[slightly off-topic]
talking about "per capita" with China hides the massive imbalance between the rich Eastern coastal provinces (with wages and standard of living comparable to "the West") and the much poorer inland provinces. The rich Chinese don't particularly like the uneducated peasants/factory workers...

"... managed to recently waste a mind-boggling $100 million in pointless digital advertising campaigns through a host of blatantly shady ad networks. One such instance involved launching "'battery saver' style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone." Upon typing "Uber" into Google Play, the service "auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves."

1) This makes it sound like Uber was making the fake "battery saver-style apps", not a dodgy ad network that got paid commission for impressions/app installs.

2) the twitter thread linked to says the "waste" was 15% of their $100m advertising budget, not that the entire $100m was wasted.

this is how the Singapore app works too. When you register the app (or the standalone bluetooth token), you give the Ministry of Health your contact details, but the phone apps and tokens only swap your random ID with each other, and those exchanges stay on the device.

If you are diagnosed with Covid-19, the MOH gives you a code you put into the phone app that will let it upload all the recent exchange data to their website, where it can be associated with your contact details. (Or you give them the bluetooth token, if you are using that instead of the phone app.)

If the police have access to the MOH registry, then they can only access people's contact details (which the Singapore government already knows for everyone in the country), and presumbly the uploaded random identifiers for anyone unlikely enough to get a Covid-19 diagnosis.

There is currently a separate system called SafeEntry which is based on scanning a QR code when you enter any shop or shopping mall, and presumably that uploads identifiable location data to a government website. However if the police are really interested then they can already access cell phone tower data to know where your phone has been. (even pre-pay SIM cards in Singapore require ID to purchase, so the government knows who has every number.)

when I moved countries (but took my wireless router with me), google used to think I was still at my old location for the first several months (when I was connected my to wifi). I guess until the next time a google car drove past and got the new location of the AP mac address...

99.8% between humans and chimpanzees refers to the entire genome (~3 billion base pairs).

23 And Me and related companies only look at about 3 million positions - the positions that are often different between different human populations/races (these are known as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).

this study was funded by Singapore's Ministry of Health partly to see if that was true... unfortunately it turns out not to be (for a 'large' majority of people, at least).

The stupid new item didn't even link to the journal article - the summary and findings are available at http://www.thelancet.com/journ...

this is misreported, as it was back in June when the policy was first announced. They are planning on having a separate network for desktops that can connect to sensitive databases (eg think of citizenship/passport etc functions), and those desktops won't have internet access. I guess those civil servants in such a position will have 2 computers on their desktop.

This is not "all civil servants are now banned from facebook/google at work".

in this case, 1MDB transferred some money to an account owned by a company with a very similar name to another investment company, and claimed it was for investment purposes. (The 'fake' company was controlled by insiders, and was named to looked like it was a Saudi-owned investment fund.) The money from the shell account was transferred through multiple other shell accounts through multiple jurisdictions, to try to hide the paper trail.

When I was in China for several months, most popular Western websites were blocked - social networking sites because people can organise/talk freely, and news websites for obvious reasons.

However different ISPs (or different regional divisions of the same large national ISP) would block different sites at different times, so it's not like all of China's traffic goes through 1 single firewalling router :). Presumably they have independent implementations of a vague set of rules. Many sites are blocked via DNS spoofing (using a public DNS server instead of the ISP's server was good enough for most of these but some sites had the DNS requests intercepted even when doing this), some pages get blocked due to the content (if not encrypted). Presumably they have more rules for content written in Chinese than in English.

I often browsed by proxying everything via SSH to my machine in my home country. Sometimes my SSH connections would time out and I couldn't use my proxy. After getting back home I discovered several thousand automated brute force password attempts on SSH, coming from a range of IP addresses assigned to the same city in China where I was staying.

I also work with someone whose family name is "Teh". The problem isn't him typing his own name into the computer, it's the entire rest of the world typing his name in. Eg I've seen conference proceedings and meeting minutes with his name spelled as "The".

presumably they can file and claim your tax refund when they have enough information to impersonate you? Especially if they file before you get around to doing it yourself...

HIV is a "retrovirus", which means the the virus's DNA integrates into the host's DNA. Some other viruses do this, but I think most don't. Some are more interesting, eg EBV is a virus from the herpes family which infects several different tissue types, and we know it can integrate into human DNA inside white blood cells, but I don't think there's proof that it can integrate inside liver or stomach cells.

As a retrovirus, the HIV sequence successfully breaks into a cell, then breaks into the cell's nucleus, then into one of the nucleus' chromosomes. (This is obviously harder to detect than viruses that stay inside the cell's cytoplasm, or that enter the nucleus but stay apart as their own episome [mini-chromosome].) That's what the article is referring to when they say their method recognises a 34-base pair long sequence - it is recognising that piece of the viral sequence in our own chromosome, and then uses something to snip out enough of the viral sequence that it can no longer make new copies of itself.

Obviously you want to be careful with any therapy that involves cutting up bits of human chromosomes... :)

I remember that doing MITM of vanilla http traffic to slashdot was one method that the spooks were using to inject browser exploits, when they were targeting IT professionals at 'interesting' companies. so I think https everywhere would be important :)

the summary and/or editor's blurb should have made it clear that in this context AR = Augmented Reality.

there is no Nobel prize for biology, since it wasn't a big field when the prizes were set up.

The closest categories are the Medicine prize and the Biology prize. A lot of inorganic chemists complain that the chemistry Nobel almost always goes to molecular biology discoveries :) The prize for Blue LEDs are a recent exception to that trend.