An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting out seven factors that would need to be known to come up with an estimate for the number of intelligent civilizations out there. These factors ranged from the the average number of stars that form each year in the galaxy through to the timespan over which a civilization would be expected to be sending out detectable signals.

But few of the factors are measurable. "Drake equation estimates have ranged from zero to a few billion [civilizations] -- it is more like a tool for thinking about questions rather than something that has actually been solved," said Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and a co-author of the research. Now Conselice and colleagues report in the Astrophysical Journal how they refined the equation with new data and assumptions to come up with their estimates. "Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution," said Conselice.

The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right, he said. "[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilizations within our galaxy," he said. Under the strictest set of assumptions -- where, as on Earth, life forms between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion years after star formation -- there are likely between four and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. But Conselice noted that this figure is conservative, not least as it is based on how long our own civilization has been sending out signals into space -- a period of just 100 years so far. The team add that our civilization would need to survive at least another 6,120 years for two-way communication. "They would be quite far away ... 17,000 light years is our calculation for the closest one," said Conselice. "If we do find things closer ... then that would be a good indication that the lifespan of [communicating] civilizations is much longer than a hundred or a few hundred years, that an intelligent civilization can last for thousands or millions of years. The more we find nearby, the better it looks for the long-term survival of our own civilization."

Most Americans don't trust social media companies to police the content on their platforms, according to a poll published Tuesday from Gallup and the Knight Foundation. CNET reports: The poll found that 80% of Americans don't trust big tech companies to make the right decisions about what content appears on their sites and what should be removed. People, especially conservatives, trust the government even less than social media companies to make these decisions, according to the report. The poll explored several topics around free speech online and the threat of misinformation.

Most Americans also support, in principle, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Facebook, Twitter and other online companies from liability for content posted by their users. Although President Donald Trump and some in Congress are pushing to reform the law, the poll found almost two-thirds of Americans support keeping the existing regulation. People and groups who favor the rule say Section 230 protects free speech and allows for an open marketplace of ideas.

Social media research group Graphika published today a 120-page report unmasking a new Russian information operation of which very little has been known so far. ZDNet reports: Codenamed Secondary Infektion, the group is different from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Sankt Petersburg company (troll farm) that has interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Graphika says this new and separate group has been operating since 2014 and has been relying on fake news articles, fake leaks, and forged documents to generate political scandals in countries across Europe and North America. The research team says it first learned of the group from reports published by Reddit and Facebook last year, along with previous research done by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

According to Graphika's analysis, most of the group's content has followed nine primary themes:

- Ukraine as a failed state or unreliable partner
- The United States and NATO as aggressive and interfering in other countries
- Europe as weak and divided
- Critics of the Russian government as morally corrupt, alcoholic, or otherwise mentally unstable
- Muslims as aggressive invaders
- The Russian government as the victim of Western hypocrisy or plots
- Western elections as rigged and candidates who criticized the Kremlin as unelectable
- Turkey as an aggressive and destabilizing state
- World sporting bodies and competitions as unfair, unprofessional, and Russophobic

Graphika says that most of this content has been aimed at attacking classic Russian political rivals like Ukraine, the US, Poland, and Germany, but also other countries where Russian influence came under attack, at one point or another. [...] Researchers said the group managed to keep its identity secret because they paid very close attention to operational security (OpSec). Graphika says Secondary Infektion agents employed single-use burner accounts for almost everything they posted online, abandoning each account in less than an hour after promoting their content. With its identity still a secret, the group is expected to continue operating and sowing conflict between Russia's rivals.

Lily Hay Newman writes via Wired: Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar were scanning the open internet on May 24 when they stumbled upon a collection of publicly accessible Amazon Web Services "buckets." Each contained a trove of data from a different specialized dating app, including 3somes, Cougary, Gay Daddy Bear, Xpal, BBW Dating, Casualx, SugarD, Herpes Dating, and GHunt. In all, the researchers found 845 gigabytes and close to 2.5 million records, likely representing data from hundreds of thousands of users. They are publishing their findings today with vpnMentor.

The information was particularly sensitive and included sexually explicit photos and audio recordings. The researchers also found screenshots of private chats from other platforms and receipts for payments, sent between users within the app as part of the relationships they were building. And though the exposed data included limited "personally identifying information," like real names, birthdays, or email addresses, the researchers warn that a motivated hacker could have used the photos and other miscellaneous information available to identify many users. The data may not have actually been breached, but the potential was there. "The researchers don't know whether anyone else discovered the exposed trove before they did," the report adds. "If you use one of the affected apps there's not a lot you can do to protect against the possibility that the data was stolen before the researchers found it. There wasn't a specific trove of passwords in the exposed data, so changing your password likely won't do much."

