James Rundle writes via the Wall Street Journal: A few years ago, executives at Intel began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn't have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers could test it for security flaws. [...] Intel's answer to this conundrum was to create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of 2019. The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more than 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment at all times. Even its location is secret -- Intel representatives declined to say where exactly it is.

The lab brings commercial value to Intel, [said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager of Intel's product assurance and security unit.], citing company research that shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that proactively test their products. [...] The lab has changed Intel's product development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with technical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10 years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian said. "Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware again," he said.

The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) is pushing for the implementation of conditional driver's licenses for the elderly by 2025, Yonhap News reports. How they'll determine who gets to keep their licenses will be via virtual reality. The Next Web reports: As of Monday, a three-year research project has been introduced, which will employ VR tech to assess whether drivers aged 65 years and older can remain behind the wheel. The program's total budget is expected to reach approximately $3 million (3.6 billion won). Contrary to other countries around the word, South Korea has no strict regulations regarding the driving license of seniors, unless they test positive for dementia. Currently, two measures apply: the three-year license renewal period for those aged 75 years and older, and the voluntary return of the driver's license for people over 65 years-old. However, the KNPA is still raising concerns over the number of accidents attributed to senior drivers, as well as the continuous aging of the country's population.

The VR test will asses driving, cognitive, and memory skills using a VR headset, close to how virtual reality technology is used in dementia clinics to check the brain functions of older people. While the specifics are yet to be disclosed, a similar academic research by independent scientists has run an experiment, testing driving performance evaluation based on virtual reality tech. The researchers conducted driving simulator experiments to measure various driving behaviors under many different driving conditions, in order to examine the participants' visual acuity. The virtual simulations included two scenarios: daytime and nighttime highway driving. In both cases, three unexpected incidents were created to test the drivers' performance [...].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The CEOs of 13 large European telecom companies today called on tech giants -- presumably including Netflix and other big US companies -- to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance the relationship between global technology giants and the European digital ecosystem." The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize the cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that home-Internet customers choose to receive.

Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model -- which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation -- can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants, but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory topics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face with services by big tech."

As wafer costs increase, so are the costs of GPUs. According to a post on the Board Forums, AMD says it's increasing the price of its RX 6000 series GPUs by 10 percent across the board. ExtremeTech reports: This pricing change will apparently occur in the next shipment of GPUs to its partners, which will apparently drive up the price of these GPUs by $20 to $40 USD. This news arrives just in time for the holiday shopping season, when demand for GPUs is expected to increase even more, as if that is even possible.

According to a translation of the board posting, AMD is citing TSMC wafer costs as the reason for the change, and as we reported earlier, sub-16nm prices, including 12nm, 7nm, and 5nm, are said to have increased roughly 10 percent, while TSMC's older nodes have gone up by as much as 20 percent. AMD seems to be passing this price increase along to its partners, who in turn are passing it along to us, the customer, or the scalper, as it were. Then the scalper passes it along to us, the gamers. Although, as Videocardz points out AMD also produces its CPUs at TSMC and there hasn't been a similar across-the-board increase, which is curious.

Nissan has announced plans to spend around $17.6 billion over the next five years to accelerate the roll-out of electric vehicles. "And to emphasize that point, Nissan unveiled a pack of delightful EV concepts, including an adorable pickup truck, an outdoorsy SUV, and a sleek sports car," reports The Verge. From the report: Nissan said it will produce 23 new electrified models by 2030, 15 of which will be fully electric. The company is targeting a 50 percent electrification mix for its Nissan and Infiniti brands by the end of the decade. In the US, Nissan plans to take things a little slower, only targeting 40 percent of its sales to be EVs by 2040. On batteries, Nissan is pursuing what it calls "all-solid-state batteries (ASSB)" by 2028. The company is preparing a "pilot plant" in Yokohama, Japan, for early 2024. Solid-state batteries could theoretically charge faster, hold more power, and last longer than traditional lithium-ion batteries, which use liquid electrolytes to move energy around. While solid-state batteries have eluded researchers for years, some companies claim that a breakthrough is nearly at hand.

