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Windows

Linux Distros Beat Windows 11 in Phoronix Performance Testing (phoronix.com) 4

Phoronix ran some fun performance tests this week. "Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions." First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system... The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including:

- Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.10
- Arch Linux (latest rolling)
- Fedora Workstation 35
- Clear Linux 35150

[...] Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro...

The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.

Out of 44 tests, here's a breakdown of how many first-place wins were scored by each OS:
  • Clear Linux: 33 (75%)
  • Fedora Workstation 35: 4 (9.1%)
  • Windows 11 Pro: 3 (6.8%)
  • Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS: 2 (4.5%)
  • Arch Linux: 1 (2.3%)
  • Ubuntu 21.10: 1 (2.3%)

Youtube

'A Mistake by YouTube Shows Its Power Over Media' (nytimes.com) 38

"Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels," reports the New York Times. "The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies.

"But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced," they write — and sometimes, YouTube does end up making mistakes. (Alternate URL here...) The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe claim that YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation... Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally in different languages. "It's impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content," said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. "YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook."

In its email on Tuesday morning, YouTube said Novara Media [a left-leaning London news group] was guilty of "repeated violations" of YouTube's community guidelines, without elaborating. Novara's staff was left guessing what had caused the problem. YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before... Novara's last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy, which hardly seemed worthy of YouTube's attention. One of the organization's few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers...

Staff members worried it had been a coordinated campaign by critics of their coverage to file complaints with YouTube, triggering its software to block their channel, a tactic sometimes used by right-wing groups to go after opponents.... An editor, Gary McQuiggin, filled out YouTube's online appeal form. He then tried using YouTube's online chat bot, speaking with a woman named "Rose," who said, "I know this is important," before the conversation crashed. Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. "We call on YouTube to immediately reinstate our account," it said. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament.

Within a few hours, Novara's channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail.

"We work quickly to review all flagged content," YouTube said in a statement, "but with millions of hours of video uploaded on YouTube every day, on occasion we make the wrong call "

But Ed Procter, chief executive of the Independent Monitor for the Press, told the Times that it was at least the fifth time that a news outlet had material deleted by YouTube, Facebook or Twitter without warning.
The Almighty Buck

An NFT Just Sold for $532 Million, But Didn't Really Sell at All 48

A white-haired, green-eyed pixelated character known as a CryptoPunk 9998 just sold for more than half a billion U.S. dollars -- or so it appeared -- the latest wild development in the booming non-fungible token space. But the Ethereum blockchain shows the money from the NFT trade ended up right back where it started, raising the question of why anyone bothered. Bloomberg reports: The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39. The process started Thursday at 6:13 p.m. New York time, when someone using an Ethereum address beginning with 0xef76 transferred the CryptoPunk to an address starting with 0x8e39.

To pay for the trade, the buyer shipped the Ether tokens to the CryptoPunk's smart contract, which transferred them to the seller -- normal stuff, a buyer settling up with a seller. But the seller then sent the 124,457 Ether back to the buyer, who repaid the loans. And then the last step: the avatar was given back to the original address, 0xef76, and offered up for sale again for 250,000 Ether, or more than $1 billion.

Larva Labs, which created the CryptoPunks, said on Twitter that "someone bought this punk from themself with borrowed money and repaid the loan in the same transaction." Evidently, this isn't the first time this has happened. "Some recent large bids were done the same way. The ether is offered and removed in a single transaction. So, while technically briefly valid, the bid can never be accepted. We'll add filtering to avoid generating notifications for these kinds of transactions in the future." In conventional, regulated securities markets, this would be called wash trading, which is banned on grounds that trading with yourself can artificially inflate prices and suggest more demand than really exists.
Facebook

What Else Do the Leaked 'Facebook Papers' Show? (msn.com) 41

The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post.

Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content."

And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg's "unique degree of control" over Facebook, he's ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as "a litany of societal harms caused by the company's relentless pursuit of growth." Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook...

