"Both sides made closing arguments this week in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' fraud trial," reports Business Insider: Prosecutors said Holmes "chose to be dishonest" and that her allegations of abuse, which were a key part of her defense, were irrelevant. The defense said "rats flee a sinking ship" but Holmes stayed, noting "that's who that woman is...."

Prosecutors kicked off their arguments by recapping testimony from each of their 29 witnesses. They argued that Holmes saw money dry up at Theranos while its progress languished and had to decide whether to "watch Theranos slowly fail" or defraud investors and patients. "She chose fraud over business failure. She chose to be dishonest," said Assistant US attorney Jeffrey Schenk, according to NBC News. "That choice was not only callous, it was criminal."

Prosecutors revisited Holmes' bombshell admissions during her seven days of testimony, including that she added pharmaceutical companies' logos to validation reports without authorization and kept Theranos' use of modified third-party devices a secret. Holmes has said she wanted to convey that the reports were the result of work done with those pharmaceutical companies and that she withheld information about the use of commercial devices because it was a trade secret.
The New York Times argues historians will see the trial as "a case study in the use of clothing to affect opinion (public and judicial) and, if not to make friends, at least to influence people. Or try to." When the verdict comes down, the transformation of the wunderkind founder of Theranos from black-clad genius to besuited milquetoast will be an integral part of the story. Did it work, or was it a seemingly transparent effort to play the relatable card? Rarely has there been as stark an example of Before and After.... Gone were her signature black turtlenecks and black slacks; gone the bright red lipstick and blond hair ironed straight as a board or pulled into a chignon.... Instead there was ... sartorial neutrality, in the form of a light gray pantsuit and light blue button-down shirt, worn untucked, with baby pink lipstick. She looked more like the college student trying on a grown-up interview look than the mastermind of a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme.... There was not a power heel or a power shoulder in sight. The only part of her outfit that was branded in any way was her diaper bag backpack (her son was born in July), which was from Freshly Picked and costs around $175...

The net effect of Ms. Holmes's makeover was middle manager or backup secretarial character in a streaming series about masters of the universe (but not her! uh-uh), with the diaper bag functioning as an implicit reminder of her maternal status and family values. In case that accessory wasn't enough, she often entered the courthouse with an actual family member — her mother, her partner — in tow, and a hand to cling to. It was code-switching of the most skillful kind. It was relatable. One of the stereotypes of Silicon Valley's superstars, after all, is that they are other: speaking in bits, relating to machines more than people; living, literally, in a different reality. When you want a jury to sympathize with your plight, you have to make them imagine themselves in your shoes. Which means, you need to look, if not like them, at least like someone they might know.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Considering a career in brain surgery or rocket science? It might well be within reach. Members of both professions aren't necessarily more clever than the general public, according to a study. Researchers asked 329 aerospace engineers and 72 neurosurgeons to complete a series of tasks to test their cognition. The results, published in the British Medical Journal, show few differences with members of the British public.

Professionals from both groups were assessed online in six cognitive domains, using a 'Great British Intelligence Test' originally devised at Imperial College, London. The test looked at areas like working memory, attention and emotion processing, and respondents were asked about their age, sex and industry experience. The results were then compared between both groups, and data previously gathered from 18,000 members of the British public. It found that neurosurgeons scored significantly higher than rocket scientists in semantic problem solving, like defining rare words. Aerospace engineers, meanwhile, performed better than their rivals when it came to attention, and to mental manipulation tasks like rotating images of objects in one's head. When compared with public scores, however, rocket scientists didn't show significant differences in any domains.

Neuroscientists, on the other hand, scored differently in only two areas: their problem solving speed was quicker, but their memory recall was slower. Researchers suggested this may be due to the "fast-paced nature of neurosurgery... or it could be, albeit less likely, a product of training for rapid decision-making in time-critical situations." "It is possible that both neurosurgeons and aerospace engineers are unnecessarily placed on a pedestal," the study reflected. "Other specialties might deserve to be on that pedestal, and future work should aim to determine the most deserving profession."

