An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients' blood to attack breast, prostate and other tumors. The project -- led by researchers at Sheffield University -- builds on progress in two key medical fields. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumors. The second focuses on soil bacteria that manufacture magnets which they use to align themselves in the Earth's magnetic field. The anti-cancer viruses that are being exploited by the Sheffield group -- who have been funded by Cancer Research UK -- are known as oncolytic viruses. They occur naturally but can also be modified to improve their efficacy and to limit the chances of them infecting healthy cells. [...] "The problem is that oncolytic viruses attract the attention of the body's immune defenses and only skin-deep tumors can be tackled this way before the viruses are blocked fairly quickly by our cell defenses," said Dr Faith Howard, another project leader. A solution, the scientists say, is to coat the viruses in magnetic particles. Injected into the blood, these microscopic projectiles could then be directed quickly to a tumor -- by using magnets placed over a patient's body -- before their progress can be blocked by immune defenses. An oncolytic virus had a diameter of about 180 nanometers while the magnets needed to be about 50 nanometers in size, added Howard. (A nanometre is a billionth of a meter.) "These tiny magnets could be made in the laboratory but we have found bacteria do a better job of manufacturing them than we could," she added. Some species of soil bacteria synthesize iron oxide nanoparticles that are called magnetosomes. These are used as compasses that allow the microbes to navigate in Earth's magnetic field and help them find optimum conditions for their growth and survival. "These microscopic magnets they make are perfectly shaped and ideally suited to the microscopic packages we need to target deep cancers," Howard said.

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China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has published guidelines that aim to stop minors from giving tips or other forms of payment to livestreamers, watching after 10pm, or livestreaming themselves. The Register reports: "Website platforms must not develop functional applications that attract minors to tip or induce minors to give 'gifts.' If it is found that the website platform violates the aforementioned requirements, measures such as suspending the tipping function and shutting down the live broadcast business will be implemented," said the recently published Opinions on Regulating Online Live Rewards and Strengthening the Protection of Minors (in Chinese). The opinions were issued jointly by China's Central Civilization Office, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, and State Internet Information Office. The focus was to "persist in taking the socialist core values as the guide." If minors try to circumvent the rules and use adult accounts, the platforms may be responsible for providing refunds. [...] Beijing's qualm with livestreaming and its tech is that the practice can result in physical and mental health issues, as well as create "social problems." [...] There is also concern that teenagers will spend their evenings staying up late online and therefore not have sufficient rest time, hence the 10pm curfew.

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DrunkenTerror shares a report from ExtremeTech: Microsoft is advising Windows 11 users to uninstall a recent update. Reports indicated the optional update KB5012643 is causing various apps to crash. The problem involves an interaction between the update and the .Net Framework that's part of Windows. At this time it's unclear which apps are affected by the issue, leaving uninstallation as the "only" viable solution. "Affected apps are using certain optional components in .NET Framework 3.5, such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow (WWF) components." This update also broke Safe Mode. Microsoft says when users booted into 'Safe Mode without networking' users might see the screen flicker. Per MS, "Components that rely on explorer.exe, such as File Explorer, the Start menu, and the taskbar, can be affected and appear unstable." Microsoft issued a Known Issue Rollback (KiR) for this already so it should be fixed. If you encounter it, you should be able to resolve it by enabling network support in Safe Mode.

