Airbnb is piloting new anti-party technology in the U.S. and Canada in its ongoing efforts to fend off users who are looking to book a house to throw large, unapproved gatherings. Fast Company reports: The vacation rental company tells Fast Company the new tech is aimed at identifying "potentially high-risk reservations." Airbnb will be looking at factors like a user's history of positive reviews and history with the service, length of the requested booking, distance from their home to the booking, and whether it's booked for a weekend or weekday. The new tech is meant to flag and prevent suspect bookings from being sent to the host for approval, so homeowners can approve bookings without fear of property damage or noise complaints. People who have been blocked from booking an entire listing because of the new system will still be able to book a single room in a whole residence, since the host is more likely to be on the premise, or a hotel room.

Airbnb has been testing the tech in Australia since October 2021 and says it's seen a 35% drop in unauthorized parties in areas where the pilot was in effect. The safety tool has rolled out nationwide in Australia and will now be tested in the U.S. and Canada. The latest update builds off the company's "under-25" system, which blocks users under the age of 25 from booking entire properties close to where they live until they have at least three positive reviews. The company said in a statement that the new system is meant to prevent more party-seeking users from booking, "while having less of a blunt impact on guests who are not trying to throw a party."

Google cannot be held liable for defamation simply for providing hyperlinks to other webpages, Australia's highest court ruled today. Ars Technica reports: By itself, providing a URL is not "participation in the communication of defamatory matter which happens to be at that address... In reality, a hyperlink is merely a tool which enables a person to navigate to another webpage," the High Court of Australia ruling said. The case relates to a Google search result that linked to a 2004 article published by The Age with the title, "Underworld loses valued friend at court." The article described Melbourne-based lawyer George Defteros, who was charged with conspiracy to murder and incitement to murder the day before it was published. The charge was withdrawn in 2005. Defteros sued Google after becoming aware that a Google search of his name produced a link to the article and a snippet. Google refused to remove the article from search results despite a request from Defteros in 2016.

A lower-court judge "found that the Underworld article conveyed a defamatory imputation, namely that the respondent had crossed the line from being a professional solicitor to being a confidant and friend of criminal elements," today's ruling noted. Lower courts decided that Google "published the defamatory matter because the provision of the Search Result was instrumental to the communication of the content of the Underworld article to the user, in that it lent assistance to its publication," according to a summary of today's ruling (PDF) provided by the High Court of Australia. Google had been ordered to pay Defteros $40,000 (about $27,710 in USD). But in reversing lower-court rulings, a 5-2 majority of the High Court found that Google did not publish the defamatory matter.

Google "did not lend assistance to The Age in communicating the defamatory matter contained in the Underworld article" because the "provision of a hyperlink in the Search Result merely facilitated access to the Underworld article and was not an act of participation in the bilateral process of communicating the contents of that article to a third party," the summary of the ruling said. "There was no other basis for finding publication because the appellant had not participated in the writing or disseminating of the defamatory matter." [...] Today's ruling could have been different if Google had been paid to promote The Age article. The appeal "does not present the occasion to consider whether the conclusion would be different in respect of those hyperlinks that, by agreement with a third party, are promoted by the appellant following a search request," the ruling said. "Nor was any issue raised on this appeal about any service provided in the aggregation of news results. It suffices to say that it is arguable that the appellant and a third party might share a common intention to publish the content of a third-party webpage that, as a consequence of an agreement between the appellant and the third party, is promoted as a search result."

Australia's public broadcaster interviewed a virologist who "played a key role in mapping the evolution of COVID-19" (and was also "the first person to release the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to the world.")

But interestingly, this Australian virologist also visited the Wuhan market in 2014, "and recognised the risk of virus transmission between animals and humans and suggested taking some samples." "While I was there, I noticed there were these live wildlife for sale, particularly raccoon dogs and ... muskrats" he said. "I took the photographs because I thought to myself: 'God, that's, that's not quite right'." Raccoon dogs had been associated with the emergence of a different coronavirus outbreak, SARS-CoV-1, in 2002-04, which became known worldwide as the SARS virus.

