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Points finger at privilege escalation via application rights in Azure AD, which Microsoft says is as designed

Security company Malwarebytes suspects a breach of its Office 365 and Azure tenancies is by the same attacker behind the SolarWinds hack, but reckons flaws in Azure Active Directory security are also to blame.…

China is rushing to build a massive quarantine camp that can house more than 4,000 people, after an outbreak of Covid-19 this month that has left tens of millions of people under strict lockdown. From a report: The quarantine camp is located on the outskirts of Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei province, which surrounds the country's capital, Beijing. China has largely contained the spread of the virus, with much of the country returning to normal. However, a sudden rise in cases has alarmed officials and raised concerns ahead of the Lunar New Year, the county's most important annual festival, during which hundreds of millions of people are expected to travel to visit family members. Officials in Shijiazhuang, where the outbreak is centered, have initiated mass testing and strict lockdowns, moving entire villages into centralized quarantine facilities in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. The new quarantine camp will house close contacts of confirmed Covid-19 patients, as authorities continue an extensive contact tracing and testing program. It was originally planned to house 3,000 people, but has since been expanded to a capacity of 4,160. More than 4,000 construction workers performed "six days' and nights' work" to complete the first phase, said Shijiazhuang Deputy Mayor Meng Xianghong on Tuesday. Authorities began construction on January 13 and the first section of the camp is now complete and ready for use, while construction continues on the second phase, according to state-owned broadcaster CCTV. Each prefabricated room is expected to measure 18 square meters (around 194 square feet), and will come with an en-suite bathroom and shower, desks, chairs, beds, Wi-Fi, and a television set, according to CCTV.

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Nearly every division enjoyed double or triple-digit growth for Q3 '21

The pandemic has been kind to Logitech, whose profits have almost quadrupled from what they were a year ago.…

Outgoing President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at thwarting foreign use of cloud computing products for malicious cyber operations against the United States, the White House said on Tuesday, Trump's last full day in office. From a report: The order, first reported by Reuters, gives the Commerce Department authority to write rules to bar transactions with foreigners in cloud computing products or services, if a foreigner uses them for cyber attacks. "What we have seen in this space is that...an individual will rent thousands of pieces of this infrastructure inside the United States and resell them to actors who then abuse them," a senior administration official told Reuters. "This provides the Secretary of Commerce the ability to say...' There is no reason for you to continue to have access to the nation's products,'" the person added, noting the restrictions could apply to jurisdictions as well as people and companies. The order also requires the agency to write rules in six months for U.S. providers of Infrastructure as a Service, a type of cloud computing, to verify the identity of foreigners with whom they do business and keep certain records.

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Also: Qualifying Starliner and Blue Origin gets ready for humans

In brief After an initial failure in 2020, the Virgin Galactic spinout reached orbit on its second try, with the LauncherOne rocket deploying its payloads to a 500km orbit.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Marc Lore, a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Jet.com to Walmart for $3 billion and then oversaw the transformation of the retail giant's e-commerce business over the last four years, is leaving his full-time role with the company at the end of the month, he told Recode. His next big entrepreneurial swing will be something far afield from his current expertise: a multi-decade project to build "a city of the future" supported by "a reformed version of capitalism." "It's a new model for society we'll be testing," he teased. Lore declined to offer more details, but said he would be prepared to reveal additional information in the coming months. Some who have heard of the project say one focus will be on giving everyday citizens direct economic upside in the city's growth. "Imagine a city with the vibrancy, diversity and culture of New York City combined with the efficiency, safety and innovation of Tokyo and the sustainability, governance, and social services of Sweden," reads the vision statement for the project. "This will be our New City." "This is going to be a lifelong project," he added. "It's the thing I'm most passionate about."

