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Distinctly odd

TalkTalk-using readers have contacted The Reg to say they are suffering decidedly odd bandwidth issues shutting off, or severely slowing, access to certain sites while leaving others working as normal.…

From a report: When the English translation of "The Three-Body Problem" was published in 2014, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. President Barack Obama praised the novel, calling it "just wildly imaginative." Mark Zuckerberg recommended it to his tens of millions of Facebook followers; George R.R. Martin blogged about it. Publishers around the world chased after translation rights, which eventually sold in 26 languages, including Turkish and Estonian. It won the 2015 Hugo Award, one of the genre's most prestigious honors, making Liu Cixin the first Asian author to win the prize for best novel. It was also the first time a novel in translation had won the prize. The book and its two sequels went on to sell nearly nine million copies worldwide. Now, Liu Cixin says, he recommends that Chinese sci-fi fans who speak English read Ken Liu's translation of "The Three-Body Problem" rather than the Chinese version. "Usually when Chinese literature gets translated to a foreign language, it tends to lose something," he says. "I don't think that happened with 'The Three-Body Problem.' I think it gained something." The success of "The Three-Body Problem" not only turned Liu Cixin into a global literary star; it opened the floodgates for new translations of Chinese science fiction. This, in turn, has made Ken Liu a critical conduit for Chinese writers seeking Western audiences, a literary brand as sought-after as the best-selling authors he translates. (Among Chinese sci-fi authors and fans, he is often referred to affectionately as Xiao Liu, Little Liu, to distinguish him from Liu Cixin, who is known as Da Liu, Big Liu.) Liu's translations have reshaped the global science-fiction landscape, which has long been dominated by American and British authors. Over the past decade, he has translated five novels and more than 50 works of short fiction by dozens of Chinese authors, many of whom he has discovered and championed himself.

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Reuters reports: In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation's once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor. The bureau chose Pegasystems, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective. Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems, according to Reuters interviews with six technology professionals currently or formerly involved in the census digitization effort. And its projected cost has doubled to $167 million -- about $40 million more than the bureau's 2016 cost projection for building the site in-house. The Pega-built website was hacked from IP addresses in Russia during 2018 testing of census systems, according to two security sources with direct knowledge of the incident. One of the sources said an intruder bypassed a "firewall" and accessed parts of the system that should have been restricted to census developers. "He got into the network," one of the sources said. "He got into where the public is not supposed to go." In a separate incident during the same test, an IP address affiliated with the census site experienced a domain name service attack, causing a sharp increase in traffic, according to one of the two sources and a third source with direct knowledge of the incident.

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High-rez screen or going all day without a charge: Pick one

The fourth-generation ThinkPad Yoga X1 has swapped the finish of yesteryear for something a little more metallic.…

The Python security team removed two trojanized Python libraries from PyPI (Python Package Index) that were caught stealing SSH and GPG keys from the projects of infected developers. From a report: The two libraries were created by the same developer and mimicked other more popular libraries -- using a technique called typosquatting to register similarly-looking names. The first is "python3-dateutil," which imitated the popular "dateutil" library. The second is "jeIlyfish" (the first L is an I), which mimicked the "jellyfish" library. The two malicious clones were discovered on Sunday, December 1, by German software developer Lukas Martini. Both libraries were removed on the same day after Martini notified dateutil developers and the PyPI security team. While the python3-dateutil was created and uploaded on PyPI two days before, on November 29, the jeIlyfish library had been available for nearly a year, since December 11, 2018.

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After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years, Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix that addresses one of the most requested features from customers in the nation: Portability. From a report: The e-commerce giant today unveiled the Echo Input Portable Smart Speaker Edition, a new variant in the lineup that includes a built-in battery. The 4,800mAh enclosed battery will offer up to 10 hours of continuous music playing or up to 11 hours of stand-by life, the company said. "Portability has been one of the most requested features in India," said Miriam Daniel, VP of Alexa Devices. "You want to be able to carry Alexa with you from room to room within your homes. So we have designed something just for you."

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Media center app maker Plex officially launched its ad-supported video service with movies and TV shows from MGM, Warner Bros., Lionsgate and Legendary Wednesday. The service will be available in more than 200 countries and territories, making it the first ad-supported video service with a nearly global reach. From a report: Getting the rights to launch in so many countries was key to bringing ad-supported video to Plex, said CEO Keith Valory in a recent interview with Variety. "More than half of our users are outside of the U.S." The initial catalog will include thousands of movies and TV show episodes, according to Plex executives, with plans to add many more over time. Some titles will only be streaming in some territories, while others are being made available everywhere. At launch, users will have access to movies like "Rain Man," "Teen Wolf," "The Terminator," "American Ultra," "Frequency," "Hard Candy," "Ghost in the Shell," and more. Plex's free-to-watch catalog will initially be more heavily focused on movies than TV shows, but the company plans to add more TV content in the coming months.

