The U.S. Department of Defense's internet-defending Cyber Command teamed with "a foreign government" in two operations which shut down a major overseas ransomware group by hijacking its servers, reports the Washington Post. Several U.S. officials told the Post the operation left the ransomware gang's leaders "too frightened of identification and arrest to stay in business." "Domains hijacked from REvil," wrote 0_neday, an REvil leader, on a Russian-language forum popular with cyber criminals, on October 17.... "The server was compromised," he wrote hours later, "and they are looking for me." And then: "Good luck everyone, I'm taking off."

Soon after, REvil ceased operations, such as recruitment of affiliates, ransom negotiations and distribution of malware.

The Washington Post previously reported that REvil's servers ["reachable only through Tor"] had been hacked in the summer, permitting the FBI to have access. The compromise allowed the FBI, working with the foreign partner, to gain access to the servers and private keys, officials said. The bureau was then able to share that information last month with the U.S. Cyber Command, enabling the hijacking, they said... Cyber Command leader, General Paul Nakasone, said at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that while he wouldn't comment on specific operations, "we bring our best people together ... the really good thinkers" to brainstorm ways to "get after folks" conducting ransomware attacks and other malign activities. "I'm pleased with the progress we've made," he said, "and we've got a lot more to do."

The group's departure may be temporary. Ransomware gangs have been known to go underground, regroup and reappear, sometimes under a new name. But the recent development suggests that ransomware crews can be influenced — even temporarily — to cease operations if they fear they will be outed and arrested, analysts say. "The latest voluntary disappearance of REvil highlights the powerful psychological impact of having these villains believe that they are being hunted and that their identities will be revealed," said Dmitri Alperovitch, executive chairman of the think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and a cyber expert. "U.S. and allied governments should proudly acknowledge these cyber operations and make it clear that no ransomware criminal will be safe from the long reach of their militaries and law enforcement agencies...."

Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Dmitry Smilyanets believes "REvil as a brand is done."
And meanwhile, an anonymous Slashdot reader shares the news that German investigators "have identified a deep-pocketed, big-spending Russian billionaire whom they suspect of being a core member of the REvil ransomware gang," according to Threatpost. "He lolls around on yachts, wears a luxury watch with a Bitcoin address engraved on its dial, and is suspected of buying it all with money he made as a core member of the REvil ransomware gang." The showy billionaire goes by "Nikolay K." on social media, and German police are hoping he'll cruise out of Russia on his next vacation — preferably, to a country with a cooperation agreement with Germany so they can arrest him. In case he decides to kick back somewhere other than sunny Crimea, they've got an arrest warrant waiting for him....

According to Reuters, which broke the news about last week's law enforcement move against the gang, REvil's also behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, as opposed to a culprit presumed to be a ransomware group named DarkSide.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stripe is signing up to pay for carbon-removal technologies that haven't been invented yet. The payments company has formed a partnership with Deep Science Ventures, a London investment firm that specializes in building technology companies from the ground up. DSV will recruit scientists to develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If they come up with viable concepts, Stripe will be their first customer. It will pay DSV startups $500,000 each up front to capture and store carbon, then a further $1 million if they meet performance milestones.

The new partnership marks an expansion of Stripe's effort to provide a market for unproven technology that could potentially help limit the damage of global warming. The United Nations' scientific panel on climate change says the least-bad global-temperature scenarios depend on people removing billions of tons of planet-warming gases from the atmosphere. It also cautions that companies and governments may never be able to deploy the technology on the scale required to make that happen. Since August 2019, when it promised "to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage," Stripe has committed $9 million to 10 carbon-removal projects.

Stripe's carbon-removal procurement is led by Ryan Orbuch, who was a product manager before focusing on climate, and the team's projects are vetted by a panel of industry experts. Costs vary, with the most expensive service costing more than $2,000 per ton of carbon removed. Scalability is more important than current pricing. Stripe says technologies should have the potential to remove half a gigaton of carbon dioxide a year by 2050 at a cost of $100 per ton, and store it for at least 1,000 years. Stripe has tethered its core business of operating payment infrastructure to its side project. Stripe Climate, a tool introduced in October 2020, lets Stripe's customers divert a percentage of revenue to the carbon-removal pot. Roughly 9,000 of Stripe's millions of business users have enrolled contributing nearly $3 million a year collectively, and roughly 8% of new Stripe users sign up [...].

