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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

US House passes bill to tear down judiciary's paywall:

The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Open Courts Act. The bill aims to modernize PACER, the website that provides public access to federal court records. It also aims to eliminate PACER's paywall by 2025.

The PACER system represented a big advance for judicial transparency when it went online in the 1990s. But the system hasn't kept up with the times, with a user interface that has changed little since the days of dial-up Internet.

Each federal trial and bankruptcy court—around 200 courts in total—has its own distinct PACER website, with limited capabilities to search across multiple sites. Not only is this inconvenient for users, but maintaining dozens of separate websites is an administrative headache.

[...] The Open Courts Act aims to modernize the system in two phases. In the first phase, scheduled for completion by 2025, the courts would replace the current patchwork system with a national, searchable PACER website.

[...] After the House vote, the legislation must pass the Senate before it can go to President Trump for his signature. On Wednesday, a bipartisan pair of US senators—Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—introduced a Senate version of the Open Courts Act. It's not clear if advocates can get the bill through the Senate in the three weeks before the current session of Congress expires. But even if they fail, the successful House vote will give the proposal momentum in 2021.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Uber wants drivers and delivery workers to get priority access to COVID-19 vaccine:

Given how reliant many people have become on rideshare drivers and especially delivery workers during the pandemic, Uber is pushing for them to get priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine. Today, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent a letter to all 50 governors asking them to prioritize giving drivers and delivery workers the vaccine as essential workers.

[...] In the letter, Khosrowshahi argues that the work of drivers and delivery people has become essential. That's why Uber wants them to get the vaccine "quickly, easily and for free," he wrote in the letter. Additionally, Uber has offered to help share information about the vaccine and encourage those who are eligible to get vaccinated.

"After nine months on the frontlines keeping their communities running, we are asking governors in all 50 states to prioritize drivers and delivery people for early vaccine access," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement to TechCrunch. "Uber stands ready to do everything we can—leveraging our technology, our logistical expertise and our resources—to help protect the people working on our platform and bring vaccines to the public as quickly and efficiently as possible."

See also: Uber's letter to the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

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takyon writes:

Hyundai takes control of Boston Dynamics in $1.1B deal

Hyundai is officially purchasing a controlling stake in robot maker Boston Dynamics from SoftBank in a deal that values the company at $1.1 billion, the company announced today. The deal has been in the works for a while, according to recent a report from Bloomberg, and marks a major step into consumer robotics for Hyundai. Hyundai is taking approximately an 80 percent stake in the company while its previous owner, Softbank, will retain around 20 percent through an affiliate.

Hyundai says its investment will help its development of service and logistics robots, but that over time it hopes to build more humanoid robots for jobs like "caregiving for patients at hospitals." Other areas of interest include autonomous driving and smart factories.

EF could not be reached for comment.

Also at Bloomberg and CNBC.

Previously: Google to Sell Robotics Group Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics Produces a Wheeled Terror as Google Watches Nervously
SoftBank Acquires Boston Dynamics and Schaft From Google
Boston Dynamics Will Now Sell Any US Business its Own Spot Robot for $74,500
Boston Dynamics' Dog-Like Robot Spotted in Chernobyl
Boston Dynamics' Spot Is Helping Chernobyl Move Towards Safe Decommissioning

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Spotify resets passwords after a security bug exposed users’ private account information – TechCrunch:

Spotify said it has reset an undisclosed number of user passwords after blaming a software vulnerability in its systems for exposing private account information to its business partners.

In a data breach notification filed with the California attorney general’s office, the music streaming giant said the data exposed “may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of birth only to certain business partners of Spotify.” The company did not name the business partners, but added that Spotify “did not make this information publicly accessible.”

Spotify said the vulnerability existed as far back as April 9 but wasn’t discovered until November 12. But like most data breach notices, Spotify did not say what the vulnerability was or how user account data became exposed.

From the announcement:

We have conducted an internal investigation and have contacted all of our business partners that may have had access to your account information to ensure that any personal information that may have been inadvertently disclosed to them has been deleted. We also rest your Spotify password to help keep your account secure.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1957:

Fragments of energy – not waves or particles – may be the fundamental building blocks of the universe:

Matter is what makes up the universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter. We propose that matter is not made of particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is made of fragments of energy.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for FatPhil:

Singapore Approves a Lab-Grown Meat Product, a Global First:

First, meat came from farms and forests. Then, it came from factories. More recently, entrepreneurs have been making it from plants.

Some have wondered whether there's a more advanced approach: Could meat be grown in a laboratory, from existing cells? That effort has faced multiple challenges, from skepticism over something that comes from a lab to questions about what governments might think.

The nascent laboratory meat industry won a small victory Wednesday on that last point, as an American start-up became the first to win government approval — in this case, an announcement by the city-state of Singapore — to sell the fruit of its labs to the public in the form of "cultured chicken."

