A key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory group unanimously voted Thursday to recommend distributing Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 booster shots to older Americans and nursing home residents, clearing the way for the agency to give the final OK as early as this evening. CNBC reports: The agency's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices specifically endorsed giving third Pfizer shots to people 65 and older in the first of four votes. The panel will also vote on whether to recommend the shots for adults with medical conditions that put them at risk of severe disease and those who are more frequently exposed to the virus -- possibly including people in nursing homes and prisons, teachers, front-line health employees and other essential workers. The elderly were among the first groups to get the initial shots in December and January.

The vote is seen as mostly a win for President Joe Biden, whose administration has said it wants to give booster shots to all eligible Americans 16 and older as early as this week. While the CDC panel's recommendation doesn't give the Biden administration everything it wanted, boosters will still be on the way for millions of Americans. The endorsement comes a day after the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to administer third Pfizer shots to many Americans six months after they complete their first two doses. While the CDC's panel's recommendation isn't binding, Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is expected to accept the panel's endorsement shortly.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Federal Reserve is pushing ahead with its study into whether to implement its own digital currency and will be releasing a paper on the issue shortly, Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday. No decision has been made on the matter yet, he added, and said the Fed does not feel pressured to do something quickly as other nations move forward with their own projects. "I think it's important that we get to a place where we can make an informed decision about this and do so expeditiously," Powell said at his post-meeting news conference. "I don't think we're behind. I think it's more important to do this right than to do it fast." Powell added that the Fed is "working proactively to evaluate whether to issue a CBDC, and if so in what form."

The Boston Fed has taken point on the project, joining with MIT in an initiative on whether the central bank should establish its own digital coin targeted at making the payments system more effective. Fed Governor Lael Brainard has been a strong advocate of the effort, though several other officials, including Vice Chair for Supervision Randal Quarles, have cast doubts. Advocates such as Brainard say a central bank digital currency's benefits include getting payments quickly to people in times of crisis and also providing services to the unbanked. "We think it's really important that the central bank maintain a stable currency and payments system for the public's benefit. That's one of our jobs," he said. He noted the "transformational innovation" in the area of digital payments and said the Fed is continuing to do work on the matter, including its own FedNow system expected to go online in 2023. The test for a CBDC, he said, is "are there clear and tangible benefits that outweigh any costs and risks."

Some concerns even have been raised that if the Fed does not act more aggressively, the dollar's position as the global reserve currency could be challenged. Powell noted the dollar's position in the world and said the Fed is "in a good place" to make a decision on whether to implement its own digital currency. He expressed some concern about the regulatory landscape and said the Fed likely will need congressional permission should it decide to proceed. "Where the public's money is concerned, we need to make sure that appropriate regulatory protections are in place, and today there really are not in some cases," Powell said.

Foreign Policy magazine explores just what happened after El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal currency and launched its official government-approved bitcoin wallet Chivo: Chivo launched just after midnight on Sept. 7. The system started failing at three a.m. Server capacity was increased, and app installations were not re-enabled until 11:30 a.m. Transactions failed through the day; customer service lines were jammed; Chivo ATMs ran out of cash. Shortly after ten a.m., the price of bitcoin crashed by $10,000 in three minutes...

After protests on Sept. 6, more than 1,000 people marched on the Legislative Assembly on Sept. 7, jumping barriers placed early that morning to keep them out. One group of protestors set some tires on fire. Opposition politicians attended the day's session in "No Bitcoin" shirts. The protests were not against bitcoin itself. People protested the forced acceptance, the complete lack of transparency from the government, and the dysfunctional Chivo payment system — "people are against how things are being done in the name of bitcoin," local businessman Patrick Murray said....

[T]he Bitcoin Law, and the disastrous launch of Chivo, has frightened the bond markets; El Salvador's sovereign debt dropped almost five cents in a single day, ending Sept. 7 trading at 87.6 cents on the dollar. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are already reluctant to supply further funding because of the Bitcoin Law...

