Amazon is making its biggest push into the healthcare industry yet with the launch today of Amazon Pharmacy: a new service offering home delivery for prescription medication. From a report: Customers can sign up to the new store by creating a "secure pharmacy profile," with the option of adding information about their health insurance, any outstanding medical issues like allergies, and any regular prescriptions. The store will offer a range of "generic and brand-name drugs," reports CNBC, including "commonly prescribed drugs like insulin, triamcinolone steroid creams, metformin for controlling blood sugar, and sumatriptan for migraines." Notably, the pharmacy will not sell Schedule II medications, which includes many common opioids like Oxycontin. As usual for Amazon, Prime members will get a number of advantages over regular customers. These perks include free, two-day delivery on orders and discounts on medication. Amazon claims Prime members will be able to save "up to 80 percent off generic and 40 percent off brand name medications when paying without insurance." Prime members will also be able to save on medication bought in person from over 50,000 pharmacies across the US, including Rite Aid, CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens.

Four astronauts aboard their SpaceX Dragon capsule "Resilience" have arrived at the International Space Station, circling 262 miles above the Earth, where they will stay until spring. From a report: The capsule lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center Sunday evening atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, chasing the ISS for 27 hours before matching its altitude and speed for an orbital dock. The flight marks only the second crewed flight for Crew Dragon, which became the first commercial vehicle to put humans in orbit when astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched in May. "SpaceX, this is Resilience. Excellent job, right down the center," commander Hopkins radioed to mission control after the docking. "SpaceX and NASA, congratulations." The flight marks another milestone for SpaceX flying its first fully operational mission. After the May launch, designated "Demo-2" with Hurley and Behnken, NASA certified the capsule for operational use in its Commercial Crew program. The Resilience crew includes three NASA astronauts and one from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who were mostly passengers during the flight of Crew Dragon, which generally flies without human input and docks to the ISS autonomously.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy since September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that COVID-19 might have spread beyond China earlier than previously thought. The Italian researchers' findings, published by the INT's scientific magazine Tumori Journal, show that 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020, had developed coronavirus antibodies well before February.

A further specific SARS-CoV-2 antibodies test was carried out by the University of Siena for the same research titled "Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy." It showed that four cases dated back to the first week of October were also positive for antibodies neutralizing the virus, meaning they had got infected in September, Giovanni Apolone, a co-author of the study, told Reuters.

"This is the main finding: people with no symptoms not only were positive after the serological tests but had also antibodies able to kill the virus," Apolone said. "It means that the new coronavirus can circulate among the population for long and with a low rate of lethality not because it is disappearing but only to surge again," he added. Italian researchers told Reuters in March that they reported a higher than usual number of cases of severe pneumonia and flu in Lombardy in the last quarter of 2019 in a sign that the new coronavirus might have circulated earlier than thought.

The giant, aging cables that support one of the world's largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the brink of collapse. The Associated Press reports: The Arecibo Observatory, which is tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico's lush mountain region, boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" and the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed toward Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable. Last week, one of the telescope's main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1.2 million pounds (544,000 kilograms) snapped under only 624,000 pounds (283,000 kilograms). That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole and damaging the dome above it.

Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on previous inspections. It's a blow for the telescope that more than 250 scientists around the world were using. The facility is also one of Puerto Rico's main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. Research has been suspended since August, including a project aiding scientists in their search for nearby galaxies. Some new cables are scheduled to arrive next month, but officials said funding for repairs has not been worked out with federal agencies. Scientists warn that time is running out. Only a handful of cables now support the 900-ton platform. The observatory estimates the damage at more than $12 million and is seeking money from the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that owns the observatory. The report notes that the observatory is considered crucial for the study of pulsars, which are the remains of stars that can be used to detect gravitational waves. It's also used to search for natural hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed.

dcblogs writes: Japan's Fugaku ARM-based supercomputer is the world's most powerful in the latest Top500 list, setting a world record of 442 petaflops. But this was otherwise an unremarkable year for supercomputers, with a "flattening performance curve," said Jack Dongarra, one of the academics behind the twice-a-year ranking and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. This is a result of Moore's Law slowing down as well as a slowdown in the replacement of older systems, he said. But the U.S. is set to deliver an exascale system -- 1,000 petaflops -- next year and China as well. Meanwhile, the EU has a 550 petaflop system in development in Finland. "On the Top500 list, the second-ranked system was IBM Power Systems at nearly 149 petaflops using its Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Tesla GPUs. It is at the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee," adds TechTarget.

