The US government's China Initiative sought to protect national security. In the most comprehensive analysis of cases to date, MIT Technology Review reveals how far it has strayed from its goals. Technology Review: A visiting researcher at UCLA accused of hiding his connection to China's People's Liberation Army. A hacker indicted for breaking into video game company servers in his spare time. A Harvard professor accused of lying to investigators about funding from China. And a man sentenced for organizing a turtle-smuggling ring between New York and Hong Kong. For years, the US Department of Justice has used these cases to highlight the success of its China Initiative, an effort to counter rising concerns about Chinese economic espionage and threats to US national security. Started in 2018, the initiative was a centerpiece of the Trump administration's hardening stance against China. Now, an investigation by MIT Technology Review shows that the China Initiative has strayed far from its initial mission. Instead of focusing on economic espionage and national security, the initiative now appears to be an umbrella term for cases with almost any connection to China, whether they involve state-sponsored hackers, smugglers, or, increasingly, academics accused of failing to disclose all ties to China on grant-related forms.

To date, only about a quarter of defendants charged under the initiative have been convicted, and about half of those defendants with open charges have yet to see the inside of an American courtroom. Although the program has become a top priority of US law enforcement and domestic counterintelligence efforts -- and an unusual one, as the first country-specific initiative -- many details have remained murky. The DOJ has not publicly defined the initiative or answered many basic questions about it, making it difficult to understand, let alone assess or exercise oversight of it, according to many civil rights advocates, lawmakers, and scholars. While the threat of Chinese intellectual property theft is real, critics wonder if the China Initiative is the right way to counteract it. Today, after months of research and investigation, MIT Technology Review is publishing a searchable database of 77 cases and more than 150 defendants. While likely incomplete, the database represents the most comprehensive accounting of the China Initiative prosecutions to date. Our reporting and analysis showed that the climate of fear created by the prosecutions has already pushed some talented scientists to leave the United States and made it more difficult for others to enter or stay, endangering America's ability to attract new talent in science and technology from China and around the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Crypto Briefing: The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services has announced that several cryptocurrency executives will testify at a panel hearing. Jeremy Allaire, CEO of the USD Coin company Circle, is first on the list of executives that will attend the panel. The list also includes Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO and founder of the crypto exchange FTX. It additionally includes Brian Brooks, current CEO of Bitfury and former acting comptroller for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Chad Cascarilla, CEO of the stablecoin and brokerage firm Paxos, will also appear on the panel. Paxos is best known for powering crypto services for PayPal and Facebook's Novi wallet. Denelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, and Alesia Haas, CFO of Coinbase, will also make an appearance.

The panel will be led by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Committee on Financial Services. Waters previously held a hearing on Facebook's proposed crypto plans in 2019, as well as other panels on crypto, digital currencies, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This upcoming panel is titled "Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation in the United States." The page describing the hearing suggests the goal of the event is to hold financial companies accountable to consumers and investors. The hearing will be held at 10:00 AM ET on Wednesday, Dec. 8. It will be available as an online webcast.

At the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021 yesterday, Qualcomm introduced their new always-on camera capabilities in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, which is expected to arrive in high-end Android phones early next year. The company says this new feature will let users wake and unlock their phone without having to pick it up or have it instantly lock when it no longer sees their face. Even though Judd Heape, Qualcomm Technologies vice president of product management, said that the "always-on camera data never leaves the secure sensing hub while it's looking for faces," it raises a serious privacy concern that "far outweighs any potential convenience benefits," argues The Verge's Dan Seifert. From the report: Qualcomm is framing the always-on camera as similar to the always-on microphones that have been in our phones for years. Those are used to listen for voice commands like "Hey Siri" or "Hey Google" (or lol, "Hi Bixby") and then wake up the phone and provide a response, all without you having to touch or pick up the phone. But the key difference is that they are listening for specific wake words and are often limited with what they can do until you do actually pick up your phone and unlock it. It feels a bit different when it's a camera that's always scanning for your likeness.

