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Gov. Hochul visited Washington to appeal for more migrant aid Wednesday, emerging with what she characterized as much-needed but insufficient commitments three days after the Biden administration offered New York City a round of criticism over the crisis.

The White House pledged to provide personnel, data and resources to identify thousands of migrants in New York who are eligible for work permits, Hochul said in a statement.

This is a critical first step but make no mistake: it is not enough to fully address this crisis or provide the level of support that New Yorkers need and deserve, the governor added. I am grateful to the White House for agreeing to continue these productive discussions.

Hochul spoke for about 150 minutes with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, according to the governors office. Her statement described the conversation as frank and productive.

In its own statement, the White House said it would join New York in embarking upon a month of action to help close the gap between non-citizens who are eligible for work authorization and those who have applied.

The arrival of more than 100,000 asylum seekers in New York since last year has severely stretched the citys shelter system and put significant strain on the relationships between Hochul, Mayor Adams and President Biden, who are all moderate Democrats.

As the governor arrived in the nations capital, officials in New York City were still stewing over advice offered by the Biden administration earlier in the week.

Responding to long-running calls from Adams for more federal help and a speech from Hochul last week intended to pressure Biden, the Homeland Security Department on Sunday sent a letter outlining about 24 ways the city could better handle the crisis.

The Biden administrations advice, delivered in parallel documents to Adams and Hochul, also came with a list of 11 New York-area sites suggested as possible migrant shelters.

President Biden has been under pressure from New York officials. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Among the sites: the Atlantic City Airport in New Jersey, a naval center north of Albany in Schenectady, N.Y., and a small airport in Massena, N.Y., according to the list, which was obtained by the Daily News and previously reported by Bloomberg News.

The Massena Airport serves about 30 passengers a day, according to its website. It is located along the Canadian border in a conservative section of the state roughly 300 miles from New York City.

The Homeland Security Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment for this story.

Last week, Hochul said the White House had tentatively offered a long-sought lease agreement that would allow New York to put a state-funded migrant shelter at an airfield in southeast Brooklyn.

But the offer of the site, Floyd Bennett Field on Jamaica Bay, has hardly satisfied New York officials.

Waves of arrivals, many fleeing political and economic turmoil in Central and South America, have sent city officials scrambling over the past year. About 60,000 asylum seekers are currently in New York Citys care, according to the Adams administration.

The city projects the costs of the crisis could balloon to $12 billion by 2025. The population of the shelter system has doubled since last summer.

Responding to the influx, the city has opened more than 200 shelter sites and helped the asylum seekers travel to far-off locations, including Canada.

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Latest news and more on politics and government in New York City and New York State.

The city has also embarked upon a controversial, trouble-plagued program intended to bus migrants to upstate communities and to cover their board at hotels. The program has been partially derailed by litigation and county-level orders intended to stop the buses.

The city and homeless advocates have implored Hochul to issue a statewide executive order overruling local bans on migrant transports. She has declined to do so, instead urging Biden to accelerate migrants work papers.

This crisis originated with the federal government, and it must be resolved through the federal government, the governor said in her speech last week.

Hochul, who is expected to serve as campaign surrogate for Bidens reelection bid in 2024, has still taken a gentler tone on the White House than Adams, who once said Biden had failed New York City and was later dropped from the surrogate squad.

He did not join Hochul in Washington on Wednesday.

Mayor Adams has said President Biden has "failed" New York on immigration. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/for New York Daily News)

At a news conference Tuesday, Adams continued to express frustration about the lack of support for the city, saying the federal government had not even reached for low-hanging fruit.

They gave us a list of spaces, he said. I am just really baffled that very smart people believe that this is sustainable.

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After White House meeting, Hochul touts 'first step' on migrant crisis help - New York Daily News

C.E.O.s urge Washington to help with asylum seekers

As New York Citys migrant crisis continues to escalate, with more than 100,000 arrivals from the southern U.S. border straining shelters, some of the citys top business leaders are intervening in a fight over whos responsible.

More than 120 executives including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Jane Fraser of Citigroup sent a letter to President Biden and congressional leaders on Monday, urging Washington to fulfill New York States request for federal assistance. But recent communications by the Biden administration suggest that such calls wont be heeded.

