$2 million worth of Dai was stolen Thursday from the cryptocurrency borrowing/lending service Akropolis, reports ZDNet — after which the service's admins paused all transactions. These attacks have been growing in numbers since early February this year, and one of the biggest flash loan attacks took place last month, in October, when hackers stole $24 million worth of cryptocurrency assets from decentralized finance service Harvest Finance.

The good news is that Akropolis says it has already identified the attacker's Ethereum account, which would allow it to track funds as they move around the blockchain. The DeFi platform says it already notified major cryptocurrency exchanges about the hack and the attacker's wallet in an attempt to have funds frozen and prevent the attacker from laundering funds into other forms of cryptocurrencies, lose the investigators' tracks, and cash out the funds.

Akropolis said it is currently exploring ways to reimburse users for the loss.

New webcam-based anti-cheating monitoring is so stressful, it's made some students cry, the Washington Post reports: "Online proctoring" companies saw in coronavirus shutdowns a chance to capitalize on a major reshaping of education, selling schools a high-tech blend of webcam-watching workers and eye-tracking software designed to catch students cheating on their exams. They've taken in millions of dollars, some of it public money, from thousands of colleges in recent months. But they've also sparked a nationwide school-surveillance revolt, with students staging protests and adopting creative tactics to push campus administrators to reconsider the deals. Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to click too much or rest their eyes for fear they'll be branded as cheats...

One system, Proctorio, uses gaze-detection, face-detection and computer-monitoring software to flag students for any "abnormal" head movement, mouse movement, eye wandering, computer window resizing, tab opening, scrolling, clicking, typing, and copies and pastes. A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough. If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having "multiple faces detected." If someone else takes the test on the same network — say, in a dorm building — it's potential "exam collusion." Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.

As an unusually disrupted fall semester churns toward finals, this student rebellion has erupted into online war, with lawsuits, takedowns and viral brawls further shaking the anxiety-inducing backdrop of college exams. Some students have even tried to take the software down from the inside, digging through the code for details on how it monitors millions of high-stakes exams... Some students said the experience of having strangers and algorithms silently judge their movements was deeply unnerving, and many worried that even being accused of cheating could endanger their chances at good grades, scholarships, internships and post-graduation careers. Several students said they had hoped for freeing, friend-filled college years but were now resigned to hours of monitored video exams in their childhood bedrooms, with no clear end in sight....

[T]he systems' technical demands have made just taking the tests almost comically complicated. One student at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario shared the instructions for his online Introduction to Linear Algebra midterm: five pages, totaling more than 2,000 words, requiring students to use a special activity-monitoring Web browser and keep their face, hands and desk in view of their camera at all times...

Students who break the rules or face technical difficulties can be investigated for academic misconduct. "The instructions," the student said, "are giving me more anxiety than the test itself."
Company executives "say a semester without proctors would turn online testing into a lawless wasteland" according to the article. But one long-time teacher counters that "the most clear value conveyed to students is 'We don't trust you.'"

Yet the education tech nonprofit Educause reported that 54% of higher education institutions they'd surveyed "are currently using online or remote proctoring services.

"And another 23% are planning or considering using them."

"The Radiophonic Workshop has always broken new sonic ground, from the Doctor Who theme to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Now they're at it again — this time using the internet as a musical instrument," reports the Guardian.

"The band includes composers from the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which created soundtracks for most BBC shows from the 60s to the 90s and influenced generations of musicians from Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield to Aphex Twin, Orbital and Mary Epworth..." A performance of Latency will take place at a special online event on 22 November using a technique inspired by lockdown Zoom calls... The internet has an unpredictable natural lag, or latency, caused by the milliseconds it takes for electrical signals from one computer to reach another, as anyone using Zoom has experienced. The trick that Bob Earland and Paddy Kingsland discovered was that they could extend the internet's delay from a few milliseconds into several seconds. Instead of trying to play at the same time, the Radiophonic Workshop will play one after another — in sequence, rather than in parallel.

"We had the bright idea of using that latency to make a loop of music," Earland said. "The sound gets sent to someone, and they add to it, and it keeps going round. So you're not relying on everyone being on the same clock..." Workshop member Peter Howell, who is also a lecturer in film and TV music, said: "It does feel like live playing, it's just that every person has a little bubble of time in which they're playing live."

The performance comes the day before 23 November, the anniversary of the first transmission of Doctor Who in 1963 which is also Delia Derbyshire Day, in honour of the Radiophonic Workshop's leading light, who created the sound of the show's famous theme tune.

"A software company that provides services for insurance groups disclosed this week that about 27.7 million Texas driver's license records were exposed in a data breach earlier this year," reports The Hill: The company, Vertafore, said in a statement posted on a website set up to address the breach that the data was exposed between March and August and affected licenses issued before February 2019. Exposed data included driver's license numbers, addresses, dates of birth and vehicle registration history, according to the company. The group said that no Social Security numbers or financial account information were compromised.

The breach happened after three files were accessed by an unauthorized user after the files were "inadvertently stored in an unsecured external storage service," Vertafore said in its statement....

Vertafore said that it is providing a year of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services to all Texas residents whose driver's license data was exposed... Vertafore emphasized in disclosing the breach that it was taking steps to enhance employee cybersecurity and privacy training, reinforcing security procedures and policies, and further enhancing the security of its systems.

"Earlier this week Apple announced their new, ARM-based 'Apple Silicon' machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards," writes Mike Croucher, technical evangelist at The Numerical Algorithms Group.

"Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. At the time of writing this is the only Fortran compiler publicly available for Apple Silicon although that will likely change soon as open source Fortran compilers get updated."

An anonymous Slashdot reader offers this analysis: Apple Silicon currently has no open source Fortran compiler and Apple themselves are one of the few silicon manufacturers who don't have their own Fortran compiler. You could be forgiven for thinking that this doesn't matter to most users... if it wasn't for the fact that sizeable percentages of foundational data science platforms such as R and SciPy are written in Fortran.
Croucher argues that "More modern systems, such as R, make direct use of a lot of this code because it is highly performant and, perhaps more importantly, has been battle tested in production for decades. Numerical computing is hard (even when all of your instincts suggest otherwise) and when someone demonstrably does it right, it makes good sense to reuse rather than reinvent..."

"The community needs and will demand open source (or at least free) Fortran compilers if data scientists are ever going to realise the full potential of Apple's new hardware and I have no doubt that these are on the way. Other major silicon providers (e.g. Intel, AMD, NEC and NVIDIA/PGI) have their own Fortran compiler that co-exist with the open ones. Perhaps Apple should join the club..."

Wednesday Twitch warned its users to delete any videos containing copyrighted music. PC Gamer reports on what happened next: Since October, Twitch has been deleting significant quantities of videos over copyright claims, leaving the affected streamers with no way to respond or issue counter-claims. Twitch eventually explained that the number of DMCA notifications it receives from major record labels has surged, going from "fewer than 50" each year to "thousands" beginning in May. The recommendation offered to streamers was to play games with the music muted, which obviously isn't great advice when it comes to rhythm games, or games that don't have the option to mute music separately from other audio. Meanwhile, some streamers have had videos muted due to sound effects, with claims coming via automated content recognition software Audible Magic. These claims can be contested, but it's still frustrating for those affected by content ID software that can't tell the difference between copyrighted audio and the noise of a grandfather clock chiming in a horror game.