It's true that smart home products already have features like this. Google's Nest Hub Max uses its camera to recognize your face when you walk up to it and greet you with personal information like your calendar. Home security cameras and video doorbells are constantly on, looking for activity or even specific faces. But those devices are in your home, not always carried with you everywhere you go, and generally don't have your most private information stored on them, like your phone does. They also frequently have features like physical shutters to block the camera or intelligent modes to disable recording when you're home and only resume it when you aren't. It's hard to imagine any phone manufacturer putting a physical shutter on the front of their slim and sleek flagship smartphone.

Lastly, there have been many reports of security breaches and social engineering hacks to enable smart home cameras when they aren't supposed to be on and then send that feed to remote servers, all without the knowledge of the homeowner. Modern smartphone operating systems now do a good job of telling you when an app is accessing your camera or microphone while you're using the device, but it's not clear how they'd be able to inform you of a rogue app tapping into the always-on camera. [...] But even if it's not found in every phone next year, the mere presence of the feature means that it will be used by someone at some point. It sets a precedent that is unsettling and uncomfortable; Qualcomm may be the first with this capability, but it won't be long before other companies add it in the race to keep up. Maybe we'll just start having to put tape on our smartphone cameras like we already do with laptop webcams.

Apple is asking a higher court to halt a judge's decision that will force changes to its App Store while a legal fight with Epic Games continues. From a report: Lawyers for the company filed Tuesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, seeking action by Dec. 8. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers rejected Apple's request to put on hold her ruling allowing developers to steer customers to payment methods outside the App Store, an overhaul the judge ordered in September that could cost the tech giant a few billion dollars annually. The company said at that time it would appeal to the higher court.

The Biden administration is looking for communities willing to serve as temporary homes for tens of thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste currently stranded at power plants around the country. Bloomberg reports: The Energy Department filed (PDF) a public notice Tuesday that it is restarting the process for finding a voluntary host for spent nuclear fuel until a permanent location is identified. "Hearing from and then working with communities interested in hosting one of these facilities is the best way to finally solve the nation's spent nuclear fuel management issues," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. The agency, in its notice, requested input on how to proceed with a "consent-based" process for a federal nuclear storage facility, including what benefits could entice local and state governments and how to address potential impediments. Federal funding is also possible, the notice said. Approximately 89,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is being stored at dozens of nuclear power plants and other sites around the country.
[...]
One such interim storage site could be in Andrews, Texas. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September approved a license for a proposal by Orano CIS LLC and its joint venture partner, J.F. Lehman & Co.'s Waste Control Specialists LLC, to establish a repository in the heart of Texas' Permian Basin oil fields for as many as 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. The joint venture envisioned having nuclear waste shipped by rail from around the country and sealed in concrete casks where it would be stored above ground at a site about 30 miles (48.28 kilometers) from Andrews. But the plan has drawn opposition from Texas authorities and local officials who once embraced it as an economic benefit but have since had a change of heart. A similar nuclear waste storage project, proposed in New Mexico by Holtec International Corp., is awaiting approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said it expects to make a decision on that proposal in January 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: When a scammer wants to set up an account on Amazon, Discord, or a spread of other online services, sometimes a thing that stands in their way is SMS verification. The site will require them to enter a phone number to receive a text message which they'll then need to input back into the site. Sites often do this to prevent people from making fraudulent accounts in bulk. But fraudsters can turn to large scale, automated services to lease them phone numbers for less than a cent. One of those is 5SIM, a website that members of the video game cheating community mention as a way to fulfill the request for SMS verification.

Various YouTube videos uploaded by the company explain how people can use its service explicitly for getting through the SMS verification stage of various sites. The videos include instructions specifically on PayPal, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and dating site Plenty of Fish. Instagram told Motherboard it is concerned by sites that suggest people can use services to bypass Instagram's measures to then abuse the platform. Instagram said it uses SMS verification to prevent the creation of fake accounts and to make account recovery possible. "We have many measures in place to protect against scripted account creation and block millions of fake accounts at registration every day," an Instagram spokesperson said.

