"Catching the coronavirus from surfaces is rare. The World Health Organization and national public-health agencies need to clarify their advice," urges an editorial in Nature (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted predominantly through the air — by people talking and breathing out large droplets and small particles called aerosols. Catching the virus from surfaces — although plausible — seems to be rare. Despite this, some public-health agencies still emphasize that surfaces pose a threat and should be disinfected frequently. The result is a confusing public message when clear guidance is needed on how to prioritize efforts to prevent the virus spreading... People and organizations continue to prioritize costly disinfection efforts, when they could be putting more resources into emphasizing the importance of masks, and investigating measures to improve ventilation. The latter will be more complex but could make more of a difference. Now that it is agreed that the virus transmits through the air, in both large and small droplets, efforts to prevent spread should focus on improving ventilation or installing rigorously tested air purifiers. People must also be reminded to wear masks and maintain a safe distance. At the same time, agencies such as the WHO and the CDC need to update their guidance on the basis of current knowledge. Research on the virus and on COVID-19 moves quickly, so public-health agencies have a responsibility to present clear, up-to-date information that provides what people need to keep themselves and others safe.

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Robert J. Shapiro advised senior members of the Obama administration on economic policy, and served as an Under Secretary of Commerce under Bill Clinton. Now a senior fellow at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown, he's suspicious of the surge in GameStop's stock price: Allegedly, this is the tale of scrappy, small online day traders buying shares of a beleaguered company to thwart a hedge fund scheme to take it down... Yet, certain facts are publicly available, including GameStop's daily trading volume, its daily prices, the number of short sales of its stock, and how many shares are held by big institutional players. Those facts suggest that the Reddit online traders have been on the sidelines of a trading war among a handful of big institutional investors. The SEC should subpoena the records because the hard data also suggest that some big players may be using trading strategies used in the past to manipulate stock prices... Unless most of the Reddit bunch have assets in the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans, they were mere bystanders to last week's trading of 682 million shares at an average price of $218.20 — purchases totaling nearly $150 billion in a wildly volatile market. Only institutional investors have such resources to trade stocks, not self-styled populists with Robinhood on their iPhones. Since most big players are regulated public corporations with fiduciary responsibilities to avoid the enormous risks involved in this high-stakes game of chicken, the GameStop players almost certainly are all lightly regulated hedge funds. The trading volume and price gyrations also suggest that those hedge funds may be manipulating the market... [S]ome 20 million or more of the GameStop shorts were never borrowed and never delivered to their buyers. They were what the SEC calls "naked shorts." The SEC has banned naked shorting as abusive market manipulation because large-scale naked shorting artificially drives down a stock's price. Given the volume of short sales and overall trading in GameStop, large-scale naked short-selling was clearly involved when GameStop's share price fell $153 last Wednesday (from $347 to $194) and again this Monday when the price plummeted from $325 to $225... The data also suggest a bigger story of possible manipulation involving the huge increases in GameStop's share price. The wild swings in those share prices reflect hundreds of millions of shares being traded each day, mostly in big blocks and presumably from one hedge fund to another. When the price rose, one fund got out and took huge profits while another bought in, expecting the price to rise further, and yet another sold short, expecting the price to fall... In effect, hedge funds may have manipulated GameStop in opposite directions, wringing out profits daily or even two or three times a day. If this is correct, the GameStop saga is not some populist uprising but a rolling version of "pump and dump," a classic form of manipulation and naked shorting.

