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As Russia held its Victory Day parade this year, hackers backing the Kremlin hijacked an orbiting satellite that provides television service to Ukraine. Instead of normal programming, Ukrainian viewers saw parade footage beamed in from Moscow: waves of tanks, soldiers and weaponry. The message was meant to intimidate and was an illustration that 21st-century war is waged not just on land, sea and air but also in cyberspace and the reaches of outer space. Disabling a satellite could deal a devastating blow without one bullet, and it can be done by targeting the satellite’s security software or disrupting its ability to send or receive signals from Earth. If you can impede a satellite’s ability to communicate, you can cause a significant disruption, said Tom Pace, CEO of NetRise, a cybersecurity firm focused on protecting supply chains. Think about GPS, said Pace, who served in the Marines before working on cyber issues at the Department of Energy. Imagine if a population lost that and the confusion it would cause. Satellites are the short-term challenge More than 12,000 operating satellites now orbit the planet, playing a critical role not just in broadcast communications but also in military operations, navigation systems like GPS, intelligence gathering and economic supply chains. They are also key to early launch-detection efforts, which can warn of approaching missiles. That makes them a significant national security vulnerability, and a prime target for anyone looking to undermine an adversary’s economy or military readiness or deliver a psychological blow like the hackers supporting Russia did when they hijacked television signals to Ukraine. Hackers typically look for the weakest link in the software or hardware that supports a satellite or controls its communications with Earth. The actual orbiting device may be secure, but if it’s running on outdated software, it can be easily exploited. As Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, someone targeted Viasat, the U.S.-based satellite company used by Ukraine’s government and military. The hack, which Kyiv blamed on Moscow, used malware to infect tens of thousands of modems, creating an outage affecting wide swaths of Europe. National security officials say Russia is developing a nuclear, space-based weapon designed to take out virtually every satellite in low-Earth orbit at once. The weapon would combine a physical attack that would ripple outward, destroying more satellites, while the nuclear component is used to fry their electronics. U.S. officials declassified information about the weapon after Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, issued a public warning about the technology. Turner has pushed for the Department of Defense to provide a classified briefing to lawmakers on the weapon, which, if deployed, would violate an international treaty prohibiting weapons of mass destruction in space. Turner said such a weapon could render low-Earth orbit unusable for satellites for as long as a year. If it were used, the effects would be devastating: potentially leaving the U.S. and its allies vulnerable to economic upheaval and even a nuclear attack. Russia and China also would lose satellites, though they are believed to be less reliant on the same kinds of satellites as the U.S. Turner compared the weapon, which is not yet ready for deployment, to Sputnik, the Russian satellite that launched the space age in 1957. If this anti-satellite nuclear weapon would be put in space, it would be the end of the space age, Turner said. It should never be permitted to go into outer space. This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in space. Mining the moon and beyond Valuable minerals and other materials found on the moon and in asteroids could lead to future conflicts as nations look to exploit new technologies and energy sources. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy announced plans this month to send a small nuclear reactor to the moon, saying it’s important the U.S. does so before China or Russia. Were in a race to the moon, in a race with China to the moon, Duffy said. To have a base on the moon, we need energy and some of the key locations on the moon. … We want to get there first and claim that for America. The moon is rich in a material known as helium 3, which scientists believe could be used in nuclear fusion to generate huge amounts of energy. While that technology is decades away, control over the moon in the intervening years could determine which countries emerge as superpowers, according to Joseph Rooke, a London-based cybersecurity expert who has worked in the U.K. defense industry and is now director of risk insights at the firm Recorded Future. The end of the Cold War temporarily halted a lot of investments in space, but competition is likely to increase as the promise of mining the moon becomes a reality. This isn’t sci-fi. It’s quickly becoming a reality, Rooke said. If you dominate Earths energy needs, thats game over. China and Russia have announced plans for their own nuclear plants on the moon in the coming years, while the U.S. is planning missions to the moon and Mars. Artificial intelligence is likely to speed up the competition, as is the demand for the energy that AI requires. Messages left with Russia’s Embassy in Washington were not returned. Despite its steps into outer space, China opposes any