Some online services don't allow users to perform SMS verification with VoIP numbers, presumably in an effort to mitigate against fraud. 5SIM's numbers, however, are just like ordinary phone numbers, the site claims. When people buy 5SIM's services, they must only use it for receiving texts related to an online account. "Different SMS will [be] rejected," the website adds. 5SIM also offers an API to automate parts of the service. 5SIM's rules say that customers are "Forbidden to use the service for any illegal purposes as well as not to take actions that harm the service and (or) third parties." The website also includes a denylist of words that its service may block. In an email to Motherboard, 5SIM said: "5sim service is prohibited to use for illegal purposes. In cases, where fraudulent operations with registered accounts are detected, restrictions may be imposed on the 5sim account until the circumstances are clarified. 5sim is used by those who want to get a discount or bonus, webmasters, SMM specialists, owners of business for advertising and increasing business loyalty."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Record: A recently discovered FBI training document shows that US law enforcement can gain limited access to the content of encrypted messages from secure messaging services like iMessage, Line, and WhatsApp, but not to messages sent via Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, or Wickr. The document, obtained earlier this month following a FOIA request filed by Property of the People, a US nonprofit dedicated to government transparency, appears to contain training advice for what kind of data agents can obtain from the operators of encrypted messaging services and the legal processes they have to go through.

Dated to January 7, 2021, the document doesn't include any new information but does a good job at providing an up-to-date summary of what type of information the FBI can currently obtain from each of the listed services. [...] While the document confirms that the FBI can't gain access to encrypted messages sent through some services, the other type of information they can glean from providers might still help authorities in other aspects of their investigations. The content of the document, which may be hard to read due to some font rendering issues, is also available in the table [embedded in the article]. Of note, the table above does not include details about Keybase, a recent end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) service that has been gaining in popularity. The service was acquired by video conferencing software maker Zoom in May 2020.

The Biden administration is launching its first big effort on privacy policy by looking at how data privacy issues affect civil rights. From a report: The National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA), the telecom unit of the Commerce Department, plans to hold "listening sessions" and seek comment on the intersection of privacy, equity and civil rights, according to an agency notice. NTIA intends to develop a report on the "ways in which commercial data flows of personal information can lead to disparate impact and outcomes for marginalized or disadvantaged communities." The agency noted that data collection can lead to harm through discriminatory targeted advertising or via software that uses race as a factor in predicting academic success, as detailed by a report in The Markup.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Rights groups petitioned Israel's top court on Monday to repeal new COVID-19 measures that authorize the country's domestic intelligence service to use counter-terrorism phone tracking technology to contain the spread of the Omicron virus variant. Announcing the emergency measures on Saturday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the phone tracking would be used to locate carriers of the new and potentially more contagious variant in order to curb its transmission to others. Israeli rights groups say the emergency measures violate previous Supreme Court rulings over such surveillance, used on-and-off by the country's Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency since March, 2020.

A senior health ministry official said on Sunday that use of phone tracking would be "surgical" in nature, only to be utilized on confirmed or suspected carriers of the variant. The surveillance technology matches virus carriers' locations against other mobile phones nearby to determine with whom they have come into contact. Israel's Supreme Court this year limited the scope of its use after civil rights groups mounted challenges over privacy concerns. Further reading: Omicron Covid Variant Poses Very High Global Risk, Says WHO

Lawmakers including Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to crack down on "cyber Grinches" using bots to quickly snap up entire inventories of popular holiday toys and resell them at higher prices. Bloomberg reports: "This bill seeks to stop Cyber Grinch greed from ruining kids' holidays," Blumenthal says in a statement. "New tools are needed to block cyber scammers who snap up supplies of popular toys and resell them at astronomic prices. Price gouging hot toys by Grinch bots should have zero tolerance." The legislation, also introduced in the House of Representatives, would apply to e-commerce sites to ban bots from bypassing security measures on online retail portals. However, with Congress facing urgent deadlines to avoid a federal government shutdown and a debt limit default, it's unclear the bill will move in time to save Christmas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Three former Google employees who were fired by the company in 2019 sued Google on Monday, claiming that the company violated the part of its code of conduct that says "Don't Be Evil." "Don't Be Evil" was, famously, Google's motto for years. The company moved away from the motto after renaming itself Alphabet in 2015, but "Don't Be Evil" is still part of the company's official employee code of conduct: "Remember don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right -- speak up!," the final line of Google's code of conduct states. Employees are expected to sign the contract as a condition of their employment at Google.