The letter underscores the increasing urgency of the crisis, which has pitted Mayor Eric Adams against Gov. Kathy Hochul and both Democrats against Biden. Adams has said the crisis could cost the city $12 billion over three years, while Hochul has spent $1.5 billion and deployed nearly 2,000 National Guard members so far.

The migrant crisis is a business issue. Of immediate concern is the financial strain that the wave of asylum seekers is putting on local governments: The situation is overwhelming the resources not only of the border region but of city and state governments across the nation, the letter reads.

The migrants are affecting New York-based companies in another way: New arrivals are increasingly being forced to sleep outdoors in the city despite the opening of 200 emergency sites. And long lines have snaked around the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, now an intake center just blocks away from JPMorgans offices.

The C.E.O.s also said that immigration control was clearly a federal issue, siding with Hochul in calling for federal funding for educational, housing, security and health care services for migrants.

They also supported Hochuls and Adamss requests for faster processing of asylum applications and work permits, since newly arrived migrants must otherwise wait 180 days before they can work legally.

But the Biden administration has pushed back against New Yorks requests. In letters to city and state officials, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, questioned New Yorks handling of the crisis. Mayorkas identified structural and operational issues and said that the administration had offered access to hangars at Kennedy Airport and at Floyd Bennett Field in Queens, as well as 11 other federal sites that could be repurposed to house migrants.

That response led to pushback from New York officials: A Hochul representative said that many of those locations were far from the city, and a spokeswoman for Adams said bluntly, Our requests from the federal government remain the same, and quite frankly, unaddressed.

Its unclear whether the voices from top business leaders, many of whom are Democratic donors, will break that impasse.

Donald Trump has yet another court date. His trial on federal charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election is set to begin March 4, two years earlier than what his lawyers had requested. It could bring the proceedings into conflict with other Trump trials, including ones in Manhattan and Georgia, and is a day before Super Tuesday in the Republican presidential primary.

OpenAI unveils an enterprise version of ChatGPT. The business-focused edition of the chatbot will allow customers to customize it, and offers faster performance and unlimited data use. Corporate adoption of tools like chatbots has been considered key for A.I. companies, especially as consumer use of ChatGPT has started to wane.

Hawaiian Electric rebuffs blame for the deadly Maui wildfire. The embattled utility said in a court filing that while its power lines set off a fire the morning of Aug. 8, Maui County fire officials declared it contained and that the company wasnt responsible for what it called a later blaze that devastated a town. The filing sets up a court clash between Hawaiian Electric and Maui County.

Goldman Sachs sells another business as it revamps its strategy. The Wall Street bank agreed to sell an investment advisory division to Creative Planning, a wealth management firm, just four years after acquiring it. The sale is part of Goldmans effort to refocus on its core base of highly wealthy clients. Meanwhile, the company is reportedly in the final stages of selling its GreenSky consumer lending unit.

Nearly 50 years ago, Terry Gou founded a tiny manufacturing shop that eventually became Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that produces many of the worlds best-known electronic devices most importantly the iPhone.

Gous run for Taiwans presidency, announced on Monday, could be a long shot, but it could also have big ramifications for geopolitics, especially given the billionaires desire for closer ties between Taipei and Beijing.

Gou favors talks with China to preserve peace in the Taiwan Strait. Thats as the ruling Democratic Progressive Party continues to assert Taiwanese sovereignty in the face of ongoing Chinese claims to the island. By contrast, Gou prioritizes an interpretation of the so-called one-China framework that favors a closer relationship between Beijing and Taipei over support for Taiwans independence.

The Foxconn founder, who stepped down from the company in 2019 to pursue an unsuccessful presidential run, has blamed the D.P.P. for unnecessary saber-rattling: If we dont pull back now, it will be too late to save Taiwan from falling, he said on Monday.

Gou could upend Americas approach to China. The White House has taken a hard-line stance with Beijing on multiple fronts and President Biden has pledged to defend Taiwan against a Chinese incursion.

A Gou victory could put Taiwan whose vast electronics manufacturing plants are vitally important to American businesses more firmly in Beijings orbit. Tech investors have long grasped the importance of Taiwan, an important hub for chip makers like Nvidia.

