An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The manufacturer of EpiPen devices failed to address known malfunctions in its epinephrine auto-injectors even as hundreds of customer complaints rolled in and failures were linked to deaths, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The damning allegations came to light today when the FDA posted a warning letter it sent September 5 to the manufacturer, Meridian Medical Technologies, Inc. The company (which is owned by Pfizer) produces EpiPens for Mylan, which owns the devices and is notorious for dramatically raising prices by more than 400 percent in recent years. The auto-injectors are designed to be used during life-threatening allergic reactions to provide a quick shot of epinephrine. If they fail to fire, people experiencing a reaction can die or suffer serious illnesses. According to the FDA, that's exactly what happened for hundreds of customers. In the letter, the agency wrote: "In fact, your own data show that you received hundreds of complaints that your EpiPen products failed to operate during life-threatening emergencies, including some situations in which patients subsequently died."

The agency goes on to lambast Meridian Medical for failing to investigate problems with the devices, recall bad batches, and follow-up on problems found. For instance, a customer made a complaint in April 2016 that an EpiPen failed. When Meridian disassembled the device, it found a deformed component that led to the problem -- the exact same defect it had found in February when another unit failed.

gubol123 shares a report from The Economic Times: Six leading car makers are eyeing the government's plan to buy 10,000 electric vehicles while policy makers are considering generous fiscal incentives to make their capital and running cost cheaper than petrol cars within five years. Broadly, the aim is to put on roads one million electric three-wheelers and 10,000 electric city buses by mid-2019 and make India the world leader in at least some segments of the market as the country strives to shift entirely to battery-powered transportation by 2030. In six to eight months, 10,000 e-vehicles are expected to be running in the national capital region. The tender to buy 10,000 e-vehicles has already attracted Tata Motors, Hyundai, Nissan, Renault, Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra & Mahindra, and would be quickly followed by a dramatic scaling up of the e-vehicles program. The tender would be awarded by the end of this month and cars would start rolling in by mid-November.

swschrad writes: Call it a stampede, call it a business decision, but Best Buy has pulled Kaspersky internet security software from its shelves and website. Some in the U.S. government suspect Russian ties make it a suspicious product. Since all major security companies have links with each other and with government security agencies, sharing threat evidence to find counters, Kaspersky's defense seems valid. But if you want it, be prepared to buy it off their own website. Best Buy will give Kaspersky software purchasers 45 days to exchange it for free for another product if they want. Additionally, customers can also uninstall it themselves or have a Geek Squad agent do it for free within that time window.

In response to the massive Equifax cybersecurity incident impacting approximately 143 million U.S. consumer -- making it possibly the worst leak of personal info ever -- Slashdot reader AdamStarks asks: What steps can the average Joe take to protect their identity? Accepting Equifax's help forfeits your right to sue; it's the same with applying for protection at TransUnion (not sure about Experian). Extra services at those companies also cost money, but that's putting even more of your data in their hands, and it's not clear whether the protection/help they provide is worth it (leaving aside not wanting to reward bad behavior).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Note brand is still going strong despite Samsung recalling and discontinuing Note 7 devices last year for battery explosions. The company today announced that more customers in the U.S. have preordered the Note 8 than any other Notes it has ever sold in previous years during the same time period. Note 8 preorders went live on August 24th and the device is one of Samsung's most expensive smartphones to date, starting at $930. It's unapologetically pricey, though Samsung did attempt to offset that price tag with some presale offers. Samsung did not specify exactly how many Note 8 preorders it has received so far, but judging by how popular Note 7s were last year before everything went down, it seems that little has deterred Note fans from upgrading -- not even the price tag.

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: Microsoft has declined to patch a security bug Cisco Talos researchers discovered in the Edge browser, claiming the reported issue is by design. Apple and Google patched a similar flaw in Safari (CVE-2017-2419) and Chrome (CVE-2017-5033), respectively. According to Cisco Talos researcher Nicolai Grodum, the vulnerability can be classified as a bypass of the Content Security Policy (CSP), a mechanism that allows website developers to configure HTTP headers and instruct the browsers of people visiting their site what resources (JavaScript, CSS) they can load and from where. The Content Security Policy (CSP) is one of the tools that browsers use to enforce Same-Origin Policy (SOP) inside browsers. Grodum says that he found a way to bypass CSP -- technical details available here -- that will allow an attacker to load malicious JavaScript code on a remote site and carry out intrusive operations such as collecting information from users' cookies, or logging keystrokes inside the page's forms, and others.