extraterrestrial arms race, according to Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for China’s Embassy in Washington. He said it is the U.S. that is threatening to militarize the final frontier. It has kept expanding military strength in space, created space military alliances, and attempted to turn space into a war zone, Liu said. China urges the U.S. to stop spreading irresponsible rhetoric, stop expanding military build-up in space, and make due contribution to upholding the lasting peace and security in space. What the US is doing about security in space Nations are scrambling to create their own rocket and space programs to exploit commercial prospects and ensure they aren’t dependent on foreign satellites. It’s an expensive and difficult proposition, as demonstrated last week when the first Australian-made rocket crashed after 14 seconds of flight. The U.S. Space Force was created in 2019 to protect American interests in space and to defend U.S. satellites from attacks from adversaries. The space service is far smaller than the more well-established services like the Army, Navy or Air Force, but it’s growing, and the White House is expected to announce a location for its headquarters soon. Colorado and Alabama are both candidates. The U.S. military operates an unmanned space shuttle used to conduct classified military missions and research. The craft, known as the X-37B, recently returned to Earth after more than a year in orbit. The Space Force called access to space a vital national security interest. Space is a warfighting domain, and it is the Space Forces job to contest and control its environment to achieve national security objectives, it said in the statement. American dominance in space has been largely unquestioned for decades following the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. But the new threats and competition posed by Russia and China show the need for an aggressive response, U.S. officials say. The hope, Turner said, is that the U.S. can take steps to ensure Russia and China can’t get the upper hand, and the frightening potential of space weapons is not realized. You have to pay attention to these things so they don’t happen, Turner said. David Klepper, Associated Press
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AI is quietly reshaping the efficiency, power, and potential of U.S. healthcare, even as government health policy and spending drastically shift. Philips, the legacy electronics manufacturer turned medtech provider, is leading the AI healthcare revolution, streamlining and accelerating the workflow of patient care. Philips North America CEO Jeff DiLullo shares how technology can have the biggest impact on health outcomes todayfrom radiology scans to cancer diagnoses, and what it takes for leaders in any industry to rethink the way we work to best meet the moment. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. AI seems to be changing everything. There’s a lot of talk about it, but in some businesses, I feel like the conversation about it is ahead of the actual implementation or the impact, and I’m curious how true that might be in medtech. How is AI impacting things now, today, versus what you think it can do in the future? If you remember, we released the Future of Health Index. One of the things that we realized is that AI, in some of these compartments I’m talking about, is quite mature. FDA cleared, very safe for clinical use. Other areas, it’s more experimental. But the trust factor of the use of that AI is actually quite nascent. It’s the biggest barrier right now to larger scale deployment. Yeah. That health index that you mentioned, the 2025 Future Health Index, I mean, there was this sort of trust gap in it, right? That something like 60, 65% of clinicians trust AI, but only about a third of patients or certainly older patients do. How do you bridge that gap? Is it Philips’s job to bridge that gap? Whose job is it? So I have the benefit of having two Gen Zs and a millennial, they are digitally fluid. They don’t worry at all about the AI models that are coming on the other side of this because they’re used to it and they understand it. Older patients, not so much. The magic is always the healthcare practitioner that’s directly interfacing with the customers or the patients. If they believe what they’re doing, if they know it’s credible, if they’re using it to augment their analysis or their diagnostics, not replacing it, I think ultimately we’ll see an uplift. It’s our job to provide valid FDA-cleared, very good diagnostic capability leveraging AI. But if our doctors and nurses believe what we’re doing and they see the value in increasing their time with patients and also a little de-stressing, we think it’s going to really pick up in a parabolic way in the next few years, at least in health. I can understand and see how AI can quickly help some of the back office functionality in healthcare, but you’re talking about for practitioners, right? How does that practically work today? So I’m going to give you, let’s talk radiology. It’s the biggest field right now, diagnostic, right? The earlier the diagnostic, the better the outcome most likely. And when I think of a radiologist, I have to wait a month and a half. I’m in a pretty nice part of Vanderbilt University area, like a lot of health tech around me in Nashville, but I’ve got to wait over a month to get a scan. So in radiology, we start with the