For all Facebook's troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the "Rest of World," including India, France and Italy...

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits.

Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization... Starting in 2017, Facebook's algorithm gave emoji reactions like "angry" five times the weight as "likes," boosting these posts in its users' feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business. The company's data scientists eventually confirmed that "angry" reaction, along with "wow" and "haha," occurred more frequently on "toxic" content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less "disturbing" content and less "graphic violence," company data scientists found.

The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg "makes decisions that cause harm" and then also dismissed the findings as being "based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context..."

Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, "We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible."

She added that the company is "constantly making difficult decisions."
Medicine

Vaccination Offers Better Protection Than Previous COVID-19 Infection (thehill.com) 214

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A new study from the [CDC] finds that vaccination provides better protection against hospitalization with COVID-19 than a previous infection with the virus. The analysis found people hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms were more than five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 if they had had recent prior infection than if they were recently vaccinated. The study released Friday examined more than 7,000 people across nine states and 187 hospitals, comparing those who were unvaccinated and had previously had the coronavirus in the last three to six months and those who were vaccinated over the same time frame.

The CDC urged even those who were previously infected to get their shots. [...] Overall, [CDC Director Rochelle Walensky] said at a press briefing earlier this week that the hospitalization rate among unvaccinated people is 12 times higher than for vaccinated people. The vaccination rate for those 12 and older has now reached 78 percent with at least one shot, but Walensky noted that still leaves more than 60 million eligible Americans unvaccinated.

NASA

NASA Wants Your Help Improving Perseverance Rover's AI (extremetech.com) 12

NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in.

The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.

Space

Juno Reveals Deep 3D Structure of Jupiter's Massive Storms (arstechnica.com) 10

Nasa's Juno mission, the solar-powered robotic explorer of Jupiter, has completed its five-year prime mission to reveal the inner workings of the Solar System's biggest planet. The most recent findings from these measurements have now been published in a series of papers, revealing the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter's weather systems -- including of its famous Great Red Spot, a centuries-old storm big enough to swallow the Earth whole. The Conversation reports: Jupiter's Great Red Spot has had a hard time in recent years. [...] But fans of the storm can take comfort from Juno's latest findings. In 2017, Juno was able to observe the red spot in microwave light. Then, in 2019, as Juno flew at more than 200,000 kilometers per hour above the vortex, Nasa's Deep Space Network was monitoring the spacecraft's velocity from millions of kilometers away. Tiny changes as small as 0.01 millimeters per second were detected, caused by the gravitational force from the massive spot. By modeling the microwave and gravity data, my colleagues and I were able to determine that the famous storm is at least 300 km (186 miles) deep, maybe as deep as 500 km (310 miles). That's deeper than the expected cloud-forming "weather layer" that reaches down to around 65 km (40 miles) below the surface, but higher than the jet streams that might extend down to 3,000 km (1,864 miles). The deeper the roots, the more likely the Red Spot is to persist in the years to come, despite the superficial battering it has been receiving from passing storms. To place the depth in perspective, the International Space Station orbits ~420 km (260 miles) above Earth's surface. Yet despite these new findings, the spot could still be a "pancake-like" structure floating in the bottomless atmosphere, with the spot's 12,000 km (7,456 mile) width being 40 times larger than its depth.

In the cloud-forming weather layer, Juno's microwave antennae saw the expected structure of belts and zones. The cool zones appeared dark, indicating the presence of ammonia gas, which absorbs microwave light. Conversely, the belts were bright in microwave light, consistent with a lack of ammonia. These bright and dark bands in the weather layer were perfectly aligned with the winds higher up, measured at the top of the clouds. But what happens when we probe deeper? The temperature of Jupiter's atmosphere is just right for the formation of a water cloud around 65 km (40 miles) down below the cloud tops. When Juno peered through this layer, it found something unexpected. The belts became microwave-dark, and the zones became microwave-bright. This is the complete reverse of what we saw in the shallower cloudy regions, and we are calling this transition layer the "jovicline" -- some 45-80 km (28-50 miles) below the visible clouds. [...] The jovicline may separate the shallow cloud-forming weather layer from the deep abyss below. This unexpected result implies something is moving all that ammonia around.