cdreimer writes: According to a report in The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled, alternative source), Uber is under investigation by federal law-enforcement authorities for using a program called "Hell" to illegally interfere with the competition by creating fake Lyft accounts, initiating phony ride requests for Lyft drivers, and offering cash bonuses for drivers who drive for both services to leave Lyft. This is creating a new headache for incoming CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to deal with. From the report: "Federal law-enforcement authorities in New York are investigating whether Uber Technologies Inc. used software to interfere illegally with its competitors, according to people familiar with the investigation, adding to legal pressures facing the embattled ride-hailing company and its new chief executive. The investigation, led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office and the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, is focused on a defunct Uber program, known internally as 'Hell,' that could track drivers working for rival service Lyft Inc., the people said. 'We are cooperating with the SDNY investigation,' said an Uber spokesman, referring to New York's Southern District. He declined to offer additional details. Uber has never publicly discussed the details of the program. But people familiar with the matter said 'Hell' worked like this: Uber created fake Lyft customer accounts, tricking Lyft's system into believing prospective customers were seeking rides in various locations around a city. That allowed Uber to see which Lyft drivers were nearby and what prices they were offering for various routes, similar to how such information appears when an authentic Lyft app is opened on a user's smartphone, these people said. The program was also used to glean data on drivers who worked for both companies, and whom Uber could target with cash incentives to get them to leave Lyft, said these people, who added that the program was discontinued last year."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The United Nations' aviation agency is backing the creation of a single global drone registry, as part of broader efforts to come up with common rules for flying and tracking unmanned aircraft. While the International Civil Aviation Organization cannot impose regulations on countries, ICAO has proposed formation of the registry during a Montreal symposium this month to make data accessible in real time, said Stephen Creamer, director of ICAO's air navigation bureau. The single registry would eschew multiple databases in favor of a one-stop-shop that would allow law enforcement to remotely identify and track unmanned aircraft, along with their operator and owner. It's not yet clear who would operate such a database, although ICAO could possibly fill that role. The proposal, however, could face push back from users, after hobbyists successfully challenged the creation of a U.S. drone registry by the Federal Aviation Administration in court earlier this year.

Brian Stelter, writing for CNN: Why won't Facebook show the public the propagandistic ads that a so-called Russian troll farm bought last year to target American voters? That lack of transparency is troubling to many observers. "Show us the ads Zuck!" Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jason Calacanis wrote on Twitter when The Washington Post reported on the surreptitious ad buys on Wednesday. Calacanis said Facebook was "profiting off fake news," echoing a widely held criticism of the social network. It was only the latest example of Facebook's credibility problem. For a business based on the concept of friendship, it's proving to be a hard company to trust. On the business side, Facebook's metrics for advertisers have been error-prone, to say the least. Analysts and reporters have repeatedly uncovered evidence of faulty data and measurement mistakes. Facebook's opaqueness has also engendered mistrust in the political arena. Conservative activists have accused the company of censoring right-wing voices and stories. Liberal activists have raised alarms about its exploitation of personal information to target ads. And the news business is worried about the spread of bogus stories and hoaxes on the site. Some critics have even taken to calling Facebook a "surveillance company," seeking to reframe the business the social network is in -- not networking but ad targeting based on monitoring of users. Over at The Verge, Casey Newton documents inconsistencies in Facebook's public remarks over its role in the outcome of the presidential election last year. Newton says Facebook's shifting Russian ads stories and unwillingness to disclose information citing laws (which seem to imply otherwise) are damaging its credibility.

As hurricanes continue to increase in frequency and intensity, a $10-billion-a-year project proposes injecting sulfate into the atmosphere to cool down the Earth and reduce the number of hurricanes by 50% for a staggering 50 years. From a report: In an attempt to combat climate change, a multinational team of scientists are working on a plan to literally re-engineer the Earth in order to cool it down and reduce the impact of storm systems. For example, a team led by John Moore, who is the head of China's geoengineering research program, is studying how shading sulfate aerosols that are dispersed into the stratosphere could help cool the planet and reduce the number of hurricane occurrences. In an interview with Popular Mechanics, outlining how the plan works, Moore asserts, "We're basically mimicking a volcano and saying we're going to put 5 billion tons of sulfates a year into the atmosphere 20 kilometers high, and we'll do that for 50 years." In their current research model, in which the scientists tested a senario where the sulfate injection is doubled over time, the team found that incidences of Katrina-level hurricanes could be maintained (they would be kept at the same rate that we currently see) and that storm surges, which is the rise in seawater level that is caused solely by a storm, could be mitigated by half. The researchers noted that the volcanic eruption in 1912 of Katmai in Alaska "loaded the Northern Hemisphere with aerosol [sulfates], and [was] followed by the least active hurricane season on record." Moore explains that warmer waters can spark and fuel hurricanes, and cooling them with shading sulfates reduces the size and intensity of these hurricanes.