"Third place went to Sierra supercomputer, which also uses Power9 and Nvidia GPUs, at about 95 petaflops. It is at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would begin the formal process of selling leases to oil companies in a last-minute push to achieve its long-sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. That sets up a potential sale of leases just before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, leaving the new administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has opposed drilling in the refuge, to try to reverse them after the fact.

The Arctic refuge is one of the last vast expanses of wilderness in the United States, 19 million acres that for the most part are untouched by people, home instead to wandering herds of caribou, polar bears and migrating waterfowl. It has long been prized, and protected, by environmentalists, but President Trump has boasted that opening part of it to oil development was among the most significant of his efforts to expand domestic fossil fuel production. The Federal Register on Monday posted a "call for nominations" from the Bureau of Land Management, to be officially published Tuesday, relating to lease sales in about 1.5 million acres of the refuge along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. A call for nominations is essentially a request to oil companies to specify which tracts of land they would be interested in exploring and potentially drilling for oil and gas.

The administration's announcement establishes a tight timeline for lease sales, with the earliest they could occur being on or about Jan. 17. The call for nominations will allow for comments until Dec. 17, after which the bureau, part of the Interior Department, could issue a final notice of sales to occur as soon as 30 days later. Normally the bureau would take time to review the comments and determine which tracts to sell before issuing the final notice of sale, a process that can take several months. In this case, however, the bureau could decide to make the entire coastal plain available and issue the notice immediately. Any sales would be subject to review by agencies in the Biden administration, including the bureau and the Justice Department, a process that could take a month or two. That could allow the Biden White House to refuse to issue the leases, perhaps by claiming that the scientific underpinnings of the plan to allow drilling in the refuge were flawed, as environmental groups have claimed.

Last week, Apple released macOS Big Sur and the rollout was anything but smooth. The mass upgrade caused the Apple servers responsible for checking if a user opens an app not downloaded from the App Store to slow to a crawl. Apple eventually fixed the problem, "but concerns about paralyzed Macs were soon replaced by an even bigger worry -- the vast amount of personal data Apple, and possibly others, can glean from Macs performing certificate checks each time a user opens an app that didn't come from the App Store," writes Dan Goodin via Ars Technica. From the report: Before Apple allows an app into the App Store, it must first pass a review that vets its security. Users can configure the macOS feature known as Gatekeeper to allow only these approved apps, or they can choose a setting that also allows the installation of third-party apps, as long as these apps are signed with a developer certificate issued by Apple. To make sure the certificate hasn't been revoked, macOS uses OCSP -- short for the industry standard Online Certificate Status Protocol -- to check its validity. [...] Somehow, the mass number of people upgrading to Big Sur on Thursday seems to have caused the servers at ocsp.apple.com to become overloaded but not fall over completely. The server couldn't provide the all clear, but it also didn't return an error that would trigger the soft fail. The result was huge numbers of Mac users left in limbo.

The post Your Computer Isn't Yours was one of the catalysts for the mass concern. It noted that the simple HTML get-requests performed by OCSP were unencrypted. That meant that not only was Apple able to build profiles based on our minute-by-minute Mac usage, but so could ISPs or anyone else who could view traffic passing over the network. (To prevent falling into an infinite authentication loop, virtually all OCSP traffic is unencrypted, although responses are digitally signed.) Fortunately, less alarmist posts like this one provided more helpful background. The hashes being transmitted weren't unique to the app itself but rather the Apple-issued developer certificate. That still allowed people to infer when an app such as Tor, Signal, Firefox, or Thunderbird was being used, but it was still less granular than many people first assumed. The larger point was that, in most respects, the data collection by ocsp.apple.com wasn't much different from the information that already gets transmitted in real time through OCSP every time we visit a website. [...] In short, though, the takeaway was the same: the potential loss of privacy from OCSP is a trade-off we make in an effort to check the validity of the certificate authenticating a website we want to visit or a piece of software we want to install.

In an attempt to further assure Mac users, Apple on Monday published this post. It explains what the company does and doesn't do with the information collected through Gatekeeper and a separate feature known as notarization, which checks the security even of non-App Store apps. The post went on to say that in the next year, Apple will provide a new protocol to check if developer certificates have been revoked, provide "strong protections against server failure," and present a new OS setting for users who want to opt out of all of this. [...] People who don't trust OCSP checks for Mac apps can turn them off by editing the Mac hosts file. Everyone else can move along.

