President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over in the US, even as the number of Americans who have died from Covid continues to rise. From a report: Mr Biden said that while "we still have a problem", the situation is rapidly improving. Statistics show that over 400 Americans on average are dying from the virus each day. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that the end of the pandemic is "in sight". In an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, Mr Biden said that the US is still doing "a lot of work" to control the virus. The interview - aired over the weekend - was partly filmed on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show, where the president gestured towards the crowds. "If you notice, no one's wearing masks," he said. "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape...I think it's changing."

In August, US officials extended the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency, which has been in place since January 2020, through 13 October. To date, more than one million Americans have died from the pandemic. Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the seven-day average of deaths currently stands at over 400, with more than 3,000 dead in the last week. In January 2021, by comparison, more than 23,000 people were reported dead from the virus over a single week-long span. About 65% of the total US population is considered fully vaccinated. Some federal vaccine mandates remain in place in the US - including on healthcare workers, military personnel and any non-US citizen entering the country by airplane.

The Pentagon has ordered a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare after major social media companies identified and took offline fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms' rules. From a report: Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month after the White House and some federal agencies expressed mounting concerns over the Defense Department's attempted manipulation of audiences overseas, according to several defense and administration officials familiar with the matter.

The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny. Like others interviewed for this report, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations. The researchers did not specify when the takedowns occurred, but those familiar with the matter said they were within the past two or three years. Some were recent, they said, and involved posts from the summer that advanced anti-Russia narratives citing the Kremlin's "imperialist" war in Ukraine and warning of the conflict's direct impact on Central Asian countries. Significantly, they found that the pretend personas -- employing tactics used by countries such as Russia and China -- did not gain much traction, and that overt accounts actually attracted more followers.

The world's freight-carrying trucks and ships use GPS-based satellite tracking and navigation systems, reports ZDNet. But "Criminals are turning to cheap GPS jamming devices to ransack the cargo on roads and at sea, a problem that's getting worse...." Jammers work by overpowering GPS signals by emitting a signal at the same frequency, just a bit more powerful than the original. The typical jammers used for cargo hijackings are able to jam frequencies from up to 5 miles away rendering GPS tracking and security apparatuses, such as those used by trucking syndicates, totally useless. In Mexico, jammers are used in some 85% of cargo truck thefts. Statistics are harder to come by in the United States, but there can be little doubt the devices are prevalent and widely used. Russia is currently availing itself of the technology to jam commercial planes in Ukraine.

As we've covered, the proliferating commercial drone sector is also prey to attack.... During a light show in Hong Kong in 2018, a jamming device caused 46 drones to fall out of the sky, raising public awareness of the issue.
While the problem is getting worse, the article also notes that companies are developing anti-jamming solutions for drone receivers, "providing protection and increasing the resiliency of GPS devices against jamming attacks.

"By identifying and preventing instances of jamming, fleet operators are able to prevent cargo theft."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Ukraine's airspace has been busy this year -- that's the nature of war. But scientists in the country are looking to the skies and seeing something they didn't expect: An inordinate number of UFOs, according to a new preprint paper published (PDF) by Kyiv's Main Astronomical Observatory in coordination with the country's National Academy of Science. The paper does not specifically address the war, but in the United States, the Pentagon has long hinted, speculated, and warned that some UFOs could be advanced technology from foreign militaries, specifically China and Russia (though it hasn't really given any evidence this is actually the case). The Ukraine paper is particularly notable because it not only shows that science has continued to occur during the war, but also explains that there have been a lot of sightings. "We see them everywhere," the research said. "We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear."

The paper is titled Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events come from observations made at NAS' Main Astronomical Observatory in Kyiv and a village south of Kyiv called Vinarivka. According to the paper's authors, the observatories took on the job of hunting for UFO's as an independent project because of the enthusiasm around the subject. It describes a specific type of UFO the researchers call "phantoms" that is an "object [that] is a completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it." The researchers also observed that the UFOs it's seeing are so fast that it's hard to take pictures of them. "The eye does not fix phenomena lasting less than one-tenth of a second," the paper said. "It takes four-tenths of a second to recognize an event. Ordinary photo and video recordings will also not capture the [unidentified aerial phenomenon]. To detect UAP, you need to fine-tune the equipment: shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range."