Gou denies feeling any pressure from Beijing. Critics note that his roughly $7 billion fortune was built on cross-strait ties: Foxconn shot to success via its main manufacturing hub in central China. (Hes still a shareholder in the company.) But the mogul has insisted that he will not bow to Chinas threats and that any effort by Beijing to seize Foxconn assets would backfire, given the manufacturers importance to global clients like Apple, Tesla and Amazon.

But his run might actually help the D.P.P., since it could end up splitting support among opposition candidates. Gou is currently polling at about 15 percent, behind the nominees of the Taiwan Peoples Party and the Kuomintang and well behind the D.P.P.s candidate, Vice President Lai Ching-te.

If Gou runs, the rest of us are done for, Ko Wen-je, the Taiwan Peoples Party candidate, said in July.

In other China news:

Following a meeting on Tuesday morning with Vice Premier He Lifeng, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo again struck a conciliatory note on trade: While we will never of course compromise in protecting our national security, I want to be clear that we do not seek to decouple or to hold Chinas economy back.

Raimondo also discussed U.S. concerns over Beijings trade restrictions on the chip makers Intel and Micron and components like gallium and germanium with her Beijing counterpart, Wang Wentao.

The fate of TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app that has been under pressure in Washington, remains in limbo; Ms. Raimondo isnt expected to discuss it during her trip.

Andy Jassy, Amazons C.E.O., in a meeting with employees, a recording of which was obtained by Insider. Jassy reportedly defended making workers come back to the office three days a week, even though, unlike many of the companys decisions, it was not based on reams of data.

Wall Street appears poised to clash again with the S.E.C., this time over new rules the agency says will bring transparency to the fast-growing private funds sector.

Last week, the S.E.C. adopted rules to introduce more stringent reporting guidelines for hedge funds and private equity firms such as Blackstone, Apollo and Citadel. Gary Gensler, the agencys chair, said the measure would bring down fees and remove opacity.

The industry, which has fought rule changes for the past year, has ridden a decade-long investing boom that brought its assets under management to roughly $20 trillion.

The new requirements were approved by the three Democratic commissioners, but opposed by both Republicans. They will require funds to provide reports on quarterly performance, fees and expenses, and submit to additional audits. The new disclosures would benefit the millions of Americans with retirement savings in pension plans, Andrew Park, a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, a financial sector watchdog group, told DealBook.

But Hester Peirce, a Republican S.E.C. commissioner, said they would unnecessarily add government red tape to contracts between investors and the funds.

Industry players were initially relieved to have won some concessions. The final rules seemed less strict than the S.E.C.s first shot, which would have opened up the funds to more legal liability. Still, some industry representatives told DealBook they believe the rules will raise compliance costs for private fund advisers, which could chill investment opportunities.

Brace for litigation. Trade groups like the Managed Funds Association say they are contemplating a lawsuit to block the measure. (Opponents have 60 days from its publication date to sue.)

One to watch is the previously unknown National Association of Private Fund Managers, which is registered to the address of a Texas law firm and has raised its objections to the rules. Those closely following the matter say it appears to have been strategically created to ensure at least one legal challenge would be heard in the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The association did not respond to a request for comment.

Deals

Chamath Palihapitiyas Social Capital reportedly sought to sell off its stakes in over 250 tech start-ups that the firm valued collectively at more than $300 million. (The Information)

Danaher agreed to buy Abcam, a top maker of supplies for the life sciences industry that is known as the Amazon of antibodies, for $5.7 billion. (Bloomberg)

The supermodel Karlie Kloss is said to be in talks to buy i-D magazine from Vice Media. (Puck)

Policy

Tech executives including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai of Google and Sam Altman of OpenAI will meet with Washington lawmakers next month to discuss potential A.I. regulations. (NYT)

The rapper Eminem asked Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-woke activist running for the Republican presidential nomination, to stop using his music in his campaign. (NYT)

The S.E.C. took its first enforcement action against an N.F.T. issuer, calling the tokens released by Impact Theory unregistered securities. (The Verge)

Best of the rest

Wed like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

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CEOs Back New York's Call for Help With Migrant Crisis - The New York Times

Theres a joke, playing on the quantum worlds unique properties, that goes, There are three types of people in this world: Those who understand quantum computing, those who dont understand quantum computing, and those who simultaneously do and do not understand quantum computing. All kidding aside, Weiwen Jiang sees a world in which quantum computing is in widespread use; with new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he is taking steps toward that goal.