One possibility is that each jet stream is associated with a "circulation cell," a climate phenomenon that moves gases around via currents of rising and falling air. The rising could cause ammonia enrichment, and the sinking ammonia depletion. If true, there would be about eight of these circulation cells in each hemisphere. [...] Other meteorological phenomena might be responsible for moving the ammonia around within this deep atmosphere. For example, vigorous storms in Jupiter's belts might create mushy ammonia-water hailstones (known as "mushballs"), which deplete ammonia within the shallow belts before falling deep, eventually evaporating to enrich the belts at great depths.

Power

A Colorado Firm Claims It Can Triple the Power of Electric Engines (interestingengineering.com) 64

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: Energy densities of lithium-ion batteries haven't reached the potential where long-range flights can be undertaken. So, a Colorado-based startup, H3X, looked to the electric motor for ways to improve its power capacity. The team started from scratch, looking at the various components of the electric motor. Comprised of a gearbox, a power delivery system, and a main motor, these components are usually housed separately to allow sufficient cooling space, without which could result in engine failure. However, using advances in material science and electronics, coupled with the ability to 3D-print structures such as copper, the team managed to put all components together into a single housing that weighs just 33 pounds (15 kg) without impacting their cooling needs. Their motor, called the HPDM-250, is much smaller than their contemporaries and has a lesser mass as well.

The company claims that, according to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) guidelines, a propulsion system of a commercial aircraft such as Boeing 737 must deliver a continuous power density of 12 kW/kg. However, conventional electric motors can only generate a maximum of up to 4kW/kg. Thanks to its reduced weight, the HPDM-250's power density clocks up to an impressive 13kW/kg. According to H3X, this is sufficient to power any mass-sensitive or high-performance application such as electric boats and has urban air mobility applications. Among the other targets for the company that remain in the distance are short-haul, large commercial flights in the sub-1000 mile range.

Max Liben, Chief Technology Office at H3X, told TechCrunch that using advanced technologies made the manufacturing of their electric motor less laborious and yet not very expensive. Even when putting the components together, the team was conscious of maintenance needs and has ensured that servicing their motors is hassle-free as well. Whether powered by electric batteries or hydrogen fuel, these advanced electric motors are likely to play a role in enabling electric air mobility, even over longer distances.

The Courts

The US Government Wants Signal's Private User Data That It Simply Doesn't Have (hothardware.com) 49

According to a post on the Signal blog, a federal grand jury in the Central District of California has subpoena'd Signal for a whole pile of user data, like subscriber information, financial information, transaction histories, communications, and more. HotHardware reports: The thing is, the subpoena is moot: Signal simply doesn't have the data to provide. The company can't provide any of the data that the grand jury is asking for because, as the company itself notes, "Signal doesn't have access to your messages, your chat list, your groups, your contacts, your stickers, [or] your profile name or avatar." The only things that Signal can offer up to the court are Unix timestamps for when the accounts in question were created and last accessed the service.

The announcement (and, we suppose, this news post) essentially amounts to an advertisement for Signal, but it's an amusing -- or possibly distressing -- anecdote nonetheless. While Signal is secure, keep in mind that the messages still originate from your device, which means that other apps on your device (like, say, your keyboard) could still be leaking your data. Lest you doubt Signal's story, the app creators have published the subpoena, suitably redacted, on their blog.

Open Source

Mastodon Puts Trump's Social Network On Notice For Improperly Using Its Code (theverge.com) 89

Mastodon has sent former President Donald Trump's company a formal notification that it's breaking the rules by using Mastodon's open-source code to build its social network, named Truth. The Verge reports: This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon's software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump's group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so.

