Boeing has found debris in the fuel tanks of 35 of their 737 Max aircraft. After inspecting just 50 of the 400 planes which were awaiting delivery to customers, Boeing found debris in "about two-thirds" of them reports the Wall Street Journal, citing both federal and aviation-industry officials.

"The revelation comes as the plane maker struggles to restore public and airline confidence in the grounded fleet." Materials left behind include tools, rags and boot coverings, according to industry officials familiar with the details... [T]he new problem raises fresh questions about Boeing's ability to resolve lingering lapses in quality-control practices and presents another challenge to Chief Executive David Calhoun, who took charge in January... Last year, debris was found on some 787 Dreamliners, which Boeing produces in Everett, Washington... Boeing also twice had to halt deliveries of the KC-46A military refueling tanker to the U.S. Air Force after tools and rags were found in planes after they had been delivered from its Everett factory north of Seattle.
Their report include this observation from an Air Force procurement chief last summer. "It does not take a rocket scientist to deliver an airplane without trash and debris on it. It just merely requires following a set of processes, having a culture that values integrity of safety above moving the line faster for profit."

But "This isn't an isolated incident either," argues long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace. "The New York Times reported about shody production and weak oversight at Boeing's North Charleston plant which makes the 787 Dreamliner back in April." A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of internal emails, corporate documents and federal records, as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, reveals a culture that often valued production speed over quality. Facing long manufacturing delays, Boeing pushed its work force to quickly turn out Dreamliners, at times ignoring issues raised by employees...

Safety lapses at the North Charleston plant have drawn the scrutiny of airlines and regulators. Qatar Airways stopped accepting planes from the factory after manufacturing mishaps damaged jets and delayed deliveries. Workers have filed nearly a dozen whistle-blower claims and safety complaints with federal regulators, describing issues like defective manufacturing, debris left on planes and pressure to not report violations. Others have sued Boeing, saying they were retaliated against for flagging manufacturing mistakes.

XXongo writes: According to a yet-to-be-published study from Brown University of the origin of 6.5 million tweets about climate and global warming, a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, disproportionately skeptical of climate science and action. The Brown University study wasn't able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had on the climate debate. "On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots," reports The Guardian. "This proportion was higher in certain topics -- bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about 'fake science' and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon. Conversely, tweets that could be categorized as online activism to support action on the climate crisis featured very few bots, at about 5% prevalence."

HB11 Energy, a spin-out company originating at the University of New South Wales, claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected. Along with this announcement, the company also announced a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation. New Atlas reports: The results of decades of research by Emeritus Professor Heinrich Hora, HB11's approach to fusion does away with rare, radioactive and difficult fuels like tritium altogether -- as well as those incredibly high temperatures. Instead, it uses plentiful hydrogen and boron B-11, employing the precise application of some very special lasers to start the fusion reaction. Here's how HB11 describes its "deceptively simple" approach: the design is "a largely empty metal sphere, where a modestly sized HB11 fuel pellet is held in the center, with apertures on different sides for the two lasers. One laser establishes the magnetic containment field for the plasma and the second laser triggers the 'avalanche' fusion chain reaction. The alpha particles generated by the reaction would create an electrical flow that can be channeled almost directly into an existing power grid with no need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine generator."

HB11's Managing Director Dr. Warren McKenzie clarifies over the phone: "A lot of fusion experiments are using the lasers to heat things up to crazy temperatures -- we're not. We're using the laser to massively accelerate the hydrogen through the boron sample using non-linear forced. You could say we're using the hydrogen as a dart, and hoping to hit a boron , and if we hit one, we can start a fusion reaction. That's the essence of it. If you've got a scientific appreciation of temperature, it's essentially the speed of atoms moving around. Creating fusion using temperature is essentially randomly moving atoms around, and hoping they'll hit one another, our approach is much more precise." He continues: "The hydrogen/boron fusion creates a couple of helium atoms. They're naked heliums, they don't have electrons, so they have a positive charge. We just have to collect that charge. Essentially, the lack of electrons is a product of the reaction and it directly creates the current."

