In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning story. Now a business columnist for the Times, this week he covers new pushback on the COVID lab leak claim: Here's an indisputable fact about the theory that COVID originated in a laboratory: Most Americans believe it to be true. That's important for several reasons. One is that evidence to support the theory is nonexistent.

Another is that the claim itself has fomented a surge of attacks on science and scientists that threatens to drive promising researchers out of the crucial field of pandemic epidemiology. That concern was aired in a commentary by 41 biologists, immunologists, virologists and physicians published Aug. 1 in the Journal of Virology. The journal probably isn't in the libraries of ordinary readers, but the article's prose is commendably clear and its conclusions eye-opening. "The lab leak narrative fuels mistrust in science and public health infrastructures," the authors observe. "Scientists and public health professionals stand between us and pandemic pathogens; these individuals are essential for anticipating, discovering, and mitigating future pandemic threats. Yet, scientists and public health professionals have been harmed and their institutions have been damaged by the skewed public and political opinions stirred by continued promotion of the lab leak hypothesis in the absence of evidence...."

[O]ne can't advance the lab leak theory without positing a vast conspiracy encompassing scientists in China and the U.S., and Chinese and U.S. government officials. How else could all the evidence of a laboratory event that resulted in more than 7 million deaths worldwide be kept entirely suppressed for nearly five years... "Validating the lab leak hypothesis requires intelligence evidence that the WIV possessed or carried out work on a SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus prior to the pandemic," the Virology paper asserts. "Neither the scientific community nor multiple western intelligence agencies have found such evidence." Despite that, "the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence," the paper says...

I've written before about the smears, physical harassment and baseless accusations of fraud and other wrongdoing that lab leak propagandists have visited upon scientists whose work has challenged their claims; similar attacks have targeted experts who have worked to debunk other anti-science narratives, including those about global warming and vaccines... What's notable about the Virology paper is that it represents a comprehensive and long-overdue pushback by the scientific community against such behavior. More to the point, it focuses on the consequences for public health and the scientific mission from the rise of anti-science propaganda... "Scientists have withdrawn from social media platforms, rejected opportunities to speak in public, and taken increased safety measures to protect themselves and their families," the authors report. "Some have even diverted their work to less controversial and less timely topics. We now see a long-term risk of having fewer experts engaged in work that may help thwart future pandemics...."

Thanks in part to social media, anti-science has become more virulent and widespread, the Virology authors write.

"Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it."

That's a U.S. presidential candidate, speaking yesterday in North Carolina to warn that the practice "is anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices."

Ironically, it's a problem caused by technology that's impacting some of America's major tech-industry cities. Investopedia reports: Harris proposed a slate of policies aimed at curbing the high cost of housing, which many economists have traced to a long-standing shortage. The affordability situation for both renters and first-time buyers took a turn for the worse starting in 2020 when home prices and rents rose sharply. Harris's plan called for the construction of 3 million new houses to close the gap between how many homes exist in the country, and how many are needed, with the aim of evening out supply and demand and putting downward pressure on prices. This would be accomplished by offering tax incentives to builders for constructing starter homes, by funding local construction, and by cutting bureaucratic red tape that slows down construction projects. Harris would also help buyers out directly, through the first-time buyer credit.

For renters, Harris said she would crack down on companies that own many apartments, who she said have "colluded" to raise rents using pricing algorithms. She also called for a law blocking large investors from buying houses to rent out, a practice she said was driving up prices by competing with individual private buyers. Harris's focus on corporate crackdowns extended to the food business, where she called for a "federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries," without going into specifics about what exact behavior the ban would target.
Investopedia reminds readers that the executive branch is just one of three branches of the U.S. government: Should Harris win the 2024 election and become president, her ideas are still not guaranteed to be implemented, since many would require the support of Congress. Lawmakers are currently divided with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives and Democrats in control of the Senate.

In his new memoir, Imminent, former senior intelligence official Luis Elizondo claims that a supersecret program has been retrieving technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin for decades, warning that these phenomena could pose a serious national security threat or even an existential threat to humanity. The New York Times reports: Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Elizondo's disclosures at the time created a sensation. They were buttressed by explosive videos and testimony from Navy pilots who had encountered unexplained aerial phenomena, and led to congressional inquiries, legislation and a 2023 House hearing in which a former U.S. intelligence official testified that the federal government has retrieved crashed objects of nonhuman origin.

Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published by HarperCollins on Aug. 20 after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Safety advocates have been touting the potential of technology that allows vehicles to communicate wirelessly for years. So far, the rollout has been slow and uneven. Now the U.S. Department of Transportation is releasing a roadmap it hopes will speed up deployment of that technology -- and save thousands of lives in the process. "This is proven technology that works," Shailen Bhatt, head of the Federal Highway Administration, said at an event Friday to mark the release of the deployment plan (PDF) for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. Users could send and receive frequent messages to and from each other, continuously sharing information about speed, position, and road conditions -- even in situations with poor visibility, including around corners or in dense fog or heavy rain. [...]

Despite enthusiasm from safety advocates and federal regulators, the technology has faced a bumpy rollout. During the Obama administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed making the technology mandatory on cars and light trucks. But the agency later dropped that idea during the Trump administration. The deployment of V2X has been "hampered by regulatory uncertainty," said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group that represents automakers. But he's optimistic that the new plan will help. "This is the reset button," Bozzella said at Friday's announcement. "This deployment plan is a big deal. It is a crucial piece of this V2X puzzle." The plan lays out some goals and targets for the new technology. In the short-term, the plan aims to have V2X infrastructure in place on 20% of the National Highway System by 2028, and for 25% of the nation's largest metro areas to have V2X enabled at signalized intersections. V2X technology still faces some daunting questions, including how to pay for the rollout of critical infrastructure and how to protect connected vehicles from cyberattack. But safety advocates say it's past time to find the answers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: California's bill to prevent AI disasters, SB 1047, has faced significant opposition from many parties in Silicon Valley. California lawmakers bent slightly to that pressure Thursday, adding in several amendments suggested by AI firm Anthropic and other opponents. On Thursday the bill passed through California's Appropriations Committee, a major step toward becoming law, with several key changes, Senator Wiener's office told TechCrunch.

[...] SB 1047 still aims to prevent large AI systems from killing lots of people, or causing cybersecurity events that cost over $500 million, by holding developers liable. However, the bill now grants California's government less power to hold AI labs to account. Most notably, the bill no longer allows California's attorney general to sue AI companies for negligent safety practices before a catastrophic event has occurred. This was a suggestion from Anthropic. Instead, California's attorney general can seek injunctive relief, requesting a company to cease a certain operation it finds dangerous, and can still sue an AI developer if its model does cause a catastrophic event.

According to Kaspersky, hackers linked to Chinese threat actors have targeted Russian state agencies and tech companies in a campaign named EastWind. The Record reports: [T]he attackers used the GrewApacha remote access trojan (RAT), an unknown PlugY backdoor and an updated version of CloudSorcerer malware, which was previously used to spy on Russian organizations. The GrewApacha RAT has been used by the Beijing-linked hacking group APT31 since at least 2021, the researchers said, while PlugY shares many similarities with tools used by the suspected Chinese threat actor known as APT27.

According to Kaspersky, the hackers sent phishing emails containing malicious archives. In the first stage of the attack, they exploited a dynamic link library (DLL), commonly found in Windows computers, to collect information about the infected devices and load the additional malicious tools. While Kaspersky didn't explicitly attribute the recent attacks to APT31 or APT27, they highlighted links between the tools that were used. Although PlugY malware is still being analyzed, it is highly likely that it was developed using the DRBControl backdoor code, the researchers said. This backdoor was previously linked to APT27 and bears similarities to PlugX malware, another tool typically used by hackers based in China.

Climate activists have broken into four German airport sites, briefly bringing air traffic to a halt at two of those before police made arrests. From a report: Protesters from Letzte Generation -- Germany's equivalent to Just Stop Oil -- gained access on Thursday to airfields in areas near the takeoff and landing strips of Cologne-Bonn, Nuremberg, Berlin Brandenburg and Stuttgart airports at dawn. Air traffic was suspended for a short time at Nuremberg and Cologne-Bonn due to police operations. The activists cut holes in fences with bolt cutters, glued themselves to the asphalt and unfurled banners reading "Oil kills" and "Sign the treaty," in reference to Letzte Generation's demand that the German government negotiate and sign an agreement for an international ban on the use of oil, gas and coal by 2030.

