BANGKOK — Thailand’s National Security Council has ordered heightened counter-drone measures at Suvarnabhumi Airport following reports of drone sightings near the airport late Saturday, officials said.
The council directed Airports of Thailand to fast-track procurement of advanced anti-drone technology after residents in Nong Prue subdistrict, in Samut Prakan province, reported seeing drone-like objects near the airport perimeter on December 20. An emergency meeting on Monday also ordered security forces to maintain a constant presence at the airport during the transition period.
Authorities warned that flying drones in restricted airport zones carries the country’s harshest penalties, as airports are designated high-security areas.
Suvarnabhumi Airport Director Kittipong Kittikachorn said the drones did not enter controlled airspace and remained near the outer perimeter fence. In response, the airport and security agencies installed signal jammers to prevent any intrusion, coordinating with Aeronautical Radio of Thailand to ensure flight safety.

“Suvarnabhumi Airport and security agencies assure passengers and tourists that the airport meets international safety standards, and personnel are ready to manage incidents at all times,” Kittipong said.
He urged the public to distinguish between drones and aircraft, noting that drones typically display green and red lights and emit audible sounds at low altitudes, while aircraft have strobe lights and continuous engine noise.
Police Region 1 Commander Lt. Gen. Wattana Yeesin said officers have been deployed around the clock along the airport perimeter and at all entry points to inspect vehicles and suspicious activity. He dismissed social media claims of dozens of drones as inaccurate, saying investigators identified only two to three drones flying intermittently for 10 to 20 minutes east of the airport and outside restricted airspace.

Security sources said the drones were operated by foreign tourists photographing aircraft and posed no threat. Authorities questioned the individuals on Monday.
The Royal Thai Air Force is leading prevention operations, deploying counter-drone equipment including Redsky-II systems, drone-disabling guns and shotguns. The Royal Thai Police and local police units have also integrated their anti-drone systems into the operation.
The reports heightened public anxiety as Thailand’s military has been engaged in clashes with Cambodia along the border, although the fighting is far from Suvarnabhumi Airport.
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A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go!
That beautiful feature fell away when consoles joined the Internet. Suddenly there were servers to sign in to and updates to download and a whole bunch of hoops to jump through before you even got to play a game. Now, those early generations of Internet-connected consoles are becoming retro, and that’s introduced a whole new set of problems now the infrastructure is dying or dead. Boot up and play? You must be joking!

Microsoft first launched the Xbox 360 in 2005. It was the American company’s second major console, following on from the success of the Xbox that fought so valiantly against the Sony PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo GameCube. Where those sixth generation consoles had been the first to really lean in to online gaming, it was the seventh generation that would make it a core part of the console experience.
The Xbox 360 liked to sign you straight into Xbox Live the moment you switched on the console. All your friends would get hear a little bling as they were notified that you’d come online, and you’d get the same in turn. You could then boot into the game of your choice, where you’d likely sign into a specific third-party server to check for updates and handle any online matchmaking.
The Xbox 360 didn’t need to be always online, it just really wanted you to be. This was simply how gaming was to be now. Networked and now highly visible, in a semi-public way. Where Microsoft blazed a trail in the online user experience for the console market, Sony soon followed with its own feature-equivalent offering, albeit one that was never quite as elegant as that which it aimed to duplicate.

Fire up an Xbox 360 today, and you’ll see that console acting like it’s still 2008 or something. It will pleasantly reach out to Microsoft servers, and it will even get a reply—and it will then prompt you to log in with your Xbox Live or Microsoft account. You’ve probably got one—many of us do—but here lies a weird problem. When you try to log in to an Xbox 360 with your current Microsoft account, you will almost certainly fail! You might get an error like 8015D086 or 8015D000, or have it fail more quietly with a simple timeout.
It all comes down to authentication. See, the Internet was a much happier, friendly place when the Xbox 360 first hit the shelves. Back then, a simple password of 8 characters or more with maybe a numeral or two was considered pretty darn good for login purposes. Not like today, where you need to up the complexity significantly and throw in two-factor authentication to boot. And therein lies the problem, because the Xbox 360 was never expecting two-factor authentication to be a thing.
Today, your Microsoft account won’t be authorized for login without it, and thus your Xbox 360 won’t be able to log in to Xbox Live. In fairness, you wouldn’t miss much. All the online stores and marketplaces and games servers were killed ages ago, after all. However, the 360 really doesn’t like not being online. It will ask you all the time if you want to sign in! Plus, if you wanted to get your machine the very last dashboard updates or anything like that… you need to be able to sign into Xbox Live.
Thankfully, there is a workaround. Community members have found various solutions, most easily found in posts shared on Reddit. Sometimes you can get by simply by disabling two-factor authentication and changing to a low-complexity password due to the 360’s character limit in the entry field. If that doesn’t work, though, you have to go to the effort to set up a special “App Password” in your Microsoft account that will let the Xbox 360 authenticate in a simpler, more direct fashion.

Pull all this off, and you’ll hear that famous chime as your home console reaches the promised land of Xbox Live. None of your friends will be online, and nobody’s really checking your Gamerscore anymore, but now you can finally play some games!
Only, for a great many titles on the Xbox 360, there were dedicated online servers, too. Pop in FIFA 16, and the game will stall for a moment before it reports that it’s failed to connect to EA’s servers. Back in the day, those servers provided a continual stream of minor updates to the game, player rosters, and stats, making it feel like almost a living thing. Today, there’s nothing out there but a request that always times out.
This would be no issue if it happened just once, but alas… you’ll have to tangle with the game doing this time and again, every time you boot it up. It wants that server, it’s so sure it’s out there… but it never phones back from the aether.
Many games still retain most of their playability without an Internet connection, and most consoles will still boot up without one. Nevertheless, the more these machines are built to rely on an ever-present link to the cloud, the less of them will be accessible many years into the future.

This problem is not unique to the Xbox 360. It’s common to run into similar problems with the PlayStation 3, with Sony providing a workaround to get the old consoles online. For both consoles, you’re still relying on the servers remaining online. It’s fair to assume the little remaining support for these machines will be switched off too, in time. Meanwhile, if you’re playing Pokemon Diamond on the Nintendo DS, you’ve probably noticed the servers are completely gone. In that case, you’re left to rely on community efforts to emulate the original Nintendo WFC servers, which run with varying levels of success. For less popular games, though there’s simply nothing left—whatever online service there was is gone, and it’s not coming back.
These problems will come for each following console generation in turn. Any game and any console that relies on manufacturer-run infrastructure will eventually shut down when it becomes no longer profitable or worthwhile to run. It’s a great pity, to be sure. The best we can do is to pressure manufacturers to make sure that their hardware and games retain as much capability as possible when a connection isn’t available. That will at least leave us with something to play when the servers do finally go dark.
The AI data center build-out, as it currently stands, is dependent on two things: Nvidia chips and borrowed money. Perhaps it was inevitable that people would begin using Nvidia chips to borrow money. As the craze has gone on, I have begun to worry about the weaknesses of the AI data center boom; looking deeper into the financial part of this world, I have not been reassured.
Nvidia has plowed plenty of money into the AI space, with more than 70 investments in AI companies just this year, according to PitchBook data. Among the billions it's splashed out, there's one important category: neoclouds, as exemplified by CoreWeave, the publicly tr …

The Interior Department has illegally ordered the pause of five wind power projects in the Atlantic, one of which was already providing enough cheap electricity to power 400,000 homes in Massachusetts, on the first day of winter and during a holiday season that has already seen large increases in electricity prices compared to previous years.
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