Jiang, an assistant professor in George Mason Universitys Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading two recently awarded NSF projectsworth a total $900,000for work on the development of these complex devices and on building the quantum workforce of tomorrow.

Quantum computers differ from classical computers in that they use elements of quantum mechanics to perform calculations, allowing them to operate much faster and crunch more data. While there are several operational quantum computers in useIBM and Google are among the top manufacturersthey currently are far from their promised potential and simply cannot yet make the large-scale calculations predicted of them.

Jiang said one key problem is, They are not stable. We can use them for computations, but you might get one answer today and then get an entirely different answer tomorrow.

Quantum devices are notoriously susceptible to noisespecifically, things like cosmic rays, changes in the Earth's magnetic field, radiation, and even mobile wi-fi signals. The noise contributes to the devices instability.

The $600,000 collaborative grant will fund the work of Jiang and his collaborators from Kent State University in developing an adaptor that will adjust to fluctuating noise, improving the performance of applications on quantum devices. Jiang is well versed on the topic, having recently won the Best Poster Award for System-level optimizations in improving the robustness of quantum applications on unstable quantum devices at an event at Oak Ridge National Lab.

According to Jiangs preliminary works, the deployment of the quantum applications faces several challenges, including: sustainabilityon one quantum processor, most quantum applications are sensitive to the temporal changes of quantum noise; portabilitydifferent quantum processors (even from the same vendor) with specific properties will lead to variation of model uncertainty; and transparencya lack of visualization tools can block users from tailoring their quantum applications to quantum computers for higher reliability. The NSF project will systematically provide solutions in response to these challenges.

Jiang is optimistic about the future of quantum computing: Every year, we see a lot of breakthroughs. Just a couple of months ago IBM published a paper on noise reduction. And every year, we see that the number of qubits in quantum computers increases from five in the year 2000 to over 400 on a new computer from IBM. (A qubit is the basic unit of information used in quantum computing, much like a 1 and 0 for traditional computing.)

Another grant, which Jiang shares with collaborators MingzhenTian and JessicaRosenberg in the College of Science, provides $300,000 from NSF to bolster the quantum workforce pipeline. The grant is for an end-to-end quantum system integration training program. The faculty members are developing a new course at Mason, organizing workshops at the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing in September (where Jiang is the quantum system track co-chair), and conducting tutorials at international conferences. Recently the team, led by Rosenberg, coordinated a summer immersion program at Mason for high school students. In addition, in the coming months, Jiang will be conducting seminars at a variety of minority-serving institutions in the DC region.

Jiang said the opportunities for quantum-trained engineers are robust and growing. I have collaborations locally with Leidos and MITRE, for example, and they have needs in this field. Further, we know that quantum will make a difference in everything from finance to drug discovery to machine learning and beyond.

He is encouraged about the quantum futureboth in the world and here at Mason. He stressed that as student demand grows for this technology, we need to provide the appropriate materials for our students, because were seeing a lot of strong interest in this field.

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Quantum Conundrums: Navigating Noise and Enhancing Expertise - George Mason University

August 28, 2023August 28, 2023

A digital signature developed by researchers from Clemson University and three universities in Europe could become part of the national standard for encryption tools designed to protect the privacy of digital information against quantum computers in the future.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is holding a competition to select standard post-quantum digital signature algorithms that would securely authenticate email, credit card and bank transactions, and digital documents from unwanted third parties tampering.

The researchers CROSS (Codes and Restricted Objects Signature Scheme) proposal was named a candidate for standardization.

Now, researchers from around the world will try to break it.

If you think about it, this is the best way to choose the standards, said Felice Manganiello, an associate professor in the Clemson School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences and one of the developers of CROSS. Once they decide which proposals are the candidates, the rest of the world can try to attack them to find vulnerabilities. These systems are secure until they are not anymore. So, these competitions are actually a healthy way to decide the standard by having a lot of people working on proving the security.

Clemson graduate student Freeman Slaughter and researchers from Polytechnic University of Marche,Polytechnic University of Milanand Technical University of Munich also worked on the proposal.

Quantum computers could revolutionize the future of fields such as medicine, finance, energy and transportation by solving complex problems that are beyond the reach of even the best of todays classic supercomputers.