The lasers themselves rely upon cutting-edge "Chirped Pulse Amplification" technology, the development of which won its inventors the 2018 Nobel prize in Physics. Much smaller and simpler than any of the high-temperature fusion generators, HB11 says its generators would be compact, clean and safe enough to build in urban environments. There's no nuclear waste involved, no superheated steam, and no chance of a meltdown. "This is brand new," Professor Hora tells us. "10-petawatt power laser pulses. It's been shown that you can create fusion conditions without hundreds of millions of degrees. This is completely new knowledge. I've been working on how to accomplish this for more than 40 years. It's a unique result. Now we have to convince the fusion people -- it works better than the present day hundred million degree thermal equilibrium generators. We have something new at hand to make a drastic change in the whole situation. A substitute for carbon as our energy source. A radical new situation and a new hope for energy and the climate."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The Department of Defense agency responsible for securing the communications of President Trump has suffered a data breach. Here's what is known so far. The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) describes itself as a combat support agency of the Department of Defense (DoD) and is tasked with the responsibility for supporting secure White House communications, including those of President Trump. As well as overseeing Trump's secure calls technology, DISA also establishes and supports communications networks in combat zones and takes care of military cyber-security issues. It has also confirmed a data breach of its network, which exposed data affecting as many as 200,000 users.

First picked up by Reuters, disclosure letters dated February 11 have been sent out to those whose personal data may have been compromised. Although it is not clear which specific servers have been breached, nor the nature of the users to whom the letters have been sent, that an agency with a vision to "connect and protect the war-fighter in cyberspace" should suffer such an incident is concerning, to say the least. While many of the details surrounding this breach are likely to remain, understandably, confidential, given the nature of the DISA work, the letter itself has already been published on Twitter by one recipient. Signed by Roger S. Greenwell, the chief information officer at DISA, the letter revealed the breach took place between May and July last year, and information including social security numbers may have been compromised as a result. It also stated that there is no evidence that any personally identifiable information (PII) has been misused as a result. The letter does, however, confirm that DISA will be offering free credit monitoring services to those who want it.

Science-fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just published the latest installment in my case histories of "adversarial interoperability" -- once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web's immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems' guardians and created a menu-driven interface to campus resources, then the whole internet. Gopher ruled until browser vendors swallowed Gopherspace whole, incorporating it by turning gopher:// into a way to access anything on any Gopher server. Gopher served as the booster rocket that helped the web attain a stable orbit. But the tools that Gopher used to crack open the silos, and the moves that the web pulled to crack open Gopher, are radioactively illegal today.

If you wanted do to Facebook what Gopher did to the mainframes, you would be pulverized by the relentless grinding of software patents, terms of service, anticircumvention law, bullshit theories about APIs being copyrightable. Big Tech blames "network effects" for its monopolies -- but that's a counsel of despair. If impersonal forces (and not anticompetitive bullying) are what keeps tech big then there's no point in trying to make it small. Big Tech's critics swallow this line, demanding that Big Tech be given state-like duties to police user conduct -- duties that require billions and total control to perform, guaranteeing tech monopolists perpetual dominance. But the lesson of Gopher is that adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.

Ethos Capital, the company controversially buying the .org top-level domain, says it will sign legally binding agreements banning steep fee increases for nonprofit domain holders and establishing an independent "stewardship council" that could veto attempts at censorship or inappropriate data use. "The rules would kick in if Ethos successfully acquires Public Interest Registry (PIR), a nonprofit organization that manages .org," reports The Verge. From the report: ICANN, which oversees the internet's top-level domains, is currently scrutinizing the acquisition. President and CEO Goran Marby previously expressed discomfort with the deal, and PIR announced today that it's extending the review period until March 20th. ICANN hasn't yet taken a position on the latest proposal. "We are in the process [of] analyzing the information we have received and therefore have no comment beyond the fact that we welcome Ethos' efforts to engage with the Internet Society community and .org customers, and look forward to the outcome of those discussions," said Marby in a statement to The Verge.

