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Day traders on viral video app TikTok are encouraging people to speculate on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. Based on an old Internet meme -- an overly sincere and whimsically grammar-challenged Shiba Inu dog -- the digital coin was developed as a Bitcoin-spinoff in 2013, after which it quickly rose to prominence as a gag. From a report: The shenanigans of the cryptocurrency-pumpers appear to be working, at least for now. The price of Dogecoin has nearly doubled since July 6th, rising 95% to $0.00448 from $0.0023, according to data from OnChainFX, a cryptocurrency data tracker. The price of Dogecoin peaked in January 2018 at $0.013 before promptly crashing. It appears a flood of stuck-at-home market hypers is behind the push to hype the cryptocurrency. "Go invest in Dogecoin, make me rich," wrote one pumper. "They cant stop us all," encouraged another. Yet one more: "worth it. i swear #stocks #coins #dogecoin #money"

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Hackers hit honeypots hours after CISO downplays risk, proof-of-concept exploit code emerges

VIdeo This week Citrix tried to reassure everyone the 11 security flaws it just patched in its network perimeter products weren't all that bad. Well, we hope they're right because someone's scanning the internet looking for vulnerable installations.…

Google's campus security system subjected Black and Latinx workers to bias and prompted complaints to management, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the situation, leading the company to scrap a key part of the approach. From a report: The internet giant encouraged employees to check colleagues' ID badges on campus, and asked security staff to do the same. This went beyond the typical corporate office system where workers swipe badges to enter. The policy was designed to prevent unauthorized visitors and keep Google's open work areas safe. But some staffers told management that Black and Latinx workers had their badges checked more often than other employees, according to the people, who experienced this themselves or saw friends and colleagues go through it. As a result, these employees felt policed on campus in a similar way that they are under suspicion elsewhere in life, said the people, who weren't authorized to speak publicly about the issue. It's an example of the unconscious, or overlooked, biases that make working in Silicon Valley harder for minorities, the people added.

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Australian and British privacy regulators opened a joint probe into Clearview AI, saying they want to examine how the company's facial-recognition technology uses people's data, just days after the company suspended operations in Canada. From a report: The Australian Information Commissioner and the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office said they will focus on the company's use of "scraped" data and biometrics of individuals. Clearview is facing growing scrutiny of the billions of images it has scraped from social media platforms and how the New York-based company shares those with law enforcement agencies. It suspended a contract with its last Canadian client, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, after regulators there said they were investigating allegations Clearview collected personal information without consent and shared it with police. Clearview will cooperate with the U.K. and Australian regulators, Chief Executive Officer Hoan Ton-That said in a statement. The company searches publicly available photos from the Internet in accordance with applicable laws, he said.

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Trying to get an up close and personal look at the solar system's gas giants is a tricky and dangerous journey. From a report: Jupiter, like the other gas giants, doesn't have a rocky surface, but that doesn't mean it's just a massive cloud floating through the vacuum of space. It's made up of mostly helium and hydrogen, and as you move from the outer layers of the atmosphere toward the deeper parts, that gas grows denser and the pressures become more extreme. Temperatures quickly rise. In 1995, NASA's Galileo mission sent a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere; it broke up at about 75 miles in depth. Pressures here are over 100 times more intense than anything on Earth. At the innermost layers of Jupiter that are 13,000 miles deep, the pressure is 2 million times stronger than what's experienced at sea level on Earth, and temperatures are hotter than the sun's surface. So clearly, no human is going to be able to venture too far down into Jupiter's depths. But would it be safe to simply orbit the planet? Perhaps we could establish an orbital space station, right? Well, there's another big problem when it comes to Jupiter: radiation. The biggest planet in the solar system also boasts its most powerful magnetosphere. These magnetic fields charge up particles in the vicinity, accelerating them to extreme speeds that can fry a spacecraft's electronics in moments. Spaceflight engineers have to figure out an orbit and spacecraft design that will reduce the exposure to this radiation. NASA figured this out with the triple-arrayed, perpetually spinning Juno spacecraft, but it doesn't look as if this would be a feasible design for a human spacecraft. Instead, for a crewed spacecraft to safely orbit or fly past Jupiter, it would have to keep a pretty significant distance away from the planet.

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Apple today seeded the first public betas of upcoming iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14 updates to its public beta testing group, two weeks after first providing the updates to developers after the WWDC keynote.

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Tap-tap-tapping on lander's scoop

Engineers have hit pause on attempts make the Mars InSight lander's self-hammering mole dig into the red planet as boffins admit "the task is not likely to become easier."…

Days after it was rumored that Apple might not ship a charger with its next iPhone, Samsung is copying that, too. According to a new report from South Korea, future Samsung phones may not ship with a charger. From a report: Samsung ships hundreds of millions of smartphones every single year. Dropping the charger from even half of its lineup is going to result in major cost reductions for the company. It may also enable the company to price its affordable devices even more aggressively. According to the report, Samsung is discussing plans to exclude the charger from the box components for some smartphones. If it decides to go ahead with this, we might see the first Samsung phones to ship without a charger starting next year.