Traders were reluctant to accept bitcoin. "I'd rather lose the sale," one trader told La Prensa Grafica. Others didn't trust money they couldn't hold in their hands. Street vendors may not even have phones. Many of their customers are illiterate. Some government offices didn't accept bitcoin payments. Transfers from Chivo to bank accounts were not reliable. The Chivo ATMs didn't work well — one machine had a reported three successful cash withdrawals in a day. Even transfer of bitcoins in and out of Chivo had problems...
"El Salvador's Bitcoin Law Is a Farce," blares the headline on the article, saying El Salvador's system "doesn't work, the currency crashed, and the public hates it."

"Fears of criminals bringing in dirty bitcoins and exchanging them for clean dollars, draining the $150 million trust that was set up as a buffer between bitcoins and dollars, have not come to pass — because Chivo doesn't work well enough."

Watch the video here!

"SpaceX safely returned its Crew Dragon spacecraft from orbit on Saturday, with the capsule carrying the four members of the Inspiration4 mission back to Earth after three days in space..." reports CNBC: "Thanks so much SpaceX, that was a heck of a ride for us and we're just getting started!" Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman said from the capsule after touching down.

Elon Musk tweeted his congratulations to the crew shortly after splashdown.

The historic private mission — which includes Isaacman, pilot Sian Proctor, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux and mission specialist Chris Sembroski — orbited the Earth at an altitude as high as 590 kilometers, which is above the International Space Station and the furthest humans have traveled above the surface in years. A free-flying spaceflight, the capsule did not dock with the ISS but instead circled the Earth independently at a rate of 15 orbits per day.

Inspiration4 shared photos from the crew's time in orbit, giving a look at the expansive views from the spacecraft's "cupola" window.

This is the third time SpaceX has returned astronauts from space, and the second time for this capsule — which previously flew the Crew-1 mission for NASA on a trip that returned in May.

One of the non-fungible token (NFT) space's biggest marketplaces has admitted that a senior employee has been getting the drop on its most popular drops. From a report: Twitter users last night accused Nate Chastain, head of product at OpenSea, of using secret Ethereum wallets to snap up the platform's front-page NFT drops before general release. Citing transactional data on Etherscan, Twitter user Zuwu said that Chastain seems to be selling these pieces "shortly after the front-page-hype spike for profits." His actions have been likened to frontrunning or insider trading, which in regulated financial markets refers to dealing on information that is not yet public.

On September 15, OpenSea published a blog post acknowledging Chastain's actions. "Yesterday we learned that one of our employees purchased items that they knew were set to display on our front page before they appeared there publicly," said OpenSea. "This is incredibly disappointing. We want to be clear that this behavior does not represent our values as a team. We are taking this very seriously and are conducting an immediate and thorough review of this incident so that we have a full understanding of the facts and additional steps we need to take." The company has rolled out new policies specifying that team members may not buy or sell from collections while they are being promoted, and cannot use confidential information to purchase or sell NFTs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A Long Island man was charged on Wednesday with using his position as an I.T. supervisor for Suffolk County to mine cryptocurrency from government offices, costing the county thousands of dollars in electricity. Prosecutors said that Christopher Naples, 42, of Mattituck, L.I., had hidden 46 specialized devices used to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in six rooms in the Suffolk County Center in Riverhead, including underneath floorboards and inside an unused electrical panel. Mr. Naples was charged with public corruption, grand larceny, computer trespass and official misconduct. If convicted of the top charge, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

