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Submission + - U.S. intelligence officials say Chinese government is collecting Americans' DNA (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The largest biotech firm in the world wasted no time in offering to build and run COVID testing labs in Washington, contacting its governor right after the first major COVID outbreak in the U.S. occurred there. The Chinese company, the BGI Group, made the same offer to at least five other states, including New York and California, 60 Minutes has learned.

This, along with other COVID testing offers by BGI, so worried Bill Evanina, then the country's top counterintelligence officer, that he authorized a rare public warning. "Foreign powers can collect, store and exploit biometric information from COVID tests" declared the notice. Evanina believes the Chinese are trying to collect Americans' DNA to win a race to control the world's biodata.

Jon Wertheim speaks to Evanina and others for an investigation into how personal data, particularly biodata, has become a precious commodity and in the wrong hands, poses threats to national security and the economy.

Comment Re: May be embarrassing but.. (Score 1) 242

by Blig (#61007402) Attached to: 'We Spoke To a Guy Who Got His Dick Locked In a Cage By a Hacker'

You as a 15 year old are probably more skilled, and resourceful, than most adults. Definitely more resourceful than Mr. Bolt Cutters, when a smaller tool would have sufficed.

Yeah bolt cutters... I'm picturing him and his 'play' friend running off to a local hardware store and asking someone who worked in there if they had something to cut a "round metal thing" off "something" (I'm assuming he was too embarrassed to go into details) and was recommended a bolt cutter. He should be thankful the store employee didn't recommend an angle grinder with a cutting blade...

Submission + - US Military's GPS Tests a Major Threat to Airline Safety (ieee.org) 1

Submitted by cusco
cusco writes: In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. “Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain,” wrote the controller. “Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead."...

There are some 90 ASRS reports detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country.

Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. “When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don’t do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn’t.”

Submission + - Cable ISP Warns 'Excessive' Uploaders, Says Network Can't Handle Heavy Usage (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mediacom, a cable company with about 1.4 million Internet customers across 22 states, is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage — even when those users are well below their monthly data caps. Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB. But as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is "reach[ing] out to a growing number of its heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed throttle or the possible closure of their account." Mediacom told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders "more frequently than before" because of increased usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders "may be under their total bandwidth usage allowance but still have a negative impact on Mediacom’s network."

Mediacom's terms and conditions say the company charges $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB used by customers who exceed the data cap. But users may be warned about their usage long before they risk overage fees. One user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the predicament on a DSLReports forum in early January, said they paid for the 6TB plan "to make sure we wouldn't go over the cap" and had never used more than 4TB. Another gigabit user in Missouri named Cory told Stop the Cap that the 6TB monthly cap "is way more than I will ever use, but I still received a warning letter claiming I was uploading too much. I discovered I used about 900GB over the last two months, setting up a cloud backup of my computer. At most I can send files at around 50Mbps, which they claim is interfering with other customers in my neighborhood. I don't understand."

Submission + - "Serious" vulnerability found in Libgcrypt, GnuPG's cryptographic library

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Libgcrypt 1.9.0, the newest version of a cryptographic library integrated in the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) free encryption software, has a “severe” security vulnerability and should not be used, warned Werner Koch. Koch, who is the principal developer behind GnuPG and the author of Libgcrypt, sent the urgent warning via the project’s mailing list.

Submission + - Apple Adds 'BlastDoor' to Secure iOS From Zero-Click Attacks (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Apple has quietly added several anti-exploit mitigations into iOS in what appears to be a specific response to zero-click iMessage attacks observed in the wild.

The new mitigations were discovered by Samuel Groß, a Google Project Zero security researcher, with the first big addition being a new, tightly sandboxed “BlastDoor” service that is now responsible for the parsing of untrusted data in iMessages.

With iOS 14, Groß discovered that Apple shipped a significant refactoring of iMessage processing, and made all four parts of an attack much harder to succeed.

Submission + - State Reps Try To Ban Comcast Data Cap and Price Hikes Until Pandemic Is Over (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In response to Comcast imposing a data cap on Massachusetts residents, state lawmakers have proposed a ban on data caps, new fees, and price increases on home-Internet services for the duration of the pandemic. The legislation was filed on Tuesday this week by Democratic state representatives Andy Vargas and Dave Rogers. Vargas called the bill a "response to Comcast Internet data cap plans," while Rogers said the goal is "to push back at Comcast and any other service providers who try to raise prices or fees during a pandemic." Verizon FiOS and RCN also provide Internet service in Massachusetts but do not impose data caps.

Vargas and Rogers previously led a group of 71 Massachusetts lawmakers who urged Comcast to halt enforcement of its 1.2TB monthly data cap, arguing that the cap hurts low-income people and is unnecessary because of Comcast's robust network capacity. While Comcast already enforced the data cap in 27 states for several years, the cable company brought the cap to the rest of its territory—an additional 12 states including Massachusetts and the District of Columbia—this month. Comcast is easing-in enforcement so that the first overage charges for newly capped customers will be assessed for data usage in the April 2021 billing period. The Massachusetts House has a 128-30 Democratic majority. Besides Vargas and Rogers, the bill so far has 21 cosponsors, most of whom just signed on today.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Censorship 'Can't Be The Only Answer' To Anti-Vax Misinformation, Argues EFF (eff.org) 313

Posted by EditorDavid from the APIs-for-algorithms dept.
Despite the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation, "censorship cannot be the only answer," argues the EFF, adding that "removing entire categories of speech from a platform does little to solve the underlying problems."

"Tech companies and online platforms have other ways to address the rapid spread of disinformation, including addressing the algorithmic 'megaphone' at the heart of the problem and giving users control over their own feeds... " Anti-vax information is able to thrive online in part because it exists in a data void in which available information about vaccines online is "limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic." Because the merit of vaccines has long been considered a decided issue, there is little recent scientific literature or educational material to take on the current mountains of disinformation. Thus, someone searching for recent literature on vaccines will likely find more anti-vax content than empirical medical research supporting vaccines. Censoring anti-vax disinformation won't address this problem.

Even attempts at the impossible task of wiping anti-vax disinformation from the Internet entirely will put it beyond the reach of researchers, public health professionals, and others who need to be able to study it and understand how it spreads. In a worst-case scenario, well-intentioned bans on anti-vax content could actually make this problem worse. Facebook, for example, has over-adjusted in the past to the detriment of legitimate educational health content...

Platforms must address one of the root causes behind disinformation's spread online: the algorithms that decide what content users see and when. And they should start by empowering users with more individualized tools that let them understand and control the information they see.... Users shouldn't be held hostage to a platform's proprietary algorithm. Instead of serving everyone "one algorithm to rule them all" and giving users just a few opportunities to tweak it, platforms should open up their APIs to allow users to create their own filtering rules for their own algorithms. News outlets, educational institutions, community groups, and individuals should all be able to create their own feeds, allowing users to choose who they trust to curate their information and share their preferences with their communities.

Comment Re:What do you do with fake facts? (Score 1) 230

by Blig (#54193889) Attached to: Google Tackles Fake News With Global Fact-Checking Rollout

How do you know that the "facts" are facts in the first place?

Indeed. "Fact checking" groups/sites are always going to be biased towards someone/some group. There is no such thing as an unbiased independent "fact checking" anything. Might as watch the horrid unashamedly biased news sites like CNN and Fox News who are two different sides of the same coin.

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