Nissan says that solid-state batteries will help make EVs more affordable by reducing the price of battery packs down to $75 per kWh by 2028. The company aims to bring it further down to $65 per kWh to achieve cost parity between EV and gasoline vehicles in the future. To underline its commitment to an electric future, Nissan revealed a handful of EV concepts: a small pickup truck called Surf-Out; a boxy crossover called Hang-Out; a compact SUV called Chill-Out; and a convertible sports car called Max-Out. [...] It's an impressive commitment, but Nissan notably stopped short of making the same promise that other automakers have to phase out the production of gas-powered vehicles. For example, Volvo and General Motors have vowed to become EV-only companies by 2030 and 2040, respectively.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Three former Google employees who were fired by the company in 2019 sued Google on Monday, claiming that the company violated the part of its code of conduct that says "Don't Be Evil." "Don't Be Evil" was, famously, Google's motto for years. The company moved away from the motto after renaming itself Alphabet in 2015, but "Don't Be Evil" is still part of the company's official employee code of conduct: "Remember don't be evil, and if you see something that you think isn't right -- speak up!," the final line of Google's code of conduct states. Employees are expected to sign the contract as a condition of their employment at Google.

The new lawsuit, which alleges a breach of contract by Google, comes as part of drawn out legal proceedings between Google and three former employees who were fired within minutes of each other on November 25, 2019. Google claimed to fire the workers for leaking "confidential" information to the press, and because they engaged in "systematic searches" for information "outside the scope of their job." But the software engineers say they were fired for protesting Google's decision to sell cloud computing software to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which at the time was caging migrants and separating parents from children. They circulated a company-wide petition requesting Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP or ICE. The three workers, Rebecca Rivers, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman, are now suing Google for allegedly violating its own code of conduct as well as California public policy. California sued Trump in 2019 over the indefinite detention of migrant children. "The new complaint alleges that all three of the fired employees saw Google's collaboration with CBP under the Trump administration as 'evil' and had followed Google's mandate to call out unethical conduct by protesting the company's actions," the report adds. "It claims that Google never informed the fired employees that they had in any way violated the company's 'data security policy,' and that none of the employees had engaged in 'systematic searches.' They had only accessed documents that any full-time Google employee could have found on their own, court documents say."

No one really knew why some patients with a white blood cell cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or C.L.L., relapsed after treatment and got a second cancer. Were some cancer cells just resistant? An unexpected answer to this mystery has been found using a new technique that researchers call bar coding: The treatment does not always target the right cells. From a report: Scientists discovered that the cancer does not always originate in the mature bone marrow cells where it is found and where textbooks say it originates. Instead, for some patients, the mother lode of the cancer can be primitive bone marrow cells, the stem cells, that give rise to all of the body's white and red blood cells. Those cells, not affected by the chemotherapy treatment, can spawn new cancer cells, causing a relapse. The discovery is one early fruit of the bar coding method, which is aiding the study of the origins of cancer and other diseases. The results are too new to have led to patient therapies. But they are leading to provocative discoveries that are expected to inspire novel methods for treating diseases.

The method works by marking individual cells with a stamp that is passed on to all of a cell's progeny. Researchers can look at a cell, note its bar code and trace its lineage back to its parents, grandparents, great-grandparents -- all the way back to its origins -- because each cell that arose from the original bar coded cell has the same stamp. The idea for bar coding during embryonic development originated with Dr. Jay Shendure and his colleagues at the University of Washington, and this class of methods was anointed the breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2018. Now there is a variety of methods for bar coding ranging from embryo cells to cancer cells to mature cells.

For example, Dr. Shendure and another group of colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are using bar codes in mice with pancreatic cancer to study the spread of cancer cells in their bodies. In the case of C.L.L. above, Dr. Vijay Sankaran at Boston Children's Hospital and his colleagues bar coded human cancer cells by taking advantage of innocuous, naturally occurring mutations that mark individual cells and are inherited by their progeny. Bar coding, Dr. Sankaran said, "starts to give us a view of cancer that we never had before."

Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin has put forward a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that aims to tackle the network's gas fee problems by adding a limit on the total transaction calldata, which would, in turn, reduce transaction gas cost. From a report: Since Ethereum can only process 15 transactions per second, gas fees tend to spike at times of network congestion. On November 9, the average transaction network fee reached USD 62 per transaction. As of now, Ethereum transactions cost around USD 44, according to BitInfoCharts.

After highlighting concerns regarding the transaction fees on the Ethereum network, Buterin suggested the new EIP-4488, saying that it would "decrease transaction calldata gas cost, and add a limit of how much total transaction calldata can be in a block." In other words, EIP-4488 would limit the total transaction calldata, where data from external calls to functions are stored, before reducing the calldata gas cost to remove the possibility of breaking the network.

The UK competition regulator is expected to block Meta's $315m acquisition of online gif platform Giphy in the coming days in an escalation of the watchdog's assault on Big Tech. Financial Times: The Competition and Markets Authority is set to reverse the deal according to individuals close to the matter, in what would be the first time the CMA has unwound a Big Tech deal. The watchdog began investigating Meta's acquisition of New-York based Giphy -- the biggest provider of animated images known as gifs to social networks -- in June last year. A decision to block the deal would set an eye-catching precedent from the UK regulator, which has never sought to reverse a completed tech deal. In August the CMA provisionally ruled Meta, formerly known as Facebook, should be forced to sell Giphy due to competition concerns. It has until December 1 to make a final call. At that time the CMA argued Meta could cut off its rivals' access to gifs, and demand platforms like TikTok or Snapchat hand over more of their data in order to access gifs, consolidating power in Meta's hands. The watchdog also said the deal could remove a competitor to Meta in the display advertising market in the UK, despite Giphy's lack of presence in that sector.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, CNBC reported Monday citing sources.

Update: Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal will replace Jack Dorsey as CEO, the company announced. From a report: Dorsey, 45, was serving as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Dorsey will remain a member of the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders, the company said. Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor will become the chairman of the board, succeeding Patrick Pichette, a former Google executive, who will remain on the board as chair of the audit committee.

"I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders," Dorsey said in a statement, though he didn't provide any additional detail on why he decided to resign. Agrawal will have to meet Twitter's aggressive internal goals. The company said earlier this year it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.

CNBC reports: Cryptocurrency miners are using compromised Google Cloud accounts for computationally-intensive mining purposes, Google has warned. The search giant's cybersecurity team provided details in a report published Wednesday. The so-called "Threat Horizons" report aims to provide intelligence that allows organizations to keep their cloud environments secure. "Malicious actors were observed performing cryptocurrency mining within compromised Cloud instances," Google wrote in an executive summary of the report...

Google said 86% of 50 recently compromised Google Cloud accounts were used to perform cryptocurrency mining. In the majority of cases, cryptocurrency mining software was downloaded within 22 seconds of the account being compromised, Google said.

"A team of researchers has finally created a long-sought locally testable code that can immediately betray whether it's been corrupted..." reports Quanta magazine.

"Many thought local testability would never be achieved in its ideal form." Now, in a preprint released on November 8, the computer scientist Irit Dinur of the Weizmann Institute of Science and four mathematicians, Shai Evra, Ron Livne, Alex Lubotzky and Shahar Mozes, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have found it. "It's one of the most remarkable phenomena that I know of in mathematics or computer science," said Tom Gur of the University of Warwick. "It's been the holy grail of an entire field."

Their new technique transforms a message into a super-canary, an object that testifies to its health better than any other message yet known. Any corruption of significance that is buried anywhere in its superstructure becomes apparent from simple tests at a few spots. "This is not something that seems plausible," said Madhu Sudan of Harvard University. "This result suddenly says you can do it."

Most prior methods for encoding data relied on randomness in some form. But for local testability, randomness could not help. Instead, the researchers had to devise a highly nonrandom graph structure entirely new to mathematics, which they based their new method on. It is both a theoretical curiosity and a practical advance in making information as resilient as possible....

