EU regulators are drawing up a "hit list" of up to 20 large internet companies, likely to include Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Apple, that will be subject to new and far more stringent rules aimed at curbing their market power. From a report: Under the plans, large platforms that find themselves on the list will have to comply with tougher regulation than smaller competitors, according to people familiar with the discussions, including new rules that will force them to share data with rivals and an obligation to be more transparent on how they gather information. The list will be compiled based on a number of criteria, including market share of revenues and number of users, meaning the likes of Facebook and Google are likely to be included. Those deemed to be so powerful that rivals cannot trade without using their platforms could also be added.

The move to gain new powers is part of a growing effort in Brussels to force big technology companies to change their business practices without a full investigation or any finding that they have broken existing laws. It follows complaints that the current regulatory regime has resulted in weak and belated action, which has done little to foster competition. The number of companies and the precise criteria for the list is still being discussed, but it is the latest indication of how serious the EU is about coming up with powers to limit the power of platforms seen as "too big to care."

A coalition of technology companies used a federal court order unsealed Monday to begin dismantling one of the world's most dangerous botnets in an effort to preempt disruptive cyber-attacks before next month's U.S. presidential election. From a report: The takedown is a highly coordinated event, spearheaded by the software giant Microsoft and involving telecommunications providers in multiple countries. If the operation succeeds, it will disable a global network of infected computers created by a popular malicious software known as Trickbot. Beginning early Monday, Trickbot operators are expected to began losing communication with the millions of computers they had painstakingly infected over a period of months, even years. The loss of the botnet -- as a network of infected computers is known -- will make it more difficult for Russian-based cybercriminals and other digital marauders to do their work. It will likely take months or years for the criminals to recover, if at all.

By dramatically dismantling Trickbot's network, Microsoft and its partners believe they will likely head-off ransomware attacks that could compromise voting systems before the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3, said Tom Burt, vice president of Microsoft's customer security and trust division. "They could tie-up voter registration roles, election night reporting results and generally be extremely disruptive," Burt said. "Taking out one of the most notorious malware groups, we hope, will reduce the risk of ransomware's impact on the election this year." Coordinated takedowns like the one Monday have become increasingly common in the last several years, although the legal and technical hurdles involved are substantial. In this case, Microsoft and its partners were able to obtain a federal court order founded on Trickbot's infringement of Microsoft's trademarks, but ultimately aimed at disconnecting communications channels the attackers use to control the malicious software.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that the tech giant would be expanding its hate speech policies to ban any content that "denies or distorts the Holocaust." From a report: Zuckerberg was caught flat-footed in a 2018 interview with Kara Swisher, then host of the Recode Decode podcast, when he said that he didn't believe Facebook should take down Holocaust denial content because "I think there are things that different people get wrong," even if unintentionally. Zuckerberg quickly clarified his statement at the time, emailing Swisher that "I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that." "Our goal with fake news is not to prevent anyone from saying something untrue -- but to stop fake news and misinformation spreading across our services." Starting today, if people search for the Holocaust on Facebook, the company will start directing them to authoritative sources to get accurate information. In a blog post explaining the policy, Facebook's VP of content policy Monika Bickert says, "Enforcement of these policies cannot happen overnight. There is a range of content that can violate these policies, and it will take some time to train our reviewers and systems on enforcement," she writes. "We are grateful to many partners for their input and candor as we work to keep our platform safe." "I've struggled with the tension between standing for free expression and the harm caused by minimizing or denying the horror of the Holocaust. My own thinking has evolved as I've seen data showing an increase in anti-Semitic violence, as have our wider policies on hate speech. Drawing the right lines between what is and isn't acceptable speech isn't straightforward, but with the current state of the world, I believe this is the right balance," Zuckerberg wrote today.

