Germany on Monday halted use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, the Health Ministry announced in a statement, with Italy, France and Spain following suit later in the day. Several other EU countries have stopped use of the vaccine because of the possibility of blood clots. From a report: The Health Ministry announced that use of the vaccine was "suspended as a precaution" on the basis of advice from the national health regulator, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI). According to the Health Ministry, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will decide "whether and how the new information will affect the authorization of the vaccine" pending an investigation. "After new reports of thrombroses of the cerebral veins in connection with the vaccination in Germany and Europe, the PEI considers further investigations to be necessary," the Health Ministry announced. German Health Minister Jens Spahn said "the decision is a professional, not political one," following advice from the PEI. Spahn said the risk of blood clots from the AstraZeneca jab is low, but could not be ruled out. "The most important thing for confidence is transparency," Spahn said during a briefing.

A user shares a report from Apple Insider: Researchers are working on a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable, in a system that echoes the design path of Thunderbolt. Presented at the February IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the research aims to develop a connection type that offers far better connectivity than current methods. In part, it aims to accomplish this by replacing copper wiring with something else.

Copper is typically used for wires like USB and HDMI to handle data transfers, but it requires a lot of power to work for high levels of data transmission. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged," said MIT alumni and lead author Jack Holloway. While the "increasingly bulky and costly" copper could be replaced by fiber optic cables, that introduces its own issues. As silicon chips have difficulty dealing with photons, this makes the interconnection between the cable and the computers more challenging to optimize. Combining the benefits of copper and fiber optic conduits, a plastic polymer is used by the researchers. This makes it cheaper to manufacture than copper wires, which could be an attractive proposition for cable producers.

The polymer can also use sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, which is more energy-efficient than copper at high data loads. It is believed this efficiency brings it close to that of fiber optic systems, but crucially with better compatibility with silicon chips. Low-cost chips are paired with the polymer conduit that can generate the high-frequency signals powerful enough to transmit into the conduit directly. As such, the system is expected to be manufactured with standard methods, which also makes it cost-effective to produce. The cables themselves can also be extremely thin, with the cross-sectional area of the interconnect measuring 0.4 millimeters by a quarter millimeter, smaller than typical copper variants. That small hair-like cable can be used to transport data over three different parallel channels, enabling it to achieve a total bandwidth of 105 gigabits per second. Bundling conduits together could bring the cables into the terabit-per-second range, while still remaining at a reasonable cost.

Thunderbolt, Intel's super-speedy connection technology, isn't widely used. But that may change in the coming year, as more computer makers incorporate the USB competitor into their new models. From a report: Intel has hoped Thunderbolt, which debuted in 2011 on Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro, would become commonplace for computer users. A year later, the chipmaker forecast that "most PCs" would have Thunderbolt by 2015 to 2017. Despite the hype, only premium PCs carry the fast connection. To get a boost in adoption, Intel has built Thunderbolt into its newest Core processors, code-named Tiger Lake, which means laptop makers get Thunderbolt without having to pay extra for separate controller chips. Because Intel chips are so widely used, the company says Thunderbolt will now have its moment to shine.

"I would expect by 2022 Thunderbolt will be in more than 50% of the PCs sold," said Jason Ziller, who runs Intel's connectivity products, adding that more than half of laptops that ship in the next year will "definitely" carry the technology. Ziller has led Thunderbolt work since before it debuted in Apple's 2011 MacBook Pro laptops almost exactly 10 years ago. PC ports don't capture the imagination the way fast processors or smartphone cameras do. But they're a crucial part of most people's computing experience. Thunderbolt ports provide fast and versatile connections to external storage devices, monitors, network adapters and other peripherals. They can replace ports for HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet and power. The new Thunderbolt 4 lets multiport docks and hubs offer three Thunderbolt ports instead of just one.

Dustin Curtis, writing on his blog: About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac, I was met with a curious error: "Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes." The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data, including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I'd never heard of similar cases involving Apple's services, and I wouldn't expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and made a mental note to try again later. The next day, Music.app stopped working: "You cannot login because your account has been locked."