So the researchers did just that using two meteor monitoring stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka. "We have developed a special observation technique, taking into account the high speeds of the observed objects," the paper said. "The exposure time was chosen so that the image of the object did not shift significantly during exposure. The frame rate was chosen to take into account the speed of the object and the field of view of the camera. In practice, the exposure time was less than 1 ms, and the frame rate was no less than 50 Hz." The scientists divided the phenomenon they observed into two different categories: cosmics and phantoms. "We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle)," the paper said. "Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 percent."

Using the cameras, stationed roughly 75 miles apart, allowed the scientists to make repeated observations of strange objects moving in the sky. The paper didn't speculate on what the objects were, merely noted the observations and mentioned the objects' incredible speeds. "Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second," the research said. "Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 -- 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s." The easy explanation would be that these are missiles, or rockets, or something else associated with the war. But the scientists insist that their nature "is not clear."

hackingbear shares a report from Gizmodo: China claims that America's National Security Agency used sophisticated cyber tools to hack into an elite research university on Chinese soil. The attack allegedly targeted the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an (not to be confused with a California school of the same name), which is highly ranked in the global university index for its science and engineering programs. The U.S. Justice Department has referred to the school as a "Chinese military university that is heavily involved in military research and works closely with the People's Liberation Army," painting it as a reasonable target for digital infiltration from an American perspective.

China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) recently published a report attributing the hack to the Tailored Access Operations group (TAO) -- an elite team of NSA hackers which first became publicly known via the Snowden Leaks back in 2013, helps the U.S. government break into networks all over the world for the purposes of intelligence gathering and data collection. [CVERC identified 41 TAO tools involved in the case.] One such tool, dubbed 'Suctionchar,' is said to have helped infiltrate the school's network by stealing account credentials from remote management and file transfer applications to hijack logins on targeted servers. The report also mentions the exploitation of Bvp47, a backdoor in Linux that has been used in previous hacking missions by the Equation Group -- another elite NSA hacking team. According to CVERC, traces of Suctionchar have been found in many other Chinese networks besides Northwestern's, and the agency has accused the NSA of launching more than 10,000 cyberattacks on China over the past several years.

On Sunday, the allegations against the NSA were escalated to a diplomatic complaint. Yang Tao, the director-general of American affairs at China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published a statement affirming the CVERC report and claiming that the NSA had "seriously violated the technical secrets of relevant Chinese institutions and seriously endangered the security of China's critical infrastructure, institutions and personal information, and must be stopped immediately."

schwit1 writes: Imperial College will shut down two major research centres sponsored by Chinese aerospace and defence companies amid a crackdown on academic collaborations with China, the Guardian has learned.

The Avic Centre for Structural Design and Manufacturing is a long-running partnership with China's leading civilian and military aviation supplier, which has provided more than $6m to research cutting-edge aerospace materials. The second centre is run jointly with Biam, a subsidiary of another state-owned aerospace and defence company, which has contributed $4.5m for projects on high-performance batteries, jet engine components and impact-resistant aircraft windshields. The centres' stated goals are to advance civilian aerospace technologies, but critics have repeatedly warned that the research could also advance China's military ambitions.

Now Imperial has confirmed the two centres will be shut by the end of the year after the rejection of two licence applications to the government's Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU), which oversees the sharing of sensitive research with international partners. The closures follow a warning in July by the heads of MI5 and the FBI of the espionage threat posed by China to UK universities, and highlight the government's hardening attitude on the issue.

"You can say with a high degree of confidence that this decision has been taken because the government is of the view that continuing licensing would enable the military development in China, which is viewed as a threat to security," said Sam Armstrong, director of communications at the Henry Jackson Society thinktank. "The government has made it clear to universities that there is an overall shift in the weather such that these collaborations are no longer possible."

