UPDATED: Earlier this week ZDNet reported that Facebook's parent company Meta "has granted the Kazakhstan government direct access to its content reporting system," as part of a joint agreement to work on removing content that is deemed harmful on social network platforms like Facebook and Instagram," with the agreement focusing on protecting children.

But the Washington Post clarified tonight that in fact Kazakhstan's statement "was apparently released independent of Facebook." Meta spokesman Ben McConaghy said in an email that the company has "a dedicated online channel for governments around the world to report content to us that they believe violates local law."

"We follow a consistent global process to assess individual requests — independent from any government — in line with Facebook's policies, local laws and international human rights standards," he added. "This process is the same in Kazakhstan as it is for other countries around the world."
Here's ZDNet's original report: In a joint statement, the Ministry of Information and Social Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the social media giant said the agreement, which is the first of its kind in Central Asia, would help increase the efficiency and effectiveness to counter the spread of illegal content. Giving the Kazakhstan government access to its content reporting system will allow the government to report content that may violate Facebook's global content policy and local content laws in Kazakhstan, Facebook said. Under the agreement, both parties will also set up regular communication, including having an authorised representative from Facebook's regional office work with the Ministry on various policy issues.

"Facebook is delighted to work with the government of Kazakhstan together, particularly in the aspect of online safety for children," Facebook regional public policy director George Chen said in a statement.

"At the age of 98, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence," reports Time magazine: He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. The two have teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a bracing new book, The Age of AI, about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of artificial intelligence, which they say "augurs a revolution in human affairs." The book argues that artificial intelligence processes have become so powerful, so seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs, and so unpredictable, that without some forethought and management, the kind of "epoch-making transformations" they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction...

Schmidt: The visit to Google got him thinking. And when we started talking about this, Dr. Kissinger said that he is very worried that the impact that this collection of technologies will have on humans and their existence, and that the technologists are operating without the benefit of understanding their impact or history. And that, I think, is absolutely correct...

Kissinger: [T]he technologists are showing us how to relate reason to artificial intelligence. It's a different kind of knowledge in some respects, because with reason — the world in which I grew up — each evidence supports the other. With artificial intelligence, the astounding thing is, you come up with a conclusion which is correct. But you don't know why. That's a totally new challenge. And so in some ways, what they have invented is dangerous. But it advances our culture. Would we be better off if it had never been invented? I don't know that. But now that it exists, we have to understand it. And it cannot be eliminated. Too much of our life is already consumed by it....

Up to now humanity assumed that its technological progress was beneficial or manageable. We are saying that it can be hugely beneficial. It may be manageable, but there are aspects to the managing part of it that we haven't studied at all or sufficiently. I remain worried. I'm opposed to saying we therefore have to eliminate it. It's there now. One of the major points is that we think there should be created some philosophy to guide to the research.

Time: Who would you suggest would make that philosophy? What's the next step?

Kissinger: We need a number of little groups that ask questions. When I was a graduate student, nuclear weapons were new. And at that time, a number of concerned professors at Harvard, MIT and Caltech met most Saturday afternoons to ask, What is the answer? How do we deal with it? And they came up with the arms-control idea.

Schmidt: We need a similar process. It won't be one place, it will be a set of such initiatives. One of my hopes is to help organize those post-book, if we get a good reception to the book.

I think that the first thing is that this stuff is too powerful to be done by tech alone. It's also unlikely that it will just get regulated correctly. So you have to build a philosophy. I can't say it as well as Dr. Kissinger, but you need a philosophical framework, a set of understandings of where the limits of this technology should go. In my experience in science, the only way that happens is when you get the scientists and the policy people together in some form. This is true in biology, is true in recombinant DNA and so forth.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes the aviation news site AVweb's report on a "Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin" and "Airworthiness Directive" being issued by America's aircraft-regulating Federal Aviation Administration "concerning the rollout of 5G cellular phone service in 46 major metropolitan areas of the U.S." (reportedly happening on December 5th). The actions are expected to limit the use of automated systems on aircraft that rely on radar altimeters (also called radio altimeters) and it's possible that flight delays and cancellations will result. Reuters also quoted a letter from FAA Deputy Administrator Bradley Mims that says the agency shares "the deep concern about the potential impact to aviation safety resulting from interference to radar altimeter performance from 5G network operations in the C band."

