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Garbage in, garbage out

US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases, after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by AI systems than white patients, despite being sicker.…

Amazon-owned home surveillance company Ring gave law enforcement a heat map that let police see all devices installed in an area, allowing them to view users down to the street level. CNET first reported the news. From a report: While the feature was removed in July, law enforcement could reportedly use the function to search for the concentration of cameras in a neighborhood, and even see circles drawn around individual user locations. The documents that revealed the feature were obtained by a privacy researcher and shared with the publication. The feature was so specific, according to CNET, that police could essentially obtain the specific location of Ring customers. While police can request videos from users through Ring, the company has denied that it provides information to law enforcement on who, specifically, owns their products. Ring said in a statement to CNET that zooming in on the map "would not provide actual device locations."

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Fired four threaten to file complaint with National Labor Relations Board

The four engineers fired by Google just before Thanksgiving for allegedly e-stalking co-workers have said they will file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming they were subject to an illegal intimidation campaign.…

According to Motherboard, the FBI applied for a search warrant in October compelling Sony to provide data on a PlayStation 4 user who was allegedly part of a cocaine distribution network. The application even asks for what games the alleged drug dealer played, and his progress in them. From the report: "The Provider is hereby ordered to disclose the above information to the Government within 14 days of service of this warrant," the search warrant application, filed on October 22 in the Western District of Missouri, reads. The case revolves around Curtis Alexander, also known as "Dola," who the FBI alleges used PlayStation's online service to coordinate the sale of large quantities of cocaine. "The CHS [Confidential Human Source] stated ALEXANDER was currently charging $34,000 per kilogram of cocaine. The CHS stated ALEXANDER utilizes the PlayStation username 'Speedola20,'" the application reads, referring to an unnamed informant for the FBI who helped investigate Alexander. The CHS said Alexander contacted them through the PlayStation game "during game." "The phase 'during game' is a reference to audio communication held during the CHS and ALEXANDER's participation in an online multi-player game," the application continues. "Investigators believe that ALEXANDER likely believes that audio communication during the course of his participation in an online game is secure. As such, ALEXANDER likely believes that he can use audio communication during game play on the PlayStation to arrange the details of a drug transaction." The FBI and CHS went on to setup a sting in which the Bureau surveilled Alexander selling the informant a bag of around 100 grams of white powder for $4,400, and Alexander told the CHS he wanted to talk again later that evening on the "game," the court document adds. The FBI asked for essentially all info that Sony may have held on the user, "including stored or preserved copies of emails, chats, or other messages sent to and from the Account, drafts of such, and the source destination addresses associated with each, the date and time at which each was sent, and the size and length of each," the search warrant application reads. It's not known if Sony provided the data.

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Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its login system that could have been used to trick unsuspecting victims into giving over complete access to their online accounts. TechCrunch reports: The bug allowed attackers to quietly steal account tokens, which websites and apps use to grant users access to their accounts without requiring them to constantly re-enter their passwords. These tokens are created by an app or a website in place of a username and password after a user logs in. That keeps the user persistently logged into the site, but also allows users to access third-party apps and websites without having to directly hand over their passwords. Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity company CyberArk found that Microsoft left open an accidental loophole which, if exploited, could've been used to siphon off these account tokens used to access a victim's account -- potentially without ever alerting the user. CyberArk's latest research, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, found dozens of unregistered subdomains connected to a handful of apps built by Microsoft. These in-house apps are highly trusted and, as such, associated subdomains can be used to generate access tokens automatically without requiring any explicit consent from the user. With the subdomains in hand, all an attacker would need is to trick an unsuspecting victim into clicking on a specially crafted link in an email or on a website, and the token can be stolen. [...] Luckily, the researchers registered as many of the subdomains they could find from the vulnerable Microsoft apps to prevent any malicious misuse, but warned there could be more.