At its Search On event today, Google introduced several new features that, taken together, are its strongest attempts yet to get people to do more than type a few words into a search box. From a report: By leveraging its new Multitask Unified Model (MUM) machine learning technology in small ways, the company hopes to kick off a virtuous cycle: it will provide more detail and context-rich answers, and in return it hopes users will ask more detailed and context-rich questions. The end result, the company hopes, will be a richer and deeper search experience. Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan oversees search alongside Assistant, ads, and other products. He likes to say -- and repeated in an interview this past Sunday -- that "search is not a solved problem." That may be true, but the problems he and his team are trying to solve now have less to do with wrangling the web and more to do with adding context to what they find there.

For its part, Google is going to begin flexing its ability to recognize constellations of related topics using machine learning and present them to you in an organized way. A coming redesign to Google search will begin showing "Things to know" boxes that send you off to different subtopics. When there's a section of a video that's relevant to the general topic -- even when the video as a whole is not -- it will send you there. Shopping results will begin to show inventory available in nearby stores, and even clothing in different styles associated with your search. For your part, Google is offering new ways to search that go beyond the text box. It's making an aggressive push to get its image recognition software Google Lens into more places. It will be built into the Google app on iOS and also the Chrome web browser on desktops. And with MUM, Google is hoping to get users to do more than just identify flowers or landmarks, but instead use Lens directly to ask questions and shop.

"Fans of Japanese video games couldn't believe their ears as Olympic athletes paraded into Tokyo's National Stadium during the opening ceremony for the 2020 Games on Friday..." reports the Huffington Post. During the Parade of Nations section of the ceremony, "The orchestra was playing tunes from some of their favorite games." In a celebration of Japanese popular culture that is appreciated worldwide, the entry parade was set to tunes from games developed by Sega, Capcom and Square Enix. It kicked off with "Overture: Roto's Theme" from Dragon Quest. Next up was "Victory Fanfare" from Final Fantasy. The parade featured more tunes from Monster Hunter, Soulcaliber and Sonic the Hedgehog. According to Classic FM, the music from Kingdom Hearts was composed by Yoko Shimomura, who is responsible for the music for some of the biggest video games ever made. Fans were delighted to hear her work being incorporated into the ceremony.

While the list didn't feature widely recognized tunes from cultural juggernauts like Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda, the music helped give a sense of atmosphere to the ceremony, which was held in almost an empty stadium due to coronavirus restrictions.
There's even an elaborate doodle at Google.com commemorating the Opening Ceremonies with an anime animation that leads to a multi-level 1980s-style videogame in which Lucky the cat competes in various sporting events. (Though the Huffington Post notes that in the real world, about 1,000 people sat in the 68,000-capacity stadium.)

The Washington Post reports the Japanese public "overwhelmingly opposed hosting the Olympics as a new wave of the pandemic hit the country." But unfortunately, host city Tokyo signed a contract agreeing the event could only be cancelled by the International Olympic Committee, and now "There's the possibility — once utterly remote — that Japanese voters could kick Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga out of power in parliamentary elections later this year."

Grubhub and Russian self-driving startup Yandex are teaming up to use robots to deliver food on US college campuses. It represents the latest deal that envisions hundreds of six-wheeled self-driving robots that essentially act as roving lunchboxes in cities across the country. From a report: The robot-powered delivery service won't kick off until this fall when college students return to campus. Yandex, which is often described as Russia's Google, will operate the robots, as well as handle the entire food delivery process. Grubhub, which has partnerships with over 250 college campuses in the US, will serve as the platform for the delivery transactions.