A media lobbying group wants to see tech platforms reigned in with stronger antitrust laws. But the group's president tells the New York Times the biggest force supporting the status quo is hyperpartisanship.

The Times reports: The lack of regulation of technology companies is not because elected officials don't understand the internet. That used to be the case, and it helps explain why they have been so slow with oversight measures. Now, though, new questions about technology get mapped onto increasingly intractable political divides. Without the distractions of bizarre questions, what's left is the naked reality that the parties are deeply at odds over how to protect consumers and encourage businesses. Dozens of bills to strengthen privacy, encourage competition and quell misinformation have stalled because of a basic disagreement over the hand of government on businesses.

"Congress has again shown it's all bark and no bite when it comes to regulating Big Tech," said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, adding: "We've made no progress for decades."

The cost of the government's long education on tech is that regulation is increasingly out of reach. In April 2018, 14 years after founding thefacebook.com and more than five years after Facebook surpassed 1 billion users, Mark Zuckerberg appeared for the first time before Congress... [D]espite bipartisan agreement that tech companies have run roughshod and deserve more oversight, none of the bills discussed in those hearings four years ago have been passed. Turns out, holding a hearing that humbles the most powerful business executives in the world is much easier than legislating. Very bright lines of partisan disagreements appear when writing rules that restrict how much data can be collected by platforms, whether consumers can sue sites for defamation, and whether regulators can slow the march of dominance of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook.
The Times points out that, just for example, when it came to the possibility of regulating cryptocurrency, "the divides on regulation broke down along party lines" Wednesday after six crypto executives testified before a House committee. Democrats warned that the fast-growing industry needed clearer oversight. "Currently, cryptocurrency markets have no overarching or centralized regulatory framework, leaving investments in the digital assets space vulnerable to fraud, manipulation and abuse," said Representative Maxine Waters, the Democrat of California who chairs the committee. Other Democrats expressed similar caution....

Republicans hewed to their free-market stripes at the crypto hearing. Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, told the crypto executives that he was in favor of their work and that regulations the industry has embraced may go too far. Representative Ted Budd, Republican of North Carolina, worried that lawmakers could push innovation in financial technology out of the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' auction of an NFT and the iMac he used to build the website has stirred up drama in the notoriously rigid Wikipedia community. The trouble began when Wales posted an announcement about the auction on his user talk page -- a kind of message board where users communicate directly with each other. Wikipedia has strict rules against self-promotion and some editors felt that Wales' announcement violated that rule. "Am I crazy? Jimbo has posted a thread on his user talk page promoting an auction of some of his stuff, which he has refused to confirm would not benefit him personally," editor Floquenbeam said on December 3.. "This is self-promotion 101, right? I've told him if he doesn't remove it, I will. That's policy, right? [...] Wales pushed back, saying he'd spoken to the WMF communications and legal departments and that they'd agreed a simple post about the auction on his user talk page would be fine.

The conversation went on like this for about a day before another editor shut it down, saying it was "past the point of productive discourse." The thread announcing the auction on Wales' talk page was removed but another thread remains where he's answering questions about the auction and NFTs from other users. An email thread on the Wikimedia-L listserv is more measured but still has some pedantic arguments that is common with Wikimedia drama. Some users are concerned that he's taking something from Wikimedia and could use the money to fund his commercial enterprise WT:Social. Another user said "The concept of NFT seems to go against the very principles of Wikipedia. On one hand, we share our work freely, both in terms of access and by using a copyleft license. On the other hand, this NFT takes something that was shared freely and then restricts it so that it can be sold." The NFT Wales is selling is a website that allows users to relive the moment of Wikipedia's creation. The site looks like Wikipedia did in its fledgling moments, and whoever wins the auction can edit it as they will.

The second big controversy among Wikipedia's editors was whether Wales had the right to auction off something like this and if he was even recreating the site correctly at the moment of its inception. The discussion devolved into a lengthy conversation about who owns the rights to what they edit on Wikipedia and the state of servers and timestamps from 2001. It's worth mentioning here that Wales' NFT is a recreation of a memory and not an actual editable bit of code that will be reflected on Wikipedia in any way. Eventually, all sides relented. "There is at least one good thing that should be coming out of this," editor Smallbones said. "The community has made it very clear that anything that is considered to be promotional or an advertisement, even if it is for a charitable cause, on any page in Wikipedia, posted by any editor -- even the most senior and most respected -- may be removed by any editor at any time."