Mr. Naples had admitted that the devices belonged to him and that he had been operating them for at least several months before the district attorney's office was alerted to the scheme. Prosecutors said that at least 10 of Mr. Naples's machines had been running since February, costing Suffolk County more than $6,000. [...] [G]iven that 36 more machines had been discovered, it was likely that Mr. Naples had cost the county thousands more. [...] [O]ne room in which Mr. Naples had placed the devices had critically important computer servers and other equipment for the entire county, and that the temperature in that room in which the devices were placed had dropped 20 degrees shortly after they were disabled.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, OpenStack, the open-source, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud {and related projects such as Airship, open-source tools for cloud provisioning, and Zuul, the Ansible-based continuous integration (CI) system} has hovered between what Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment and Slope of Enlightenment. Now with Microsoft joining the Open Infrastructure Foundation, it should be clear to anyone that OpenStack and its related technologies have jumped to the Plateau of Productivity. Why? Because together they can advance and profit from using these cloud technologies to further the hybrid cloud and, an OpenStack specialty, 5G. Microsoft is joining the Open Infrastructure Foundation as a Platinum Member. This move makes perfect sense. According to the 2021 OpenStack User Survey, which will be released shortly in Superuser Magazine, 40% of OpenStack users running their deployment in a multi-cloud configuration are already running OpenStack on Azure. Clearly, OpenInfra and Microsoft belong together.

Artist Banksy's team was warned his website had a security weakness seven days before a hacker scammed a fan out of $336,000. The BBC reports: On Tuesday a piece of art was advertised on Banksy's official website as the world-renowned graffiti artist's first NFT (non-fungible token). A British collector won the auction to buy it, before realizing it was a fake. A cyber-security expert warned Banksy that the website could be hacked, but was ignored. Sam Curry, a professional ethical hacker from the US and founder of security consultancy Palisade, said he first heard that the site could have a weakness on the social network Discord, last month.

"I was in a security forum and multiple people were posting links to the site. I'd clicked one and immediately saw it was vulnerable, so I reached out to Banksy's team via email as I wasn't sure if anyone else had. "They didn't respond over email, so I tried a few other ways to contact them including their Instagram, but never received a response." Mr Curry's disclosure, first reported by rekt.news was made initially by email on 25 August. The BBC was shown the email thread and has tried to contact Banksy's team several times, with no response.

Mr Curry says the website flaw -- which has now been fixed -- "allowed you to create arbitrary files on the website" and post your own pages and content. The new page, called 'Banksy.co.uk/NFT,' was deleted shortly after the auction, with Banksy's team saying: "Any Banksy NFT auctions are not affiliated with the artist in any shape or form." The British man who won the auction is a prominent NFT collector and Banksy fan known on Twitter as Pranksy. He said he felt "burned" when he was scammed out of nearly $340,000 in cryptocurrency coins, but was relieved when the hacker inexplicably returned most of the money to him by the end of the day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It looks like a Lightning cable, it works like a Lightning cable, and I can use it to connect my keyboard to my Mac. But it is actually a malicious cable that can record everything I type, including passwords, and wirelessly send that data to a hacker who could be more than a mile away. This is the new version of a series of penetration testing tools made by the security researcher known as MG. MG previously demoed an earlier version of the cables for Motherboard at the DEF CON hacking conference in 2019. Shortly after that, MG said he had successfully moved the cables into mass production, and cybersecurity vendor Hak5 started selling the cables. But the more recent cables come in new physical variations, including Lightning to USB-C, and include more capabilities for hackers to play with.

"There were people who said that Type C cables were safe from this type of implant because there isn't enough space. So, clearly, I had to prove that wrong. :)," MG told Motherboard in an online chat. The OMG Cables, as they're called, work by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot itself that a hacker can connect to from their own device. From here, an interface in an ordinary web browser lets the hacker start recording keystrokes. The malicious implant itself takes up around half the length of the plastic shell, MG said. MG said that the new cables now have geofencing features, where a user can trigger or block the device's payloads based on the physical location of the cable. "It pairs well with the self-destruct feature if an OMG Cable leaves the scope of your engagement and you do not want your payloads leaking or being accidentally run against random computers," he said. "We tested this out in downtown Oakland and were able to trigger payloads at over 1 mile," he added. He said that the Type C cables allow the same sort of attacks to be carried out against smartphones and tablets. Various other improvements include being able to change keyboard mappings, the ability to forge the identity of specific USB devices, such as pretending to be a device that leverages a particular vulnerability on a system.

