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FDA Authorizes NASA-Developed Ventilator For Use In COVID-19 Treatment
Xiaomi Found Recording 'Private' Web and Phone Use, Researchers Claim
Intel Unveils 10th Gen 'Comet Lake' CPUs, Pricing
USB 4 Will Fully Support DisplayPort 2, Including 8K HDR Monitors
Quibi, JetBlue and Others Gave Away Email Addresses, Report Says
WhatsApp: Israeli Firm 'Deeply Involved' In Hacking Our Users
Amazon Sales Surge But Bezos Says Coronavirus Costs Could Hit $4 Billion
US Senator Wants To Know Which Federal Authorities Are Using Clearview AI To Track the Coronavirus
NSA's Guide For Choosing a Safe Text Chat and Video Conferencing Service
Google Announces Chrome Web Store Crackdown For August 2020
HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself
Microsoft's Big Xbox Game Pass Bet is Starting To Pay Off
Trump's Disinfectant Talk Trips Up Sites' Vows Against Misinformation
Amazon To Cut Price of its Ebooks in UK To Reflect Removal of VAT
Microsoft's Visual Studio Online Code Editor is Now Visual Studio Codespaces and Gets a Price Drop

FDA Authorizes NASA-Developed Ventilator For Use In COVID-19 Treatment

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 08:30 PM PDT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for emergency use as outlined in the agency's COVID-19 guidelines a new ventilator designed by engineers working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The ventilator, which has an acronym because this is NASA we're talking about, is called "VITAL" (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), and its design is being offered for free, licensed use for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The JPL-developed emergency use ventilator is an intubation ventilator, meaning that a patient has to be sedated, with a breathing tube inserted all the way down their airway to assist their breathing. It's reserved for COVID-19 patients exhibiting the most serious symptoms, and even then is really designed for use only to free up availability of existing, fully approved ventilator hardware in the case of extreme shortages. What makes VITAL most interesting is that it is made of "far fewer" parts than existing traditional ventilators, according to NASA, and it also can be assembled much more quickly, and maintained with less expertise and effort over time. The design provides for use for between three or four months, however, rather than years for traditional hardware, and is meant specifically for COVID-19 patient use, hence its simpler design versus models that are made to serve in a number of different medical situations. NASA's JPL is seeking commercial manufacturing partners for the hardware now that it has its authorization, however, in order to get it built in large numbers for distribution to hospitals in need.

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Xiaomi Found Recording 'Private' Web and Phone Use, Researchers Claim

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 07:00 PM PDT

According to an exclusive report from Forbes, cybersecurity researcher Gabi Cirlig discovered that his Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 smartphone was watching much of what he was doing and sending that data to remote servers hosted by Chinese tech giant Alibaba, which were ostensibly rented by Xiaomi. From the report: The seasoned cybersecurity researcher found a worrying amount of his behavior was being tracked, whilst various kinds of device data were also being harvested, leaving Cirlig spooked that his identity and his private life was being exposed to the Chinese company. When he looked around the Web on the device's default Xiaomi browser, it recorded all the websites he visited, including search engine queries whether with Google or the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo, and every item viewed on a news feed feature of the Xiaomi software. That tracking appeared to be happening even if he used the supposedly private "incognito" mode. The device was also recording what folders he opened and to which screens he swiped, including the status bar and the settings page. All of the data was being packaged up and sent to remote servers in Singapore and Russia, though the Web domains they hosted were registered in Beijing. Meanwhile, at Forbes' request, cybersecurity researcher Andrew Tierney investigated further. He also found browsers shipped by Xiaomi on Google Play -- Mi Browser Pro and the Mint Browser -- were collecting the same data. Together, they have more than 15 million downloads, according to Google Play statistics. Cirlig thinks that the problems affect many more models than the one he tested. In response to the findings, Xiaomi said, "The research claims are untrue," and "Privacy and security is of top concern," adding that it "strictly follows and is fully compliant with local laws and regulations on user data privacy matters." A spokesperson did however confirm it was collecting browsing data, claiming the info was anonymized and users had consented to it. Cirlig and Tierney pointed out that Xiaomi "was also collecting data about the phone, including unique numbers for identifying the specific device and Android version," reports Forbes. "Cirlig said such 'metadata' could 'easily be correlated with an actual human behind the screen.'" The researchers also say they found their Xiaomi apps to be sending data to domains that appeared to reference Sensor Analytics, which Xiaomi says "provides a data analysis solution for Xiaomi," adding that that the collected anonymous data "are stored on Xiaomi's own servers and will not be shared with Sensor Analytics, or any other third-party companies."