Even in 2014, Professor Holmes believed the market could become a site of virus transmission between animals and humans. The monitoring that Professor Holmes suggested never took place but, in the early days of COVID-19, he was still convinced that a market like the one in Wuhan was the logical origin of the virus. "They are the kind of engine room of [this sort] of disease emergence ... because what you're doing is you're putting humans and wildlife in close proximity to each other," he said.
The professor also describes the theory that the virus some how leaked from a Chinese lab as "horrendous, blame-game finger-pointing," noting that the nearest lab is miles away. And he cites other reasons the market is where the virus originated: Aside from the geographic clustering, he also points to the fact that two different strands emerged almost simultaneously in humans, something that is much more likely if the virus had already been mutating in animals. "They're sufficiently far apart that they were probably independent jumps.

"It means there was a pool of infected animals in the market and it's mutated amongst them before it jumped to humans."

All of this has led Professor Holmes to conclude that the question of how COVID-19 emerged is settled. "I'm extremely confident that the virus is not from a laboratory. I think that's just a nonsensical theory," he said. Detailed mapping of where samples were detected inside the Huanan seafood wholesale market allowed Professor Holmes and his colleagues to even pinpoint to a few square metres where COVID-19 was likely to have jumped between humans and animals.

"It's extraordinary," he said. "And I took a photo in 2014 of one of the stalls that was the most positively tested in the whole market."

Australia's consumer watchdog agency said Friday that Google has been ordered to pay AU$60 million, nearly $43 million, by the Federal Court over the collection of location data on Android phones. From a report: The fine stems from legal action the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission initiated back in 2019. The ACCC accused Google of "making misleading representations to consumers" about the collection and use of personal location data on Android devices between January 2017 and December 2018. The court previously found that Google misled consumers into thinking "Location History" was the only setting that impacted whether the tech giant collected, kept and used location data, when in fact, the "Web & App Activity" setting also allowed Google to collect some of this information, according to the ACCC. An estimated 1.3 million people with Google accounts in Australia may have "viewed a screen found by the Court to have breached the Australian Consumer Law," the ACCC said.

Groupon confirmed to TechCrunch that it's laid off more than 500 of its employees -- 15% of its 3,416-person headcount. It's also re-organizing the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support." From the report: "Our overall business performance is not at the levels we anticipated and we are taking decisive actions to improve our trajectory," CEO Kedar Deshpande said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. The chief executive says that the layoffs, as well as a reinvestment in marketing and initiatives that drive customer purchase frequency, will set the company up to generate positive cash flow by the end of 2022.

In a letter to staff, Deshpande said that Groupon is reducing its North America sales teams to focus on "self-service merchant acquisition capabilities." It is also re-organizing the company to focus "only on mission-critical activities and leaning on more external support." "In addition, we are proposing to reduce cloud infrastructure and support functions as we wrap up cloud migrations." Groupon is also closing its Australia Goods business, more than a decade after launching there in the first place. Finally, Groupon said that it will "rationalize" its real estate footprint to be more in line with hybrid work. "Over the past few years, the number of Groupon shoppers has fallen sharply," adds TechCrunch. "According to Statista, 22.2 million visitors to the company's site purchased at least one offer in Q1 2022, down from nearly 54 million in Q4 2014."