"A vital offsite electricity supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been destroyed by shelling," the Guardian reported Friday, "and there is little likelihood a reliable supply will be re-established, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog chief has said." Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said shelling had destroyed the switchyard of a nearby thermal power plant. The plant has supplied power to the nuclear facility each time its normal supply lines had been cut over the past three weeks.

The thermal plant was also supplying the surrounding area, which was plunged into darkness. Local Ukrainian officials said work was under way to restore the connection, which has been cut multiple times this week....

When the thermal supply has been cut the plant has relied on its only remaining operating reactor for the power needed for cooling and other safety functions. This method is designed to provide power only for a few hours at a time. Diesel generators are used as a last resort. The constant destruction of thermal power supply has led Ukraine to consider shutting down the remaining operating reactor, said Grossi. Ukraine "no longer [has] confidence in the restoration of offsite power", he said.

Grossi said that if Ukraine decided not to restore the offsite supply the entire power plant would be reliant on emergency diesel generators to ensure supplies for the nuclear safety and security functions.

"As a consequence, the operator would not be able to restart the reactors unless offsite power was reliably re-established," he said.
NPR provides some context: Normally, the plant holds a 10-day reserve of diesel fuel, the agency says, and currently has approximately 2,250 tonnes of fuel available. If that fuel is depleted, or the generators are damaged in further fighting, it could trigger a meltdown.

But Steven Nesbit, a nuclear engineer and member of the American Nuclear Society's rapid response taskforce, which is tracking the current crisis, says that doesn't necessarily mean there would be a Chernobyl-like catastrophe. The meltdown at Chernobyl was due to a unique mix of design flaws and operator error that would be essentially impossible to replicate at Zaporizhzhia. And unlike the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, some of the reactors at Zaporizhzhia have already been shut down for a while, allowing the nuclear fuel to cool somewhat, Nesbit says. Even in the worst case scenario, the reactors at Zaporizhzhia are a modern design surrounded by a heavy "containment" building, Nesbit says. "It's reinforced concrete, typically about three to four feet of that; it's designed to withstand very high internal pressures." That could allow it to hold in any radioactive material.

But the world's nuclear agency doesn't want to test any of this.
Meanwhile, the French international news agency AFP reports on what's been happening at the plant since it was captured by Russian troops in March: Russian forces controlling Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have killed two staff at the facility and detained and abused dozens of others, the head of Ukraine's nuclear energy agency told AFP on Friday.

"We do not know where about ten people are now," Petro Kotin said. "They were taken (by the Russians) and after that we have no information about their whereabouts," Kotin said, adding about 200 people had been detained. He described the current situation at the plant as "very difficult," citing "torture" of staff and "beatings" of personnel. "The Russians look for pro-Ukrainian people and persecute them. People are psychologically broken," he said in an interview with AFP reporters in his office in Kyiv... "Two people on the territory of the plant were wounded during shelling — a woman and a man — on separate occasions," Kotin, clad in a military-style jacket, said.

"But people understand that the nuclear safety of the plant depends on them, so the employees return to Energodar and continue working at the facility," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would "harm national security" and told a government transparency website that all of the government's UFO videos are classified information. In a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new UFO videos "will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release."

The Black Vault was seeking all videos "with the designation of 'unidentified aerial phenomena.'" This is an interesting response from the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response, where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.

"While three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released via unofficial channels before official release," it said. "Those events were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was possible to release the files without further damage to national security."

North Korea has passed a law declaring itself to be a nuclear weapons state, according to state news agency KCNA. The country's leader Kim Jong-un called the decision "irreversible" and ruled out the possibility of any talks on denuclearisation, it said. From a report: The law also enshrines the country's right to use a pre-emptive nuclear strike to protect itself. Despite crippling sanctions, Pyongyang has conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017. It has continued to advance its military capability - in breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions - to threaten its neighbours and potentially even bring the US mainland within striking range. Mr Kim carried out long-range launches and nuclear tests in 2019 following two headline-grabbing but inconclusive summits with then US president Donald Trump. But talks between the countries have since stalled.