Locast has announced that it is suspending its TV streaming service starting today, following a court ruling earlier this week in a lawsuit from ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC, which jointly sued the nonprofit service shortly after it launched. From a report: "As a non-profit, Locast was designed from the very beginning to operate in accordance with the strict letter of the law, but in response to the court's recent rulings, with which we respectfully disagree, we are hereby suspending operations, effective immediately," an email to Locast users sent out this morning reads. Locast was launched in 2019 as an internet-based alternative to over-the-air television, rebroadcasting local, free over-the-air signals over the internet to users in those areas. Unlike Aereo, a similar service that was shut down after a lawsuit ruled it was violating copyright by rebroadcasting over-the-air networks online, Locast relied on a loophole, using its status as a nonprofit to retransmit broadcasts. Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued (2019).

Shortly after announcing Windows 11's October 5 release date, Microsoft began booting Windows Insider preview PCs with unsupported hardware out of Windows 11 testing. PCWorld reports: [T]he day that Microsoft announced Windows 11's release date, Windows Insiders on unsupported PCs began receiving a message telling them they're no longer eligible for the Windows 11 Insider program, as seen in BetaWiki's tweet above and confirmed by BleepingComputer. Unsupported Insider PCs need to go back to Windows 10 to continue participating in the program (and presumably continue to receive updates). While the move isn't a surprise, the timing is, as Microsoft previously stated that Windows Insiders with non-compatible hardware would be able to continue to run Windows 11 until it was "generally available." Most PCs released or built over the last three years will run Windows 11 without issue, however.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: Nearly a decade ago, Theranos touted a revolutionary diagnostic device that could run myriad medical tests without having to draw blood through a needle. Today, the startup's founder, Elizabeth Holmes, goes to court, where she's facing 12 criminal counts for statements she made to investors and consumers about her company's technology. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University at the age of 19. Driven by her phobia of needles, Holmes wanted to create diagnostic tests that use blood from finger pricks rather than from needles. The idea caught on, attracting well-connected board members like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis, drawing over $400 million in investments from wealthy investors including Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, and securing lucrative partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway. At its peak, Theranos was worth over $9 billion. But Theranos' myth started unwinding in 2015 when a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the company had been performing most of its tests on traditional blood diagnostic machines rather than its own "Einstein" device. The company's own employees doubted the machine's accuracy.

Holmes and [Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Theranos' president and chief operating officer] were indicted in June 2018, and soon Theranos was facing mounting civil and criminal investigations. The company settled a Securities and Exchange Commission probe and shut down shortly thereafter. The end of Theranos didn't halt the scrutiny of Holmes' and Balwani's behavior, though. Three rounds of indictments have brought the total to 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The latest indictment, which supersedes the previous two, was filed in June 2020. Both Holmes and Balwani have pleaded not guilty, and Balwani's trial will begin next year. The indictments aren't limited to claims about the company's proprietary diagnostic machine but also include what Holmes and Balwani allegedly said to investors about revenue and business deals. The prosecution says the pair told investors that Theranos would bring in over $100 million in revenue in 2014, helping the company break even, and hit $1 billion in 2015, amounts that exceeded the executives' actual expectations. Prosecutors also say that the pair falsely told investors that the company landed contracts with the Pentagon.

The road to trial has been filled with delays, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then again when Holmes became pregnant. Her child was born in July, around the time the trial was supposed to begin. If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison. Today's proceedings kick off jury selection, in which prosecutors and defense attorneys will begin questioning over 100 potential jurors. [...] Opening statements are scheduled to begin on September 8, and the trial may run through mid-December. Holmes is expected to claim that Balwani, who was her boyfriend for much of Theranos' existence, was an abusive and controlling partner. A court filing released on Saturday revealed that Holmes is expected to take the stand during the trial and allege that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails and was physically violent, claims that Balwani denies. Her attorneys say these actions affected her "state of mind" when the alleged fraud took place.

