A group of filmmakers have sued the State Department for making visa applicants hand over details about their social media accounts. "The lawsuit argues that the requirement unconstitutionally discourages applicants from speaking online -- and, conversely, discourages people who post political speech from trying to enter the U.S.," reports The Verge. From the report: This lawsuit, filed by the Doc Society and the International Documentary Association, challenges the decision on First Amendment grounds. It calls the registration system "the cornerstone of a far reaching digital surveillance regime" that makes would-be visitors provide "effectively a live database of their personal, creative, and political activities online" -- which the government can monitor at any time, long after the application process has been completed. Applicants must even disclose accounts that they use pseudonymously, and if U.S. authorities fail to keep that information secure, it could potentially endanger people who are trying to avoid censorship from a repressive foreign government.

The plaintiffs in this lawsuit say that some non-U.S. members have begun deleting social media content or stopped expressing themselves online because they're afraid it will complicate their ability to enter the U.S. Others have decided to stop working in the country because they don't want to reveal their social media accounts. "The Registration Requirement enables the government to compile a database of millions of people's speech and associations, which it can cross-reference to glean more information about any given visa applicant," warns the suit. And "the government's indefinite retention of information collected through the Registration Requirement further exacerbates the requirement's chilling effect because it facilitates surveillance into the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: After more than two years since it's been used the last time, the Chinese government deployed an infamous DDoS tool named the "Great Cannon" to launch attacks against LIHKG, an online forum where Hong Kong residents are organizing anti-Beijing protests. [...] DDoS attacks with the Great Cannon have been rare, mainly because they tend to generate a lot of bad press for the Chinese government. But in a report published today, AT&T Cybersecurity says the tool has been deployed once again. This time, the Great Cannon's victim was LIHKG.com, an online platform where the organizers of the Hong Kong 2019 protests have been sharing information about the locations of daily demonstrations. The site is also a place where Hong Kong residents congregate to recant stories of Chinese police abuse and upload video evidence.

AT&T Cybersecurity says the first Great Cannon DDoS attacks targeted LIHKG on August 31, while the last one being recorded on November 27. AT&T Cybersecurity researcher Chris Doman said the August attacks used JavaScript code that was very similar to the one spotted in the 2017 attacks on Mingjingnews.com. According to LIHKG, the site received more than 1.5 billion requests per hour during the August attack, compared to the site's previous traffic record that was only a meager 6.5 million requests per hour.

The Microsoft threat research team scanned all Microsoft user accounts and found that 44 million users were employing usernames and passwords that leaked online following security breaches at other online services. From a report: The scan took place between January and March 2019. Microsoft said it scanned user accounts using a database of over three billion leaked credentials, which it obtained from multiple sources, such as law enforcement and public databases. The scan effectively helped Microsoft identify users who reused the same usernames and passwords across different online accounts. The 44 million total included Microsoft Services Accounts (regular user accounts), but also Azure AD accounts.

A collection of 31 advocacy groups is pressing the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to dig into how digital media companies advertise to children and collect their data. From a report: The request for the FTC to use its subpoena authority to probe so-called kidtech companies comes as the agency considers updates to how it implements a children's online privacy law. The coalition, which includes the Center for Digital Democracy and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, argues the FTC must examine data collection and digital marketing practices before it changes how it enforces the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Possible targets for the FTC study include Google, Disney, Viacom, Adobe, TikTok, Twitch and AT&T's Warner Media. "As kids are spending more time than ever on digital devices, we need the full power of the law to protect them from predatory data collection -- but we can't protect children from Big Tech business models if we don't know how those models truly work," Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, said in a statement.

Facebook today filed a lawsuit against a Chinese company and two Chinese nationals for abusing the Facebook ad platform to run a malware scheme. From a report: The accused are ILikeAd Media International Company, a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2016, and Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao, the two men behind it. Facebook said today that ILikeAd used Facebook ads to lure victims into downloading and installing malware. Once installed, the malware would compromise victims' Facebook accounts and use access to these accounts to place new ads, on behalf of the infected users.

Shannon Bond, writing for NPR: Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in pita bread. If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, it's a familiar scene. But what's missing here are waiters and customers. Every dish is placed in a to-go box or bag. Delivery drivers line up in a waiting area ready for the name on their order to be called. Behind the counter, racks of metal shelves hold bags of food. Each bag sports a round, red sticker with the logo of DoorDash, America's biggest food delivery app. DoorDash manages this building, the drivers, the counter staff -- everything but the food, which is made by five restaurants that are renting kitchens here.