Now I was genuinely worried. I checked my phone and neither the App Store nor Apple Music would work there, either. A few minutes later, Calendar popped up an error â" it had stopped syncing. I immediately tried to call Apple Support from my Mac, but Apple's Handoff feature had been disabled as well. The first person I spoke to at Apple spent a while researching the issue and then told me there was nothing she could do but escalate the issue, and that I should expect a call "hopefully" within the next day. I asked what the problem might be, and she seemed as confused as I was. Although some Apple services were still working, like iMessage (thank God) and Photos, I was terrified that more services would suddenly become inaccessible or that I would lose the considerable amount of data I have stored in iCloud.

A couple of days later, I became impatient and contacted Apple Support again. This time, the representative mumbled something about Apple Card before saying that he also had no power to help me. Apple ID was a different department, he said, and they could only be contacted by email. He emailed them. I continued to wait. The next time I tried to use my Apple Card, it was declined. Strange. I checked the Wallet app, and the balance was below the limit. I remembered the Apple support representative mumbling about Apple Card, so I did some digging through my email to see if I could find a connection. As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, which is fighting a legal battle with Apple, offered some commentary on this: "It's terrifying how much leverage Apple has over consumers and developers by integrating everything, locking us all in, and exerting total control. Normal companies respect the natural boundaries that exist between platforms and services. Apple does not! For Apple, every choke point they create is both a profit center and a lever to exert control. After blocking Fortnite updates from over a billion iOS users, Apple threatened to block Sign in With Apple -- which they forced us to adopt -- affecting Fortnite players on 7 platforms."

An anonymous reader shares a report: When French telecommunications company Altice acquired U.S. cable companies Cablevision and Suddenlink, Chairman Patrick Drahi made a bold statement: Altice USA would rival Comcast and Charter in size, becoming one of the three dominant U.S. cable operators. Fast forward nearly six years, and Altice USA has about 5 million customer relationships, compared with about 31 million each for Comcast and Charter. (Altice USA did announce a $310 million acquisition of Morris Broadband on Monday, which will give it about 36,000 more customers.) CEO Dexter Goei explained to CNBC what prevented Altice USA's rapid expansion, why he thinks cable and wireless will eventually merge in the U.S., and why it's only a matter of time before cable TV becomes extinct.

CNBC: So let me ask that question in a slightly different way. Do you envision a day where cable TV, as we know it, simply no longer exists?
Goei: Yes. For sure. Everything is going to be IP-based, and then the question is because everything is IP based, and you have so many different choices...what the cable bundle is doing today is putting together everything that's available in the OTT world and providing it to you in a good format for you to be able to guide yourself through lots of different options in the way you watch television. As technology and integration technology continues to get better and better, you're going to be able to aggregate that on your OTT platforms, your smart TV. Your Samsung TV today already has, say, 20 apps, 30, 40 apps already there. The pain of it is you're always clicking between the apps, all the time. Once you can get the whole aggregation together and make it look very similar to what you do in a cable environment, then that interactivity becomes second nature and doesn't really matter who's doing the bundle. It could just be your set-box provider, your smart TV provider.

CNBC:: So this idea that some media executives have that there's going to be a floor at 50 million subscribers, that's ultimately fantasy?
Goei: I think so, because name me one person under 30 years old who has a cable video connection. I can't. So it's just a question of time. People grow up in a certain way. I tell my kids all day long, how could you spend 10 hours a day on your iPhone? And they're like, "Daddy, that's our life. We didn't go out in the woods and build bricks and castles and stuff like you. That stuff is boring. My whole life is on my phone." So, there's an evolution of technology and habits and the way people consume content that's changed dramatically over the last ten years, and it's going to continue to change.

Phys.org shares an announcement from the University of Texas at Austin: Researchers believe they have closed the case of what killed the dinosaurs, definitively linking their extinction with an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago by finding a key piece of evidence: asteroid dust inside the impact crater.