Smithsonian magazine explores the many Mars simulation facilities around the world, including the Mars Desert Research Station — which is located in Utah, four hours south of Salt Lake City, "but everyone spoke and acted as though they were actually on Mars." A group of six people lived in a two-story cylindrical building. The commander, a former member of the Army National Guard, kept the participants on a strict schedule of fixing electrical systems, taking inventory, tidying up the facilities and sampling the soil. Everyone was assigned a special role: [photographer] Klos' was to prepare reports to share with the public. The health safety officer kept tabs on the crew's well-being, and the engineer monitored levels of carbon dioxide and solar power. Before stepping outside in a spacesuit, Klos and the others had to get permission from mission control back on "Earth" (actually a coordinator stationed in a nearby town). That person would send information about the winds and weather, and determine how long each person could stay outside the base. Sometimes dust storms rolled in, cutting off the solar power supply just as they would on Mars...

There are about a dozen such habitats around the globe, hosting simulations that run anywhere from two weeks to a full year. One of these is run by NASA's Human Research Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. But other facilities are funded by private organizations. The Mars Society, established by Brooklyn-born aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, operates the habitat in Utah, where Klos returned for another mission in 2017, and another in the Canadian Arctic. Klos also took part in a mission at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS. The facility is run by the International MoonBase Alliance, a group founded by the Dutch entrepreneur Henk Rogers.

HI-SEAS is located on Hawaii's big island at 8,200 feet above sea level, on top of the active volcano Mauna Loa. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is collaborating with the facility to gather information about volcanic caves and the microbes that live in those Mars-like conditions. HI-SEAS is also studying the limitations of doing that kind of work while wearing heavy spacesuits. It's hard enough for astronauts to hold a screwdriver in a gloved hand while repairing the International Space Station, but if people are going to be clambering on Martian rocks looking for microbes, they'll need the right gear.
The article notes these missions "are open to people who have no background in science, engineering or astronaut training. After all, the goal is to send ordinary folks into space, so it's worth finding out whether ordinary folks can coexist in Mars-like conditions here on Earth." (Some are even recruited off the internet.) "Sometimes people make the critique that we're role-playing too much," the photographer tells the magazine. "But the goal is to really live the way people are going to live on Mars so scientists can figure out how to make it work when we get there."

And the article also points out that "The data we're gathering now about surviving on solar power, conserving water and growing plants in arid conditions could be useful here at home as our climate changes."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Chinese rideshare app Didi announced Friday that it will delist from the New York Stock Exchange just months after its initial public offering. The company's brief announcement on the microblog Weibo noted plans to relist on Hong Kong's exchange, but gave few other details. Didi had been valued at nearly $70 billion after its first day of trading in June, but has since seen its shares collapse amid a crackdown from Beijing. [China says the company broke data privacy laws and posed cybersecurity risks.]

Chinese authorities announced a probe of the company's data security practices shortly after its listing, but that investigation has not yet been closed. The company, which successfully held Uber out of its domestic market, owns a vast trove of data on Chinese users. The company's market capitalization now sits at roughly $38 billion. Its shares tumbled even further Friday following the news of the delisting. "Didi's repatriation to [Hong Kong] is a significantly worrying indicator for the larger US-Sino economic relationship," Brock Silvers, chief investment officer at Kaiyuan Capital in Hong Kong, told CNN. "Beijing essentially forced Didi's hand. [...] Didi's repatriation looks likely to be the start of a trend, and the market should expect that others will follow. Equity investors may not wait for the other shoe to drop."

