More children have been absent from school this academic year than a year earlier, with attendance declining as the pandemic wears on, new research and data show. From a report: Students attending school in person as well as those learning remotely are struggling with poor attendance, though it is worse among the millions of homebound students who are still learning primarily through a screen. Districts showed a 2.3% decline in average daily attendance nationally from September to November of last year, compared with the same period in 2019, according to data from PowerSchool, which tracks grades and attendance for schools. Attendance fell in 75% of the districts as the year wore on, dropping by 1.5% on average each month, data show. The data covers 2,700 districts that include more than 2.5 million students learning in person and online. Limited data from some states and districts shows that students learning remotely -- especially students of color, special needs and elementary school students -- were attending school less often compared with their in-school classmates. The data deepens concerns that the lengthy school closures will widen the pre-pandemic academic achievement gaps between poor students and others. About 56% of school districts were exclusively remote as of Dec. 18, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Washington focused on improving public education in the U.S. The barriers for students learning online continue to include problems with internet connectivity and access to devices.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Over the last two years, the government of Pakistan has forced Google and Apple to take down apps in the country created by developers based in other nations who are part of a repressed religious minority. The move is part of a crackdown led by the country's telecommunications regulator targeting the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. Adherents, called Ahmadis, number about 4 million in Pakistan. Though Ahmadis identify as Muslim, Pakistan's government views them as heretics, and a 1984 ordinance forbids them from "posing" as Muslims, adopting Islamic religious practices, and referring to their houses of worship as mosques. Pakistan is the only country to declare that Ahmadis are not Muslim. Ahmadis have faced persecution for decades, including an attack in 2010 that killed 93 people. But the pressure on multinational tech companies from Pakistan's telecom regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), signals a new willingness to target religious minorities beyond its borders. It is also one of the first examples of governments using anti-blasphemy rules to force international tech companies to censor content. At issue are seven religious apps created by the Ahmadi community in the United States, published under the name "Ahmadiyya Muslim Community." Three of the apps contain "the exact same [Arabic] text found universally in all versions of the Holy Quran," as well as commentary from the Ahmadi perspective, according to their descriptions. They are still available on app stores in other countries. All of these have been taken down by Google in Pakistan. In addition, there are four other apps, which include an FAQ on Islam and a weekly Urdu-language news magazine, that the PTA is pressuring Google to remove, but which have not been taken down.

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Google has launched a limited version of its News Showcase in Australia despite threatening to pull Search from the nation a fortnight ago. ZDNet reports: News Showcase, Google claims, provides an "enhanced view" of articles, and aims to give participating news publishers more ways to share important news to readers while having "more direct control of presentation and branding." The product will appear across Google News on Android, iOS and the mobile web, and in Discover on iOS. As part of the initial version of News Showcase in Australia, seven local news publishers have partnered with the search giant, Google APAC news, web and publishing head Kate Beddoe said in a blog post. "The initial publishers featured in today's launch were among the first globally to sign up, providing early feedback and input on how the product could help bring their journalism to the fore for readers," she said. The Australian publications included in the initial version of Google News Showcase are The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily, and The Conversation.

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The iconic Empire State Building that has crowned Midtown Manhattan since the early 1930s is now a game changer in American architecture in a different way: by becoming completely powered with renewable energy. The Hill reports: Announced on Wednesday, Empire State Realty Trust (ESRT) confirmed that it struck a three-year contract with Green Mountain Energy to power its entire commercial real estate portfolio with renewable wind electricity. This reportedly makes ESRT the largest user of green power in U.S. real estate. Green Mountain Energy, based out of Vermont, is a leading sustainable energy provider, offering plans with public and private real estate groups using solar panels and wind turbines as the source of electricity. ESRT controls more than 10.1 million square feet of real estate, all of which will be powered by renewable energy for the next three years. This switch will spare about 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. This is roughly the equivalent of every New York State household turning off all of their lights for an entire month. Prior to this partnership, the Empire State Building underwent renovations a decade ago to help convert the building to be more environmentally friendly, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in energy usage prior to the contract with Green Mountain.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Magma was developed by Facebook to help telecom operators deploy mobile networks quickly and easily. The project, which Facebook open-sourced in 2019, does this by providing a software-centric distributed mobile packet core and tools for automating network management. This containerized network function integrates with the existing back end of a mobile network and makes it easy to launch new services at the network edge. Magma operators can build and augment modern and efficient mobile networks at scale. It integrates with existing LTE and newly minted 5G networks. Several Magma community members are also collaborating in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)'s Open Core Network project group. The plan is to define, build, test, and deploy core network products that integrate Magma with TIP Open Core disaggregated hardware and software solutions. The Linux Foundation will help oversee this new stage in Magma's organizational future. Magma will be managed under a neutral governance framework at the Linux Foundation. Arm, Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, FreedomFi, Qualcomm, the Institute of Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University, the OpenAirInterface(OAI) Software Alliance, and the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF). You may ask, since Magma is already working with OIF, which is something of a Linux Foundation rival, why Magma will be working with both? Arpit Joshipura, the Linux Foundation's general manager of Networking, Edge, and IoT, explained, "Magma has gotten great community support from several ecosystem players and foundations including OIF, OAI etc. What we are announcing today is the next evolution of the project where the actual hosting of the project is being set up under the Linux Foundation with neutral governance that has been accepted by the community for a long time. OIF, OAI, and LF will work with their communities of Software Developers to contribute to Magma's core project."

