Xiaomi plunged a record 10% after the Trump administration blacklisted China's No. 2 smartphone maker and 10 other companies, broadening efforts to undercut the expansion of the country's technology sector. From a report, shared by dxxt: The U.S. has targeted scores of Chinese companies for the stated purpose of protecting national security, but going after Xiaomi was unexpected. The Beijing-based company has been viewed as China's answer to Apple, producing sleek smartphones that draw loyal fans with each new release. The company, which vies with Huawei Technologies for the title of China's No. 1 mobile device brand, also makes electric scooters, earphones and smart rice cookers. The U.S. Defense Dept. identified Xiaomi as one of nine companies with alleged ties to the Chinese military -- which means American investors will be prohibited from buying their securities and will have to divest holdings by November.

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Amazon.com is offering other companies the ability to use the building blocks of the Alexa digital assistant for their own automated versions, the latest effort to embed the company's voice software into other devices. From a report: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV will be the first to use Alexa Custom Assistant, relying on Amazon-built speech recognition and other software to power the automaker's in-car tools, Amazon said Friday in a statement. The retail and technology giant also invited other companies to customize the underlying Alexa system with their own wake word, voice and unique capabilities. Alexa is most closely associated with Echo smart speakers, but Amazon has been working to extend the software's reach, and fend off rivals like Apple and Alphabet's Google, by adding utility for tasks like home automation and the potentially lucrative and fiercely contested market for in-car software. Amazon, which lacks the massive base of captive smartphone users of its main rivals, has suggested voice assistants should be able to talk to one another. The company, like competitors, already offers for rent elements of the technology that powers its digital assistant, but Alexa Custom Assistant represents a more complete set of tools, Amazon said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A coalition of health and technology organizations are working to develop a digital COVID-19 vaccination passport to allow businesses, airlines and countries to check if people have received the vaccine. The Vaccination Credential Initiative, announced on Thursday, is formulating technology to confirm vaccinations in the likelihood that some governments will mandate people provide proof of their shots in order to enter the nation. The organization hopes the technology will allow people to "demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy." The initiative, which includes members like Microsoft, Oracle and U.S. nonprofit Mayo Clinic, is using the work from member Commons Project's international digital document that verifies a person has tested negative for COVID-19, the Financial Times reported. The Commons Project's technology, created in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, is being utilized by three major airline alliances. The coalition is reportedly in discussions with several governments to create a program requiring either negative tests or proof of vaccination to enter, Paul Meyer, the chief executive of The Commons Project, told the Times. The technology will need to allow patients to keep their data secure while being available in a digital wallet or a physical QR code for them to regulate who sees the information.

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Later this year, cryptocurrency exchange company Gemini is planning to launch a credit card that earns bitcoin rewards based on your purchases. It's based on the work done by Blockrize, a fintech startup which Gemini has acquired for an undisclosed sum. TechCrunch reports: The credit card will work like any other credit card and will be available in the U.S. Customers will earn up to 3% in bitcoin rewards (again, up to 3%). You'll be able to earn other crypto assets as well. Those rewards will be deposited on your Gemini account. This isn't the first time a company is announcing a credit card with bitcoin rewards. BlockFi already announced its own card back in December. Both companies have yet to launch their cards. As a comparison, BlockFi promises 1.5% rewards on fiat purchases. There's a $200 annual fee, but you get $250 back if you spend at least $3,000 with the card in the first three months. [...] Gemini customers can sign up to the waitlist today. Blockrize has been working on a credit card for some time. While it is now part of Gemini, people who previously signed up to Blockrize's waitlist are still on the waitlist.