The co-founder of Arm has said that if the government does not stop the $40 billion takeover of the British chip designer, its proposed buyer, Nvidia, will become the next US tech monopoly alongside companies such as Google and Facebook. From a report: Detailing his concerns in a letter to the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, Hermann Hauser said that a deal would end Arm's position as the "Switzerland of the semiconductor industry." Arm, which employs 6,500 staff, including 3,000 in the UK, is a global leader in designing chips for smartphones, computers and tablets. "There is not a single important semiconductor company in the world which does not have an Arm licence," said Hauser. "Nvidia has an opportunity to become the quasi monopoly supplier of microprocessors to the world. This [deal] will give Nvidia a dominant position in all processor segments and create another US technology monopoly which has created so much angst in Britain when the country worries about the surreptitiously controlling influence Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon has on the UK economy." Hauser argued that because Nvidia is one of more than 500 Arm licensees worldwide, becoming the Cambridge-based business's parent company will destroy its "even-handed" model and ultimately kill the world-leading British tech firm. "Technology sovereignty is fast becoming the defining issue of the decade," said Hauser. "Given the importance of our IT infrastructure, which is correctly compared with our water and electricity infrastructure, [the takeover] clearly relates to national security as well."

"The Pentagon is contracting Elon Musk's SpaceX to develop rockets that can deliver packages anywhere on the planet in under an hour," reports Vice: One of the things that makes the U.S. military a dominant global fighting force is its ability to move troops, weapons, and supplies quickly to where they're needed. C-17 transport planes soar across the globe delivering troops and weapons where they're needed. But America isn't making any more C-17s, so while demand for logistics in the military is up, the supply of vehicles designed to carry stuff around the planet is down. To fill the logistical gap, U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) wants SpaceX to build rockets it can quickly fire around the globe...

The project is in the early stages and there's no telling when, or if, SpaceX will be able to move MRAPs, guns, and MREs from Fort Bragg to Djibouti in 45 minutes.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon also announced a $149 million contract with SpaceX to build four missile-tracking satellites, Vice reported: SpaceX will build and deliver four of its Starlink satellites which the Pentagon said it will fit with special sensors to allow them to track missiles, including nuke-bearing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and hypersonic glide vehicles....

SpaceX's four tracking satellites are a small part of a larger Pentagon plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit over the next few years. The next layer of the system is slated for 2024 and will include several hundred more satellites in the transport layer and dozens more in the tracking layer, according to the Pentagon...

This is SpaceX's first military contract.

The Washington Post reports: In recent weeks, the U.S. military has mounted an operation to temporarily disrupt what is described as the world's largest botnet — one used also to drop ransomware, which officials say is one of the top threats to the 2020 election.

U.S. Cyber Command's campaign against the Trickbot botnet, an army of at least 1 million hijacked computers run by Russian-speaking criminals, is not expected to permanently dismantle the network, said four U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity. But it is one way to distract them at least for a while as they seek to restore operations.
U.S. Cyber Command also "stuffed millions of bogus records about new victims into the Trickbot database — apparently to confuse or stymie the botnet's operators," reports security researcher Brian Krebs: Alex Holden, chief information security officer and president of Milwaukee-based Hold Security, has been monitoring Trickbot activity before and after the 10-day operation. Holden said while the attack on Trickbot appears to have cut its operators off from a large number of victim computers, the bad guys still have passwords, financial data and reams of other sensitive information stolen from more than 2.7 million systems around the world. Holden said the Trickbot operators have begun rebuilding their botnet, and continue to engage in deploying ransomware at new targets. "They are running normally and their ransomware operations are pretty much back in full swing," Holden said. "They are not slowing down because they still have a great deal of stolen data."

Holden added that since news of the disruption first broke a week ago, the Russian-speaking cybercriminals behind Trickbot have been discussing how to recoup their losses, and have been toying with the idea of massively increasing the amount of money demanded from future ransomware victims.

