An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The South Korean Ministry of Justice has provided more than 100 million photos of foreign nationals who travelled through the country's airports to facial recognition companies without their consent, according to attorneys with the non-governmental organization Lawyers for a Democratic Society. While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a "human rights disaster" that is relatively unprecedented. "It's unheard-of for state organizations -- whose duty it is to manage and control facial recognition technology -- to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology," six civic groups said during a press conference last week.

The revelation, first reported in the South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh, came to light after National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested and received documents from the Ministry of Justice related to a April 2019 project titled Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction Project. The documents show private companies secretly used biometric data to research and develop an advanced immigration screening system that would utilize artificial intelligence to automatically identify airport users' identities through CCTV surveillance cameras and detect dangerous situations in real time. Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit.

"We, the NGOs, urge the government to immediately stop the establishment of a biometric monitoring system that is not only illegal but also significantly violates international human rights norms," wrote Advocates for Public Interest Law, MINBYUN -- Lawyers for a Democratic Society, the Institute for Digital Rights, the Joint Committee with Migrants in Korea, and the Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet, in a press release that was translated and provided to Motherboard. Attorneys claim the project directly violates South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act, a law that strictly limits the processing of personal information in the country. Still, the Ministry has yet to announce plans to halt the program, which was scheduled to be completed in 2022.

Apple just announced Self Service Repair, a new program designed to let users perform common repairs on devices at home. Through the program, users with damaged devices will be sent "Apple genuine" tools and components -- same as the ones they use at the Genius Bar. From a report: The company will also be offering up online repair manuals (text, not video), accessible through the new Apple Self Service Repair Online Store. The system is similar to the one the company rolled out for Independent Repair Providers (of which there are currently 2,800 in the U.S. plus 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers), beginning with the iPhone 12 and 13, focused on display, battery and camera fixes. A similar service for M1Macs will be launching "soon" after.

"Creating greater access to Apple genuine parts gives our customers even more choice if a repair is needed," COO Jeff Williams said in a release tied to the announcement. "In the past three years, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and training, and now we're providing an option for those who wish to complete their own repairs." Apple hasn't listed specific prices yet, but customers will get a credit toward the final fee if they mail in the damaged component for recycling. When it launches in the U.S. in early-2022, the store will offer some 200 parts and tools to consumers. Performing these tasks at home won't void the device's warranty, though you might if you manage to further damage the product in the process of repairing it -- so hew closely to those manuals. After reviewing that, you can purchase parts from the Apple Self Service Repair Online Store.

The recent hack at app-based investment platform Robinhood also impacted thousands of phone numbers, Motherboard has learned. From the report: Originally, Robinhood said that the breach included the email addresses of 5 million customers, the full names of 2 million customers, and other data from a smaller group of users. Motherboard obtained a copy of the stolen phone numbers from a source who presented themselves as a proxy for the hackers. The file includes around 4,400 phone numbers.

When asked if the numbers belonged to Robinhood customers, the company told Motherboard in a statement that "We've determined that several thousand entries in the list contain phone numbers, and the list also contains other text entries that we're continuing to analyze." "We continue to believe that the list did not contain Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers and that there has been no financial loss to any customers as a result of the incident. We'll continue making appropriate disclosures to affected people," the statement added. Robinhood said it plans to update its blog post about the breach with the new information about the phone numbers.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new national recycling strategy today, the agency's first ever such commitment, according to the Washington Post. The Verge reports: It's a roadmap for the US to achieve a goal of recycling at least half of its municipal waste by the end of the decade. That's a steep rise considering the US' recycling rate has actually declined since 2015, and was only at about 32 percent of all municipal waste in 2018 (the most recent year for which there's EPA data). The recycling plans the EPA announced today are just the first piece in "a series" of forthcoming documents the agency plans to release to work towards a "circular economy," or an economy where resources are recovered and reused to make new products rather than allowed to wind up in landfills. It's a sort of tacit acknowledgement that recycling alone doesn't make a huge dent in the world's trash problems.