In response, streamers have been protesting by playing games with the sound off completely to highlight the absurdity of the situation, some using the hashtag #DMCAsoundoff. Watching Rocksmith players grunt or silently nod along to songs nobody can hear highlights the problem while still entertaining their viewers, as does hearing them improvise their own the sound effects for games like Resident Evil 2.
Polygon argues it's "alarming that these are the lengths players are going to in order to try and protest Twitch's policy..." But they also applauded the creativity of the protesters It's a surprising look at the transformative nature of streaming. When players are forced to play in dead silence, people still tune in and watch. Even while complying with copyright law to the absolute letter, each stream is different, and each act of protest feels wholly unique.

Twitch recently posted a long statement in response to the controversy, writing: "Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can — and should — be better for creators than they have been recently. We should have developed more sophisticated and user-friendly tools long ago. To all the creators who lost their community's best moments, we're sorry. This shouldn't have happened."

Despite the statement, Twitch has yet to provide concrete solutions for the ongoing problem, and the platform has yet to address the issue of in-game audio triggering the DMCA process (besides a suggestion to mute in-game audio.)

"YouTube is facing growing criticism for allowing election misinformation after it decided not to remove or individually fact-check videos that spread unfounded conspiracy theories alleging voter fraud," reports NBC News: While all internet platforms are struggling to contain the volume of misinformation since voting ended last week — and all have been criticized to some degree by researchers for their handling of the situation — YouTube has staked out a position that is less aggressive than its social media competitors, most notably Facebook and Twitter.

YouTube said before the election that it wouldn't allow videos that encourage "interference in the democratic process," but now, as state officials are working to certify vote tallies, the company said it wants to give users room for "discussion of election results," even when that discussion is based on debunked information. Somewhere in between those two policies it has decided to leave up videos challenging Joe Biden's election, and some have received millions of views.

"Is YouTube unable to contend with this material, meaning they lack resources? Or is it a lack of will?" asked Sarah Roberts, co-director of UCLA's Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and an associate professor of information studies. "I think one of those is probably more damning than the other, but they both have the same outcome of allowing propaganda material masquerading as news being distributed on their platform at a critical juncture for the American political cycle," Roberts said...

"There's a good chance YouTube's handling of this goes in the first sentence of every story about how social networks handled the 2020 election for the next several years," Casey Newton, a journalist who writes the technology newsletter Platformer, said in a tweet.

"Ubuntu developers have fixed a series of vulnerabilities that made it easy for standard users to gain coveted root privileges," reports Ars Technica: "This blog post is about an astonishingly straightforward way to escalate privileges on Ubuntu," Kevin Backhouse, a researcher at GitHub, wrote in a post published on Tuesday. "With a few simple commands in the terminal, and a few mouse clicks, a standard user can create an administrator account for themselves."

The first series of commands triggered a denial-of-service bug in a daemon called accountsservice, which as its name suggests is used to manage user accounts on the computer... With the help of a few extra commands, Backhouse was able to set a timer that gave him just enough time to log out of the account before accountsservice crashed. When done correctly, Ubuntu would restart and open a window that allowed the user to create a new account that — you guessed it — had root privileges...

The second bug involved in the hack resided in the GNOME display manager, which among other things manages user sessions and the login screen. The display manager, which is often abbreviated as gdm3, also triggers the initial setup of the OS when it detects no users currently exist. "How does gdm3 check how many users there are on the system?" Backhouse asked rhetorically. "You probably already guessed it: by asking accounts-daemon! So what happens if accounts-daemon is unresponsive....?"

The vulnerabilities could be triggered only when someone had physical access to, and a valid account on, a vulnerable machine. It worked only on desktop versions of Ubuntu.
"This bug is now tracked as CVE-2020-16125 and rated with a high severity score of 7.2 out of 10. It affects Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 18.04..." reports Bleeping Computer.

They add that the GitHub security research who discovered the bugs "reported them to Ubuntu and GNOME maintainers on October 17, and fixes are available in the latest code."

"Elon Musk predicted in March, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, that there would be 'probably close to zero new cases' in the United States by the end of April," reports the Washington Post.

"Now, the Tesla chief executive is trying to figure out whether he has a virus that has killed at least 242,000 Americans." The billionaire said early Friday that he's experiencing cold-like symptoms, but that four rapid tests have produced two positives and two negatives — an experience that left him questioning the process.

"Something extremely bogus is going on," Musk, 49, tweeted. "Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse..."
UPDATE: Thursday Musk tweeted he was also in the process of getting "PCR tests" — plural — "from separate labs," with results to be delivered within 24 hours. On Saturday, Musk then tweeted the news that he "most likely" has a moderate case of Covid-19.

Musk had said he had "symptoms of a typical cold," tweeting that for the past few days he's had "slight fever" and "mild sniffles" — and that he'd been taking NyQuil.

"The Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history," state and federal election officials said in a statement Thursday. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." Bloomberg reports: The statement acknowledged the "many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections" and urged Americans to turn to election administrators and officials for accurate information. The statement was signed by officials from the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which shares information among state, local and federal officials, and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council, which includes election infrastructure owners and operators.

Among the 10 signatories were Benjamin Hovland, who chairs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and Bob Kolasky, the assistant director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Key officials at the cybersecurity agency, including its head, Christopher Krebs, are stepping down or expecting to get fired as Trump refuses to concede. Krebs, who has enjoyed bipartisan support for his role in helping run secure U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020, has told associates he expects to be dismissed, according to three people familiar with internal discussions. His departure would follow the resignation of Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, who resigned on Thursday morning after about two years at the agency. In addition, Valerie Boyd, the assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CISA, has also left, according to two other people. Krebs and Ware are both Trump appointees.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Shekinah and Orlandria Lennon were sitting at their kitchen table this fall, taking online classes, when video of their teachers and fellow students suddenly froze on their laptop screens. The wireless antenna on the roof had stopped working, and it could not be fixed. Desperate for a solution, their mother called five broadband companies, trying to get connections for their home in Orrum, N.C., a rural community of fewer than 100 people with no grocery store or traffic lights. All the companies gave the same answer: Service is not available in your area. The response is the same across broad stretches of Robeson County, N.C., a swath of small towns and rural places like Orrum dotted among soybean fields and hog farms on the South Carolina border. About 20,000 of the county's homes, or 43 percent of all households, have no internet connection.

The technology gap has prompted teachers to upload lessons on flash drives and send them home to dozens of students every other week. Some children spend school nights crashing at more-connected relatives' homes so they can get online for classes the next day. [...] Millions of American students are grappling with the same challenges, learning remotely without adequate home internet service. Even as school districts like the one in Robeson County have scrambled to provide students with laptops, many who live in low-income and rural communities continue to have difficulty logging on. "About 15 million K-12 students lived in households without adequate online connectivity in 2018," the report notes, citing a study of federal data by Common Sense Media, an education nonprofit group that tracks children's media use.

"[T]he pandemic turned the lack of internet connectivity into a nationwide emergency: Suddenly, millions of schoolchildren were cut off from digital learning, unable to maintain virtual 'attendance' and marooned socially from their classmates."

Australia's climate has entered a new era of sustained extreme weather events, such as dangerous bushfires and heatwaves, courtesy of rising average temperatures, a new report by the nation's two government climate science agencies has found. From a report: Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel burning, has driven more dangerous bushfires, rising sea levels and a rapid rise in the days where temperatures reach extreme levels, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO said in Australia's latest State of the Climate Report. "What we are seeing now is beyond the realm of what was possible previously," said Dr Jaci Brown, director of CSIRO's Climate Science Centre.