The new lawsuit, which alleges a breach of contract by Google, comes as part of drawn out legal proceedings between Google and three former employees who were fired within minutes of each other on November 25, 2019. Google claimed to fire the workers for leaking "confidential" information to the press, and because they engaged in "systematic searches" for information "outside the scope of their job." But the software engineers say they were fired for protesting Google's decision to sell cloud computing software to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which at the time was caging migrants and separating parents from children. They circulated a company-wide petition requesting Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP or ICE. The three workers, Rebecca Rivers, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman, are now suing Google for allegedly violating its own code of conduct as well as California public policy. California sued Trump in 2019 over the indefinite detention of migrant children. "The new complaint alleges that all three of the fired employees saw Google's collaboration with CBP under the Trump administration as 'evil' and had followed Google's mandate to call out unethical conduct by protesting the company's actions," the report adds. "It claims that Google never informed the fired employees that they had in any way violated the company's 'data security policy,' and that none of the employees had engaged in 'systematic searches.' They had only accessed documents that any full-time Google employee could have found on their own, court documents say."

Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people," Reuters reported Monday, citing internal documents. From the report: A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government's procurement website -- reported in the media for the first time -- details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases. A 5 million yuan ($782,000) contract was awarded on Sept. 17 to Chinese tech company Neusoft (600718.SS), which was required to finish building the system within two months of signing the contract, separate documents published on the Henan government procurement website showed. Reuters was unable to establish if the system is currently operating.

China is trying to build what some security experts describe as one of the world's most sophisticated surveillance technology networks, with millions of cameras in public places and increasing use of techniques such as smartphone monitoring and facial recognition. U.S.-based surveillance research firm IPVM, which has closely tracked the network's expansion and first identified the Henan document, said the tender was unique in specifying journalists as surveillance targets and providing a blueprint for public security authorities to quickly locate them and obstruct their work.

The New York Times tells the remarkable story of Uber's need for more intelligence gathering back in 2016: Uber was expanding aggressively into foreign markets. The pushback was swift and sometimes violent. Taxi drivers staged widespread protests, and in Nairobi, Kenya, several Uber cars were lit on fire and drivers were beaten. Competitors in China and India used sophisticated methods to collect Uber's data and undercut its prices. To fight back, Uber began to recruit a team of former C.I.A. officers like [Nick] Gicinto, law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts. The team would gather intelligence about threats against Uber drivers and executives, and investigate competing companies and potential acquisitions. "They didn't know what was going on, on the ground," Mr. Gicinto said. "They recognized that they needed somebody who understood the human aspect of these things and understood foreign environments...."

In addition to Uber's recruitment from the C.I.A., Google, Facebook and Amazon poached hackers from the National Security Agency to fend off cyberattacks, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agents to staff teams responsible for fielding law enforcement requests and former Pentagon officials to advise on defense contracts.
A history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle tells the Times it's not at all unusual for tech companies to hire from the intelligence community, a long-standing practice to protect intellectual secrets.

So for example, Uber's team "outsourced some of the projects to intelligence firms, which sent contractors to infiltrate driver protests... the team filmed Waymo's vehicles and scraped competitors' apps to collect pricing information." The men who gathered intelligence for Uber were supposed to be ghosts. For years, they were un-Googleable sentries, quietly informing executives about the actions of competitors, opponents and disgruntled employees. But the secrecy of the tightknit team ended abruptly in 2017 when one of its members turned on the others, accusing them of stealing trade secrets, wiretapping and destroying evidence. They flouted the law while carrying out Uber's dirtiest missions, their former co-worker, Richard Jacobs, claimed in an April 2017 email sent to top Uber executives. His lawyer followed up with a letter that said the team went so far as to hack foreign governments and wiretap Uber's own employees.

But Mr. Jacobs's most damning allegations of illegal activity were not true. In June, nearly four years after his claims drew wide attention, he retracted them. In a letter to his former co-workers that he wrote as part of a legal settlement, Mr. Jacobs explained that he had never intended to suggest that they broke the law. "I am sorry," he wrote. "I regret not having clarified the statements at an earlier time and regret any distress or injury my statements may have caused." Gary Bostwick, a lawyer for Mr. Jacobs, declined to comment....