There are several key tactics the EPA plans to employ to meet its new recycling goal. For starters, the US will have to do a better job of collecting recyclable materials. The uptick in online shopping has changed where packaging waste winds up. There's less cardboard for instance, coming from shopping malls and grocery stores because of the popularity of home deliveries. That has posed problems for recycling companies because cardboard coming from peoples' homes tends to be dirtier than retailers' trash, experts tell The Verge. Often times, cardboard or plastic that's too contaminated with food or other items can't be recycled. So the EPA intends to do more public outreach and education to ensure more of the stuff people throw out actually gets recycled.

The EPA also wants to develop new markets for recycled materials so that it's worth it for companies to recycle. That means there could be new policies or financial incentives on the way to boost demand for recycled materials. The strategy document mentions, for example, a "Demand Challenge partnership program" that would recognize companies for using more recycled materials in their products. Notably, the EPA says it might finally "explore" ratification of the Basel Convention, a 1989 international treaty aimed at reducing the flow of e-waste and other hazardous trash from wealthy to lower income nations. The new strategy also marks the first time, the EPA says, that the agency's recycling plans will connect the dots between waste, environmental injustice, and the climate crisis.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg report: In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. People [...] with no tax or payroll records, were identified as in need, enrolled in the program, and paid without any in-person contact. According to Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, "the U.S. program looks like a dinosaur" in comparison.

[The program called Novissi], which means "solidarity" in the local Ewe language, is the brainchild of Cina Lawson, who heads the Ministry of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation. [...] Togo had run some cash transfer programs in the past, but they were small-scale and typically involved registering households one at a time and distributing physical money by hand. According to [Shegun Bakari, a close adviser to the president], other cabinet members objected to the idea of using mobile technology, arguing that many in rural areas didn't have access to phones or identification, and even those who did might lack the wherewithal to navigate a digital system. Yet in fact, Togolese -- like people across Africa -- had for years been using "mobile money," stored on and transferred from their mobile phones. The president quickly embraced the proposal. [....] Covid pushed countries to move quickly beyond age-old debates over who is deserving of government aid and whether transfers should be unconditional. The sheer breadth of suffering undercut the paternalistic attitude that the poor brought their suffering upon themselves.

Even with the president's support, Lawson's team faced big challenges. For starters they didn't know which Togolese were most in need: Tax rolls were no help in a country where four out of five working-age people toil in the informal economy. The last national census, conducted almost a decade earlier, hadn't gathered information about households' wealth or income. To ensure payments were made only to verified individuals, the team sought to build the platform off an existing database. Few Togolese possessed a driver's license or national ID card, but 3.6 million adults are registered to vote, according to the country's electoral commission, which requires potential voters to indicate their occupation and address. This electoral database was thought to represent somewhere between 83% and 98% of the adult population. Lawson and other members of the cabinet decided to focus the first round of support on anyone with an address in greater Lome who had listed an informal occupation, including shopkeepers, seamstresses, maids, hairdressers, and drivers. With the funding allocated by the government, they could provide each beneficiary one-third of the minimum wage, about $20 per month. Lawson insisted that the platform be able to offer an instantaneous payoff; otherwise, she warned, Togolese would doubt the promise of "free money" and fail to enroll. "You register, the platform determines you're eligible -- because once you enter your voter ID, the platform knows your profession and your geographic position -- and bam! You receive an SMS with the money," she says. The program wasn't without hiccups, however. When Novissi first began on April 8th, there were millions of registration attempts and tens of thousands of people calling for troubleshooting help, causing the platform to briefly buckle. But, as the report notes, it "largely worked," with more than 567,000 people receiving payments in the first round of disbursements.

"In part because Novissi proved so successful, the ministry teamed up with GiveDirectly and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to fund a round of payments for the 200 poorest cantons," adds Bloomberg. "To find them, the researchers trained an algorithm to identify impoverished communities based on their urban layout and housing materials, using satellite images. The researchers couldn't pick individual beneficiaries by occupation because many rural residents didn't have differentiated professions; instead, they created a second algorithm that used data from mobile phones -- including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use -- to identify the poorest users. Over the next few months, this round pushed funds out to 138,000 more beneficiaries."