While Truth hasn't officially launched yet, internet users discovered that a test version basically had the same interface as Mastodon, and that some of the code for the site was unchanged from the other social network's code. By itself, that's actually the intended use of open-source software -- but as the Software Freedom Conservancy pointed out last week, apps or websites based on software that uses the AGPLv3 license have to in turn provide their own source code. According to the foundation that wrote AGPL, it's meant to make the community's software better: if you improve on something that someone else made, they should be able to benefit from your work like you did theirs.

As Mastodon and Rochko reiterated on Friday, though, TMTG hasn't done that -- it even went as far as to call its software "proprietary," and seemingly tried to hide the fact that it was based on Mastodon. Now that the Truth has been revealed, however, TMTG will either have to rebuild it without using Mastodon's code -- a tall order, as bootstrapping a social network site isn't particularly easy -- or release its source code and change the terms of service.

China

US Intelligence Concludes: China Didn't Weaponize COVID-19, Didn't Have Foreknowledge (dni.gov) 117

The head of America's Intelligence Community reports that the U.S. intelligence community "was able to reach broad agreement" on several key issues about the origins of COVID-19.

"We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon," they announced today.

In addition, the U.S. intelligence community report includes a second new assessment: that China's officials "did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of COVID-19 emerged."

Beyond that, they note that most of the intelligence community's agencies also specifically assess that SARS-CoV-2 "probably was not genetically engineered" (albeit with "low confidence"). Of the 19 member agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, just two believed that there just wasn't enough evidence to actually issue an assessment of either possibility, the report adds.

The [U.S.] intelligence community judges they will be unable to provide a more definitive explanation for the origin of COVID-19 unless new information allows them to determine the specific pathway for initial natural contact with an animal or to determine that a laboratory in Wuhan was handling SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus before COVID-19 emerged. The intelligence community — and the global scientific community — lacks clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest COVID-19 cases. If we obtain information on the earliest cases that identified a location of interest or occupational exposure, it may alter our evaluation of hypotheses.

China's cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19. Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information, and blame other countries, including the United States. These actions reflect, in part, China's government's own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China.

In assessing whether a lab incident or a "natural" exposure to an infected animal caused the outbreak, they cited assessments from eight different U.S. intelligence community elements. Half of them agreed with the National Intelligence Council assessment (with low confidence) "that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus — a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2. These analysts give weight to China's officials' lack of foreknowledge, the numerous vectors for natural exposure, and other factors."

Three of the remaining four "remain unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, with some analysts favoring natural origin, others a laboratory origin, and some seeing the hypotheses as equally likely." One element did assess "with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology... Variations in analytic views largely stem from differences in how agencies weigh intelligence reporting and scientific publications and intelligence and scientific gaps."

The 18-page assessment includes an appendix addressing details of specific theories, but ultimately concludes that "Our growing understanding of the similarities of SARS-CoV-2 to other coronaviruses in nature and the ability of betacoronaviruses — the genus to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs — to naturally recombine suggests SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered." It even notes that the much-discussed furin cleavage sites "have been identified in naturally occurring coronaviruses in the same genetic location [as in SARS-CoV-2]. This suggests that SARS-CoV-2 or a progenitor virus could have acquired its furin cleavage sites through natural recombination with another virus."
Facebook

John Carmack Issues Some Words of Warning For Meta and Its Metaverse Plans (arstechnica.com) 32

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse. "I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player -- one company -- winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said. The idea of the metaverse, Carmack says, can be "a honeypot trap for 'architecture astronauts.'" Those are the programmers and designers who "want to only look at things from the very highest levels," he said, while skipping the "nuts and bolts details" of how these things actually work.

These so-called architecture astronauts, Carmack said, "want to talk in high abstract terms about how we'll have generic objects that can contain other objects that can have references to these and entitlements to that, and we can pass control from one to the other." That kind of high-level hand-waving makes Carmack "just want to tear [his] hair out... because that's just so not the things that are actually important when you're building something." "But here we are," Carmack continued. "Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made."