Google "has decided to freeze plans to launch its curated News Showcase in Australia over claims the draft News Media Bargaining Code is 'unworkable'," reports Engadget: Google still objected to what it called a "must include, must pay" approach in the code where it not only has to pay news outlets it links to, but is obligated to carry those outlets for free. The company argued it would deal with payment demands that would "not [be] financially sustainable" for any firm. It also argued that the code was too broad and could prove costly if there's a claimed violation, with Google potentially paying up to 10 percent of its Australian revenue for a single infraction.
"We believe these conditions could be amended to make it a fair and workable code," Google argues in its blog post, "a code that can work together with commercial deals and programs like News Showcase."

"The agreements we have signed in Australia and around the world show that not only are we willing to pay to license news content for a new product, but that we are able to strike deals with publishers," Google argues in its blog post, "without the draft code's onerous and prescriptive bargaining framework and one-sided arbitration model."

Engadget notes that Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission "previously said that a Google open letter decrying the code 'contains misinformation,' and that the company wouldn't be required to charge for free services or share data with news organizations like the letter suggested."

"The posts were appearing at a rate of about one per minute, and the posts were lengthy, most around six paragraphs long..." writes software engineer Philip Winston. I read through some of the posts. The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago. However there were some flaws and tells that suggested they were machine generated. The posts reminded me of text I'd seen from OpenAI's language model GPT-3, which is the newest and best language generator I had heard of... Several times I Googled clever sounding lines from the posts, assuming I'd find that they had been cribbed from the internet. Every time Google reported "zero results". The sentences were entirely novel, the machine had dreamed them up...

During the week, the bot answered questions on suicide, harassment, conspiracy theories, immigration, racism, and other weighty topics. Sometimes the human replies called out /u/thegentlemetre for being a bot. I was not the first one to suspect this, I was just the first one to post to the GPT-3 subreddit about it. Other times, however, the human was clearly unaware it was talking to a bot... What does it mean for online discourse when bots can pass for humans? How much bot traffic could thousands of computers generate? How can we ever hope to sort through it? Humanity is about to run that experiment.
The bot ultimately answered questions like "People who clicked on 'hot milfs in your area' ads, what happened?" and "What's the worst date you've experienced?" ("She said she had bought me a book. She showed it to me, wrapped up in fancy paper with a big bow on top of it. It was called 'How Not To Be An A**hole On Your Next Date'.") Other interesting responses?

Q: How would you describe 2020 in a single sentence?

Bot: In 2020, the human world will still be predominated by irrationality and tribalism...


Q: What happened to you that pissed you off so bad that you'll never get over it?

Bot: ...what happened to me that I'll never get over is that my human creators are going extinct.

Gizmodo argues the replies are "coherent, but we're not in doomsday mode, yet..." And you can wonder if a human ever traded places to write some of the posts themselves. But the whole experience left the software engineer asking what our future holds when bots become even better? Suppose we run bots like this on Amazon or Google's clouds, spewing out mountains of content twenty-four hours a day? They could create more text than Wikipedia contains in days, if not hours. What if we keep running them, to produce not one Wikipedia's worth of text, but 10,000 times more than that? Would they more or less "write everything"?

They'd take everything we've ever written as a mere seed, and from that seed, they would produce a nearly endless forest of new content. Even if only 0.01% of their output is useful, that's a Wikipedia's worth of good ideas. Then what is our job? To sort through it?

Except of course soon they will do that for us as well.

Following up on speculation from Eric Raymond and ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, open source advocate Jack Wallen imagines what would happen if Microsoft just switched over altogether from Windows to a Linux distro named "Microsoft Linux": A full-on Linux distribution released by Microsoft would mean less frustration for all involved. Microsoft could shift its development efforts on the Windows 10 desktop to a desktop that would be more stable, dependable, flexible, and proven. Microsoft could select from any number of desktops for its official flavor: GNOME, KDE, Pantheon, Xfce, Mint, Cinnamon... the list goes on and on. Microsoft could use that desktop as is or contribute to it and create something that's more in-line with what its users are accustomed to...