All you can really do is hope the developer locks down the cloud infrastructure before anyone grabs the information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Snap, the company behind Snapchat, has revealed plans for a fully fledged digital platform taking on not only Facebook but also Google and Apple. The company is launching an app store, expanding its games platform and offering the facility for external developers to upload machine-learning models to build augmented reality experiences. It is allowing other apps to integrate its camera software for the first time, and incorporating businesses into its maps alongside users' friends.

The features announced by Snap at its annual developer summit, held virtually last week, are the early stage of that revolution. One series of tools, called Scan, let users identify plants, trees and dogs by pointing their camera at them. A planned integration with Yuka, a dieting app, will offer a similar function for packaged foods. Another new product lets developers build their own AI filters for cameras. Initially, the tool will probably be used to generate ever more inventive lenses for the company's messaging product -- examples already include a filter that turns a video into the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and a simple hand-tracking tool that places stars at your fingertips. [T]he goal is that eventually creativity will expand to include utility.

In Snap's vision of the future, its camera platform replaces the home screen of a smartphone or the newsfeed of Facebook as the default starting point from where all other tasks begin. New AR technology is one way to achieve that, but another is getting more apps into the camera, and its camera in more apps. The latter is achieved by CameraKit, which lets other applications replace their default camera with Snapchat's. The idea is that there is mutual benefit: the app doesn't have to build a fully featured camera function if it just wants to include the ability to take or send photos, while Snapchat's camera platform becomes increasingly valuable to developers who might be on the fence about whether to build features for it. For the former, Snap launched Minis, a feature that allows for micro-apps to be embedded within SnapChat, which can be opened without installation.

An IP address allegedly used by The Pirate Bay and claimed to be owned by a Swedish ISP does not belong to the provider, it's being claimed. According to Obenetwork, the IP address is actually operated by local VPN service OVPN. As a result, the ISP has asked a court to withdraw an information injunction obtained by a pair of Scandinavian movie companies. TorrentFreak reports: [Earlier this month, movie companies Svensk Filmindustri and Nordisk Film] presented Cloudflare with a copyright infringement complaint, stating that The Pirate Bay was connected to mass infringement of their rights. In response, the CDN company revealed that on June 2, 2020, an IP address apparently operated by Swedish ISP Obenetwork was in use by the torrent site. With this information in hand, the companies went to court in Sweden, filing for an information injunction against Obenetwork and demanding that the ISP preserve all records relating to its business with The Pirate Bay. The companies claimed that the matter was so urgent that Obenetwork should not be heard in the matter and fined $10,667 in the event of non-compliance.

The IP address provided by Cloudflare and said to be in use by The Pirate Bay was directly linked to Obenetwork by the studios. In comments to Tarnkappe last week, however, the ISP was crystal clear: this is not their IP address and it actually belongs to someone else. "The IP address that The Pirate Bay uses in our network belongs to the anonymous VPN provider 'OVPN.se,'" the company said in a statement, referring to one of its customers. [...]

Speaking with TorrentFreak this morning, OVPN's David Wibergh confirmed that the IP address in question is indeed owned by OVPN and not Obenetwork. Whether TPB was ever a customer is a question he won't answer though. "As we don't provide information regarding any potential customers, I won't confirm if thepiratebay.org was actually using OVPN or not. I can only confirm that the IP address specified in the injunction was one that OVPN owns and not Obenetwork. I will not confirm whether or not thepiratebay.org was actually using that IP address," Wibergh said.

T-Mobile's network suffered an outage across the U.S. yesterday, and the Federal Communications Commission is investigating. "The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable. The @FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers -- and so are American consumers," tweeted FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Ars Technica reports: No matter what the investigation finds, Pai may be unlikely to punish T-Mobile or impose any enforceable commitments. For example, an FCC investigation last year into mobile carriers' response to Hurricane Michael in Florida found that carriers failed to follow their own previous voluntary roaming commitments, unnecessarily prolonging outages. Pai himself called the carriers' response to the hurricane "completely unacceptable," just like he did with yesterday's T-Mobile outage. But Pai's FCC imposed no punishment related to the bad hurricane response and continued to rely on voluntary measures to prevent recurrences. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert confirmed the outage in a blog post. "Starting just after 12pm ET and continuing throughout the day, T-Mobile has been experiencing a voice and text issue that has intermittently impacted customers in markets across the US," Sievert wrote. Sievert reported that the "issues are now resolved" just after 1am ET, about 13 hours after the outage began.