While 2019 was Australia's hottest on record that helped deliver unprecedented bushfires, those temperatures would be seen as average once global heating reaches 1.5C, the report said. Among the key findings, the report said Australia's climate had warmed by 1.44C since 1910 with bushfire seasons getting longer and more dangerous. Australia's oceans had warmed by 1C and were acidifying. In a briefing to reporters on Tuesday, Dr Karl Braganza, manager of climate environmental prediction service at the bureau, said conditions in Australia were in line with projections over recent decades. But he said: "What we are seeing now is a more tangible shift in the extremes and we are starting to feel how that shift in the average is impacting on extreme events. So we don't necessarily feel that 1.44C increase in average temperature, but we do feel those heatwaves and we feel that fire weather."

A potential hostage situation is reportedly taking place at the building in which game developer Ubisoft's Montreal office is housed. From a report: A group of suspects are reportedly holding tens of people hostage at Ubisoft Montreal, according to local (French-language) media outlet LCN. The situation reportedly began around 1:30pm Eastern Time. Montreal police confirmed that there is an "ongoing police operation" at the intersection where Ubisoft Montreal sits, adding, "We ask people to avoid the area. The SPVM is currently validating information and more details will follow." [...] When asked about the reports, an Ubisoft representative offered the following statement to Ars Technica: "We are aware of the situation and working with local authorities." Updated at 22:41, November 13: Police said no threat had yet been found, and CBC News reported that the incident had been caused by a hoax 911 call.

YouTube says it will not produce its annual end-of-year "Rewind" video this year, due to the global pandemic. The BBC reports: The video-sharing platform has produced an annual retrospective since 2010, featuring well-known YouTube stars referencing big viral moments. But, in a statement it said: "2020 has been different. And it doesn't feel right to carry on as if it weren't."

Journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, who writes about YouTube and other social platforms, said it was a shame that Rewind had been cancelled because YouTube had become "a major source of entertainment and support for people during the pandemic." But he added: "There's just not that much new that's come out of YouTube this year. It's been outmoded and overtaken as the place that trends begin, by more nimble apps like TikTok. "Rewind has always featured a similar cast of characters since it started in 2010, but the potential list of people they could feature would look even more stale in 2020 in comparison to other platforms."

theodp writes: What if we could build a better world through code?", begins the just-released teaser video for Microsoft's 2020 Hour of Code: A Minecraft Tale of Two Villages . "Help us bring two villages together through the power of code! [...] You will experience empathy and compassion for your neighbor while embracing the diversity that makes us all uniquely special." Intended for ages 7-and-up, the accompanying Educator Guide suggests opening the 45-minute coding lesson (using Blocks or Python) with a 10-minute discussion of unconscious and conscious bias, including "prejudice based on race, ethnicity, age, gender, gender identity, physical ability, religion, and body weight." The Guide also suggests how teachers might explain to students the harm biases can cause: "Both conscious and unconscious biases can cause us to behave negatively or discriminate against people. When we stereotype people based on their gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or some other characteristic, it can be detrimental to us and our community. On a larger and extreme scale, bias can lead to oppression, genocide, and even slavery." The Guide notes that this year's Hour of Code lesson adheres to five Social Justice Standards. The use of Minecraft, Microsoft Education suggests, will help keep students developing and applying social and emotional skills during the pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org : Even if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, Earth will warm for centuries to come and oceans will rise by meters, according to a controversial modeling study published Thursday. Natural drivers of global warming -- more heat-trapping clouds, thawing permafrost, and shrinking sea ice -- already set in motion by carbon pollution will take on their own momentum, researchers from Norway reported in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. Using a stripped-down climate model, [lead author Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School] and colleague Ulrich Goluke projected changes out to the year 2500 under two scenarios: the instant cessation of emissions, and the gradual reduction of planet warming gases to zero by 2100.

In an imaginary world where carbon pollution stops with a flip of the switch, the planet warms over the next 50 years to about 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- roughly half-a-degree above the target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement -- and cools slightly after that. Earth's surface today is 1.2C hotter than it was in the mid-19th century, when temperatures began to rise. But starting in 2150, the model has the planet beginning to gradually warm again, with average temperatures climbing another degree over the following 350 years, and sea levels going up by at least three meters. Under the second scenario, Earth heats up to levels that would tear at the fabric of civilization far more quickly, but ends up at roughly the same point by 2500.

The core finding -- contested by leading climate scientists -- is that several thresholds, or "tipping points", in Earth's climate system have already been crossed, triggering a self-perpetuating process of warming, as has happened millions of years in the past. One of these drivers is the rapid retreat of sea ice in the Arctic. [...] Another source is the thawing of permafrost, which holds twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. The third is increasing amounts of water vapor, which also has a warming effect. Reactions from half-a-dozen leading climate scientists to the study -- which the authors acknowledge is schematic -- varied sharply, with some saying the findings merit follow-up research, and others rejecting it out of hand. There is a way to stop the melting process, but it involves sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it underground, which isn't yet possible at the scale required. The authors also suggest making Earth's surface brighter and planting billions of trees to slow or halt the planet warming gases.

Temperature and symptom-based screening programs don't help catch coronavirus cases, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report that took a closer look at the programs used at US airports until mid-September. CNN reports: The CDC said this was a resource-intensive program that had a low case detection rate. Between January 17 and September 13, the CDC screened more than 766,000 travelers. Nearly 300 met the criteria for public health assessment, 35 were tested for the coronavirus, and nine tested positive. That means the program identified about one case per 85,000 travelers screened, the CDC reported Thursday in the agency's weekly report. This style of screening doesn't seem to work for a few reasons. Covid-19 has a wide range of nonspecific symptoms common to other infections, there are a high number of asymptomatic cases, travelers may deny symptoms or take steps to avoid detection and passenger data was limited.

The CDC also only shared contact information with local health departments for 68% of the passengers it screened. There were data collection problems, the report said, and some states opted out of receiving the information. The CDC ended the program September 14. Instead, the CDC has concentrated on communicating more with travelers to promote recommended preventive measures. The agency has also enhanced the public health response capacity at ports of entry. The CDC said travelers and their local communities would be better protected if there was "more efficient" collection of contact information for international air passengers before they arrive and real-time data that could be sent to US health departments. Pre-departure testing within 72 hours before the trip and testing upon arrival would help, as would rules that would encourage a traveler to self-isolate for a certain period.

It was teased last month, and now it's official: PayPal is bringing its newly-announced support for cryptocurrency to all US accounts. Engadget reports: PayPal says all eligible users can start buying, selling and holding bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum and bitcoin cash. Beginning next year, PayPal also plans to bring cryptocurrency into Venmo and will allow users to pay merchants with their cryptocurrency holdings (the digital currency will be converted to fiat currency). The company hasn't detailed its plans to make cryptocurrency trading available in other countries, but says it will come to "select international markets in the first half of 2021."

The Commerce Department said Thursday that it won't enforce its order that would have effectively forced the Chinese-owned TikTok video-sharing app to shut down, citing a federal court ruling in Philadelphia. From a report: The department's action delays implementation of a regulation, set to take effect Thursday, that would have barred U.S. companies such as Apple from offering TikTok as a mobile app, and companies including Amazon.com and Alphabet from offering web-hosting service for TikTok -- moves that would effectively make it inoperable. In making its decision, the Commerce Department cited a preliminary injunction against the shutdown last month by U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia in a suit brought by three TikTok stars: comedian Douglas Marland, fashion guru Cosette Rinab and musician Alex Chambers. The Commerce Department statement said that the shutdown order won't go into effect "pending further legal developments." In the Philadelphia case, Judge Beetlestone said the government action "presents a threat to the 'robust exchange of informational materials'" and therefore likely exceeds the government's authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law the Trump administration has relied on to take action against TikTok. Two other court cases are pending. TikTok has filed its own request for an injunction for the shutdown in a case before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington.