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Element Matrix Services adds to the messaging interoperability toolbox

Element Matrix Services is adding a bridge between hipster chat platform Slack and the open-source world of Matrix messaging.…

Scrutiny system worked OK until firm was forced off western chip tech

US sanctions on Huawei got the Chinese firm kicked out of Britain, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has told Parliament – adding that he didn't feel under pressure to change the body's own verdict on keeping Huawei in UK mobile networks.…

Investments into clean-energy technologies totaled more than $500 billion for the first time ever, according to a BloombergNEF report released Tuesday. Axios reports: Technologies making energy and other material cleaner needs to expand rapidly if the world is to adequately address climate change in the coming decades. Global investment in the low-carbon energy transition was $501.3 billion in 2020, up 9% from 2019 despite the pandemic driving the world into a recession. This tally includes investments in renewables, energy storage, electric vehicle charging stations, hydrogen production, carbon capture projects and more. The largest areas of investment are renewable energy and electrified transportation. The report also reflects another broader trend, which is that investment often lags in technologies beyond renewable electricity and electric cars. This includes carbon capture and most industrial processes like cement, according to the International Energy Agency.

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A confession from ex-Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer. Also: WPA fun in the Registry

The product activation inflicted on Windows by Microsoft has few fans, but one of its creators stepped up over the weekend to explain and defend the maligned technology.…

Azure wins on Ultra Disk storage but it's expensive, says Cockroach Labs

Distributed SQL database biz Cockroach Labs has analysed public cloud performance and concluded that Google Cloud Platform wins on throughput, although AWS is ahead on CPU performance and network latency.…

Terraformation, a startup led by Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit, is demonstrating an approach to reforest the planet quickly enough to fight climate change. Fast Company reports: Trees can play a key role in capturing carbon at scale -- by one estimate, nearly a trillion hectares of land could feasibly be reforested, and those trees could potentially store more than 200 gigatons of carbon. But efforts at reforestation are moving too slowly. "Essentially, we need to scale the solution in about 10 years, so that there is time for the forest to mature and become a carbon sink of reasonable size to meet various nations' commitments to be net zero around 2040 or 2050," says Yishan Wong, CEO of the Hawaii-based startup, called Terraformation. One of the challenges the company identified was the lack of land: Some land that was originally forested is now covered by cities or used for farming. Other areas might not be available for sale. But there's a large amount of desertified land that is available. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification reports that around 4.7 billion acres on the planet -- about twice the size of China -- have been affected by drought or desertification, but could potentially be restored. Finding enough water to grow trees there is a challenge. But the folks at Terraformation believe that if desalinated water is used to irrigate seedlings, a restored forest will eventually be able to sustain itself. In Hawaii, the startup built the world's largest fully off-grid, solar-powered desalination system. With a half-acre of solar panels, there's enough power to desalinate around 34,000 gallons of water per day, taken from a well on the site. A drip irrigation system sends the water to the roughly 1,900 native trees and shrubs that have been planted in the area so far. As the forest grows, proving that the system works, the company is working to replicate the same idea around the world. It's creating seed banks that fit inside shipping containers and can store the millions of native seeds that are necessary for large planting projects. It's also building open-source software that groups can use to collect data and track progress after trees are planted.

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Surprisingly fixable... with a bulging toolbox

AirPods are as close as you can get to a swearword in the repair world, known for being almost impossible to service thanks to their densely packed circuitry and closed design. Mercifully, that isn't the case when it comes to Apple's hugely expensive AirPods Max headphones.…

But remember – more pixels doesn't automatically mean better pictures

Taiwanese chip flinger MediaTek has introduced two new additions to its Dimensity SoC lineup, both targeting higher-end smartphones.…

On his final night in office, President Trump granted clemency to a total of 143 people, ranging from former adviser Stephen K. Bannon to rapper Lil Wayne. One name in particular that stands out in the tech community is none other than Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer that was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google. "Levandowski left Google in 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, which was quickly acquired by Uber for $680 million," reports CNET. "These actions set off a chain of events that led to Google's autonomous vehicle unit, Waymo, suing Uber over alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets." Why would this tech executive be pardoned you may ask? The Press Secretary writes: "This pardon is strongly supported by James Ramsey, Peter Thiel, Miles Ehrlich, Amy Craig, Michael Ovitz, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Ken Goldberg, Mike Jensen, Nate Schimmel, Trae Stephens, Blake Masters, and James Proud, among others..."