In an auction of radio spectrum last year, the major telecoms paid a total of $78 billion in an FCC auction to get access to a thin slice of the finite range of available radio frequencies to carry 5G signals. Those signals will be in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz part of the so-called C-Band, which is apparently the sweet spot for carrying the data-heavy 5G signals. Radar altimeters operate in the 4.2-4.4 GHz frequency range (their sweet spot) and the fear is that the nearby powerful cell signals will cause interference for the avionics. The FCC approved the use of the spectrum for 5G saying "well-designed [radio altimeter] equipment should not ordinarily receive any significant interference (let alone harmful interference)."

But aviation groups say the risk for thousands of aircraft is real and the FAA seems to agree.

Slashdot reader FlatEric521 tipped us off to an interesting story (from the News Service of Florida): When police responded in 2018 to a call about a shattered window at a home in Orange County, they found a black Samsung smartphone near the broken window. A woman in the home identified the phone as belonging to an ex-boyfriend, Johnathan David Garcia, who was later charged with crimes including aggravated stalking.

But more than three years after the shattered window, the Florida Supreme Court is poised to hear arguments in the case and consider a decidedly 21st Century question: Should authorities be able to force Garcia to give them his passcode to the phone?

Attorney General Ashley Moody's office appealed to the Supreme Court last year after the 5th District Court of Appeal ruled that requiring Garcia to turn over the passcode would violate his constitutional right against being forced to provide self-incriminating information... The case has drawn briefs from civil-liberties and defense-attorney groups, who contend that Garcia's rights under the U.S. Constitution's 5th Amendment would be threatened if he is required to provide the passcode.

But Moody's office in a March brief warned of trouble for law enforcement if the Supreme Court sides with Garcia in an era when seemingly everybody has a cell phone. Police obtained a warrant to search Garcia's phone but could not do so without a passcode. "Modern encryption has shifted the balance between criminals and law enforcement in favor of crime by allowing criminals to hide evidence in areas the state physically cannot access," the brief said.

Why didn't the European Union drop its annual observation of Daylight Saving Time? ABC News reports: [I]n 2018, the European Parliament voted to end the practice after a poll of 4.8 million Europeans showed overwhelming support for scrapping it. Critics of the ritual have pointed to scientific studies showing the negative physical and psychological effects of switching back and forth to mark daylight saving time. "The time change will be abolished," the European Commission's then-president, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German public broadcaster ZDF in 2018. "People do not want to keep changing their watches."

Although the decision was supposed to take effect in 2021, the coronavirus pandemic has delayed its implementation, pushing it to the bottom of the political agenda for many countries. The fate of daylight saving time in Europe remains unclear.

Member states of the European Union are also struggling to agree on which time to adopt.

"We agree on the time change, but we are stuck on whether to stay on summer or winter time," Karima Delli, a French member of the European Parliament, told French broadcaster BFM TV in 2019. "We have a real problem." While Germany is calling for summer time, Greece and Portugal want to keep switching between the two. Forcing all member states to implement the same time would be complicated, as some would get less daylight than others. So the European Commission, tasked with executing the decision from Parliament, has asked countries to align with their neighbors. But even that would be tricky.

For instance, since the U.K.'s withdrawal from the European Union in 2020, the island nation is no longer concerned with the European Parliament's decision on daylight saving time. Yet neighboring Ireland, a European Union member state, will be impacted by a change to the current system, potentially complicating border crossings...

Only about 70 countries in the world still observe daylight saving time, but many are reconsidering it.

Tonight 70 countries around the world set their clocks back an hour — including most of the United States, Canada, the EU and the UK.