"Chinese founders previously looked to [New York] for a number of reasons, including looser listing standards, often higher multiples and a domicile beyond Beijing's financial [and] regulatory grasp," Silvers added. "That calculus has rapidly changed, and today's companies -- especially established market leaders or those in certain tech sectors -- will likely face increasing pressure to list on China-controlled exchanges."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Vegan alternatives to leather could save more than just animals. The scientists behind fashion's new latest must-have -- the "mushroom leather" handbag -- believe that mycelium, a material grown from fungi which can be engineered to look and feel like calfskin or sheepskin, could help save the planet. Speaking to the Guardian before a talk at the Business of Fashion Voices conference in Oxfordshire, Dr Matt Scullin, CEO of biomaterials company MycoWorks, forecast that mushroom leather could be a sustainability gamechanger, "unlocking a future of design which begins with the material, not with the object."

Fine Mycelium, a patented material which can be grown from fungi in trays in a matter of weeks, replicates the appearance and feel of leather while outperforming it in strength and durability. The material recently made its high fashion debut as an exclusive HermÃs handbag. "It can give the same emotional response as an animal leather. It has that hand-feel of rarity," says Scullin. On a planet of finite natural resources, Scullin believes both the technology and the mindset of carbon-neutral, grown-to-order mushroom leather could be "revolutionary" -- and have implications for innovation in manufacture beyond fashion.

Microsoft is starting to roll out its new Office UI to all users this week. The visual update was originally announced earlier this year and went into testing over the summer. Now it's starting to roll out to all Office 365 and Office 2021 users. From a report: This new Office UI is designed to match the visual changes in Windows 11, and it includes a more rounded look to the Office ribbon bar, with some subtle tweaks to the buttons throughout Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It's a relatively simple refresh, and Office will now match the dark or light theme that you set inside Windows. The new look can be toggled on or off using the Coming Soon megaphone icon in the top right-hand corner of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote.

A British man has become the first patient in the world to be fitted with a 3D printed eye, according to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. From a report: Steve Verze, who is 47 and an engineer from Hackney, east London, was given the left eye on Thursday and first tried it for size earlier this month. Moorfields Eye Hospital said in a press release Thursday that the prosthetic is the first fully digital prosthetic eye created for a patient. The eye is more realistic than other alternatives, and is designed to have "clearer definition and real depth to the pupil," the hospital said. Other prosthetic eyes consist of an iris hand-painted onto a disc that is then embedded into the eye socket. However, their design prevents light from passing into the "full depth" of the eye, the hospital added in the release. As well as appearing more realistic, the procedure is considered less invasive. Fitting traditional prosthetics requires a mold to be taken of the eye socket, whereas in 3D prosthetic eye development the socket is scanned digitally to create a detailed image. Verze's functional eye was also scanned to ensure both eyes look the same.

AMC and Sony Pictures are giving away 86,000 NFTs to Stubs Premiere, A-List and Investor Connect members who buy or reserve tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home showings on December 16th. Engadget reports: Redeem a code through a special website and you'll get one of 100 designs available through the more eco-friendly Wax blockchain. You'll need to order your tickets through the AMC Theatres website or mobile app when pre-orders launch on November 29th. If you qualify, you'll get your code on December 22nd and will have until March 1st, 2022 to claim the NFT.

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.

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.

"Remember how Microsoft spent years in hot water in the late '90s and early '00s by forcing Internet Explorer on its customers?" asks ZDNet.

"European open-source cloud company Nextcloud does." Now, with a coalition of other European Union (EU) software and cloud organizations and companies called the "Coalition for a Level Playing Field," Nextcloud has formally complained to the European Commission about Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior by aggressively bundling its OneDrive cloud, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and 11.

Nextcloud claims that by pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft, the Windows giant is limiting consumer choice and creating an unfair barrier for other companies offering competing services. Specifically, Microsoft has grown its EU market share to 66%, while local providers' market share declined from 26% to 16%. Microsoft has done this not by any technical advantage or sales benefits, but by heavily favoring its own products and services, self-preferencing over other services. While self-preferencing is not illegal per se under EU competition laws, if a company abuses its dominant market position, it can break the law. Nextcloud states that Microsoft has outright blocked other cloud service vendors by leveraging its position as gatekeeper to extend its reach in neighboring markets, pushing users deeper into its ecosystems. Thus, more specialized EU companies can't compete on merit, as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access....