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A new book promises "the untold story of the cyberweapons market — the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth — and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare." Its author — a New York Times cybersecurity reporter — shares the book's story about David Evenden, a former National Security Agency analyst who later worked in Abu Dhabi: He, like two dozen other N.S.A. analysts and contractors, had been lured to the United Arab Emirates by a boutique Beltway contractor with offers to double, even quadruple, their salaries and promises of a tax-free lifestyle in the Gulf's luxury playground. The work would be the same as it had been at the agency, they were told, just on behalf of a close ally. It was all a natural extension of America's War on Terror. Mr. Evenden started tracking terror cells in the Gulf. This was 2014, ISIS had just laid siege to Mosul and Tikrit and Mr. Evenden tracked its members as they switched out burner phones and messaging apps... Soon, though, he was assigned to a new project: proving the Emiratis' neighbor, Qatar, was funding the Muslim Brotherhood. The only way to do that, Mr. Evenden told his bosses, would be to hack Qatar. "Go for it," they told him. No matter that Qatar was also an American ally or that, once inside its networks, his bosses showed no interest in ever getting out. Before long his team at the contractor, CyberPoint, was hacking Emirati enemies, real and perceived, all over the world: Soccer officials at FIFA, the monarchy's Twitter critics, and especially Qatari royals. They wanted to know where they were flying, who they were meeting, what they were saying. This too was part of the mission, Mr. Evenden was told; it had all been cleared up high. In the War on Terror and the cyber arms market, you could rationalize just about anything. All the rationalizations were stripped away the day emails from the first lady of the United States popped up on his screen. In late 2015, Michelle Obama's team was putting the finishing touches on a trip to the Middle East. Qatar's Sheikha Moza bint Nasser had invited Mrs. Obama to speak... And every last email between the first lady, her royal highness, and their staff — every personal reflection, reservation, itinerary change and security detail — was beaming back to former N.S.A. analysts' computers in Abu Dhabi. "That was the moment I said, 'We shouldn't be doing this,' he told me. "We should not be targeting these people." Mr. Evenden and his family were soon on a flight home. He and the few colleagues who joined him tipped off the F.B.I. (The agency does not comment on investigations, but interviews suggest its review of CyberPoint is ongoing.) To pre-empt any fallout, some employees came clean to Reuters. The hack of Sheika Moza's emails with Mrs. Obama has never been reported. It wasn't long after Mr. Evenden settled back in the states that he started fielding calls and LinkedIn messages from his old buddies at the N.S.A., still in the service, who had gotten a "really cool job offer" from Abu Dhabi and wanted his advice. By 2020, the calls had become a drumbeat. "Don't go," he pleaded. "This is not the work you think you will be doing." You might think you're a patriot now, he wanted to warn them, but one day soon you too could wake up and find you're just another mercenary in a cyber arms race gone horribly wrong... The author criticizes America's security establishment. "When we discovered openings in the systems that govern the digital universe, we didn't automatically turn them over to manufacturers for patching. We kept them vulnerable in the event the F.B.I. needed to access a terrorist's iPhone or Cyber Command had reason to drop a cyberweapon on Iran's grid one day..." But the author also warns that "the potential for a calamitous attack — a deadly explosion at a chemical plant set in motion by vulnerable software, for example — is a distraction from the predicament we are already in. Everything worth taking has already been intercepted: Our personal data, intellectual property, voter rolls, medical records, even our own cyberweaponry..." The book's title? This is How They Tell Me the World Ends.

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Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shared this investigation from the Washington Post's technology writer: When I spot-checked what a couple dozen apps claim about privacy in the App Store, I found more than a dozen that were either misleading or flat-out inaccurate... Apple's big privacy product is built on a shaky foundation: the honor system. In tiny print on the detail page of each app label, Apple says, "This information has not been verified by Apple." The first time I read that, I did a double take. Apple, which says caring for our privacy is a "core responsibility," surely knows devil-may-care data harvesters can't be counted on to act honorably... About 1 in 3 of the apps I checked that claimed they took no data appeared to be inaccurate... If a journalist and a talented geek could find so many problems just by kicking over a few stones, why isn't Apple? Even after I sent it a list of dubious apps, Apple wouldn't answer my specific questions, including: How many bad apps has it caught? If being inaccurate means you get the boot, why are some of the ones I flagged still available? Putting aside the deception, there's another question: Are Apple's labels even helpful...? Nowhere on any of Apple's privacy labels, in fact, do we learn with whom apps are sharing our data. Imagine if nutrition facts labels left off the whole section about ingredients. Irony alert, there's a tech giant that is more transparent: Facebook. With a setting called "off-Facebook activity" that it launched in 2020, you can actually see all the different apps and websites that are feeding your data to Facebook and ask the social network to stop using the data to target you with ads. Finally, the article notes that apps from some major companies — including Google — "have yet to even post labels."