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Intel Unveils 10th Gen 'Comet Lake' CPUs, Pricing

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 06:30 PM PDT

UnknowingFool writes: Intel released more information about their next generation CPUs, codenamed Comet Lake. Overall, CPUs will get more cores and threads and slight speed boosts. Price wise, Intel is cutting prices to be more competitive with AMD's Rzyen processors. Some of the downsides include requiring new socket (thus new MBs), LGA 1200 and lack of PCIE 4.0 compatibility. No specific benchmarks were released, however Intel claims to have the fastest gaming CPUs. "[T]he top Comet Lake chip is the same price as the top Coffee Lake at $488, and the cheapest Core i3 is $122," reports PC Gamer. They expect the release date to be sometime in May, though no official date has been confirmed.

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USB 4 Will Fully Support DisplayPort 2, Including 8K HDR Monitors

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 06:00 PM PDT

VESA has announced that USB 4 will fully support the massive bandwidth available for the DisplayPort 2.0 standard, including support for 8K 60Hz HDR or even 16K 60Hz monitors. Engadget reports: Since USB 4 works at 40Gbps and DisplayPort 2.0 supports 80Gbps speeds, how will this work? USB 4 can actually send and receive at 40Gbps at the same time, so VESA took advantage of that with a new spec called DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0. Since DisplayPort is primarily used for video, which only sends data one way from your PC to a monitor, the Alt Mode 2.0 standard remaps USB-C's data pins to work in one direction only -- giving you double the speeds. According to Anandtech, Alt Mode 2.0 will support regular USB 4 cables. At the same time, monitors won't need to have USB 4 controllers, which should simplify display designs. Since it also supports the Thunderbolt 3 standard, USB 4 will become a universal connection standard for both smartphones and PCs, supporting things like "docking, gaming, AR/VR HMDs, and professional HDR displays," VESA said.

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Quibi, JetBlue and Others Gave Away Email Addresses, Report Says

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 05:20 PM PDT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Millions of people gave their email addresses to Quibi, JetBlue, Wish and other companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) -- and those email addresses got away. They ended up in the hands of advertising and analytics companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, leaving the people with those email addresses more easily targeted by advertisers and able to be tracked by companies that study shopping behavior, according toa reportpublished on Wednesday. The customers unwittingly exposed their email addresses when signing up for apps or clicking on links in marketing emails, said the researcher Zach Edwards, who runs the digital strategy firm Victory Medium. In the report, he described the giveaway of personal data as part of a "sloppy and dangerous growth hack." Mr. Edwards, a contributor to a recent studythat examined potential privacy violations by dating services like Grindr and OkCupid, wrote in the new report that one of the "most egregious" leaks involvedQuibi, a short-form video platform based in Los Angeles that is run by the veteran executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Quibi went live on April 6, long after new data privacy regulations went into effect in Europe and California. People who downloaded the Quibi app were asked to submit their email addresses. Then they received a confirmation link. Clicking on the link made their email addresses available to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, according to the report. Quibi said in a statement on Wednesday that data security "is of the highest priority" and that "the moment the issue on our webpage was revealed to our security and engineering team, we fixed it immediately." "Mr. Edwards said customers were probably unaware of leaks at Wish, an e-commerce platform where hundreds of millions of email addresses were most likely exposed starting in 2018," the report adds. "When users clicked on links in marketing emails from the company, their email addresses were shared with Google, Facebook, Pinterest, PayPal and others, he wrote." Other companies that suffered limited leaks included The Washington Post, JetBlue, and Mailchimp.

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WhatsApp: Israeli Firm 'Deeply Involved' In Hacking Our Users

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 04:40 PM PDT

WhatsApp has alleged in new court filings that an Israeli spyware company used US-based servers and was "deeply involved" in carrying out mobile phone hacks of 1,400 WhatsApp users, including senior government officials, journalists, and human rights activists. The Guardian reports: The new claims about NSO Group allege that the Israeli company bears responsibility in serious human rights violations, including the hacking of more than a dozen Indian journalists and Rwandan dissidents. For years, NSO Group has said that its spyware is purchased by government clients for the purpose of tracking down terrorists and other criminals and that it had no independent knowledge of how those clients -- which in the past have reportedly included Saudi Arabia and Mexico -- use its hacking software. But a lawsuit filed by WhatsApp against NSO Group last year -- the first of its kind by a major technology company -- is revealing more technical details about how the hacking software, Pegasus, is allegedly deployed against targets. In the court filings last week, WhatsApp said its own investigation into how Pegasus was used against 1,400 users last year showed that servers controlled by NSO Group -- not its government clients -- were an integral part of how the hacks were executed. WhatsApp has said victims of the hack received phone calls using its messaging app, and were infected with Pegasus. Then, it said: "NSO used a network of computers to monitor and update Pegasus after it was implanted on users' devices. These NSO-controlled computers served as the nerve centre through which NSO controlled its customers' operation and use of Pegasus." NSO has said in legal filings that it has no insight into how government clients use its hacking tools, and therefore does not know who governments are targeting. But one expert, John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, who has worked with WhatsApp on the case, said NSO's control of the servers involved in the hack suggests the company would have had logs, including IP addresses, identifying the users who were being targeted. "Our products are used to stop terrorism, curb violent crime, and save lives. NSO Group does not operate the Pegasus software for its clients," the company said in a statement. "Our past statements about our business, and the extent of our interaction with our government intelligence and law enforcement agency customers, are accurate."

