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Submission + - Trump and RFK Jr. to Ban COVID-19 Vaccine 'Within Months' 4

Submitted by ukoda
ukoda writes: The Daily Beast has this worrying article:

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.

Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.

Just glad I live in a country where the Covid vaccine is free and encouraged.

Submission + - Someone read Rama series? Designed actual spacecraft. (livescience.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Proposed spacecraft could carry up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri

Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to our own. The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft.

Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.

The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation. The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors.

[My first thought was that someone read Arthur C. Clarke's book, Rendezvous with Rama and used it as a model design.]

Submission + - When facial recognition goes wrong (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'A man who is bringing a High Court challenge against the Metropolitan Police after live facial recognition technology wrongly identified him as a suspect has described it as "stop and search on steroids".

'Shaun Thompson, 39, was stopped by police in February last year outside London Bridge Tube station.

'Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said the judicial review, due to be heard in January, was the first legal case of its kind against the "intrusive technology".

'The Met, which announced last week that it would double its live facial recognition technology (LFR) deployments, said it was removing hundreds of dangerous offenders and remained confident its use is lawful.

'LFR maps a person's unique facial features, and matches them against faces on watch-lists.'

I suspect a payout of £10,000 for each false match that is acted on would probably encourage more careful use, perhaps with a second payout of £100,000 if the same person is victimised again.

Submission + - Taiwan's high 20% tariff rate linked to Intel investment (notebookcheck.net)

Submitted by EreIamJH
EreIamJH writes: German tech newsletter NotebookCheck is reporting that the unexpectedly high 20% tariff the USA recently imposed against Taiwan is intended to pressure TSMC to buy a 49% minority stake in Intel including IP transfer and also spend $400 billion in the US in addition to the $176 billion previously required.

Submission + - Canada: Let's allow the US to spy on all our citizens and backdoor everything (eff.org)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The Canadian government is preparing to give away Canadians’ digital lives—to U.S. police, to the Donald Trump administration, and possibly to foreign spy agencies.

Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill with multiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it’s a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands.

Submission + - Qantas hit by cyberattack (abc.net.au)

Submitted by dnrck
dnrck writes: Qantas has confirmed a significant cyber incident affecting one of its contact centres, where a cybercriminal gained access to a third-party customer service platform containing data on approximately six million customers.
The breach exposed customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and frequent flyer numbers, but did not compromise credit card details, personal financial information, passport details, or account passwords and PINs. Qantas responded by immediately containing the breach, notifying impacted customers, and working with government cyber agencies and law enforcement. The airlineâ(TM)s operations and safety were not affected, and additional security measures, including enhanced monitoring and support lines, have been implemented while investigations continue. Qantas has also warned customers to be vigilant against potential scams following the incident.
The company and other researchers have posited that this is likely the work of having group Scattered Spider.

Submission + - US Embassy: open your social media profiles (usembassy.gov)

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: U.S. Embassies in countries around the world, have following on their website:
Notice: Effective immediately, all individuals applying for an F, M, or J nonimmigrant visa are requested to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media accounts to ‘public’ to facilitate vetting necessary to establish their identity and admissibility to the United States under U.S. law.

Submission + - The top red teamer in the US is an AI bot (csoonline.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: The hacker “Xbow” now tops an eminent US security industry leaderboard that ranks red teamers based on reputation — and it’s an AI chatbot.

On HackerOne, which connects organizations with ethical hackers to participate in their bug bounty programs, Xbow scored notably higher than 99 other hackers in identifying and reporting enterprise software vulnerabilities. It’s a first in bug bounty history, according to the company that operates the eponymous bot.

Submission + - NYT: Inside DOGE's Chaotic Takeover of Social Security

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security, the New York Times begins: "Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found. [...] At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts. The Times’s investigation found that Mr. Musk became fixated on the program in early February after members of his team misread government spending data — a pivotal and previously unreported moment that DOGE believed had exposed massive fraud inside the agency." (Spoiler Alert: Things only go downhill from there.)

Submission + - For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: Time and memory (also called space) are the two most fundamental resources in computation: Every algorithm takes some time to run, and requires some space to store data while it’s running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their runtime, and researchers had long assumed there’s no way to do better. Williams’ proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm — no matter what it does — into a form that uses much less space.
One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.” Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.”

The relationship between these two classes is one of the central questions of complexity theory. Every problem in P is also in PSPACE, because fast algorithms just don’t have enough time to fill up much space in a computer’s memory. If the reverse statement were also true, the two classes would be equivalent: Space and time would have comparable computational power. But complexity theorists suspect that PSPACE is a much larger class, containing many problems that aren’t in P. In other words, they believe that space is a far more powerful computational resource than time. This belief stems from the fact that algorithms can use the same small chunk of memory over and over, while time isn’t as forgiving — once it passes, you can’t get it back.

Submission + - Nintendo says your Switch 2 isn't really yours even if you paid for it (betanews.com) 1

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: The new Nintendo Switch 2 is almost here. Next month, eager fans will finally be able to get their hands on the highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular hybrid console. But before you line up (or frantically refresh your browser for a preorder), you might want to read the fine print, because Nintendo might be able to kill your console.

Yes, really. That’s not just speculation, folks. According to its newly updated user agreement, Nintendo has granted itself the right to make your Switch 2 “permanently unusable” if you break certain rules. Yes, the company might literally brick your device.

Buried in the legalese is a clause that says if you try to bypass system protections, modify software, or mess with the console in a way that’s not approved, Nintendo can take action. And that action could include completely disabling your system. The exact wording makes it crystal clear: Nintendo may “render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

Submission + - Musk to "fix" Community Notes for contradicting Trump (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: The man who espouses "free speech" has announced he will be "fixing" Community Notes on Twitter because they repeatedly contradict what Trump says. He claims a cabal of governments and media are using Notes to game the system.

Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."

Yaccarino invited audience members to "think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time," but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.

Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a "neon sore thumb."

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