Intel was told to pay $2.18 billion after losing a patent-infringement trial over technology related to chip-making. From a report: Intel infringed two patents owned by closely held VLSI Technology, a federal jury in Waco, Texas, said. The jury found $1.5 billion for infringement of one patent and $675 million for infringement of the second. Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, denied infringing either of the patents and said one was invalid because it claimed to cover work done by Intel engineers, but the jury rejected those arguments. The patents had been owned by Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors, which would get a cut of any damage award, Intel lawyer William Lee of WilmerHale told jurors in closing arguments Monday. VLSI, founded four years ago, has no products and its only potential revenue is this lawsuit, he said. VLSI "took two patents off the shelf that hadn't been used for 10 years and said, 'We'd like $2 billion,"' Lee told the jury. The "outrageous" demand by VLSI "would tax the true innovators."

The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad."

But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...."

A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance."
The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company.

The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."

America's Food and Drug Administration just authorized Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, according to CBS News. "The vaccine is the third to be approved for use in the United States, and the first that requires only one shot..." Among people who got the vaccine in clinical trials, there were no COVID-related deaths. Phase 3 clinical trials also showed protection against multiple emerging virus variants, including a more contagious strain that was first discovered in South Africa and has since been detected in the U.S.

The vaccine can be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures for up to three months.
More from the BBC: The company has agreed to provide the U.S. with 100 million doses by the end of June. The first doses could be available to the US public as early as next week. The U.K., EU and Canada have also ordered doses, and 500 million doses have also been ordered through the Covax scheme to supply poorer nations.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica: As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook's top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People's Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn't a particularly close call for the company's leadership, newly disclosed emails show. "I am fine with this," wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG's photos and updates about the Turkish military's brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can't be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey. The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly...

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: "We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world," the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. "More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses." But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey's military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government's demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. "The page caused us a few PR fires in the past," one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material...
"Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down."

Brave Browser had a privacy issue that leaked the Tor onion URL addresses you visited to your locally configured DNS server, "exposing the dark web websites you visit...", writes Bleeping Computer.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes their report: To access Tor onion URLs, Brave added a "Private Window with Tor" mode that acts as a proxy to the Tor network. When you attempt to connect to an onion URL, your request is proxied through volunteer-run Tor nodes who make the request for you and send back the returned HTML. Due to this proxy implementation, Brave's Tor mode does not directly provide the same level of privacy as using the Tor Browser.

When using Brave's Tor mode, it should forward all requests to the Tor proxies and not send any information to any non-Tor Internet devices to increase privacy. However, a bug in Brave's "Private window with Tor" mode is causing the onion URL for any Tor address you visit to also be sent as a standard DNS query to your machine's configured DNS server. This bug was first reported in a Reddit post and later confirmed by James Kettle, the Director of Research at PortSwigger. BleepingComputer has also verified the claims by using Wireshark to view DNS traffic while using Brave's Tor mode.
Brave has since released an update which fixes the bug.

"Current and former top executives at SolarWinds are blaming a company intern for a critical lapse in password security that apparently went undiagnosed for years," reports CNN. The password in question, "solarwinds123," was discovered in 2019 on the public internet by an independent security researcher who warned the company that the leak had exposed a SolarWinds file server...

It is still unclear what role, if any, the leaked password may have played in enabling suspected Russian hackers to spy on multiple federal agencies and businesses in one of the most serious security breaches in U.S. history. Stolen credentials are one of three possible avenues of attack SolarWinds is investigating as it tries to uncover how it was first compromised by the hackers, who went on to hide malicious code in software updates that SolarWinds then pushed to some 18,000 customers, including numerous federal agencies. Other theories SolarWinds is exploring, said SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna, include the brute-force guessing of company passwords, as well as the possibility the hackers could have entered via compromised third-party software.

Confronted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, former SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson said the password issue was "a mistake that an intern made... They violated our password policies and they posted that password on an internal, on their own private Github account," Thompson said. "As soon as it was identified and brought to the attention of my security team, they took that down...."

Ramakrishna later testified that the password had been in use as early as 2017... That timeframe is considerably longer than what had been reported.
The remarks were made at a hearing of a House security committee, where Representative Katie Porter also strongly criticized the company. "I've got a stronger password than 'solarwinds123' to stop my kids from watching too much YouTube on their iPad! You and your company were supposed to be preventing the Russians from reading Defense Department emails!"

CNN also reports that Microsoft (which is leading the forensic investigation into the breach) "later said there is no evidence that the Pentagon was actually affected by the Russian spying campaign."