PIR said it would "continue to work collaboratively" to address any outstanding issues with ICANN. In addition to the details above, Ethos and PIR committed to creating a "Community Enablement Fund" to support .org initiatives, and PIR promised to publish an annual transparency report. The price restrictions, meanwhile, would forbid Ethos from raising domain registration and renewal fees by more than 10 percent per year (on average) for the next eight years. Ethos and PIR's press release quotes Sullivan praising the new agreements. "Ethos shows that it has been listening to the questions some have raised. Ethos has responded by embedding its commitments on pricing, censorship and data use policies in a legally-binding contract, and giving ICANN and the community the ability to hold Ethos to its commitments," says the statement.

Slickwraps, a mobile device case retailer, has suffered a major data breach exposing employee resumes, personal customer information, API credentials, and more. Bleeping Computer reports: In a post to Medium, a security researcher named Lynx states that in January 2020 he was able to gain full access to the Slickwraps web site using a path traversal vulnerability in an upload script used for case customizations. Using this access, Lynx stated that they were allegedly able to gain access to the resumes of employees, 9GB of personal customer photos, ZenDesk ticketing system, API credentials, and personal customer information such as hashed passwords, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and transactions.

After trying to report these breaches to Slickwraps, Lynx stated they were blocked multiple times even when stating they did not want a bounty, but rather for Slickwraps to disclose the data breach. "They had no interest in accepting security advice from me. They simply blocked and ignored me," Lynx stated in the Medium post. This post has since been taken down by Medium, but is still available via archive.org. Since posting his Medium post, Lynx told BleepingComputer that another unauthorized user sent an email to 377,428 customers using Slickwraps' ZenDesk help desk system. These emails begin with "If you're reading this it's too late, we have your data" and then link to the Lynx's Medium post. [...] In a statement posted to their Twitter account, Slickwraps CEO Jonathan Endicott has apologized for the data breach and promises to do better in the future. In the statement, though, Endicott says they first learned about this today, February 21st, while Lynx stated and showed screenshots of attempts to contact both Endicott via email and Slickwraps on Twitter prior to today.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For more than a decade now, security experts have had discussions about what's the best way of choosing passwords for online accounts. There's one camp that argues for password complexity by adding numbers, uppercase letters, and special characters, and then there's the other camp, arguing for password length by making passwords longer. This week, in its weekly tech advice column known as Tech Tuesday, the FBI Portland office leaned on the side of longer passwords. "Instead of using a short, complex password that is hard to remember, consider using a longer passphrase," the FBI said. "This involves combining multiple words into a long string of at least 15 characters," it added. "The extra length of a passphrase makes it harder to crack while also making it easier for you to remember."

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has uploaded more than 150,000 images of biological sketches, some dating back to the 15th century, onto the internet. A report adds: They're all in the public domain, and free for anyone who wants them. The images are pulled from journals, research material, and libraries, altogether more than 55 million pages of literature. BHL is "the world's largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives," according to its website. On top of public domain content, BHL also works with rights holders to get permission to make copyrighted materials available under a Creative Commons license.

Alphabet and SoftBank's attempts to launch flying cellphone antennas high into the atmosphere have received backing from global telcos, energizing lobbying efforts aimed at driving regulatory approval for the emerging technology. From a report: Loon, which was spun out of Google parent Alphabet's business incubator, and HAPSMobile, a unit of SoftBank Group's domestic telco, plan to deliver high speed internet to remote areas by flying network equipment at high altitudes. Lobbying efforts by the two firms, which formed an alliance last year, are being joined by companies including aerospace firm Airbus, network vendors Nokia and Ericsson and telcos China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Bharti Airtel.