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Amazon Sales Surge But Bezos Says Coronavirus Costs Could Hit $4 Billion

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 04:00 PM PDT

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos says it will take virtually all of its upcoming second-quarter operating profit to fund protective gear for employees and get products to customers. CNET reports: "If you're a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we're not thinking small," he wrote Thursday. "Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we'd expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit. But these aren't normal circumstances. Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on COVID-related expenses." That spending includes higher wages for workers, more safety gear like face masks and Amazon's internal development of COVID-19 testing capabilities. That spending could drive Amazon to report an operating loss in the second quarter, the company said Thursday. While Amazon's stock hit an all-time high this month, shares tumbled more than 5% after the market's close following Bezos' warning about these additional costs.

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US Senator Wants To Know Which Federal Authorities Are Using Clearview AI To Track the Coronavirus

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 03:20 PM PDT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that claims to have scraped over 3 billion photos from social media to power its face-matching tool, is now facing questions from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey about recent claims that it's developing a digital contact tracing tool for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That claimed in a recent NBC interview that the company is in talks with "federal and state" authorities about developing a tool that would use facial recognition to track where a person diagnosed with COVID-19 has traveled and whom they may have come in contact with. Clearview has not identified any of these authorities nor the length of the agreements or contracts it has signed or is seeking. It's also unclear how Clearview's facial recognition tools would aid in contact tracing efforts or how the company would obtain pictures of people diagnosed with the disease and track their movements at scale. In a letter to Ton-That, Markey asked Clearview to name the government agencies it claims to be communicating with and to disclose any agreements it may have reached with them. He also asked if Clearview is planning to use real-time facial recognition to power its contact tracing tool. BuzzFeed News previously reported that Clearview had developed a sister company called Insight Camera that partnered with at least two organizations to do real-time facial recognition and surveillance. In response to a detailed list of questions, Ton-That told BuzzFeed News: "We just received the letter from Senator Markey, for whom we have great respect. We will be responding to him directly." Asked by BuzzFeed News, Ton-That did not comment on which state or federal authorities the company is working with. "Technology has an important role to play in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic, but this health crisis cannot justify using unreliable surveillance tools that could undermine our privacy rights," the letter reads. "Given that your responses to my previous letter failed to address ongoing concerns about your product -- particularly around accuracy and bias testing -- any plans to deploy it widely to fight the coronavirus could further increase Clearview's threat to the public's privacy."

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NSA's Guide For Choosing a Safe Text Chat and Video Conferencing Service

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 02:40 PM PDT

The US National Security Agency (NSA) published last week a security assessment of today's most popular video conferencing, text chatting, and collaboration tools. From a report: The guidance contains a list of security criteria that the NSA hopes companies take into consideration when selecting which telework tool/service they want to deploy in their environments. The NSA document is not only meant for US government and military entities but the private sector as well. The idea behind the NSA's initiative is to give military, public, and private organizations an overview of all of a tools' features, so IT staff don't make wrong decisions, expecting that a tool provides certain features that are not actually living up to the reality. Per the NSA's document, the assessed criteria answers to basic questions like: Does the service implement end-to-end (E2E) encryption? Does the E2E encryption use strong, well-known, testable encryption standards? Is multi-factor authentication (MFA) available? Can users see and control who connects to collaboration sessions? Does the tool's vendor share data with third parties or affiliates? Do users have the ability to securely delete data from the service and its repositories as needed (both on client and server-side)? Is the tool's source code public (e.g. open source)? Is the service FedRAMP approved for official US government use?

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Google Announces Chrome Web Store Crackdown For August 2020

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 02:00 PM PDT

Google announced this week new rules for the Chrome Web Store in an attempt to cut down the number of shady Chrome extensions submitted and listed on the site. From a report: Starting August 27, Google says it intends to enforce a new set of rules, which will result in a large number of extensions being delisted. These rules are meant to crack down on a series of practices extension developers have been recently employing to flood the Web Store with shady extensions or boost install counts for low-quality content. They include: 1. Developers cannot submit duplicate extensions anymore. (e.g. Wallpaper extensions that have different names but provide the user with the same wallpapers when installed.) 2. Extensions are not allowed to use "keyword spam" techniques to flood metadata fields with multiple terms and have the extension listed across multiple categories to improve the extension's visibility in search results. 3. Developers are not allowed to use misleading, improperly formatted, non-descriptive, irrelevant, excessive, or inappropriate metadata. Extension metadata needs to be accurate, and Google intends to be strict about it. 4. Developers are now forbidden from inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or paid downloads, reviews, and ratings.