Yet "The practice has drawn complaints about its disruptive effects on sleep and schedules," reports UPI, adding that "The American Academy of Medicine has called for an end to Daylight Saving Time, citing growing research that shows its deleterious effects on health and safety." [U.S.] Lawmakers are also increasingly wondering whether Daylight Saving Time is a good idea. At least 350 bills and resolutions have been introduced in every state taking aim at Daylight Saving Time since 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over the last four years, 19 states have passed similar legislation providing year-round daylight saving time if Congress allowed such changes.

Members of Congress have introduced legislation making changes to Daylight Saving Time, to no avail.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (Democrat — Rhode Island), said in a video posted to Twitter on Friday that the upcoming switchover was one of his least favorite times of the year since it means darker afternoons. He touted his Sunshine Protection Act that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

"We can do a lot better for daylight for everyone who is up in the afternoon," he said.
Also supporting that change is Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. "We're about to once again do this annual craziness of changing the clock, falling back, springing forward," Newsweek quotes him as saying. "Let's go to permanent daylight saving time. The overwhelming majority of members of Congress approve and support it. Let's get it done. Let's get it passed so that we never have to do this stupid change again."

But currently in America it's the Department of Transportation which is in charge of the practice, reports USA Today, and the Department believes that the practice saves energy, prevents traffic accidents and curbs crime.

So, as the Washington Post reports, "It's that time of the year again. We change the clocks back and we whine about it."

After the U.S. Copyright Office's once-every-three-years review of allowed exemptions, "We have some good news to share...." reads a new announcement this week from the Free Software Foundation: The FSF was one of several activist organizations pushing for exemptions to the anticircumvention rules under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that make breaking Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) illegal, even for ethical and legitimate purposes. We helped bring public awareness to a process that is too often only a conversation between lawyers and bureaucrats.

As of late last week, there are now multiple new exemptions that will help ease some of the acute abuse DRM inflicts on users.

However, the main lesson to be learned here is that we should and must keep pushing. Individual, specific exemptions are not enough. The entire anticircumvention law needs to be repealed. We want to thank the 230 individuals who co-signed their names to our comments supporting exemptions across the board. We should take this as a sign that even though it can be difficult, anti-DRM activism yields practical results.

Section 1201 is one of the most nefarious sections of the DMCA. The provisions contained in 1201 impose legal penalties against anyone trying to circumvent the DRM on their software and devices or, in other words, anyone who tries to control that software or device themselves instead of leaving it up to its corporate overlords.... It takes the hard work of hundreds to secure the anticircumvention use exemptions we already have, and even more work to eke out a few more. Yet thanks to the support of citizens, activists, and researchers around the world, the U.S. Copyright Office has approved a few more, while at the same time demonstrating the DMCA's serious flaws.

In coverage of the new round of anticircumvention exemptions we've seen so far, something that stands out is the U.S. Copyright Office's approval for blind users to break the digital restrictions preventing any ebooks from being processed through a screen reader. At least at first glance, it looks like a big win for all of us concerned with user freedom, but a closer look shows something more sinister, as the U.S. Copyright Office refused to make this exemption permanent. The message this sends to all user freedom activists, but especially the visually impaired among us, is: "we're giving you this now because it would seem inhumane otherwise, but we hope that you'll forget to fight for it later so we can allow corporations to keep on restricting you...."

[P]articipating organizations have been able to make progress on other important exemptions, whether that's the right to install free software on wireless routers or the right to repair dedicated devices like game consoles. It's the coalescing of groups like these that is "chipping away" at Section 1201. At the same time, it's telling that we're forced to fight tooth and nail for the meager exemptions we're granted, even with such a broad base of support. The corporations who have a vested interest in the DMCA and Congress itself are content with the status quo, but we shouldn't be content with patches on a broken system. Incremental progress against Section 1201 is of course a good thing, but we shouldn't lose sight of our goal as user freedom activists: a complete repeal of Section 1201, and all other laws that codify or mandate DRM.