The company, Eat Just, is based in San Francisco and describes its product as "real, high-quality meat created directly from animal cells for safe human consumption." Singapore's Food Agency said on Wednesday that it had approved the product for sale as an ingredient in chicken nuggets.

"This is a historic moment in the food system," Eat Just's chief executive, Josh Tetrick, said by telephone on Wednesday. "We've been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we've eaten meat we've had to kill an animal — until now."

Singapore's move is "the world's first regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product," said Elaine Siu, the managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit organization that promotes cultivated meat and plant-based substitutes for animal products.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New superhighway system discovered in the Solar System:

Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes can drive comets and asteroids near Jupiter to Neptune's distance in under a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.

In their paper, published in the Nov. 25 issue of Science Advances, the researchers observed the dynamical structure of these routes, forming a connected series of arches inside what's known as space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. This newly discovered "celestial autobahn" or "celestial highway" acts over several decades, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of years that usually characterize Solar System dynamics.

Journal Reference:
Nataša Todorović, Di Wu, Aaron J. Rosengren. The arches of chaos in the Solar System [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1313)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

We're watching the world go blind, researchers say:

As 2020 comes to a close, an international group of researchers set out to provide updated estimates on the number of people that are blind or visually impaired across the globe, to identify the predominant causes, and to illustrate epidemiological trends over the last 30 years.

"This is important because when we think about setting a public health agenda, knowing the prevalence of an impairment, what causes it, and where in the world it's most common informs the actions that key decision makers like the WHO and ministries of health take to allocate limited resources," says Joshua Ehrlich, M.D., M.P.H., a study author and ophthalmologist at Kellogg Eye Center.

[...] "Working as a global eye care community, we need to now look at the next 30 years," Ehrlich says. "We hope to take these findings and create implementable strategies with our global partners through our Kellogg Eye Center for International Ophthalmology so fewer people go blind unnecessarily."

In an effort to contribute to the WHO initiative VISION 2020: The Right to Sight, the researchers updated estimates of the global burden of vision loss and provided predictions for what the year 2050 may look like.

They found that the majority of the 43.9 million people blind globally are women. Women also make up the majority of the 295 million people who have moderate to severe vision loss, the 163 million who have mild vision loss and the 510 million who have visual impairments related to the unmet need for glasses, specifically poor near vision.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus_:

In their closest alignment in 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn will create a wonder: A Christmas Star:

The lousiest year in living memory will end with an offering of heavenly wonder: a Christmas Star.

It's actually the alignment of two planets — Jupiter and Saturn — which happens every 20 years or so. But it's not always in December and it's been nearly 800 years — we're talking Middle Ages — since they got this close.

Technically, the two largest planets in our solar system will still be hundreds of millions of miles apart. But Dec. 21, from our vantage point, they'll look like they're nearly touching, creating a radiant point of light that's being dubbed the Christmas Star, or Star of Bethlehem, for obvious reasons.

Making it even more special: Dec. 21 also marks the winter solstice — the longest night of the year, the tipping point where daylight once again starts gaining ground on darkness.

Gotta love the symbolism.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Are dining tents a safe way to eat out during the pandemic?:

Health experts say outdoor dining tents are generally safer than dining inside, but caution that they're not all equal.

Many restaurants are erecting individual tents, igloos and other outdoor structures that let people who are dining together avoid being indoors, where the coronavirus spreads more easily.

Experts say the structures should be well-ventilated. A tent with four walls and a roof, for example, might not have better ventilation than an indoor dining room.

"The more airflow through the structure, the better it is," says Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a public health expert at Cornell University.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

World's largest study on New Year's resolutions reveals 1 tip for thriving in 2021:

According to the largest study on New Year's resolutions to date, people who create resolutions that add behaviors rather than erase them are more likely to maintain them for a year. It's a slight shift that tweaks how you phrase the resolution in the first place — changing "I will quit or avoid" to "I will start to".

[...] researchers recruited 1,066 people across Sweden who made resolutions in 2017. Each participant came up with their own resolution. The most popular resolutions were related to physical health, weight loss, and changing eating habits.

[...] The participants were divided into three different groups, which received different levels of support throughout the year: no support at all, some support, and extended support.

In the "no support" group, participants received brief, general information on New Year's resolutions before reporting their own resolutions and belief in their chances of achieving success.

In the second group, with some support, they did the same but also received information about the positive effects of receiving social support when striving toward a personal goal. They then were asked to name a person responsible for supporting them throughout the year. The participants were also sent exercises and information on how to cope with possible hurdles when striving toward personal goals.