To get a sense of what their graph looks like, imagine observing it from the inside, standing on a single edge. They construct their graph such that every edge has a fixed number of squares attached. Therefore, from your vantage point you'd feel as if you were looking out from the spine of a booklet. However, from the other three sides of the booklet's pages, you'd see the spines of new booklets branching from them as well. Booklets would keep branching out from each edge ad infinitum. "It's impossible to visualize. That's the whole point," said Lubotzky. "That's why it is so sophisticated...."

[A] test at one node can reveal information about errors from far away nodes. By making use of higher dimensions, the graph is ultimately connected in ways that go beyond what we typically even think of as connections... It establishes a new state of the art for error-correcting codes, and it also marks the first substantial payoff from bringing the mathematics of high-dimensional expanders to bear on codes...

Practical and theoretical applications should soon follow. Different forms of locally testable codes are now being used in decentralized finance, and an optimal version will allow even better decentralized tools.

Despite recent reports that congestion issues are easing on the water at California's major ports, drayage truckers claim this isn't the case for them -- as long wait times, a flawed appointment system and other efficiency issues continue to plague marine terminal operators in the state. From a report: As Port of Oakland officials are urging ocean carriers to add direct services to their port to help relieve supply chain bottlenecks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, truckers whose livelihoods depend on how many containers they can turn in a day are bracing for possible extra capacity if steamship lines skip Southern California and head to Oakland.

"All we hear in the news is the lack of congestion on the waterside and we can confirm that, but we are drowning on the landside by long lines and staffing issues at the terminals," Bill Aboudi, president of AB Trucking, told FreightWaves this week. An unreliable appointment system has drayage companies checking day and night to find open slots and vessel schedule changes -- which Aboudi compared to playing musical chairs -- have truckers concerned they won't be able to handle a container volume increase if some of these issues aren't addressed soon. A group of trucking company owners, each with about 30 years of drayage experience under their belts, are working with port officials in Oakland to create a task force to air their grievances and open the lines of communications with marine terminal operators.

Google has pledged more restrictions on its use of data from its Chrome browser to address concerns raised by Britain's competition regulator about its plan to ban third-party cookies that advertisers use to track consumers. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating Google's plan to cut support for some cookies in Chrome - an initiative called the "Privacy Sandbox" -- because it is worried it will impede competition in digital advertising. Alphabet's Google has said its users want more privacy when they are browsing the web, including not being tracked across sites.

Other players in the $250 billion global digital ad sector, however, have said the loss of cookies in the world's most popular browser will limit their ability to collect information for personalising ads and make them more reliant on Google's user databases. Google agreed earlier this year to not implement the plan without the CMA's sign-off, and said the changes agreed with the British regulator will apply globally.

Apple's first AR headset will be released in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to a research note from analyst Ming-chi Kuo. The Verge: Kuo predicted back in March that the headset would be released sometime next year, and is now also providing more technical information on the device. The headset will have two processors, according to Kuo, one with "the same level of computing power as M1" and one lower-end chip to handle input from the various sensors. For example, Kuo says that the headset has "at least 6-8 optical modules to simultaneously provide continuous video see-through AR services." The headset is also said to have two 4K OLED microdisplays from Sony. Kuo cites the headset's "Mac-level (PC-level) computing power," its ability to be operated untethered, and its wide range of applications as factors that will differentiate it from competitors. Various reports on the device have disagreed as to whether it will be wholly independent or rely on an iPhone or a separate processor box to stream content.

We're on alert overload. Stray comments and offhand requests once shouted across the office now blink and buzz at us from Microsoft Teams and Slack. Our communication has grown fragmented, spread across myriad apps we have to learn, conform to, remember to check. From a report: Meanwhile, personal texts and social-media mentions have bled into the workday after all this time at home, adding another layer of distraction to our time on the clock. Why put your phone on silent if the boss isn't hovering over you? Our culture has evolved to accommodate rapid communication, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and it can be mentally taxing. Many of us struggle to conjure up that brilliant thought that hit right before the notification burst in. "Your memory is just overflowing with information," she says.