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These things could be more common than first thought

Astronomers have discovered the two largest-known radio galaxies to date. At a whopping 62 times the size of our own Milky Way, they are believed to be the largest single objects yet found in the universe.…

Expect it in handsets from Motorola, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, Xiaomi

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 870, a 5G-capable system-on-chip designed for high-ish-end Android smartphones coming out at the end by March.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nine months ago, GameStop stock bottomed out at $2.80 a share, a reflection of the myriad problems facing the retailer specifically and brick-and-mortar game retail as a whole. As of Tuesday morning, though, that stock price is hovering around $40 a share (peaking at $44.74 as of this writing), with the vast majority of those gains coming in the last couple of weeks. Is GameStop really worth up to 16 times as much as it was back in April? Is the company's ambitious turnaround plan finally (and suddenly) turning things around? Is GameStop roaring its way back to the nearly $10 billion market cap it enjoyed at the height of the Wii phenomenon? Probably not. Analysts suggest the recent surge in GameStop's stock price is the result of a massive short squeeze bubble that will pop eventually. But beyond the sky-high valuations of recent weeks, analysts also suggest there's some reason to believe GameStop's long-term health is more robust than last year's stock doldrums suggest. Investor Ryan Cohen, best known as the founder of pet food superstore Chewy.com, bought in to a roughly 10 percent ownership stake in the retailer back in August. "Since August, Cohen has bought even more GameStop shares, and he and two former Chewy executives have been named to the company's board of directors," reports Ars. "That gives Cohen, along with fellow activist investors from Hestia, the potential capability to steer the company in a new direction." "There's nothing wrong with GameStop," says Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, who has a target price of $16 for GameStop stock. "I'm absolutely convinced they're going to thrive and survive. They don't have net debt, so they're not going bankrupt or anything. And with the new console launch, they're probably going to sell a lot of consoles and be fine." As long as there's demand for new and used physical games, there will be demand for GameStop, suggests Pachter.

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schwit1 shares a report from Penn State University: Range anxiety, the fear of running out of power before being able to recharge an electric vehicle, may be a thing of the past, according to a team of Penn State engineers who are looking at lithium iron phosphate batteries that have a range of 250 miles with the ability to charge in 10 minutes. "We developed a pretty clever battery for mass-market electric vehicles with cost parity with combustion engine vehicles," said Chao-Yang Wang, William E. Diefenderfer Chair of mechanical engineering, professor of chemical engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, and director of the Electrochemical Engine Center at Penn State. "There is no more range anxiety and this battery is affordable." The researchers also say that the battery should be good for 2 million miles in its lifetime. They report today (Jan. 18) in Nature Energy that the key to long-life and rapid recharging is the battery's ability to quickly heat up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for charge and discharge, and then cool down when the battery is not working. The battery uses a self-heating approach previously developed in Wang's center. The self-heating battery uses a thin nickel foil with one end attached to the negative terminal and the other extending outside the cell to create a third terminal. Once electrons flow it rapidly heats up the nickel foil through resistance heating and warm the inside of the battery. Once the battery's internal temperature is 140 degrees F, the switch opens and the battery is ready for rapid charge or discharge. [...] Because of the self-heating, the researchers said they do not have to worry about uneven deposition of lithium on the anode, which can cause lithium spikes that are dangerous.

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Get your updates when you can for gear from scores of manufacturers

Seven vulnerabilities have been found in a popular DNS caching proxy and DHCP server known as dnsmasq, raising the possibility of widespread online attacks on networking devices.…