Grubhub cited the cost savings it will get by eliminating the delivery worker from the equation as a potential benefit from the deal with Yandex -- though neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership. "We're excited to offer these cost-effective, scalable and quick food ordering and delivery capabilities to colleges and universities across the country that are looking to adapt to students' unique dining needs," said Brian Madigan, vice president of corporate and campus partners at Grubhub, in a statement. Yandex says that its delivery robots can navigate pavement, pedestrian areas and crosswalks, and reach campus areas not accessible by car. "Such functionality enables the robots to handle delivery tasks traditionally performed by people and provides efficient last-mile logistics automation," the company says.

According to a new study from the CDC, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 94 percent effective in preventing hospitalization for COVID-19 among people age 65 and older. The Hill reports: The study provides new evidence on the benefits of vaccination, and builds on results from the clinical trials by adding real-world evidence from 417 hospitalized adults in 14 states from January to March. "This multisite U.S. evaluation under real-world conditions suggests that vaccination provided protection against COVID-19-associated hospitalization among adults aged [65 and older]," the study states.

The 94 percent efficacy rate was for people who were fully vaccinated, meaning they were at least two weeks past their second dose. For people who were only partially vaccinated, meaning they were more than two weeks past the first dose but less than two weeks past the second dose, effectiveness was 64 percent. Notably, no significant effectiveness was found for people who were less than 14 days past their first dose, highlighting that it takes some time for protection to kick in and that people should not disregard precautions right away. The results show that as vaccinations spread, hospitalizations and deaths are set to decline, the CDC said.

A digital certificate to kick-start foreign travel should be given to citizens across the EU "without discrimination," officials say. From a report: The aim is to enable anyone vaccinated against Covid-19, or who has tested negative or recently recovered from the virus to travel within the EU. The 27 member states will decide how to use the new digital certificate. Vaccine passports have faced opposition from some EU member states over concerns they might be discriminatory. Some argue that they would enable a minority to enjoy foreign travel without restrictions while others, such as young people who are not seen as a priority for inoculation, continue to face measures such as quarantine. European Commission officials have made clear they want to avoid discrimination.

Another issue raised has been that data on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing a person from carrying or passing on the virus is incomplete. Ahead of the EU's announcement, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was working to "create an international trusted framework" for safe travel, but that vaccinations should not be a condition. Separately, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to withhold exporting vaccines to the UK and any other countries outside the EU that do not supply doses in a reciprocal way. "We're still waiting for doses to come from the UK," she said. "So, this is an invitation to show us that there are also doses from the UK coming to the European Union."

Samsung is considering spending more than $10 billion building its most advanced logic chipmaking plant in the U.S., a major investment it hopes will win more American clients and help it catch up with industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Bloomberg News: The world's largest memory chip and smartphone maker is in discussions to locate a facility in Austin, Texas, capable of fabricating chips as advanced as 3 nanometers in the future, people familiar with the matter said. Plans are preliminary and subject to change but for now the aim is to kick off construction this year, install major equipment from 2022, then begin operations as early as 2023, they said. While the investment amount could fluctuate, Samsung's plans would mean upwards of $10 billion to bankroll the project, one of the people said.

Samsung is taking advantage of a concerted U.S. government effort to counter China's rising economic prowess and lure back home some of the advanced manufacturing that over the past decades has gravitated toward Asia. The hope is that such production bases in the U.S. will galvanize local businesses and support American industry and chip design. Intel's troubles ramping up on technology and its potential reliance in the future on TSMC and Samsung for at least some of its chipmaking only underscored the extent to which Asian giants have forged ahead in recent years.

sciencehabit summarizes a new article from Science magazine: Attention racehorse jockeys: Start fast, but save enough energy for a final kick. That's the ideal strategy to win short-distance horse races, according to the first mathematical model to calculate how horses use up energy in races. The researchers say the approach could be used to identify customized pacing plans that, in theory, would optimize individual horses' chances of winning.

The team took advantage of a new GPS tracking tool embedded in French racing saddles. The trackers let fans watch digital images of the horses move across a screen, and they gave the researchers real-time speed and position data. The scientists studied patterns in dozens of races at the Chantilly racetracks north of Paris and developed a model that accounted for winning strategies for three different races: a short one (1300 meters), a medium one (1900 meters), and a slightly longer one (2100 meters), all with different starting points on the same curved track. The model takes into account not just different race distances, but also the size and bend of track curves, and any slopes or friction from the track surface.