Encryption

Hive Ransomware Now Encrypts Linux and FreeBSD Systems (bleepingcomputer.com) 25

Hive, a ransomware group that has hit over 30 organizations since June 2021, now also encrypts Linux and FreeBSD using new malware variants specifically developed to target these platforms. BleepingComputer reports: However, as Slovak internet security firm ESET discovered, Hive's new encryptors are still in development and still lack functionality. The Linux variant also proved to be quite buggy during ESET's analysis, with the encryption completely failing when the malware was executed with an explicit path. It also comes with support for a single command line parameter (-no-wipe). In contrast, Hive's Windows ransomware comes with up to 5 execution options, including killing processes and skipping disk cleaning, uninteresting files, and older files. The ransomware's Linux version also fails to trigger the encryption if executed without root privileges because it attempts to drop the ransom note on compromised devices' root file systems.
Transportation

Toyota Unveils Its First All-Electric Car (electrek.co) 83

At an event in Japan today, Toyota unveiled its first all-electric car: the bZ4X. Electrek reports: "bZ" stands for "beyond zero," which is Toyota's latest electrification strategy and a sort of sub-brand for its upcoming electric vehicles, starting with the bZ4X. The electric SUV hasn't been updated much from the concept. It still features some sharp lines and aggressive design. In terms of specs, we finally have more details. Toyota has been clear that every spec it released today is for the Japanese version of the car. Details on the US version are expected to come next month, but it should still give us a good idea.

The vehicle is equipped with a 71.4 kWh battery pack. As for what range it enables, Toyota is only releasing right now "cruising range per charge (WLTC)," which it claims to be 500 km (310 miles) for the front-wheel drive version and 460 km (286 miles) for the all-wheel-drive version. The front-wheel-drive version is equipped with a single 150 kW motor while the all-wheel-drive version is equipped with an 80 kW motor on each axle. The DC fast-charging capacity is apparently capped at 150 kW and Toyota says that it can charge to 80% state-of-charge in about 30 minutes with that capacity.

First off, it's capable of bidirectional charging for vehicle-to-home capacity. It's also offered with an optional solar roof, which Toyota says can "generates electricity equivalent to 1,800 km of driving distance per year." Toyota is also offering the bZ4X with an optional "wing-shaped" steering wheel, which the automaker claims improve visibility. The electric SUV is expected to land first in Japan in mid-2022.
More details about pricing, specs and features will be available in the coming months. The news comes after the company said it expects to spend more than $13.5 billion to develop EV battery tech and supply by 2030.
Security

Ransomware Has Disrupted Almost 1,000 Schools In the US This Year (vice.com) 7

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: So far this year, almost 1,000 schools across the country have suffered from a ransomware attack, and in some cases had classes disrupted because of it, according to tallies by Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that specializes in tracking and investigating ransomware attacks, and another cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Brett Callow, a researcher at Emsisoft shared the list with Motherboard. It includes 73 school districts, comprising 985 schools. Callow said that it's very likely there's some schools that are missing from the list, meaning the total number of victims is likely higher than 1,000. The list includes schools such as the Mesquite Independent School District in Texas, which comprises 49 different schools; the Haverhill Public Schools in Massachusetts, which comprises 16 schools; and the Visalia Unified School District in California, which comprises 41 schools.

"There is a huge jump in ransomware attacks hitting schools starting in 2019 and that trend is accelerating," Allan Liska, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future who tracks ransomware, told Motherboard in an online chat. [...] Schools are getting hit every other week, and 2021 was worse than 2020, according to Liska, who said that last year he and his company catalogued 56 ransomware attacks impacting almost 700 schools. "The thing is, as bad as it is right now it will likely get worse before it gets better. While most ransomware attacks are not targeted there are two sectors that ransomware groups do seem to enjoy going after are healthcare and schools," Liska said. "It seems like schools are basically proving ground for ransomware actors to test out their skills. Schools pay significantly less in average ransom than most sectors (when they pay, which is rare), so the ransomware groups are not going after schools for the money."

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