The last, most supported group, received the same information as group two but also received extra information about the value of setting a specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-framed goal — as well as four follow up emails. They were also asked to formulate goals in terms of approaching rather than avoiding something and to set interim goals throughout the year.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

New sunspot cycle could be one of the strongest on record, new research predicts: Scientists use an extended, 22-year solar cycle to make the forecast:

In direct contradiction to the official forecast, a team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the Sunspot Cycle that started this fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began.

In a new article published in Solar Physics, the research team predicts that Sunspot Cycle 25 will peak with a maximum sunspot number somewhere between approximately 210 and 260, which would put the new cycle in the company of the top few ever observed.

The cycle that just ended, Sunspot Cycle 24, peaked with a sunspot number of 116, and the consensus forecast from a panel of experts convened by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that Sunspot Cycle 25 will be similarly weak. The panel predicts a peak sunspot number of 115.

If the new NCAR-led forecast is borne out, it would lend support to the research team's unorthodox theory -- detailed in a series of papers published over the last decade -- that the Sun has overlapping 22-year magnetic cycles that interact to produce the well-known, approximately 11-year sunspot cycle as a byproduct. The 22-year cycles repeat like clockwork and could be a key to finally making accurate predictions of the timing and nature of sunspot cycles, as well as many of the effects they produce, according to the study's authors.

"Scientists have struggled to predict both the length and the strength of sunspot cycles because we lack a fundamental understanding of the mechanism that drives the cycle," said NCAR Deputy Director Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist who led the study. "If our forecast proves correct, we will have evidence that our framework for understanding the Sun's internal magnetic machine is on the right path.

Journal Reference:
Scott W. McIntosh, Sandra Chapman, Robert J. Leamon, et al. Overlapping Magnetic Activity Cycles and the Sunspot Number: Forecasting Sunspot Cycle 25 Amplitude [open], Solar Physics (DOI: 10.1007/s11207-020-01723-y)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus_:

U.S. physicists rally around ambitious plan to build fusion power plant:

U.S. fusion scientists, notorious for squabbling over which projects to fund with their field's limited budget, have coalesced around an audacious goal. A 10-year plan presented last week to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee is the first since the community tried to formulate such a road map in 2014 and failed spectacularly. It calls for the Department of Energy (DOE), the main sponsor of U.S. fusion research, to prepare to build a prototype power plant in the 2040s that would produce carbon-free electricity by harnessing the nuclear process that powers the Sun.

The plan formalizes a goal set out 2 years ago by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and embraced in a March report from a 15-month-long fusion community planning process. It also represents a subtle but crucial shift from the basic research that officials in DOE's Office of Science have favored. "The community urgently wants to move forward with fusion on a time scale that can impact climate change," says Troy Carter, a fusion physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who chaired the planning committee. "We have to get started."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In 2018 employees of two companies, Beijing Baice Technology and Shenzhen Zhipu Technology, planted malware on devices sold by Chinese smartphone maker Gionee with the intent to activate the software to take over user phones. The malware was in the form of an SDK wrapped up in an update to Story Lock Screen, a screen-locker app that came preinstalled with Gionee devices.

Court documents say that between December 2018 to October 2019, more than 20 million Gionee devices across the world received more than 2.88 billion "pull functions" (ads), generating more than 27.85 million Chinese yuan ($4.26 million) in profit for the two companies.

The four persons received prison sentences ranging from 3 to 3.5 years and fines of 200,000 Chinese yuan ($30,500) each. Shenzhen Zhipu Technology also received a separate fine of 400,000 Chinese yuan ($61,000).

Crime pays.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Premiere security firm FireEye says it was breached by nation-state hackers:

FireEye, a $3.5 billion company that helps customers respond to some of the world's most sophisticated cyberattacks, has itself been hacked, most likely by a well-endowed nation-state that made off with "red-team" attack tools used to pierce network defenses.

The revelation, made in a press release posted after the close of stock markets on Tuesday, is a significant event. With a market capitalization of $3.5 billion and a some of the most seasoned employees in the security industry, the company's defenses are formidable. Despite this, attackers were able to burrow into FireEye's heavily fortified network using techniques no one in the company had ever seen before.

The hack also raises the specter that a group that was already capable of penetrating a company with FireEye's security prowess and resources is now in possession of proprietary attack tools, a theft that could make the hackers an even greater threat to organizations all over the world. FireEye said the stolen tools didn't included any zeroday exploits. FireEye shares fell about 7 percent in extended trading following the disclosure.

So far, the company has seen no evidence that the tools are actively being used in the wild and isn't sure if the attackers plan to use them. Such tools are used by so-called red teams, which mimic malicious hackers in training exercises that simulate real-world hack attacks. FireEye has released a trove of signatures and other countermeasures that customers can use to detect and repel the attacks in the event that the tools are used. Some researchers who reviewed the countermeasures said they appeared to show that the tools weren't particularly sensitive.

Also at www.schneier.com and www.securityweek.com

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