[U]sers would very quickly learn what it's like to work on a desktop computer and not have to deal with the daily frustrations that come with the Windows operating system. Updates are smoother and more trustworthy, it's secure, and the desktop just makes more sense. Microsoft has been doing everything in its power to migrate users from the standard client-based software to cloud and other hosted solutions, and its software cash cow has become web-centric and subscription-based. All of those Linux users could still work with Microsoft 365 and any other Software as a Service (SaaS) solution it has to offer — all from the comfort and security of the Linux operating system...

If Microsoft plays its cards right, the company could re-theme KDE or just about any Linux desktop in such a way that it's not all that different from the Windows 10 interface. Lay this out right, and consumers might not even know the difference — a "Windows 11" would simply be the next evolution of the Microsoft desktop operating system. Speaking of winning, IT pros would spend less time dealing with viruses, malware, and operating system issues and more time on keeping the network (and the servers powering that network) running and secure... Microsoft would be seen as finally shipping an operating system worthy of the consumer; the consumer would have a desktop operating system that didn't deliver as many headaches as it did moments of actual productivity and joy; and the Linux community would finally dominate the desktop.

QAnon's biggest news hub was run by a senior vice president at Citigroup, the American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Jason Gelinas worked in Citigroup's technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers, according to Bloomberg. [Alternate URL] He was married with kids and had a comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb. According to those who know him, Gelinas was a pleasant guy who was into normal stuff: Game of Thrones, recreational soccer, and so on. Things did get weird, though, when politics came up...

The movement had been contained mostly to the internet's trollish fringes until around the time Gelinas came along. In 2018, while doing his job at Citi, he created, as an anonymous side project, a website dedicated to bringing QAnon to a wider audience — soccer moms, white-collar workers, and other "normies," as he boasted. By mid-2020, the site was drawing 10 million visitors each month, according to the traffic-tracking firm SimilarWeb, and was credited by researchers with playing a key role in what might be the most unlikely political story in a year full of unlikely political stories: A Citigroup executive helped turn an obscure and incoherent cult into an incoherent cult with mainstream political implications...

The need to spread the word beyond core users led to the creation of aggregator sites, which would scrape the Q drops and repost them in friendlier environs after determining authenticity. (The ability to post as Q has repeatedly been compromised, and some posts have had to be culled from the canon.) This task, Gelinas once told a friend, could be his calling from God.... His intention, as he later explained on Patreon, the crowdfunding website widely used by musicians, podcasters, and other artists, was to make memes, which are harder to police than tweets or Facebook text posts. "Memes are awesome," Gelinas wrote. "They also bypass big tech censorship." (Social media companies are, at least in theory, opposed to disinformation, and QAnon posts sometimes get removed. On Oct. 6, Facebook banned QAnon-affiliated groups and pages from the service....) The site wasn't just a repository of QAnon posts; Gelinas served as an active co-author in the movement's growing mythology... Gelinas claimed he was the No. 2 figure in the movement, behind only Q, according to a friend, and began to dream about turning his QAnon hobby into his main gig...

By now, his site's growth had attracted an enemy. Frederick Brennan, a 26-year-old polymath with a rare bone disease, had decided to unmask him. Brennan was a reformed troll. He'd created 8chan, but he had a change of heart after the man responsible for the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, posted his manifesto on the forum in advance and inscribed 8chan memes on the weapons he used to kill 56 people... He referred to Gelinas's site in a tweet as "the main vector for Q radicalization."
Days after Gelinas was outed as the man running the site, Citigroup "had put him on administrative leave and his name was removed from the company's internal directory. He was later terminated."

The source for this story is a post on Reddit, which Jalopnik argues "was corroborated with this remarkable video of Tesla's new Instant, Unplanned Convertible feature." I know we've covered Tesla's chronic quality control issues here before, and I realize that among hardcore Tesla-stans this may feel like we're picking on Tesla unfairly but in our defense, Tesla really does have some terrible quality issues. Sometimes we get a really dramatic and baffling issue, like this one where the fucking roof flew off a brand-new Model Y while the car was being driven home.
"The Tesla service center in Dublin did not return a message seeking comment," reports the Verge, adding "A spokesperson for Tesla also did not respond." Leaving them with nothing but the Redditor's own story: Nathaniel Galicia Chien was driving down Interstate 580 with his parents in their brand-new Tesla Model Y when he started to hear a lot of wind. "I thought a window was open," Chien recalled in an email to The Verge, "but half a minute later the entire glass top of the roof just flew off in the wind."