The outage may have been self-inflicted when T-Mobile was making network configuration changes. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince last night tweeted that T-Mobile was "making some changes to their network configurations today. Unfortunately, it went badly. The result has been for around the last 6 hours a series of cascading failures for their users, impacting both their voice and data networks." The T-Mobile problem was "almost certainly entirely of their own team's making," he also wrote. [...] The T-Mobile outage was so large that it apparently caused some people to think other carriers and websites were down, too.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Tesla confirmed Monday night that it recently cut the price of the 2020 Model S Long Range Plus by $5,000 and boasted that the EPA-rated range for this version of the Model S -- meaning the number of miles the vehicle can travel per single charge in testing conditions -- has increased to 402 miles. A spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency told CNBC in an e-mail on Tuesday: "EPA can confirm that we approved a 402 mile range for the updated Tesla Model S Long Range Plus. Tesla has updated the 2020 Model S Long Range Plus vehicle making several changes to the vehicle from the one EPA previously tested. EPA approved the new label value based on a review of the testing protocols and data submitted by Tesla and found it was complete and accurate. Fueleconomy.gov will be updated in about a week with this information."

In other words, the EPA approved Tesla's right to advertise a 402-mile range rating for the latest version of the Model S Long Range Plus, but the agency has not conducted its own tests of the vehicle. In Tesla's blog post on Monday, the company focused on the ways in which it has improved the range of the Model S Long Range Plus as compared to earlier versions of the company's flagship electric sedan. Among other things, Tesla said it achieved range improvements by reducing the mass of the vehicle by using lighter weight materials in its battery pack and drive units, and other lighter weight components. It also updated its "HOLD" features which allow drivers to remain stopped on a hill without having to keep the brake pedal pressed down. These features maximize regenerative braking in the Model S and other Tesla vehicles that have it. Last month, the EPA rebuffed comments Elon Musk made concerning what he calls an error during the Model S Long Range's testing process, which the executive says cost the car a 400-mile range estimate. The agency said it conducted the testing properly.

"The real Model S range is 400 miles, but when we did the last EPA test, unfortunately, a TA left the car door open and the keys in the car," said Elon Musk at the time. "So the car -- and they did this overnight. And so, the car actually went into a waiting for driver mode and lost 2% of its range. And as a result, it had a 391 test. As soon as the EPA reopens for testing, we will redo the test, and we're actually confident that we will achieve a 400-mile or greater range with the Model S. But to be clear, the Model S, for the past two months -- the true range of the Model S for the past two months has been 400 miles."

For years, Parallels has provided virtualization software so you could run full Windows installs on a Mac, but today they're tackling a new OS. From a report: The company just announced that it is partnering with Google to work on bringing full Windows application support to Chrome OS enterprise devices. That's a big deal for the many businesses out there that run various pieces of legacy Windows software -- or just any business that wants to run Microsoft's Office software natively. It could Chrome OS devices a lot more viable in a variety of workspaces that may have previously had to rely on Windows hardware, though of course that'll depend on how well it is implemented. How exactly this will work remains to be seen; Parallels only said that partnership would "seamlessly add full-featured Windows apps, including Microsoft Office, to Chromebook Enterprise devices."

In a conference call on Monday lasting under six minutes, T-Mobile vice president James Kirby told hundreds of Sprint employees that their services were no longer needed. He declined to answer his employees' questions, citing the "personal" nature of employee feedback, and ended the call. From a report: TechCrunch obtained leaked audio of that call, which was said to be one of several calls held by T-Mobile leadership throughout the day to lay off staff across the organization. The layoffs come just two months after its contested $26 billion Sprint merger was finally completed. On the call, Kirby said T-Mobile was eliminating Sprint's inside sales unit (BISO), a sales division that focuses on small businesses across the United States. The executive didn't say exactly how many staff were laid off. Almost 400 people were in the phone meeting, a person on the call told TechCrunch. Kirby is heard saying that the division's layoffs would make way for 200 new positions, and encouraged employees to apply for one of the new positions using T-Mobile's external careers page, spelling out the web address on the call twice.