Testifying in court, Mr. Jacobs seemed to distance himself from some of the claims in the letter. He hadn't had much time to review it before his lawyer sent it, he said, and he wasn't sure if Mr. Gicinto and his other former co-workers had broken the law. "I did not believe it was patently illegal. I had questions about the ethics of it," Mr. Jacobs testified. "It felt overly aggressive and invasive and inappropriate."
The Times reports that Uber had paid $7.5 million to cooperate with an investigation into Jacobs' allegations (according to legal filings), and while the findings were never made public, the co-workers accused in the letter "said they had been told that they were cleared of any wrongdoing...

"In 2021, Mr. Jacobs settled the libel lawsuit by his former co-workers. The terms of the settlement are not public."

"Remember how Microsoft spent years in hot water in the late '90s and early '00s by forcing Internet Explorer on its customers?" asks ZDNet.

"European open-source cloud company Nextcloud does." Now, with a coalition of other European Union (EU) software and cloud organizations and companies called the "Coalition for a Level Playing Field," Nextcloud has formally complained to the European Commission about Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior by aggressively bundling its OneDrive cloud, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and 11.

Nextcloud claims that by pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft, the Windows giant is limiting consumer choice and creating an unfair barrier for other companies offering competing services. Specifically, Microsoft has grown its EU market share to 66%, while local providers' market share declined from 26% to 16%. Microsoft has done this not by any technical advantage or sales benefits, but by heavily favoring its own products and services, self-preferencing over other services. While self-preferencing is not illegal per se under EU competition laws, if a company abuses its dominant market position, it can break the law. Nextcloud states that Microsoft has outright blocked other cloud service vendors by leveraging its position as gatekeeper to extend its reach in neighboring markets, pushing users deeper into its ecosystems. Thus, more specialized EU companies can't compete on merit, as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access....

So, Nextcloud is asking the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition to prevent this kind of abusive behavior and keep the market competitive and fair for all players. Nextcloud is doing this by filing an official complaint with this body. In addition, Nextcloud has also filed a request with the German antitrust authorities, the Bundeskartellamt, for an investigation against Microsoft. With its partners, it's also discussing filing a similar complaint in France.

Nextcloud is being joined in its complaint by several open-source, non-profit organizations. These include the European DIGITAL SME Alliance; the Document Foundation, LibreOffice's backing organization; and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)... Numerous businesses are also supporting Nextcloud's legal action. This includes Abilian, an open-source software publisher; DAASI, an open-source identity management company; and Mailfence.

Google has pledged more restrictions on its use of data from its Chrome browser to address concerns raised by Britain's competition regulator about its plan to ban third-party cookies that advertisers use to track consumers. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating Google's plan to cut support for some cookies in Chrome - an initiative called the "Privacy Sandbox" -- because it is worried it will impede competition in digital advertising. Alphabet's Google has said its users want more privacy when they are browsing the web, including not being tracked across sites.

Other players in the $250 billion global digital ad sector, however, have said the loss of cookies in the world's most popular browser will limit their ability to collect information for personalising ads and make them more reliant on Google's user databases. Google agreed earlier this year to not implement the plan without the CMA's sign-off, and said the changes agreed with the British regulator will apply globally.

Australia's defense minister on Wednesday won a defamation case over a six-word tweet that called him a "rape apologist." From a report: Critics and experts said the court case exemplified the conservative government's heavy-handed approach toward regulating damaging commentary on social media -- what Prime Minister Scott Morrison called "a coward's palace." The case also represented a troubling shift as politicians bring more lawsuits against ordinary citizens, they said. The dispute began when Shane Bazzi, an advocate for refugees who has 13,000 Twitter followers, wrote a Twitter post in February about Peter Dutton, then the country's home affairs minister and now the defense minister.

