SoylentNews

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/huawei-sues-fcc-to-stop-ban-on-huawei-gear-in-us-funded-

Huawei has sued the Federal Communications Commission over the agency's order that bans Huawei equipment in certain government-funded telecom projects.

[...] The FCC voted unanimously on November 22 to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment in projects paid for by the commission's Universal Service Fund (USF). The order will affect many small telecom providers that rely on the companies' network gear.

[...] "The US government has never presented real evidence to show that Huawei is a national security threat," Song said. "That's because this evidence does not exist. When pushed for facts, they respond that 'disclosing evidence might also undermine US national security.' This is complete nonsense."

[...] "We've built networks in places where other vendors would not go. They were too remote, or the terrain was difficult, or there just wasn't a big enough population," he said. "In the US, we sell equipment to 40 small wireless and wireline operators. They connect schools, hospitals, farms, homes, community colleges, and emergency services."

Hoftstra University law professor Julian Ku said that "even a small [Huawei] victory in the case, one that makes the FCC go and start the process over again, would be a huge victory for them," according to The New York Times. But it may be a difficult case for Huawei to win because US courts usually give federal agencies "a tremendous amount of deference," Ku said.

Previously:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Huawei Funds $56M in Academic Research in Canada. That Has Some Experts Concerned
How China Is Building A World-Beating Phone Network
FCC Tells US Telcos: Buy Chinese Kit And You Won't See Another Dime From Us
American Giants Get 90 Days To Wrap Up Deals With 'Dangerous' Huawei
Huawei's First Google-Free Phone Stripped And Searched: Repair Not Too Painful... Once You're In
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Urges Europe to Take a Stand Against Huawei
Microsoft President Says US Government Isn't Being Open About Huawei Ban
Huawei: ARM Cortex-A77 Cores Would Shorten Battery Life
Huawei Might Put its IOT OS on Mobile Phones After All
Huawei Announces HarmonyOS, a Smartphone OS and Android Alternative
Huawei Doesn't See Open Source as the Fix for Spying Accusations (but They Should)
Huawei Reportedly Helped North Korea Build Out 3G Network in Secret
Huawei's Android Alternative Lives on... for IoT
What Huawei To Go: Hundreds Of Chinese Tech Giant's US Workers To Get Pink Slip
Trump Administration Will Loosen Restrictions Against Huawei
Huawei Soldiers on, Announces Nova 5 and Kirin 810
Huawei Blacklisting Predicted to Cause DRAM Prices to Drop 15%
NSA Spied on Chinese Government and Huawei

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for chromas.

The Future of Texting Is Far Too Easy to Hack

Ask practically any phone carrier, and they'll tell you that the future of smartphone features from texting to video calls is a protocol called Rich Communication Services. Think of RCS as the successor to SMS, an answer to iMessage that can also handle phone and video calls. Last month, Google announced that it would begin rolling RCS out to its Messages app in all US Android phones. It's easy to imagine a near-future where RCS is the default for a billion people or more. But when security researchers looked under the hood, they found the way carriers and Google have implemented the protocol creates a slew of worrying vulnerabilities.

At the Black Hat security conference in London today, German security consultancy SRLabs demonstrated a collection of problems in how RCS is implemented by both phone carriers and Google in modern Android phones. Those implementation flaws, the researchers say, could allow texts and calls to be intercepted, spoofed, or altered at will, in some cases by a hacker merely sitting on the same Wi-Fi network and using relatively simple tricks. SRLabs previously described those flaws at the DeepSec security conference in Vienna last week, but at Black Hat also showed how those RCS hijacking attacks would work in videos like the one below:[*]

SRLabs founder Karsten Nohl, a researcher with a long track record of exposing security flaws in telephony systems, argues that RCS is in many ways no better than SS7, the decades-old phone system carriers still used for calling and texting, which has long been known to be vulnerable to interception and spoofing attacks. While using end-to-end encrypted internet-based tools like iMessage and WhatsApp obviates many of those of SS7 issues, Nohl says that flawed implementations of RCS make it not much safer than the SMS system it hopes to replace.

"You're going to be more vulnerable to hackers because your network decided to activate RCS," says Nohl. "RCS gives us the capability to read your text messages and listen to your calls. That's a capability that we had with SS7, but SS7 is a protocol from the '80s. Now some of these issues are being reintroduced in a modern protocol, and with support from Google."

[*] YouTube Link.

Original Submission

Samoa Shuts Down in Unprecedented Battle Against Measles

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Bytram.

Samoa shuts down in unprecedented battle against measles

Samoa began a two-day shutdown on Thursday as authorities embarked on an unprecedented mass vaccination campaign to contain a deadly outbreak of measles that has killed 62 people, mostly small children, in the Pacific island nation.