An anonymous reader writes: Boston Dynamics today opened commercial sales of Spot, its quadruped robot that can climb stairs and traverse rough terrain. Businesses can purchase the Spot Explorer developer kit for $74,500 at shop.bostondynamics.com. Spot Explorer includes the robot, two batteries, the battery charger, the tablet controller, a robot case, a power case, and Python client packages for Spot APIs. Boston Dynamics will also be selling Spot payloads, and customers will get software updates "when available." The company is offering free shipping for a limited time -- the website currently states that Spot Explorer ships in six to eight weeks.

The announcement marks a couple of milestones for the company founded in 1992. It's the first time businesses can purchase a Boston Dynamics robot directly. It's also the company's first online sales offering. Spot is only for sale in the U.S. for commercial and industrial use, but the company hopes to expand internationally this year. "We plan to manufacture around a thousand Spots in the next year but can increase that based on the demand," a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told VentureBeat. "We are exploring opportunities for enabling sales overseas this year." The company was originally planning to finish building 1,000 Spots by mid-2020, but the coronavirus pandemic disrupted that timeline.

Basecamp launched its email product Hey earlier this week. David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, tweeted on Tuesday that Apple is already creating challenges for the firm. In a series of tweets, he said: Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll remove the app. On the day the EU announced their investigation into Apple's abusive App Store practices, HEY is subject to those very same capricious, exploitive, and inconsistent policies of shakedown. It's clear they feel embolden to tighten the screws with no fear of regulatory consequences. He adds: Apple has been capriciously, inconsistently, and in a few cases, cruelly, enforcing their App Store policies for years. But most of the abuses were suffered by smaller developers without a platform and without recurse. Apple saw that it worked, and that it paid. Now moving up. This is exactly the issue I gave testimony in front of congress earlier this year! We hadn't yet launched HEY, but I said it worried me, what Apple might do, if you're in direct competition with them. And now we know what they'd do. Attempt to crush us. But while I'm sure Apple's attempt to cut off the air supply to the likes of Spotify is board-room stuff, I think what we're facing is simply the banality of bureaucracy. Apple has publicly pivoted to services for growth, so KPIs and quarterly targets trickle down. And frankly, it's hard to see what they have to fear. Who cares if Apple shakes down individual software developers for 30% of their revenue, by threatening to destroy their business? There has been zero consequences so far! Most such companies quietly cave or fail. We won't. There is no chance in bloody hell that we're going to pay Apple's ransom. I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils. This is profoundly, perversely abusive and unfair.

We did everything we were supposed to with the iOS app. Try downloading it (while you can?). You can't sign up, because Apple says no. We don't mention subscriptions. You can't upgrade. You can't access billing. We did all of it! Wasn't enough. We've been in the App Store with Basecamp for years. We know the game. It was always rigged. It was always customer-hostile, deeply confusing, but the unstated lines were reasonably clear. Now Apple has altered the deal, and all we can do is pray they don't alter it further.

The rapid rise of Bookshop.org during the shutdown has been hailed as a boon for independent stores. But some booksellers worry it could become another competitor for online business. From a report: In January, when Andy Hunter, the publisher of a small press, started an online bookstore that he pitched as the indie alternative to Amazon, many in the book business had their doubts. Earlier efforts to create a portal for independent booksellers had done little to chip away at Amazon's market share, and even retailers like Barnes & Noble have struggled to compete. Mr. Hunter felt there was an unexploited opportunity. Seizing even a fraction of Amazon's sales would be a windfall for independent stores, which would receive a cut of the site's profits. Mr. Hunter told investors that within two years, his site, Bookshop, could reach $30 million in annual sales, a projection that struck some as wildly optimistic. Then, in March, the coronavirus pandemic forced bookstores across the United States to shut their doors. Hundreds of bookstore owners, many of whom couldn't enter their stores to fulfill online or phone orders, joined the new site.

Now Bookshop is on track to exceed $40 million in sales this year, blowing past the sum that Mr. Hunter initially hoped to reach by 2022. The site sold some $4.5 million of books in May, and more than $7 million in the first two weeks of June. More than 750 bookstores have joined, and Bookshop has generated more than $3.6 million for stores. The company is preparing to expand its operations to Britain later this year, where it plans to partner with the book wholesaler Gardners. "There were a number of skeptics about whether this would work," said Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics & Prose in Washington. "Bookshop has certainly worked better than anybody anticipated, because nobody anticipated a pandemic." Some wonder whether Bookshop will remain a viable player in the online retail ecosystem as stores begin to reopen, and customers who turned to the site during the shutdown revert to in-store and curbside shopping. Meanwhile, Amazon, which accounts for some 70 percent of online book sales, has strengthened its position as the world's largest online retailer. The company reported $75.5 billion in sales during its most recent fiscal quarter, a 26 percent increase from the year-ago quarter.

