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Submission + - T-Mobile/Sprint Deal Is Good Actually, Feds Tell Court In States' Lawsuit (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Federal regulators that want to let T-Mobile complete its acquisition of rival wireless carrier Sprint are pushing back on a collective effort by some states to block the deal. The $26 billion transaction was subject to federal approval by both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. The agencies both blessed the deal, with the DOJ reaching a settlement in July and the FCC granting a green light in October. The deal also requires approval by regulators in several states, however. While about a dozen have in some way approved the deal or signaled support for the federal settlements, attorneys general representing 13 states and the District of Columbia filed suit to block the merger.

The FCC and DOJ on Friday submitted a filing [400-page PDF] in that case arguing that the deal is in the best interest of the U.S., and any nationwide injunction holding up the merger would block "substantial, long-term, and procompetitive benefits for American consumers." The argument, in large part, boils down to: trust us, we're the experts. "Both the Antitrust Division and the FCC have significant experience and expertise in analyzing these types of transactions and do so from a nationwide perspective," the agencies write. "Thus, their conclusions that the merger as remedied is in the public interest deserve appropriate weight in this remedy inquiry by this honorable court."

Submission + - SPAM: Code.org Boasts It's 'Served' an Hour of Code to 910+ Million Students 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The Hour of Code home page captured by the Internet Archive on Dec. 17th boasted that 835,581,513 students had been 'served' an Hour of Code. Three days later, however, the numbers had jumped to 910,905,104 served, presumably due to counter updates that were deferred during this year's event. "It has been a HUGE year-and decade!-for computer science education," tweeted tech-backed Code.org. All over the world, more than 910 MILLION students have started an #HourOfCode since we began this journey in 2013. Thank YOU for being part of this global movement!" In 2015, Code.org explained, "We're switching our counter to a McDonald's format — because the Hour of Code counter is both double-counting and under-counting participation." Speaking of possible over-counting, the Hour of Code Leaderboards consistently suggest the city in the world with the greatest Hour of Code participation is tiny Boardman, OR (population 4,490), perhaps because of the Amazon data centers that an AWS Case Study notes power Code.org.

Submission + - German Economy Minister Defends Huawei with Jab at U.S. Spies (sfchronicle.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier defended the government's decision not to impose a ban on Huawei, saying it didn't issue a "boycott" of U.S. companies in the wake of espionage accusations by the U.S. National Security Agency dating to 2013. "The U.S. also demands from its companies that they pass on certain information that are needed to fight terrorism," Altmaier said during a talk show on ARD television late Sunday that focused on whether China can be trusted. U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist, called comments an "insult" to American troops stationed in the country. "The recent claims by senior German officials that the United States is equivalent to the Chinese Communist Party are an insult to the thousands of American troops who help ensure Germany's security," Grenell said in a statement distributed by the embassy Monday, i.e. the US secretly spied on its allies and their leaders for the sake of "protecting" them in the name of counter-terrorism. Leaked documents made public by WikiLeaks showed that the US spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's private conversations and talks with other world leaders such as Frecnh President Sarkozy and Italian PM Berlusconi, while no real evidence of Huawei spying was seen. Later, Altmaier, a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said he was not suggesting that the political systems in the U.S. and China are “on the same level.”

Submission + - Linux 5.4 released

Submitted by diegocg
diegocg writes: Linux 5.3 has been released, featuring the new kernel lockdown mode, intended to strengthen the boundary between UID 0 and the kernel; virtio-fs, a high-performance virtio driver which allows a virtualized guest to mount a directory that has been exported on the host; fs-verity, for detecting file tampering, like dm-verity, but works on files rather than block devices; dm-clone, which allows live cloning of dm targets; two new madvise() flags for improved app memory management on Android, support for new Intel/AMD GPUs, support for the exfat file system and removing the experimental status of the erofs file system; a new haltpoll cpuidle driver and governor that greatly improves performance for virtualized guests wanting to do guest-side polling in the idle loop; and blk-iocost, a new cgroup controller that attempts to calculate more accurately the cost of IO. As always, many other new drivers and improvements can be found in the changelog.

Submission + - AMD Launches Threadripper 3970X, 3960X And Smokes Intel's New 18-Core CPU (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel and AMD have been duking it out in the high-end desktop processor space lately. AMD's return to competitive footing versus Intel has propelled the company forward and the brand has a loyal, passionate following due the competitive performance-per-dollar its 3d Gen Ryzen processors bring versus Intel offerings. Today, both companies have launched new flagship many-core CPUs, the Intel Core i9-10980XE, which is an 18-core chip, and the AMD 3rd Gen Threadripper 3970X and 3960X, which are 32-core and 24-core chips, respectively. Intel's Core i9-10980XE brings a lower price of $999 and competes more favorably versus AMD's lower-end 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X that's priced at just $750. Meanwhile, the new AMD Threadripper 3960X at $1399 and Threadripper 3970X at $1999 leave Intel's fastest desktop chip in the dust in multi-threaded workloads, sometimes by a wide margin. In addition, while Threadripper 3960X and 3970X pull only about 26 to 36 Watts of additional power versus Intel's new Core i9-10980XE, they do it with 33% — 77% more core resources. Regardless, it's impressive how the tables have turned, as AMD is now firmly entrenched with some better value propositions in high-end desktop processors, and better performance in many cases as well.

Submission + - Invisible hardware hacks allowing full remote access cost pennies (wired.com)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as little as $200 worth of equipment.

