn't force us to disclose anything along those lines to them,' said Childs, referring to the US NSA. While it doesn't force vulnerability disclosure, the NSA, the leading cryptology and signals intelligence organisation in the United States government, does its fair share of vulnerability hoarding, said Greg Austin, who has consulted with governments on China's cyber and foreign policy for more than a decade. In one incident in 2016, a group called the Shadow Brokers released a cache of secret software exploits – essentially hacking tools – that were allegedly stolen from the NSA. 'We're talking about agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the NSA who have discovered vulnerabilities that they don't want to reveal so that they can attack systems in other countries,' he said. 'China's the same.' Since the data laws have come into effect, China's hacking breakthroughs have slipped further behind a wall of secrecy, experts said. 'There is a veil on the front side so we can't see what they're working on and what they're working towards. 'We only see the results of it when it gets into the wild and actually gets demonstrated against a real live party,' Childs said. Chinese hacking competitions have also evolved in recent years. Along with challenging participants to break into a Tesla or security software, now the events include Chinese electric vehicles, phones and computers, said Eugenio Benincasa, a senior cyber defence researcher at the Centre for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, who closely monitors online reporting of these contests for clues about the challenges and what, if any, results are publicised. The increased focus on Chinese domestic products aligns with Beijing's broader policy objective known as 'Delete America,' aiming for self-sufficiency in advanced technologies and reducing reliance on foreign suppliers, Benincasa said. It also comes as the United States and China continue to restrict exports of key technology components to each other. 'It highlights the goal of fully domesticating China's information technology infrastructure, and replacing foreign-made core components, such as semiconductors, software, and databases, with Chinese-made ones,' Benincasa said. — Bloomberg Jamie Tarabay writes for Bloomberg. The views expressed here are the writer's own.
Japan Times
01-05-2025
- Business
- Japan Times
Chinese hacking competitions fuel the country's broad cyber ambitions
Dustin Childs can still describe the best demonstration of a winning hack at an international tournament he's ever seen. It happened almost a decade ago. The participants had to find a way to break into a Windows workstation that was hardened with firewalls and up-to-date software to make it more secure. One member of a team from China typed an IP address into the Windows browser, he said, "and took their hands off the keyboard, and that was it.' The address triggered computer code that turned the Chinese team's access from "guest' to "host,' giving them administrator rights and the ability to install whatever code or software — or malware — they wanted. That was in 2017 at Pwn2Own, a hacking competition that drew entrants from around the world — analysts and researchers from cybersecurity firms, primarily — to find new ways to exploit popular software and mobile devices. By then, teams from China had been competing for years, and dominating. They came from universities, companies and elsewhere, said Childs, the head of threat awareness at the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. The top title at the tournament was called "Master of Pwn,' said Childs, who has been affiliated with the tournament since 2009 and is part of the Zero Day Initiative that runs it. "We implemented that title in 2016. The Chinese companies won it at every competition until they stopped participating,' he said. That international acclaim also drew the attention of critical eyes back home. In 2017, the billionaire founder of Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, Zhou Hongyi, publicly criticized Chinese participation in overseas hackathons, arguing that vulnerabilities discovered by Chinese experts should remain within that country's borders. The criticism from Zhou, a member of a political advisory board to the Communist Party government, didn't go unnoticed. The following year, there were no Chinese teams competing at Pwn2Own. Instead, China started its own hacking tournament, called the Tianfu Cup. Participants were encouraged to hack into Apple operating systems, Google phones and Microsoft networks, according to media reports. But there was a difference. At Pwn2Own and other hacking competitions, the findings are reported to the companies that make the software or devices so they can fix them before hackers take advantage. A man takes part in a hacking contest in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 29, 2017. | REUTERS Participants in Chinese hacking competitions are required to report them to the government first, according to a 2018 regulation. "In practice, this meant vulnerabilities were passed to the state for use in operations,' said Dakota Cary, a China-focused consultant at the U.S. cybersecurity company SentinelOne. One example, cybersecurity experts said, occurred in 2019, when Google reported that a flaw uncovered at the inaugural Tianfu Cup bore striking similarities with a hacking campaign targeting China's persecuted Uyghur ethnic communities. More recently, files attributed to a Chinese cybersecurity firm called i-Soon were posted on the code-sharing site GitHub, a purported data leak that suggested the contests, the government, and the cyber firms that were given access to those vulnerabilities were all connected. Among the chat records was a discussion between i-Soon employees noting a request to China's Ministry of Public Security, the country's main police agency, for zero-day vulnerabilities discovered at Tianfu Cup. The documents indicated that the Tianfu Cup was a "likely vulnerability feeder system' for the ministry, said Winnona DeSombre Bernsen, a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, who studied the logs. In March, several employees of i-Soon were charged by U.S. authorities for carrying out cyberattacks