Officials suspended non-essential government services to allow civil servants to support the vaccination drive, and ordered all businesses to close. Inter-island ferry services were also cancelled.

"No one is being permitted to drive unless they are going to hospital or they have special permission," Al Jazeera's Jessica Washington said from the capital, Apia. Behind her wide streets were all but empty of people and cars.

"The ban is to make it as simple as possible for the medical teams to travel throughout Samoa and access as many families as possible."

Red Flags To Mark Homes Of Unvaccinated In Samoa, Officials Say

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

People who have not been vaccinated against the measles virus should mark their homes with red flags, Samoan officials announced Tuesday.

The outbreak has flourished after the vaccination rate of infants plunged to an estimated 31 percent last year. Health officials linked the drop in vaccination to the tragic deaths of two infants, who were given measles vaccines tainted with fatal doses of muscle relaxant. Two nurses were convicted in the cases and sentenced to five years in prison. Despite the convictions, anti-vaccine advocates have used the cases to drum up fear of vaccines.

As the outbreak took off last month, the Samoan government declared a state of emergency. It has closed schools, banned children from public gatherings, and begun a mass vaccination campaign. Samoa has since vaccinated over 58,000 people.

NB: The population of Samoa is just under 200,000 people.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

Hair Dyes and Straighteners Might Be a Breast Cancer Risk, Especially for Black Women, Study Finds

If you're a woman, regularly coloring or straightening your hair might come with a hidden risk, according to new government-led research. The study found a link between using permanent hair dye and straightening products and an increased risk of breast cancer in women, especially for black women.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health looked at data from an earlier government project that studied the long-term health of healthy women in the U.S. whose sisters had earlier developed cancer, aptly named the Sister Study. As part of the project, women were asked about their use of hair products over the 12 months prior to their enrolling in the research. Using this data, they tracked the health of some 45,000 U.S. women between the ages of 35 to 74 over an average of eight years.

Women who reported regularly using permanent hair dyes before the study began, they found, were 9 percent more likely than women who didn't use hair dye to develop breast cancer. And those who used straighteners were 18 percent more likely—an increased risk that shot up to 30 percent for women who used straighteners every five to eight weeks.

The study's findings were published Tuesday in the International Journal of Cancer.

As is often the case in studying cancer risk, these sorts of studies can only indirectly suggest that something causes cancer. And while some research has pointed to a link between hair dye and cancer, the evidence as a whole has been mixed. A 2018 review that looked specifically at breast cancer, however, did find a positive link to hair dye products.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Amazon AI generates medical records from patient-doctor conversations

Amazon believes its latest Web Services tool will help doctors spend more time with their patients. The tool, called Amazon Transcribe Medical, allows doctors to easily transcribe patient conversations and add those interactions to someone's medical records with the help of deep learning software.

According to Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services, the tool can understand medical language. Additionally, doctors don't have to worry about calling out commas and periods; the software will take care of that automatically. Wood also claimed that Transcribe Medical is very accurate, though Amazon has yet to publish a study that shows just how well it works. Lastly, doctors can use the software in conjunction with Comprehend Medical, a tool Amazon announced last year that can read unstructured medical text and then pull information like dosages and symptoms from it.

"Our overarching goal is to free up the doctor, so they have more attention going to where it should be directed," Wood told CNBC. "And that's to the patient."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Bizarre space first: A tiny star was spotted consuming a giant planet four times its size

We think of stars as humongous objects that hold sway over everything in their considerable vicinity, but for the first time astronomers have spotted a giant planet that circles a dying dwarf star only a quarter of its size.

The puny sun exerts its dwindling force over the planet, stripping away its atmosphere and spinning an elegant disc of gas around itself in the process.

The oddball star carries the uninspired name WDJ0914+1914, located some 1,500 light years away, and the evaporating planet around it is thought to be something like Neptune based on the levels of hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur in the gassy disc. Yes, this planet is quite literally releasing silent but deadly stinky fumes across its solar system.

"Such a system has never been seen before, and it was immediately clear to me that this was a unique star," lead researcher Boris Gänsicke from the University of Warwick in the UK said in a release. "We knew that there had to be something exceptional going on in this system, and speculated that it may be related to some type of planetary remnant."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

SpaceX scrubbed yesterday's scheduled launch attempt for CRS-19 (Commercial Resupply Mission) to the ISS (International Space Station) because of concerns about upper altitude winds.

The backup launch window is scheduled for four hours from the time of this story today, at 12:29pm ET (17:29 UTC). Conditions look favorable with a forecast of 80% favorable winds.

Ars Technica notes:

[...] Typically, the newest variant of the Falcon 9 rocket has enough lift capacity to loft the Dragon spacecraft into orbit before using its remaining fuel to steer it back to a landing site on the Florida coast.