The Defective by Design campaign takes a radical stance when it comes to DRM and the laws that support it. We believe that they should not exist at all, under any circumstance, and we need your help to support this mission....

Peloton, the makers of an internet-connected exercise bike, saw their stock price drop 35% overnight on Thursday, reports CNBC. "At least four Wall Street investment firms downgraded the stock following Peloton's dismal fiscal first-quarter financial report... Peloton's stock has fallen 63% year to date."

The company had cut its annual revenue forecast — by $1 billion — and lowered its projections for both profit margins and paying subscribers. Bloomberg reports: At best, Peloton currently expects to have 3.45 million connected fitness subscriptions by the end of the fiscal year. It had previously called for 3.63 million. And gross profit margin will be 32%, compared with an earlier forecast of 34%. All that will add up to a loss of as much as $475 million, excluding some items....

On a more upbeat note, the company hinted that it plans to launch new products in the coming weeks and months. Peloton has been working on a rowing machine and a heart-rate monitor that attaches to a wearer's arm, Bloomberg News has reported.
The article suggests Peloton's business was hurt by the end of lockdowns, supply-chain constraints, and the cost of freight. But they also point out another factor. "Like several other companies, Peloton also blamed Apple Inc.'s ad-related privacy changes, which have made it more difficult to target shoppers based on their interests." Apple's new Ad Tracking Transparency feature (or "ATT") now first asks users to deny or allow apps to track their activity for the targeted advertising which had apparently been boosting Peloton's business.

And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) tipped us off to a larger trend, since Gizmodo reports that Peloton "isn't the only company that has pointed accusingly at Apple lately." When reporting its third quarter earnings at the end of October, Facebook (now called Meta) — which depends on targeted ads for almost 98% of its revenue — said that ATT had decreased the accuracy of its ad targeting. The feature also increased "the cost of driving outcomes" for advertisers, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained, and made it harder to measure those outcomes. "Overall, if it wasn't for Apple's iOS 14 changes, we would have seen positive quarter-over-quarter revenue growth," Sandberg said.

On Sunday, the Financial Times reported that ATT had cost Snap, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an estimated $9.85 billion in lost revenue in the second half of this year. That's an 87% increase year over year.

The U.S. Department of Defense's internet-defending Cyber Command teamed with "a foreign government" in two operations which shut down a major overseas ransomware group by hijacking its servers, reports the Washington Post. Several U.S. officials told the Post the operation left the ransomware gang's leaders "too frightened of identification and arrest to stay in business." "Domains hijacked from REvil," wrote 0_neday, an REvil leader, on a Russian-language forum popular with cyber criminals, on October 17.... "The server was compromised," he wrote hours later, "and they are looking for me." And then: "Good luck everyone, I'm taking off."

Soon after, REvil ceased operations, such as recruitment of affiliates, ransom negotiations and distribution of malware.

The Washington Post previously reported that REvil's servers ["reachable only through Tor"] had been hacked in the summer, permitting the FBI to have access. The compromise allowed the FBI, working with the foreign partner, to gain access to the servers and private keys, officials said. The bureau was then able to share that information last month with the U.S. Cyber Command, enabling the hijacking, they said... Cyber Command leader, General Paul Nakasone, said at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that while he wouldn't comment on specific operations, "we bring our best people together ... the really good thinkers" to brainstorm ways to "get after folks" conducting ransomware attacks and other malign activities. "I'm pleased with the progress we've made," he said, "and we've got a lot more to do."

The group's departure may be temporary. Ransomware gangs have been known to go underground, regroup and reappear, sometimes under a new name. But the recent development suggests that ransomware crews can be influenced — even temporarily — to cease operations if they fear they will be outed and arrested, analysts say. "The latest voluntary disappearance of REvil highlights the powerful psychological impact of having these villains believe that they are being hunted and that their identities will be revealed," said Dmitri Alperovitch, executive chairman of the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and a cyber expert. "U.S. and allied governments should proudly acknowledge these cyber operations and make it clear that no ransomware criminal will be safe from the long reach of their militaries and law enforcement agencies...."

Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Dmitry Smilyanets believes "REvil as a brand is done."
And meanwhile, an anonymous Slashdot reader shares the news that German investigators "have identified a deep-pocketed, big-spending Russian billionaire whom they suspect of being a core member of the REvil ransomware gang," according to Threatpost. "He lolls around on yachts, wears a luxury watch with a Bitcoin address engraved on its dial, and is suspected of buying it all with money he made as a core member of the REvil ransomware gang." The showy billionaire goes by "Nikolay K." on social media, and German police are hoping he'll cruise out of Russia on his next vacation — preferably, to a country with a cooperation agreement with Germany so they can arrest him. In case he decides to kick back somewhere other than sunny Crimea, they've got an arrest warrant waiting for him....

According to Reuters, which broke the news about last week's law enforcement move against the gang, REvil's also behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, as opposed to a culprit presumed to be a ransomware group named DarkSide.

Late Friday night U.S. Congressmen passed a long-awaited Bipartisan Infrastructure bill. "The infrastructure package contains $550 billion in entirely new investments, including money for electric-car charging stations and zero-emission school buses," reports the Washington Post.

"The spending is mostly paid for — without raising taxes. The bulk of the funding comes from repurposing unspent coronavirus relief money and tightening enforcement on reporting gains from cryptocurrency investments."

An additional $65 billion will fund broadband Internet, with new statements on the White House web site hailing the bill as "a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation's infrastructure and competitiveness" and "the largest investment in public transit in U.S. history."

This Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will rebuild America's roads, bridges and rails, expand access to clean drinking water, ensure every American has access to high-speed internet, tackle the climate crisis, advance environmental justice, and invest in communities that have too often been left behind. The legislation will help ease inflationary pressures and strengthen supply chains by making long overdue improvements for our nation's ports, airports, rail, and roads. It will drive the creation of good-paying union jobs and grow the economy sustainably and equitably so that everyone gets ahead for decades to come. Combined with the President's Build Back Framework, it will add on average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.
Or, as U.S. president Biden said in his own statement, the newly-passed bill "will create millions of jobs, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st Century."

To address the climate crisis, the legislation "will upgrade our power infrastructure, by building thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewables and clean energy, while lowering costs," according to the White House's statement. "And it will fund new programs to support the development, demonstration, and deployment of cutting-edge clean energy technologies to accelerate our transition to a zero-emission economy."

More specifics from the White House:

• "Millions of Americans feel the effects of climate change each year when their roads wash out, power goes down, or schools get flooded. Last year alone, the United States faced 22 extreme weather and climate-related disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each — a cumulative price tag of nearly $100 billion.... The legislation makes our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks, with an investment of over $50 billion to protect against droughts, heat, floods and wildfires, in addition to a major investment in weatherization. The legislation is the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history."

• "In thousands of rural and urban communities around the country, hundreds of thousands of former industrial and energy sites are now idle — sources of blight and pollution. Proximity to a Superfund site can lead to elevated levels of lead in children's blood. The bill will invest $21 billion clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine land and cap orphaned oil and gas wells..."

• "U.S. market share of plug-in EV sales is only one-third the size of the Chinese EV market. That needs to change. The legislation will invest $7.5 billion to build out a national network of EV chargers in the United States. This is a critical step in the President's strategy to fight the climate crisis and it will create good U.S. manufacturing jobs. The legislation will provide funding for deployment of EV chargers along highway corridors to facilitate long-distance travel and within communities to provide convenient charging where people live, work, and shop. This investment will support the President's goal of building a nationwide network of 500,000 EV chargers to accelerate the adoption of EVs, reduce emissions, improve air quality, and create good-paying jobs across the country."