Although the Biden administration has indicated it's willing to talk to Pyongyang, it hasn't said whether President Joe Biden would meet Mr Kim. The White House also said its attempts to contact Pyongyang and overtures of help over its Covid outbreak had gone unanswered so far. The US reviewed its North Korea policy last year and reiterated that "complete denuclearisation" of the Korean peninsula was the goal. Mr Biden said he would pursue it with a mix of diplomacy and "stern deterrence". Mr Kim responded by saying his country must prepare for both "dialogue and confrontation."

The ship that would have become the world's largest cruise liner has been scrapped before it ever had the chance to take its maiden voyage. Gizmodo reports: Global Dream II was slated to carry 9,000 passengers and was built by German-Hong Kong shipbuilding firm MV Werften to the tune of nearly $US1.4 ($2) billion, according to the Daily Mail. It was nearly finished when the company went bankrupt at the start of this year. Since that happened, no buyer has stepped up to buy the 20-deck, 341.99 m-long monstrosity. That means it's now destined for the scrap heap. The Mail says that Global Dream II also features an outdoor waterpark and a movie theatre.

The capacity of this ship blows the second largest ship, the Oasis-class Wonder of the Sea which is owned and operated by Royal Caribbean, out of the water (I love a good pun). The Wonder of the Seas has a passenger capacity of only 6,988. Pathetic. Despite the $US1.4 ($2) billion put out to build this behemoth, the ship still needs about $US230,000,000 ($319,286,000) worth of work. Apparently, it is structurally complete, but equipment and passenger facilities still need to be finished. Eagle-eyed readers will have noted the "II" in the ship's name. Yes, there is a twin Global Dream, but it hasn't been given the ax... yet. The Mail reports that right now the two ships are being stored in a German shipyard in Wismar. However, that yard will soon be used to build military vessels. That means the Global Dreams have to be out of there by the end of next year.

The Financial Times tells how the head of a Ukrainian cybersecurity company recruited dozens of "high-level Ukrainian hackers" and borrowed a Starlink internet satellite for "the large-scale infiltration of internet-connected security cameras to surveil Russian-occupied territory, and honey-trapping Russian soldiers into revealing their bases." [T]hey hacked thousands of security and traffic cameras in Belarus and parts of Ukraine that Russia had occupied. To filter the information, the team wrote machine-learning code that helped them separate military movements from ordinary traffic, and they funnelled the information to the military via a public portal.

In one example, described to the Financial Times with photographs and locations, they identified a remote Russian base near occupied Melitopol in southern Ukraine. Then, using fake profiles of attractive women on Facebook and Russian social media websites, they tricked soldiers into sending photos that they geolocated, and shared with the Ukrainian military....

A few days later, they watched on TV as the base was blown up by Ukrainian artillery.

The US Army is taking delivery of a first batch of high-tech combat goggles made by Microsoft, citing encouraging results from testing in the field. From a report: Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Douglas Bush has "cleared the Army to begin accepting" some of the 5,000 sets of goggles, spokesman Jamal Beck said in a statement. Their delivery had been placed on hold over concern about the device's performance until more rigorous testing took place. Based on the test results so far the service "is adjusting its fielding plan to allow for time to correct deficiencies and also field to units that are focused on training activities," Beck said.

Microsoft's Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, is expected to provide a "heads-up display" for U.S. ground forces, similar to those for fighter pilots. The system -- a customized version of Microsoft's HoloLens goggles -- would let commanders project information onto a visor in front of a soldier's face and would include features such as night vision. The Army projects spending as much as $21.9 billion over a decade on Microsoft's combat goggles, spare parts and support services if all options are exercised.

Chip designer Nvidia on Wednesday said that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition and hamper a business Nvidia expects to generate $400 million in sales this quarter. Reuters reports: Nvidia shares fell 4% after hours. The company said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year. Nvidia said U.S. officials told it the new rule "will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a "military end use" or "military end user" in China."