Last week, Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player in history, returned to the scene of his famous IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeat -- the ballroom of a New York hotel -- for a debate with AI experts organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He met with WIRED senior writer Will Knight there to discuss chess, AI, and a strategy for staying a step ahead of machines. From the report: WIRED: What was it like to return to the venue where you lost to Deep Blue?
Garry Kasparov: I've made my peace with it. At the end of the day, the match was not a curse but a blessing, because I was a part of something very important. Twenty-two years ago, I would have thought differently. But things happen. We all make mistakes. We lose. What's important is how we deal with our mistakes, with negative experience. 1997 was an unpleasant experience, but it helped me understand the future of human-machine collaboration. We thought we were unbeatable, at chess, Go, shogi. All these games, they have been gradually pushed to the side [by increasingly powerful AI programs]. But it doesn't mean that life is over. We have to find out how we can turn it to our advantage. I always say I was the first knowledge worker whose job was threatened by a machine. But that helps me to communicate a message back to the public. Because, you know, nobody can suspect me of being pro-computers.

What message do you want to give people about the impact of AI?
I think it's important that people recognize the element of inevitability. When I hear outcry that AI is rushing in and destroying our lives, that it's so fast, I say no, no, it's too slow. Every technology destroys jobs before creating jobs. When you look at the statistics, only 4 percent of jobs in the US require human creativity. That means 96 percent of jobs, I call them zombie jobs. They're dead, they just don't know it. For several decades we have been training people to act like computers, and now we are complaining that these jobs are in danger. Of course they are. We have to look for opportunities to create jobs that will emphasize our strengths. Technology is the main reason why so many of us are still alive to complain about technology. It's a coin with two sides. I think it's important that, instead of complaining, we look at how we can move forward faster. When these jobs start disappearing, we need new industries, we need to build foundations that will help. Maybe it's universal basic income, but we need to create a financial cushion for those who are left behind. Right now it's a very defensive reaction, whether it comes from the general public or from big CEOs who are looking at AI and saying it can improve the bottom line but it's a black box. I think it's we still struggling to understand how AI will fit in. Further reading: Fast-and-Loose Culture of Esports is Upending Once Staid World of Chess; and Kramnik and AlphaZero: How To Rethink Chess.

Google has announced this week plans to crack down on Android apps that abuse the OS permissions system and request access to user geo-location data when the app is not in use. From a report: Starting with May, the OS maker plans to show warnings in the Play Store backend to all Android app developers about the need to update their apps. Going forward, Android apps will have to request access to location data based on the way they need this information. Google plans to review each app on a case-by-case basis and remove apps from the Play Store if they request access to location data and that's not immediately used inside the app. Google plans to review its own apps as well, the company said in a blog post this week. The goal of this major rule change is to crack down on apps that may be secretly harvesting location data while they are not in use. This type of data is called "background location data" and most app makers often sell it to analytics firms and online advertisers.

Google has implemented a browser capability in Chrome called ScrollToTextFragment that enables deep links to web documents, but it has done so despite unresolved privacy concerns and lack of support from other browser makers. From a report: Via Twitter on Tuesday, Peter Snyder, privacy researcher at privacy-focused browser maker Brave Software, observed that ScrollToTextFragment shipped earlier this month in Chrome 80 unflagged, meaning it's active, despite privacy issues that have been raised. "Imposing privacy and security leaks to existing sites (many of which will never be updated) REALLY should be a 'don't break the web,' never-cross redline," he wrote. "This spec does that." The debate over the feature percolated last year on mailing lists and in GitHub issues posts and picked up in October when the team working on Chrome's Blink engine declared their intent to implement the specification. The feature rollout serves to illustrate that the consensus-based web standards process doesn't do much to constrain the technology Google deploys.