The report notes that these cuts aren't as large as the ones made in 2020 when Groupon said it would lay off or furlough 2,800 employees following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler was dealt another blow in his battle for artificial intelligence machines to be recognized as inventors on patents, after the nation's top patent court found that inventors must be humans. The term "individual" in the Patent Act refers only to humans, meaning an AI doesn't count as an inventor on a patentable invention, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Friday. From a report: The decision lines up with courts in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Australia that have refused to accept Thaler's argument. His only currently existing win is from a South African court that said an AI can be a patent inventor. Unless the US Supreme Court steps in, the Federal Circuit is typically the final authority on US patent matters -- hearing all such appeals from federal district courts and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Thaler already plans to appeal to the high court, his attorney, Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan LLP, said. The Federal Circuit adopted a "narrow and textualist approach" to the Patent Act, Abbott said. "It ignores the purpose of the Patent Act and the outcome that AI-generated inventions are now unpatentable in the United States," he said. "That is an outcome with real negative social consequences."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Marine scientists have found that parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest levels of coral cover since monitoring began nearly four decades ago, although they warn the reef's recovery could be swiftly undone by global warming. The Australian Institute of Marine Science, a government agency, began monitoring Earth's largest reef system 36 years ago. Its latest report indicates that the northern and central parts of the reef are on the mend after an "extensive bout" of disturbances over the past decade, said Mike Emslie, a senior research scientist at the institute. The results of the institute's annual survey show that the reef "is still vibrant and still resilient, and it can bounce back from disturbances if it gets the chance," Emslie said in an interview Thursday.

News of the recovery in the reef's northern and central parts was partly offset by the report's finding that there was a loss of coral cover in the southern region. There, the reef fell prey to an outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, which feed exclusively on live coral, the scientists said. About half of the reefs were surveyed before the most recent coral bleaching event in February and March. Emslie said researchers won't know the full extent of the coral cover lost from that event until next year. The sheer size of the Great Barrier Reef system -- it spans some 1,700 miles and is so large it can easily be spotted from space -- means the survey is staggered over seven or eight months of the year.

Among the 87 reefs surveyed for the latest report, average hard coral cover in the north increased to 36 percent, up from 27 percent in 2021, and to 33 percent in the central Great Barrier Reef from 26 percent last year. Average coral cover in the southern region decreased from 38 percent in 2021 to 34 percent this year. Much of the recent reef recovery was driven by the fast-growing Acropora species -- whose delicate branching and table corals have adorned countless postcards for tourists. Marine scientists worry that these corals are some of the most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, including marine heat waves, coral bleaching and damaging waves, such as those generated during tropical cyclones.

Wave Swell Energy's remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results. New Atlas reports: As we've discussed before, the UniWave system is a floating device that can be towed to any coastal location and connected to the local energy grid. It's designed so that wave swells force water into a specially designed concrete chamber, pressurizing the air in the chamber and forcing it through an outlet valve. Then as the water recedes, it generates a powerful vacuum, which sucks air in through a turbine at the top and generates electricity that's fed into the grid via a cable. As a result, it draws energy from the entire column of water that enters its chamber, a fact the team says makes it more efficient than wave energy devices that only harvest energy from the surface or the sea floor.

[...] A 200-kW test platform was installed last year off King Island, facing the notoriously rough seas of Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the mainland of Australia. There, it's been contributing reliable clean energy to the island's microgrid around the clock for a full 12 months. The WSE team has made a few live tweaks to the design during operation, improving its performance beyond original expectations. "We set out to prove that Wave Swell's wave energy converter technology could supply electricity to a grid in a range of wave conditions, and we have done that," said WSE CEO Paul Geason in a press release. "One key achievement has been to deliver real-world results in Tasmanian ocean conditions to complement the AMC test modeling. In some instances, the performance of our technology in the ocean has exceeded expectations due to the lessons we've learnt through the project, technological improvements and the refinements we have made over the course of the year." "Our team is excited to have achieved a rate of conversion from wave power to electricity at an average of 45 to 50% in a wide range of wave conditions," he continues. "This is a vast improvement on past devices and shows that the moment has arrived for wave power to sit alongside wind, solar and energy storage as part of a modern energy mix."

The King Island platform will remain in place at least until the end of 2022, and the company is now gearing up to go into production. "Having proven our device can survive the toughest conditions the Southern Ocean and Bass Strait can throw at it, and deliver grid compliant electricity, our priority now shifts to commercializing the technology," said Gleason. "For Wave Swell this means ensuring the market embraces the WSE technology and units are deployed to deliver utility scale clean electricity to mainland grids around the world."