"A batch of early coronavirus data that went missing for a year has emerged from hiding," reports the New York Times. (Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, had found copies of 13 of the deleted sequences on Google Cloud.)

Though their deletion raised some suspicions, "An odd explanation has emerged, stemming from an editorial oversight by a scientific journal," reports the Times. "And the sequences have been uploaded into a different database, overseen by the Chinese government."

The Times also notes that the researchers had already posted their early findings online in March 2020: That month, they also uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, which is maintained by the National Institutes of Health, and submitted a paper describing their results to a scientific journal called Small. The paper was published in June 2020... [A] spokeswoman for the N.I.H. said that the authors of the study had requested in June 2020 that the sequences be withdrawn from the database. The authors informed the agency that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database... On July 5, more than a year after the researchers withdrew the sequences from the Sequence Read Archive and two weeks after Dr. Bloom's report was published online, the sequences were quietly uploaded to a database maintained by China National Center for Bioinformation by Ben Hu, a researcher at Wuhan University and a co-author of the Small paper.

On July 21, the disappearance of the sequences was brought up during a news conference in Beijing... According to a translation of the news conference by a journalist at the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency, the vice minister of China's National Health Commission, Dr. Zeng Yixin, said that the trouble arose when editors at Small deleted a paragraph in which the scientists described the sequences in the Sequence Read Archive. "Therefore, the researchers thought it was no longer necessary to store the data in the N.C.B.I. database," Dr. Zeng said, referring to the Sequence Read Archive, which is run by the N.I.H.

An editor at Small, which specializes in science at the micro and nano scale and is based in Germany, confirmed his account. "The data availability statement was mistakenly deleted," the editor, Plamena Dogandzhiyski, wrote in an email. "We will issue a correction very shortly, which will clarify the error and include a link to the depository where the data is now hosted." The journal posted a formal correction to that effect on Thursday.
While the researchers' first report had described their sequences as coming from patients "early in the epidemic," thus provoking intense curiosity, the sequences were, as promised, updated, to include a more specific date after they were published in the database, according to the Times. "They were taken from Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University on January 30 — almost two months after the earliest reports of Covid-19 in China."

Developer Harrison Allen has developed a playable clone of Pokemon for the Pebble smartwatch, which was officially discontinued in late 2016 after the company was sold to Fitbit. Gizmodo reports: According to the game's developer, Harrison Allen, Pebblemon uses a graphics library they created that replicates Pokémon Yellow, which was the first version of the popular game series to take advantage of the Game Boy Color's limited color palette. As a result, while Pebblemon appears to be playable using the Pebble smartwatch's buttons (the wearable lacked a touchscreen), it's a smaller version of the original game featuring "various areas within the Johto region" but players will still "Encounter all 251 Pokemon from the Game Boy Color games" and will still be able to find items to help them out during gameplay.

Pebblemon is currently available through the Rebble.io repository, which was created shortly after the company died as a place to continue to allow users to maintain their smart wearables, and to give developers a way to distribute new apps. If you don't already use it, you'll have to jump through a few hoops to get it to play nice with your Pebble watch, but it doesn't appear terribly difficult. Alternately, Allen has provided all of his source code through GitHub, if you're in the mood to compile or adapt it into something else yourself. There are two things to keep in mind if you want to try Pebblemon out: it's only compatible with the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Round, and Pebble 2 models -- not the original version of the wearable -- and you're going to want to jump on this as soon as possible because there's a very good chance Nintendo's eager lawyers are already aware of the game, and are already working to wipe it off the face of the Earth.

A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that lead to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today. Krebs on Security reports: Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals that's been "swatting" and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames. At Sonderman's sentencing hearing today, prosecutors told the court the defendant and his co-conspirators would text and call targets and their families, posting their personal information online and sending them pizzas and other deliveries of food as a harassment technique.