According to Windows Latest, "Microsoft is A/B testing a new feature that is designed to nag users with fullscreen window-less Microsoft Edge recommendations in the OOBE screen." From the report: The nag will appear when users set up their PC, sign in to their system after applying updates, or when they click on a new ad banner within the Settings. [...] Microsoft is trying to convince users of rival browsers who are visiting Windows Settings of the benefits of trying the Chromium Edge. In the Settings app, there's a new banner that appears to be rolling out to non-Insiders. As you can see in the above screenshot, the advert appears across the top of the Settings app window, just above the settings options.

The banner states that you can "get even more out of Windows" and it surprisingly launches the OOBE (out of the box experience) screen. [...] This ad appeared only when our devices were set to use Google Chrome and Firefox as the default web browser. The user can easily close the advert by clicking the second option "Don't update your browser settings." If you try to skip the setup, the pop-up will appear again in future. Unfortunately, you cannot permanently disable these recommendations in Windows 10.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A new study shows that the demand for employee surveillance software was up 55% in June 2020 compared to the pre-pandemic average. From webcam access to random screenshot monitoring, these surveillance software products can record almost everything an employee does on their computer. VPN review website Top10VPN used its global monitoring data to analyze over 200 terms related to employee surveillance software. It took into account both generic and brand-specific queries for its study which compared searches during March-May 2020 with internet searches in the preceding year. Global demand for employee monitoring software increased by 108% in April, and 70% in May 2020 compared with searches carried out the preceding year. Queries for "How to monitor employees working from home" increased by 1,705% in April and 652% in May 2020 compared with searches carried out the preceding year.

The surge in popularity of such an open-ended phrase like this reveals how unprepared many companies were for the abrupt shift to mass home-working. The most popular surveillance tools are Time Doctor, Hubstaff, and FlexiSPY. The tools with the biggest increase in demand include Teramind, DeskTime, Kickidler, and Time Doctor, with interest for the latter tripling compared to the pre-pandemic levels. The top three tools account for almost 60% of global demand in surveillance software because of the range of features offered. The radical shift away from office-working has clearly made employers nervous about a reduction in productivity and its potential impact on their business. Greater surveillance, however, may actually reduce long-term productivity. Your boss watching your every move may make you less productive in the long run and could significantly impact your feelings about the company itself.

Tesla is officially going to join the S&P500, sending its stock price soaring as much as 12% -- adding over $40 billion in market capitalization to the automaker. Electrek reports: The S&P 500, or simply the S&P, is a stock market index that measures the stock performance of 500 large companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is basically a representation of the US stock market, and it is often updated to add growing companies in order to better represent the market. The indice did a reshuffle in September, but Tesla was surprisingly not included.

Now the S&P has announced that Tesla will be included in the next reshuffle coming in December: "On November 16, 2020, S&P DJI announced that TSLA will be added to the S&P 500 effective prior to the open of trading on Monday, December 21 to coincide with the December quarterly rebalancing effective date." They didn't disclose which company is going to by taken out of the indice now that Tesla is being included. It will be announced closer to the reshuffle.

Tesla's inclusion is so significant that the S&P is seeing feedback on who it should be handled: "Due to the large size of the addition, S&P Dow Jones Indices is seeking feedback through a consultation to the investment community to determine if Tesla should be added all at once on the rebalance effective date or in two separate tranches ending on the rebalance effective date." In semi-related news, Tesla has stopped selling the $35,000 version of the Model 3 altogether with the new 2021 model year refresh.

"[I]n the coming weeks," Google will show a new blanket setting to "turn off smart features" which will disable features like Smart Compose, Smart Reply, in apps like Gmail; the second half of the same prompt will disable whether additional Google products -- like Maps or Assistant, for example -- are allowed to be personalized based on data from Gmail, Meet, and Chat. Gizmodo reports: Google writes in its blog post about the new-ish settings that humans are not looking at your emails to enable smart features, and Google ads are "not based on your personal data in Gmail," something CEO Sundar Pichai has likewise said time and again. Google claims to have stopped that practice in 2017, although the following year the Wall Street Journal reported that third-party app developers had freely perused inboxes with little oversight. (When asked whether this is still a problem, the spokesperson pointed us to Google's 2018 effort to tighten security.)