box or the design, right? I have an MRI that is highly efficient. I can move it around, I can put it on a truck. But today, I can get a scan done in half or even a third of the time. The AI built into the system software makes it much faster. Just a few months ago, I had a scan that took only 20 minuteswhereas a couple of years ago, the same scan would have taken about 45 minutes. The smart speed that we have on the system actually compresses the scanning time. It doesn’t fill in the blanks, it removes the noise. You actually get a better scan in a shorter time. If you’re a radiologist having to do 12 or 15 studies a day, but you can do 20 studies a day, I get more patients through, I drive more reimbursement, it’s better for the hospital, it’s better for patient care. Then I take it into workflow, and today I can pinpoint things that are happening in that digital image and send it to a radiologist and say, “You should look here,” in just very simple speak. It’s very complicated stuff, but the AI is already mainstream today where we can actually pinpoint areas for radiologists to look at and make a determination. I can digitize the whole process today with digital pathology. And I can have a finding where somebody’s waiting, do I have cancer or not? I can do this in hours now because it’s all digital. And that kind of workflow and orchestration is a game changer. And the issue of AI hallucinations, which show up with some of the generative AI things, does that apply to healthcare? Are there different kinds of safeguards? Because I guess there’s a human who’s checking. There’s so many things today, like smart speed I just talked about, being able to run that radiology workflow to compress the time of diagnostics, run the tumor boards in hours, on-demand meetings like you and I would on Zoom or teams, all of that is happening today, but not happening at the pace it could. My point is, go do that right now. Every health system, go do that. As you start to unpack these more generative AI models, I think there’s real reason to be cautious and make sure we have the right controls and the governance on them, but not experimenting in them also is not an option. We kind of have to. But we see leading institutions, MGB, Stanford, Mount Sinai in New York, we see them really working with population health data to really try to train models on very specific and even broad use cases. There’s so much to do right now. In other words, you don’t have to go all the way out to the silver bullet of, we’re going to live forever or we’re going to solve every health problem. You can make the system we have right now more efficient and more effective today. Bob, when you first drove a car, was the first thing you did to go to the Autobahn? Probably not. There’s so much to do in the neighborhood. There’s so much to do in my town that I can really get good at what we’re doing and drive productivity at scale. You need to have the innovation and the creativity to get us to the next place, but 80% of it we can do today. That is just game-changing in terms of how we deliver today, and that’s what we think is really the next opportunity here for healthcare. And I think that’ll happen with what’s mature in AI and virtual capabilities in the next few years because the need is so great.
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Google has agreed to pay a 55 million Australian dollar ($36 million) fine for signing anticompetitive deals with Australias two largest telecommunications companies that banned the installation of competing search engines on some smartphones, the U.S. tech giant and Australias competition watchdog said. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in a statement it had commenced proceedings in the Australian Federal Court on Monday against the Singapore-based Google Asia Pacific division. The court will decide whether the AU$50 million ($36 million) penalty is appropriate. Under the anticompetitive agreements, which were in place for 15 months until March 2021, Telstra and Optus only pre-installed Google Search on Android phones sold to customers. Other search engines were excluded. In return, the telcos received a share of the advertisement revenue Google generated from those customers. Google accepted that the agreements were likely to have the effect of substantially lessening competition, the commission said. Google has also signed a court-enforceable undertaking that commits the company to removing certain pre-installation and default search engine restrictions from its contracts with Android phone manufacturers and telcos, the commission said. The tech company said in a statement: Were pleased to resolve the ACCCs concerns, which involved provisions that havent been in our commercial agreements for some time. Commissioner chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said: “Conduct that restricts competition is illegal in Australia because it usually means less choice, higher costs, or worse service for consumers. Importantly, these changes come at a time when AI search tools are revolutionizing how we search for information, creating new competition, Cass-Gottlieb added. Last year, Telstra, Optus, and their smaller rival TPG agreed to court-enforceable undertakings with the commission that they would not renew or make similar deals with Google to limit search options. By Rod McGuirk, Associated Press
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