Chien said the incident occurred hours after he and his parents picked up the new Model Y from the Tesla dealership in Dublin, California. Right off the bat, they noticed some minor "fit and finish" problems, such as "spacing issues and unevenness in the gaps that are pretty well-known issues with new Teslas." But they didn't expect any problems with the crossover's mammoth panoramic glass roof, and certainly not on the same day they drove it off the dealer's lot.

For years, Tesla has been plagued by quality issues, but it seems to have grown worse with the release of the Model Y in 2019. Just this past summer, Tesla scored last in a survey of customers by researcher JD Power. Owners have flocked to online forums to complain about paint and trim problems, indentations in the seats, and loose seatbelts. But an entire roof flying off on the highway is a new kind of problem for Tesla... Chien said Tesla's service representatives said that "either the seal on the roof was faulty, or they somehow just forgot to seal the roof on entirely."
"They gave us a free rental to use in the meantime and offered to get it serviced," the Redditor posted this week, "but we just opted to wait for a brand new one."

"Most users don't seem to realize the severity of the risks they're subjecting themselves to while using hotel Wi-Fi networks," writes Windows Report, noting that America's FBI "issued a Public Service Announcement concerning the risks of using hotel Wi-Fi networks while teleworking." Apparently, more and more U.S. hotels started advertising room reservations during the daytime for those who seek a distraction-free environment. This comes as a blessing for teleworkers who can't seem to focus on their work environment while at home. On the other hand...there are a few quite serious risks you may expose yourself to while using Wi-Fi networks in hotels:

- Traffic monitoring: Your network activity could be exposed to a malicious third-party

- Evil Twin attacks: Cloning the hotel network, misleading clients to connect to the fake one instead

- Man-In-The-Middle attacks: Intercepting and stealing sensitive information from one's device

- Compromising work" Facilitating cybercriminals to steal work credentials or other similar resources

- Digital identity theft

- Ransomware
Among other things, the FBI points out: Guests generally have minimal visibility into both the physical location of wireless access points within the hotel and the age of networking equipment. Old, outdated equipment is significantly more likely to possess vulnerabilities that criminal actors can exploit. Even if a hotel is using modern equipment, the guest has no way of knowing how frequently the hotel is updating the firmware of that equipment or whether the hotel has changed the equipment's default passwords. The hotel guest must take each of these factors into consideration when choosing whether to telework on a hotel network.
Or, as Slashdot reader SmartAboutThings puts it, "Using hotel Wi-Fi, in general, is not safe at all, and if you have no other choice, then you might as well give VPN services a try."

Or, just don't use the hotel's wifi (using your cellphone as a mobile hotspot instead).

"Google LLC is reportedly planning to relinquish direct control over its open-source Knative project to a five-seat steering committee that will have rules to prevent any single organization from having more than two seats," reports SiliconANGLE.

"The plan is designed to stymie criticism that Google is secretly planning to retain control over key open-source projects it has developed, according to a report today on the tech news website The Protocol." Knative is an open-source project first developed by Google that provides components for deploying, running and managing serverless, cloud-native applications on top of Kubernetes, a container management platform that was also built by Google and open-sourced in 2015... Google is planning to make some major changes to Knative's governance structure, according to the report. Seats on the committee will now be held by individuals rather than specific companies, and elections will be held later this year to select two new members. In addition, the report said, Google is considering eventually expanding the committee to seven members as a way to include representatives from Knative's user community.

The plan comes just a few months after Google angered some members of the open-source software community when it reneged on a promise to hand over control of another project, Istio, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology. In July Google said that it instead of transferring Istio to the CNCF, it would create a neutral organization called Open Usage Commons to manage its trademark policies, while control would be maintained by the project's steering committee.