• "Broadband internet is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school learning, health care, and to stay connected. Yet, by one definition, more than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds — a particular problem in rural communities throughout the country... The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will deliver $65 billion to help ensure that every American has access to reliable high-speed internet through a historic investment in broadband infrastructure deployment. The legislation will also help lower prices for internet service and help close the digital divide, so that more Americans can afford internet access...."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Electronic monitoring of home workers by companies is rising sharply, a survey suggests. The government is being urged to toughen the rules -- and ban most webcam use. "It was creepy," says Chris. "One of my managers was watching people's personal computers to monitor what we were doing at home -- all the time, not just when we were working. It was a bizarre way to carry on." When the first lockdown started, the firm that employed Chris -- a 31-year-old engineer from Sheffield -- sent most of its staff home. They were ordered to connect their private laptop and desktop computers to more powerful office machines so they could continue their high-tech operations. "We didn't mind," says Chris, "but I found loads of screens switched on one day when I came in to the office, and everybody's desktops were there, on display. "One of the managers wasn't just looking at our work. He could see exactly what we were doing all the time -- what we were watching on YouTube, that kind of thing."

Chris, who changed companies after he found out one of his managers was monitoring his home activities, thinks "excessive" surveillance is counter-productive. "My productivity didn't go down when I started working from home," he says, "and when I knew what was happening it made me more nervous. A lot of the time in my job is spent designing things on paper, away from the screen, so that doesn't register if someone is simply looking at what's going on on my desktop. It probably looked to that guy like I was downstairs watching Netflix or something, but I wasn't. It's a very blunt, depersonalizing way of trying to ensure people behave in the way a company wants."

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: The U.S. government wants to find the people responsible for the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack (and many others) and it's putting up multi-million rewards for data on the operators behind the DarkSide extortion campaign. The Department of State on Thursday offered up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of senior members of the DarkSide gang that caused major gas disruptions earlier this year. In addition, the U.S. State Department is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction in any country "of any individual conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in a DarkSide variant ransomware incident." "In offering this reward, the United States demonstrates its commitment to protecting ransomware victims around the world from exploitation by cyber criminals," it added. "The United States looks to nations who harbor ransomware criminals that are willing to bring justice for those victim businesses and organizations affected by ransomware."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by climate reporter Brian Kahn: In a major announcement at United Nations climate talks on Thursday, 20 countries said they would stop funding fossil fuel development abroad and instead plow money into clean energy. The group of countries includes finance heavy-hitters like the U.S., UK, and Canada as well as smaller players like Mali and Costa Rica. An analysis by Oil Change International indicates that the 20 countries plus four other investment institutions who signed on could shift $15 billion annually from funding fossil fuels to clean energy projects. "The signatories of today's statement are doing what's most logical in a climate emergency: stop adding fuel to the fire and shift dirty finance to climate action," Laurie van der Burg, the global public finance campaigns co-manager at Oil Change International, said in an emailed statement.

[T]he agreement doesn't pull funding from projects already in the pipeline (climate joke, please laugh). Between 2018 and 2020, Oil Change International also found, the G20 kicked an estimated $188 billion to fossil fuel projects in other countries. That's a lot of very recent extraction happening. The lack of financing abroad also doesn't mean a lack of financing at home. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are major oil and gas producers. Without a plan to wind down production at home, the pledge to end financing for fossil fuels abroad is a bit like promising you won't lend your neighbor money for cigarettes while you keep smoking a pack a day.

Some of the biggest smokers -- errr, fossil fuel funders -- on the block also didn't sign on. Those include Japan, Korea, and China, which are the biggest fossil fuel backers in the G20, according to Oil Change International. Together, they account for more than $29 billion in annual fossil fuel development abroad. That's a major lifeline for fossil fuel developers. We also still need more details on the pledge to end funding, including how exactly the 20 countries and banks define fossil fuel funding. Lastly, the world's private banks and investment firms also need to sign on.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled against Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin in the company's lawsuit versus NASA over a lucrative astronaut lunar lander contract awarded to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this year. Federal judge Richard Hertling sided with the defense in his ruling, completing a months-long battle after Blue Origin sued NASA in August. From a report: Blue Origin, NASA, and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling. NASA in April awarded SpaceX with the sole contract for the agency's Human Landing System program under a competitive process. Worth $2.9 billion, the SpaceX contract will see the company use its Starship rocket to deliver astronauts to the moon's surface for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions.