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The more educated people are, the more likely they are to believe claims made by QAnon, according to a tracking poll by polling firm Morning Consult. From Politico: Twenty-seven percent of people with a postgraduate degree responded that QAnon claims are either very accurate or somewhat accurate. That compared to 20% of those with a bachelor's degree and 14% of those with less than a college degree. The numbers were similar in Morning Consult's October poll. But a new survey from the same pollsters also shows fewer Americans believing in QAnon's conspiracy theories. Newsweek writes: While eight percent of Americans still believe the radical conspiracy theory is "very accurate" and a further 10 percent consider its claims "somewhat accurate," this 18 percent figure is a six-point drop from a similar poll in October... Trust in the widely debunked conspiracy listed as a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI is also dropping among Republicans. According to the survey, 24 percent of GOP voters who have heard of QAnon say its claims are at least somewhat accurate — a 14-point drop from October... And 51% of the adults surveyed also believe social media's spread of conspiracy theories is a "major problem."

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"A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him," reports The Register. Long-time Slashdot reader couchslug shared their report: The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program's source code is a trade secret. The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour. The company offered the defense access under tightly controlled conditions outlined in a non-disclosure agreement, which included accepting a $1m liability fine in the event code details leaked. But the defense team objected to the conditions, which they argued would hinder their evaluation and would deter any expert witness from participating... Those arguing on behalf of the defense cited past problems with other genetic testing software such as STRmix and FST (Forensic Statistical Tool). Defense expert witnesses Mats Heimdahl and Jeanna Matthews, for example, said that STRmix had 13 coding errors that affected 60 criminal cases, errors not revealed until a source code review. They also pointed out, as the appeals court ruling describes, how an FST source code review "uncovered that a 'secret function...was present in the software, tending to overestimate the likelihood of guilt.'" EFF activists have already filed briefs in multiple courts "warning of the danger of secret software being used to convict criminal defendants," reports an EFF blog post. "No one should be imprisoned or executed based on secret evidence that cannot be fairly evaluated for its reliability, and the ruling in this case will help prevent that injustice."

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Slashdot reader rushtobugment quotes a story from Hot Hardware: One of the software options for running a Raspberry Pi module is Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), the officially supported Debian-based operating system put out by The Raspberry Pi Foundation. It has been around since 2015 without too much complaint. However, a recent update has some Raspberry Pi OS users up in arms over a key change involving Microsoft. The latest update installs a Microsoft apt respository on all any machine running Raspberry Pi OS, and does it without any admin consent. As discovered by Reddit user fortysix_n_2, the official reason is an endorsement of Microsoft's integrated development environment, Visual Studio Code, which is fine and dandy. However, it's claimed this even gets installed on headless devices that used a light image without a GUI. As a result, every time you do an "apt update" on your Pi device, the OS pings Microsoft. "By having this repo, every time an install of Raspberry Pi OS is updated it will ping a Microsoft server. Microsoft will know you're using Raspberry Pi OS/likely Raspberry Pi owner and your IP address...." fortysix_n_2 explains. Or, as a headline explains on the Windows Central blog, "Microsoft repo silently added to Raspberry Pi OS, folks begin the freak out..." "As one particularly vocal commenter pointed out, modifying the sources.list in Linux without consent just doesn't happen. It also doesn't just apply to new images, it has been built out to be added to existing machines, too." UPDATE: An anonymous Slashdot reader spotted Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton's response to the controversy on Twitter. When asked if the foundation could be more transparent, like publishing a blog post about the repositories to be included, Upton responded: "I can't understand why you think this was a controversial thing to do. We do things of this sort all the time without putting out a blog post about how to opt out."