So, Nextcloud is asking the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition to prevent this kind of abusive behavior and keep the market competitive and fair for all players. Nextcloud is doing this by filing an official complaint with this body. In addition, Nextcloud has also filed a request with the German antitrust authorities, the Bundeskartellamt, for an investigation against Microsoft. With its partners, it's also discussing filing a similar complaint in France.

Nextcloud is being joined in its complaint by several open-source, non-profit organizations. These include the European DIGITAL SME Alliance; the Document Foundation, LibreOffice's backing organization; and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)... Numerous businesses are also supporting Nextcloud's legal action. This includes Abilian, an open-source software publisher; DAASI, an open-source identity management company; and Mailfence.

"According to a report in The Telegraph, Raspberry Pi Trading, the arm responsible for the creation of the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Pico and the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W could soon be listed with a value of more than £370m ($493m)," reports Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi Trading has hired advisors from two investment banks, Stifel and Liberum to advise on floating the company in spring 2022. The news comes just a few months after Raspberry Pi received a £45m ($60m) investment from Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust which was used to fund the development of new products as demand increased during the global pandemic. A source close to The Telegraph has valued Raspberry Pi at a premium of $500m...

"Obviously, the $45m we raised in September takes away some of the urgency around figuring out how we fund the future. On the other hand, we have great plans for what we are going to do over the next five years." Eben Upton, talking to The Telegraph.

How many members of your team are so irreplaceable that if they were hit by a bus, your project would grind to a halt?

For PHP, that number is: two. (According to a post by PHP contributor Joe Watkins earlier this year that's now being cited in Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column.) "Maybe as few as two people would have to wake up this morning and decide they want to do something different with their lives in order for the PHP project to lack the expertise and resources to move it forward in its current form, and at current pace," Watkins wrote at the time, naming Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov as those two. Well, last week, Nikita Popov was thankfully not hit by a bus, but he did decide to move on from his role with PHP to instead focus his activities on LLVM.

Also thankfully, Watkins' article earlier this year opened some eyes to the situation at hand and, as he writes in a follow-up article this week, JetBrains (Popov's employer) reached out to him at the time regarding starting a PHP Foundation. This week, with Popov's departure, the PHP Foundation was officially launched with the goal of funding part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core in 2022. At launch, the PHP Foundation will count 10 companies — Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains — among its backers, with an expectation to raise $300,000 per year, and with JetBrains contributing $100,000 annually. Alongside that, the foundation is being launched using foundation-as-a-service provider Open Collective, and just under 700 contributors have already raised more than $40,000 for the foundation.

One of the key benefits to creating a foundation, rather than sticking with the status quo, goes beyond increasing the bus factor — it diversifies the influences on PHP. Watkins points out that, for much of the history of PHP, Zend, the employer of Dmitry Stogov, has been a primary financial backer, and as such has had some amount of influence on the language's direction. Similarly, JetBrains had increased influence during its time employing Popov on PHP."To say they have not influenced the direction of the language as a whole would just not be true...." While Watkins says that everything has been above board and gone through standard processes to ensure so, influence is nonetheless indisputable, and that "The Foundation represents a new way to push the language forward..."

The current RFC process, JetBrains writes, "will not change, and language decisions will always be left to the PHP Internals community."
And in addition, Watkins adds, "It provides us the mechanism by which to raise the bus factor, so that we never face the problems we face today, and have faced in the past."

IEEE Spectrum reports on the progress being made to develop a "smart artificial pancreas" that senses blood glucose and administers insulin accordingly. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: The artificial pancreas is finally at hand. This is a machine that senses any change in blood glucose and directs a pump to administer either more or less insulin, a task that may be compared to the way a thermostat coupled to an HVAC system controls the temperature of a house. All commercial artificial pancreas systems are still "hybrid," meaning that users are required to estimate the carbohydrates in a meal they're about to consume and thus assist the system with glucose control. Nevertheless, the artificial pancreas is a triumph of biotechnology.