23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki wants to make drugs using insights from millions of customer DNA samples, and doesn't think that should bother anyone. From a report: A few months ago, on the morning 23andMe Holding Co. was about to go public, Chief Executive Officer Anne Wojcicki received a framed sheet of paper she hadn't seen in 15 years. As she was preparing to ring in the Nasdaq bell remotely from the courtyard of her company's Silicon Valley headquarters, Patrick Chung, one of its earliest investors, presented her with the pitch document she'd shown him when she was first asking for money, reproduced on two pieces of paper so she could see both sides. The one-sheet outlined a radical transformation in the field of DNA testing. Wojcicki's plan back then was to turn genetics from the rarefied work of high-end labs into mainstream health and quasi entertainment products.

First she'd sell tastemakers on her mail-in spit kits as a way to learn sort-of-interesting things about their DNA makeup, such as its likely ancestral origins and the chance it would lead to certain health conditions. Eventually she'd be able to lower prices enough to make the kits broadly accessible, allowing 23andMe to build a database big enough to identify new links between diseases and particular genes. Later, this research would fuel the creation of drugs the company could tailor to different genetic profiles. 23andMe would become a new kind of health-care business, sitting somewhere between a Big Pharma lab, a Big Tech company, and a trusted neighborhood doctor.

Some of this still sounds as far off now as it did during the Bush years. Improbably, though, 23andMe has rounded second base and is heading for third. Wojcicki did sell millions of people on DNA test kits -- 11 million and counting -- and bring such tests to the mainstream, with some help from Oprah's holiday gift guide. An estimated 1 in 5 Americans have turned over their genetic material to 23andMe or one of its competitors. Now that she's got the data, Wojcicki is working on the drugs. Her company is collaborating on clinical trials for one compound (and nearing trials for another) that could be used for what's known as immuno-oncology, treatments that attempt to harness the body's complex immune system to beat cancer. 23andMe says it's also exploring drugs with potential use in treatments for neurological, cardiovascular, and other conditions, though it declined to specify them. Last month the company bought Lemonaid Health, a telehealth and drug delivery startup that offers treatment and prescriptions for a select group of conditions, including depression, anxiety, and STDs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: Facebook says it will stop using facial recognition for photo-tagging. In a Monday blog post, Meta, the social network's new parent company, announced that the platform will delete the facial templates of more than a billion people and shut off its facial recognition software, which uses an algorithm to identify people in photos they upload to Facebook. This decision represents a major step for the movement against facial recognition, which experts and activists have warned is plagued with bias and privacy problems. But Meta's announcement comes with a couple of big caveats. While Meta says that facial recognition isn't a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company's new commitment doesn't apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. In fact, Meta is already exploring ways to incorporate biometrics into its emerging metaverse business, which aims to build a virtual, internet-based simulation where people can interact as avatars. Meta is also keeping DeepFace, the sophisticated algorithm that powers its photo-tagging facial recognition feature.

"We believe this technology has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control, and transparency, and it's an approach we'll continue to explore as we consider how our future computing platforms and devices can best serve people's needs," Grosse told Recode. "For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we'll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we're living up to our responsible innovation framework."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Former police officer, vegan, and mayor-elect of New York City Eric Adams has dreams of putting the Big Apple on the blockchain. In an interview with Bloomberg Radio on Wednesday, Adams bragged that he would finally transform the city into one hospitable to cryptocurrency. "We need to look at what's preventing the growth of bitcoins and cryptocurrency in our city," Adams told Bloomberg on Wednesday. He pointed to Miami, which has recently attempted to attract the cryptocurrency industry to the city, teasing a "friendly competition" on the horizon. "He has a MiamiCoin that is doing very well -- we're going to look in the direction to carry that out."