Peloton has filed fresh lawsuits against two of its rivals, iFit and Echelon. From a report: It alleges that the companies are violating up to four patents it holds related to on-demand classes, one of which it only obtained last week, as Bloomberg Law notes. Peloton is seeking a court order to block sales of the devices until the patents expire, in addition to compensation. In both suits, Peloton accuses competitors of attempting to "free ride" off its technology. The iFit complaint concerns NordicTrack, ProForm and FreeMotion products that use the company's leaderboard and/or its ActivePulse or SmartAdjust features. "Prior to the actions giving rise to this suit, iFit Functionality never delivered live classes -- i.e., classes taught by instructors and streamed to users' devices in substantially real time -- or offered its members the ability to participate in competitive classes via a leaderboard. Instead, iFit Functionality only allowed subscribers to follow along with pre-recorded exercise classes on their machines, without any sort of community engagement," Peloton wrote in the filing. It accuses iFit of "profiting immensely from this infringement." In October, iFit paused its plan to go public due to adverse market conditions.

Whilst the European Parliament has been fighting bravely for the rights of everyone in the EU to exist freely and with dignity in publicly accessible spaces, the government of Portugal is attempting to push their country in the opposite direction: one of digital authoritarianism. From a report: The Portuguese lead organisation in the Reclaim Your Face coalition D3 (Defesa Dos Direitos Digitais) are raising awareness of how the Portuguese government's new proposed video surveillance and facial recognition law amounts to illiberal biometric mass surveillance. Why? Ministers are trying to secretly rush the law through the Parliament, endangering the very foundations of democracy on which the Republic of Portugal rests.

Eerily reminiscent of the failed attempts by the Serbian government just two months ago to rush in a biometric mass surveillance law, Portugal now asked its Parliament to approve a law in a shocking absence of democratic scrutiny. Just two weeks before the national Assembly will be dissolved, the government wants Parliamentarians to quickly approve a law, without public consultation or evidence. The law would enable and encourage widespread biometric mass surveillance -- even though we have repeatedly shown just how harmful these practices are. Reclaim Your Face lead organisation EDRi sent a letter to representatives of Portugal's main political parties, supporting D3's fight against biometric mass surveillance practices that treat each and every person as a potential criminal. Together, we urged politicians to reject this dystopian law.

Ohio's largest public pension system filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social media giant misled investors and breached the public's trust. From a report: Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which manages $125 billion on behalf of 1.1 million Ohioans, says it purchased Facebook stock "at artificially inflated prices" in 2021 and suffered damages because of Facebook's violations of federal securities laws. "Defendants were aware that Facebook's platforms facilitate dissension, illegal activity, and violent extremism, and cause significant harm to users, especially children, but Facebook refused to correct these issues," the federal lawsuit alleges. "All told, these disclosures erased more than $100 billion in shareholder value and subjected Facebook to immense reputational harm." The lawsuit comes after former Facebook project manager Frances Haugen testified before Congress that the company "put their astronomical profits before people."

Untraceable "ghost guns" assembled from parts bought online "can be ordered by gang members, felons and even children," writes the New York Times.

They call the guns "increasingly the lethal weapon of easy access around the U.S., but especially California," based on interviews with law enforcement officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco: Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. The vast majority of suspects caught with them were legally prohibited from having guns. "I've been on the force for 30 years next month, and I've never seen anything like this," said Lt. Paul Phillips of the San Diego Police Department, who this year organized the force's first unit dedicated to homemade firearms. By the beginning of October, he said, the department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about double the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year.

Law enforcement officials are not exactly sure why their use is taking off. But they believe it is basically a matter of a new, disruptive technology gradually gaining traction in a market, then rocketing up when buyers catch on. This isn't just happening on the West Coast. Since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide... There is a huge surfeit of supplies in circulation, enough to supply dealers who sell pre-assembled guns, via social media platforms or the dark web, for years. At the same time, the increasing availability of 3-D printers, which can create the plastic and metal components of guns, has opened a new backdoor source of illegal weapons for gangs and drug dealers who would otherwise have to steal them.

"This isn't going away," said Los Angeles city attorney, Mike Feuer...

Brian Muhammad, who works with at-risk young people in Stockton, said he recently asked a group of teenagers where they got their guns. "Did you drive to Vegas?" he asked, referring to Nevada's looser gun laws. They looked at him as if he were crazy.

"Who would do that?" one of them replied. "You order them in pieces using your phone."

Euractive reports: The French government's roadmap for developing open source to make it a vector of digital sovereignty and a guarantee of "democratic confidence" was presented by Public Transformation and Civil Service Minister Amélie de Montchalin on Wednesday (10 November).