The first European contact with indigenous Maori ended with four sailors killed and a hasty retreat. But it led to an identity for this South Pacific country: Nieuw Zeeland in Dutch, or New Zealand when it later became part of the British Empire. Now, some lawmakers want New Zealanders to drop a name that harks back to an era of colonization and adopt another -- Aotearoa, a Maori word referring to the clouds that indigenous oral history says helped early Polynesian navigators make their way here. From a report: Around the world, several countries are rethinking their identities to address resentment at their colonial past and forge a new future. In some cases, that involves changing the head of state, such as Barbados's severing of ties to the British monarchy. In others, it has meant changing its official name, as Eswatini did in 2018 when its absolute ruler decided it should no longer be known as Swaziland. Australia in recent years tweaked its national anthem because it didn't reflect its Aboriginal history. In New Zealand, the issue is coming to a head because a petition to rename the country Aotearoa -- pronounced 'au-te-a-ro-uh' -- garnered more than 70,000 signatures and will be considered by a parliamentary committee that could recommend a vote in Parliament, put it to a referendum or take no further action.

"Jacob Wayne John Keen, now 24, was 15 years old and living in his mother's rental when he allegedly created a sophisticated spyware tool known as a remote access trojan that allowed users to remotely take control of their victims' computers," reports the Guardian.

Once installed it could be used to steal victims' personal information, spy on them via webcams and microphones and track what they typed into emails or documents. Keen allegedly sold the tool for $35 on a hacking forum, making between $300,000 and $400,000 by selling it to more than 14,500 people in 128 countries....

Keen was slapped with six charges earlier in July, and is due to appear at Brisbane's magistrates court next month. His mother, 42, has also been charged with allegedly dealing in the proceeds of crime.

A global investigation involving more than a dozen law enforcement agencies across Europe led to 85 search warrants being executed around the world, with 434 devices seized and 13 people arrested for using the malware for "alleged criminality".
Among the tool's 14,500 users were a "statistically high" proportion of domestic violence perpetrators (and at least one child sex offender), according to the Australian federal police, who believe there were ultimately "tens of thousands" of victims globally.

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 suggests an appropriate punishment would be sentencing Keen to work for spy agencies.

Newsweek reports that "A huge piece of space debris appears to have fallen from the sky and landed on a sheep farm in Australia." On July 9, locals across the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales heard a bang, ABC Australia reported. It was heard for miles, by those as far away as Albury, Wagga Wagga and Canberra.... Sheep farmer Mick Miners then came across a strange, charred object on his ranch, south of Jindabyne, on July 25. "I didn't know what to think, I had no idea what it was," Miners told ABC Australia.

He found the 10 foot chunk of metal wedged into the ground in a remote part of his sheep paddock.

He was not the only one. His neighbor, Jock Wallace also found some strange debris in the area. "I didn't hear the bang, but my daughters said it was very loud," Wallace told ABC. "I think it's a concern, it's just fallen out of the sky. If it landed on your house it would make a hell of a mess."

Serial numbers were noted on the charred, pieces of debris. Australian National University College of Science astrophysicist Brad Tucker told ABC News that the debris is likely from the trunk section of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The spacecraft launched in 2020, and the debris may have fallen as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

Tucker told ABC that is may have been the largest piece of space debris to fall in Australia for decades — the last time was in 1979, when NASA's Skylab space station fell in Western Australia.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 192_kbps for sharing the article!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shoppers at a supermarket chain in southern England are being tracked by facial recognition cameras, prompting a legal complaint by a privacy rights group. Big Brother Watch said Southern Co-operative's use of biometric scans in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton, and London was "Orwellian in the extreme" and urged Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate whether it breaches data protection legislation.

The complaint claims the use of the biometric cameras "is infringing the data rights of a significant number of UK data subjects." It outlines how the facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers. If a customer on the list enters the store, staff are alerted. [...] "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse," Southern Co-operative said. It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender. Kmart and Bunnings stores in Australia are also being investigated for the privacy implications of their facial recognition systems. The two chains were trialing the technology to spot banned customers, prevent refund fraud and reduce theft.

