Miscellaneous News

[GulfLander]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916121828637938169

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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916344104801472838

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When was this?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916174965574885853

 

[AndrewJ]

Is this real? The explosive in Iran's port is missile fuel components from China?

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A person with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that what exploded was sodium perchlorate, a major ingredient in solid fuel for missiles. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.
The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency quoted an official as saying the explosion was likely set off by containers of chemicals, but did not identify the chemicals. What caused them to detonate was not clear, but the Iranian authorities did not suggest it was sabotage or a deliberate attack.
The security firm Ambrey told The Associated Press that there were indications that the blast resulted from improper storage of sodium perchlorate at the port. The Financial Times reported in January that China had shipped the chemical to Iran, whose stocks of missile propellant were depleted last year when it and its proxy, Hezbollah, launched missiles at Israel.

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Private security firm Ambrey says the port received missile fuel chemical in March. It is part of a shipment of ammonium perchlorate from China by two vessels to Iran, first reported in January by the Financial Times. The chemical used to make solid propellant for rockets was going to be used to replenish Iran’s missile stocks, which had been depleted by its direct attacks on Israel during the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“The fire was reportedly the result of improper handling of a shipment of solid fuel intended for use in Iranian ballistic missiles,” Ambrey said.
In a first reaction Sunday, the spokesman of Iran’s defense ministry Gen. Reza Talaeinik, denied reports that missile fuel had been imported through the port.
“No sort of imported and exporting consignment for fuel or military application was (or) is in the site of the port,” he told state TV by phone. He called foreign reports on the missile fuel baseless.
Ship-tracking data analyzed by The Associated Press put one of the vessels believed to be carrying the chemical in the vicinity in March, as Ambrey said. Iran hasn’t acknowledged taking the shipment.
It’s unclear why Iran wouldn’t have moved the chemicals from the port, particularly after the Beirut port blast in 2020. That explosion, caused by the ignition of hundreds of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, killed more than 200 people and injured more than 6,000 others. However, Israel did target Iranian missile sites where Tehran uses industrial mixers to create solid fuel.
Social media footage of the explosion on Saturday at Shahid Rajaei saw reddish-hued smoke rising from the fire just before the detonation. That suggests a chemical compound being involved in the blast, like in the Beirut explosion.
“Get back, get back! Tell the gas (truck) to go!” a man in one video shouted just before the blast. “Tell him to go, it’s going to blow up! Oh God, this is blowing up! Everybody evacuate! Get back! Get back!”
On Saturday night, the state-run IRNA news agency said that the Customs Administration of Iran blamed a “stockpile of hazardous goods and chemical materials stored in the port area” for the blast, without elaborating.
An aerial shot released by Iranian media after the blast showed fires burning at multiple locations in the port, with authorities later warning about air pollution from chemicals such as ammonia, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide in the air. Schools and offices in Bandar Abbas will be closed Sunday as well.

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Many in the comment section now doubt it's an operation by Mossad or CIA.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916293465169953243

 

[GulfLander]

Is this real? The explosive in Iran's port is missile fuel from China?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916280440849420697

NYT source w ties w Ir4n's rev guards?
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U.S. Space Force defines path to space superiority in first Warfighting framework

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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916076672375308337

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916058846164095473

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https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916297673956634912

 

[FriedButter]

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China’s Huawei develops new AI chip, seeking to match Nvidia​

SINGAPORE—Huawei Technologies is gearing up to test its newest and most powerful artificial-intelligence processor, which the company hopes could replace some higher-end products of U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

The steady advance by one of China’s flagship technology companies points to the resilience of the country’s semiconductor industry despite efforts by Washington to stymie it, including by cutting off access to some Western chip-making equipment.

Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D, people familiar with the matter said.

The company is slated to receive the first batch of samples of the processor as early as late May, some of the people said.

The development is still at an early stage, and a series of tests will be needed to assess the chip’s performance and get it ready for customers, the people said.

Huawei hopes that the latest iteration of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100, a popular chip used for AI training that was released in 2022, said one of the people. Previous versions are called 910B and 910C.

Huawei has emerged as China’s champion in a technology field where the U.S. remains ahead. The Shenzhen-based company has developed some of the country’s most promising substitutes for Nvidia’s AI chips. It is part of Beijing’s effort to groom a self-sufficient semiconductor industry.

Huawei, which has been on a U.S. trade blacklist for nearly six years, showed its ability to shrug off American restrictions by releasing a high-end smartphone in 2023.

The model, the Mate 60, was powered by a locally produced processor and raised eyebrows within the U.S. government when it was introduced during a visit to Beijing by then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Earlier this month, Washington added Nvidia’s H20 chip—the most advanced processor the company could sell in China without a license—to a growing list of semiconductors whose sales are restricted there. Nvidia said it would take a $5.5 billion charge as a result.

The restrictions offer an opportunity to Nvidia’s Chinese rivals such as Huawei and Beijing-based Cambricon Technologies, which have developed similar chips.

This year, Huawei is poised to ship more than 800,000 Ascend 910B and 910C chips to customers including state-owned telecommunications carriers and private AI developers such as TikTok parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. Some buyers have already been in talks with Huawei to increase orders of the 910C after the Trump administration restricted the exports of Nvidia’s H20s, the people said.

Despite manufacturing bottlenecks, Huawei and several Chinese chip firms have already been able to deliver some products comparable to Nvidia chips, albeit with a lag of a few years. Chip makers have been turning to technologies that can pack several chips together to create more powerful processors, as it gets harder and more expensive to make the circuitry inside chips smaller.