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Samsung is considering Austin, Texas, as the site for a new $17 billion chip plant that the South Korean firm said could create 1,800 jobs, according to documents filed with Texas state officials. Reuters reports: The documents say the project would involve building out 7 million square feet (650,000 square meters) of new space on a 640-acre (259-hectare) site that the company already owns. The company has an existing chip plant in Austin that makes computing chips. Samsung's filing said it plans to make "advanced logic devices" for outside customers at the facility, meaning it would aim to make the smallest, fastest kinds of computing chips. Samsung said in its filings that if Austin is selected, the company would break ground on the site in the second quarter of this year and that the plant will become operational in the third quarter of 2023.

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Google has blocked The Great Suspender extension from the Chrome store "because it contains malware." The extension was very popular for users running Chrome with 8GB or less of RAM, as it would automatically suspend tabs you hadn't used in a while, freeing up precious memory and CPU power. It would then allow you to return to the tab and reload back to where you were. Mishaal Rahman writes via XDA Developers: For some people, this isn't news. Since November of 2020, close followers of the extension have warned that it may be running malicious code. The old maintainer of the extension sold it to an unknown party in June of 2020, and users alleged that the unknown party quietly slipped some trackers into version 7.1.8 of the extension. Although version 7.1.9 removed the tracker, many users were understandably suspicious of the extension. Then in early January of this year, multiple media outlets picked up on the news, and many, including myself, decided to ditch it. Earlier today, however, Google pulled the plug entirely on the popular Chrome extension, forcibly removing The Great Suspender from people's Chrome installations and removing the extension's listing on the Chrome Web Store. You can recover your suspended tabs by opening up your search history and searching for "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg." If that doesn't work, you can try the other options outlined in this GitHub post. Some alternatives to The Great Suspender, as recommended by XDA Developers community member TheMageKing, include: Tabs Outliner, Auto Tab Discard, or Session Buddy.

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President Joe Biden's nominee for Commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, said she knows of "no reason" why Huawei and other Chinese companies shouldn't remain on a restricted trade list. From a report: Raimondo, in written questions from Senate Republicans, was asked about the company, as well as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and others. They are on a list that requires U.S. firms to obtain government licenses if they want to sell American tech and intellectual property to the companies. "I understand that parties are placed on the Entity List and the Military End User List generally because they pose a risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests," said Raimondo, the Democratic governor of Rhode Island. "I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new company called Metalenz, which emerges from stealth mode today, is looking to disrupt smartphone cameras with a single, flat lens system that utilizes a technology called optical metasurfaces. A camera built around this new lens tech can produce an image of the same if not better quality as traditional lenses, collect more light for brighter photos, and can even enable new forms of sensing in phones, all while taking up less space. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metalenz's design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1x1 to 3x3 millimeter in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you'll see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems. The core technology was formed through a decade of research when cofounder and CEO Robert Devlin was working on his PhD at Harvard University with acclaimed physicist and Metalenz cofounder Federico Capasso. The company was spun out of the research group in 2017. Light passes through these patterned nanostructures, which look like millions of circles with differing diameters at the microscopic level. The resulting image quality is just as sharp as what you'd get from a multilens system, and the nanostructures do the job of reducing or eliminating many of the image-degrading aberrations common to traditional cameras. And the design doesn't just conserve space. Devlin says a Metalenz camera can deliver more light back to the image sensor, allowing for brighter and sharper images than what you'd get with traditional lens elements. Another benefit? The company has formed partnerships with two semiconductor leaders (that can currently produce a million Metalenz "chips" a day), meaning the optics are made in the same foundries that manufacture consumer and industrial devices -- an important step in simplifying the supply chain. Metalenz will go into mass production toward the end of the year. Its first application will be to serve as the lens system of a 3D sensor in a smartphone. (The company did not give the name of the phone maker.)