Kmart and Bunnings have temporarily halted use of facial recognition in their local stores while the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) investigates the privacy implications of their systems. The two chains were trialing the technology to spot banned customers, prevent refund fraud and reduce theft. Engadget reports: The investigation started in mid-July, a month after the consumer advocacy group Choice learned that Kmart and Bunnings were testing facial recognition. Bunnings had already paused use as it migrated to a new system. Other Australian retailers, such as Aldi, Coles and Woolworths, have said they don't have plans to adopt the technology.

Both retailers defended their implementations. A Kmart spokesperson stressed that its facial recognition tech was used for "preventing criminal activity" and had strict privacy controls. Bunnings managing director Mike Schneider, meanwhile, claimed Choice was "mischaracterizing" face detection. The company's trial is only meant to catch banned customers and doesn't store images for regular shoppers, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Built by Sony AI, a research lab launched by the company in 2020, Gran Turismo Sophy is a computer program trained to control racing cars inside the world of Gran Turismo, a video game known for its super-realistic simulations of real vehicles and tracks. In a series of events held behind closed doors last year, Sony put its program up against the best humans on the professional sim-racing circuit. What they discovered during those racetrack battles -- and the ones that followed -- could help shape the future of machines that work alongside humans, or join us on the roads.

Back in July 2021, [Emily Jones], who is based in Melbourne, Australia, and races for the e-sports team Trans Tasman Racing, didn't know what to expect. "I wasn't told much about it," she says now, a year later. "'Don't do any practice,' they said. 'Don't look at its lap times.' I was like, it's obviously going to be good if they're keeping it secret from me." In the end, GT Sophy beat Jones's best lap by 1.5 seconds. At a level where records are smashed in millisecond increments, 1.5 seconds is an age. But Sony soon learned that speed alone wasn't enough to make GT Sophy a winner. The program outpaced all human drivers on an empty track, setting superhuman lap times on three different virtual courses. Yet when Sony tested GT Sophy in a race against multiple human drivers, where intelligence as well as speed is needed, GT Sophy lost. The program was at times too aggressive, racking up penalties for reckless driving, and at other times too timid, giving way when it didn't need to.

Sony regrouped, retrained its AI, and set up a rematch in October. This time GT Sophy won with ease. What made the difference? It's true that Sony came back with a larger neural network, giving its program more capabilities to draw from on the fly. But ultimately, the difference came down to giving GT Sophy something that Peter Wurman, head of Sony AI America, calls "etiquette": the ability to balance its aggression and timidity, picking the most appropriate behavior for the situation at hand. This is also what makes GT Sophy relevant beyond Gran Turismo. Etiquette between drivers on a track is a specific example of the kind of dynamic, context-aware behavior that robots will be expected to have when they interact with people, says Wurman. An awareness of when to take risks and when to play it safe would be useful for AI that is better at interacting with people, whether it be on the manufacturing floor, in home robots, or in driverless cars.

Zipmex, a Singapore-based digital assets trading platform, today announced that it is pausing customer withdrawals. From a report: The company took to Twitter on Wednesday to announce the move, citing "a combination of circumstances beyond our control" that made it take the decision. "Due to a combination of circumstances beyond our control including volatile market conditions, and the resulting financial difficulties of our key business partners, to maintain the integrity of our platform, we would be pausing withdrawals until further notice," said the exchange.

Zipmex, which markets itself as "Asia's leading digital assets exchange" and has offices in Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia, offers a variety of products including cryptocurrency spot trading and interest-bearing accounts. According to the company's website, users can enjoy up to 10% in rewards per year by depositing their funds on the platform. For example, Zipmex claims to offer 6% returns on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), and 10% on the USDC stablecoin. The startup, which counts Eduardo Saverin's B Capital as an investor, had concluded a $52 million fundraise in March this year.

