An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: President Trump blasted Twitter's "trending" section in a Monday tweet, calling it "really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!" "So disgusting to watch Twitter's so-called 'Trending', where sooo many trends are about me, and never a good one," Trump posted. "They look for anything they can find, make it as bad as possible, and blow it up, trying to make it trend," he added.

The president's relationship with Twitter, where he often turns to speak directly to supporters, has grown more contentious in recent months. The social media platform put warnings and fact checks on two of Trump's posts in May about mail-in voting, saying the tweets contained "potentially misleading information." Twitter also added an advisory to one of Trump's June tweets, which threatened demonstrators who want to create an "autonomous zone" in Washington, D.C. The advisory said the tweet broke Twitter's rules about abusive behavior and threatening violence. The president sought to fight back in May, issuing an executive order intended to strip social media platforms of certain legal protections, though experts say the order is largely toothless and stands on shaky legal ground.

Amazon has announced that it's launching a new Counterfeit Crimes Unit as the latest effort by the online retailer to fight counterfeit products on its website. The Verge reports: The new team is said to be made up of "former federal prosecutors, experienced investigators, and data analysts," who will work to proactively "go on the offensive" against counterfeiters, instead of just reacting by trying to identify and block bad listings. According to Amazon, the new Counterfeit Crimes Unit will make it easier for the company to file civil lawsuits, aid brands in their own investigations, and work with law enforcement officials in fighting counterfeiters. Earlier this month, 3M sued merchants who used Amazon to sell 3M and counterfeit masks for more than 18 times their standard price. The Trump administration also took aim at Amazon by recently including the company's foreign websites in Canada, the U.K., Germany, France and India in its annual report on "notorious markets" for counterfeit foreign goods.

A paper coauthored by over 112 researchers across 160 data and social science teams found that AI and statistical models, when used to predict six life outcomes for children, parents, and households, weren't very accurate even when trained on 13,000 data points from over 4,000 families. From a report: They assert that the work is a cautionary tale on the use of predictive modeling, especially in the criminal justice system and social support programs. "Here's a setting where we have hundreds of participants and a rich data set, and even the best AI results are still not accurate," said study co-lead author Matt Salganik, a professor of sociology at Princeton and interim director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "These results show us that machine learning isn't magic; there are clearly other factors at play when it comes to predicting the life course."

The study [PDF], which was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the fruit of the Fragile Families Challenge, a multi-year collaboration that sought to recruit researchers to complete a predictive task by predicting the same outcomes using the same data. Over 457 groups applied, of which 160 were selected to participate, and their predictions were evaluated with an error metric that assessed their ability to predict held-out data (i.e., data held by the organizer and not available to the participants). The Challenge was an outgrowth of the Fragile Families Study (formerly Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study) based at Princeton, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan, which has been studying a cohort of about 5,000 children born in 20 large American cities between 1998 and 2000.

New submitter andywest shares a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration attempted to persuade a German firm developing a possible vaccine for coronavirus to move its research work to the United States, German officials said, raising fears in Berlin that President Trump was trying to assure that any inoculation would be available first, and perhaps exclusively, in the United States. The offer arose from a March 2 meeting at the White House that included the chief executive of the German firm CureVac, Daniel Menichella. President Trump briefly attended the meeting and Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House coronavirus task force, was also there. White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But two senior American officials said that some of the German news accounts first reporting the story were overblown, particularly with regard to any effort by the United States to secure exclusive access to a vaccine. The Trump administration has spoken with more than 25 companies that say they can help with a vaccine, one of the American officials said, and is open to speaking with others. Any solution, he said, would be shared with the world.

Nevertheless, Germany's interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said that Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a famously testy relationship with Mr. Trump, will lead a crisis meeting with ministers on Monday that will include discussion of a German defense strategy for the firm. Asked by a reporter to confirm that the U.S. administration had tried to take over a German company researching vaccines, Seehofer responded that he had heard about the effort "from several members of the government and it will be discussed tomorrow in the crisis team." Another official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said the company was offered a "large sum" of money.