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John Trumpian shares a report from Live Science: A man brewed a tea from "magic mushrooms" and injected the concoction into his veins; several days later, he ended up at the emergency department with the fungus growing in his blood. The man spent 22 days in the hospital, with eight of those days in the intensive care unit (ICU), where he received treatment for multisystem organ failure. Now released, he is still being treated with a long-term regimen of antibiotic and antifungal drugs, according to a description of the case published in the Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. The case didn't reveal whether injecting shroom tea can cause persistent psychoactive effects, as sometimes seen when people ingest the fungus orally, the doctors wrote in the report. [...] By injecting shrooms into his bloodstream, the 30-year-old patient had hoped to relieve symptoms of bipolar disorder and opioid dependence, according to the report. His family members noted that he had recently stopped adhering to his prescribed bipolar medications and was "cycling between depressive and manic states."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, showed that 2020 now ranks as the second-hottest year, with average temperatures hitting 58.77 degrees Fahrenheit -- a mere 0.04 degrees cooler than 2016, which holds the record. The Northern Hemisphere experienced its hottest year on record, surpassing the 20th century average by 2.3 degrees, according to NOAA. Oceans were also "exceptionally warm" last year, with record-high sea surface temperatures logged across parts of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. Above-average temperatures also shrank Arctic sea ice to near record lows, NOAA scientists said. Satellite observations revealed that Arctic sea ice in 2020 covered an average of 3.93 million square miles, tying 2016 for the smallest on record. Though NOAA has designated 2020 as the second-hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880, there are some discrepancies among other agencies that conduct similar measurements. A NASA analysis found that global average surface temperatures in 2020 tied with 2016, while the World Meteorological Organization still has 2016 in the lead. The discrepancies among these groups owe to subtle differences in how they account for data gaps over parts of the planet that lack reliable weather stations, such as in the polar regions or over wide swaths of the ocean. But experts say these small differences are inconsequential against the broader backdrop of global warming. The planet's seven warmest years on record have all been since 2014, according to NOAA, with 10 of the warmest years occurring since 2005.

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Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person's political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. TechCrunch reports: The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University's Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person's sexual preference could be predicted from facial data. [...] The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski's paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site's questionnaire. The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features -- as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren't necessary intuitive things like "eyebrow color" and "nose type" but more computer-native concepts. The system was given political affiliation data sourced from the people themselves, and with this it diligently began to study the differences between the facial stats of people identifying as conservatives and those identifying as liberal. Because it turns out, there are differences. Of course it's not as simple as "conservatives have bushier eyebrows" or "liberals frown more." Nor does it come down to demographics, which would make things too easy and simple. After all, if political party identification correlates with both age and skin color, that makes for a simple prediction algorithm right there. But although the software mechanisms used by Kosinski are quite standard, he was careful to cover his bases in order that this study, like the last one, can't be dismissed as pseudoscience. The most obvious way of addressing this is by having the system make guesses as to the political party of people of the same age, gender and ethnicity. The test involved being presented with two faces, one of each party, and guessing which was which. Obviously chance accuracy is 50%. Humans aren't very good at this task, performing only slightly above chance, about 55% accurate. The algorithm managed to reach as high as 71% accurate when predicting political party between two like individuals, and 73% presented with two individuals of any age, ethnicity or gender (but still guaranteed to be one conservative, one liberal).

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A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was charged Thursday with hiding work he did for the Chinese government while he was also collecting U.S. dollars for his nanotechnology research. The Associate Press reports: Gang Chen, 56, was arrested by federal agents at his home in Cambridge on charges including wire fraud, officials said. While working for MIT, Chen entered into undisclosed contracts and held appointments with Chinese entities, including acting as an "overseas expert" for the Chinese government at the request of the People's Republic of China Consulate Office in New York, authorities said. Many of those roles were "expressly intended to further the PRC's scientific and technological goals," authorities said in court documents. Chen did not disclose his connections to China, as is required on federal grant applications, authorities said. He and his research group collected about $29 million in foreign dollars, including millions from a Chinese government funded university funded, while getting $19 million in grants from U.S federal agencies for his work at MIT since 2013, authorities said. "It is not illegal to collaborate with foreign researchers. It is illegal to lie about it," Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling told reporters. Chen's attorney said the professor "loves the United States and looks forward to vigorously defending these allegations." MIT said it is "deeply distressed" by Chen's arrest. "MIT believes the integrity of research is a fundamental responsibility, and we take seriously concerns about improper influence in U.S. research. Prof. Chen is a long-serving and highly respected member of the research community, which makes the government's allegations against him all the more distressing," the school said in a statement.