The action was reminiscent of similar protests this summer and followed raids carried out a week ago on the homes of climate activists in five German cities, at which police collected DNA samples, in what Letzte Generation called "an attempt at intimidation." The interior minister, Nancy Faeser, condemned the protest and called for anyone convicted of involvement in Thursday's action to be given prison sentences. She wrote: "These criminal actions are dangerous and stupid. These anarchists are risking not only their own lives, but are also endangering others. We have recommended tough prison sentences. And we obligate airports to secure their facilities significantly better."

TechCrunch's Lauren Forristal reports: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Wednesday a final rule that will tackle several types of fake reviews and prohibit marketers from using deceptive practices, such as AI-generated reviews, censoring honest negative reviews and compensating third parties for positive reviews. The decision was the result of a 5-to-0 vote. The new rule will start being enforced 60 days after it's published in the official government publication called Federal Register. [...]

According to the final rule, the maximum civil penalty for fake reviews is $51,744 per violation. However, the courts could impose lower penalties depending on the specific case. "Ultimately, courts will also decide how to calculate the number of violations in a given case," the Commission wrote. [...] The FTC initially proposed the rule on June 30, 2023, following an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking issued in November 2022. You can read the finalized rule here (PDF), but we also included a summary of it below:

- No fake or disingenuous reviews. This includes AI-generated reviews and reviews from anyone who doesn't have experience with the actual product.
- Businesses can't sell or buy reviews, whether negative or positive.
- Company insiders writing reviews need to clearly disclose their connection to the business. Officers or managers are prohibited from giving testimonials and can't ask employees to solicit reviews from relatives.
- Company-controlled review websites that claim to be independent aren't allowed.
- No using legal threats, physical threats or intimidation to forcefully delete or prevent negative reviews. Businesses also can't misrepresent that the review portion of their website comprises all or most of the reviews when it's suppressing the negative ones.
- No selling or buying fake engagement like social media followers, likes or views obtained through bots or hacked accounts.

Apple will begin letting third parties use the iPhone's payment chip to handle transactions, a move that allows banks and other services to compete with the Apple Pay platform. From a report: The move, announced Wednesday, follows years of pressure from regulators, including those in the European Union. Apple said it will allow developers to use the component starting in iOS 18.1, an upcoming software update for the iPhone. The payment chip relies on a technology called NFC, or near-field communication, to share information when the phone is near another device.

The change will allow outside providers to use the NFC chip for in-store payments, transit system fares, work badges, home and hotel keys, and reward cards. Support for government identification cards will come later, the company said. Users will also be able to set a third-party payment app as their default system, replacing Apple Pay. Apple had been reluctant to open up the chip to developers, citing security concerns. The change also threatens the revenue it generates from Apple Pay transactions. The company takes a cut of all payments made via the iPhone.

A rare bid to break up Alphabet's Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The move would be Washington's first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft two decades ago.

Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google's web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

Google is rolling out a new feature for Google Wallet that uses AI to generate a digital version of IDs, tickets, and other passes. "Replacing the old 'Photo' option, Everything else lets you 'Scan a photo of any pass like an event ticket, gym membership, insurance card, and more' to create a digital version that appears in Google Wallet," writes 9to5Google's Abner Li. "The app explains how AI is leveraged to 'determine what kind of pass you're adding and to suggest the content of the pass.'" From the report: If you're adding something sensitive with health or government ID information, it will be classified as private and not get synced to other devices, while authentication is required before opening. However, you can change the private pass classification later. After taking a picture of the pass, Google will extract the information and let you edit common fields, as well as add your own. At this stage, you can change the pass type [...]. When finalized, it will appear below your carousel of credit/debit cards. Google will let you access the original "Pass photos" when viewing the digital copy.

Over the weekend, former President Donald Trump's campaign said that it had been hacked, with internal documents reportedly obtained illegally by foreign sources to interfere with the 2024 election. While the Trump campaign claimed that Iran was responsible, it is unclear who exactly was behind the incident. The FBI said it was aware of the allegations and confirmed Monday that it is "investigating this matter." The Hill reports: U.S. agencies have thus far failed to comment on the claims that Iran was responsible for the hack, even as recent intelligence community reports have noted growing Iranian efforts to influence the U.S. election. "This is something we've raised for some time, raised concerns that Iranian cyber actors have been seeking to influence elections around the world including those happening in the United States," John Kirby, the White House's national security communications adviser, told reporters Monday. "These latest attempts to interfere in U.S. elections is nothing new for the Iranian regime, which from our vantage point has attempted to undermine democracies for many years now."