The announcement signals a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. [...] Nvidia said it had booked $400 million in sales of the affected chips this quarter to China that could be lost if Chinese firms decide not to buy alternative Nvidia products. It said it plans to apply for exemptions to the rule but has "no assurances" that U.S. officials will grant them. Stacy Rasgon, a financial analyst with Bernstein, said the disclosure signaled that about 10% of Nvidia's data center sales, which investors have closely monitored in recent years, were coming from China and that the hit to sales was likely "manageable" for Nvidia.

United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur.

So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket." Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series....

The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants.

People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis.
An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."

Thursday Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant was cut off from the country's electricity grid, causing "widespread power outages across southern Ukraine," according to the New York Times. Friday afternoon it was reconnected to Ukraine's national power grid, the Times adds — "but its time offline renewed concerns about the safe operation of the plant..."

The Guardian notes it's the first such disconnection in nearly 40 years. Three other power lines connecting the reactors to the grid "had already been taken out during the war," though when the fourth and final line went out, "the plant still received supplies of electricity from one remaining backup line connected to the nearby conventional power plant." (Though two other lines to that power plant were already also down.) "Disconnecting the plant from the grid is dangerous because it raises the risk of catastrophic failure of the electricity-run cooling systems for its reactors and spent fuel rods.... If all external connections go down, it must rely on diesel-fuelled generators for power. If they break down, engineers only have 90 minutes to stave off dangerous overheating." (Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that during the break in power, back-up diesel generators did indeed immediately kick in to ensure continuous power supply, according to Reuters.)

But is Russia executing a larger strategy here? Earlier, Russian engineers informed plant workers that the nuclear plant would be switched to Russia's power network in the event of an emergency, according to the head of Ukraine's atomic energy company. Speaking to the Guardian, he adds that the plant's workers were told that "The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system" — and he worries that Russia is now attempting to create those preconditions.

He's not the only one thinking that. Voice of America interviewed a nuclear engineer at the plant who claims that Russian troops have several times "bombed places that cannot affect the safe operation of the power plant. I think that the Russians are trying to discredit the armed forces of Ukraine for the purpose of propaganda.... At the same time, the Russians deliberately damaged the high-voltage power lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant with the Ukrainian power system.... [T]he Russians want to arrange a small accident and stop Zaporizhzhia for a short time, then supply us with electricity from Crimea and automatically switch the nuclear power plant to the Russian energy system."

He also claims to have seen Russian military equipment stored in the plant. For example, "Different types of Russian artillery and missile installations are located both inside the territory of the nuclear power plant and around it, on the perimeter, near the Kakhovka Reservoir."

The last power line connecting the reactors to the grid was disconnected by fires "caused by shelling," the Guardian reported.

The New York Times reports on the aftermath: Ukrainian engineers were able to restore damaged external power lines after repeated shelling on Thursday, ensuring the facility was able to meet its own power needs and continue to operate safely, according to Ukrainian and international officials, but efforts to reconnect it to the grid took longer. With fires raging around the plant, new shelling in and around the facility on a near daily basis and an exhausted and stressed team of Ukrainian engineers tasked with keeping the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant running safely, however, calls for international intervention grew louder.

Negotiations with Ukraine and Russia to allow safety experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit and inspect the plant appeared to be making progress, as U.N. officials indicated they expected an agreement soon. "We are in active consultations for an imminent I.A.E.A. mission," a spokesman for the agency said.

The stakes are high.

"Nowhere in the history of this world has a nuclear power plant become a part of a combat zone, so this really has to stop immediately," Bonnie Denise Jenkins, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Russian actions, she said, "have created a serious risk of a nuclear incident — a dangerous radiation release — that could threaten not only the people and environment of Ukraine, but also affect neighboring countries and the entire international community."
Here's the opinion of that nuclear engineer at the Ukrainian nuclear plant (interviewed by Voice of America). "The expectation is that after the [International Atomic Energy] agency's conclusion, international pressure on Moscow will intensify, and Russia will be required to withdraw heavy weapons and troops from the nuclear power plant.