A Google spokesperson emphasized that the company only uses email contents for security purposes like filtering spam and phishing attempts. These personalization changes aren't so much about tightening security as they are another informed consent defense which Google can use to repel the current regulatory siege being waged against it by lawmakers. [...] Inquiries in the U.S. and EU have found that Google's privacy settings have historically presented the appearance of privacy, rather than privacy itself. [...] So this is nice, and also Google's announcement reads as a letter to regulators. "This new setting is designed to reduce the work of understanding and managing [a choice over how data is processed], in view of what we've learned from user experience research and regulators' emphasis on comprehensible, actionable user choices over data."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The pandemic is helping Japan's demon slayers, monsters and robots make the leap to the global market. Animated video in the Japanese style -- aka anime -- has long been a niche taste for fans in the U.S. and elsewhere, and some anime films such as those by Hayao Miyazaki have become mainstream hits. Now, with the pandemic putting a premium on escapist video content, the business is getting hotter. Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are scouring the globe for fresh content, from documentaries to calming videos, and anime has an advantage over live-action content because it doesn't require actors and crew to expose themselves to virus contagion. With the latest anime hit bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in Japan, industry players say the next year is likely to bring more deals and more content for the U.S. "I used to have the sense that the anime category was spreading widely around the world, but what we're seeing these days is a big leap beyond that," said Taiki Sakurai, Netflix's chief anime producer. "The global anime fan base is expanding rapidly." Last month, Netflix said it had 16 projects in the works at its Tokyo-based anime production hub, including "Godzilla" and "Transformers" titles, with plans for global distribution that it said were pushed forward by the evidence of higher demand.

Netflix, which hired a creative team dedicated to anime production in Tokyo four years ago, said more than 100 million households around the world watched at least one anime title on the streaming site in the year to September 2020, growing by 50% from a year earlier. Anime titles have appeared in the top-10 list in nearly 100 countries this year, it said. Amazon Prime also features a wealth of anime titles. The financial reports of Tokyo-based Toei Animation, the studio responsible for anime such as the "Dragon Ball" and "Sailor Moon" franchises, give a glimpse into how the industry is changing. Four years ago, revenue received from outside Japan accounted for one-third of Toei Animation's overall revenue. The overseas portion rose to half of the total in the year ended this past March, and overseas revenue more than doubled to the equivalent of $243 million, with "Dragon Ball" programs available on streaming services such as Hulu in the U.S. In the most recent six months, overseas sales rose to nearly three-fifths of the total.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 1 billion people could be immunized against coronavirus by the end of next year with shots from the first two companies to reveal positive results, after the latest vaccine was shown to be nearly 95% effective in trials. With the US's top infectious diseases official, Anthony Fauci, hailing "the light at the end of the tunnel", the US biotech firm Moderna announced impressive results for its mRNA vaccine on Monday, a week after interim results for a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine showed 90% effectiveness.

The inclusion of high-risk and elderly people in the Moderna trial suggested the vaccine would protect those most vulnerable to the disease, said Peter Openshaw, a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, who described the results as "tremendously exciting." Though it is more expensive, Moderna's vaccine could potentially provide a major advantage over Pfizer's, which requires ultracold freezing between -70C (-94F) and -80C from production facility to patient. Moderna said it had improved the shelf life and stability, meaning its vaccine can be stored for six months at -20C for shipping and long-term storage, and at standard refrigeration temperatures of 2C to 8C for 30 days. Moderna said it could potentially manufacture 1bn doses by the end of 2021, adding to a further 1.3bn from Pfizer/BioNTech in the same timeframe. Both vaccines require two doses and are due to be assessed by regulators in coming weeks. Moderna is planning to apply to the FDA for emergency use authorization in the coming weeks. "The biotech company said it would have 20 million doses ready to ship in the U.S. before the end of 2020 and hoped to manufacture 500 million to 1 billion doses globally next year," reports The Guardian. It's not expected to be available outside the U.S. until next year.

Hulu's live TV bundle is getting more expensive. From a report: The new prices are $10 per month higher than Hulu's current fees and will go into effect Dec. 18, 2020. The higher rates apply to both current and new subscribers. Hulu began notifying subscribers of the price hikes Monday. Under the new pricing, the baseline Hulu + Live TV with ads in the VOD content bundle is rising to $64.99 per month (an 18% increase) and the version with no VOD ads is rising to $70.99 per month (up 16%). Both bundles provide more than 65 live channels, including the four major broadcast networks, and access to Hulu's large on-demand library.