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An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command. Bleeping Computer reports: In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed. When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records. The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version. What's worse is, the vulnerability can be triggered by standard and low privileged user accounts on Windows 10 systems. [...] It is unclear why accessing this attribute corrupts the drive, and Jonas told BleepingComputer that a Registry key that would help diagnose the issue doesn't work. One striking finding shared by Jonas with us was that a crafted Windows shortcut file (.url) that had its icon location set to C:\:$i30:$bitmap would trigger the vulnerability even if the user never opened the file! As observed by BleepingComputer, as soon as this shortcut file is downloaded on a Windows 10 PC, and the user views the folder it is present in, Windows Explorer will attempt to display the file's icon. To do this, Windows Explorer would attempt to access the crafted icon path inside the file in the background, thereby corrupting the NTFS hard drive in the process. Next, "restart to repair hard drive" notifications start popping up on the Windows PC -- all this without the user even having opened or double-clicked on the shortcut file.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Aljazeera: Tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, a former presidential contender, officially declared his run for New York City mayor. In a campaign video released late Wednesday on Twitter, Yang put forth an agenda that included a guaranteed minimum income, bringing universal high-speed Internet, starting a "people's bank" and reopening New York City "intelligently" from the pandemic. "I moved to New York City 25 years ago," he said in the video. "I came of age, fell in love, and became a father here. Seeing our city in so much pain breaks my heart." His agenda includes a focus on New York City's nightlife. On his campaign website, Yang pledges to make permanent outdoor dining, "to-go cocktails" and other temporary measures put in place during the pandemic. He also says he wants to attract so-called TikTok hype houses, where social-media influencers live together in big mansions and shoot videos together. Yang's basic income program would start by providing $2,000 a year to half a million New Yorkers in extreme poverty. Participants would receive the cash through monthly transfers to a bank account opened in their name at a newly-created "People's Bank." His most detailed policy focuses on reviving the city's small businesses. He pledged to open 15,000 small businesses by 2022 and also offered a bevy of unconventional ideas, including buying heaters in bulk and then selling them to restaurants that are serving customers in the frigid outdoors as indoor dining remains shut. He also suggested the city make an investment in Cinch Market, a Brooklyn startup that brings together small businesses on one online platform, whose tagline is "Shop Brooklyn Not Bezo$." Yang, 46, whose two kids attend public school in the city, also said he wanted to subsidize broadband for schools, expand the city's universal preschool program, and reform the school system's admissions process. "There will be no recovery without schools being open and teaching children safely every day," he said.

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AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: When Apple revived MagSafe with the iPhone 12 lineup, one question brought up was how these latest devices with more magnets would interact with medical devices like pacemakers. Apple's official word was that iPhone 12/MagSafe wouldn't interfere more than previous iPhones. Now one of the first medical studies has been published by the Heart Rhythm Journal that saw a Medtronic pacemaker deactivated by holding an iPhone 12 near it (via MacMagazine. It doesn't sound like there is concrete evidence that iPhone 12 and MagSafe do pose a greater risk of increased interference but with this study out now, we may see more testing in the medical field to find out for sure. Of course it's not just iPhones or smartphones that can create interference issues, it can be any item that contains magnets strong enough create a problem. As you'd expect, the short-term solution is to keep iPhones and other devices away from pacemakers and other similar medical devices. However, reported by Medical Xpress, Medtronic and others are likely looking to shift away from the reliance on magnets in future devices: "Unless companies like Medtronic get on board and move to smarter device configuration options, they will continue to butt heads with consumer devices -- and they will continue to lose. Smarter options don't have to be expensive; just look at your cheap IR TV remote or ultrasonic receiver-emitter pair. These devices simply work. They use an uncomplicated code to make sure there is no interference from all the other ambient sources that are invariably present. A couple of secure ultrasonic bits superimposed on your basic 40 khz carrier waves is all that is really needed. It is likely that companies like Medtronic are working on solutions like this; for example, a Medtronic programming head of some sort can be had on Ebay at the moment for a mere $34.99."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today Google's senior VP of Hardware, Rick Osterloh, announced Google has closed its acquisition of Fitbit. The $2.1 billion deal was announced back in November 2019, which kicked off a regulatory review process from governments around the world concerned about Google's influence over the Internet and the data it can collect on users. Normally, Osterloh announcing "Google has completed its acquisition of Fitbit, and I want to personally welcome this talented team to Google" would mean Google has cleared its worldwide regulatory gauntlet. Google's announcement today is highly unusual since the DOJ has not yet cleared the deal. As the US Department of Justice told New York Times reporter Cecilia Kang, "The Antitrust Division's investigation of Google's acquisition of Fitbit remains ongoing." Australian regulators also haven't announced a final decision on the merger. It also seems particularly provocative for Google to do something like this while it is also dealing with a DOJ antitrust investigation. Fitbit's CEO, president, and co-founder, James Park, also has a blog post today, saying "many of the things you know and love about Fitbit will remain the same. We'll stay committed to doing what's right, to putting your health and wellness at the center of everything we do, and to offering a no-one-size-fits-all approach with choices that work across both Android and iOS." [...] Google's side of the story is laid out in the blog post, with Osterloh saying "This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we've been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users' privacy... Fitbit users' health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data." Google also says it won't do anything crazy with Android, like lock all Android phones exclusively to Fitbit wearables, which apparently was something the EU was worried about.