Death by asteroid rather than by a series of volcanic eruptions or some other global calamity has been the leading hypothesis since the 1980s, when scientists found asteroid dust in the geologic layer that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs. This discovery painted an apocalyptic picture of dust from the vaporized asteroid and rocks from impact circling the planet, blocking out the sun and bringing about mass death through a dark, sustained global winter — all before drifting back to Earth to form the layer enriched in asteroid material that's visible today. In the 1990s, the connection was strengthened with the discovery of a 125-mile-wide Chicxulub impact crater beneath the Gulf of Mexico that is the same age as the rock layer.

The new study seals the deal, researchers said, by finding asteroid dust with a matching chemical fingerprint within that crater at the precise geological location that marks the time of the extinction... The telltale sign of asteroid dust is the element iridium — which is rare in the Earth's crust, but present at elevated levels in certain types of asteroids... In the crater, the sediment layer deposited in the days to years after the strike is so thick that scientists were able to precisely date the dust to a mere two decades after impact.

"We are now at the level of coincidence that geologically doesn't happen without causation," said co-author Sean Gulick, a research professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who co-led the 2016 expedition with Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London...

The dust is all that remains of the 7-mile-wide asteroid that slammed into the planet millions of years ago, triggering the extinction of 75% of life on Earth, including all nonavian dinosaurs.

The FCC has taken a major step toward offering financial support for people struggling to pay broadband bills during the pandemic. If approved, the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program could provide $50 per month to millions of households, and more in tribal lands. From a report: The EBBP was created in the budget passed by Congress earlier this year, which earmarked $3.2 billion to offset the cost of broadband in households already struggling to make ends meet. "From work to healthcare to education, this crisis has made it clear that without an internet connection too many households are locked out of modern life," said acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in a statement. "It's more apparent than ever that broadband is no longer nice-to-have. It's need-to-have. But too many of us are struggling to afford this critical service."

The general shape of the EBBP was already known, but since Congress first proposed it last year it has been up to the FCC to decide what it would actually look like. The rules for the program Rosenworcel circulated at the agency today are an important step in taking it from idea to reality. The important bit is spelling out exactly who qualifies for the benefit -- to wit, anyone who:
1. Qualifies for the FCC's existing Lifeline connectivity subsidy program
2. Receives free and reduce-price school lunch or breakfast benefits
3. Received a Pell Grant
4. Meets other eligibility requirements for internet providers' existing low-income or pandemic-related programs
5. "Experienced a substantial loss of income since February 29, 2020"

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: The Milky Way is surrounded by dozens of dwarf galaxies that are thought to be relics of the very first galaxies in the universe. Among the most primitive of these galactic fossils is Tucana II -- an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy that is about 163,000 light years, from Earth. MIT astrophysicists have detected stars at the edge of Tucana II, in a configuration that is surprisingly far from its center but nevertheless caught up in the tiny galaxy's gravitational pull. This is the first evidence that Tucana II hosts an extended dark matter halo -- a region of gravitationally bound matter that the researchers calculated to be three to five times more massive than scientists had estimated. This discovery of far-flung stars in an ancient dwarf galaxy implies that the very first galaxies in the universe were also likely extended and more massive than previously thought.

The team used an imaging filter on the telescope to spot primitive, metal-poor stars beyond the galaxy's core. Analysis shows a kinematic connection, that these far-out stars move in lockstep with the inner stars, like bathwater going down the drain. The results suggest that Tucana II must have an extended dark matter halo that is three to five times more massive than previously thought, in order for it to keep a gravitational hold on these far-off stars. "Without dark matter, galaxies would just fly apart," Chiti. says. "[Dark matter] is a crucial ingredient in making a galaxy and holding it together." The team's results are the first evidence that an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy can harbor an extended dark matter halo. "This probably also means that the earliest galaxies formed in much larger dark matter halos than previously thought," The findings appear in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Suspected Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in software made by SolarWinds to help break into U.S. government computers last year, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing five people familiar with the matter, marking a new twist in a sprawling cybersecurity breach that U.S. lawmakers have labeled a national security emergency. From a report: Two people briefed on the case said FBI investigators recently found that the National Finance Center, a federal payroll agency inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was among the affected organizations, raising fears that data on thousands of government employees may have been compromised. The software flaw exploited by the suspected Chinese group is separate from the one the United States has accused Russian government operatives of using to compromise up to 18,000 SolarWinds customers, including sensitive federal agencies, by hijacking the company's Orion network monitoring software. Security researchers have previously said a second group of hackers was abusing SolarWinds' software at the same time as the alleged Russian hack, but the suspected connection to China and ensuing U.S. government breach have not been previously reported.