The results might surprise jockeys who hold horses back early for bursts of energy in the last furlough. Instead, a strong start leads to a better finish, the team found. That doesn't mean those jockeys are wrong, though. Too strong of a start can be devastating as well, leaving the horse 'exhausted by the end,' one of the researchers says.
Even so, "We can't truly model performance," argues a veterinarian at the University of Sydney with over 30 years of experience working at horse racetracks. But he also asks Science, "Do we really want to?

"For people who love horse racing, the uncertainty provides the excitement, and the actual running of the horses provides the spectacle and the beauty."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Two months ago, esports pro Seth "Scump" Abner logged into the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War multiplayer alpha and found himself struggling. Not because of any major gameplay changes developer Treyarch had made, Cold War plays like any other Call of Duty from the past decade, but rather because of the players Abner was being put up against: They were all good. This, Abner felt, wasn't normal. He should know: he's a world champion, he spends dozens of hours every week playing against the best in the world, and dozens more streaming his "casual" play on Twitch. Why was he having to suddenly work so hard to win games? A few hours into the alpha test weekend, Abner came up with an answer: it was the skill-based matchmaking (SBMM).

Skill-based matchmaking, as you can guess, is a type of multiplayer matchmaking system in which players' are pitted against other players of similar skill level. In other words, the Black Ops Cold War alpha was purposefully matching Abner up against players with players who were just as good as him. This, he felt, was not good. "[Skill-based matchmaking] does not belong in Call of Duty. There should be a ranked playlist for people to sweat in," he tweeted as the alpha weekend was coming to a close. "I'm not trying to play Scuf wielding game fuel chugging demons with szn in their psn on Miami TDM." Abner wasn't the only esports pro to take issue with this system. With the release of Cold War last week, a number of notable streamers have echoed Abner's criticisms. Skill-based matchmaking, they argue, takes their agency away, forcing them into a purgatory of having to play their "best" every single game.

These critics point to a number of games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Halo 3 as examples games who have gotten multiplayer "right" by letting players choose between a "ranked" playlist and "unranked" playlist -- offering the freedom to decide when they want to sweat and when they want to kick back and own some noobs. Modern multiplayer developers have made a serious misstep in implementing skill-based matchmaking across the board, they argue, and they should go back to the way things used to be. This all sounds reasonable, were it not for the fact that skill-based matchmaking has been in every major multiplayer shooter since Halo 2. [...] The issue today is not that skill-based matchmaking exists, but that players are now aware of just how prevalent it is. Up until recently, one could assume that joining an "unranked" playlist meant they were being dropped into matches with the entire playerbase, and thus who they played against was purely random. Under this false assumption, it's easy to wave away bad games as flukes, while conveniently believing that any good games were the result of skill. Now that most know that they're being matched with people with similar skill levels all the time, they can't help but perceive their opponent as equals. In closing, Steve Rousseau writes via Motherboard: "The unavoidable truth about multiplayer matchmaking is that there will always be winners and losers. Someone's success always comes at the expense of someone else's failure. When players ask to be put into matches in which they can reliably chill and get 20 kills while only dying 10 times, this inevitably requires someone else to die 20 times. What they're asking for is special treatment. And that's just not fair."

78-year-old filmmaker Werner Herzog shared some interesting thoughts before the release of his new documentary on asteroids, Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds now available on Apple TV+.

From Herzog's new interview with the science site inverse: Herzog tells Inverse he's less concerned than ever that a meteorite will destroy the Earth, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still be worried about our own extinction. "It may be 100 million years to go until then," Herzog says, before adding, "within the next thousand years, we may have done such stupid things that we are not around anymore to contemplate it...."

There's a theory that all life on Earth came from a meteorite. Do you think that's possible...?

[I]f you expand the question, it wouldn't surprise me if we found life somewhere outside of our solar system, or even within our solar system, because we share the same chemistry with the universe. We share the same physics with the universe. And we share the same history with the universe. So with trillions and trillions and trillions of stars out there, it's highly likely that somewhere there are some forms of life. Probably not as good and interesting as in movies. We can be pretty certain there are no creatures out there like in Star Wars...