"People may scream at me for saying this, but net neutrality is one of America's longest and now most pointless fights over technology." So argues the New York Times "On Tech" newsletter author Shira Ovide, calling the debate "a distraction for our elected leaders and corporations when there are more pressing issues."

Ovide also shares their discussion with Times technology and regulatory policy reporter Cecila Kang: Kang: You can see the appeal of rules that make sure internet providers don't stall web traffic unless it's from their preferred business partners or their own streaming services. However, the debate feels much less urgent now that we're talking about threats of online disinformation about vaccine deployment and elections. The net neutrality debate focused on internet service providers as powerful gatekeepers of internet information. That term now seems better applied to Facebook, Google and Amazon....

Ovide: Internet providers, public interest groups, some tech companies and a bunch of our elected leaders have been screaming holy war about an issue for 13 years without a resolution. Can they reach a middle ground and we'll all move on?

Kang: There probably isn't much of a middle ground. There are either net neutrality rules or there aren't. And the internet service providers see net neutrality as a slippery slope that leads to broader regulation of high-speed internet services or government-imposed limits on prices they can charge. They will fight any regulation. And that's true, too, of the lobbyists who are hired to argue against anything.

Apple has added iPhone and MacBook repairability scores to its online store in France to comply with a new French law that came into effect this year. From a report: MacGeneration reports that the rating takes into account features like how easily a device can be disassembled and the availability of repair manuals and spare parts. Links to each product's final score, with details for how they were calculated, are available on this support page. The ratings for Apple's products vary between products and generations. Its iPhone 12 lineup all have scores of six out of 10 for example, while the previous year's iPhone 11s are rated lower at between 4.5 and 4.6. The improvement, according to the detailed scoring assessment, is due to the newer iPhones being easier to dismantle than the previous year's models, and spare parts being cheaper compared to the cost of the phone itself. There's less of a spread between the company's different MacBook models, whose scores range from 5.6 to 7.

John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: In my piece yesterday about email tracking images ("spy pixels" or "spy trackers"), I complained about the fact that Apple -- a company that rightfully prides itself for its numerous features protecting user privacy -- offers no built-in defenses for email tracking. A slew of readers wrote to argue that Apple Mail does offer such a feature: the option not to load any remote resources at all. It's a setting for Mail on both Mac and iOS, and I know about it -- I've had it enabled for years. But this is a throwing-the-baby-out-with-bath-water approach. What Hey offers -- by default -- is the ability to load regular images automatically, so your messages look "right", but block all known images from tracking sources (which are generally 1 x 1 px invisible GIFs).

Typical users are never going to enable Mail's option not to load remote content. It renders nearly all marketing messages and newsletters as weird-looking at best, unreadable at worst. And when you get a message whose images you do want to see, when you tell Mail to load them, it loads all of them -- including trackers. Apple Mail has no knowledge of spy trackers at all, just an all-or-nothing ability to turn off all remote images and load them manually. Mail's "Load remote content in messages" option is a great solution to bandwidth problems -- remember to turn it on the next time you're using Wi-Fi on an airplane, for example. It's a terrible solution to tracking. No one would call it a good solution to tracking if Safari's only defense were an option not to load any images at all until you manually click a button in each tab to load them all. But that's exactly what Apple offers with Mail. "Don't get me started on how predictable this entire privacy disaster was, once we lost the war over whether email messages should be plain text only or could contain embedded HTML. Effectively all email clients are web browsers now, yet don't have any of the privacy protection features actual browsers do," he adds.

President Joe Biden has lifted a freeze on green cards issued by his predecessor during the pandemic that lawyers said was blocking most legal immigration to the United States. From a report: Former President Donald Trump last spring halted the issuance of green cards until the end of 2020 in the name of protecting the coronavirus-wracked job market -- a reason that Trump gave to achieve many of the cuts to legal immigration that had eluded him before the pandemic. Trump on Dec. 31 extended those orders until the end of March. Trump had deemed immigrants a "risk to the U.S. labor market" and blocked their entry to the United States in issuing Proclamation 10014 and Proclamation 10052. Biden stated in his proclamation Wednesday that shutting the door on legal immigrants "does not advance the interests of the United States."

"To the contrary, it harms the United States, including by preventing certain family members of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents from joining their families here. It also harms industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world," Biden stated in his proclamation. Most immigrant visas were blocked by the orders, according to immigration lawyers. As many as 120,000 family-based preference visas were lost largely because of the pandemic-related freeze in the 2020 budget year, according to the American Immigrant Lawyers Association.