"I think this is unrealistic. The Russians will not leave here by their own will. Without a war, it is impossible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software "useful for surveillance" as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China's surveillance state. Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can "classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features," according to research grant documents obtained via public records request. "These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance," the document read.

Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor's research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha's lab to research military applications of AI technologies. But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha's research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha's research team. In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha's team pledged to "work closely with Alibaba researchers" to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as "aggressive," "shy," "impulsive," and other personalities. The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba. The software's "clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled," Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. "Given what we know now about China's architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it."

It's not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor's expertise. In January 2019 -- back when the Alibaba grant was still active -- Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team. The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled "large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds." Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into "efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds." Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant. There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises "serious questions about ethics in machine learning research," Fedasiuk said.

MIT Technology Review obtained Prince's investor presentation for the "RedPill Phone," which promises more than it could possibly deliver. From the report: Erik Prince's pitch to investors was simple -- but certainly ambitious: pay just 5 million euros and cure the biggest cybersecurity and privacy plagues of our day. The American billionaire -- best known for founding the notorious private military firm Blackwater, which became globally infamous for killing Iraqi civilians and threatening US government investigators -- was pushing Unplugged, a smartphone startup promising "free speech, privacy, and security" untethered from dominant tech giants like Apple and Google. In June, Prince publicly revealed the new phone, priced at $850. But before that, beginning in 2021, he was privately hawking the device to investors -- using a previously unreported pitch deck that has been obtained by MIT Technology Review. It boldly claims that the phone and its operating system are "impenetrable" to surveillance, interception, and tampering, and its messenger service is marketed as "impossible to intercept or decrypt."

Boasting falsely that Unplugged has built "the first operating system free of big tech monetization and analytics," Prince bragged that the device is protected by "government-grade encryption." Better yet, the pitch added, Unplugged is to be hosted on a global array of server farms so that it "can never be taken offline." One option is said to be a server farm "on a vessel" located in an "undisclosed location on international waters, connected via satellite to Elon Musk's StarLink." An Unplugged spokesperson explained that "they benefit in having servers not be subject to any governmental law." The Unplugged investor pitch deck is a messy mix of these impossible claims, meaningless buzzwords, and outright fiction. While none of the experts I spoke with had yet been able to test the phone or read its code, because the company hasn't provided access, the evidence available suggests Unplugged will fall wildly short of what's promised.

[...] The UP Phone's operating system, called LibertOS, is a proprietary version of Google's Android, according to an Unplugged spokesperson. It's running on an unclear mix of hardware that a company spokesperson says they've designed on their own. Even just maintaining a unique Android "fork" -- a version of the operating system that departs from the original, like a fork in the road -- is a difficult endeavor that can cost massive money and resources, experts warn. For a small startup, that can be an insurmountable challenge. [...] Another key issue is life span. Apple's iPhones are considered the most secure consumer device on the market due in part to the fact that the company offers security updates to some of its older phones for six years, longer than virtually all competitors. When support for a phone ends, security vulnerabilities go unaddressed, and the phone is no longer secure. There is no information available on how long UP Phones will receive security support. "There are two things happening here," says Allan Liska, a cyberintelligence analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. "There are the actual attempts to make real secure phones, and then there is the marketing BS. Distinguishing between those two can be really hard."

"When I worked in US intelligence, we [penetrated] a number of phone companies overseas," says Liska. "We were inside those phone companies. We could easily track people based on where they connected to the towers. So when you talk about being impenetrable, that's wrong. This is a phone, and the way that phones work is they triangulate to cell towers, and there is always latitude and longitude for exactly where you're sitting," he adds. "Nothing you do to the phone is going to change that."