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An anonymous reader writes: "Dutch prosecutors have asked a judge for a three-year prison sentence for a local politician who doubled as a hacker and breached the personal iCloud accounts of more than 100 women, stealing and then leaking sexually explicit photos and videos online," reports ZDNet. The hacker (VVD politician Mitchel van der K.) is believed to have been part of the Celebgate (TheFappening) movement. Between 2015 and 2017, van der K. used credentials leaked at other sites to hack into iCloud accounts belonging to acquaintances and Dutch celebrities, from where he stole nudes and sex tapes. Some he leaked online, some he kept for himself. Victims included acquaintances, but also local celebrities, such as Dutch YouTube star Laura Ponticorvo and Dutch field hockey star Fatima Moreira de Melo. After he was arrested, van der K. claimed he was forced to hack his victims by other hackers, an excuse which the prosecution quickly knocked down, pointing out that half of his victims were friends and acquaintances, and not celebrities that would be of interest to other hackers. Days before he was arrested, van der K. was also elected to his city's council, a position from which he resigned.

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We sat through a three-hour AWS lecture so that you didn't have to

re:Invent In a three-hour keynote at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy took pops at competitors (especially Microsoft) and announced a wide range of new services, spanning compute, database, storage and machine learning.…

The FBI warned in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Monday that it considers mobile applications developed in Russia, including the popular photo-aging app "FaceApp," to be "potential counterintelligence threats." Axios reports: FaceApp is a Russian-owned mobile application that allows users to upload photos of themselves and see what they may look like at a different age. Experts warned about potential privacy and national security concerns when the app spiked in popularity this past summer, prompting Schumer to request that the FBI and Federal Trade Commission look into the matter in July. "The FBI considers any mobile application or similar product developed in Russia, such as FaceApp, to be a potential counterintelligence threat, based on the data the product collects, its privacy and terms of use policies, and the legal mechanisms available to the Government of Russia that permit access to data within Russia's borders." The agency goes on to say: "Russia's intelligence services maintain robust cyber exploitation capabilities [...] the [Russian Federal Security Service] can remotely access all communications and servers on Russian networks without making a request to ISPs." The FBI said it will coordinate for notifications and investigations, and will work with applicable task forces if the app is perceived as a threat to "elected officials, candidates, political campaigns or political parties." Schumer said in a statement: "In light of FBI's warning that FaceApp, and similar applications developed in Russia, poses a potential counterintelligence threat to the United States, I strongly urge all Americans to consider deleting apps like FaceApp immediately and proceed with extreme caution when downloading apps developed in hostile foreign countries."

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"On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation, The Verge shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers," writes Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket. From the report: Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's campus, sucking up energy and investigating astrophysics. It's a popular stop for tours trying to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their parents, and it's one of the few living legacies of a weird science chapter in PlayStation's history. Those squat boxes, hulking on entertainment systems or dust-covered in the back of a closet, were once coveted by researchers who used the consoles to build supercomputers. With the racks of machines, the scientists were suddenly capable of contemplating the physics of black holes, processing drone footage, or winning cryptography contests. It only lasted a few years before tech moved on, becoming smaller and more efficient. But for that short moment, some of the most powerful computers in the world could be hacked together with code, wire, and gaming consoles. "The game consoles entered the supercomputing scene in 2002 when Sony released a kit called Linux for the PlayStation 2," reports The Verge. Craig Steffen, senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and his group hooked up between 60 and 70 PlayStation 2s, wrote some code, and built out a library. "The PS3 entered the scene in late 2006 with powerful hardware and an easier way to load Linux onto the devices," the report adds. "Researchers would still need to link the systems together, but suddenly, it was possible for them to imagine linking together all of those devices into something that was a game-changer instead of just a proof-of-concept prototype."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services has developed a more powerful version of its own chips to power services for cloud-computing customers, as well as some of AWS's own programs. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy on Tuesday introduced a second-generation chip, called Graviton2, aimed at general-purpose computing tasks. He didn't specify a release date. The company last year unveiled its first line of Graviton chips, which it said would support new versions of its main EC2 cloud-computing service. Prior to that, Amazon -- and other big cloud operators -- had almost exclusively used Intel Xeon chips. The company said at the time that the Graviton-backed cloud service would be available at a "significantly lower cost" than existing offerings run on Intel processors. Jassy said Intel is "a very close partner," but to push the envelope on prices, "we had to do some innovating ourselves." "Amazon is using its 2015 acquisition of startup Annapurna Labs, which Jassy called a 'a big turning point for us,' to design its own chips," reports Bloomberg. "The new processor uses technology from SoftBank Group Corp. unit ARM Holdings, a standard that dominates in mobile phones."