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After Twitter banned President Trump's account last week, the site and its executives, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, were largely silent in justifying their decision. That changed last night when Dorsey, in a series of tweets, explained that he felt banning Trump's account was the right move for the social network. The Verge reports: "Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all," he wrote. Dorsey blamed Twitter's failure "to promote healthy conversation," acknowledged that Twitter needs to "look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement," and said that social platforms needed more transparency around moderation. Then, Dorsey plugged an effort to build a decentralized standard for social media he began in 2019 when he sought to hire five engineers to work on it. That's how, eight tweets into a thread on why his company banned Donald Trump, the CEO of Twitter managed to change the subject to his passion for bitcoin. Banning the RealDonaldTrump Twitter account had "real and significant ramifications," Dorsey wrote. Dorsey said that the widespread suspension of the president by many platforms challenged the notion that if people didn't like Twitter's rules, they could simply go somewhere else. And though the president can issue a press release or call a press conference whenever he wishes -- or simply go on television -- Dorsey expressed concern that the enforcement actions might "erode a free and open global internet." And that was when bitcoin came up. Dorsey is also CEO of Square, an internet payment company, that bought $50 million of bitcoin as part of a bet on cryptocurrency. Square has accepted bitcoin since 2014. According to Dorsey, bitcoin provides a model for a decentralized model for social media. Dorsey did not elaborate on how such a network might address Twitter's failures in moderation, creating healthy conversations, or provide for more consistent policy enforcment. "It's important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world," Dorsey wrote on Twitter. "Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth. I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this."

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The higher a person's income, the more likely they were to protect themselves at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Johns Hopkins University economists find. From a report: When it comes to adopting behaviors including social distancing and mask wearing, the team detected a striking link to their financial well-being. People who made around $230,000 a year were as much as 54% more likely to increase these types of self-protective behaviors compared to people making about $13,000. The findings, that could contribute to more accurate predictions of how the disease will spread, appear in the latest Journal of Population Economics. As part of a six-country survey, 1,000 people in the United States, from Texas, Florida, California and New York, were asked a series of questions in April 2020 to determine if and how their behavior had changed as Covid-19 cases were beginning to spike across the country. The resulting data includes information on income, gender and race along with unique variables relevant to the pandemic, such as work arrangements and housing quality. The team, which included economics graduate student Matthew Zahn, found that while almost everyone changed their behavior in some way to try to stay safe, people making the most money made the most changes. The highest earners were 13% more likely to change their behaviors, 32% more likely to increase social distancing and 30% more likely to increase hand washing and mask wearing. But the team found it was also much easier for people with more money to take extra safety measures. Higher-income individuals were more likely to report being able to work from home and more likely to have transitioned to telework instead of losing their job. The researchers found the ability to telework emerged as a huge predictor of whether someone would social distance. Compared to somebody who continued to work, people able to telework were 24% more likely to social distance.