Mike Allen, reporting for Axios: President Trump has told friends he wants to start a digital media company to clobber Fox News and undermine the conservative-friendly network, sources tell Axios. The state of play: Some Trump advisers think Fox News made a mistake with an early call (seconded by AP) of President-elect Biden's win in Arizona. [...] Here's Trump's plan, according to the source: There's been lots of speculation about Trump starting a cable channel. But getting carried on cable systems would be expensive and time-consuming. Instead, Trump is considering a digital media channel that would stream online, which would be cheaper and quicker to start. Trump's digital offering would likely charge a monthly fee to MAGA fans. Many are Fox News viewers, and he'd aim to replace the network -- and the $5.99-a-month Fox Nation streaming service, which has an 85% conversion rate from free trials to paid subscribers -- as their top destination. Trump's database of email and cellphone contacts would be a huge head start. Trump's lists are among the most valuable in politics -- especially his extensive database of cellphone numbers for text messages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [A] new study [published in the journal Nature] by Lin Li and Pinaki Chakraborty at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University focuses on a less-than-obvious question: what happens to hurricanes after landfall in a warming world? Once a storm moves over land, it loses the water vapor from warm ocean waters that fuel it, so it rapidly weakens. The total damage done depends in part on how quickly it weakens. The researchers examined a data set of all North Atlantic landfalling hurricanes between 1967 and 2018. The primary metric they were interested in was the rate the hurricane lost strength over the first 24 hours after landfall. Strength "decays" on an exponential curve, so they boiled this down to a mathematical parameter for decay time.

This parameter varies a fair bit from storm to storm depending on weather conditions and terrain, so the researchers compared averages for each half of the 50-year period. They found a pretty strong trend. In the earlier 25-year period, the average storm lost about 75 percent of its strength over the first day. In the latter half, the average storm lost only half of its strength. The researchers also analyzed sea surface temperatures in this area, which have obviously increased over the last 50 years. That means there's a rough correlation between warmer ocean temperatures and hurricanes retaining strength after landfall. But is there a physical reason to believe the former caused the latter?

To test this, the researchers used a computer-model simulation of an idealized hurricane -- that is, a hurricane in a homogenous virtual setting rather than above a specific location on the Earth. They simulated a series of hurricanes over increasingly warm water, with intensity capped at Category 4, and had each one make landfall at exactly the same strength. Landfall was simulated by suddenly cutting off the supply of water vapor at the bottom of the storm. Sure enough, the storms that had grown over a warmer ocean took longer to weaken. That means this isn't a matter of, say, the back half of a storm still feeding on warm water while the front half crosses onto land. Instead, it appears that increased water vapor entrained within the storm itself helped sustain it. Another set of simulations confirmed this by also removing the water vapor at landfall -- in this case, the storms all weakened identically.

In a lengthy blog post, Twitch told streamers that they must stop playing recorded music on their streams (unless it's officially licensed) and that "if you haven't already, you should review your historical VODs and Clips that may have music in them and delete any archives that might." Variety reports: The Amazon-owned live-streaming platform also claimed that it is "actively speaking with the major record labels about potential approaches to additional licenses that would be appropriate for the Twitch service." However, the company also said that the "current constructs for licenses" that record labels have with other services (which typically take a cut of revenue from creators for payment to record labels) "make less sense for Twitch." "We're open-minded to new structures that could work for Twitch's unique service, but we must be clear that they may take some time to materialize or may never happen at all," the company said in the blog.

Twitch's music-copyright communique comes after several major U.S. music organizations -- including the RIAA, the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Music Managers Forum, the American Association of Independent Music and SAG-AFTRA -- sent a letter last month to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (copying Twitch CEO Emmet Shear). The letter, among other things, accused Twitch of "allowing and enabling its streamers to use our respective members' music without authorization, in violation of Twitch's music guidelines." Twitch said it was caught off guard by the music industry's crackdown on unlicensed music on its service. According to the company, starting this May, reps for music companies began sending thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright-takedown notices targeted at users' archived content, "mostly for snippets of tracks in years-old clips." Before then, Twitch said, it received fewer than 50 music-related DMCA notifications per year.

Twitch said it analyzed DMCA notifications received from the end of May through mid-October and found that more than 99% of them were for tracks that streamers were playing in the background of their stream. Twitch apologized to creators for the angst the DMCA takedowns have caused, noting that a warning email it sent to many last month about the videos deleted from their accounts "didn't include all the information that you'd typically get in a DMCA notification." "We could have developed more sophisticated, user-friendly tools a while ago. That we didn't is on us," it said. "And we could have provided creators with a longer time period to address their VOD and Clip libraries -- that was a miss as well. We're truly sorry for these mistakes, and we'll do better."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BNN Bloomberg: Occidental Petroleum Corp. became the first major U.S. oil producer to aim for net zero emissions from everything it extracts and sells, accelerating an industry trend that's become commonplace in Europe. The Houston-based company announced a target to reach net zero emissions from its own operations by 2040 and an ambition to do the same from customers' use of its products by 2050, Chief Executive Officer Vicki Hollub said during a conference call with analysts on Tuesday. The plan relies heavily on capturing carbon dioxide and burying it, a technology that's so far been prohibitively expensive.

Occidental's announcement is significant because the company has one of the biggest footprints in the Permian Basin, the sprawling oil field beneath Texas and New Mexico that produces more crude than any other region on the continent. [...] Occidental is aiming to reduce all three categories of emissions. Scope 1 involves pollution emanating directly from company operations, while Scope 2 includes indirect emissions from utilities selling power to the company, and similar sources. Scope 3 -- the category most U.S. oil drillers have so far excluded -- involves pollution farthest removed from a company's control, such as consumers burning refined fuels like gasoline. It would be the first major U.S. oil company to target Scope 3 emissions, according to BloombergNEF. "Key to achieving Occidental's targets is building the world's largest so-called direct-air capture plant in the Permian region," the report adds. "The facility will pull CO2 from the air and concentrate it to be either stored underground or used to help push crude out of old wells."

"Occidental plans to use its carbon-capture business, named 1PointFive, to generate cash for investment in new facilities. The carbon-capture business probably will generate as much cash flow as Occidental's chemicals business within 10 to 15 years."

A consortium led by Rolls Royce has announced plans to build up to 16 mini-nuclear plants in the UK. The BBC reports: It says the project will create 6,000 new jobs in the Midlands and the North of England over the next five years. The prime minister is understood to be poised to announce at least 200 million pounds for the project as part of a long-delayed green plan for economic recovery. Rolls argues that as well as producing low-carbon electricity, the concept could become a new export industry.

The company's UK "small modular reactor" (SMR) group includes the National Nuclear Laboratory and the building company Laing O'Rourke. The government says new nuclear is essential if the UK is to meet its target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050 -- where any carbon released is balanced out by an equivalent amount absorbed from the atmosphere. But there is a nuclear-sized hole opening up in the energy network. Six of the UK's seven nuclear reactor sites are due to go offline by 2030 and the remaining one, Sizewell B, is due to be decommissioned in 2035. Together they account for around 20% of the country's electricity.