EURACTIV France reports Montchalin spoke at the closing of the first edition of the "Open Source Experience", which took place from 9-10 November and brought together all players in the free software community in Paris. "We must now build the public action of the new century," she said, indicating that France will look to inspire the "many States [that] seek to embark" on greater openness of public data and the use of open source... With the vast majority of relations between citizens and state services now being digital, Montchalin believes a "culture of transparency" is necessary for "democratic trust". It is also a matter of digital sovereignty, she added.

According to a European Commission study published in September, investment in open source software in 2018 generated a sum of €65-95 billion in revenue. According to the same report, France was crowned European champion of open source policies.

To help French administrations make greater use of such solutions, Montchalin announced the creation of a team within the Interministerial Digital Directorate responsible for the promotion and inter-ministerial coordination of this mission. She also revealed the launch of the code.gouv.fr platform, which will inventory all source code published by public organisations... [French prime minister] Jean Castex urged all government departments on 27 April to do more to facilitate access to their data, algorithms and codes "in open formats that can be used by third parties". The PM also urged them to turn to free and open software...

[Montchalin] wants the state to retain "control over the solutions" it uses. She also stressed the importance of interoperability — the ability to work with other existing or future products or systems — and reversibility — the ability to resume using data or software in the event of migration to another solution. "By using open source software, you give yourself much more autonomy than by using proprietary software and a fortiori proprietary cloud services that are hosted outside Europe," Stéfane Fermigier, co-president of the Union of Free Software and Open Digital Businesses, told EURACTIV.
The article also summarizes a concern from French digital law firm LegalUP Consulting that open source code "makes it easier to discover security flaws, which can be exploited."

But a representative from LegalUP also calls open source software "an extremely interesting alternative for Europe, a third way between digital giants and local players; an opportunity to ensure independence through neutrality and decentralisation rather than conflict."

In the war against misinformation and social media-inspired violence, ultimately the social media platforms are just one front. But what about the people consuming misinformation? In June America's National Security Council unveiled a "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism," which argued that "pursuing the goal of preventing, disrupting, and deterring acts of domestic terrorism... can mean, broader still, cultivating the type of digital literacy that can empower the American public to resist those who would use online communications platforms and other venues to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize to violence."

This week America's Department of Homeland Security warned the country still faces "a diverse and challenging threat environment" including the possibility of violence "by individuals and small groups...including domestic violent extremists and those inspired or motivated by foreign terrorists and other malign foreign influences.....These actors continue to exploit online forums to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and promote violent activity." (Though they add that the agency "is not aware of an imminent and credible threat to a specific location...")

But besides offering links to mental health resources and info on law enforcement tip lines, the agency also suggests Americans "Maintain digital media literacy to recognize and build resilience to false and harmful narratives" — linking to an online publication about "Media Literacy and Critical Thinking Online."

Here's our look at the documents they're making available — and the language that they're using to convey the threat.

"Singapore's government has been covering the medical bills of COVID-19 patients throughout the pandemic," reports NPR. "But it says unvaccinated people will soon be on their own." Those who are "unvaccinated by choice" will have to start paying for their own COVID-19 treatment starting December 8, the Ministry of Health announced on Monday, citing the strain they are putting on the nation's health care system.

"Currently, unvaccinated persons make up a sizeable majority of those who require intensive inpatient care, and disproportionately contribute to the strain on our healthcare resources," it said in a statement...

"Our hospitals really much prefer not to have to bill these patients at all, but we have to send this important signal, to urge everyone to get vaccinated if you are eligible," Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Monday.

Singapore has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. As of Sunday, 85% of its population was fully vaccinated, and 18% had received booster shots, according to health ministry data.
Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for sharing the story...

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr brings news of "an exploit in the FBI's Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal web site that would let anyone send an email to any arbitrary recipient..."

Security researcher Brian Krebs reports: Late in the evening of November 12 ET, tens of thousands of emails began flooding out from the FBI address eims@ic.fbi.gov, warning about fake cyberattacks.

Around that time, KrebsOnSecurity received an email from the same email address. "Hi its pompompurin," read the message. "Check headers of this email it's actually coming from FBI server. I am contacting you today because we located a botnet being hosted on your forehead, please take immediate action thanks." A review of the email's message headers indicated it had indeed been sent by the FBI, and from the agency's own Internet address. The domain in the "from:" portion of the email I received — eims@ic.fbi.gov — corresponds to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS).