A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released last month noted Iranian efforts designed to "fuel distrust in U.S. political institutions and increase social discord." "The IC has observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive would increase tensions with the United States. Tehran relies on vast webs of online personas and propaganda mills to spread disinformation," the report states, including being particularly active on exacerbating tensions over the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Civil servants in the UK are locked in a row with the government over plans to use AI to answer taxpayer complaints. The Telegraph: Letters and emails to the Treasury are already being read by an AI tool which summarises the contents and suggests responses for civil servants. The government is now in talks to use AI across more departments, The Telegraph understands. A government spokesman said: "We make no apology for exploring innovations which improve public services. This tool has already been in use for four months and has increased productivity by 30pc, helping us save taxpayers' money by stopping the need to use expensive contractors during busy periods.

"Staff at the Treasury will continue to write all public correspondence and make decisions on cases. This tool, which was developed by data science experts in the department, helps civil servants respond to thousands more questions quickly and on time." But the civil serrvice trade body, the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, warned that the AI tool could be developed "on the cheap," leading to correspondence being misread. Fran Heathcote, PCS general secretary, said that while the union has no objection in principle to AI, that training the tool "properly takes a long time and considerable resources." Ms Heathcote added: "Further, in anticipation of AI working well, staff numbers are cut so you get the worst of all worlds: a poorly functioning AI system with too few humans left behind to pick up the broken pieces."

"Zelle payments can't be reversed once they're sent," notes the Los Angeles Times — which could be why they're popular with scammers. "You can't simply stop the payment (like a check) or dispute it (like a credit card). Now, the federal regulator overseeing financial products is probing whether banks that offer Zelle to their account holders are doing enough to protect them against scams. Two major banks — JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — disclosed in their security filings in the last week that they'd been contacted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. According to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the filings Wednesday, the CFPB is exploring whether banks are moving quickly enough to shut down scammers' accounts and whether they're doing enough to identify and prevent scammers from signing up for accounts in the first place...

A J.D. Power survey this year found that 3% of the people who'd used Zelle said they had lost money to scammers, which was less than the average for peer-to-peer money transfer services such as Venmo, CashApp and PayPal. The chief executive of Early Warning Services, which runs Zelle, told a Senate subcommittee in July that only 0.1% of the transactions on Zelle involved a scam or fraud; in 2023, the company said, that percentage was 0.05%. But Zelle operates at such a large scale — 120 million users, 2.9 billion transactions and $806 billion transferred in 2023, according to Early Warning Services — that even a tiny percentage of scam and fraud problems translates into a large number of users and dollars... From 2022 to 2023, Zelle cut the rate of scams by nearly 50% even as the volume of transactions grew 28%, resulting in less money scammed in 2023 than in 2022, said Ben Chance, the chief fraud risk management officer for Zelle. The company didn't disclose the amounts involved, but if 0.05% of the $806 billion transferred in 2023 involved scam or fraud, that would translate to $403 million.

Do Zelle users get reimbursed for scams? Only in certain cases, and this is where the banks that offer Zelle have drawn the most heat. If you use Zelle to pay a scammer, banks say, that's a payment you authorized, so they're not obliged under law to refund your money... Some banks, such as Bank of America, say they will put a freeze on transfers by a suspected scammer as soon as a report comes in, then investigate and, if the report is substantiated, seize and return the money. But that works only if the scam is reported right away, before the scammer has the chance to withdraw the funds — which many will do immediately, said Iskander Sanchez-Rola, director of innovation at the cybersecurity company Gen.

"Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health," the New York Times reported this June, citing a study co-authored by Tim Stockwell, an epidemiologist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. Dr. Stockwell (and other scientists he's collaborated with) "are overhauling decades-worth of scientific evidence — and newspaper headlines — that backed the health benefits of alcohol," writes the Telegraph, "or what is known in the scientific community as the J-curve. The J-curve is the theory that, like a capital J, the negative health consequences of drinking dip slightly into positive territory with moderate drinking — as it benefits such things as the heart — before rising sharply back into negative territory the more someone drinks."