Australia's environment is in a shocking state and faces further decline from amplifying threats, according to an anticipated report. The BBC reports: The survey of Australia's ecological systems -- conducted every five years -- found widespread abrupt changes. These can be blamed on climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and mining, it said. The threats are not being adequately managed - meaning they are on track to cause more problems. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the document paints a "shocking" and "sometimes depressing" story, vowing to implement new policies and laws.

The 2,000-page State of the Environment report, commissioned by the government, found or reiterated:
- Nineteen ecosystems are on the brink of collapse
- There are now more non-native plant species in Australia than native ones
- Australia has lost more species to extinction than any other continent
- All bar one category of environment examined has deteriorated since 2016, and more than half are now in a "poor" state.

The koala and gang-gang cockatoo are among more than 200 animal and plant species with upgraded threats since 2016. Many of those species are unique to Australia. In recent years, Australia has suffered severe drought, historic bushfires, successive years of record-breaking floods, and six mass bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef. The report found Australia lacks an adequate framework to manage its environment, instead relying on confusing systems that straddle different tiers of government. Federal government spending on sustaining biodiversity has dropped at the same time risks have been increasing, it said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Synchron, a brain-computer interface startup, reportedly implanted its first device in a US patient earlier this month. The startup implanted a 1.5-inch device into the brain of an ALS patient at Mount Sinai West medical center in New York on July 6, Bloomberg first reported. The purpose of the device is to allow the patient to communicate -- even after they have lost the ability to move -- by using their thoughts to send emails and texts. Bloomberg reported that Synchron has already implanted the device in four patients in Australia who have been able to use the brain implant to send messages on WhatsApp and shop online. Elon Musk's Neuralink has a similar mission, but is still waiting for FDA approval. "Neuralink and Synchron's products have several key differences: namely, size and installation," notes the report. "The Australian startup's product can be inserted into a human skull without cutting into it using a catheter that feeds the device through the jugular vein into a blood vessel in the brain. The process requires two separate surgeries."

"In contrast, Neuralink plans to make a much smaller and more powerful device that would require a portion of the individual's skull to be removed and would be performed using a robot." Neuralink also appears to be slightly more ambitious, with Musk referring to the device as "a Fitbit in your skull."

The New York Times describes Pegasus as "a 'zero-click' hacking tool that can remotely extract everything from a target's mobile phone [and] turn the mobile phone into a tracking and recording device." But they also report that the tool's "notorious" maker, NSO Group, was visited "numerous times" in recent months by a executives from American military contractor L3Harris — makes of the cellphone-tracking Stingray tool — who'd wanted to negotiate a purchase of the company.

Their first problem? The U.S. government had blacklisted NSO Group in November, saying Pegasus had been used to compromise phones of political leaders, human rights activists and journalists. But five people familiar with the negotiations said that the L3Harris team had brought with them a surprising message that made a deal seem possible. American intelligence officials, they said, quietly supported its plans to purchase NSO, whose technology over the years has been of intense interest to many intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world, including the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

The talks continued in secret until last month, when word of NSO's possible sale leaked and sent all the parties scrambling. White House officials said they were outraged to learn about the negotiations, and that any attempt by American defense firms to purchase a blacklisted company would be met by serious resistance.... Left in place are questions in Washington, other allied capitals and Jerusalem about whether parts of the U.S. government — with or without the knowledge of the White House — had seized an opportunity to try to bring control of NSO's powerful spyware under U.S. authority, despite the administration's very public stance against the Israeli firm....

[NSO Group] had seen a deal with the American defense contractor as a potential lifeline after being blacklisted by the Commerce Department, which has crippled its business. American firms are not allowed to do business with companies on the blacklist, under penalty of sanctions. As a result, NSO cannot buy any American technology to sustain its operations — whether it be Dell servers or Amazon cloud storage — and the Israeli firm has been hoping that being sold to a company in the United States could lead to the sanctions being lifted....