Have you heard the theory that we're living inside a simulation?

Yes, but I don't buy it. Because when I kick a soccer ball from the penalty spot, I know this is for real. If the goalie saves it, oh shit, this is for real.
He also discusses the 1998 asteroid disaster film Deep Impact and his own appearance on Rick and Morty, as well as part on The Mandalorian — and the experience of watching its premiere with 1,000 hardcore Star Wars fans. ("It was unbelievable. The first credit appears and there's a shout of joy that you cannot describe... It's evident Star Wars is a new mythology for our times, whether you like it or not.")

But though Herzog's films "often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature," according to Wikipedia, Herzog insists to Inverse that Elon Musk's plan to build a city on Mars is a "mistake."
In a blistering criticism, Herzog describes the idea as "an obscenity," and says humans should "not be like the locusts...."

Herzog is not opposed to going to Mars at all. In fact, the German filmmaker would "love to go [to Mars] with a camera with scientists." But the long-term vision of a Mars city is a "mistake." Herzog's main concern is that humanity should "rather look to keep our planet habitable," instead of trying to colonize another one.

In short, Mars is not a livable place. There is no liquid water at the surface, or air to breathe. Solar wind means inhabitants would be "fried like in a microwave," Herzog says.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, electric scooters were booming in big cities across the United States and other countries as urbanites embraced a relatively novel way of getting around town. The rentable, battery-boosted rides also brought a rising number of pedestrian-involved crashes as some riders illegally zipped down sidewalks and darted around traffic before the craze was interrupted by the pandemic. Downtowns became ghost towns when businesses told workers to stay home, and e-scooter business slowed, dropping as much as 70 percent. As people reemerge from shutdowns, wary of congested trains and buses, the micromobility industry may enjoy a post-pandemic renaissance, analysts say. People are buying more of the two-wheelers in some markets. China-based Niu saw sales rise sales 6.3 percent internationally as cities such as Boston, New York and Minneapolis expanded bike lanes to encourage social distancing, setting the framework for a potential e-scooter comeback.

By the time the novel coronavirus is in the rearview mirror, riders could be encountering a new type of e-scooter, one that picks up safety tools from modern cars. Last week, micromobility companies Luna and Voi Technology came together to kick off a test fleet of e-scooters with pedestrian detection. The test scooters are deployed in Northampton, England. Luna, a Dublin-based start-up, developed the system of cameras and sensors that it says will enable the scooters to learn and respond to their environments. Voi, a Swedish e-scooter manufacturer, integrated Luna's computer vision system into 50 of its e-scooters. [...] The immediate goal for Voi and Luna is to have the devices detect people and objects in a scooter's path, even if the rider doesn't see them. The idea is to make scooter users and pedestrians feel safe as they navigate busy streets, which is the most significant issue plaguing cities with legalized shared e-scooters, according to Fredrik Hjelm, CEO of Voi.

"Steve Saleen claims that China has stolen 40 years' worth of intellectual property from him in launching the Saleen brand in China," reports the site Carscoops.

More information from the Los Angeles Times: Saleen's Chinese backers have accused his business partner of fraud and embezzlement and taken over the company, freezing its accounts and forcing hundreds of employees out of work. Police raided the sprawling new factory emblazoned with Saleen's name. Two senior executives were detained, and a court order sealed its Shanghai showroom... "What I'm trying to do is to bring to light how American companies will contribute IP, brands and knowhow to the China market — and overnight they will change direction, kick you out and keep the IP," Saleen said...

Whatever the outcome, Saleen's bid to bring his high-powered cars to China has crashed, leaving the 71-year-old filled with regret. "When it came to taking my brand on a global basis, it really seemed to offer me an opportunity that I could not refuse," Saleen said. "In hindsight I realize the deal was too good to be true...." Saleen said his experience should convince Washington to enact tougher protections for U.S. investors, deny Chinese firms that steal trade secrets access to capital markets and prohibit the use of Chinese asset valuations that could be subject to manipulation.
Carscoops has some more background: Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Saleen claims "the deal was a sham." According to the racing legend, the joint venture applied for 510 Chinese patents based on his designs, technologies, trade secrets and engineering developments. He adds that most of these patent filings didn't list him as an inventor. The company, known as Jiangsu Saleen Automotive Technologies (JSAT), unveiled a range of models 12 months ago.