According to the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, which first reported the story on Sunday, Mr. Trump offered CureVac roughly $1 billion in exchange for exclusive access to the vaccine. The newspaper quoted an unnamed German government source who said Mr. Trump wanted the resulting vaccine "only for the United States." But another German official, reached by The New York Times, said it was unclear whether the administration simply wanted the research work, and for any resulting production to be on American soil.

Amazon cracked down on coronavirus price gouging. Now, while the rest of the world searches, some sellers are holding stockpiles of sanitizer and masks. From a report: On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves. Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from "little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods," his brother said. "The major metro areas were cleaned out." Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, "it was crazy money." To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic.

The next day, Amazon pulled his items and thousands of other listings for sanitizer, wipes and face masks. The company suspended some of the sellers behind the listings and warned many others that if they kept running up prices, they'd lose their accounts. EBay soon followed with even stricter measures, prohibiting any U.S. sales of masks or sanitizer. Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them. "It's been a huge amount of whiplash," he said. "From being in a situation where what I've got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to 'What the heck am I going to do with all of this?'" A day after the story ran, the Tennessee man donated all of the supplies on Sunday.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new technology being developed by McLaren Technology Centre for its "Elva," a multi-million dollar, 804-horsepower two-seat roadster.

It doesn't have a windshield... In place of a windscreen, Elva will debut a technology called Active Air Management System (AAMS). When engaged, it generates two air flows streaming over the cockpit: One glances off the low, curvaceous wind deflector rising out of the front bodywork, with an energy proportional to vehicle speed. The other airflow is scooped up in a low-mounted grille intake and turned 135 degrees. Now ducted up and slightly forward, this high pressure flow intercepts the deflected airflow, bending the combined flows over the cockpit. Meanwhile, streaming air clinging to the hood wants to be drawn down, below face level, following the Elva's curving scuttle and dash.

And so the Elva's historically unique, eye-of-the-hurricane gestalt: Driver and passenger motoring at highway speeds, talking at normal volume, as warm or as cool as desired and, looking out, seeing nothing... but scenery. No helmet limiting their peripheral vision as if looking through a well-padded porthole, stifling breath and sense of smell. And no heavy, roof-supporting "A" pillars either, which clumsily bracket existence in almost all modern cars. The Elva is the motoring equivalent of a horizonless pool.

Under the right conditions the Elva's system can billow precipitation out of the way, over the car, so the occupants stay dry. Heading up the mountain to Gstaad? With the AAMS active, falling snow will swirl past but never settle... What about bugs? I asked. Will they be deflected too? "It depends on the mass of the bug," said Andrew Kay, Elva project chief engineer, being completely serious. What about stones thrown up by trucks? Overtalk...inaudible... In any event, McLaren expects all occupants will be wearing helmets on piste and will only engage the AAMS bareheaded at moderate speeds...

At 60 mph, the wind was so still I could have lit a cigarette.

A security firm consulted by ProPublica found that the "IowaReporter" app used to count and report votes from individual precincts in the Iowa Democratic caucuses was vulnerable to hacking. From the report: The IowaReporterApp was so insecure that vote totals, passwords and other sensitive information could have been intercepted or even changed, according to officials at Massachusetts-based Veracode, a security firm that reviewed the software at ProPublica's request. Because of a lack of safeguards, transmissions to and from the phone were left largely unprotected. Chris Wysopal, Veracode's chief technology officer, said the problems were elementary. He called it a "poor decision" to release the software without first fixing them. "It is important for all mobile apps that deal with sensitive data to have adequate security testing, and have any vulnerabilities fixed before being released for use," he said.

There's no evidence that hackers intercepted or tampered with caucus results. An attack would have required some degree of sophistication, but it would have been much easier to pull off had a precinct worker used an open Wi-Fi hotspot to report votes instead of a cell data plan. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security offered to test the app for the Iowa Democratic Party, but the party never took the government up on it, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said the party did participate in a dry run, known as a tabletop exercise. The party did not respond to requests for comment on this issue. Gerard Niemira, Shadow's CEO, said in a statement to ProPublica that "we are committed to the security of our products, including the app used during the Iowa caucuses. While there were reporting delays, what was most important is that the data was accurate and the caucus reporting process remained secure throughout."