Other victims of the group told prosecutors their tormentors further harassed them by making false reports of child abuse to social services local to the target's area, and false reports in the target's name to local suicide prevention hotlines. Eventually, when subjects of their harassment refused to sell or give up their Twitter and Instagram usernames, Sonderman and others would swat their targets -- or make a false report to authorities in the target's name with the intention of sending a heavily armed police response to that person's address. [...]

Sonderman might have been eligible to knock a few months off his sentence had he cooperated with investigators and refrained from committing further crimes while out on bond. But prosecutors said that shortly after his release, Sonderman went right back to doing what he was doing when he got caught. Investigators who subpoenaed his online communications found he'd logged into the Instagram account "FreeTheSoldiers," which was known to have been used by the group to harass people for their social media handles. Sonderman was promptly re-arrested for violating the terms of his release, and prosecutors played for the court today a recording of a phone call Sonderman made from jail in which he brags to a female acquaintance that he wiped his mobile phone two days before investigators served another search warrant on his home. "Although it may seem inadequate, the law is the law," said Judge Norris after giving Sonderman the maximum sentence allowed by law under the statute. "The harm it caused, the death and destruction... it's almost unspeakable. This is not like cases we frequently have that involve guns and carjacking and drugs. This is a whole different level of insidious criminal behavior here."

According to CNBC, the UK's largest chip producer, Newport Wafer Fab, is set to be acquired by Chinese-owned semiconductor company Nexperia for around $87 million next week. The deal comes shortly after the crown jewl of the UK tech industry, Arm, agreed to be acquired by US chip giant Nvidia for $40 billion. From the report: Located in Newport, South Wales, privately-held NWF's chip plant dates back to 1982 and it is one of just a handful of semiconductor fabricators in the U.K. Nexperia is set to announce the takeover as soon as Monday or Tuesday, the sources said. "We are in constructive conversations with NWF and Welsh Government about the future of NWF," a Nexperia spokesperson said. "Until we have reached a conclusion we cannot further comment." The deal comes during a global chip shortage that has led countries to try and become more independent when it comes to semiconductor production. The vast majority of today's chips are manufactured in Asia, with Taiwan's TSMC, South Korea's Samsung and China's SMIC among the largest chip producers in the world.

Tom Tugendhat, leader of the U.K. government's China Research Group and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said he was concerned about a potential takeover of NWF in a letter to U.K. Business Minister Kwasi Kwarteng in June. "I must stress again that having the U.K.'s leading 200mm silicon and semiconductor technology development and processing facility being taken over by a Chinese entity -- in my view -- represents a significant economic and national security concern," Tugendhat said. He urged the U.K. government to review the deal under the National Security and Investment Act, which was introduced in April as part of an effort to protect the nation's technology companies from overseas takeovers when there's an economic risk or a security threat. "This is the largest last remaining advanced semiconductor factory in England being sold to the Chinese and the British government aren't doing s*** about it," a source said, adding that they should at least try and get $1 billion for it.

The discovery of a huge fossilised skull that was wrapped up and hidden in a Chinese well nearly 90 years ago has forced scientists to rewrite the story of human evolution. Shmoodling writes: Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals. The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or "Dragon man," by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation.

"I think this is one of the most important finds of the past 50 years," said Prof Chris Stringer, research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the project. "It's a wonderfully preserved fossil." The skull appears to have a remarkable backstory. According to the researchers, it was originally found in 1933 by Chinese labourers building a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin, in China's northernmost province, Heilongjiang, during the Japanese occupation. To keep the skull from falling into Japanese hands it was wrapped and hidden in an abandoned well, resurfacing only in 2018 after the man who hid it told his grandson about it shortly before he died. Details are published in three papers in The Innovation.