In this case, however, the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage is slated to land on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship more than 100 miles offshore. Asked about this, SpaceX's director of Dragon mission management, Jessica Jensen, said Tuesday that the rocket's upper stage is slated to fly a "thermal demonstration" for another, unnamed customer. To put this second stage into the proper orbit for this demonstration, the first stage will need to burn longer and will not have the fuel needed to return to the coast.

There are two SpaceX YouTube streams for this mission: CRS-19 Mission Control Audio and the audio+video CRS-19 Mission. SpaceX streams typically start approximately 15 minutes before the scheduled launch time.

Also available on YouTube is the NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV.

For last-minute developments, keep an eye on the SpaceX Twitter feed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

[Update: In the first comment, a Soylentil cautioned against following the story's link. I investigated. Running with scripts disabled on Chrome on Android I got a blank page. On a laptop running Win7Pro x64, Opera 35 (with scripts disabled) displayed a blank page. Pale Moon 28.7.2 (running NoScript, uBlock Origin, and Adblock Latitude) the story displayed fine without being asked any questions. Using Lynx (a character mode browser) and denying all cookies also displayed the story just fine. With scripts disabled, IE11 also displayed the story just fine. YMMV. Out of an abundance of caution it has been put in a spoiler tag. --martyb]

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Lunaz is electrifying beautiful but unreliable classic cars

Few would question the beauty of classic cars from the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, these vehicles are increasingly rare on British roads as they fall into disrepair or become a treasured possession that is only driven on weekends, after hours of meticulous maintenance in a private garage. David Lorenz, however, is desperate to keep classic cars on the road. He's driven them for years, knowing full well they'll probably break down every six months. "It didn't really bother me," Lorenz said. "I could laugh it off and say it was part of the experience of owning a classic."

One particular mid-drive malfunction stung, though. Lorenz recalls sitting on the side of the road, in the freezing cold, with no vehicular heating to keep him warm. Breakdown services showed up 90 minutes later. "My brain was going 'How do we change this?'" he said. In that moment, Lorenz realized that classic cars would eventually become too hard to fix and, therefore, inaccessible to his daughter Luna's generation. "She's just not going to [own] these types of vehicles," he thought. "Because people will not continue like this."

Instead of wallowing in this automotive bleakness, Lorenz sought a solution. He stewed on the idea of electric conversions until April 2018, when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle drove a Jaguar E-Type Concept Zero at their wedding. "That really cemented it as an idea I had to go ahead with," Lorenz said.

Lunaz says its Phantom V is in the final stages of the build process.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Vulnerability in fully patched Android phones under active attack by bank thieves

A vulnerability in millions of fully patched Android phones is being actively exploited by malware that's designed to drain the bank accounts of infected users, researchers said on Monday.

The vulnerability allows malicious apps to masquerade as legitimate apps that targets have already installed and come to trust, researchers from security firm Promon reported in a post. Running under the guise of trusted apps already installed, the malicious apps can then request permissions to carry out sensitive tasks, such as recording audio or video, taking photos, reading text messages or phishing login credentials. Targets who click yes to the request are then compromised.

Researchers with Lookout, a mobile security provider and a Promon partner, reported last week that they found 36 apps exploiting the spoofing vulnerability. The malicious apps included variants of the BankBot banking trojan. BankBot has been active since 2017, and apps from the malware family have been caught repeatedlyinfiltrating the Google Play Market.

The vulnerability is most serious in versions 6 through 10, which (according to Statista) account for about 80% of Android phones worldwide. Attacks against those versions allow malicious apps to ask for permissions while posing as legitimate apps. There's no limit to the permissions these malicious apps can seek. Access to text messages, photos, the microphone, camera, and GPS are some of the permissions that are possible. A user's only defense is to click "no" to the requests.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956_

Scientists stumped by 18,000-year-old frozen 'dog'

Researchers are trying to determine whether an 18,000-year-old puppy found in Siberia is a dog or a wolf.

The canine - which was two months old when it died - has been remarkably preserved in the permafrost of the Russian region, with its fur, nose and teeth all intact.

DNA sequencing has been unable to determine the species.

Scientists say that could mean the specimen represents an evolutionary link between wolves and modern dogs.

Radiocarbon dating was able to determine the age of the puppy when it died and how long it has been frozen. Genome analyses showed that it was male.

Researcher Dave Stanton at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden told CNN the DNA sequencing issue meant the animal could come from a population that is a common ancestor of both dogs and wolves.

"We have a lot of data from it already, and with that amount of data, you'd expect to tell if it was one or the other," he said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Atlassian scrambles to fix zero-day security hole accidentally disclosed on Twitter

Twitter security celeb SwiftOnSecurity on Tuesday inadvertently disclosed a zero-day vulnerability affecting enterprise software biz Atlassian, a flaw that may be echoed in IBM's Aspera software.