According to the Department of Justice... "CJIS systems are available to the criminal justice community, including law enforcement, jails, prosecutors, courts, as well as probation and pretrial services..."

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Pompompurin said the hack was done to point out a glaring vulnerability in the FBI's system. "I could've 1000% used this to send more legit looking emails, trick companies into handing over data etc.," Pompompurin said.
Instead Pompompurin apparently sent emails with the subject line, "Urgent: Threat actor in systems," with the body (apparently from eims@ic.fbi.gov) warning that "Our intelligence monitoring indicates exfiltration of several of your virtualized clusters in a sophisticated chain attack...." The email then blames the real-world founder of two dark web intelligence companies (apparently the subject of a long standing feud with Pompompurin's community), and ultimately closes with the words "Stay safe, U.S. Department of Homeland Security — Cyber Threat Detection and Analysis — Network Analysis Group."

The FBI issued a statement in response to the incident — saying "The impacted hardware was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue."

The technology site Recode interviewed 12 "leading thinkers and leaders on Facebook today," including the Senator pushing tech-industry updates for U.S. antitrust law, an early researcher on viral misinformation, and a now-critical former Facebook executive. "[M]ost believe that Facebook can be fixed, or at least that some of its issues are possible to improve..." Their ideas are wide-ranging, with some more ambitious and unexpected than others. But common themes emerge in many of their answers that reveal a growing consensus about what Facebook needs to change and a few different paths that regulators and the company itself could take to make it happen:

- Antitrust enforcement. Facebook isn't just Facebook but, under the Meta umbrella, also Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus. And several experts Recode interviewed believe that forcing Facebook to spin off these businesses would defang it of its concentrated power, allow smaller competitors to arise, and challenge the company to do better by offering customers alternatives for information and communication.

- Create a federal agency to oversee social media, like the Food and Drug Administration. The social media industry has no dedicated oversight agency in the U.S. the way that other industries do, despite its growing power and influence in society. That's why some people we interviewed advocated for making a new agency — or at least increasing funding for the existing FTC — so that it could regulate safety standards on the internet the same way the FDA does for food and pharmaceutical drugs.

- Change Facebook's leadership. Facebook's problems are almost synonymous with the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg, who has unilaterally controlled the company he started in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Many interviewees believe that for any meaningful change to happen, Facebook needs an executive shake-up, starting from the very top... some experts Recode interviewed suggested that Facebook executives should be criminally prosecuted for either misleading business partners or downplaying human harms their company causes.
The experts also want reforms on the safety-from-prosecution shields of Section 230 "in a way that won't run into First Amendment challenges," and also increased transparency from social media companies about problematic content.

"Some of the experts interviewed by Recode argued that Facebook and other social media companies should be legally required to share certain internal data with vetted researchers about what information is circulating on their platforms."

"Intel's plan to ease the ongoing chip shortage by increasing production in China has reportedly been opposed by the Biden administration," writes PC Magazine, "over concerns about the potential security impact." Bloomberg reports that Intel wanted to manufacture silicon wafers in a factory located in Chengdu, China by the end of 2022. When the company recently shared details of this plan with the U.S. government, however, "Biden administration officials strongly discouraged the move." The report doesn't specify the exact nature of the White House's security concerns. Relations between the U.S. and China have reached the point where it could be anything from a fear of Intel's designs being stolen to the possibility of the processors being compromised in some way.
Bloomberg reports that Intel has also been seeking federal assistance "to ramp up research and production in the U.S.," with Intel adding in a statement that "Intel and the Biden administration share a goal to address the ongoing industrywide shortage of microchips, and we have explored a number of approaches with the U.S. government. Our focus is on the significant ongoing expansion of our existing semiconductor manufacturing operations and our plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in new wafer fabrication plants in the U.S. and Europe."

But PC Magazine points out that "Much of that money is coming from government sources, however, which is part of the reason why the White House was briefed on Intel's plan to increase production in China to begin with."

Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration "is scrambling to address constraints, but it's also trying to bring production of vital components back to the U.S. — a goal Intel's China plan didn't serve..." The episode comes as the White House is debating whether to restrict certain strategic investments into China. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said the administration is considering an outbound investment screening mechanism and is working with allies on what it could look like... A representative for the White House declined to comment on specific transactions or investments, but said the administration is "very focused on preventing China from using U.S. technologies, know-how and investment to develop state-of-the-art capabilities," which could contribute to human rights abuses or activities that threaten U.S. national security...

Following deliberations with the Biden team, Intel has no plans to add the production in China at the moment, a person familiar with the decision said...

The chip industry has a complicated relationship with China, one that became much more difficult during the Trump administration's trade war. China is the biggest consumer of semiconductors for local use, and it serves as the assembly center for much of the world's electronics. To help with logistics and to keep Beijing happy, chipmakers — including Intel — have located plants there. But they face longstanding U.S. government restrictions that prevent them from exporting cutting-edge semiconductors to the country.
At the same time, the article points out, automakers "are losing more than $200 billion in revenue because of the lack of chips," while Apple "expects to miss out on more than $6 billion of sales this quarter because it can't get enough components."

The BBC is hailing "the first ever climate deal to explicitly plan to reduce coal, the worst fossil fuel for greenhouse gases." But they also report that developing nations "were unhappy about the lack of progress on what's known as 'loss and damage', the idea that richer countries should compensate poorer ones for climate change effects they can't adapt to."

And the Guardian reports that "In relative terms, the agreements and deals made by the 196 nations in Glasgow nudged the world a little closer towards the path to keeping global temperature rises below 1.5C and avoiding the worst of the climate crisis's impacts.

"But in absolute terms, there is still a mountain to climb." Before Cop26, firm pledges to cut emissions by 2030 pointed to 2.7C of global heating — a catastrophe. After, the figure is 2.4C — still a catastrophe. Longer term promises to go to net zero emissions, notably by India, might possibly restrict heating to 1.8C by the end of the century, but lack the concrete plans to be credible. And 1.8C still means immense suffering to people and the planet.

The key agreements sealed in Glasgow essentially kick the can down the road. Big emitting nations with feeble plans to cut emissions must return in a year to improve them — that is how 1.5C can be said to still be alive. The $100bn a year to pay for clean energy in developing countries promised a decade ago for 2020 will not be delivered until 2023...

There are positives to build on. The 196 nations are now firmly fixed on the 1.5C target demanded by the science. For the first time, nations are called on to "phase down" coal and fossil fuel subsidies in a Cop text... Deals on ending the razing of forests by 2030, cutting emissions of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — and making green technology like electric cars the cheapest option globally are all encouraging, even if the pact to end sales of fossil fuel powered cars stalled, with the major markets and manufacturers failing to sign up. An end to international finance for coal power will also dent emissions and some of the most outrageous loopholes in proposed rules for a global carbon market rules were closed — but not all, and cheats may yet prosper.

Because of a "surprising and sudden request" from America's Federal Aviation Administration that's "based on unverified potential radio interference, a highly anticipated increase in 5G speeds and availability just got put on hold," writes the president/chief analyst of market research/consulting firm TECHnalysis.

But in an opinion piece for USA Today, he asks if the concern is actually warranted? [A]s soon as you start to dig into the details, the concerns quickly seem less practical and more political. Most notably, the plan to launch 5G services on C-Band frequencies has been in the works for several years and really took on momentum after the three big U.S. carriers spent over $80 billion earlier this year to get access to these frequencies. In addition, a report that the FAA cited as part of their complaint has been out for well over a year, so why the last-minute concerns?

U.S. government agencies are, unfortunately, known to hold grudges against one another, sometimes without real clarity as to what's actually involved, as appears to be the case here... Some 40 countries around the world are already using most of the C-Band frequencies for 5G (part of the reason the U.S. has fallen behind on the 5G front), and none have reported any interference with radio altimeters on planes in their countries, the wireless trade association CTIA argues on its website 5GandAviation.com. In addition, new filtering technologies being built into a somewhat obscure part of smartphones called the RF (radio frequency) front end, such as Qualcomm's recently introduced ultraBAW filters, can reduce interference issues on next generation smartphones.