A US magistrate judge has ordered Valve to provide sales data to Apple in response to a subpoena issued amid Apple's continuing legal fight with Epic Games. From a report: In addition to some aggregate sales data for the entirety of Steam, Valve will only have to provide specific, per-title pricing and sales data for "436 specific apps that are available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store," according to the order. That's a significant decrease from the 30,000+ titles Apple for which Apple originally requested data. In resisting the subpoena, Valve argued that its Steam sales data was irrelevant to questions about the purely mobile app marketplaces at issue in the case. Refocusing the request only on games available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store makes it more directly relevant to the questions of mobile competition in the case, Judge Thomas Hixson writes in his order.

"Recall that in these related cases, [Epic] allege that Apple's 30% commission on sales through its App Store is anti-competitive and that allowing iOS apps to be sold through other stores would force Apple to reduce its commission to a more competitive level," Hixson writes in the order. "By focusing... on 436 specific games that are sold in both Steam and Epic's store, Apple seeks to take discovery into whether the availability of other stores does in fact affect commissions in the way [Epic] allege." The California judge overseeing Apple's attempts to drag Valve into an ongoing beef with Epic Games admitted that Apple "salted the Earth with subpoenas, so don't worry, it's not just you."

Facebook is discussing building facial recognition into its upcoming smart glasses product and has been weighing the legal implications of the controversial technology, Buzzfeed News reported citing remarks from executives at an internal meeting Thursday. From a report: During a scheduled companywide meeting, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality, told employees that the company is currently assessing whether or not it has the legal capacity to offer facial recognition on devices that are reportedly set to launch later this year. Nothing had been decided, he said, and he noted that current state laws may make it impossible for Facebook to offer people the ability to search for others based on pictures of their face. "Face recognition ... might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things," Bosworth said in response to an employee question about whether people would be able to "mark their faces as unsearchable" when smart glasses become a prevalent technology. The unnamed worker specifically highlighted fears about the potential for "real-world harm," including "stalkers."

The Economic Security Project is trying to make a point about big tech monopolies by releasing a browser plugin that will block any sites that reach out to IP addresses owned by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon. From a report: The extension is called Big Tech Detective, and after using the internet with it for a day (or, more accurately, trying and failing to use), I'd say it drives home the point that it's almost impossible to avoid these companies on the modern web, even if you try. Currently, the app has to be side-loaded onto Chrome, and the Economic Security Project expects that will remain the case. It's also available to side-load onto Firefox. By default, it just keeps track of how many requests are sent, and to which companies. If you configure the extension to actually block websites, you'll see a big red popup if the website you're visiting sends a request to any of the four. That popup will also include a list of all the requests so you can get an idea of what's being asked for.

As part of its war on web tracking, Mozilla is adding a new tool to Firefox aimed at stopping cookies from keeping tabs on you across multiple sites. From a report: The "Total Cookie Protection" feature is included in the web browser's latest release -- alongside multiple picture-in-picture views -- and essentially works by keeping cookies isolated between each site you visit. Or, in Mozilla's words: "By creating a separate cookie jar for every website." Firefox's new feature pares with last month's network partitioning tool, which works by splitting the Firefox browser cache on a per-website basis to prevent tracking across the web, itself targeted at blocking more stubborn "supercookies." According to Mozilla, these types of cookies are more difficult to delete and block as they are stored in obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags. Both tools are available as part of Firefox's enhanced tracking protection suite in "strict mode" on desktop and Android.

Google today quietly added App Privacy labels to its Gmail app, marking the first of its major apps to receive the privacy details aside from YouTube. From a report: Though App Privacy information has been added to Gmail, Google has done so server side and has yet to issue an update to the Gmail app. It has been two months since the Gmail app last saw an update. Earlier in February, the Gmail app was displaying warnings about the app being out of date as it has been so long since new security features were added, but Google eliminated that messaging without pushing an update to the app. Apple has been enforcing App Privacy labels since December, and Google has been slow to support the feature. Google said in early January that it would add privacy data to its app catalog "this week or next week," but by January 20, most apps still had not been updated with the App Privacy. Google has since been adding App Privacy labels to apps like YouTube and some of its smaller apps, but of major apps like Google Search, Google Photos, and Google Maps, Gmail is the first to get the new labeling.