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Only in India for the time being

Amazon today announced a new battery-powered version of its ubiquitous Echo speakers.…

Eh, at least it doesn't need to renegotiate patent deals

Qualcomm is to appeal against the decision of a South Korean court to fine the US chip giant $873m for unfairly using patent licensing to stymie rivals' sales.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: He was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a "disruptive technologist" and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise as a force for good. But then, in April, Virgil Griffith traveled to North Korea with a visa he had obtained from a diplomatic mission in New York City, going through China to circumvent an American travel ban. He gave a talk at a conference in Pyongyang about how to use cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to launder money, according to federal investigators. Now Mr. Griffith, 36, faces federal charges that he violated international sanctions. He was arrested on Thursday as he landed at Los Angeles International Airport. Mr. Griffith, an American citizen who lives in Singapore and works for the Ethereum Foundation, is accused of conspiring with North Korea since August 2018. He appeared in federal court in Los Angeles last week and will eventually be brought to New York. He faces up to 20 years in prison. Though the United States government had denied Mr. Griffith permission to go to North Korea, he traveled there anyway in April and spoke at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday. During his speech and in discussions afterward, he provided information about how North Korea could use cryptocurrency to "achieve independence from the global banking system," the complaint said. He also later made plans "to facilitate the exchange" of a digital currency between North and South Korea. "We cannot allow anyone to evade sanctions, because the consequences of North Korea obtaining funding, technology, and information to further its desire to build nuclear weapons put the world at risk," said William F. Sweeney Jr., an assistant director-in-charge at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "It's even more egregious that a U.S. citizen allegedly chose to aid our adversary." Hacker magazine, 2600, where Mr. Griffith was a contributing writer, said on Twitter that what Mr. Griffith had done -- explaining the concept of cryptocurrency -- was not a crime. The magazine's editor, Emmanual Goldstein, said Mr. Griffith was incapable of doing what federal investigators have accused him of. "He would not help a murderous dictator," he said. "He's a typical hacker who loves technology and adventure."

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Users doubtful 5 years enough to get everyone moved in time

German enterprise software giant SAP is in a "standoff" with customers over the 2025 deadline for withdrawing support for its SAP Business Suite range.…

Getting giddy over CI/CD with Anthos and Kubernetes

DevOps World Lisbon CloudBees joined the SaaS club today with a preview of its Jenkins X CI/CD product running atop Google's cloud.…

Yes, in all-caps

The Council of the European Union has warned member states that the introduction of 5G networks poses increased security risks while also bringing economic and infrastructure benefits.…

Roberto Escobar, brother of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, has announced a foldable smartphone that is "very difficult to break" thanks to the screen's "special type of plastic." The Escobar Fold 1, as it is called, significantly undercuts Samsung's Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X with a price of only $349. Neowin reports: While all the foldable phones announced so far have a price tag of at least $1,500+, the Escobar Fold 1 will be available from only $349 which includes free shipping and a case as well. It will be sold unlocked and work on all compatible networks worldwide. This makes it cheaper than other non-foldable flagship smartphones available in the market right now. The drug lord's brother has been able to price the phone so low by cutting out the middlemen like networks and retailers. He is also preparing to file a $30 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple for scamming people and wants the company to "give some of their illegal profits back to the people." Like the Huawei Mate X, the Escobar Fold can be unfolded to turn it into a tablet with a screen size of 7.8-inches. The expanded AMOLED display has a 4:3 aspect ratio and an FHD+ resolution. The design language is different from the Samsung Galaxy Fold which features two separate displays, one of which folds.

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Add-ons accused of slurping every URL netizens visit

The Firefox extensions built by Avast have been pulled from the open-source browser's online add-on store over privacy fears.…

AWS subscribers, you can forget GPUs (unless you need to train your models)

re:Invent Amazon Web Services has made Inf1, its cloud instance for running machine-learning software on its custom-designed AI chip Inferentia, available to all.…

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix accused of ducking dues

Fair Tax Mark, a UK-based civic advocacy group, has accused Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix of depriving public coffers of more than $100bn in taxes since 2010 through aggressive tax avoidance schemes.…

A NASA satellite has found India's Vikram lander, which crashed on the lunar surface in September. The Guardian reports: Nasa released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that showed the site of the spacecraft's impact and associated debris field, with parts scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers. In a statement, Nasa said it had released a mosaic image of the site on 26 September, inviting the public to search it for signs of the lander. It added that a person named Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris -- with the first piece found about 750 meters north-west of the main crash site. Blasting off in July, emerging Asian giant India had hoped with its Chandrayaan-2 ("moon vehicle 2") mission to become just the fourth country after the U.S., Russia and regional rival China to make a successful moon landing, and the first on the lunar south pole.

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Browser biz continues exploring privacy as a source of revenue

Patting itself on the back for blocking more than one trillion web tracking requests through its Enhanced Tracking Protection tech, Mozilla on Tuesday continued its privacy push with a further test of its Firefox Private Network service, an update to Firefox Preview Beta for Android, and the debut of its latest desktop browser, Firefox 71.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Huawei's latest phone, which it unveiled in September -- the Mate 30 with a curved display and wide-angle cameras that competes with Apple's iPhone 11 -- contained no U.S. parts, according to an analysis by UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, a Japanese technology lab that took the device apart to inspect its insides. In May, the Trump administration banned U.S. shipments to Huawei as trade tensions with Beijing escalated. That move stopped companies like Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. from exporting chips to the company, though some shipments of parts resumed over the summer after companies determined they weren't affected by the ban. While Huawei hasn't stopped using American chips entirely, it has reduced its reliance on U.S. suppliers or eliminated U.S. chips in phones launched since May (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), including the company's Y9 Prime and Mate smartphones, according to Fomalhaut's teardown analysis. Similar inspections by iFixit and Tech Insights Inc., two other firms that take apart phones to inspect components, have come to similar conclusions. With the Mate 30, audio chips supplied in older versions came from Cirrus Logic. In the newer Mate 30 models, chips were provided by NXP Semiconductors NV, a Dutch chip maker, according to Fomalhaut. Power amplifiers provided by Qorvo or Skyworks were replaced with chips from HiSilicon, Huawei's in-house chip design firm, the teardown analysis showed. A Huawei spokesman said it is the company's "clear preference to continue to integrate and buy components from U.S. supply partners. If that proves impossible because of the decisions of the U.S. government, we will have no choice but to find alternative supply from non-U.S. sources."

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