All told, there are numerous reasons why the FAA's concerns around 5G deployment look to be more of a red herring than a legitimate technical concern. While it is true that some older radio altimeters with poor filtering might have to be updated and/or replaced to completely prevent interference, it's not clear that the theoretical interference would even cause an issue.
The article complains that the delayed expansion of bandwidth "could also delay important (and significant) economic impacts," since every previous change in cellular service levels "has triggered billions of dollars of new business and thousands of new jobs by creating new opportunities that faster wireless networks bring with them and 5G is expected do the same...

"While airplane safety shouldn't be compromised in any way, an overabundance of unnecessary caution on this issue could have a much bigger negative impact on the U.S.'s technology advancements and economy than many realize."

"Austria is expected to impose lockdown restrictions on millions of unvaccinated people in the coming days," reports CNBC: Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg told a press conference Friday that his government wanted to give the "green light" to such measures by Sunday, Austria Press Agency reported. Lawmakers will meet over the weekend to discuss the move, according to the news agency.

The chancellor rejected the notion of a nationwide lockdown being applied to all of Austria's citizens, telling reporters on Friday that the two-thirds of the population who had accepted the immunization would not be forced to show "solidarity" with the unvaccinated. However, he did caution that there may be some tightening of other restrictions.

Schallenberg said last month that if Covid-19 cases continued to rise, unvaccinated people would face new lockdown restrictions in line with the government's incremental plan. That strategy would place unvaccinated people under lockdown once coronavirus patients occupy 30% of ICU beds in hospitals.

Covid patients currently take up 20% of ICU beds in Austria, according to Reuters, and that level is rising fast.
On Thursday Schallenberg had said that he didn't see "why two-thirds should lose their freedom because one-third is dithering."

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that starting Monday the country of Latvia will ban unvaccinated lawmakers from attending in-person and remote parliament meetings. "Their wages also will be suspended if they are not able to work at the parliament."

"Texans will be paying for the effects of last February's cold snap for decades to come," reports Ars Technica, "as the state's oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm.

"The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years." During the winter storm, natural gas prices spiked as cold temperatures drove demand up while also depressing supply... The governor's office knew of the looming shortages days before they happened, yet the preparations they made did little to alter the course of the disaster... Gas sellers made record profits in just a few days, together bringing in as much as $11 billion, about 70-100 times more than normal, based on spot prices at the time. Meanwhile, many Texans suffered through blackouts and bitter cold, and 210 people died, according to the latest estimate from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

In the wake of the storm, many officials have called on utilities and oil and gas companies to winterize their operations...

Texans aren't the only ones whose bills are higher as a result of producers' and utilities' unwillingness to winterize their equipment. Utilities around the country were forced to buy natural gas at significantly higher prices when Texas' markets went haywire as a result of low supply and high demand. Ratepayers as far away as Minnesota will be paying surcharges for years to come after their utilities had to pay $800 million more than expected for natural gas.
The article also includes a quote from Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, from an April article in The Washington Post.

"It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas' lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A patent filed by Apple and published Thursday by the US Patent and Trademark Office details the tech giant's interest in creating "privacy eyewear" that blurs content on a device's screen unless someone is wearing special glasses to look at it. As spotted by Patently Apple, the patent, which focuses on creating different FaceID profiles for various visual impairments, explores a new type of privacy screen. The patent doesn't specify any Apple product by name. Instead, it refers to electronic devices in general, including smartphones, watches, laptops, TVs, and car displays. Drawings in the patent show the feature working on a smartphone-like device. The technology would use a face scan to determine if the user is wearing the required glasses. It could recognize the headgear by a specific graphic, such as a QR or bar code.

If you're worried about someone looking at your phone over your shoulder, you could activate the feature "to make the graphical output illegible." Your privacy eyewear, meanwhile, would "counteract the intentional blur." "The blurred graphical output may compensate for the distortion created by the privacy eyewear vision of the user by, for example, blurring a portion and/or the entirety of a standard graphical output; generating an overlay over the standard graphical output; and/or making elements of the standard graphical output larger, brighter, and/or more distinct," Apple's patent reads. "In some embodiments, the blurred graphical output may only replace certain graphical elements presented in the standard graphical output. The blurred graphical output may be a default graphical output designed to compensate for the privacy eyewear." Further reading: Apple Aiming To Announce Mixed-Reality Headset In 'Next Several Months'