Saleen asserts that the government of Rugao is attempting to take over the joint venture now that it has his intellectual property and patents. He claims that the director of corporate affairs for JSAT, Grace Yin Xu, has been missing since June 22 when she entered a government building shortly after refusing to lie to local law enforcement who wanted her to state Saleen's business partner had provided false information and embezzled money. In addition, the company's vice president of manufacturing, Frank Sterzer, was allegedly detained for six hours by the authorities.

In his op-ed, Saleen states that "China can no longer go unchecked", citing a 2019 survey that 20 per cent of North American corporations say the People's Republic has stolen their intellectual property in the past year.

"Johnson & Johnson's experimental coronavirus vaccine protected macaque monkeys with a single shot in a pre-clinical study, potentially gaining on other vaccines that are further along in testing but require two doses over time," reports Bloomberg: Five of six primates exposed to the pandemic-causing pathogen were immune after a single injection. The exception showed low levels of the virus, according to a study published in the medical journal Nature...

The health-care behemoth kick-started human trials on July 22 in Belgium and in the U.S. earlier this week. Although other vaccine-makers have moved more quickly into development, with AstraZeneca having already administered its experimental vaccine to almost 10,000 people in the U.K., gaining protection with a single dose could prove an advantage in the logistical challenge of rolling out massive vaccination programs worldwide.... The primate data show that the coronavirus vaccine candidate generated a strong antibody response, and provided protection with only a single dose, said Paul Stoffels, the drugmaker's chief scientific officer.

J&J aims to embark on the last phase of tests in September, compressing the traditional timeline as it races against others including AstraZeneca, Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline Plc for a shot to end the pandemic.... The New Brunswick, New Jersey-based drugmaker will test both a one-dose coronavirus shot, and a shot coupled with a booster in its early-stage studies of more than 1,000 adults, which launched this month.

One of the biggest announcements made in Google's recent announcement of security enhancements for G Suite services is that authenticated logos are coming for emails from participating companies. Engadget reports: Last year Google announced it joined the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) group, which is pushing an email spec that adds brand logos to authenticated emails. In practice it seems a lot like the verified stamps that have proliferated across social media, but when you see them it won't be a blue check, it will be the logo of the company that sent the email (Example). Emails are authenticated using the existing DMARC system and then there's certification that applies the associated logo, which hopefully gives people trust an email came from the company or person it's claiming to represent. Google said it will kick off a pilot of the technology within Gmail "in the coming weeks," so don't be surprised when you see those kinds of indicators popping up in the existing avatar box.

An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times: Testing for the novel coronavirus in the Seattle area will get a huge boost in the coming weeks as a project funded by Bill Gates and his foundation begins offering home-testing kits that will allow people who fear they may be infected to swab their noses and send the samples back for analysis. Results, which should be available in one to two days, will be shared with local health officials who will notify those who test positive.

Via online forms, infected people can answer questions about their movements and contacts, making it easier for health officials to locate others who may need to be tested or quarantined, as well as to track the virus' spread and identify possible hot spots.

Initially, the lab will be able to conduct about 400 tests a day, eventually expanding to thousands of tests a day, said Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project is ramping up as quickly as possible, but it's not clear exactly when it will launch, he added. Among other things, software needs to be upgraded to handle the expected crush of requests, and a detailed questionnaire finalized for people who request tests. "Although there's a lot to be worked out, this has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic," Dowell said.
The article points out that the kits "will reduce the need for sick people to visit a doctor's office or clinic, lowering the chance of exposing others."

The foundation has already committed up to $100 million to the global response to COVID-19, including up to $20 million to accelerate international efforts to control the spread, up to $20 million to help partners in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia strengthen their response, and up to $60 million to kick-start the development of vaccines and treatments.