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Friday the U.S. military released 400 other names it considered for Space Force's soliders (before settling on the word "guardians.") Politico writes that the names were "crowdsourced" from the U.S. military's space workforce, and "Troops clearly had fun with their submissions, which included Space Cadet, Spacies, Anti-Gravity Gang, Homo Spaciens and Spacefolk." But the Space Force had more science fiction-inspired names it could have picked. Fleet Officer, Stormtrooper and Trekkies were both among the suggested names... Many in the public still confuse NASA's civil space mission with the Space Force's national security focus, and a name like Ground-Based Astronauts or Apollonauts, harkening back to the space agency's moon landing program, would not help... One suggestion was Skywalker, though members of the Space Force at least in the short-term will be Earth-bound to operate the nation's GPS constellation and provide early missile warning. Though the Space Force's workforce is expected to be highly-skilled in technical fields, its members may not have taken kindly to one suggestion: Geek... Others perhaps took the suggestion process too literally, with one suggestion just saying "nothing because you wouldn't hear it in space anyway." The UPI reminds readers that the U.S. Space Force "is now a full military branch that was allocated $15.4 billion in the 2021 budget and enlisted 16,000 active duty and civilian personnel who were all reassigned from the defunct Air Force Space Command." White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that the Biden administration will keep Space Force... "They absolutely have the full support of the Biden administration. And we are not revisiting the decision to establish the Space Force," Psaki said Wednesday at a White House news briefing... Many experts were not surprised that President Joe Biden will keep Space Force as its own branch of the military because it would take an act of Congress to abolish it when it now has bipartisan support as a valuable tool in future military efforts.... The UPI also got this comment from a research associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The name is funny; it sounds like something that Trump just dreamed up," said Young. "But it's been talked about in national security circles for over a decade now. It's something that's just going to be important to have going forward." And a co-director of the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution tells them bluntly that "The Space Force is a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem, and that problem is the deployment of anti-satellite weapons by countries like Russia and China."

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AlmaLinux describes itself as "an open-source, community-driven project that intends to fill the gap left by the demise of the CentOS stable release." And now AlmaLinux "has announced their beta release of their CentOS/RHEL 8 fork," writes Slashdot reader juniorkindergarten. AlmaLinux will be getting $1 million a year in development funding from CloudLinux (the company behind CloudLinux OS, a CentOS clone with over 200,000 active server instances). Their CEO stresses that AlmaLinux "is built with CloudLinux expertise but will be owned and governed by the community. We intend to deliver this forever-free Linux distribution this quarter." And they've committed to supporting it through 2029. Their press release touts AlmaLinux as "a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8, with an effortless migration path from CentOS to AlmaLinux. Future RHEL releases will also be forked into a new AlmaLinux release." From the AlmaLinux blog: We've collected community feedback and built our new beta release around what you would expect from an enterprise-level Linux distribution...inspired by the community and built by the engineers and talent behind CloudLinux. Visit https://almalinux.org to download the Beta images. With the Beta release deployed, we'd like to ask the community to be involved and provide feedback. We aim to build a Linux distribution entirely from community contributions and feedback. During AlmaLinux Beta, we ask for assistance in testing, documentation, support and future direction for the operating system. Together, we can build a Linux distribution that fills the gap left by the now unsupported CentOS distribution. On Wednesday they'll be hosting a live QA webinar with the AlmaLinux team. And there's also a small AlmaLinux forum on Reddit.