Rather than having to build a physical brick-and-mortar store, we do that on their behalf. And then they move into our DoorDash kitchen and then overnight they're live on the DoorDash platform," said Fuad Hannon, DoorDash's head of new business verticals. He oversees the new kitchen venture. Not long ago, food delivery in many places was limited to pizza and Chinese takeout. But now, thanks to apps like DoorDash, Grubhub and Postmates, customers can summon their favorite dish with a tap on a smartphone screen, whether they live in a city or the far-flung suburbs. "Your customer is just like, at their living room, watching Netflix," said Min Park, an investor in DoorDash tenant Rooster & Rice, a chicken chain with six locations in the Bay Area.

A shared hatred of robocalls is one issue uniting the House during a divisive impeachment inquiry. From a report: House lawmakers yesterday passed a bipartisan bill aimed to crack down on the fraudulent auto-dial callers by a nearly unanimous 417-to-3 vote. The legislation, known as the TRACED Act, now moves to the Senate, where it is co-sponsored by Senate GOP Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and is expected to pass. The bill's passage amid broad Congressional gridlock -- on the very day the House Judiciary Committee hosted a heated impeachment hearing -- underscores just how bad the robocall epidemic has become. Americans received more than 5 billion such calls last month alone, according to the robocall blocking app YouCall. Congress's move to intervene could score points with Americans across the political spectrum who are fed up with the fraudsters.

A Falcon 9 rocket launched on Thursday from Florida, delivering its Dragon spacecraft into orbit. From a report: The first stage then made a safe landing on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. The company's webcast ended without any coverage of the second stage's six-hour coast to demonstrate a capability for an unnamed customer. This was the tenth Falcon 9 launch of 2019. Overall the rocket has now launched 76 times. Sometime in 2020, among rockets in active service, the Falcon 9 will almost certainly become the U.S. booster with the most launch experience, surpassing the Atlas V. That rocket has launched 80 times, with one more mission scheduled for later this month -- a test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.

Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, it's already a way of life. From a report: McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the poorest counties in the country. There's a sit-down restaurant, Opal's, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen, a pair of dollar stores, and some of the fastest Internet in the United States. Subscribers to Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (P.R.T.C.), which covers all of Jackson County and the adjacent Owsley County, can get speeds of up to one gigabit per second, and the cooperative is planning to upgrade the system to ten gigabits. (By contrast, where I live, in the mountains above Lake Champlain, we are lucky to get three megabytes.) For nearly fifteen million Americans living in sparsely populated communities, there is no broadband Internet service at all. "The cost of infrastructure simply doesn't change," Shirley Bloomfield, the C.E.O. of the Rural Broadband Association, told me. "It's no different in a rural area than in Washington, D.C. But we've got thousands of people in a square mile to spread the cost among. You just don't in rural areas."

Keith Gabbard, the C.E.O. of P.R.T.C., had the audacious idea of wiring every home and business in Jackson and Owsley Counties with high-speed fibre-optic cable. Gabbard, who is in his sixties, is deceptively easygoing, with a honeyed drawl and a geographically misplaced affection for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He grew up in McKee and attended Eastern Kentucky University, thirty-five miles down Route 421; he lives with his wife, a retired social worker, in a house next door to the one in which he grew up. "I've spent my whole life here," he said. "I'm used to people leaving for college and never coming back. The ones who didn't go to college stayed. But the best and the brightest have often left because they felt like they didn't have a choice." When Gabbard returned to his home town after college, in 1976, he took an entry-level job at the telephone cooperative. "I had this degree in business management that I thought was really cool, but I got a job answering the phones," he said. "At the time, we were all on party lines, and everybody was calling and complaining about somebody on their line and they couldn't get the phone. I was taking those complaints. And I remember thinking that, once we got everyone their own lines, we won't have any more problems. I didn't have a clue what was coming."