"I love that my car recorded a hit-and-run on my behalf," writes a technology columnist at the Washington Post. "Yet I'm scared we're not ready for the ways cameras pointed inside and outside vehicles will change the open road..."

Long-time Slashdot reader Strudelkugel shared the Post's report: It's not just crashes that will be different. Once governments, companies and parents get their hands on car video, it could become evidence, an insurance liability and even a form of control... [I]t's not just the bad guys my car records. I've got clips of countless people's behinds scooching by in tight parking lots, because Sentry Mode activates any time something gets close. It's also recording my family: With another function called Dash Cam that records the road, Tesla has saved hours and hours of my travels -- the good driving and the not-so-good alike.

We've been down this road before with connected cameras. Amazon's Ring doorbells and Nest cams also seemed like a good idea, until hackers, stalkers and police tried to get their hands on the video feed... Applied to a car, the questions multiply: Can you just peer in on your teen driver -- or spouse? Do I have to share my footage with the authorities? Should my car be allowed to kick me off the road if it thinks I'm sleepy? How long until insurance companies offer "discounts" for direct video access? And is any of this actually making cars safer or less expensive to own? Your data can and will be used against you. Can we do anything to make our cars remain private spaces...?

Their design choices may well determine our future privacy. It's important to remember: Automakers can change how their cameras work with as little as a software update. Sentry mode arrived out of thin air last year on cars made as early as 2017... Tesla is already recording gobs. Living in a dense city, my Sentry Mode starts recording between five and seven times per day -- capturing lots of people, the vast majority of whom are not committing any crime. (This actually drains the car's precious battery. Some owners estimate it sips about a mile's worth of the car's 322-mile potential range for every hour it runs.) Same with the Dash Cam that runs while I'm on the road: It's recording not just my driving, but all the other cars and people on the road, too. The recordings stick around on a memory card until you delete them or the card fills up, and it writes over the old footage... Now imagine what Google or Facebook might want to do with that data on everywhere you drive...

Without Sentry Mode, I wouldn't have known what hit me. The city's response to my hit-and-run report was that it didn't even need my video file. Officials had evidence of their own: That bus had cameras running, too.
"Thank You St. Tesla," jokes Slashdot reader DenverTech, linking to a story in which a Tesla owner shared the video it recorded of another car struck in a hit-and-run accident in the parking lot of a Colorado Olive Garden. "It just makes me really thankful that there are cars out there, that can prove what happened so justice can happen," that car's owner told a local news station -- though the Tesla owner had also already written down the license number of the truck which struck her vehicle.

The news station also links to another story in which a man accused of dragging a knife across a parked Tesla "was also captured on the vehicle's built-in camera."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Observer: If you like to cook but not to shop or plan your own meals, and if you weren't too hungry, and if you didn't like cooking for too many friends, then Blue Apron -- the startup delivering precisely measured, prepackaged amounts of just enough salmon, green beans, butter and lemon for one meal, no leftovers -- was for you. Exactly who it was that was both upwardly mobile to pay for this service while also having a barren kitchen, nobody really knew -- but by the divine math of Silicon Valley gamblers, your existence made this an idea worth several billion dollars and potent enough to "disrupt" the grocery business. People actually believed this. Or they did until Jeff Bezos and Amazon went shopping and bought out Whole Foods. Or until HelloFresh launched. Or until Blue Apron spent millions on packaging and shipping, as well as marketing, literally gifting away boxes of neatly assorted ingredients to millennials who never ordered another box. All this conspired to, one-by-one, wreck Blue Apron's IPO, crater stock prices to all-time list lows, kick founders out of company leadership and now, at last, the seemingly undeniable, ultimate doom of the company.