It is a triumph of hope, as well. We well remember a morning in late December of 2005, when experts in diabetes technology and bioengineering gathered in the Lister Hill Auditorium at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. By that point, existing technology enabled people with diabetes to track their blood glucose levels and use those readings to estimate the amount of insulin they needed. The problem was how to remove human intervention from the equation. A distinguished scientist took the podium and explained that biology's glucose-regulation mechanism was far too complex to be artificially replicated. [Boris Kovatchev, a scientist at the University of Virginia, director of the UVA Center for Diabetes Technology, and a principal investigator of the JDRF Artificial Pancreas Project] and his colleagues disagreed, and after 14 years of work they were able to prove the scientist wrong.

It was yet another confirmation of Arthur Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." [...] Progress toward better automatic control will be gradual; we anticipate a smooth transition from hybrid to full autonomy, when the patient never intervenes. Work is underway on using faster-acting insulins that are now in clinical trials. Perhaps one day it will make sense to implant the artificial pancreas within the abdominal cavity, where the insulin can be fed directly into the bloodstream, for still faster action. What comes next? Well, what else seems impossible today?

Cryptographers are upset that "crypto" sometimes now refers to cryptocurrency, reports the Guardian: This lexical shift has weighed heavily on cryptographers, who, over the past few years, have repeated the rallying cry "Crypto means cryptography" on social media. T-shirts and hoodies trumpet the phrase and variations on it; there's a website dedicated solely to clarifying the issue. "'Crypto' for decades has been used as shorthand and as a prefix for things related to cryptography," said Amie Stepanovich, executive director of Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado Law School and creator of the pro-cryptography T-shirts, which have become a hit at conferences. "In fact, in the term cryptocurrency, the prefix crypto refers back to cryptography...."

[T]here remains an internecine feud among the tech savvy about the word. As Parker Higgins of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who has spent years involved in cryptography activism, pointed out, the cryptography crowd is by nature deeply invested in precision — after all, designing and cracking codes is an endeavor in which, if you get things "a little wrong, it can blow the whole thing up...."

"Strong cryptography is a cornerstone of the way that people talk about privacy and security, and it has been under attack for decades" by governments, law enforcement, and "all sorts of bad actors", Higgins said. For its defenders, confusion over terminology creates yet another challenge.

Stepanovich acknowledged the challenge of opposing the trend, but said the weight of history is on her side. "The study of crypto has been around for ever," she said. "The most famous code is known as the Caesar cipher, referring to Julius Caesar. This is not new." Cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is a relatively recent development, and she is not ready to concede to "a concept that may or may not survive government regulation".

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The South Korean Ministry of Justice has provided more than 100 million photos of foreign nationals who travelled through the country's airports to facial recognition companies without their consent, according to attorneys with the non-governmental organization Lawyers for a Democratic Society. While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a "human rights disaster" that is relatively unprecedented. "It's unheard-of for state organizations -- whose duty it is to manage and control facial recognition technology -- to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology," six civic groups said during a press conference last week.

The revelation, first reported in the South Korean newspaper The Hankyoreh, came to light after National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested and received documents from the Ministry of Justice related to a April 2019 project titled Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction Project. The documents show private companies secretly used biometric data to research and develop an advanced immigration screening system that would utilize artificial intelligence to automatically identify airport users' identities through CCTV surveillance cameras and detect dangerous situations in real time. Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit.

"We, the NGOs, urge the government to immediately stop the establishment of a biometric monitoring system that is not only illegal but also significantly violates international human rights norms," wrote Advocates for Public Interest Law, MINBYUN -- Lawyers for a Democratic Society, the Institute for Digital Rights, the Joint Committee with Migrants in Korea, and the Korean Progressive Network Jinbonet, in a press release that was translated and provided to Motherboard. Attorneys claim the project directly violates South Korea's Personal Information Protection Act, a law that strictly limits the processing of personal information in the country. Still, the Ministry has yet to announce plans to halt the program, which was scheduled to be completed in 2022.

shoor writes: As much as 38 percent of the Internet's domain name lookup servers are vulnerable to a new attack that allows hackers to send victims to maliciously spoofed addresses masquerading as legitimate domains, like bankofamerica.com or gmail.com. The exploit, unveiled in research presented today, revives the DNS cache-poisoning attack that researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed in 2008. He showed that, by masquerading as an authoritative DNS server and using it to flood a DNS resolver with fake lookup results for a trusted domain, an attacker could poison the resolver cache with the spoofed IP address. From then on, anyone relying on the same resolver would be diverted to the same imposter site.