But Stockwell's study prompted at least one scientist to accuse Stockwell of "cherry picking" evidence to suit an agenda — while a think-tank executive suggests he's a front for a worldwide temperance lobby: Dr Stockwell denies this. Speaking to The Telegraph, he in turn accused his detractors of being funded by the alcohol lobby and said his links to temperance societies were fleeting. He was the president of the Kettil Bruun Society (a think tank born out of what was the international temperance congresses) [from 2005 to 2007] and he has been reimbursed for addressing temperance movements and admits attending their meetings, but, he says, not as a member...

Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal. "Dr Stockwell's research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations," Dr Harding said. "You record people's lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it's just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own. And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them. Really, the important thing is not the epidemiology, it's the effect that alcohol actually has on the body. We know the reasons why the curve is J-shaped; it's because of the protective effect moderate consumption has on heart disease and a number of other diseases."

Dr Stockwell rejects Dr Harding's criticism of his study, telling The Telegraph that Dr Harding "doesn't appear to have read it" and accusing him of being in the pocket of the alcohol industry. "We identified six high-quality studies out of 107 and they didn't find any J-shaped curve," Dr Stockwell said. "In fact, since our recent paper, we've now got genetic studies which are showing there's no benefits of low-level alcohol use. I personally think there might still be small benefits, but the point of our work is that, if there are benefits, they've been exaggerating them."
The article notes that Stockwell's research "has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs," and that "scientists he has collaborated with on research highlighting the dangers of alcohol are in positions of power at major institutions, such as the World Health Organisation."

And honestly, the opposing viewpoint seems to be thinly-sourced. Besides Harding (the former British government scientist), the article cites:

• The head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs (which Wikipedia describes as "a right-wing, free market think tank")

• An alcohol policy specialist at Brock University in Ontario (who argues rather unconvincingly that "you can't measure when someone didn't hurt themselves because a friend invited them for a drink.")

On the basis of that, the article writes "respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research". (And that "fellow academics and experts" told The Telegraph "they read the report in disbelief.") Did the Telegraph speak to others who just aren't mentioned in the story? Or are they extrapolating, in that famous British tabloid journalism sort of way?

The New York Times visits the downtown of one of America's biggest tech cities to explore San Francisco's "Vacant to Vibrant" initiative, where "city and business leaders provide free rent for up to six months" to "entrepreneurs who want to set up shop in empty spaces, many of which are on the ground floor of office buildings."

The program also offers funding for business expenses (plus technical and business permit assistance) — and it seems to be working. One cafe went on to sign a five-year lease for a space in the financial district's iconic One Embarcadero Center building — and the building's landlord says the program also resulted in another three long leases. Can the progress continue? The hope is that these pop-up operations will pay rent and sign longer leases after the free-rent period is over, and that their presence will regenerate foot traffic in the area. Some 850 entrepreneurs initially applied for a slot, and 17 businesses were chosen to occupy nine storefront spaces in the fall. Out of those businesses, seven extended their leases and now pay rent. Eleven businesses were selected in May for the program's second cohort, which started operating their storefronts this summer...

The city's office vacancy rate hit 33.7%, a record high, in the second quarter this year, according to JLL, a commercial real estate brokerage. That's one of the bleakest office markets in the nation, which has an average vacancy rate of about 22%. For the moment, however, San Francisco has a silver lining in Vacant to Vibrant. Rod Diehl, the BXP executive vice president who oversees its West Coast properties, said the pop-up strategy was good not just for local business owners to test their concepts and explore growth opportunities, but also for office leasing efforts... Beyond free rent, which is typically given for three months with a possibility for another three months, Vacant to Vibrant provides up to $12,000 to the businesses to help cover insurance and other expenses. The program also offers grants up to $5,000 for building owners to cover costs for tenant improvements in the spaces as well as for other expenses like utilities...

In addition to the Vacant to Vibrant program — which received $1 million from the city initially and is set to receive another $1 million for the current fiscal year, which began July 1 — the city is directing nearly $2 million toward a similar pop-up program. This new program would help businesses occupy larger empty spaces along Powell Street, as crime and other retail pressures have driven out several retailers, including Anthropologie, Banana Republic and Crate & Barrel, in the Union Square area.
One business owner who joined "Vacant to Vibrant" in May says they haven't decided yet whether to sign a lease. "It's not as crowded as before the pandemic." But according to the article, "she was hopeful that more businesses opening nearby would attract more people."