at the direction of Chinese intelligence agencies. China rejects the allegations. I-Soon hasn't responded to the charges and didn't respond to requests for comment. Asked about vulnerability disclosures, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the reporting regulations "aim to prevent the leakage and unauthorized disclosure of vulnerable information.' The regulations "explicitly support the direct provision of security vulnerability information to network product providers, including foreign organizations and individuals,' the spokesperson said in Beijing. Representatives for the Tianfu Cup could not be located for comment. Flaws in computer software and mobile devices are relatively common, prompting periodic patches to the software and updates to the devices to fix them. For criminal hackers and cyber spies, flaws that aren't previously known to the developers — known as zero days — are particularly valuable because no fix is immediately available, leaving systems exposed. Some companies specialize in finding zero days and selling them to government intelligence agencies. Pwn2Own was created in 2007 to investigate potential security flaws in Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Since then, winners have been paid cash prizes for finding vulnerabilities, which are then shared with the software company or device maker to fix. All the participants, including those from China, adhered to those rules. But the first year they were gone from Pwn2Own, in 2018, Beijing stated that vulnerabilities discovered at Chinese hacking competitions must be reported to the government, said Sentinel One's Cary. Three years later, data security laws that went into effect required that vulnerabilities discovered by Chinese researchers — whether they were found in contests or in the course of their work — went straight to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The laws also restrict companies from sharing vulnerability information with anyone before the Chinese government has had a chance to address them — with a 48-hour reporting deadline. There are stiff financial penalties and potential legal action for anyone who doesn't comply. The Chinese government paid i-Soon to hack and steal information in a manner that obscured its involvement, the U.S. alleges. | Bloomberg China's policy of requiring researchers to disclose computer bugs they find to the government distinguishes it from the U.S. and other Western countries, experts said. "The NSA doesn't force us to disclose anything along those lines to them,' said Childs, referring to the U.S. National Security Agency. While it doesn't force vulnerability disclosure, the NSA, the leading cryptology and signals intelligence organization in the U.S. government, does its fair share of vulnerability hoarding, said Greg Austin, who has consulted with governments on China's cyber and foreign policy for more than a decade. In one incident in 2016, a group called the Shadow Brokers released a cache of secret software exploits — essentially hacking tools — that were allegedly stolen from the NSA. "We're talking about agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency who have discovered vulnerabilities that they don't want to reveal so that they can attack systems in other countries,' he said. "China's the same.' Since the data laws have come into effect, China's hacking breakthroughs have slipped farther behind a wall of secrecy, experts said. "There is a veil on the front side, so we can't see what they're working on and what they're working towards. We only see the results of it when it gets into the wild and actually gets demonstrated against a real live party,' Childs said. Chinese hacking competitions have also evolved in recent years. Along with challenging participants to break into a Tesla or security software, now the events include Chinese electric vehicles, phones and computers, said Eugenio Benincasa, a senior cyber defense researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, who closely monitors online reporting of these contests for clues about the challenges and what, if any, results are publicized. The increased focus on Chinese domestic products aligns with Beijing's broader policy objective known as "Delete America,' aiming for self-sufficiency in advanced technologies and reducing reliance on foreign suppliers, Benincasa said. It also comes as the U.S. and China continue to restrict exports of key technology components to each other. "It highlights the goal of fully domesticating China's IT infrastructure, and replacing foreign-made core components, such as semiconductors, software, and databases, with Chinese-made ones,' Benincasa said.
BBC News
24-04-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Surrey teachers strike for first time in Ewell school's history
Teachers at a school in Surrey are going on strike for the first time in its 99-year history, a union has of the National Education Union (NEU) who work at Ewell Castle School have planned walkouts on Thursday, Tuesday and Wednesday, then on 7-9 strike action at the co-educational day school comes following a dispute about teacher pension arrangements, according to the Edmonds, Ewell Castle School's principal, said: "The school has made good progress in its discussions with the NEU and we hope matters will be quickly resolved." Picket lines will be formed between 08:00 BST and 09:00 in front of the school entrance in Church Street and in the staff car union said teachers at the school are members of the Teachers' Pension Scheme (TPS), a government-run scheme which guarantees benefits based on career length and salary. The school's governors have proposed leaving the defined benefit scheme and replacing this with an "inferior, privately-operated defined contribution scheme", the NEU Childs, the NEU's senior regional officer, said: "We are calling for the governors to withdraw the current proposals and to suspend further consideration of changes to teachers' pension provision." Mr Childs added: "The governors' current proposal represents a materially adverse change to existing staff contracts. "NEU members do not engage in this action lightly, but it is clear to them that industrial action is their only resort in this situation."