The sleight of hand worked because DNS at the time relied on a transaction ID to prove the IP number returned came from an authoritative server rather than an imposter server attempting to send people to a malicious site. The transaction number had only 16 bits, which meant that there were only 65,536 possible transaction IDs. Kaminsky realized that hackers could exploit the lack of entropy by bombarding a DNS resolver with off-path responses that included each possible ID. Once the resolver received a response with the correct ID, the server would accept the malicious IP and store the result in cache so that everyone else using the same resolver -- which typically belongs to a corporation, organization, or ISP -- would also be sent to the same malicious server.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg report: In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. People [...] with no tax or payroll records, were identified as in need, enrolled in the program, and paid without any in-person contact. According to Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, "the U.S. program looks like a dinosaur" in comparison.

[The program called Novissi], which means "solidarity" in the local Ewe language, is the brainchild of Cina Lawson, who heads the Ministry of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation. [...] Togo had run some cash transfer programs in the past, but they were small-scale and typically involved registering households one at a time and distributing physical money by hand. According to [Shegun Bakari, a close adviser to the president], other cabinet members objected to the idea of using mobile technology, arguing that many in rural areas didn't have access to phones or identification, and even those who did might lack the wherewithal to navigate a digital system. Yet in fact, Togolese -- like people across Africa -- had for years been using "mobile money," stored on and transferred from their mobile phones. The president quickly embraced the proposal. [....] Covid pushed countries to move quickly beyond age-old debates over who is deserving of government aid and whether transfers should be unconditional. The sheer breadth of suffering undercut the paternalistic attitude that the poor brought their suffering upon themselves.

Even with the president's support, Lawson's team faced big challenges. For starters they didn't know which Togolese were most in need: Tax rolls were no help in a country where four out of five working-age people toil in the informal economy. The last national census, conducted almost a decade earlier, hadn't gathered information about households' wealth or income. To ensure payments were made only to verified individuals, the team sought to build the platform off an existing database. Few Togolese possessed a driver's license or national ID card, but 3.6 million adults are registered to vote, according to the country's electoral commission, which requires potential voters to indicate their occupation and address. This electoral database was thought to represent somewhere between 83% and 98% of the adult population. Lawson and other members of the cabinet decided to focus the first round of support on anyone with an address in greater Lome who had listed an informal occupation, including shopkeepers, seamstresses, maids, hairdressers, and drivers. With the funding allocated by the government, they could provide each beneficiary one-third of the minimum wage, about $20 per month. Lawson insisted that the platform be able to offer an instantaneous payoff; otherwise, she warned, Togolese would doubt the promise of "free money" and fail to enroll. "You register, the platform determines you're eligible -- because once you enter your voter ID, the platform knows your profession and your geographic position -- and bam! You receive an SMS with the money," she says. The program wasn't without hiccups, however. When Novissi first began on April 8th, there were millions of registration attempts and tens of thousands of people calling for troubleshooting help, causing the platform to briefly buckle. But, as the report notes, it "largely worked," with more than 567,000 people receiving payments in the first round of disbursements.

"In part because Novissi proved so successful, the ministry teamed up with GiveDirectly and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to fund a round of payments for the 200 poorest cantons," adds Bloomberg. "To find them, the researchers trained an algorithm to identify impoverished communities based on their urban layout and housing materials, using satellite images. The researchers couldn't pick individual beneficiaries by occupation because many rural residents didn't have differentiated professions; instead, they created a second algorithm that used data from mobile phones -- including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use -- to identify the poorest users. Over the next few months, this round pushed funds out to 138,000 more beneficiaries."