"In addition to filling empty storefronts, the program has the opportunity to bring in a fresher and more localized downtown shopping vibe, said Laurel Arvanitidis, director for business development at San Francisco's Office of Economic and Workplace Development." Victor Gonzalez, an entrepreneur who founded GCS Agency to stage showings for artists, is embracing the opportunity to get a foothold downtown despite the city's challenges. When he opened a storefront as part of the first Vacant to Vibrant cohort in the Financial District last year, he immediately knew that he wanted to stay there as long as possible. He has since signed a three-year lease. "San Francisco is no stranger to big booms and busts," he said. "So if we're in the midst of a bust, what's next? It's a boom. And I want to be positioned to be part of it."

Fortune reports that Crowdstrike "is enjoying a moment of strange cultural cachet at the annual Black Hat security conference, as throngs of visitors flock to its booth to snap selfies and load up on branded company shirts and other swag." (Some attendees "collectively shrugged at the idea that Crowdstrike could be blamed for a problem with a routine update that could happen to any of the security companies deeply intertwined with Microsoft Windows.") Others pointed out that Microsoft should take their fair share of the blame for the outage, which many say was caused by the design of Windows in its core architecture that leads to malware, spyware and driver instability. "Microsoft should not be giving any third party that level of access," said Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert, attorney and former FBI operative. "Microsoft will complain, well, it's just the way that the technology works, or licensing works, but that's bullshit, because this same problem didn't affect Linux or Mac. And Crowdstrike caught it super-early."
Their article notes that Crowdstrike is one of this year's top sponsors of the conference. Despite its recent missteps, Crowdstrike had one of the biggest booths, notes TechCrunch, and "As soon as the doors opened, dozens of attendees started lining up." They were not all there to ask tough questions, but to pick up T-shirts and action figures made by the company to represent some of the nation-state and cybercriminal grups it tracks, such as Scattered Spider, an extortion racket allegedly behind last year's MGM Resorts and Okta cyberattacks; and Aquatic Panda, a China-linked espionage group.

"We're here to give you free stuff," a CrowdStrike employee told people gathered around a big screen where employees would later give demos. A conference attendee looked visibly surprised. "I just thought it would be dead, honestly. I thought it would be slower over there. But obviously, people are still fans, right?"

For CrowdStrike at Black Hat, there was an element of business as usual, despite its global IT outage that caused widespread disruption and delays for days — and even weeks for some customers. The conference came at the same time as CrowdStrike released its root cause analysis that explained what happened the day of the outage. In short, CrowdStrike conceded that it messed up but said it's taken steps to prevent the same incident happening again. And some cybersecurity professionals attending Black Hat appeared ready to give the company a second chance....

TechCrunch spoke to more than a dozen conference attendees who visited the CrowdStrike booth. More than half of attendees we spoke with expressed a positive view of the company following the outage. "Does it lower my opinion of their ability to be a leading-edge security company? I don't think so," said a U.S. government employee, who said he uses CrowdStrike every day.
Although TechCrunch does note that one engineer told his parent company they might consider Crowdstrike competitor Sophos...

FBI agent Rick Smith remembered seeing that Austrian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur one year earlier — walking into San Francisco's Soviet Consulate in the early 1980s. Their chance reunion at a bar "would sow the seeds for a major counterintelligence campaign," writes a national security journalist in Politico, describing the collaboration as "an FBI-led operation that sold the Soviet Bloc millions in secretly sabotaged U.S. hi-tech."

The Austrian was already selling American tech goods to European countries, and "By the early 1980s, the FBI knew the Soviet Union was desperate for cutting-edge American technology, like the U.S.-produced microchips then revolutionizing a vast array of digital devices, including military systems..." Moscow's spies worked assiduously to steal such dual use tech or purchase it covertly. The Soviet Union's ballistic missile programs, air defense systems, electronic spying platforms, and even space shuttles, depended on it.... But such tech-focused sanctions-evasion schemes by America's foes offer opportunities for U.S. intelligence, too — including the opportunity to launch ultra-secret sabotage campaigns to alter sensitive technologies before they reach their final destination... Working under the FBI's direction, the Austrian agreed to pose as a crook, a man willing to sell prohibited technology to the communist Eastern Bloc... [T]he FBI and the Austrian would seed faulty tech to Moscow and its allies; drain the Soviet Bloc's coffers; expose its intelligence officers and secret American conspirators; and reveal to American counterspies exactly what tech the Soviets were after...