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In 2019 two New York Times opinion writers obtained cellphone app data "containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017." (It's data that they say is "supposed to be anonymous, but it isn't. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.") Now they've obtained a remarkable new trove of data, "this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump's political rally turned into a violent insurrection." And here the stakes for a privacy violation were even higher: [The data set] shows how Trump supporters traveled from South Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Kentucky to the nation's capital, with pings tracing neatly along major highways, in the days before the attack. Stops at gas stations, restaurants and motels dot the route like bread crumbs, each offering corroborating details. In many cases, these trails lead from the Capitol right back to their homes... Unlike the data we reviewed in 2019, this new data included a remarkable piece of information: a unique ID for each user that is tied to a smartphone. This made it even easier to find people, since the supposedly anonymous ID could be matched with other databases containing the same ID, allowing us to add real names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and other information about smartphone owners in seconds. The IDs, called mobile advertising identifiers, allow companies to track people across the internet and on apps. They are supposed to be anonymous, and smartphone owners can reset them or disable them entirely. Our findings show the promise of anonymity is a farce. Several companies offer tools to allow anyone with data to match the IDs with other databases. We were quickly able to match more than 2,000 supposedly anonymous devices in the data set with email addresses, birthdays, ethnicities, ages and more... Smartphone users will never know if they are included in the data or whether their precise movements were sold. There are no laws forcing companies to disclose what the data is used for or for how long. There are no legal requirements to ever delete the data. Even if anyone could figure out where records of their locations were sold, in most states, you can't request that the data be deleted. Their movements could be bought and sold to innumerable parties for years. And the threat that those movements could be tied back to their identity will never go away. If the January 6 rioters didn't know before, they surely know now the cost of leaving a digital footprint... The article argues that de-anonymizing the data "gets easier by the day," warning this latest data set demonstrates "the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike." But it also warns that "The location-tracking industry exists because those in power allow it to exist... The dark truth is that, despite genuine concern from those paying attention, there's little appetite to meaningfully dismantle this advertising infrastructure that undergirds unchecked corporate data collection. "This collection will only grow more sophisticated."

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The U.S. agency overseeing elections has "quietly weakened a key element of proposed security standards..." reports the Associated Press, "raising concern among voting-integrity experts that many such systems will remain vulnerable to hacking." The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is poised to approve its first new security standards in 15 years after an arduous process involving multiple technical and elections community bodies and open hearings. But ahead of a scheduled February 10 ratification vote by commissioners, the EAC leadership tweaked the draft standards to remove language that stakeholders interpreted as banning wireless modems and chips from voting machines as a condition for federal certification. The mere presence of such wireless hardware poses unnecessary risks for tampering that could alter data or programs on election systems, say computer security specialists and activists, some of whom have long complained than the EAC bends too easily to industry pressure. Agency leaders argue that overall, the revised guidelines represent a major security improvement. They stress that the rules require manufacturers to disable wireless functions present in any machines, although the wireless hardware can remain. In a February 3 letter to the agency, computer scientists and voting integrity activists say the change "profoundly weakens voting system security and will introduce very real opportunities to remotely attack election systems." They demand the wireless hardware ban be restored... The ban on wireless hardware in voting machines would force vendors who currently build systems with off-the-shelf components to rely on more expensive custom-built hardware, said EAC Chair Benjamin Hovland, which could hurt competition in an industry already dominated by a trio of companies. He also argued that the guidelines are voluntary, although many state laws are predicated on them... Hovland stressed that the amended guidelines say all wireless capability must be disabled in voting equipment. But computer experts say that if the hardware is present, the software that activates it can be introduced. And the threat is not just from malign actors but also from the vendors and their clients, who could enable the wireless capability for maintenance purposes then forget to turn it off, leaving machines vulnerable... Experts are pushing for universal use of hand-marked paper ballots and better audits to bolster confidence in election results.

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Launched in July, China's probe "Tianwen-1" is now approaching an orbit around Mars — and it's sent back its first picture. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo spotted this report in the Guardian: The photo released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) shows geological features including the Schiaparelli crater and the Valles Marineris, a vast stretch of canyons on the Martian surface. The photo was taken from about 1.4m miles away (2.2m kilometres), said the CNSA, with the spacecraft since reaching 1.1 million kilometres from the planet... The five-tonne Tianwen-1 includes a Mars orbiter, lander, and a rover that will study the planet's soil. China hopes to land the rover in May in Utopia, a massive impact basin... China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme and first sent a human into space in 2003. It is aiming to assemble a space station in Earth orbit by 2022.