Each plant would produce 440 megawatts of electricity -- roughly enough to power Sheffield -- and the hope is that, once the first few have been made, they will cost around 2 billion pounds each. The consortium says the first of these modular plants could be up and running in 10 years, after that it will be able to build and install two a year. By comparison, the much larger nuclear plant being built at Hinkley Point in Somerset is expect to cost some 22 billion pounds but will produce more than 3 gigawatts of electricity -- over six times as much.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: The CIA and German intelligence jeopardized Switzerland's historic reputation for neutrality by using a Swiss company as a platform for a global espionage operation for decades, according to a report released Tuesday by members of the Swiss parliament. Investigators concluded that Swiss authorities were aware of, and at times complicit in, an elaborate espionage operation in which the CIA covertly owned and controlled a Swiss company, Crypto AG, that secretly sold rigged encryption systems to foreign governments.

The report marks the culmination of a Swiss investigation launched after the history of the Crypto operation was revealed earlier this year by The Washington Post in collaboration with ZDF, German public television, and Swiss broadcaster SRF. The Crypto operation exploited "Switzerland's image abroad as a neutral state," according to the report, which also said that Swiss authorities had effectively allowed the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND, to carry out "intelligence operations to the detriment of other states by hiding behind a Swiss company." The probe marks the first public accounting by a foreign government of an espionage operation so successful and extensive that a classified CIA history referred to it as "the intelligence coup of the century." The CIA did not respond to a request for comment, and the BND previously declined to comment.

Prepping was seen as a fringe hobby for survivalists and reality TV. Then came the pandemic. From a report: There's a reason "preppers," people who plan for the worst-case scenario, like to talk about the zombie apocalypse. The idea of an army of walking dead swarming the country pervades their thoughts because, says Roman Zrazhevskiy, "If you prepare as if a zombie apocalypse is going to happen, you have all the bases covered." That means: an escape route, medical supplies, a few weeks' worth of food. Zrazhevskiy has been thinking about this for decades. He was born in Russia a few months after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. At the dinner table, his family often talked about the disaster and what went wrong. Then, after they relocated to New York, Zrazhevskiy stood on the waterfront outside his Brooklyn high school on September 11, 2001, and watched the World Trade Center towers collapse. Even then, he had a small go-bag prepared with disaster supplies.

Now, he's the guy who has a kit and a checklist for every occasion, including taking his toddler to the beach. Zrazhevskiy lives in Texas and runs survival outfitters Ready to Go Survival and Mira Safety. In 2019, with protests in Hong Kong, wildfires in Australia, and the threat of war with Iran, business boomed. But when the CDC announced the U.S.'s first confirmed coronavirus case last January, business reached "a whole new level," says Zrazhevskiy. His companies spent the next couple of months scrambling to fill backorders. The flood of new customers had so many questions that he hired seven full-time staffers just to answer emails. "It's kind of a customer service nightmare," he says. "People are really flipping out." In a public imagination fueled by reality TV, preppers are lonely survivalists, members of fanatical religious groups, or even wealthy Silicon Valley moguls who buy luxury underground bunkers and keep a getaway helicopter fueled. But in reality preppers range from New Yorkers with extra boxes of canned goods squeezed in their studio apartments to wilderness experts with fully stocked bunkers.

TikTok has filed a petition in a US Court of Appeals calling for a review of actions by the Trump administration's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The reason, according to the company, is that it hasn't heard from the committee in weeks about an imminent deadline for parent company ByteDance to sell off US assets over national security concerns. From a report: The CFIUS set the deadline of November 12th for TikTok to divest itself of "any tangible or intangible assets or property, wherever located, used to enable or support ByteDance's operation of the TikTok application in the United States." TikTok says it applied for a 30-day extension that was allowed for in the CFIUS' order, but hasn't received any communication on the matter. It's not clear what would actually happen if the deadline passed; TikTok was granted a preliminary injunction against it late last month.

A British firm has won a European Space Agency contract to develop the technology to turn moon dust and rocks into oxygen, leaving behind aluminium, iron and other metal powders for lunar construction workers to build with. The Guardian reports: If the process can be made to work well enough, it will pave the way for extraction facilities on the moon that make oxygen and valuable materials on the surface, rather than having to haul them into space at enormous cost. Analyses of rocks brought back from the moon reveal that oxygen makes up about 45% of the material by weight. The remainder is largely iron, aluminium and silicon. In work published this year, scientists at Metalysis and the University of Glasgow found they could extract 96% of the oxygen from simulated lunar soil, leaving useful metal alloy powders behind.

The Esa contract will fund Metalysis for nine months to perfect an electrochemical process that releases oxygen from lunar dust and rocks by sending an electrical current through the material. The process is already used on Earth, but the oxygen is released as an unwanted byproduct of mineral extraction. To make it work for lunar explorers, the oxygen must be captured and stored. Under the contract, the firm will try to boost the yield and purity of oxygen and metals from the rock while reducing the amount of energy the process consumes. If the technology looks promising, the next step will be to demonstrate oxygen extraction on the moon. The oxygen released from the lunar surface can be combined with other gases to produce breathable air, but it is also a vital component of rocket propellant that could be manufactured on the moon and used to refuel spacecraft bound for deep space.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they originally thought the man found June 14, 2017 in a torched SUV on a logging road in Squamish, British Columbia was a local rock climber known to others in the area as a politically progressive vegan named Jesse James.

But according to a report from CTV News, at a press conference late last month authorities said new DNA evidence linked to a missing persons investigation has confirmed the man's true identity as Davis Wolfgang Hawke. A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who'd legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra.

In 2005, AOL won a $12.8 million lawsuit against him for relentlessly spamming its users. More recently, Hawke's Jesse James identity penned a book called Psychology of Seduction, which claimed to merge the "shady world of the pickup artist with modern science, unraveling the mystery of attraction using evolutionary biology and examining seduction through the lens of social and evolutionary psychology." The book's "about the author" page said James was a "disruptive technology pioneer" who was into rock climbing and was a resident of Squamish. It also claimed James held a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford, and that he was an officer in the Israeli Defense Force.

A former Microsoft software engineer from Ukraine has been sentenced to nine years in prison for stealing more than $10 million in store credit from Microsoft's online store. Ars Technica reports: From 2016 to 2018, Volodymyr Kvashuk worked for Microsoft as a tester, placing mock online orders to make sure everything was working smoothly. The software automatically prevented shipment of physical products to testers like Kvashuk. But in a crucial oversight, it didn't block the purchase of virtual gift cards. So the 26-year-old Kvashuk discovered that he could use his test account to buy real store credit and then use the credit to buy real products.

At first, Kvashuk bought an Office subscription and a couple of graphics cards. But when no one objected to those small purchases, he grew much bolder. In late 2017 and early 2018, he stole millions of dollars worth of Microsoft store credit and resold it online for bitcoin, which he then cashed out using Coinbase. US prosecutors say he netted at least $2.8 million, which he used to buy a $160,000 Tesla and a $1.6 million waterfront home (his proceeds were less than the value of the stolen credit because he had to sell at a steep discount).

Kvashuk made little effort to cover his tracks for his earliest purchases. But as his thefts got bigger, he took more precautions. He used test accounts that had been created by colleagues for later thefts. This was easy to do because the testers kept track of test account credentials in a shared online document. He used throwaway email addresses and began using a virtual private networking service. Before cashing out the bitcoins, he sent them to a mixing service in an attempt to hide their origins. Kvashuk reported the bitcoin windfall to the IRS but claimed the bitcoins had been a gift from his father.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Steve Bannon has been outed for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook. Who could have possibly seen this coming. Facebook has talked a big game about monitoring election misinformation, and yet the independent activist network Avaaz said it had to alert the company to the pages before it removed them for coordinated inauthentic behavior. The group didn't need an army of 35,000 moderators to figure this out, and yet Facebook consistently fails to spot the troublemakers that journalists and researchers with less funding and staff seem to keep spotting. As they say: makes you think. Avaaz said that it alerted Facebook to the pages on Friday night. By that time, in aggregate, Avaaz says the top seven pages -- Brian Kolfage, Conservative Values, The Undefeated, We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic, American Joe, and Trump at War -- had collectively gained over 2.45 million followers. In some cases, Bannon and Brian Kolfage, co-conspirator in the "We Build the Wall, Inc." fundraiser/alleged scam, were co-admins.

Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran told Gizmodo that its team identified the Bannon ring by running an "influencer analysis," keeping tabs on frequent guests on Bannon's podcasts and pages affiliated with Bannon's former "We Build the Wall" grift. Avaaz, which is comprised of 40 investigators and data analysts, has kept tabs on habitual misinformers and their coordinated sharing through custom software. They noticed that the Bannon-related pages tended to publish content at the same time and linked to the Populist Press, an even more right-wing Drudge Report copycat trafficking in disproven election fraud claims. The pages avoided warning labels by laundering links through the Populist Press domain rather post the original URLs for stories Facebook had already flagged as misinformation. Avaaz says they'd previously alerted Facebook to a network of 180 Bannon-connected pages and groups which have been sharing misinformation. "We're a small team run with small donations," Quran told Gizmodo. "If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them."

Quran added that Avaaz has been alerting Facebook to its problems all year. "If 2016 was an accident," Quran added, "2020 has been negligence."

An anonymous reader writes: Glaciers in China's bleak Qilian mountains are disappearing at a shocking rate as global warming brings unpredictable change and raises the prospect of crippling, long-term water shortages, scientists say. The largest glacier in the 800-kilometer (500-mile) mountain chain on the arid northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau has retreated about 450 meters since the 1950s, when researchers set up China's first monitoring station to study it. The 20-square kilometer glacier, known as Laohugou No. 12, is criss-crossed by rivulets of water down its craggy, grit-blown surface. It has shrunk by about 7% since measurements began, with melting accelerating in recent years, scientists say. Equally alarming is the loss of thickness, with about 13 meters (42 feet) of ice disappearing as temperatures have risen, said Qin Xiang, the director at the monitoring station. "The speed that this glacier has been shrinking is really shocking," Qin told Reuters on a recent visit to the spartan station in a frozen, treeless world, where he and a small team of researchers track the changes. The Tibetan plateau is known as the world's Third Pole for the amount of ice long locked in the high-altitude wilderness. But since the 1950s, average temperatures in the area have risen about 1.5 Celsius, Qin said, and with no sign of an end to warming, the outlook is grim for the 2,684 glaciers in the Qilian range. Across the mountains, glacier retreat was 50% faster in 1990-2010 than it was from 1956 to 1990, data from the China Academy of Sciences shows.

The already battered Arecibo Observatory was hit with another blow on 7 November when one of its 12 main support cables snapped and tore through the radio telescope's main dish. From a report: The incident comes just 3 months after the failure of another cable. Researchers are concerned that increasing stresses on remaining cables could lead to cascading failures and the collapse of the antenna platform that is suspended over the dish. "It's not a pretty picture," says Joanna Rankin, a radio astronomer at the University of Vermont. "This is damn serious." It is "without a doubt" the worst accident to befall the observatory in its long history, says former Director Donald Campbell, now at Cornell University. The nearly 60-year-old telescope, built into a depression in the hills of Puerto Rico, is still prized by researchers. Its huge 307-meter dish -- the largest in the world until overtaken by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in 2016 -- makes it very sensitive. And it is one of just a few telescopes with the ability not just to receive radio waves, but also emit them, in the form of radar beams -- which helps researchers track nearby asteroids that could threaten Earth.

The observatory suffered damage when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Repairs were continuing in August when a 13-centimeter-thick auxiliary cable, one of six strung between three support towers and the suspended antenna platform, detached from its socket on the platform. The auxiliary cables were added in 1994 to cope with the extra weight of new antennas added in an upgrade. Last month, the University of Central Florida (UCF), which leads a consortium managing the observatory, applied for $10.5 million for emergency repairs from Arecibo's owners, the National Science Foundation (NSF). The latest break -- at 7:39 p.m. local time on a Friday evening -- was in one of the 9-centimeter-thick main support cables. Four such cables run from each of the support towers to the 900-ton platform. Both failed cables were attached to the same tower, so the remaining cables are under significant extra stress. "The forces become scary," says former Arecibo Director Robert Kerr.

Greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants, manufacturing sites and other large facilities declined nearly 5% from 2018 to 2019, according to data released Monday. Bloomberg reports: The drop is consistent with a decade-long downward trend in greenhouse gas releases from large stationary sources, partly propelled by the power sector's ongoing shift away from coal to renewable sources and cleaner-burning natural gas. The new data reflect emissions from nearly 8,000 large, stationary facilities -- including cement plants, steel mills, oil refineries and landfills. The numbers do not cover small stationary sources that emit fewer than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually. Nor do they cover the transportation sector, now the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

Large facilities in the reporting program emitted 2.85 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in 2019, down from 2.99 billion metric tons in 2018. Overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been on a downward trend since 2005, a commonly used baseline. However, they increased 2.9% in 2018 over 2017 levels, after three years of annual declines, according to a separate EPA inventory, the last year for which data is available.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last month, as students at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, Canada, began studying for their midterm exams, many of them had to memorize not just the content on their tests, but a complex set of instructions for how to take them. The school has a student body of nearly 18,500 undergraduates, and is one of many universities that have increasingly turned to exam proctoring software to catch supposed cheaters. It has a contract with Respondus, one of the many exam proctoring companies offering software designed to monitor students while they take tests by tracking head and eye movements, mouse clicks, and more. This type of surveillance has become the new norm for tens of thousands of students around the world, who -- forced to study remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, often while paying full tuition -- are subjected to programs that a growing body of critics say are discriminatory and highly invasive.

Like its competitors in the exam surveillance industry, Respondus uses a combination of facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure "anomalies" in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm. These programs also often require students to do 360-degree webcam scans of the rooms in which they're testing to ensure they don't have any illicit learning material in sight.

Some of the requirements for Wilfrid Laurier students went even further. In exam instructions distributed to students, one WLU professor wrote that anyone who wished to use foam noise-cancelling ear plugs must "in plain view of your webcam place the ear plugs on your desk and use a hard object to hit each ear plug before putting it in your ear -- if they are indeed just foam ear plugs they will not be harmed." Other instructors required students to buy hand mirrors and hold them up to their webcams prior to beginning a test to ensure they hadn't written anything on the webcam. Another professor told students, "DO NOT allow others in your home to use the internet while you are completing your test," presumably because proctoring software can be a nightmare for students without reliable high-speed internet access. That same exam guide also said that students should not sit in front of pictures or posters that contain animal faces because the software might flag them as suspicious for having another person in the room -- not a reassuring requirement, given that one of the chief criticisms of exam proctoring software is that they often fail to recognize students with darker skin tones. One of the main reasons why this is such an issue is because most universities have chosen not to set standards for how instructors should use proctoring software.

"As a result, campuses that use the programs are increasingly seeing students voice their anger not just with the programs themselves, but with how individual professors use them," reports Motherboard. Students also aren't accepting the excuse universities and proctoring software companies often make: that professors decide how to use the tools, so they're the ones responsible for the harms they cause.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says its government is now on track to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet by 2026. CBC.ca reports: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a handful of cabinet ministers held a news conference in Ottawa to launch the $1.75 billion universal broadband fund -- a program unveiled in the federal government's 2019 budget and highlighted on the campaign trail and in September's throne speech. Most of the money was announced in last year's budget. "We were ready to go in March with the new Universal Broadband Fund and then the pandemic hit," Rural Economic Development Minister Maryam Monsef told reporters. The prime minister said the government is now on track to connect 98 per cent of Canadians to high-speed by 2026 -- an increase over the previously promised 95 per cent benchmark -- and to link up the rest by 2030.