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company's sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. MIT Technology Review reports: While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such technologies -- even to notorious dictatorships or other dangerous regimes. But charges in the Paris Judicial Court against leaders at Amesys, a surveillance company that later changed its name to Nexa Technology, claim that the sales to Libya and Egypt over the last decade led to the crushing of opposition, torture of dissidents, and other human rights abuses. The former head of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, and three current and former executives at Nexa technologies were indicted for "complicity in acts of torture" for selling spy technology to the Libyan regime. French media report that Nexa president Olivier Bohbot, managing director Renaud Roques, and former president Stephane Salies face the same charges for surveillance sales to Egypt.

The charges were brought by brought by the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes unit of the court, but the case began 10 years ago when Amesys sold its system for listening in on internet traffic to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Six victims of the spying testified in France about being arrested and tortured by the regime, an experience that they say is a direct result of these spying tools. In 2014, the company sold surveillance software to Egyptian president Abdel al-Sisi shortly after he took control of the country in a military coup. The complaints, filed by the International Federation for Human Rights, or FIDH, and the French League for Human Rights, allege that the company did not have government permission to sell its technologies to Libya or Egypt because oversight was weak and at times nonexistent. The claims led to an independent judicial investigation against Amesys/Nexa, which is still ongoing. Next, the judges will decide whether to send the case to criminal court or dismiss it if there is not sufficient evidence -- but the indictment is a major step forward and points toward the prospect that the judges will view the evidence as potentially strong enough to support a criminal trial.

A London-based hedge fund that suffered losses betting against US retailer GameStop during the first meme stock rally in January is shutting its doors [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: White Square Capital, run by former Paulson & Co trader Florian Kronawitter, told investors that it would shut its main fund and return capital this month after a review of its business model, according to people familiar with the fund and a letter to investors. White Square, which at its peak managed about $440m in assets, had bet against GameStop, say people familiar with its positioning, and suffered double-digit per cent losses in January.

The move marks one of the first closures of a hedge fund hit by the huge surges in so-called meme stocks. Retail investors, often co-ordinating their actions on online forums such as Reddit's r/WallStreetBets and in some cases deliberately targeting hedge fund short sellers, drove up the price of stocks such as GameStop and cinema chain AMC Entertainment in January and again in recent weeks. GameStop, for instance, soared from less than $20 at the start of the year to more than $480 at its January peak. That led to big losses for some funds, including US-based Melvin Capital, run by Steve Cohen protege Gabe Plotkin, and Light Street Capital, run by Glen Kacher, a former Tiger cub who worked at Julian Robertson's Tiger Management. However, the funds remain in operation, and shortly after its losses Melvin received a $2.75bn investment from Cohen's Point72 Asset Management and Ken Griffin's Citadel. "The decision to close down is related to thinking the equity long-short model is challenged," said Kronawitter.

After six months of check-out and calibration in orbit, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite will make its first two data streams available to the public on June 22. It launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Nov. 21, 2020, and is a U.S.-European collaboration to measure sea surface height and other key ocean features, such as ocean surface wind speed and wave height. Phys.Org reports: One of the sea surface height data streams that will be released is accurate to 2.3 inches (5.8 centimeters) and will be available within hours of when the instruments aboard Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich collect it. A second stream of data, accurate to 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters), will be released two days after collection. The difference in when the products become available balances accuracy with delivery timeliness for tasks like forecasting the weather and helping to monitor the formation of hurricanes. More datasets, which will be accurate to about 1.2 inches (2.9 centimeters), are slated for distribution later this year and are intended for research activities and climate science including tracking global mean sea level rise.

The satellite, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, collects its measurements for about 90% of the world's oceans. It is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission. The second satellite, Sentinel-6B, is slated for launch in 2025. Together, they are the latest in a series of spacecraft starting with TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992 and continuing with the Jason series of satellites that have been gathering precise ocean height measurements for nearly 30 years. Shortly after launch, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich moved into position, trailing the current reference sea level satellite Jason-3 by 30 seconds. Scientists and engineers then spent time cross-calibrating the data collected by both satellites to ensure the continuity of measurements between the two. Once they have are assured of the data quality, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will then become the primary sea level satellite.