Unlike conventional computers that perform computation and store information in binary form (1s and 0s), quantum computers exploit the strange properties of quantum physics to operate on information in multiple forms known as qubits. By leveraging two key phenomena quantum superposition and entanglement quantum computers can explore multiple solution pathways simultaneously, allowing them to solve problems that would take a classic computer too long to calculate.

With that power would come the ability to crack todays standards for encryption and digital signatures, which rely on math problems that even a combination of the fastest conventional computers find intractable.

The standards we have today would not be sufficient, Manganiello said.

The NIST announced the first group of three digital signatures in July 2022 after a multi-year vetting process. It called for additional digital signature proposals in 2022. About 50 proposals were received and 40 were named candidates.

A digital signature is a mathematical algorithm used to validate the authenticity and integrity of an email, credit card transaction or digital document. Digital signatures create a virtual fingerprint that is unique to a person or entity and are used to identify users and protect information in digital messages or documents.Digital signaturesare significantly more secure than other forms of electronic signatures, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Six of the digital signature candidates are code-based signatures, including CROSS.

Manganiello said that after the NISTs first call for proposals several years ago, researchers realized that code-based cryptography was not competitive because it led to large signatures.

The code-based problems were the oldest and safest problems, but they were leading to very large signatures. That made the whole community start working on what could be done to decrease these signature sizes, he said.

While CROSS is code-based, it uses Merkle trees and zero-knowledge protocols to make the signatures shorter.

Our digital signature algorithm is competitive because the signatures are quite small and the speed of computing them is faster with respect to the other candidates, he said. The only issue is that the system is based on a more recent problem than others and theres not as much literature attacking it, he said.

Manganiello said it could take several years for the NIST to decide whether the researchers algorithm will be selected as a standard.

Or email us at news@clemson.edu

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Clemson mathematicians' collaborative digital signature is a ... - Clemson News

ORLANDO, August 22, 2023 Quantum computing, which can enable advances in technologies including artificial intelligence and virtual reality, is coming in the near future, said a representative from Chattanooga, Tennessees smart city provider during a Fiber Connect address Tuesday.

Quantum computing refers to the technology that uses principles of physics to solve complex problems not solvable by computers. According to Jim Ingraham, representative for EPB, the provider of energy and connectivity for smart city in Chattanooga, Tennessee, quantum computing is the new future. Technology is evolving, is real and is well-invested, he said, claiming that it behooves the industry to be aware of coming demands on broadband networks because of it.

Networks need to be more resilient, reliable and flexible for coming adoptions, stated Ingraham. Networks have to be clean, affordable and implement advanced computing on a fiber system.

The rate of innovation and adoption is accelerating, there is no doubt about that, said Ingraham. It is happening more rapidly, rapidly, rapidly. Already, quantum computers are available, and innovators are continuing to improve their processes, he continued.

Right behind [quantum computers] is coming a quantum network, said Ingraham. It will take time. Quantum internet will evolve we will stop talking about kilobits, megabits, even gigabits. We will start talking about qubits. Qubits process data not in a linear way, but instantaneously, he explained.

Thus, quantum computing can make unimaginable applications possible for the future, he said. He predicted that virtual reality will evolve to become a 360-degree, holographic-based world in which virtual reality blends seamlessly with reality. it will not be an equipment based system, he said, referring to new virtual reality headsets released earlier this year by Apple.

Chattanooga, Tennessee is considered by some as the countrys best connected smart city when it became the first U.S. city to offer fiber internet through EPBs fiber network. EPB announced in November its partnership with Qubitekk, a provider of quantum optic-based cybersecurity solutions, to launch the nations first commercially available quantum network.

Quantum networks, like traditional networks, transmit information between nodes. Instead of sending classical bits, however, quantum networks send quantum bits or qubits each of which is comprised of a single photon. Unlike the classical binary bit, which is limited to a 1 or a 0, a qubit has unlimited values.

Today we have what we believe to be the countrys first quantum communications network that is commercial, said Ingraham. We believe that this can be an engine for innovation in this new quantum world.

He added that total annual quantum start-up investment hit the highest level of all time in 2022 at $2.4 billion, though it only grew one percent year over year.

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Artificial Intelligence-Enhancing Quantum Computing Coming in ... - BroadbandBreakfast.com