"More than at any point since the QAnon conspiracy began, there is a tremendous opportunity to pull disaffected followers out of the conspiracy," writes FiveThirtyEight. And while it's just one of three possible scenarios, online posts suggest at least some members are abandoning the group, "but they will need support to really sever their connection."

ABC News reports that some QAnon adherents "are turning to therapy and online support groups to talk about the damage done when beliefs collide with reality," including Ceally Smith, a working single mom in Kansas City: "We as a society need to start teaching our kids to ask: Where is this information coming from? Can I trust it?" she said. "Anyone can cut and paste anything." After a year, Smith wanted out, suffocated by dark prophesies that were taking up more and more of her time, leaving her terrified....

Another ex-believer, Jitarth Jadeja, now moderates a Reddit forum called QAnon Casualties to help others like him, as well as the relatives of people still consumed by the theory. Membership has doubled in recent weeks to more than 119,000 members. Three new moderators had to be added just to keep up. "They are our friends and family," said Jadeja, of Sydney, Australia. "It's not about who is right or who is wrong. I'm here to preach empathy, for the normal people, the good people who got brainwashed by this death cult." His advice to those fleeing QAnon? Get off social media, take deep breaths, and pour that energy and internet time into local volunteering.

Michael Frink is a Mississippi computer engineer who helps administer a QAnon recovery channel on the social media platform Telegram. He said that while mocking the group has never been more popular online, it will only further alienate people. Frink said he never believed in the QAnon theory but sympathizes with those who did. "I think after the inauguration a lot of them realized they've been taken for a ride," he said.
The New York Times tells the story of one Bernie Sanders supporter who entered — and then exited — the QAnon movement: Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends... "We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club." Meanwhile, her family was eating takeout all the time since she had stopped cooking and her stress levels had shot up, causing her blood pressure medication to stop working. Her doctor, worried, doubled her dose...

When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was also humbling: Ms. Perron, who has a master's degree, had looked down on Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was...

She agreed to speak for this article to help others who are still in the throes of QAnon.
And CNN reporter Anderson Cooper recently interviewed a recovering QAnon supporter, who tells him there were many theories about Cooper, including one that said he was actually a robot. The embarrassed former QAnon supporter admits that he had once believed that the people behind Q "were actually a group of 5th dimensional, intra-dimensional, extraterrestrial bi-pedal bird aliens called blue avians."

During that interview, he also tells Anderson Cooper, "I apologize for thinking that you ate babies."

Investigators probing a massive hack of the U.S. government and businesses say they have found concrete evidence the suspected Russian espionage operation went far beyond the compromise of the small software vendor publicly linked to the attack. From a report: Close to a third of the victims didn't run the SolarWinds software initially considered the main avenue of attack for the hackers, according to investigators and the government agency digging into the incident. The revelation is fueling concern that the episode exploited vulnerabilities in business software used daily by millions [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. Hackers linked to the attack have broken into these systems by exploiting known bugs in software products, by guessing online passwords and by capitalizing on a variety of issues in the way Microsoft cloud-based software is configured, investigators said.

Approximately 30% of both the private-sector and government victims linked to the campaign had no direct connection to SolarWinds, Brandon Wales, acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in an interview. The attackers "gained access to their targets in a variety of ways. This adversary has been creative," said Mr. Wales, whose agency, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is coordinating the government response. "It is absolutely correct that this campaign should not be thought of as the SolarWinds campaign." Corporate investigators are reaching the same conclusion. Last week, computer security company Malwarebytes said that a number of its Microsoft cloud email accounts were compromised by the same attackers who targeted SolarWinds, using what Malwarebytes called "another intrusion vector."

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead? From a report: I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata -- based on the volume of activity he was noticing there -- had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India. I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses -- ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection -- isn't an exact science, I wasn't certain that they would yield any scammers.

But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.