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HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 01:20 PM PDT

An anonymous reader shares a report: HTC's Exodus blockchain smartphones will soon receive their own mining app, letting them mine Monero cryptocurrency when plugged in and idle, The Block reported earlier this month. The DeMiner app, which is being developed by Midas Labs, is scheduled to launch in Q2 2020. According to Midas Labs' Jri Lee, one of HTC's Exodus 1S smartphones should be able to mine $0.0038 of Monero a day, which doesn't exactly turn the phone into a moneymaking machine. In fact, Decrypt ran the numbers and found that, at that rate, you'd be in line to make just over a dollar a year ($1.387). That means you'd pay off $237 Exodus 1S in around 170 years -- excluding electricity costs, that is.

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Microsoft's Big Xbox Game Pass Bet is Starting To Pay Off

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 12:40 PM PDT

Microsoft now has 10 million subscribers to its Xbox Game Pass service, the company said during an investor call yesterday. It's the first time Microsoft has publicly disclosed Xbox Game Pass numbers, and it's a sign that the company's ambitious bet on subscription gaming is starting to pay off. From a report: Microsoft has been trying to build a "Netflix for video games" for years, and it looks like it's taking an early lead before a significant expansion to game streaming later this year. 10 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers is a significant milestone. EA's competing subscription services, EA Access and Origin Access, hit more than 5 million subscribers last year, and Sony's PlayStation Now subscriber base reached 1 million in October, five years after its debut. Apple and Google haven't disclosed numbers for Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass, and Nvidia's GeForce Now service reached 1 million users shortly after its launch. Microsoft is also sharing some additional Xbox Game Pass statistics today. "Since March, Xbox Game Pass members have added over 23 million friends on Xbox Live, which is a 70 percent growth in friendship rate," explains Xbox chief Phil Spencer. "Game Pass members are also playing twice as much and engaging in more multiplayer gaming, which has increased by 130 percent."

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Trump's Disinfectant Talk Trips Up Sites' Vows Against Misinformation

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 12:00 PM PDT

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said in March that promoting bleach as a cure for the coronavirus was "misinformation that has imminent risk of danger" and that such messages would immediately be removed from the social network. President Trump has now put Mr. Zuckerberg's comments to the test. From a report: At a White House briefing last week, Mr. Trump suggested that disinfectants and ultraviolet light were possible treatments for the virus. His remarks immediately found their way onto Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites, and people rushed to defend the president's statements as well as mock them. But Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have declined to remove Mr. Trump's statements posted online in video clips and transcriptions of the briefing, saying he did not specifically direct people to pursue the unproven treatments. That has led to a mushrooming of other posts, videos and comments about false virus cures with UV lights and disinfectants that the companies have largely left up. A New York Times analysis found 780 Facebook groups, 290 Facebook pages, nine Instagram accounts and thousands of tweets pushing UV light therapies that were posted after Mr. Trump's comments and that remained on the sites as of Thursday. More than 5,000 other posts, videos and comments promoting disinfectants as a virus cure were also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube this week. Only a few of the posts have been taken down. The social media companies have always trod delicately when it comes to President Trump. Yet their inaction on posts echoing his remarks on UV lights and disinfectants stands out because the companies have said for weeks that they would not permit false information about the coronavirus to proliferate.

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Amazon To Cut Price of its Ebooks in UK To Reflect Removal of VAT

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 11:10 AM PDT

Amazon has confirmed it will cut the price of its Kindle ebooks from Friday, after the government announced it would bring forward plans to stop charging VAT on online publications because of the pandemic. From a report: The decision to remove the 20% VAT charged on online news subscriptions and books will bring them in line with their physical equivalents, which have always been zero-rated. Amazon said customers would very shortly start to notice the change, which will see the cost a $12.6 ebook reduced to $10.5. "For titles where Amazon sets the price, we will reduce the prices of books not already on promotion," said a spokesperson. "After receiving today's notification, we are working as fast as possible to lower prices for customers."

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Microsoft's Visual Studio Online Code Editor is Now Visual Studio Codespaces and Gets a Price Drop

Posted: 30 Apr 2020 10:31 AM PDT

About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It')s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It's also dropping the price of the service by more than 50% and giving developers the option to run it on relatively low-performance virtual machines that will start at $0.08 per hour. In today's announcement, Microsoft's Scott Hanselman points out that the company learned that most developers who used Visual Studio Online thought of it as being much more than simply an editor in the browser.

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