Google is indexing invite links to WhatsApp group chats whose administrators may want to be private. This means with a simple search, random people can discover and join a wide range of WhatsApp group chats. From a report: "Your WhatsApp groups may not be as secure as you think they are," Jordan Wildon, a multimedia journalist for German outlet Deutsche Welle, tweeted on Friday. Using particular Google searches, people can discover links to the chats, Wildon explained. App reverse-engineer Jane Wong added in a tweet that Google has around 470,000 results for a simple search of "chat.whatsapp.com," part of the URL that makes up invites to WhatsApp groups.

Motherboard used a number of specific Google searches to find invite links to WhatsApp groups. Some of the groups appear to not be overly sensitive or for a particular audience. Many of the links on Google lead to groups for sharing porn. But others appear to be catered to specific groups. Motherboard entered one WhatsApp group chat that described itself as being for NGOs accredited by the United Nations. After joining, Motherboard was able to see a list of all 48 participants and their phone numbers.

The coronavirus outbreak could result in at least a 3.3% drop -- and as high as a 9% dip -- in the volume of PCs that will ship globally this year, research firm Canalys reported Thursday evening in its revised projections to clients. From a report: PC shipments will be down between 10.1% to 20.6% in Q1 2020, the firm estimated. The impact will remain visible in Q2, when the shipments are expected to drop between 8.9% (best case scenario, per Canalys) and 23.4% (worst case scenario), it said. In the best case scenario, the outbreak would mean 382 million units will ship in 2020, down 3.4% from 396 million last year. The worst case makes a deeper dent, stating that about 362 million units will ship this year, down 8.5% from last year. "In the best-case scenario, production levels are expected to revert to full capacity by April 2020, hence the biggest hit will be to sell-in shipments in the first two quarters, with the market recovering in Q3 and Q4," the firm said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Google on Thursday was hit with a lawsuit by New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, alleging the search giant is illegally collecting data on school children. The suit says Google is collecting the personal information through a program the company has with New Mexico's school districts, in which it provides Chromebooks and access to G Suite for Education apps for free. Those apps include Gmail, Calendar and Google Docs. The practice would run afoul of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, a federal law that regulates data collection from sites with users who are under 13 years old. The lawsuit accuses Google of collecting information on students' locations, their passwords, what websites they've visited, what they've searched for on Google and YouTube, their contact lists and voice recordings. Balderas also said in the lawsuit that Google "mined students' email accounts" and "extracted" information for advertising purposes until 2014. Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said in a statement: "These claims are factually wrong. G Suite for Education allows schools to control account access and requires that schools obtain parental consent when necessary. We do not use personal information from users in primary and secondary schools to target ads. School districts can decide how best to use Google for Education in their classrooms and we are committed to partnering with them."

In Consumer Reports' "Top Picks" of the year list, Tesla's Model 3 ranks among the top 10 choices for car buyers in 2020. TechCrunch reports: The Model 3 was chosen as one of three vehicles in the $45K-$55K category, alongside the Lexus RX and the Toyota Supra. CR lauded its "thrilling driving experience," including "impressive handling and quick precise steering [that] help it feel like a sports car." They did ding it slightly for having a "stiff ride" overall, but said that that's more than made up for by its long EV battery range and emission-free eco-friendly qualities.

Consumer Reports also specifically called out a worry about the Model 3 that "Autopilot, an optional system on the vehicle, does not require the driver to stay engaged, creating safety concerns." Tesla has always positioned Autopilot as a driver-assist feature that still requires a driver to be ready to take over control at a moment's notice, but critics have suggested its implementation can lead to misuse resulting in inattentiveness. Tesla as a whole ended up ranking 11th overall out of 33 automakers in the nonprofit organization's 2020 automotive brand report card, climbing eight positions from last year.