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Finnish firm might do best with telco clouds, says analyst

From enterprise behemoths to those desperately home-schooling, the appetite for cloud-based services shows no sign of faltering. Behind the scenes sit vendors like Nokia, which today unveiled its latest network operating system (NOS), which aims to simplify the process of automating and scaling data centre fabrics.…

The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales, according to the company's latest accounts. From a report: Revenue at Apple Retail UK, which operates 38 of the company's stores in the UK, rose by more than 15% in the 12 months to 28 September. But after costs and expenses of around $1.7bn, the firm reported before-tax profits of just $47m, slashing its tax bill significantly. In a statement describing itself as "the largest taxpayer in the world," Apple said that it always paid the taxes that it owed.

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What's in the box? Not mains charger, sources say

Samsung is reportedly considering unbundling mains chargers from some of its upcoming smartphones — supposedly because customers have enough of the things lying around already.…

Tesla's Elon Musk said the carmaker is on the verge of developing technology to render its vehicles fully capable of driving themselves, repeating a claim he's made for years but been unable to achieve. From a report: The chief executive officer has long offered exuberant takes on the capabilities of Tesla cars, even going so far as to start charging customers thousands of dollars for a "Full Self Driving" feature in 2016. Years later, Tesla still requires users of its Autopilot system to be fully attentive and ready to take over the task of driving at any time. Tesla's mixed messages have drawn controversy and regulatory scrutiny. In 2018, the company blamed a driver who died after crashing a Model X while using Autopilot for not paying attention to the road. Documents made public last year showed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had issued multiple subpoenas for information about crashes involving Tesla vehicles, suggesting the agency may have been preparing a formal investigation of Autopilot.

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Tune in this month to hear from Anomali – and get a handle on separating good data from clutter

Webcast The advantages of having decent threat intelligence in place are many and various, as the threat landscape continues to widen year-on-year.…

Microsoft today published technical details about a new security feature that will soon be part of Windows 10. From a report: Named Kernel Data Protection (KDP), Microsoft says this feature will block malware or malicious threat actors from modifying (corrupting) the operating system's memory. According to Microsoft, KDP works by giving developers access to programmatic APIs that will allow them to designate parts of the Windows kernel as read-only sections. "For example, we've seen attackers use signed but vulnerable drivers to attack policy data structures and install a malicious, unsigned driver," Microsoft's Base Kernel Team said today. "KDP mitigates such attacks by ensuring that policy data structures cannot be tampered with." Microsoft says this new technology was developed with security in mind but that it also has other applications, such as anti-cheat and digital rights management (DRM) software.

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Deep upset at what is perceived as broken commitments

Google's creation of an Open Usage Commons organisation to manage trademarks including that of Istio - a key open source project for many users of Kubernetes - has drawn harsh criticism from other tech giants unhappy with the new approach.…

UK universities are testing a new online teaching link for students in China -- which will require course materials to comply with Chinese restrictions on the internet. From a report: It enables students in China to keep studying UK degrees online, despite China's limits on internet access. But it means students can only reach material on an "allowed" list. Universities UK said it was "not aware of any instances when course content has been altered." And the universities' body rejected that this was accepting "censorship." A spokeswoman said the project would allow students in China to have better access to UK courses "while complying with local regulations." But in a separate essay published by the Higher Education Policy Institute, Professor Kerry Brown of King's College London cautioned of the risk of universities adopting "self-censorship" when engaging with China. MPs on the foreign affairs select committee have previously warned against universities avoiding "topics sensitive to China," such as pro-democracy protests or the treatment of Uighur Muslims. Chinese students have become an important source of revenue for UK universities, representing almost a quarter of all overseas students - and Queen's University Belfast is chartering a plane to bring students from China this autumn.

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Print it out, pop a stamp on it, stick it in a pillar box. Might have been quicker

Axe-happy Tsohost has found another way to upset its customers this week. Email, it appears, has taken a bit of a totter.…

Security researchers say a smartwatch, popular with the elderly and dementia patients, could have been tricked into letting an attacker easily take control of the device. From a report: These watches are designed to help patients to easily call their carers and for carers to track the location of their patients. They come with their own cellular connection, so that they work anywhere. But researchers at U.K.-based security firm Pen Test Partners found that they could trick the smartwatch into sending fake "take pills" reminders to patients as often as they want, they said. "A dementia sufferer is unlikely to remember that they had already taken their medication," wrote Vangelis Stykas in a blog post. "An overdose could easily result." The vulnerabilities were found in the back-end cloud system, known as SETracker, which powers the smartwatch.

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Are these the O-RAN-compliant goods you were looking for?

Samsung has made its open, virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) platform commercially available, allowing carriers to run the external components of a 5G network on off-the-shelf x86-based hardware.…

Oracle nemesis will be focusing on SkySQL cloud product

MySQL cousin MariaDB has grabbed $25m in funding in what represents something of a mini fight-back for good ol' relational databases against the NoSQL family of systems, according to the CEO.…