It was a video of a waving robot that attracted NASA to the world's most isolated city. Engineers at Woodside Petroleum Ltd. in Perth, Australia, were just "messing around" teaching a toy robot to wave when they filmed it, Chief Technology Officer Shaun Gregory told a conference recently, but NASA liked what it saw. From a report: The U.S. space agency got in touch, and the two are now studying how to use robot technology to tackle problems in remote and difficult locations. This sort of collaboration represents exactly what Australia's largest state is trying to achieve. With some of the world's biggest resource companies operating in the region, the state aims to become a hot spot for developing technology to help miners and oil explorers cut costs and boost efficiency. "Western Australia has the opportunity to cement a place as the world's epicenter of resources technology and innovation," Mike Henry, the incoming chief executive officer of mining giant BHP Group, said at the inaugural Resources Technology Showcase in Perth last week. "Whether its autonomous haulage, robotics, drones, big data or artificial intelligence, we're changing the way we work."

A new FCC study confirms what most people already knew: when it comes to wireless coverage maps, your mobile carrier is often lying to you. From a report: If you head to any major wireless carrier website, you'll be inundated with claims of coast to coast, uniform availability of wireless broadband. But, as countless studies have shown, these claims usually have only a tenuous relation to reality, something you've likely noticed if you've ever driving across the country or stopped by mobile carrier forums. But just how bad is the disconnect? A new FCC study released this week suggests that wireless carriers may be lying about mobile coverage 40 percent of the time or more. The full study, part of the FCC's efforts to beef up wireless subsidies ahead of fifth-generation (5G) deployments, states that FCC engineers measured real-world network performance across 12 states. Staffers conducted a total of 24,649 tests while driving more than 10,000 miles.

"Only 62.3% of staff drive tests achieved at least the minimum download speed predicted by the coverage maps -- with U.S. Cellular achieving that speed in only 45.0% of such tests, T-Mobile in 63.2% of tests, and Verizon in 64.3% of tests," the FCC said. And while carriers have historically claimed they offer faster 4G LTE service to the vast majority of the country, the FCC found that wasn't actually true either. "Staff was unable to obtain any 4G LTE signal for 38% of drive tests on U.S. Cellular's network, 21.3% of drive tests on T-Mobile's network, and 16.2% of drive tests on Verizon's network, despite each provider reporting coverage in the relevant area," the agency said. But of course, the FCC also has no plans to punish the carriers.

sciencehabit writes: Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn't accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models -- some half a century old -- shows most of them were indeed accurate. "How much warming we are having today is pretty much right on where models have predicted," says the study's lead author, Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The researchers compared annual average surface temperatures across the globe to the surface temperatures predicted in 17 forecasts. Those predictions were drawn from 14 separate computer models released between 1970 and 2001. In some cases, the studies and their computer codes were so old that the team had to extract data published in papers, using special software to gauge the exact numbers represented by points on a printed graph. Most of the models accurately predicted recent global surface temperatures, which have risen approximately 0.9C since 1970. For 10 forecasts, there was no statistically significant difference between their output and historic observations, the team reports today in Geophysical Research Letters. Seven older models missed the mark by as much as 0.1C per decade. But the accuracy of five of those forecasts improved enough to match observations when the scientists adjusted a key input to the models: how much climate-changing pollution humans have emitted over the years.

In addition to the flagship Snapdragon 865 processor, Qualcomm announced details about its other new chip, the midrange Snapdragon 765. "The 765 might actually be the more interesting of the two, thanks to its integrated 5G modem and its likely future of powering cheaper, midrange devices," reports The Verge. From the report: Right now, there's not a lot of 5G devices out there, and the ones that are around tend to be very expensive. The upcoming 865 might help with that. By default, it'll only work with the X55 5G modem, meaning every Android flagship with a Snapdragon 865 (i.e., nearly all of them) will, in theory, be a 5G phone next year. But even cheaper Android phones with Qualcomm's top processor tend to cost upwards of $750. 700-series chips, on the other hand, are found in far cheaper phones, like HMD's Nokia phones, which hit much lower prices.