About $150 million from the fund will be freed up to fund projects aimed at getting communities connected by next fall. Senior officials with the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis until Jan. 15, 2021, with a goal of having projects completed by mid-November, 2021. Deciding who gets upgraded connectivity first will depend on the service providers applying, they said. The prime minister said the government also has reached a $600 million agreement with Telesat for satellite capacity to improve broadband service in remote areas and in the North.

theodp writes: The upcoming "Hack the Classroom: STEM Edition," Microsoft explains, "is a [3-day] free virtual event series designed for K-12 educators, parents, and guardians. The sessions will feature resources and tutorials to help educators support students in learning future-ready skills. These lessons can be easily incorporated into classroom curriculum while preparing for this year's Hour of Code event -- a global effort to teach and demystify coding, during Computer Science Education Week, December 7-13."

Microsoft has boasted that the Hour of Code enabled it to reach tens of millions of schoolchildren each year with its drag-and-drop Minecraft-themed tutorials. New for middle and high schoolers this year is the Minecraft Python Hour of Code, which presumably taps into the just-released Python Content for Minecraft: Education Edition (sample Python 101 Lesson). The Hour of Code is run by Microsoft-funded Code.org, whose Board of Directors include Microsoft President Brad Smith.

The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is finalizing a plan to become a citizen of the island of Cyprus, Recode has learned, becoming one of the highest-profile Americans to take advantage of one of the world's most controversial "passport-for-sale" programs. From the report: Schmidt, one of America's wealthiest people, and his family have won approval to become citizens of the Mediterranean nation, according to a previously unreported notice in a Cypriot publication in October. While it is not clear why exactly Schmidt has pursued this foreign citizenship, the new passport gives him the ability to travel to the European Union, along with a potentially favorable personal tax regime. The move is a window into how the world's billionaires can maximize their freedoms and finances by relying on the permissive laws of countries where they do not live.

The Cyprus program is one of about a half-dozen programs in the world where foreigners can effectively purchase citizenship rights, skirting residency requirements or lengthy lines by making a payment or an investment in the host country. They have become the latest way for billionaires around the world to go "borderless" and take advantage of foreign countries' laws, moving themselves offshore just like they might move their assets offshore, a phenomenon documented by the journalist Oliver Bullough in the recent book Moneyland. [...] The way the program works is that once a foreigner lays down between $2 million and $3 million worth of investment in Cyprus, typically through a real estate purchase, they can apply to what is technically called the "Citizenship by Investment" program. After the government reviews the applicant's background, conducts a security check, and hosts a visit from the foreigner, their application can be approved.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: Voters in both Denver and Chicago have overwhelmingly thrown their support behind local community broadband projects, joining the hundreds of U.S. communities that have embraced home-grown alternatives to entrenched telecom monopolies. In Chicago, roughly 90 percent of voters approved a non-binding referendum question that asked: "should the city of Chicago act to ensure that all the city's community areas have access to broadband Internet?" The vote opens the door to the city treating broadband more like an essential utility, potentially in the form of community-run fiber networks.

In Denver, 83.5 percent of the city's electorate cast ballots in favor of question 2H, which asked if the city should be exempt from a 2005 law, backed by local telecom monopolies, restricting Colorado towns and cities from being able to build their own local broadband alternatives. [...] "I think the margin in Chicago and Denver is remarkable," [said Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.] "When we work with communities where half the residents have a cable monopoly and the other half don't have any broadband, the demand for something better is strong among both populations."

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine says he plans to leave his position at the space agency under the new Joe Biden administration, even if he's asked to stay, according to an interview he did with Aviation Week. Bridenstine said the decision would be to ensure NASA has the right leader who connects with the new president. From a report: "What you need is somebody who has a close relationship with the president of the United States," Bridenstine told Aviation Week. "You need somebody who is trusted by the administration... including the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], the National Space Council and the National Security Council, and I think that I would not be the right person for that in a new administration." President Trump nominated Bridenstine, then a Republican representative from Oklahoma, to lead NASA in 2017. Bridenstine's confirmation became a contentious one, with many lawmakers decrying the idea of a politician running a scientific agency like NASA. "NASA is one of the last refuges from partisan politics," former Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said during Bridenstine's confirmation hearing in November 2017. "NASA needs a leader who will unite us, not divide us. Respectfully, Congressman Bridenstine, I don't think you're that leader." Eventually, the Senate did narrowly confirm him in April 2018, with lawmakers voting along party lines.

Zoom will implement new security practices as part of a proposed settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the agency announced on Monday. From a report: "Zoom has agreed to a requirement to establish and implement a comprehensive security program, a prohibition on privacy and security misrepresentations, and other detailed and specific relief to protect its user base, which has skyrocketed from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic," the FTC said in a press release.

Remembrance Sunday is the day of commemoration for British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the head of the British Armed Forces marked the occasion with a special interview on Sky News.

And he shared a thoughtful answer when asked whether the army might try to recruit fewer soldiers. "[W]hat I'm hinting at is that we need to be thinking about how we measure effects in a different way. I mean I suspect we can have an army of 120,000 of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows. But the answer is we need to open our minds to perhaps numbers not determining what we should be doing but rather the effect that we can achieve, is really what we should be looking for."

The armed forces are playing a key role in the government's response to the pandemic, with some 2,000 personnel deployed to Liverpool to help with a mass coronavirus testing programme for the city. "I suspect if that works successfully we might find there are other areas where we need to help in a similar sort of fashion," General Carter said. He said using the military to take over the entire coronavirus testing programme was an option but added that he had confidence in the current set-up at the moment.
The Guardian focused on the robots: Thirty thousand "robot soldiers" could form an integral part of the British army in the 2030s, working alongside humans in and around the frontline, the head of the armed forces said in a television interview on Sunday...

All Britain's armed forces have been engaged in a string of research projects involving small drones or remotely powered land or underwater vehicles, some of which are armed and others for reconnaissance. The Ministry of Defence says its policy is that only humans will be able to fire weapons, although there is growing concern about the potential danger of unrestricted robot warfare, led by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

Technology under development includes the i9 drone, which is powered by six rotors and carries two shotguns. Remotely operated, it is intended to be used to storm buildings, typically an urban warfare situation that generates some of the highest casualties.

A British software engineer came up with "a fun playful name" for his consulting business. He'd named it:

"">

Unfortunately, this did not amuse the official registrar of companies in the United Kingdom (known as Companies House). The Guardian reports that the U.K. agency "has forced the company to change its name after it belatedly realised it could pose a security risk." Henceforward, the software engineer's consulting business will instead be legally known as "THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD." He now says he didn't realise that Companies House was actually vulnerable to the extremely simple technique he used, known as "cross-site scripting", which allows an attacker to run code from one website on another.
Engadget adds: Companies House, meanwhile, said it had "put measures in place" to prevent a repeat. You won't be trying this yourself, at least not in the U.K.

It's more than a little amusing to see a for-the-laughs code name stir up trouble, but this also illustrates just how fragile web security can be.

CNET reports: Two new species of greater glider, a cat-size marsupial that lives in the forests of Australia, have been discovered after scientists ran DNA tests on new tissue samples of the animals. A new study published in Nature's public access Scientific Reports journal details the findings...