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23andMe is becoming a publicly-traded company through a merger with Virgin's VG Acquisition. Engadget reports: The deal values 23andMe at about $3.5 billion and should give the company the finances it wants to boost its personal healthcare and therapeutics plans. It should have over $900 million in cash, for instance. The merger is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021 and will have private $25 million investments from both 23andMe chief Anne Wojcicki and Virgin's Sir Richard Branson. While 23andMe didn't say much about how its strategy might change by going public, it was keen to promote its contributions to genetic research and its involvement in therapeutic programs for conditions like cardiovascular disease and respiratory issues. As Sir Branson suggested, the public offering could help 23andMe "revolutionize" personalized medicine.

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According to a new study, the Apple Watch can be used to monitor symptoms of Parkinson's disease. STAT reports: Researchers at Apple, working with specialists who treat Parkinson's, designed a system that uses the Apple Watch to detect the motor symptoms that are a hallmark of the neurological disease. By monitoring resting tremors and other involuntary movements, the researchers were able to identify the characteristic "on" and "off" patterns of medication's effects. Their findings were published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. The new system, called the Motor Fluctuations Monitor for Parkinson's disease (MM4PD), uses the Apple Watch's accelerometer and gyroscope data to detect the presence of resting tremor or dyskinesia. Resting tremors, which can affect the hands, legs, and other parts of the body, are a common symptom of Parkinson's. Dyskinesia, another type of involuntary movement, is a frequent side effect of medication used to treat the disease. The algorithms underlying the model were developed using data from a pilot study with 118 people in which researchers matched subject's smartwatch data to a scoring system called MDS-UPDRS Part III, the gold standard by which motor symptoms of Parkinson's are measured. The authors say that the measurements helped spot symptoms missed in regular care and identified changes after subjects underwent surgery for deep brain stimulation. The paper also suggests the tool helped pinpoint people who slipped on medication adherence, as well as cases in which a person might benefit from a modified medication regimen.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SolarWinds, the previously little-known company whose network-monitoring tool Orion was a primary vector for one of the most serious breaches in US history, has pushed out fixes for three severe vulnerabilities. Martin Rakhmanov, a researcher with Trustwave SpiderLabs, said in a blog post on Wednesday that he began analyzing SolarWinds products shortly after FireEye and Microsoft reported that hackers had taken control of SolarWinds' software development system and used it to distribute backdoored updates to Orion customers. It didn't take long for him to find three vulnerabilities, two in Orion and a third in a product known as the Serv-U FTP for Windows. There's no evidence any of the vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild. The most serious flaw allows unprivileged users to remotely execute code that takes complete control of the underlying operating system. Tracked as CVE-2021-25274 the vulnerability stems from Orion's use of the Microsoft Message Queue, a tool that has existed for more than 20 years but is no longer installed by default on Windows machines. [...] The second Orion vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-25275, is the result of Orion storing database credentials in an insecure manner. Specifically, Orion keeps the credentials in a file that's readable by unprivileged users. Rakhmanov facetiously called this "Database Credentials for Everyone." While the files cryptographically protect the passwords, the researcher was able to find code that converts the password to plaintext. The result: anyone who can log in to a box locally or through the Remote Desktop Protocol can gain the credentials for the SolarWindsOrionDatabaseUser. The third vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-25276, resides in the Serv-U FTP for Windows. The program stores details for each account in a separate file. Those files can be created by any authenticated Windows user. Rakhmanov wrote: "Specifically, anyone who can log in locally or via Remote Desktop can just drop a file that defines a new user, and the Serv-U FTP will automatically pick it up. Next, since we can create any Serv-U FTP user, it makes sense to define an admin account by setting a simple field in the file and then set the home directory to the root of C:\ drive. Now we can log in via FTP and read or replace any file on the C:\ since the FTP server runs as LocalSystem." Fixes for Orion and Serv-U FTP are available here and here.

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hcs_$reboot shares a report from The New York Times: Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation and three of its popular anchors are the targets of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed on Thursday by Smartmatic, a company that became a prominent subject of discredited theories about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic, an election technology company, filed the suit in New York State Supreme Court against the Fox Corporation, Fox News, and the anchors Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. As part of the same action, the company is suing Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who made the case for election fraud as guests on Fox programs while representing President Donald J. Trump. In its 276-page complaint, Smartmatic argues that Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell "created a story about Smartmatic" and that "Fox joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic and its election technology and software." Smartmatic, which provided services for the 2020 election in only one county, filed its suit in the tense aftermath of a vote that Mr. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly and falsely described as rigged or stolen. Smartmatic is seeking damages of "no less than $2.7 billion," the complaint says, and is requesting a jury trial. In a statement to CNN, Powell said: "I have not received notice or a copy of this alleged lawsuit. However, your characterization of the claims shows that this is just another political maneuver motivated by the radical left that has no basis in fact or law."