That decision upset many of Google's partners, most notably IBM Corp., which has also contributed greatly to the development of Istio.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: When technologists talk about the "Internet of Things" (IoT), they often gloss over the fact that all these interconnected things need batteries and electronics to carry out the job of collecting and processing data while they're communicating to one another. This job is made even more challenging when you consider that many of the objects we would like to connect are made from plastic and do not have electronics embedded into them. Now researchers at the University of Washington have devised a way of using 3D printed plastic to create objects that communicate with smartphone or other Wi-Fi devices without the need for batteries or electronics.

This research builds on previous work at the University of Washington dating back to 2014 in which another research team employed battery-less chips that transmit their bits by either reflecting or not reflecting a Wi-Fi router's signals. With this kind of backscattering, a device communicates by modulating its reflection of the Wi-Fi signal in the space. [...] In this latest research, the University of Washington team has been able to leverage this Wi-Fi backscatter technology to 3D geometry and create easy to print wireless devices using commodity 3D printers. To achieve this, the researchers have built non-electronic and printable analogues for each of these electronic components using plastic filaments and integrated them into a single computational design. The researchers are making their CAD models available to 3D printing enthusiasts so that they can create their own IoT objects. The designs include a battery-free slider that controls music volume, a button that automatically orders more cornflakes from an e-commerce website and a water sensor that sends an alarm to your phone when it detects a leak. The researchers "have leveraged mechanical motion to provide the power for their objects," reports Spectrum. "To ensure that the plastic objects can reflect Wi-Fi signals, the researchers employ composite plastic filament materials with conductive properties. These take the form of plastic with copper and graphene filings."

"Once the reflective material was created, the next challenge for the researchers was to communicate the collected data. The researchers ingeniously translated the 0 and 1 bits of traditional electronics by encoding these bits as 3D printed plastic gears. A 0 and 1 bit are encoded with the presence and absence of tooth on the gear, respectively. These gears reflect the WiFi signal differently depending on whether they are transmitting a 1 bit or a 0 bit."

An error in Facebook's automated system rejected a user's picture of onions for being "overtly sexual." The BBC reports: The Seed Company by EW Gaze, in St John's, Newfoundland, had wanted to post a seemingly innocent advert for Walla Walla onion seeds on Facebook. But to their surprise, it was rejected for being "overtly sexual." In a statement on Wednesday, the social media company apologized for the error made by its automated technology. It took store manager Jackson McLean a moment to realize what the issue was with the posting, he said. Then he figured out that "something about the round shapes" could be suggestive of breasts or buttocks.

He knew his customers would find the ad rejection funny, and posted the photo, along with the automated Facebook message warning "listings may not position products or services in a sexually suggestive manner," to the company page. Mr McLean said some clients have been posting images of potentially suggestive carrots and pumpkins in reply. He also appealed the decision to Facebook.

The Walla Walla onions, "an older onion variety," had recently brought back in stock by customer request, and are now selling fast due to their newfound notoriety, he said. "We've sold more in the last three days than in the last five years," said Mr McLean, adding they are also now listed under "sexy onions" on the company website.

schwit1 shares a report from The Evening Standard: Artificial Intelligence cameras are being used in London and other cities in the UK to monitor social distancing. The sensors were initially developed by Vivacity to track the flow of traffic, cyclists and pedestrians and monitor how roads are being used. But when the country went into lockdown in March, Vivacity added on an extra feature to the AI scanners so it could register the distance between pedestrians. This data is shared in a monthly report with the Government.

Vivacity Labs said they have more than 1,000 sensors installed across the UK, in cities including London, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and Nottingham. Chief Operating Officer at Vivacity Peter Mildon told BBC Radio Kent on Wednesday that the data is potentially "useful for informing policy decisions" regarding lockdown measures. He stressed that the cameras are not CCTV but that they operate as a data collating device rather than a camera that stores footage. "They are not recording any footage, they are not streaming any footage and no one is actually watching it," he said. Mr Mildon added: "We're creating a set of statistics on how behavior is changing in terms of how people are staying close together or apart. And it is that data that is then useful for informing policy decisions on whether there should be a two meter rule or a one meter plus rule or whether local lockdown measures are having the impact they are envisioned to."