"Our app underwent multiple, rigorous tests by a third party, but we learned today that a researcher found a vulnerability in our app. As with all software, sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered after they are released." He added that no "hack or intrusion" occurred during the caucuses, and that "the integrity of the vote in Iowa was not compromised in any way." The app is not currently in use, he said.

NBC News is also reporting that the phone number used to report Iowa caucus results was posted on 4chan on Monday night "along with encouragement to 'clog the lines,' an indication that jammed phone lines that left some caucus managers on hold for hours may have in part been due to prank calls."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cameras with artificial intelligence (AI) software that the South Korean government claims can detect the likelihood of crime will be installed in Seoul within the year. The Seocho District of South Korea's capital and Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ERTI), a national research institute, said they will install 3,000 cameras at the district by July. The cameras will use AI software that processes the location, time, and behavior patterns of passersby to measure the likelihood of a crime taking place.

The cameras will automatically measure whether somebody is walking normally or tailing someone. It will also detect what passersby are wearing -- such as hats, masks, or glasses -- and what they are carrying with them such as bags or dangerous objects that have a strong possibility of being used to commit a crime. The cameras will also consider whether it is day or night. They will use this information to deduce the probability that a crime will take place, they claim. If the rate exceeds a certain rate, the cameras will alert the district office and nearby police stations to send personnel to the location. Going forward, Seocho and ETRI plan to analyze 20,000 court sentencing documents and crime footage to deduce crime patterns for the AI software to memorize.

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: Emperor Palpatine is back with a fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers, the masses are scared to fight the Final Order, and the last glimmer of hope for the rebellion is nearly stamped out by ... overbearing DRM? The Rise of Skywalker is an allegory for the dystopian nightmare we are quickly hurtling toward, one in which we don't own our droids (or any of our other stuff), their utility hampered by arbitrary decisions and software locks by monopolistic corporations who don't want us to repair our things. In Skywalker, C3PO, master of human-cyborg relations, speaks six million languages including Sith (spoken by the Dark Side), but a hard-coded software lock (called Digital Rights Management here on Earth) in his circuitry prevents him from translating Sith aloud to his human users. Presumably, this is to prevent the droid from being used by the Sith, but makes very little sense in the context of a galactic war that has relied so heavily on double agents, spies, and leaked plans and documents. The only explanation that makes any sense is a greedy 3PO manufacturer that sells the Sith language pack as a microtransaction and a galactic Congress that hasn't passed strong right to repair laws for the junk traders, droid mechanics, and droid users of the galaxy. C3PO's software lock is a major plot point in Skywalker as he's unable to translate a Sith passage that could lead our heroes to the Sith planet that the aforementioned Palpatine is hanging out on.

Astronomers compared old views of the sky with what we see today and found that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, they say parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). CNET reports: On March 16, 1950, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory pointed a telescope roughly in the direction of the constellation Lupus the wolf and took a picture. When scientists look at that same patch of sky today, something is missing, and it could be evidence of something else lurking out there. Back in 2016, researchers in Sweden reported that a star had been lost. One of the roiling distant suns visible in that USNO image from the previous century could no longer be seen, even with the more advanced and sensitive digital sky surveys in use today.

The team published a paper on the discovery, but called it "very uncertain" at the time, resolving to do more follow-up work and to continue scouring old USNO observations for other celestial objects that seem to have gone missing. Three years later, it's still unclear what happened to that star spotted in 1950, but the team behind the "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (Vasco) project now says they've found a hundred more missing stars like it by comparing old and new observations. "Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish," explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain's Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias. "The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations."

According to a report in Politico, the Trump administration held a National Security Council meeting on Wednesday that weighed the challenges and benefits of encryption. "One of Politico's sources said that the meeting was split into two camps: Decide, create and publicize the administration's position on encryption or go so far as to ask Congress for legislation to ban end-to-end encryption," reports Gizmodo. From the report: That would be a huge escalation in the encryption fight and, moreover, would probably be unsuccessful due to a lack of willpower in Congress. No decision was made by the Trump administration officials, Politico reported. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The fact that these discussions are ongoing both within the White House and with Silicon Valley shows that the issue is still very much alive within the corridors of power.