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Sergey leaves his first love… again

The co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have announced they are stepping down from their respective CEO and president roles of parent company Alphabet – and handing over to Google's current CEO Sundar Pichai.…

Don't be Stalin, you only have until July, thanks to new law

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed off on the law requiring most electronics sold in the country to be pre-bundled with domestically produced software.…

...nd its nt evevn lunchteim yt

On Tuesday Qualcomm teased three upcoming Snapdragon system-on-chips at its aptly named Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii.…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is adding another responsibility to his job: Pichai will also be the CEO of parent holding company Alphabet going forward, taking the helm from co-founder and longtime CEO Larry Page. From a report: Additionally, co-founder Sergey Brin will be resigning from his post as the president of Alphabet. Brin and Page jointly announced the leadership change in a blog post Tuesday afternoon, writing: "Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet's investment in our portfolio of Other Bets."

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Homeland Security also clamping down on H1-B visas

The Trump Administration is planning to fast-track a new policy of compulsory facial recognition at the border, and including US citizens and permanent residents in its plans for the first time.…

Amazon is leveraging machine learning to fight fraud, audit code, transcribe calls, and index enterprise data. From a report: Today during a keynote at its Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, the tech giant debuted Amazon Fraud Detector, a fully managed service that detects anomalies in transactions, and CodeGuru, which automates code review while identifying the most "expensive" lines of code. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. With Fraud Detector (in preview), AWS customers provide email addresses, IP addressees, and other historical transaction and account registration data, along with markers indicating which transactions are fraudulent and which are legitimate. Amazon takes that information and uses algorithms -- along with data detectors developed on the consumer business of Amazon's business -- to build bespoke models that recognize things like potentially malicious email domains and IP address formation. After the model is created, customers can create, view, and update rules to enable actions based on model predictions without relying on others.

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AWS gets faster ARM-based EC2 instances

re:Invent In conjunction with its re:Invent show in Las Vegas this week, Amazon Web Services offered a preview of the next iteration of its Arm-based EC2 instances, based on its Graviton2 processor.…

Qualcomm uncorked this year's version of its Snapdragon Technology Summit by announcing the names of its two new upcoming Snapdragon chips, the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765/765G. Not surprisingly, the emphasis this year is on 5G, and the "AI" which those chips will apply for software enhancements. From a report: Because this is the Snapdragon Technology Summit, we expect to hear more details of each of these chips in the coming days. For now, however, Qualcomm is just teasing the names and their basic capabilities. Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips are some of the most prevalent processors in smartphones and a mainstay in high-end flagships, powering the Samsung Galaxy S10 and OnePlus 7 Pro among others. Both of these phones incorporate the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 that was introduced at last year's Snapdragon Summit, and it's fair to say we'd expect the eventual successor of those phones to use the new chips, as well. Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile at Qualcomm Technologies, introduced both the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765/765G but said nothing about a enhanced "Plus" version, as Qualcomm introduced with the Snapdragon 855 Plus midway through this year. Specifically, Katzouian said, the Snapdragon 865 will be built around the Snapdragon X55, Qualcomm's second-gen 5G modem that the company launched in February of this year. The X55 was part of the "Project Limitless" PC platform Qualcomm showed off with Lenovo at Computex, but is expected to be much more of a factor within smartphones.

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The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group, is suing Google for "unethical, unfair and anticompetitive" behavior. From a report: Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to drop because its lyrics -- which are annotated by its contributors -- are being copied, and then published by Google via the tech giant's lyrics partner, LyricFind. The lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday (December 3) and seeks "no less than $50 million" in "combined minimum damages" from both Google and Canada-based LyricFind. "Defendants Google LLC and LyricFind have been caught red-handed misappropriating content from Genius's website, which they have exploited -- and continue to exploit -- for their own financial benefit." The suit reads: "One of Genius's primary services is the development and maintenance of a vast repository of annotated music lyrics, some of which are artist-supplied and many of which are transcribed and refined by a community of over two million Genius contributors."

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Got a phone for The Reg to stroke a claw across, Roberto?

Escobar Inc, the company founded by the brother of late Colombian pharmaceutical executive, Pablo Escobar, has announced it’s getting into the handset business. Welcome to 2019, where that’s a completely normal and factual sentence.…