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Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares "Another take of the implications of Section 230... One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had 'wronged' her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google's search results." The New York Times reports: Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The results were full of posts on strange sites accusing him of being a thief, a fraudster and a pedophile. The posts listed Mr. Babcock's contact details and employer. The images were the worst: photos taken from his LinkedIn and Facebook pages that had "pedophile" written across them in red type. Someone had posted the doctored images on Pinterest, and Google's algorithms apparently liked things from Pinterest, and so the pictures were positioned at the very top of the Google results for "Guy Babcock." Mr. Babcock, 59, was not a thief, a fraudster or a pedophile. "I remember being in complete shock," he said. "Why would someone do this? Who could it possibly be? Who would be so angry?" Then he Googled his brother's name. The results were just as bad. He tried his wife. His sister. His brother-in-law. His teenage nephew. His cousin. His aunt. They had all been hit. The men were branded as child molesters and pedophiles, the women as thieves and scammers... Ripoff Report offered "arbitration services," which cost up to $2,000, to get rid of "substantially false" information. That sounded like extortion; Mr. Babcock wasn't about to pay to have lies removed... Ripoff Report is one of hundreds of "complaint sites" — others include She's a Homewrecker, Cheaterbot and Deadbeats Exposed — that let people anonymously expose an unreliable handyman, a cheating ex, a sexual predator. But there is no fact-checking. The sites often charge money to take down posts, even defamatory ones. And there is limited accountability. Ripoff Report, like the others, notes on its site that, thanks to Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, it isn't responsible for what its users post. "If someone posts false information about you on the Ripoff Report, the CDA prohibits you from holding us liable for the statements which others have written. You can always sue the author if you want, but you can't sue Ripoff Report just because we provide a forum for speech...." The Times found over 100 so-called "complaint" sites with more defamatory posts — Babcock's brother-in-law calculates there've been 12,000 made by the same person. The Times ultimately attributes the posts to a disgruntled employee fired by Mr. Babcock's father — in the year 1993 — who was now using a computer in a public library at the University of Toronto. "Under U.S. law, a foreign court generally can't force an American website to remove content..." the Times notes, leaving few options for the victims they'd interviewed. "Victims spent years begging Google, Pinterest and WordPress to take down the slanderous posts or at least make them harder to find. The companies rarely did so, until I contacted them to request comment for this article. Pinterest then removed photos... Automattic, which owns WordPress, deleted her blogs." But not Google Images.

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"Even with Friday's bounce, GameStop Corp. wrapped up its worst week on record as a stunning reversal of fortune wiped out $18 billion from the video-game retailer's stock-market value," reports Bloomberg: The stock fell 80% in the last five days, its worst weekly performance on record, to $63.77 in New York. The 19% gain on Friday after Robinhood Markets removed buying limits still left it far below last week's high of $483 as retail trader demand and excitement across platforms like Reddit simmered. GameStop's market value slipped to $4.4 billion, a far cry from the $33.7 billion value it hit on on January 28 when it briefly became the largest company in the Russell 2000 Index. AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which also had limits removed on trading, edged lower in Friday's session and capped off its worst week on record with a 48% drop... While GameStop has shed $29.2 billion in value since its peak, the stock is still up more than 200% this year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Denmark's government has agreed to take a majority stake in a 25 billion euro artificial "energy island," which is to be built 50 miles (80km) offshore, in the middle of the North Sea. The island to the west of the Jutland peninsula will initially have an area of 120,000 sq meters -- the size of 18 football pitches -- and in its first phase will be able to provide 3m households with green energy. It will be protected from North Sea storms on three sides by a high sea wall, with a dock for service vessels taking up the fourth side. In a broad deal struck on Wednesday night, the Social Democrat government agreed with its support parties and the rightwing opposition that the state should hold a 51% stake in the island, with the remainder held by the private sector. The project builds on an inter-party deal struck in June on energy policy, in which the parties agreed to construct two wind energy hubs, one artificial and another centered on the Baltic island of Bornholm. The two hubs will initially support 5GW of wind generation and triple Denmark's current installed offshore wind. The capacity will later be expanded to as much as 12GW.