After losing another $23.7 million in the last three months of 2019, Blue Apron is laying off 240 workers and shutting down the shop at its Arlington, Texas warehouse location. Blue Apron will keep, for now, its California and New York assembly-and-distribution shops, while leaders ponder peddling what's left at a paltry $50 million price tag. Meanwhile, customers continue to desert Blue Apron, down to 351,000 in the last quarter of 2019, from 557,000 the year before. Selling off Blue Apron that low would mean a loss in the neighborhood of $143 million for Blue Apron's capital investors, including Fidelity and Goldman Sachs. That hurts, but as usual, retail investors took the worst hit. Stock-market playing rubes, who bought in when Blue Apron went public at $11 a share, have lost more than 80% on their investment -- and that represents a recovery. Shares were trading for $3.60 at the close on Wednesday, up from 2018 when Blue Apron was worth less than a dollar. There's no other analysis than this: Blue Apron was one of the biggest-ever Silicon Valley catastrophes, a mix of hubris, unrealistic expectations, a misunderstanding of how people exist in the world -- and, Amazon.

"No, the luxurious Borgata Hotel, Casino and Spa isn't located in a central New Jersey wildlife preserve," reports a local news team in New York. But an ad for the casino in Waze was apparently tagged with the wrong geographical coordinates, CNN reports, and.... The Jackson township Police Department's public information officer Lt. Christopher Parise said the police department found out about the error when one his officers was out assisting a stranded car. The driver told the officer they were headed for the Borgata but wound up at the 12,000 acre wildlife area through unpaved roads after using Waze for directions...

"My department towed 10 cars in 5 days that were stuck," Parise said. "A Waze response to the error report stated 249 others reported the same location error in the past couple days, so hundreds have been misled back there."
Police complained of a "tremendous increase" in disabled motor vehicles -- one driver found themselves at least 10 minutes away from any paved roads. Long-time Slashdot reader Newer Guy tipped us off to the story, though Waze told CNN that after being made aware of it, they'd fixed the issue "within hours".

But the casino is still urging future visitors "to check the route before they begin driving" to make sure they're actually being routed to Atlantic City. And the folks in Jackson Township (population 54,856) had a real good laugh, posting over 100 comments on the police department's Facebook page.

• "You can take the people out of the city but you can't take the city out of the people..."

• "who the hell is going on unpaved roads thinking it'll lead them to a casino?"

• "You would think when they go down a dirt road common sense would kick in..."

• "This must be a short cut to Atlantic City, just keep going. Ha ha ha..."

• "This is why you need to learn how to read a map!"

• "I keep picturing in my head these people driving into the woods thinking its Atlantic City..."

• "We could just put a couple of slot machines and poker tables out there.... "

• "I knew people were stupid but this is ridiculous."

• "Don't blame the app, Blame the morons driving."

• "How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you are nowhere near the ocean??!!"

• "So natural selection is going high tech?"

• "I was wondering how this lovely couple ended up way back by the lake when I was hunting there last week. They flagged me down and pleaded with me to show them the way out.
  
  "They must've thought they were in the middle of Deliverance."

Rob Barry and Dustin Volz, reporting for Wall Street Journal: The hackers seemed to be everywhere. In one of the largest-ever corporate espionage efforts, cyberattackers alleged to be working for China's intelligence services stole volumes of intellectual property, security clearance details and other records from scores of companies over the past several years. They got access to systems with prospecting secrets for mining company Rio Tinto, and sensitive medical research for electronics and health-care giant Philips NV. They came in through cloud service providers, where companies thought their data was safely stored. Once they got in, they could freely and anonymously hop from client to client, and defied investigators' attempts to kick them out for years. Cybersecurity investigators first identified aspects of the hack, called Cloud Hopper by the security researchers who first uncovered it, in 2016, and U.S. prosecutors charged two Chinese nationals for the global operation last December. The two men remain at large.

A Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the attack was much bigger than previously known. It goes far beyond the 14 unnamed companies listed in the indictment, stretching across at least a dozen cloud providers, including CGI Group, one of Canada's largest cloud companies; Tieto Oyj, a major Finnish IT services company; and International Business Machines. The Journal pieced together the hack and the sweeping counteroffensive by security firms and Western governments through interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the investigation, hundreds of pages of internal company and investigative documents, and technical data related to the intrusions. The Journal found that Hewlett Packard Enterprise was so overrun that the cloud company didn't see the hackers re-enter their clients' networks, even as the company gave customers the all-clear.