Submission + - Study: Many Popular Medical Apps Send User Info To 3rd or 4th Parties (bmj.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: A study in the British Medical Journal ( https://www.bmj.com/content/36... ) that looked at 24 of the 100s of Medical apps available on Google Play found that 79% pass all sorts of user info — including sensitive medical info like what your reported symptoms are and what medications you are taking in some cases — on to 3rd and 4th parties. A German-made and apparently very popular medical app named Ada was found to share user data with trackers like Facebook, Adjust and Amplitude for example ( article in German: https://www.heise.de/ct/artike... ). The New York Times also warned recently about apps that want to retrieve/store your medical records ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... ). From the conclusion of the study: 19/24 (79%) of sampled apps shared user data. 55 unique entities, owned by 46 parent companies, received or processed app user data, including developers and parent companies (first parties) and service providers (third parties). 18 (33%) provided infrastructure related services such as cloud services. 37 (67%) provided services related to the collection and analysis of user data, including analytics or advertising, suggesting heightened privacy risks. Network analysis revealed that first and third parties received a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-6, range 1-24) unique transmissions of user data. Third parties advertised the ability to share user data with 216 “fourth parties”; within this network (n=237), entities had access to a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-11, range 1-140) unique transmissions of user data. Several companies occupied central positions within the network with the ability to aggregate and re-identify user data.

Comment One important piece of the puzzle (Score 5, Insightful) 136

by jbernardo (#59249054) Attached to: Do We Need To Rethink What Free Software Is?

Strange coincidence that Matthew is coming with this discussion just after a lynchmob, in which he participated, got Stallman to resign. Was he just waiting for it, in order to be able to advance his point of view with less opposition?

In case anyone forgets, he was one of the virtue signallers repeating Selam's hit piece: https://twitter.com/mjg59/stat...

Submission + - Google Doodle honours British chemist Henry Perkin, the man who discovered synth (tumblr.com)

Submitted by Storifytimes
Storifytimes writes: In this a hundred and eightieth birthday, Google Doodle is memory Henry Perkin the person UN agency ordered the muse of today’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries together with his artificial dye referred to as mauveine, that gave the US the color mauve.
Google Doodle celebrates Henry Perkin

Google Doodle is memory British chemist Sir chemist Perkin with a bright-colored sketch doodle on his a hundred and eightieth birthday. Perkin is being honored for his discovery of 1st dye, referred to as mauveine, the color of that was adopted by the British royalty and fashion business earlier. Read more at Storifytimes

Submission + - SPAM: Samsung Galaxy A70s With 64-Megapixel Camera Said to Launch in India This Month

Submitted by TechtoGlobe
TechtoGlobe writes: To make the Galaxy A series in India a $ 4 billion mark this year, Samsung plans to release its highest-end Galaxy device, the Galaxy A70, with a 64-megapixel rear-view camera sensor released later this month informed sources IANS on Thursday.

The Samsung Galaxy A70 should be available in two variants — with prices from RS. 30,000 This will be the first Samsung device with a 64-megapixel photosensor. The Galaxy A70 will also be compatible with Samsung's new design language, as evidenced by the recently introduced Galaxy A30s in India and the Galaxy A50 for € 299 and the Galaxy A50 for € 2,950. In addition, the support page for the Galaxy A70 was found on the Samsung website with model number SM-A707F / DSM. [spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source

Submission + - China Boosts Government Presence At Alibaba, Private Giants (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The government of one of China’s top technology hubs is dispatching officials to 100 local corporations including e-commerce giantAlibaba, the latest effort to exert greater influence over the country’smassive private sector. Hangzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, is assigning government affairs representatives to facilitate communication and expedite projects, the city government said on itswebsite. Chinese beverage giantHangzhou Wahaha.and automakerZhejiang Geely.are among the other companies based in the prosperous region that have been singled out, according to reports in statemedia.

The Hangzhou government said the initiative was aimed at smoothing work flow between officials and China’s high-tech companies and manufacturers. But the move could be perceived also as an effort to keep tabs on a non state-owned sector that’s gaining clout as a prime driver of the world’s No. 2 economy. Representatives of the country’s public security system are alreadyembeddedwithin China’s largest internet companies, responsible for crime prevention and stamping out false rumors. Government agencies may also be heightening their monitoring of the vast private sector at a time China’s economy is decelerating — raising the prospect of destabiliziing job cuts as enterprises try to protect bottom lines. Alibaba is hosting its annual investors’ conference this week in Hangzhou against the backdrop of a worseningoutlookfor the country.

Submission + - Massive wave of account hijacks hits YouTube creators (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past few days, a massive wave of account hijacks has hit YouTube users, and especially creators in the auto-tuning and car review community, a ZDNet investigation discovered following a tip from one of our readers.

Several high-profile accounts from the YouTube creators car community have fallen victim to these attacks already. The list includes channels such as Built [Instagram post, YouTube channel], Troy Sowers [Instagram post, YouTube channel], MaxtChekVids [YouTube channel], PURE Function [Instagram post, YouTube Support post, YouTube channel], and Musafir [Instagram post, YouTube channel].

The account hacks are the result of a coordinated campaign that consisted of messages luring users to phishing sites, where hackers logged account credentials. Some of these phishing attacks also bypassed 2FA.

Submission + - Apple neutered ad blockers in Safari (zdnet.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: There's been much said about Google's supposed plans to limit the power of ad blockers in Chrome, but something similar has already happened in Safari, and not that many people have noticed, let alone criticize Apple. Unlike Google, Apple never received any flak, and came out of the whole process with a reputation of caring about users' privacy.

Apple deprecated Safari extensions, automatically disabling software such as "AdBlock Plus" and "Ghostery". The last to go was uBlock Origin, which shut down a couple of weeks ago.

The replacement system is called App Extensions, but it enforces a limit of 50,000 rules for ad blockers, even fewer than Google's now abandoned proposal for Chrome. Some extensions have soldiered on, converting to App Extensions but with reduced features and effectiveness, while others have been forced to give up.

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