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Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn't much else to do. From a report: Buchanan had an idea for a social media site about movies. At the time, he reflected, he used Flickr to share photos and Last.fm to share his taste in music. IMDb was a database; it wasn't, in essence, social. That left a gap in the field. The result was an app and social media network called Letterboxd, which its website describes, aptly, as "Goodreads for film." After it was introduced at the web conference Brooklyn Beta in the fall of 2011, Letterboxd steadily developed a modest but passionate following of film fans eager to track their movie-watching habits, create lists of favorites, and write and publish reviews. In 2020, however, the site's growth was explosive. Letterboxd has seen its user base nearly double since the beginning of the pandemic: They now have more than 3 million member accounts, according to the company, up from 1.7 million at this time last year. The pandemic has ravaged the movie industry, as theaters have remained mostly shuttered and high-profile would-be blockbusters like "Tenet" have drastically underperformed. But for Letterboxd, all that time at home has been a boon. "We love talking about movies," said Gemma Gracewood, Letterboxd's editor in chief. "And we're talking even more about what we love lately because we're all stuck indoors." In the beginning, Letterboxd mainly attracted film obsessives: hard-core cinephiles, stats fanatics and professional critics looking to house their published work under one roof. Mike D'Angelo, a longtime contributor to Entertainment Weekly and Esquire, used Letterboxd to retroactively log every movie he has seen, by date, since January 1992. In addition to uploading his old reviews to the platform, he uses the site as a kind of diary for more off-the-cuff musings.

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A coalition of public interest advocates is asking U.S. regulators to investigate whether Amazon.com violates consumer protection laws with its process for canceling Prime subscriptions. From a report: In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, a group led by Public Citizen said the steps required to cancel Prime "are designed to unfairly and deceptively undermine the will of the consumer," and may violate both FTC rules as well as other consumer protection laws. The letter draws on a complaint by Norway's consumer protection agency, which on Thursday asked Norwegian regulators to determine whether Amazon violated local law.

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Silicon Valley's leading lobby, the Internet Association, is struggling to manage the competing interests of the companies it represents just as the industry faces a tide of bipartisan anger. From a report: Tech will fight policy battles around antitrust, content moderation and privacy without a unified industry voice. Major tech firms have drawn attention in recent days for pressing pause on political donations in the wake of last week's deadly attack on the Capitol. But lobbying, the other major path for currying favor in Washington, hasn't been working for tech for a while. Too many firms working at cross purposes. The Internet Association was founded almost a decade ago to be Silicon Valley's voice in Washington. But now its biggest members -- companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon -- increasingly bump heads as they each seek to channel policymakers' fury away from themselves, and they can have wildly different goals from smaller members. Facebook, for instance, has signaled that it's open to new federal laws introducing privacy regulations and modest updates to Section 230, tech's liability shield. Smaller companies worry giants could handle the burden of complying while they'd struggle to survive.

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Blue Origin launched its first mission of 2021, flying its New Shepard rocket in West Texas to a medium height of just over 350,000 feet. From a report: This is the first flight for this particular booster, and for the capsule it carried, which was equipped with a range of new passenger safety, control and comfort systems that Blue Origin was testing during flight for the first time. Also on board was a life-sized test dummy called 'Mannequin Skywalker' that recorded information during the flight and landing that the Blue Origin will now review. Based on the video stream and commentary from the company, this looks like a very successful test, including a takeoff, booster separation, controlled landing burn and touchdown -- and a parachute-aided landing back on terra firma for the crew capsule. The mission didn't carry any real passengers, although there were 50,000 postcards on board from school kids globally that have now officially been to space (past the Karman line) which will be returned to those students via Blue Origin's non-profit 'Club for the Future.'

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Samsung committed a tech faux earlier this week when it issued a promotional tweet from an iPhone, the flagship handset made by a smartphone market arch rival. "With #SamsungUnpacked drawing closer, we're working hard to bring you some exciting news. Which field of innovation and advancement are you hoping to see us reveal?" Samsung asks in the tweet.

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Just ahead of its launch for commercial PC-like devices, an install image of Windows 10X for single screens has leaked, giving us an early peek at Microsoft's new OS. And yes, it's just like Chrome OS. From a report: Let's just get that out of the way. Microsoft has been working for years on a Chromebook competitor, but it has been largely unsuccessful. Windows 10 S, which was originally called Windows 10 Cloud, was Terry Myerson's approach, and that, of course, crashed and burned, in part because it looked identical to Windows 10 but couldn't run downloaded Windows 10 desktop applications. And now we have Windows 10X. Microsoft tried to hide its true intent with this product by pretending last year that it was aimed at a new generation of dual-display PCs, but the software giant really created 10X to compete with Chrome OS on inexpensive single-display PCs. So after failing to get its container-based Windows desktop application compatibility solution to work, Microsoft scaled back and repositioned Windows 10X as was originally intended: It will now ship only on new traditional PCs aimed at education and other commercial markets.

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