After their house was vandalized, long-time Slashdot reader lsllll needs some help finding a battery-powered, wifi-enabled camera that can dump motion-detected videos to a local server: There are some nice cameras out there that'll work for nearly 5 months off a rechargeable battery. You can even pair them with a solar panel which would keep them constantly topped off. But none of them offer anything other than local storage (free on SD card) or in the cloud (subscription).

Obviously, being a programmer and a sysadmin, I realize that the effort to dump a video to a cloud service and opening a connection to a local FTP/SMB server require the same bandwidth, battery usage. So this decision to not support local FTP/SMB servers must be intentional and the way everything is going nowadays: juice the customers for as much money as you can after they've purchased your product.

The question is, are the any cameras out there that run on rechargeable batteries, support WiFi, and dump videos to a local server?
Share your suggestions in the comments!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans' past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times. Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within a commercial database in five investigations over the past two and a half years, agency officials disclosed in a memo they wrote for Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

The disclosure sheds light on an emerging loophole in privacy law during the digital age: In a landmark 2018 ruling known as the Carpenter decision, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution requires the government to obtain a warrant to compel phone companies to turn over location data about their customers. But the government can instead buy similar data from a broker -- and does not believe it needs a warrant to do so. "D.I.A. does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially available data for intelligence purposes," the agency memo said.

Mr. Wyden has made clear that he intends to propose legislation to add safeguards for Americans' privacy in connection with commercially available location data. In a Senate speech this week, he denounced circumstances "in which the government, instead of getting an order, just goes out and purchases the private records of Americans from these sleazy and unregulated commercial data brokers who are simply above the law." He called the practice unacceptable and an intrusion on constitutional privacy rights. "The Fourth Amendment is not for sale," he said.

Mashable reports: We're all judged by the company we keep.

With that adage seemingly in mind, Discord moved Friday to ban a pro-Donald Trump server from its platform. TheDonald, as the server was titled, allowed likeminded individuals to digitally gather and was directly linked to the recently banned r/DonaldTrump subreddit and a separate discussion forum...

"While there is no evidence of that server being used to organize the Jan 6 riots, Discord decided to ban the server called TheDonald yesterday due to its overt connection to an online forum used to incite violence, plan an armed insurrection in the United States, and spread harmful misinformation related to 2020 U.S. election fraud," a Discord spokesperson confirmed over email.
Mashable even notes one comment they'd spotted about shooting politicians.

And the forum's reaction to Discord's ban included "calling Discord 'pedos' and saying 'these CEOs need to be dragged out into the street.'"

Wi-Fi is about to get a lot better. Many of this year's new phones, laptops, TVs, routers, and more will come with support for Wi-Fi 6E, a new upgrade to Wi-Fi that's essentially like expanding your wireless connection from a two-lane road to an eight-lane highway. From a report: It's the biggest upgrade to Wi-Fi in 20 years, and connections should be faster and a lot more reliable because of it. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry-wide group that oversees Wi-Fi, is now starting to certify the first wave of products with support for Wi-Fi 6E. Phones, PCs, and laptops with support should start hitting the market in the first months of 2021, according to the IDC research group, and TVs and VR devices with support are expected to arrive by the middle of the year. Some of the first devices are likely to be announced over the next week.

IBM has agreed to pay $24.25 million to resolve a pair of investigations by the Federal Communications Commission(FCC) over subsidies awarded to connect schools and libraries to broadband. From a report: IBM's payment will resolve two FCC investigations that have spanned nearly 15 years over its alleged violations of "E-Rate" program rules in connection with New York City and El Paso school districts. Under the agreement, IBM agreed to return $24.25 million to the Universal Service Fund that funds the E-Rate program, but did not admit wrongdoing. The FCC said its investigations found IBM had not satisfied the competitive bidding rules in New York for 2005-2008 and provided ineligible equipment and services in El Paso for 2001. IBM said in a statement it believed it "acted appropriately in its support of the E-rate program, but in the interest of amicably resolving a longstanding matter we are pleased to have reached this settlement." IBM added it had provided internet connectivity to thousands of U.S. schools and libraries and millions of American students through the E-rate program.