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The fabric of spacetime may be frothing with gigantic gravitational waves, and the possibility has sent physicists into a tizzy. A potential signal seen in the light from dead stellar cores known as pulsars has driven a flurry of theoretical papers speculating about exotic explanations. Scientific American reports: The most mundane, yet still quite sensational, possibility is that researchers working with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), which uses the galaxy as a colossal gravitational-wave detector, have finally seen a long-sought background signature produced when supermassive black holes crash and merge throughout the universe. Another interpretation would have it originating from a vibrating network of high-energy cosmic strings that could provide scientists with extremely detailed information about the fundamental constituents of physical reality. A third possibility posits that the collaboration has spotted the creation of countless small black holes at the dawn of time, which could themselves account for the mysterious substance known as dark matter. [...] The NANOGrav collaboration still needs to confirm that it is in fact seeing gravitational waves. And the shape of those gravitational waves' spectrum has yet to be traced out and found to conform to the cosmic string interpretation, each of which is likely to take years. Meanwhile, another contingent of the physics community has suggested that the signal could originate from entities known as primordial black holes. Unlike regular black holes, which are born when gigantic stars die, these would form in the early universe, when matter and energy were nonuniformly scattered through the cosmos as a consequence of processes that occurred at the end of inflation. Certain overdense areas could collapse under their own weight, generating black holes in a variety of sizes. Observations from LIGO and Virgo that could indicate mergers between primordial black holes have already planted the idea in many researchers' minds that these strange objects are more than speculative fictions. Certain theorists like them because, as entities that give off no light, they could account for some or even all of the dark matter in the universe. Along with two co-authors, Riotto has written a third paper appearing in PRL showing how the NANOGrav signal could be accounted for by a multitude of black holes the size of asteroids being created shortly after the big bang, producing a gravitational wave relic that would travel to us in the modern day. According to the researchers' model, these miniature primordial black holes could comprise up to 100 percent of the dark matter in the universe. [...] Nevertheless, the burst of theoretical activity shows how seriously physicists are taking these results. NANOGrav researchers have another two and a half years of pulsar data they are combing through, which could help distinguish whether some or a combination of all these explanations might be viable.