It's a much lower barrier to entry for 5G than anything currently available, and it could be a big part of making the next-generation network accessible to more customers, not just those who are willing to shell out for the top phones. In fact, it's possible that the Snapdragon 765 will enable better 5G experiences than phones with the 865. That's because, unlike the Snapdragon 865, the 765 has a less powerful X52 modem. It's capable of lower speeds (maxing out at 3.7 Gbps, instead of the 7 Gbps the X55 is theoretically capable of). But it has a big advantage: that 5G modem is integrated directly in the 765 chipset, meaning it should offer improved power efficiency (and, therefore, battery life) than the X55, which is its own separate chip. It'll also support a wider range of 5G standards than the current X50 modem, with Qualcomm promising support for mmWave and sub-6GHz, standalone and non-standalone 5G, and TDD and FDD with Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) network types. Both the Snapdragon 765 and 765G, which features a new Qualcomm Adreno 620 GPU, are expected to come to market in the first quarter of 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: IBM X-Force, the company's security unit, has published a report of a new form of "wiper" malware connected to threat groups in Iran and used in a destructive attack against companies in the Middle East. The sample was discovered in a response to an attack on what an IBM spokesperson described as "a new environment in the [Middle East] -- not in Saudi Arabia, but another regional rival of Iran." Dubbed ZeroCleare, the malware is "a likely collaboration between Iranian state-sponsored groups," according to a report by IBM X-Force researchers. The attacks were targeted against specific organizations and used brute-force password attacks to gain access to network resources. The initial phase of the attacks was launched from Amsterdam IP addresses owned by a group tied to what IBM refers to as the "ITG13 Group" -- also known as "Oilrig" and APT34. Another Iranian threat group may have used the same addresses to access accounts prior to the wiper campaign.

In addition to brute force attacks on network accounts, the attackers exploited a SharePoint vulnerability to drop web shells on a SharePoint server. These included China Chopper, Tunna, and another Active Server Pages-based webshell named "extensions.aspx," which "shared similarities with the ITG13 tool known as TWOFACE/SEASHARPEE," the IBM researchers reported. They also attempted to install TeamViewer remote access software and used a modified version of the Mimikatz credential-stealing tool -- obfuscated to hide its intent -- to steal more network credentials off the compromised servers. From there, they moved out across the network to spread the ZeroCleare malware. "While X-Force IRIS cannot attribute the activity observed during the destructive phase of the ZeroCleare campaign," the researchers noted, "we assess that high-level similarities with other Iranian threat actors, including the reliance on ASPX web shells and compromised VPN accounts, the link to ITG13 activity, and the attack aligning with Iranian objectives in the region, make it likely this attack was executed by one or more Iranian threat groups."

TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is being sued after allegedly violating child privacy laws and collecting the data of young users through the video app, which was formerly called Musical.ly. The Verge reports: ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017, which it later rebranded as the enormously popular social video app TikTok. According to the December 3rd complaint, ByteDance has collected data from Musical.ly users under the age of 13 without their parents' explicit consent "since at least 2014" and sold the data to third-party advertisers. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, forbids social media companies from collecting the data of children without explicit parental consent. Failing to obtain that consent would be in violation of the law and open the company up to potential lawsuits from regulators like the Federal Trade Commission. "TikTok was made aware of the allegations in the complaint some time ago, and although we disagree with much of what is alleged in the complaint, we have been working with the parties involved to reach a resolution of the issues," a TikTok spokesperson told The Verge. "That resolution should be announced soon."

TikTok is also facing a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. that claims it transferred "vast quantities" of user data to China. The lawsuit was filed in a Californian court last week.

Ford will soon start using coffee chaff from McDonald's to manufacture auto parts like headlamp housings and other interior and exterior components. "In addition to making Ford vehicles a little bit 'greener,' the coffee chaff -- or the waste produced by coffee during the roasting process -- will apparently also help the company make parts that are 20 percent lighter," reports Engadget. From the report: Ford already uses various sustainable materials like soy and tree cellulose in an effort to only use recycled and renewable plastics in its vehicles. It has added coffee chaff to the list after its research team discovered that it can be turned into a durable product by heating it to high temperatures under low oxygen and mixing it with additives like plastic. The material will then be turned into pellets that can be formed into various shapes. During the team's tests, they found that the chaff-based material has "significantly better" heat properties than the current material Ford is using. They also discovered that it'll allow the company to enjoy 25 percent energy savings during the molding process. McDonald's is expected to earmark a significant portion of the coffee chaff its North American operations produce for this project. While it's not entirely clear how much chaff that is, McD's generates 62 million pounds of chaff a year in the continent alone, which is currently just used to make coal and garden mulch.

Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that's equipped with Apple's new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock," writes iFixit's Craig Lloyd. What this means is that there will likely be thousands of perfectly good Macs being parted out or scrapped instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them. From the report: Activation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it's ever lost or stolen, and it's built into the "Find My" service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When you're getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple's Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. In other words, they won't be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts.