Both Apple and Google are having a hard time regulating all the third-party COVID-19 contact tracing apps that popped up on their app stores recently, as people begin to venture out of their homes. From a report: As The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, some of those applications aren't transparent in what they're doing with your data. Now, New York Attorney General Letitia James is urging the tech giants to ensure that those applications aren't capable of collecting sensitive personal health information, to minimize any invasive data collection and to guarantee that they truly delete consumer information. James said in a statement: As businesses open back up and Americans venture outdoors, technology can be an invaluable tool in helping us battle the coronavirus... But some companies may seek to take advantage of consumers and use personal information to advertise, mine data, and unethically profit off this pandemic. Both Apple and Google can be invaluable partners in weeding out these bad actors and ensuring consumers are not taken advantage of by those seeking to capitalize on the fear around this public health crisis."

Dr_Ish shares a BBC report: A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus. The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say. The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus. It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth. Had the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the pandemic, up to 5,000 lives could have been saved, researchers say. And it could be of huge benefit in poorer countries with high numbers of Covid-19 patients. The UK government has 200,000 courses of the drug in its stockpile and says the NHS will make dexamethasone available to patients. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there was a genuine case to celebrate "a remarkable British scientific achievement", adding: "We have taken steps to ensure we have enough supplies, even in the event of a second peak." Chief Medical Officer for England Prof Chris Whitty said it would save lives around the world.

Cyber-security experts have revealed today 19 vulnerabilities in a small library designed in the 90s that has been widely used and integrated into countless of enterprise and consumer-grade products over the last 20+ years. From a report: Affected products include smart home devices, power grid equipment, healthcare systems, industrial gear, transportation systems, printers, routers, mobile/satellite communications equipment, data center devices, commercial aircraft devices, various enterprise solutions, and many others. Experts now fear that all products using this library will most likely remain unpatched due to complex or untracked software supply chains. Problems arise from the fact that the library was not only used by equipment vendors directly but also integrated into other software suites, which means that many companies aren't even aware that they're using this particular piece of code, and the name of the vulnerable library doesn't appear in their code manifests.

Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and more than 19,000 internet users today urged Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to reverse his decision to deny end-to-end encryption to users of its free service end-to-end encryption, saying it puts activists and other marginalized groups at risk. Earlier this month, Zoom announced it will offer end-to-end encryption, but only to those who pay. From a statement: The pressure to reverse the decision comes as racial justice activists are using tools like Zoom to organize protests. Without end-to-end encryption, information shared in their online meetings could be intercepted -- a concern that has been legitimized by both recent actions by law enforcement and a long-term history of discriminatory policing. Mozilla and EFF today are presenting an open letter to Yuan, co-signed by 19,000 people, maintaining that privacy and best-in-class security should be the default, not something that only the wealthy or businesses can afford.

The European Commission announced Tuesday that it's launching two antitrust investigations into Apple's App Store rules and the Apple Pay platform. From a report: The Commission, the executive arm of the EU, said it will assess whether Apple's rules for app developers on the distribution of apps via the App Store breach EU competition rules. While companies can place their apps on the App Store at no cost, Apple charges companies 30% from in-app purchases and 30% on subscriptions for the first year, then 15% thereafter. Spotify, which competes directly with Apple Music, feels this is unfair and filed a formal complaint in March 2019. Kobo, an e-reader company that competes with Apple Books, has also filed a complaint. Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said in a statement: "Mobile applications have fundamentally changed the way we access content. Apple sets the rules for the distribution of apps to users of iPhones and iPads. It appears that Apple obtained a 'gatekeeper' role when it comes to the distribution of apps and content to users of Apple's popular devices. We need to ensure that Apple's rules do not distort competition in markets where Apple is competing with other app developers, for example with its music streaming service Apple Music or with Apple Books. I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple's App Store rules and their compliance with EU competition rules."