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A new quantum sensor can analyze the full spectrum of radio frequency and real-world signals, unleashing new potentials for soldier communications, spectrum awareness and electronic warfare. Phys.Org reports: Army researchers built the quantum sensor, which can sample the radio-frequency spectrum -- from zero frequency up to 20 GHz -- and detect AM and FM radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other communication signals. The Rydberg sensor uses laser beams to create highly-excited Rydberg atoms directly above a microwave circuit, to boost and hone in on the portion of the spectrum being measured. The Rydberg atoms are sensitive to the circuit's voltage, enabling the device to be used as a sensitive probe for the wide range of signals in the RF spectrum. The Rydberg spectrum analyzer has the potential to surpass fundamental limitations of traditional electronics in sensitivity, bandwidth and frequency range. Because of this, the lab's Rydberg spectrum analyzer and other quantum sensors have the potential to unlock a new frontier of Army sensors for spectrum awareness, electronic warfare, sensing and communications -- part of the Army's modernization strategy. The peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Applied published the researchers' findings, Waveguide-coupled Rydberg spectrum analyzer from 0 to 20 GigaHerz, co-authored by Army researchers Drs. David Meyer, Paul Kunz, and Kevin Cox.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the incoming Democrat head of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, introduced an omnibus bill signaling a pitched battle over the future of antitrust law. The law takes aim not just at big tech companies, but potentially all large companies. According to experts Motherboard spoke with, some parts of the bill offer ambitious changes to antitrust law, but others adhere to a framework that has undermined enforcing antitrust law for too long already. At its core, the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act essentially combines legislation Klobuchar has proposed over the past few years as well as some that Senate Democrats have been considering. It takes a harder stance on anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions, and also promises to empower the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division to aggressively enforce antitrust law. Some of the bill's key proposals concern amendments and provisions to the Clayton Act of 1914, an antitrust law that made certain anticompetitive practices such as price discrimination outright illegal. In her omnibus bill, one key proposal seeks to strengthen anticompetitive merger enforcement by amending the Clayton Act to outright ban mergers that "create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition," as well as mergers that create monopsonies (buyers or employers who can suppress prices or wages via anti-competitive practices targeting other buyers or employers). Klobuchar's merger prohibitions also shift the burden of proof to the merging companies, which would have to prove a deal would not be anticompetitive, or create a monopoly or monopsony. In part, this means deals where a merger (or acquisition) yielded over 50 percent market share, where a transaction is valued over $5 billion, or where an acquisition worth over $50 million by a company valued over $100 billion would be presumed illegal. This move won her some praise from experts who praised its clear presumptive bar on large mergers. Other key proposals, however, that have raised concerns among antitrust advocates who are seeking larger structural changes.

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Italian YouTuber Otto Climan modded an original Game Boy Color handheld to act as an Apple TV remote. Gizmodo reports: Otto Climan started with an original Game Boy Color handheld that they upgraded with a backlit LCD display because the GBC arrived well before Nintendo stopped using dim screens that strained your eyes. For the custom white case adorned with Apple's older rainbow logo, Climan turned to a company called Retro Modding that supplied him with matching white buttons and, more importantly, a matching white flash cartridge. The cartridge looks like a standard GB/GBC game cartridge, but it includes a slot for a microSD card and the ability to run ROM files from it. While some ne'er-do-wells use these flash carts to play games, Climan instead developed his own ROM file capable of controlling the Game Boy Color's IR port, which was originally used to transfer game data between devices. The newer and much-maligned Apple TV remote with the touchpad works over Bluetooth, but Apple retained the IR capabilities of previous Apple TV boxes so the streaming player can still control other devices like TVs. Getting the Game Boy Color to talk to the Apple TV was relatively straightforward (all the codes that Apple uses for its boxes and remotes to talk are easy to find online), but it apparently did require some overclocking of the GBC's processor, which is a trick some games used decades ago. Because the added TV remote functionality comes through a ROM file running on a flash cart, the Game Boy Color still works like a stock GBC and can play other games by just swapping the cart. You can watch Climan's video here.

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According to Billboard, SoundCloud is preparing to introduce a new payment system that would allow fans to pay artists directly. From the report: The move would make SoundCloud the first major music streaming service to embrace a direct payment model, a strategy that has been popular with Chinese streaming services like Tencent Music's QQ Music for years, and one that subscription services like Patreon and OnlyFans have built their businesses around, as musicians and fans around the world clamor for bigger digital music distributors to do the same. A source close to the company says SoundCloud is still exploring several alternative streaming payout models and will announce its plans before the end of the first quarter of 2021. SoundCloud declined to comment. The new model will be a big shift for SoundCloud, which currently utilizes a "pro-rata" model, the same method used by all major streaming services, pooling subscriber revenue and doling out earnings to the artists who brought in the most streams, directing most of the revenue to the world's biggest acts. SoundCloud's 175 million monthly users now have the option to pay up to $10 a month for the company's on-demand streaming service SoundCloud Go+, but their payments aren't distributed to artists based on who they personally listen to, and they can't "tip" or steer their subscription fees toward their favorite acts.

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