It doesn't make for great circumstances for getting work done, but there are ways individuals, managers and organizations can contend with the onslaught. Dr. Mark's research finds people switch screens an average of 566 times a day. Half the time we're interrupted; the other half we pull ourselves away. Breaks -- even mindless ones like scrolling Facebook -- can be positive, replenishing our cognitive resources, Dr. Mark says. But when something external diverts our focus, it takes us an average of 25 minutes and 26 seconds to get back to our original task, she has found. (Folks often switch to different projects in between.) And it stresses us out. Research using heart monitors shows that the interval between people's heart beats becomes more regular when they're interrupted, a sign they're in fight-or-flight mode. The onus is on teams and organizations to create new norms, Dr. Mark says. If individuals just up and turn off their notifications they'll likely be penalized for missing information. Instead, managers should create quiet hours where people aren't expected to respond. "It's a matter of relearning how to work," she says.

The government has introduced new legislation to protect smart devices in people's homes from being hacked. From a report: Recent research from consumer watchdog Which? suggested homes filled with smart devices could be exposed to more than 12,000 attacks in a single week. Default passwords for internet-connected devices will be banned, and firms which do not comply will face huge fines. One expert said that it was an important "first step". Cyber-criminals are increasingly targeting products from phones and smart TVs, to home speakers and internet-connected dishwashers. Hackers who can access one vulnerable device can then go on to access entire home networks and steal personal data.

In 2017, for example, hackers stole data from a US casino via an internet-connected fish tank. There have also been reports of people accessing home webcams and speaking to family members. And poor security on a home wi-fi router could have been behind the uploading of illegal child abuse images from a home network that led to police accusing an innocent couple of the crime. While there are strict rules about protecting people from physical harm -- such as overheating, sharp components or electric shocks -- there are no such rules for cyber-breaches.

FIFA will trial its new automatic offside technology next week at the Arab Cup as a test to potentially use it at the World Cup in Qatar next year. From a report: As per the Times, the technology relies on an artificial intelligence (AI) system sending an instant message to VAR when a player is offside, with the official then left to determine if a player has interfered with the passage of play or not. The technology will be used at all six stadiums used in the Arab Cup -- which also takes place in Qatar -- and comes after several trials behind closed doors took place at the likes of the Etihad Stadium and the Allianz Arena. Despite being able to relay an instant message to VAR, the technology will only be classed as semi-automated as the verdict will be sent to VAR and not the referee himself.

The Israeli government has restricted the list of countries to which local security firms are allowed to sell surveillance and offensive hacking tools by almost two-thirds, cutting the official cyber export list from 102 to 37 entries. From a report: The new list, obtained by Israeli business newspaper Calcalist earlier today, only includes countries with proven democracies, such as those from Europe and the Five Eyes coalition: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.

The list noticeably removes autocratic regimes, to which Israeli companies have often supplied surveillance tools. Spyware developed by Israeli companies like Candiru and the NSO Group has been linked in recent years to human rights abuses in tens of countries, with the tools being used by the local governments to spy on reporters, activists, dissidents, and political rivals.

AT&T and Verizon said they will slightly reduce the power of their 5G transmissions in C-band spectrum for six months. The companies said they will do so to allow federal aviation officials more time to study how such transmission might affect radio altimeters in aircraft. From a report: "We are committed to the rapid deployment of 5G and the safety of aviation," the two companies told the FCC in a new letter. "While we continue to believe the FCC's current rules provide for both, we will, without waiver of our legal rights associated with our substantial investments in these licenses, adopt these precautionary measures to allow for additional time for continued analysis." Importantly, according to the Wall Street Journal, executives in the wireless industry don't expect the power reduction to "seriously impair" the operators' 5G operations in the spectrum band. Further, the operators continued to argue that their 5G transmissions in C-band spectrum do not pose a risk to air travel in the US, despite a report from some airlines showing a potential risk of interference to aircraft operations.