A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence. The Guardian reports: To find new antibiotics, the researchers first trained a "deep learning" algorithm to identify the sorts of molecules that kill bacteria. To do this, they fed the program information on the atomic and molecular features of nearly 2,500 drugs and natural compounds, and how well or not the substance blocked the growth of the bug E coli. Once the algorithm had learned what molecular features made for good antibiotics, the scientists set it working on a library of more than 6,000 compounds under investigation for treating various human diseases. Rather than looking for any potential antimicrobials, the algorithm focused on compounds that looked effective but unlike existing antibiotics. This boosted the chances that the drugs would work in radical new ways that bugs had yet to develop resistance to.

Jonathan Stokes, the first author of the study, said it took a matter of hours for the algorithm to assess the compounds and come up with some promising antibiotics. One, which the researchers named "halicin" after Hal, the astronaut-bothering AI in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, looked particularly potent. Writing in the journal Cell, the researchers describe how they treated numerous drug-resistant infections with halicin, a compound that was originally developed to treat diabetes, but which fell by the wayside before it reached the clinic. Tests on bacteria collected from patients showed that halicin killed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug that causes TB, and strains of Enterobacteriaceae that are resistant to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics that are considered the last resort for such infections. Halicin also cleared C difficile and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in mice. Three days after being set loose on a database of about 1.5 billion compounds, the algorithm returned a shortlist of 23 potential antibiotics, of which two appear to be particularly potent.

"[The senior researcher] now wants to use the algorithm to find antibiotics that are more selective in the bacteria they kill," adds The Guardian. "This would mean that taking the antibiotic kills only the bugs causing an infection, and not all the healthy bacteria that live in the gut. More ambitiously, the scientists aim to use the algorithm to design potent new antibiotics from scratch."

em1ly writes: Spin bike maker Flywheel lost a patent lawsuit to rival company Peloton, announcing yesterday that it's shutting down. Motherboard uncovered some wild corporate espionage in the court documents: "At some point before the launch of FLY Anywhere, according to Peloton's lawyers, Flywheel launched 'Project Magnum,' an attempt to 'obtain as MUCH secret intel on Peloton as we can,' according to an improperly redacted document Peloton filed in court. 'Project Magnum was not some extemporaneous side-project [...] but rather a concerted, widespread effort,' one of Peloton's filings adds.

But Project Magnum was, apparently, more haphazard than spy operation. Flywheel created a Google Doc to 'create tabs with the functional areas of info so that the team know[s] to keep adding to it,' one of the documents reads. Much of the conspiracy seems to have taken place over email, judging by discovery that Peloton obtained. Someone at Flywheel named the project after the Magnum PI television series, one of the court documents adds, although the filing does not include the individual's name. The filings do not go into detail on how Flywheel apparently tried to obtain Peloton's secrets, but they do include contours of the project. In a message seemingly written by a former Flywheel CTO who now works at Facebook, he wrote 'Villency could be useful in providing insight related to Project Magnum.' Eric Villency, and his company Villency Design Group, designed the Peloton and SoulCycle stationary bikes..."

Microsoft is rolling out updates to the icons for Windows 10's core apps over the months ahead, starting with the Calendar and Mail apps in a new Release Preview for Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. Engadget reports: The company's design team explained that it wanted to break away from the flat, colorless icons you see today in favor of ones that are at once more consistent with newer branding (including apps available beyond Windows) and different enough that you'll have an easier time finding the one you want. This is arguably an overdue move. Microsoft hadn't really touched Windows 10's main icons since its debut in 2015, so they risked feeling old. There were also inconsistencies creeping in, especially once Office got its new look. This update drags Windows 10's appearance into the modern era, and might just give you a more colorful OS in the bargain. "Flat, monochrome icons look great in context of colorful tiles, but as more icon styles enter the ecosystem, this approach needs to evolve," reveals Christina Koehn, a design leader for Windows and Devices at Microsoft. "When icons in the taskbar and Start menu are different styles, it creates more cognitive load to scan and find applications. We needed to incorporate more visual cues into the icon design language using our modernized Fluent Design Language."

You can read more about Microsoft's approach to updating the icons in Windows 10 in this Medium post.