The SwiftOnSecurity Twitter account revealed that Atlassian provided a domain that resolved to a local server with a common SSL certificate for its Confluence cloud service, to enable the Atlassian Companion app to edit files in a preferred local application and save the files back to Confluence.

Confluence connects to its companion app through the browser using the rather unwieldy domain: https://atlassian-domain-for-localhost-connections-only.com.

The problem with this arrangement is that anyone with sufficient technical knowledge could copy the SSL key and use it to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack that could allow an attacker to redirect app traffic to a malicious site.

Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy confirmed that anyone using the app could be subjected to such an attack.

Original Submission

shortscreen writes:

from a page entitled Wikipedia has Cancer

According to the WMF, Wikipedia (in all language editions) now receives 16 billion page views per month. The WMF spends roughly $2 million USD per year on Internet hosting and employs some 300 staff. The modern Wikipedia hosts 11–12 times as many pages as it did in 2005, but the WMF is spending 33 times as much on hosting, has about 300 times as many employees, and is spending 1,250 times as much overall. WMF's spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.

Sounds a lot like cancer, doesn't it? For those readers who were around three years ago, did you notice at the time any unmet needs that would have caused you to conclude that the WMF needed to increase spending by $30 million dollars? I certainly didn't.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for chromas.

Building a better breast with eye-tracking technology

What makes the female breast attractive? The answer is subjective, of course. But studies using eye-tracking technology are providing a more objective basis for determining which breast areas are most attractive - which may help to improve the outcomes of surgery, reports the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

The lower breast - especially the nipple and surrounding area - gets the most attention from both men and women, according to the study by Piotr Pietruski, MD, PhD, Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Prof. W. Orlowski Memorial Hospital, Warsaw. They write, "Thanks to objective analysis of observer's gaze pattern, eye-tracking technology may provide a better insight into the visual perception of breast esthetics and symmetry."

In the study, 50 male and 50 female observers were asked to assess the aesthetics and symmetry of eight types of female breasts. The images varied in terms of breast size and degree of ptosis (sagging). The researchers used eye-tracking technology to collect data on what parts of the breast image the observers were looking at, and how long they looked at each area.

Although there were some differences based on the sex of the observer and the type of breast, "the key characteristics of gaze patterns in women and men were essentially the same," Dr. Pietruski and colleagues write. The main area of interest was the lower portion of the breast - especially the nipple and surrounding area (nipple-areola complex, or NAC).

[...] "By looking at where a participant's gaze is directed, we can see what their attention is being drawn to--whether it be a scar, a shadow, a fold or a crease," said Rahim Nazerali, MD, co-author of the Stanford University study. "This technology allows us to enhance certain features or disguise parts of the procedure area to provide the patient with the best possible outcome."

Analysis of the Visual Perception of Female Breast Aesthetics and Symmetry, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (DOI: 10.1097/PRS.0000000000006292)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1337.

Facebook built a chatbot to help employees deflect criticism over the holidays

Facebook's public image is in such a disastrous state that the company's public relations team built an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to help its employees deflect criticism from family members over the holidays, reports The New York Times. The tool, called "Liam Bot" for reasons the company has not disclosed, helps walk employees through tough conversations about Facebook's various controversies.

The tool was rolled out to employees shortly before the US Thanksgiving holiday, the NYT reports, and it first entered testing back in the spring. The answers are written by the company's public relations team and largely appear to align with executive team's public statements on topics like free speech, election meddling, moderation, and more.

When asked about hate speech, for instance, the NYT reports that Liam Bot will respond with a few available prompts like, "It [Facebook] has hired more moderators to police its content," and, "Regulation is important for addressing the issue." The bot also links out to helpful Facebook blog posts and, in the case the question is a technical one, FAQs and guides to problems like resetting an account password.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for chromas.

Hubble spots two galaxies rubbing off on each other

Size is always relative, and that’s especially true when it comes to outer space. We’re tiny creatures, so we think of the Earth as this incredibly large thing, with our solar system being almost impossibly large. The size of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is hard to wrap our heads around, so when we peer into space and spot a pair of galaxies cuddling up close to each other it’s a difficult thing to grasp.

In this image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the cosmic feature known as Arp 293 is presented in gorgeous detail. Arp 293 is actually two separate galaxies that have drifted so close to one another that they’ve begun to share some of their material.

The two galaxies that makeup Arp 293 are NGC 6285 (on the left in the image) and NGC 6286 (on the right). From our point of view, they’re sitting virtually side-by-side. They’re far closer to one another than many galaxies we can observe from Earth, and while they’re still separated by many millions of light-years, their respective gravitational pulls are acting on the other.

Original Submission