A week after popular audio chatroom app Clubhouse said it was taking steps to ensure user data couldn't be stolen by malicious hackers or spies, at least one attacker has proven the platform's live audio can be siphoned. From a report: An unidentified user was able to stream Clubhouse audio feeds this weekend from "multiple rooms" into their own third-party website, said Reema Bahnasy, a spokeswoman for Clubhouse. While the company says it's "permanently banned" that particular user and installed new "safeguards" to prevent a repeat, researchers contend the platform may not be in a position to make such promises. Users of the invitation-only iOS app should assume all conversations are being recorded, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was first to publicly raise security concerns on Feb. 13, said late Sunday. "Clubhouse cannot provide any privacy promises for conversations held anywhere around the world," said Alex Stamos, director of the SIO and Facebook's former security chief. Stamos and his team were also able to confirm that Clubhouse relies on a Shanghai-based startup called Agora to handle much of its back-end operations. While Clubhouse is responsible for its user experience, like adding new friends and finding rooms, the platform relies on the Chinese company to process its data traffic and audio production, he said.

Apple is going to make one of the most powerful types of attacks on iPhones much harder to pull off in an upcoming update of iOS. From a report: The company quietly made a new change in the way it secures the code running in its mobile operating system. The change is in the beta version of the next iOS version, 14.5, meaning it is currently slated to be added to the final release. Several security researchers who specialize in finding vulnerabilities in and crafting exploits for iOS believe this new mitigation will make it much harder for hackers to take control of an iPhone with a technique known as a zero-click (or 0-click) exploit, which allows a hacker to take over an iPhone with no interaction from the target. Apple also told Motherboard it believes the changes will impact 0-click attacks.

"It will definitely make 0-clicks harder. Sandbox escapes too. Significantly harder," a source who develops exploits for government customers told Motherboard, referring to "sandboxes" which isolate applications from each other in an attempt to stop code from one program interacting with the wider operating system. Motherboard granted multiple exploit developers anonymity to speak more candidly about sensitive industry issues. Like the name suggests, zero-click attacks allow hackers to break into a target without needing the victim to interact with anything, such as a malicious phishing link. This means that the attack is generally harder for the targeted user to detect. These are generally very sophisticated attacks. These attacks may now become much rarer, according to several security researchers who look for vulnerabilities in iOS.

Top lobbying groups backed by Amazon, Facebook, Google and other technology giants sued Maryland on Thursday, seeking to scuttle a new state tax on their massive online-advertising revenue -- and stop other local governments from following its lead. From a report: The legal challenge contends that Maryland's first-in-the-nation tax is unfair, unconstitutional and incompatible with federal laws that prohibit state policymakers from instituting levies specifically targeting online services. The lawsuit is backed by a broad coalition of businesses nationwide through a series of trade groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, a Washington-based organization that counts Silicon Valley's most prominent companies among its members. It carries great legal and political significance at a time when lawmakers well beyond Maryland's borders are starting to eye the tech industry's eye-popping pandemic profits as a potential source of much-needed new revenue.

"In light of the current pandemic and economic uncertainty, increasing taxes on services used by small businesses to keep themselves running is a particularly poor and ill-timed policy," Caroline Harris, the vice president for tax policy at the U.S. Chamber, said in a statement. In the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland, the tech giants and their political allies argue that the state's online advertising tax suffers from "many infirmities" and, as a result, threatens to "raise costs for consumers and make it more difficult for businesses to connect with potential customers."

President Joe Biden will direct his administration to conduct a review of key U.S. supply chains including semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, medical supplies and rare earth metals. From a report: The assessment, which will be led by members of both Biden's economic and national security teams, will analyze the "resiliency and capacity of the American manufacturing supply chains and defense industrial base to support national security [and] emergency preparedness," according to a draft of an executive order seen by CNBC. The text of the executive order is being finalized and the ultimate language could vary from the current draft. The White House also plans to review gaps in domestic manufacturing and supply chains that are dominated by or run through "nations that are or are likely to become unfriendly or unstable."

Though the order does not mention China, the directive is likely in large part an effort by the administration to determine how reliant the U.S. economy and military are on a critical group of Chinese exports. Biden said earlier this month that his White House is gearing up for "extreme competition" with China. The pending executive order is one of the administration's first tangible efforts to evaluate and shore up American business and defense interests through a thorough review of where, and from which countries, it receives key raw materials. Some of the commodities and components listed in the order included rare earth metals, a group of minerals used in the production of a variety of advanced technologies, including computer screens, state-of-the-art weapons and electric vehicles.

The United States has charged three North Korean computer programmers with a massive hacking spree that stole more than $1.3 billion in money and cryptocurrency, the Department of Justice said Wednesday. From a report: Officials added that a Canadian-American citizen has pleaded guilty to laundering some of the alleged hackers' money. The indictment alleges that Jon Chang Hyok, 31, Kim Il, 27, and Park Jin Hyok, 36, stole money while working for North Korea's military intelligence services. Park had previously been charged in a complaint unsealed in 2018.