The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency's elite computer hackers "prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems," according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director. From a report: The breach -- allegedly by a CIA employee -- was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks, in March 2017. The anti-secrecy group dubbed the release "Vault 7," and U.S. officials have said it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIA's history, causing the agency to shut down some intelligence operations and alerting foreign adversaries to the spy agency's techniques. The October 2017 report by the CIA's WikiLeaks Task Force, several pages of which were missing or redacted, portrays an agency more concerned with bulking up its cyber arsenal than keeping those tools secure. Security procedures were "woefully lax" within the special unit that designed and built the tools, the report said.

Harvard College has joined peers in a major -- albeit temporary -- shift in college admissions: It's dropping the requirement for standardized testing for the class of 2025, as the pandemic has restricted access to the SAT and ACT. From a report: "We understand that the Covid-19 pandemic has created insurmountable challenges in scheduling tests for all students, particularly those from modest economic backgrounds, and we believe this temporary change addresses these challenges," Harvard said in a statement Monday. Ivy League peers Yale University, Columbia University and Dartmouth College are among other U.S. schools that have temporarily dropped the test requirements. A tally of higher-education testing policies shows that more than half of all four-year colleges won't require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores for fall 2021 admission, according research released Monday by FairTest, a nonprofit that has led the "test optional" movement for 30 years.

schwit1 shares a report from The New York Times: As poor countries around the world struggle to beat back the coronavirus, they are unintentionally contributing to fresh explosions of illness and death from other diseases -- ones that are readily prevented by vaccines. This spring, after the World Health Organization and UNICEF warned that the pandemic could spread swiftly when children gathered for shots, many countries suspended their inoculation programs. Even in countries that tried to keep them going, cargo flights with vaccine supplies were halted by the pandemic and health workers diverted to fight it.

Now, diphtheria is appearing in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Cholera is in South Sudan, Cameroon, Mozambique, Yemen and Bangladesh. A mutated strain of poliovirus has been reported in more than 30 countries. And measles is flaring around the globe, including in Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Nigeria and Uzbekistan. Of 29 countries that have currently suspended measles campaigns because of the pandemic, 18 are reporting outbreaks. An additional 13 countries are considering postponement. According to the Measles and Rubella Initiative, 178 million people are at risk of missing measles shots in 2020. The risk now is "an epidemic in a few months' time that will kill more children than Covid," said Chibuzo Okonta, the president of Doctors Without Borders in West and Central Africa. As the pandemic lingers, the W.H.O. and other international public health groups are now urging countries to carefully resume vaccination while contending with the coronavirus.

The United States Department of Commerce today issued a change to allow American companies to participate in developing more streamlined standards for 5G with Huawei. TechCrunch reports: According to the Department: "This action is meant to ensure Huawei's placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei's pervasive participation in standards-development organizations."

The change is designed to allow Huawei and U.S. to both play a role in hashing out the parameters for the next-generation wireless technology. "The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation. This action recognizes the importance of harnessing American ingenuity to advance and protect our economic and national security," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. "The Department is committed to protecting U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by encouraging U.S. industry to fully engage and advocate for U.S. technologies to become international standards."

The new Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) rule essentially allows companies to share information about technologies in order to develop a joint standard without requiring an export license. Beyond that, however, the DOC has no stated plans to ease up after placing Huawei on its entities list last year.

Later this year, the International Space Station will receive a new and improved toilet system designed to bridge the gap between current lavatorial space tech and what humans will need to make extended visits to, say, Mars, in comfort. Space.com reports: It has a fancier name, of course; officially, the commode is NASA's Universal Waste Management System (UWMS). The launch is targeted for no earlier than the fall, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Space.com, although the agency is still determining what spacecraft will carry the new plumbing up. The toilet currently on offer on the U.S. side of the space station was designed in the 1990s and based on its shuttle counterpart, according to a detailed review of space toiletry. But the apparatus has its flaws. It can be clunky to use, particularly for women, and it is "sensitive to crew alignment on the seat," sometimes resulting in messes, according to that review.

So NASA has tried to keep the aspects that have gotten positive reviews while trimming mass and volume and making some design changes, like adjusting the shape of the seat and replacing the apparatus that compresses the waste. Another change mimics a feature of the toilet on the Russian side of the space station, where astronauts simply hook their feet into toe bars, rather than the thigh bars used on the American equivalent to anchor the astronaut in the microgravity environment. The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory's lifetime, and a second toilet of the same model will fly on the Orion capsule that astronauts use to fly around the moon on the first crewed Artemis mission in NASA's ambitious lunar return plan, according to the agency.