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Amazon drivers at some U.S. facilities will soon have an extra set of eyes watching them when they hit the road to make their daily deliveries. From a report: The company recently began testing AI-equipped cameras in vehicles to monitor contracted delivery drivers while they're on the job, with the aim of improving safety. Amazon has deployed the cameras in Amazon-branded cargo vans used by a handful of companies that are part of its delivery service partner program, which are largely responsible for last-mile deliveries. The cameras could be rolled out to additional DSPs over time, and Amazon has already distributed an instructional video to DSPs, informing them of how the cameras work. Deborah Bass, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed to CNBC that the company has begun using the AI-equipped cameras across its delivery fleet. Some details of Amazon's plans were previously reported by The Information. "We are investing in safety across our operations and recently started rolling out industry leading camera-based safety technology across our delivery fleet," Bass said in a statement. "This technology will provide drivers real-time alerts to help them stay safe when they are on the road."

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SpaceX disclosed in a public filing on Thursday that its Starlink satellite internet service now has "over 10,000 users in the United States and abroad." From a report: "Starlink's performance is not theoretical or experimental ... [and] is rapidly accelerating in real time as part of its public beta program," SpaceX wrote in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission. Elon Musk's company began a public beta program of Starlink in October, with service priced at $99 a month, in addition to a $499 upfront cost to order the Starlink Kit, which includes a user terminal and Wi-Fi router to connect to the satellites.

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Spotify again signaled its interest in developing new ways to monetize its investments in podcasts. From a report: In the company's fourth-quarter earnings, chief executive Daniel Ek suggested the streaming media company foresees a future where there will be multiple business models for podcasts, including, potentially, both ad-supported subscriptions and a la carte options. We understand Spotify's plans for these expanded monetization models around podcasts could be introduced in some capacity later this month at its forthcoming "Stream On" livestream event. The company revealed during earnings its podcast catalog has grown to now 2.2 million programs, said itâ(TM)s seen increasing demand for the audio format in recent months. For example, 25% of Spotify's monthly active users now engage with podcasts, up from 22% just last quarter. Podcast consumption is also increasing, with listening hours having nearly doubled year-over-year in the fourth quarter.

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The Google-sponsored Chromium project has cleaned up its act, and the result is a marked decline in queries to DNS root servers. From a report: As The Register reported in August 2020, Chromium-based browsers generate a lot of DNS traffic as they try to determine if input into their omnibox is a domain name or a search query. Verisign engineers Matthew Thomas and Duane Wessels examined the resulting traffic and reached the conclusion that it accounted for up to 60 billion DNS queries every day. Wessels has since penned a new post that went unreported when it appeared on January 7 -- the day after the US Capitol riot -- but was today resurfaced by APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for the Asia-Pacific region. In the post he says the Chromium team redesigned its code to stop junk DNS requests, and released the update in Chromium 87. The result? "Before the software release, the root server system saw peaks of ~143 billion queries per day," he wrote. "Traffic volumes have since decreased to ~84 billion queries a day. This represents more than a 41 per cent reduction of total query volume."

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Several readers have shared this report: In what could be the nation's first such case, the city of San Francisco filed suit Wednesday against its own school district, demanding the restart of in-person instruction for more than 52,000 students. City Attorney Dennis Herrera named the San Francisco Board of Education, the San Francisco Unified School District and Superintendent Vincent Matthews as defendants in what the city says is an unprecedented legal fight between overlapping government agencies over how to reopen classes during the pandemic. Herrera said the board has had more than 10 months to develop a plan to get students back into classrooms and so far "they have earned an F." Students in districts just outside San Francisco and those enrolled in San Francisco private schools have all seen the inside of classrooms since the pandemic struck, unlike SFUSD pupils, the plaintiffs said. "Having a plan to make a plan doesn't cut it," the city attorney added. While some major metropolitan areas operate public schools from City Hall, virtually all California K-12 campuses come under the authority of local districts that are autonomous from city and county governments. San Francisco City Hall and the San Francisco Unified School District, and its school board, operate independently of each other. "This is not the path we would have chosen, but nothing matters more right now than getting our kids back in school," Mayor London Breed said. "The city has offered resources and staff to get our school facilities ready and to support testing for our educators." Representatives for the National School Boards Association, an advocacy group for public schools and local boards of education, said they believe San Francisco's lawsuit is the first civil action filed by a city against a district over Covid-19 closings. "Reopening decisions are very, very difficult, but they call for collaboration, not litigation," association CEO Anna Maria Chavez said in a statement. "Everyone wants students back in schools as soon as it is safe, but it must be a community decision based on local data that involves all of the key players from teachers and administrators to parents and local health officials." Further reading: San Francisco Vs San Francisco School Board: A Push To Get Students Back In School.

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