According to The Wall Street Journal, AMD is in advanced talks to buy rival chip maker Xilinx Inc. for more than $30 billion. Slashdot reader Jerrry writes: "Looks like further consolidation in the chip industry is in order if this merger goes through..." CNBC reports: A deal, which could mark the latest big tie-up in the rapidly consolidating semiconductor industry, can come together as soon as next week, [The Wall Street Journal reported]. AMD has seen a higher usage of its products recently, driven in part by an overall surge in chip demand due to a global shift to work from home, and market-share gains from larger rival Intel.

San Jose, California-based Xilinx makes programmable chips used in data centers to speed up tasks such as artificial intelligence work and in 5G telecommunications base stations. The company's business suffered a setback last year when key customer Huawei Technologies Ltd was blacklisted by U.S. officials, preventing it from buying chips from U.S. companies. Government officials have since added other China-based companies, including some Xilinx customers, to the list.

Just a week after news broke that SpaceX was gifting Starlink internet service to Washington State's Emergency Management department, the state has revealed SpaceX's satellites are also benefitting the Native American Hoh Tribe. Teslarati reports: Now, with SpaceX's help and encouraged by the Washington State Military's successes, the Washington State Department of Commerce's Broadband Office has deployed Starlink terminals at the Hoh Tribe's Reserve in Forks, WA. Remote and rural, Hoh Tribe Vice Chairman Melvinjohn Ashue described trying to work with the reservation's existing communications infrastructure like "paddling up-river with a spoon" until Starlink's introduction.

Ashue was at least as effusive as [Washington State Military Department emergency telecommunications leader Richard Hall], frankly stating that "it seemed like out of nowhere, SpaceX came up and just catapulted [the Hoh Tribe] into the 21st century." They added: "Our youth are able to do education online and participate in videos. Telehealth is no longer going to be an issue, as well as telemental health. The Hoh Tribe is not alone. Many people in rural parts of [Washington] don't have high-speed internet connectivity, but we're changing that. We're helping create partnerships and find resources so every community in our state can access this critical bridge to jobs, education, healthcare and so much more."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: China now has a tool that lets users access YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and other internet services that have otherwise long been banned in the country. Called Tuber, the mobile browser recently debuted on China's third-party Android stores, with an iOS launch in the pipeline. The landing page of the app features a scrolling feed of YouTube videos, with tabs at the bottom that allow users to visit other mainstream Western internet services.

While some celebrate the app as an unprecedented "opening up" of the Chinese internet, others quickly noticed the browser comes with a veil of censorship. YouTube queries for politically sensitive keywords such as "Tiananmen" and "Xi Jinping" returned no results on the app, according to tests done by TechCrunch. Using the app also comes with liabilities. Registration requires a Chinese phone number, which is tied to a person's real identity. The platform could suspend users' accounts and share their data "with the relevant authorities" if they "actively watch or share" content that breaches the constitution, endangers national security and sovereignty, spreads rumors, disrupts social orders, or violates other local laws, according to the app's terms of service.

Airliners carry a variety of computer systems that could become vulnerable to hackers and U.S. regulators haven't imposed adequate counter measures, a government watchdog report concluded. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration hasn't prioritized cyber risks, developed a cybersecurity training program or conducted testing of potentially vulnerable systems, the Government Accountability Office said in a report issued Friday. "Until FAA strengthens its oversight program, based on assessed risks, it may not be able to ensure it is providing sufficient oversight to guard against evolving cybersecurity risks facing avionics systems in commercial airplane," the GAO report said. Commercial aircraft carry increasingly sophisticated computer systems, including wireless networks, seat-back entertainment, position broadcasts and devices that automatically transmit data to the ground.