Using genetic sequencing tests from tissue samples taken from various gliders found in areas of Queensland, Victoria, as well as museum specimens, researchers were able to confirm differences in the gliders' DNA... The new study focusing on the genetics of greater gliders found three distinct species living in the southern, central and northern areas of Australia. Researchers from Australian National University, the University of Canberra, CSIRO and James Cook University worked together on the study.

"There has been speculation for a while that there was more than one species of greater glider but now we have proof from the DNA. It changes the whole way we think about them," study researcher Denise McGregor told The Guardian.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares an article from Live Science asking a thought-provoking question: How long do most species last before going extinct? The majestic blue whale has plied the seas for about 4.5 million years, while the Neanderthals winked out of existence in a few hundred thousand years. But are those creatures representative of species overall? How long do species usually last before they go extinct? It turns out the answer we find now could be very different than it usually is. Because of habitat destruction, climate change, and a range of other factors, plants and animals are disappearing from the planet faster than all but maybe five other points in history. Some experts say we're in the sixth mass extinction event...

Experts don't agree on the average amount of time that species in any category last before going extinct. The fossil record documents when a species shows up and when it disappears, but it leaves a wide margin of error because conditions must be perfect for fossils to form, and those conditions aren't always present when a species shows up and blinks out. And these longevity stats aren't that useful anyway. Stuart Pimm, a leading extinction expert and a conservation ecologist at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, said he prefers to think about extinction in terms of how many species die out every day, or month, or year...

The current extinction rate is much higher than any of these predictions about the past — about 1,000 times more than Pimm's background extinction rate estimate, he said. However, not everyone agrees on how accelerated species extinction is now, said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity in Oregon. Some experts estimate that the current extinction rate is only 100 times faster or, at the other extreme, 10,000 times faster...

One thing the experts do agree on is that the modern extinction rate is far too high. "Species are adapting as fast as they can," Pimm said. "But eventually the luck runs out and they don't adapt fast enough. And they go."

Appearing on ABC, former Chicago Mayor and Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on Friday volunteered some suggestions for an economic recovery plan that America's next president could implement. "One of the things we've got to do to rebuild, mainly on infrastructure," he begins, before switching to additional ideas for also offering a more promising future to laid-off retail workers by trying to train them for better jobs. "There's going to be people like at JCPenney and other retail — those jobs aren't coming back. Give them the tools..."

One such possible job he offered as an example? Computer programming. "Six months, you're going to become a computer coder. We'll pay for it.... we need to give them a lifeline to what's the next chapter." He believes lots of people would be interested. Although before any of that, Rahm stressed, "The first part of the stimulus is creating a floor so the economy doesn't sink any more. You can't get an economy growing if states and companies are laying people off."

While computer programming was apparently meant as just one example of possible jobs training programs, this appears to have been twisted into claims that Rahm Emanuel believes millions of laid off retail workers should become computer programmers.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp does point out that Emanuel has held a long-standing faith in the potential of computer science education. ("Before leaving office, Emanuel worked to make Computer Science a high school graduation requirement beginning with the Class of 2020, although the Chicago Public Schools waived the requirement this year, citing the pandemic.") But is that also one possible solution for older generations who didn't receive computer science training in high school?

What do Slashdot's readers think? Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Should the retraining programs offered to laid-off retail workers include computer programming?

Adweek has published an article titled "What to Expect: How a Biden Administration Would Tackle Tech Policy." Some of the highlights: Industry observers have told us they don't expect a change-of-guard to upend the Google lawsuit brought by the Justice Department in concert with 11 state attorneys general over the company's search advertising hegemony. Indeed, we could see a spate of antitrust activity brought to bear on Big Tech during a Biden presidency... "Regardless of who wins the presidential election, antitrust enforcement against Big Tech will continue," said Sally Hubbard, director of enforcement strategy at liberal think tank the Open Markets Institute....

"Biden will take a...tough position on infrastructure companies like Huawei," said Alec Stapp, director of technology policy at the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, but is "less likely to come down hard on consumer apps like TikTok." He expects Biden to talk tough on China, "but with fewer unilateral tariffs and more cooperation from international allies."

"Another of Biden's promises will have particular significance during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic," reports Futurism: Back in July, he promised to reverse the incumbent Donald Trump's controversial April decision to leave the World Health Organization — the United Nations' agency that oversees and coordinates global public health efforts. "Americans are safer when America is engaged in strengthening global health," Biden said at the time.

"On my first day as President, I will rejoin the WHO and restore our leadership on the world stage."

The move wouldn't just be a rebuke to his predecessor. Experts called Trump's move a "dangerous gamble" and "unequivocally dangerous," and entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates slammed the move as being "as dangerous as it sounds." Leaving the WHO seemed particularly reckless in the United States, where the pandemic had already spiraled out of control, surpassing the toll even in China, where it originated. COVID deaths in the US have now surged past 235,000, and daily infections are now hitting daily record highs — harbingers of what could be a brutal period of weeks or months during the waning days of the Trump administration.

"A victory by Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election could usher in an abrupt change in the nation's telecommunications policy, restoring so-called net neutrality regulation," Bloomberg recently reported: Biden hasn't talked much about the FCC during the campaign, but his party's platform is specific. It calls for restoring net neutrality rules put in place under then-President Barack Obama when Biden served as vice president and taking a harder line on telecommunications mergers... If Biden wins, the FCC, which currently is at full five-member strength, could begin the new presidential term with a 2-to-1 Democratic majority, allowing it to move quickly. A Republican commissioner is leaving at the end of the current Congress and chairmen traditionally depart as a new administration arrives.

Ajit Pai hasn't indicated what he'll do. He can stay on as a commissioner but a new president could strip him of the chairmanship and its power to control what policies advance to a vote... If Pai stays after a Biden win, "he's denuded of power to do much of anything except to block things," said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a Washington telecommunications lawyer.
Bloomberg also speculates that in addition, America's FCC "may move to bar broadband providers from exempting their own entertainment or media offerings from data caps." While there had been interest in such a move four years ago, Ajit Pai "squelched an agency move toward doing so soon after taking office in 2016."

"Mark Kelly will soon be the fourth NASA astronaut to serve in the U.S. Congress," writes People magazine.

DevNull127 shares their report: In a tweet posted Wednesday, he said he was "deeply honored" to have been elected and to serve in the seat once held by the late Sen. John McCain. A retired U.S. Navy captain and astronaut, Kelly has flown in four space missions, including the final mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2011. He is married to former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, [who] was shot and nearly killed in 2011.

His identical twin Scott Kelly is also a retired astronaut. The two participated in NASA's landmark "twins study," in which Scott spent a year aboard the space station while scientists collected Mark's physiological data back home for comparison...

When he is sworn in, Kelly will be the only active member of Congress to have flown in space. He is preceded by three former NASA astronauts: former Sens. John Glenn and Jack Schmitt and Rep. Jack Swigert. Two other former members of Congress — Sen. Jake Garn and Rep. Bill Nelson — have flown in space as payload specialists. Apollo 13 astronaut John "Jack" Swigert was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, but died of cancer before he could take office.
Saturday Kelly tweeted, "Congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We've got some challenges ahead of us, and I'm looking forward to working together to tackle them."

And the same day his brother Scott Kelly tweeted a memory about the moment he left the International Space Station after 500 days, "looked out the window of our space capsule at the truss, and was struck with awe at how we came together & accomplished this great feat.

"And that if we can do this, we can do anything if we commit ourselves and work together."