That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can't reuse. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive -- oh, and it's an environmental nightmare. [...] The T2 security chip, however, erases any hope and makes it impossible to do anything on a Mac without the proper Apple ID credentials. Attempting any kind of hardware tinkering on a T2-enabled Mac activates a hardware lock, which can only be undone by connecting the device to Apple-authorized repair software. It's great for device security, but terrible for repair and refurbishment. While recyclers may not be dealing with as many locked Macs as locked iPhones (especially since Activation Lock on Macs is still very new, and there are specific software criteria that need to be met), it's only a matter of time before thousands upon thousands of perfectly working Macs are scrapped or shredded, for lack of an unknown password.

Google has stopped accepting political ads in Singapore months before a widely expected election. Reuters reports: In email correspondence between the Singapore Democratic Party and a senior Google public policy official, the tech firm said it "will not accept advertising regulated by the Code of Practice for Transparency of Online Political Advertisements." The new code of practice, part of a controversial 'fake news' law introduced in October, requires advertising intermediaries to maintain detailed records of political adverts and their sponsors and make those records available to authorities. The code applies to "all advertisement or paid content that can reasonably be regarded as being directed towards a political end." SDP said the "shocking policy" would deprive voters of information ahead of that ballot. "In an election with the media totally dominated by the state, alternative parties would have no ability to educate and inform the voters of Singapore in the run up to the elections if we are not able to use Google's advertising platforms in the first place," Paul Tambyah, chairman of SDP, said in the correspondence.

An anonymous reader shares an update to a 2017 study from the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute that claimed the manufacturing of big batteries for electric vehicles generates so much emissions that all later savings are canceled out. "Based on the data that it had to work with, the institute's study put the emissions at 150-200 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity -- one of the highest estimates that has been published," reports Ars Technica. "But IVL recently took another pass at this effort, incorporating newer data and some slightly different methods. This new study puts the emissions at 61-106kg, depending on the energy sources and efficiencies of different manufacturing plants. That cuts the estimate in half and puts it much more in line with other studies." From the report: So what accounts for the change, exactly? A few things are going on here. The first is a simple methodological change -- this study leaves out emissions associated with recycling the battery, which accounted for 15kg of CO2 in the 2017 estimate. There are different ways to define the boundaries of such a life-cycle analysis, including "cradle-to-grave" methods that cover disposal and "cradle-to-gate" methods that cover up to the point you receive the car. To make apples-to-apples comparisons, you have to know what kind of estimate you're looking at.

More importantly, the study took advantage of more recent data that measures emissions during critical steps in the manufacturing process. As the battery manufacturing industry matures, plants are running closer to capacity and with efficiency improvements. Battery chemistry, too, is shifting. [...] The cathodes and anodes of these batteries are made by mixing materials in a solvent (water or otherwise) and then evaporating the solvent to leave a powder behind. This drying dominates the energy use of the manufacturing process. More recent measurements of this process in operating plants are a major source of the difference between the new study and the 2017 study, which estimated 1.6 time to 3 times greater energy use for drying.

The new version also acknowledges that the electricity used in the manufacturing process is coming from cleaner sources and could potentially come entirely from renewables. That helps bring the low end of the estimated range down. Of the estimated 61-106kg of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity, 59kg comes from the raw materials used in the battery. Then, the manufacturing process accounts for 2-47kg, depending on the mix of energy sources used. The 2017 study used a slightly higher number for raw materials -- 60-70kg of CO2 -- but estimated manufacturing emissions at 70-110kg. Then, it added emissions associated with recycling.

Google Fiber, the division of Google parent company Alphabet that provides fiber-to-the-premises service in the U.S., will no longer sell 100Mbps broadband plans to new customers. From a report: In a blog post this morning, Fiber announced that it'll only offer gigabit (1,000Mbps) plans going forward in all 18 regions where it's launched to date. The gigabit plan's pricing -- $70 per month -- won't change, nor will its terms. (There's no data cap or throttle to speak of.) And starting tomorrow, Fiber will roll out a partnership with YouTube that'll let customers sign up for YouTube TV at the same time they sign up for Google Fiber. Google Fiber acknowledges that it's a somewhat self-serving transition.