Beijing has also encouraged Chinese AI developers to increase purchases of domestic chips. State data centers have said most chips they used were from Chinese suppliers.

Still, previous Huawei chips have struggled to live up to their hype. The 910C was marketed to clients as comparable to Nvidia’s H100, but engineers who have used the two chips said Huawei’s performance fell short of its rival.

Huawei faces challenges in producing such chips at a significant scale. It has been cut off from the world’s largest chip foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. China’s closest alternative, Semiconductor

Manufacturing International, is blocked from purchasing the most advanced chip-making equipment.

Washington has also blocked China from directly accessing some key components for AI chips, such as the latest high-bandwidth memory units.

Given such constraints, Huawei executives have talked about focusing on building more efficient and faster systems to leverage their chips, instead of making individual chips more powerful.

In April, Huawei introduced the CloudMatrix 384, a computing system connecting 384 Ascend 910C chips. Some analysts said the system was more powerful than Nvidia’s flagship rack system, which contains 72 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, under some circumstances, even though the Chinese system consumes more power.

Connecting more chips in a system isn’t a trivial task. It requires stable networks as well as software and engineering to prevent network failures, industry practitioners said.
“Having five times as many Ascends more than offsets each GPU being only one-third the performance of an Nvidia Blackwell,” research firm SemiAnalysis wrote in a report. “The deficiencies in power are relevant but not a limiting factor in China.”

Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D,

The company is slated to receive the first batch of samples of the processor as early as late May, some of the people said.

Huawei hopes that the latest iteration of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100

 

[StraightEdge]

Is this real? The explosive in Iran's port is missile fuel components from China?

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Note: I don't know what caused this latest explosion, but my general thoughts about Iran.

I will just lay down some basic hard facts, which maybe little unpleasant.
Iran (and also Russia) has shown time and again they have very porous internal security apparatus. Over past few years, I have seen countless such issues, from murder of scientists, killing of important personalities, bombings, terrorist attacks in both these countries. Nothing I have seen gives me the confidence that they have learnt anything from those incidents. It feels as if like there is no internal soul searching, they just carry on doing whatever they did earlier. If something bad happens in China, we see some concrete steps to rectify that. Every bad situation is studied and some sort of change happens. I think the thought process in both Iran/Russia is so regimental and archaic, they refuse to make changes or simply refuse to learn the hard lessons. When you are up against Israel/USA, you can't afford to be complacent and be so lackadaisical.

 

[Randomuser]

Note: I don't know what caused this latest explosion, but my general thoughts about Iran.

I will just lay down some basic hard facts, which maybe little unpleasant.
Iran (and also Russia) has shown time and again they have very porous internal security apparatus. Over past few years, I have seen countless such issues, from murder of scientists, killing of important personalities, bombings, terrorist attacks in both these countries. Nothing I have seen gives me the confidence that they have learnt anything from those incidents. It feels as if like there is no internal soul searching, they just carry on doing whatever they did earlier. If something bad happens in China, we see some concrete steps to rectify that. Every bad situation is studied and some sort of change happens. I think the thought process in both Iran/Russia is so regimental and archaic, they refuse to make changes or simply refuse to learn the hard lessons. When you are up against Israel/USA, you can't afford to be complacent and be so lackadaisical.

I honestly don't know what's their excuse. Are there that many traitors inside?

Or are they simply lazy with security planning and refuse to update their methods based of feedback?

Both are the top wrestling nations in the world with an emphasis on being manly etc. Maybe there's something in this thought process that makes them too proud to change their ways. A wrestler takes things head on the mat's circle but their enemies don't do things that way. Israel does things in a slimey and underhanded way.

 

[Bellum_Romanum]

I honestly don't know what's their excuse. Are there that many traitors inside?

Or are they simply lazy with security planning and refuse to update their methods based of feedback?

Both are the top wrestling nations in the world with an emphasis on being manly etc. Maybe there's something in this thought process that makes them too proud to change their ways. A wrestler takes things head on the mat's circle but their enemies don't do things that way. Israel does things in a slimey and underhanded way.

Try working with Persians and you'll come to understand why..

 

[TPenglake]

Note: I don't know what caused this latest explosion, but my general thoughts about Iran.

I will just lay down some basic hard facts, which maybe little unpleasant.
Iran (and also Russia) has shown time and again they have very porous internal security apparatus. Over past few years, I have seen countless such issues, from murder of scientists, killing of important personalities, bombings, terrorist attacks in both these countries. Nothing I have seen gives me the confidence that they have learnt anything from those incidents. It feels as if like there is no internal soul searching, they just carry on doing whatever they did earlier. If something bad happens in China, we see some concrete steps to rectify that. Every bad situation is studied and some sort of change happens. I think the thought process in both Iran/Russia is so regimental and archaic, they refuse to make changes or simply refuse to learn the hard lessons. When you are up against Israel/USA, you can't afford to be complacent and be so lackadaisical.

They have no excuses. China wiped out the CIA presence in the country all the way back in 2011, back when it had just barely entered middle income status from third world country. There is simply way too much corruption and lackadaisical attitudes towards national survival in both Russia and Iran.

 

[neutralobserver]

India Seems to Be Building Its Case for Striking Pakistan​

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[ZeEa5KPul]

Is this real? The explosive in Iran's port is missile fuel components from China?

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im
Many in the comment section now doubt it's an operation by Mossad or CIA.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1916293465169953243

Perchlorate is an oxidizer, it's not explosive. There can be an explosion if it's in proximity to a fuel.

India Seems to Be Building Its Case for Striking Pakistan​

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Time for the J-10C, JF-17B3 and maybe some WTC ISR assets to shine. Get the tea ready.