"Peter Dutton is a rape apologist," the tweet said, and linked to an article about comments Mr. Dutton had made that women seeking asylum in Australia used rape claims as an excuse to enter the country. The post was published on the same day that Mr. Dutton also used the phrase "she said, he said" in reference to explosive accusations by Brittany Higgins, a former government staff member, who said she had been sexually assaulted in Australia's Parliament House. Mr. Dutton began defamation proceedings soon after, saying that the post had "deeply offended" him and had wrongly suggested he condoned and excused rape. Mr Bazzi's blue Twitter check mark, Mr. Dutton also argued, implied recognition by the social media giant and had led the minister to believe that the post was not just the "rant of somebody randomly on Twitter."

It's been well over two years since the UK's data protection watchdog warned the behavioural advertising industry it's wildly out of control. From a report: The ICO hasn't done anything to stop the systematic unlawfulness of the tracking and targeting industry abusing Internet users' personal data to try to manipulate their attention -- not in terms of actually enforcing the law against offenders and stopping what digital rights campaigners have described as the biggest data breach in history. Indeed, it's being sued over inaction against real-time-bidding's misuse of personal data by complainants who filed a petition on the issue all the way back in September 2018.

But today the UK's (outgoing) information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, published an opinion -- in which she warns the industry that its old unlawful tricks simply won't do in the future. New methods of advertising must be compliant with a set of what she describes as "clear data protection standards" in order to safeguard people's privacy online, she writes.

Roblox is taking notorious YouTuber Benjamin "Ruben Sim" Simon to court over his alleged attacks on the gaming social media platform and its young fans. A lawsuit filed in California court on Tuesday wants the longtime banned player to pay $1.6 million in damages and stop harassing Roblox employees and players. From a report: First reported by Polygon, the lawsuit contains a number of allegations against Simon, who has been making and profiting from Roblox videos since 2010. Those videos run the gamut, featuring him doing everything from sexually harassing players he encounters in the game to making public "terrorist threats" against the company during its annual convention. According to Roblox, this led the company to have to temporarily shut down its Roblox Developers Conference in San Francisco last month after Simon reportedly posted about police searching for "Islamic Extremists" at the event. The company claims this cost it $50,000 to investigate the false reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Tor anonymity network has gone through a major change as the Tor software team has released a new version of its software that updated how .onion domains look and work. More specifically, the Tor Project has done away with 16-character-long .onion domains, also known as v2 addresses, and replaced them with 56-character-long domains, known as v3. The move, driven by a need to improve the Tor network's privacy, security, and resilience to deanonymization attacks, was announced years in advance, and the entire process took more than a year to complete.

But despite the Tor team's best efforts to announce the move in advance, new numbers compiled and released by dark web monitoring company DarkOwl show that the Tor network is still made up in large part of servers running older v2 domains. "In the last six weeks, DarkOwl's Vision platform has observed an average of 104,095 active .onion services across both address schemes of which: 62% are v2 addresses and 38% are v3 addresses," the company said last week. DarkOwl says it detected a spike in new v3 domains in July 2021, which coincided with the Tor team adding a fullscreen warning before accessing v2 domains in preparation for the browser's v11 release this fall. This resulted in more than 2,900 v3 domains being registered in the last two weeks of July alone. However, as the Tor team noted in its own v2-to-v3 analysis in September, the number of v3 domains is trending up. The report adds that v2 sites are expected to go extinct in the coming year. "The reason is that as most Tor node operators will update their servers to versions that will not support v2 domains, there will be no Tor relays capable of routing the traffic to these old-gen domains," report The Record.

President Joe Biden will require essential, nonresident travelers crossing U.S. land borders, such as truck drivers, government and emergency response officials, to be fully vaccinated beginning on Jan. 22, the administration planned to announce Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: A senior administration official said the requirement, which the White House previewed in October, brings the rules for essential travelers in line with those that took effect earlier this month for leisure travelers, when the U.S. reopened its borders to fully vaccinated individuals. Essential travelers entering by ferry will also be required to be fully vaccinated by the same date, the official said. The rules pertain to non-U.S. nationals. American citizens and permanent residents may still enter the U.S. regardless of their vaccination status, but face additional testing hurdles because officials believe they more easily contract and spread COVID-19 and in order to encourage them to get a shot. [...] About 47 million adults in the U.S. remain unvaccinated, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.