Mexican VAT refund site MoneyBack exposed sensitive customer information online as a result of a misconfigured database. From a report: A CouchDB database featuring half a million customers' passport details, credit card numbers, travel tickets and more was left publicly accessible, security firm Kromtech reports. More than 400GB of sensitive information could be either downloaded or viewed because of a lack of access controls before the system was recently secured.

A group of scientists from Queen's University Belfast and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany have turned exoplanet-hunting on its head, in a study that instead looks at how an alien observer might be able to detect Earth using our own methods. From a report: They find that at least nine exoplanets are ideally placed to observe transits of Earth, in a new work published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Thanks to facilities and missions such as SuperWASP and Kepler, we have now discovered thousands of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, worlds known as 'exoplanets.' The vast majority of these are found when the planets cross in front of their host stars in what are known as 'transits,' which allow astronomers to see light from the host star dim slightly at regular intervals every time the planet passes between us and the distant star. In the new study, the authors reverse this concept and ask, "How would an alien observer see the Solar System?" They identified parts of the distant sky from where various planets in our Solar System could be seen to pass in front of the Sun - so-called 'transit zones' -- concluding that the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are actually much more likely to be spotted than the more distant 'Jovian' planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), despite their much larger size. To look for worlds where civilisations would have the best chance of spotting our Solar System, the astronomers looked for parts of the sky from which more than one planet could be seen crossing the face of the Sun. They found that three planets at most could be observed from anywhere outside of the Solar System, and that not all combinations of three planets are possible.

Ina Fried, writing for Axios: If you want to know why virtual reality hasn't taken off, you might want to blame our addiction to smartphones. Why? While the power of VR is to be transported into an immersive experience, consumers will demand a lot out of something that makes them give up Twitter and Facebook, even for a few minutes. One perspective: "It has to be a really compelling reason to get you to give up all that," Shauna Heller, a former Oculus worker who now consults on VR projects, said Thursday at the Mobile Future Forward conference near Seattle. "There aren't just a ton of those reasons just yet."

From a report: To study life on Earth, you need a system. Ours is Linnaean taxonomy, the model started by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in 1735. Linnaeus's two-part species names, often Latin-based, consist of both a genus name and a species name, i.e. Homo sapiens. Like a library's Dewey Decimal system for books, this biological classification system has allowed scientists around the world to study organisms without confusion or overlap for nearly 300 years. But, like any library, taxonomy is only as good as its librarians -- and now a few rogue taxonomists are threatening to expose the flaws within the system. Taxonomic vandals, as they're referred to within the field, are those who name scores of new taxa without presenting sufficient evidence for their finds. Like plagiarists trying to pass off others' work as their own, these glory-seeking scientists use others' original research in order to justify their so-called "discoveries." "It's unethical name creation based on other people's work," says Mark Scherz, a herpetologist who recently named a new species of fish-scaled gecko. "It's that lack of ethical sensibility that creates that problem." The goal of taxonomic vandalism is often self-aggrandizement. Even in such an unglamorous field, there is prestige and reward -- and with them, the temptation to misbehave. "If you name a new species, there's some notoriety to it," Thomson says. "You get these people that decide that they just want to name everything, so they can go down in history as having named hundreds and hundreds of species." The problem may be getting worse, thanks to the advent of online publishing and loopholes in the species naming code. With vandals at large, some researchers are less inclined to publish or present their work publicly for fear of being scooped, taxonomists told me. "Now there's a hesitation to present our data publically, and that's how scientists communicate," Thomson says. "The problem that causes is that you don't know who is working on what, and then the scientists start stepping on each other's toes."

A thriving ecosystem of websites that allow users to automatically generate millions of fake "likes" and comments on Facebook has been documented by researchers at the University of Iowa. From a report: Working with a computer scientist at Facebook and one in Lahore, Pakistan, the team found more than 50 sites offering free, fake "likes" for users' posts in exchange for access to their accounts, which were used to falsely "like" other sites in turn. The scientists found that these "collusion networks" run by spammers have managed to harness the power of one million Facebook accounts, producing as many as 100 million fake "likes" on the systems between 2015 and 2016. A large number of "likes" can push a posting up in Facebook's algorithm, making it more likely the post will be seen by more people and also making it seem more legitimate.