L3 Harris's representatives told the Israelis that U.S. intelligence agencies supported the acquisition as long as certain conditions were met, according to five people familiar with the discussions. One of the conditions, those people said, was that NSO's arsenal of "zero days" — the vulnerabilities in computer source code that allow Pegasus to hack into mobile phones — could be sold to all of the United States' partners in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence sharing relationship. The other partners are Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
"Several people familiar with the talks said there have been attempts to resuscitate the negotiations..."

"Boeing's troubled 737 MAX planes — which have twice crashed, killing 346 people — have experienced at least six mid-air emergencies and dozens of groundings in the year after an extensive probe cleared them to fly," reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC News: The incidents, pulled from U.S. government air safety databases, are among more than 60 mid-flight problems reported by pilots in the 12 months after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recertified the plane's airworthiness in late 2020. Former employees of both Boeing and the FAA characterised the reports — which included engine shutdowns and pilots losing partial control of the plane — as serious and with the potential to end in tragedy.

In one incident in December 2021, a United Airlines pilot declared a mayday after the system controlling the pitch and altitude of the plane started malfunctioning...

The MAX's flight control system also failed on 22 separate flights, a problem which became the primary focus of the FAA's 20-month recertification effort after the two fatal crashes. More than 42 incidents involved equipment malfunctions, and on more than 40 occasions, flight crews chose to ground the affected aircraft while problems were fixed.... Some planes also had a multitude of problems. One Alaskan Airlines MAX-9 was grounded seven times over five months due to malfunctions with its navigation or communication equipment.

A Boeing spokeswoman told the ABC, "none of the reports indicate a trend".

"In fact, the in-service reliability of the 737 MAX is consistent with other commercial airplane models," the spokeswoman said. "Since November 2020, the 737 MAX has flown more than 1.5 million flight hours in more than 580,000 revenue flights. The overwhelming majority of these flights have been conducted without any incident."
Former senior Boeing manager Ed Pierson — who worked at the 737 MAX factory in Seattle between 2015 and 2018 — told ABC "There are a lot of similarities between what we're seeing in some of the reports with what happened during these two crashes."

The article also reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "has now confirmed it did not investigate Boeing's alleged production problems after the crashes."

Later the article adds that the U.S. government "will announce a new audit examining Boeing's production oversight of the 737 MAX planes."

"A metallic NATO is starting to take shape," writes the senior metals columnist at Reuters, "though no-one is calling it that just yet." The Minerals Security Partnership is in theory open to all countries that are committed to "responsible critical mineral supply chains to support economic prosperity and climate objectives". But the coalition assembled by the United States is one of like-minded countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany with an Asian axis in the form of Japan and South Korea. [Also the European Commission, as well as Finland and Sweden.]

It is defined as much as anything by who is not on the invite list — China and Russia.

China's dominance of key enabling minerals such as lithium and rare earths is the single biggest reason why Western countries are looking to build their own supply chains. Russia, a major producer of nickel, aluminium and platinum group metals, is now also a highly problematic trading partner as its war in Ukraine that the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" grinds on. A previously highly globalised minerals supply network looks set to split into politically polarised spheres of influence, a tectonic realignment with far-reaching implications. The United States and Europe have realised that they can't build out purely domestic supply chains quickly enough to meet demand from the electric vehicle transition....

The process was already well underway before the U.S. State Department announced the formation of the Minerals Security Partnership on June 14. U.S. and Canadian officials have been working closely as Canada fleshes out a promised C$3.8 billion ($3.02 billion) package to boost production of lithium, copper and other strategic minerals. European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic has just been in Norway to seal "a strategic partnership" on battery technologies and critical raw materials.
The article points out America's Department of Defense is already investing $120 million in a new plant for heavy rare earths separation — and has chosen an Australian company as its partner.

Shortly thereafter the Defense Department noted an online disinformation campaign against its new partner (according to U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant), disinformation which Reuters describes as "a pro-China propaganda campaign" using fake social media accounts to try to stir up opposition.