[T]he Soviet Bloc would unknowingly purchase millions of dollars' worth of sabotaged U.S. goods. Communist spies, ignorant that they were being played, would be feted with a literal parade in a Warsaw Pact capital for their success in purchasing this forbidden technology from the West... The Austrian's connections now presented a major opportunity. The Bulgarians, and their East German and Russia allies, were going to get that forbidden tech. But not before the FBI tampered with it first...

Some of the tech was subtly altered before the Bulgarians could get their hands on it. Some was rendered completely unusable. Some of it was shipped unadulterated to keep the operation humming — and allay any suspicions from the Eastern Bloc about what might be going on. And some of it never made its way to the Bulgarians at all. In one case, the bureau intercepted a $400,000 order of computer hardware from the San Jose-based firm Proquip and shipped out 6,000 pounds of sandbags instead.... Some suffered what appeared to be "accidental" wear-and-tear during the long journey to the Eastern Bloc, recalled Ed Appel [a former senior FBI official]. Other times, the FBI would tamper with the electronics so they would experience "chance" voltage overloads once Soviet Bloc operatives plugged them in. The sabotage could also be more subtle, designed to degrade machine parts or microchips over time, or to render hi-tech tools that required intense precision slightly, if imperceptibly, inaccurate.
The article concludes that "While the Soviet Union might have imploded over three decades ago... Russia's intelligence services are still scouring the globe for prohibited U.S. tech, particularly since Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine...

"Russia has reportedly even covertly imported household items like refrigerators and washing machines to rip out the microchips within them for use in military equipment."

Google's loss in an antitrust trial is just the beginning. According to Yahoo Finance's senior legal reporter, Google now also has to defend itself "against another perilous antitrust challenge that could inflict more damage." Starting in September, the tech giant will square off against federal prosecutors and a group of states claiming that Google abused its dominance of search advertising technology that is used to sell, buy, and broker advertising space online... Juggling simultaneous defenses "will definitely create a strain on its resources, productivity, and most importantly, attention at the most senior levels," said David Olson, associate professor at Boston College Law School.... The two cases targeting Google have the potential to inflict major damage to an empire amassed over the last two decades.

The second case that begins next month began with a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by the Justice Department and eight states in December 2020... Prosecutors allege that since at least 2015 Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation through its ownership of the entities and software that power the online advertising technology market. Google owns most of the technology to buy, sell, and serve advertisements online... Google's share of the US and global advertising markets — when measured either by revenue or impressions — exceeded 90% for "many years," according to the complaint.

The government prosecutors accused Google of siphoning off $0.35 of each advertising dollar that flowed through its ad tech tools.
Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The upper stage from a Chinese rocket that launched a batch of Internet satellites Tuesday has broken apart in space, creating a debris field of at least 700 objects in one of the most heavily-trafficked zones in low-Earth orbit. US Space Command, which tracks objects in orbit with a network of radars and optical sensors, confirmed the rocket breakup Thursday. Space Command initially said the event created more than 300 pieces of trackable debris. The military's ground-based radars are capable of tracking objects larger than 10 centimeters (4 inches). Later Thursday, LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket. The number of debris fragments could rise to more than 900, LeoLabs said. The culprit is the second stage of China's Long March 6A rocket, which lifted off Tuesday with the first batch of 18 satellites for a planned Chinese megaconstellation that could eventually number thousands of spacecraft. The Long March 6A's second stage apparently disintegrated after placing its payload of 18 satellites into a polar orbit.

Space Command said in a statement it has "observed no immediate threats" and "continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain." According to LeoLabs, radar data indicated the rocket broke apart at an altitude of 503 miles (810 kilometers) at approximately 4:10 pm EDT (20:10 UTC) on Tuesday, around 13-and-a-half hours after it lifted off from northern China. At this altitude, it will take decades or centuries for the wispy effect of aerodynamic drag to pull the debris back into the atmosphere. As the objects drift lower, their orbits will cross paths with SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites, the International Space Station and other crew spacecraft, and thousands more pieces of orbital debris, putting commercial and government satellites at risk of collision.