Adams has been promising to do this since he was a candidate last year, vowing to make the city a hub of all things crypto. "I'm going to promise you in one year, you're going to see a different city," he said at one event last June. "We're going to bring businesses here. We're going to become the center of life science, the center of cybersecurity, the center of self-driving cars and drones, the center of bitcoins, the center of all the technology," It's still not clear what that actually means or would entail. This may mean contending with the state's cryptocurrency regulations -- namely the Bitlicense. Introduced in 2015, the Bitlicense is a requirement for any entity that wants to carry out cryptocurrency-related transactions.

Three years after an employee revolt forced Google to abandon work on a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence, the company is aggressively pursuing a major contract to provide its technology to the military. From a report: The company's plan to land the potentially lucrative contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, could raise a furor among its outspoken work force and test the resolve of management to resist employee demands. In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in Project Maven, a military program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to refine the targeting of drone strikes. Google management caved and agreed to not renew the contract once it expired.

The outcry led Google to create guidelines for the ethical use of artificial intelligence, which prohibit the use of its technology for weapons or surveillance, and hastened a shake-up of its cloud computing business. Now, as Google positions cloud computing as a key part of its future, the bid for the new Pentagon contract could test the boundaries of those A.I. principles, which have set it apart from other tech giants that routinely seek military and intelligence work. The military's initiative, which aims to modernize the Pentagon's cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield, is a replacement for a contract with Microsoft that was canceled this summer amid a lengthy legal battle with Amazon. Google did not compete against Microsoft for that contract after the uproar over Project Maven.

The Pentagon's restart of its cloud computing project has given Google a chance to jump back into the bidding, and the company has raced to prepare a proposal to present to Defense officials, according to four people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. In September, Google's cloud unit made it a priority, declaring an emergency "Code Yellow," an internal designation of importance that allowed the company to pull engineers off other assignments and focus them on the military project, two of those people said. On Tuesday, the Google cloud unit's chief executive, Thomas Kurian, met with Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the chief of staff of the Air Force, and other top Pentagon officials to make the case for his company, two people said. Google, in a written statement, said it is "firmly committed to serving our public sector customers" including the Defense Department, and that it "will evaluate any future bid opportunities accordingly."

The bots convincingly and effortlessly help hackers break into Coinbase, Amazon, PayPal, and bank accounts. From a report: The call came from PayPal's fraud prevention system. Someone had tried to use my PayPal account to spend $58.82, according to the automated voice on the line. PayPal needed to verify my identity to block the transfer. "In order to secure your account, please enter the code we have sent your mobile device now," the voice said. PayPal sometimes texts users a code in order to protect their account. After entering a string of six digits, the voice said, "Thank you, your account has been secured and this request has been blocked. Don't worry if any payment has been charged to your account: we will refund it within 24 to 48 hours. Your reference ID is 1549926. You may now hang up," the voice said.

But this call was actually from a hacker. The fraudster used a type of bot that drastically streamlines the process for hackers to trick victims into giving up their multi-factor authentication codes or one-time passwords (OTPs) for all sorts of services, letting them log in or authorize cash transfers. Various bots target Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon, Coinbase, and a wide range of specific banks. Whereas fooling victims into handing over a login or verification code previously would often involve the hacker directly conversely with the victim, perhaps pretending to be the victim's bank in a phone call, these increasingly traded bots dramatically lower the barrier of entry for bypassing multi-factor authentication.

After Canada, now Australia has found that controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, broke national privacy laws when it covertly collected citizens' facial biometrics and incorporated them into its AI-powered identity matching service -- which it sells to law enforcement agencies and others. From a report: In a statement today, Australia's information commissioner and privacy commissioner, Angelene Falk, said Clearview AI's facial recognition tool breached the country's Privacy Act 1988 by:

Collecting Australians' sensitive information without consent
Collecting personal information by unfair means
Not taking reasonable steps to notify individuals of the collection of personal information
Not taking reasonable steps to ensure that personal information it disclosed was accurate, having regard to the purpose of disclosure
Not taking reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with the Australian Privacy Principles.