The UP Phone is due out in November 2022.

sciencehabit writes: From the start of the pandemic, the Chinese government -- like many foreign researchers -- has vigorously rejected the idea that SARS-CoV-2 somehow originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and escaped. But over the past 2 years, it has also started to push back against what many regard as the only plausible alternative scenario: The pandemic started in China with a virus that naturally jumped from bats to an "intermediate" species and then to humans -- most likely at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. Beijing was open to the idea at first. But today it points to myriad ways SARS-CoV-2 could have arrived in Wuhan from abroad, borne by contaminated frozen food or infected foreigners -- perhaps at the Military World Games in Wuhan, in October 2019 -- or released accidentally by a U.S. military lab located more than 12,000 kilometers from Wuhan. Its goal is to avoid being blamed for the pandemic in any way, says Filippa Lentzos, a sociologist at King's College London who studies biological threats and health security. "China just doesn't want to look bad," she says. "They need to maintain an image of control and competence. And that is what goes through everything they do."

The idea of a pandemic origin outside China is preposterous to many scientists, regardless of their position on whether the virus started with a lab leak or a natural jump from animals. There's simply no way SARS-CoV-2 could have come from some foreign place to Wuhan and triggered an explosive outbreak there without first racing through humans at the site of its origin. "The idea that the pandemic didn't originate in China is inconsistent with so many other things," says Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has argued for more intensive studies of the WIV lab accident scenario. "When you eliminate the absurd, it's Wuhan," says virologist Gregory Towers of University College London, who leans toward a natural origin. Yet Chinese researchers have published a flurry of papers supporting their government's "anywhere-but-here" position. Multiple studies report finding no signs of SARS-CoV-2 related viruses or antibodies in bats and other wild and captive animals in China. Others offer clues that the virus hitched a ride to China on imported food or its packaging. On the flip side, Chinese researchers are not pursuing -- or at least not publishing -- obvious efforts to trace the sources of the mammals sold at the Huanan market, which could yield clues to the virus' origins.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: North Korean hackers from the Lazarus group have been using a signed malicious executable for macOS to impersonate Coinbase and lure in employees in the financial technology sector. The name of the false document was "Coinbase_online_careers_2022_07." When launched, it displays the decoy PDF above and loads a malicious DLL that ultimately allows the threat actor to send commands to the infected device. Security researchers at cybersecurity company ESET found that the hackers also had malware ready for macOS systems. They said that the malicious file is compiled for Macs with both Intel and Apple silicon, meaning that users of both older and newer models were targeted. In a thread on Twitter, they note that the malware drops three files [...].

ESET linked the recent macOS malware to Operation In(ter)ception, a Lazarus campaign that targeted high-profile aerospace and military organizations in a similar way. Looking at the macOS malware, the researchers noticed that it was signed on July 21 (as per the timestamp value) with a certificate issued in February to a developer using the name Shankey Nohria and team identifier 264HFWQH63. On August 12, the certificate had not been revoked by Apple. However, the malicious application was not notarized -- an automatic process that Apple uses to check software for malicious components. Compared to the previous macOS malware attributed to the Lazarus group of hackers, ESET researchers observed that the downloader component connects to a different command and control (C2) server, which was no longer responding at the time of the analysis.

The U.S. has identified intensifying technological competition with China as a top national-security threat. But a Commerce Department-led process that reviews U.S. tech exports to the country approves almost all requests and has overseen an increase in sales of some particularly important technologies, according to an analysis of trade data. From a report: Of the U.S.'s total $125 billion in exports to China in 2020, officials required a license for less than half a percent, Commerce Department data shows. Of that fraction, the agency approved 94%, or 2,652, applications for technology exports to China. The figures omit applications "returned without action," meaning their outcomes were uncertain. The result: The U.S. continues to send to China an array of semiconductors, aerospace components, artificial-intelligence technology and other items that could be used to advance Beijing's military interests.

The Commerce Department says it is focused on long-term, strategic competition with China and that it makes export-control decisions with its interagency partners in the Defense, State and Energy Departments. Critics say Commerce officials are improperly giving priority to U.S. commercial interests over national security and that an urgent regulatory revamp is necessary to respond to the threat from Beijing. For Steve Coonen, the Pentagon's former top China export-controls analyst, the high rate of approvals for licenses to sell tech with potential military use is evidence of significant policy failure.