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The new free trade agreement between Australia and the UK includes a site blocking paragraph. The text requires the countries to provide injunctive relief to require ISPs to prevent subscribers from accessing pirate sites. While this doesn't change much for the two countries, rightsholders are already eying similar requirements for trade deals with other nations. TorrentFreak reports: The inclusion of a blocking paragraph in the copyright chapter of the trade deal was high on the agenda of various copyright holder groups. Following a series of hearings and consultations, both countries settled on the following text: 1. Each Party shall provide that its civil judicial authorities have the authority to grant an injunction against an ISP within its territory, ordering the ISP to take action to block access to a specific online location, in cases where: (a) that online location is located outside the territory of that Party; and (b) the services of the ISP are used by a third party to infringe copyright or related rights in the territory of that Party. 2. For greater certainty, nothing in this Article precludes a Party from providing that its judicial authorities may grant an injunction to take action to block access to online locations used to infringe intellectual property rights in circumstances other than those specified in paragraph 1. This hasn't gone unnoticed by the Alliance for Intellectual Property, which represents rightsholder organizations such as the MPA, BPI, and the Premier League. The group repeatedly urged the UK Government to include site-blocking powers in the agreement. In a recent submission to the UK Government, the Alliance once again stresses the importance of site blocking, while also hinting at broadening the current anti-piracy toolbox. "It has become a hugely valuable tool in the armory of rights holders looking to protect their IP. It is vital that the UK Government ensures the preservation of the no-fault injunctive relief regime," the Alliance writes. "We would also encourage the opening of dialogue, wherever possible, to share experience around UK practices and to encourage faster, more efficient website blocking procedures, whether through civil, criminal, administrative or voluntary means." The site-blocking language is already included in the latest trade deal draft but the Alliance is also looking ahead at future agreements with other countries. In this context, the blocking paragraph will send a clear message. "We would therefore urge the UK Government to include reference to the site blocking legislation in the FTA with Australia as it will send an important message to future countries that we might chose [sic] to negotiate trade agreements with." The Alliance for Intellectual Property doesn't mention any other countries by name. However, it specifically references a report from the U.S. Copyright Office where site blocking was mentioned as a potential future anti-piracy option. In the same report, the Copyright Office also stressed that further research would be required on the effect and impact of a U.S. site-blocking scheme, but the idea wasn't dismissed outright.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers are marveling at the scope and magnitude of a vulnerability that hackers are actively exploiting to take full control of network devices that run on some of the world's biggest and most sensitive networks. The vulnerability, which carries a 9.8 severity rating out of a possible 10, affects F5's BIG-IP, a line of appliances that organizations use as load balancers, firewalls, and for inspection and encryption of data passing into and out of networks. There are more than 16,000 instances of the gear discoverable online, and F5 says it's used by 48 of the Fortune 50. Given BIG-IP's proximity to network edges and their functions as devices that manage traffic for web servers, they often are in a position to see decrypted contents of HTTPS-protected traffic. Last week, F5 disclosed and patched a BIG-IP vulnerability that hackers can exploit to execute commands that run with root system privileges. The threat stems from a faulty authentication implementation of the iControl REST, a set of web-based programming interfaces for configuring and managing (PDF) BIG-IP devices. "This issue allows attackers with access to the management interface to basically pretend to be an administrator due to a flaw in how the authentication is implemented," Aaron Portnoy, the director of research and development at security firm Randori, said in a direct message. "Once you are an admin, you can interact with all the endpoints the application provides, including execute code." Images floating around Twitter in the past 24 hours show how hackers can use the exploit to access an F5 application endpoint named bash. Its function is to provide an interface for running user-supplied input as a bash command with root privileges. While many images show exploit code supplying a password to make commands run, exploits also work when no password is supplied. [...] Elsewhere on Twitter, researchers shared exploit code and reported seeing in-the-wild exploits that dropped backdoor webshells that threat actors could use to maintain control over hacked BIG-IP devices even after they're patched. BIG-IP users can check exploitability via a one-line bash script that can be found here.

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Facebook on Thursday began informing users that Nearby Friends and other location-based features will soon be discontinued at the end of the month. While the reasons are currently unclear, the company claims that all information related to these features will be deleted from Facebook's servers. 9to5Mac reports: Users have been getting a notification in the Facebook app for iOS and Android about the end of Nearby Friends, a feature that lets people share their current location with other Facebook friends. At the same time, Facebook also says that Time Alerts, Location History, and Background Location are also "going away soon." According to the company, Nearby Friends and other location-based features will no longer be available to users after May 31, 2022. Some of the data, such as the user's location history (which automatically uses your location to create a map of places you have visited, will be available for download by August 1, 2022. After that, Facebook says that this data will be deleted. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that Facebook's app will stop collecting users' location. The company states that location data will still be collected "for other experiences." Of course, you can always disable the Facebook app's access to your location by going into the iOS Privacy settings.

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Security researchers have noticed a malicious campaign that used Windows event logs to store malware, a technique that has not been previously documented publicly for attacks in the wild. BleepingComputer reports: The method enabled the threat actor behind the attack to plant fileless malware in the file system in an attack filled with techniques and modules designed to keep the activity as stealthy as possible. [...] The dropper copies the legitimate OS error handling file [...] and then drops an encrypted binary resource to the 'wer.dll' (Windows Error Reporting) in the same location, for DLL search order hijacking to load malicious code. DLL hijacking is a hacking technique that exploits legitimate programs with insufficient checks to load into memory a malicious Dynamic Link Library (DLL) from an arbitrary path. [Denis Legezo, lead security researcher at Kaspersky] says that the dropper's purpose is to loader on the disk for the side-loading process and to look for particular records in the event logs (category 0x4142 - 'AB' in ASCII. If no such record is found, it writes 8KB chunks of encrypted shellcode, which are later combined to form the code for the next stager. "The dropped wer.dll is a loader and wouldn't do any harm without the shellcode hidden in Windows event logs," says Legezo. The new technique analyzed by Kaspersky is likely on its way to becoming more popular as Soumyadeep Basu, currently an intern for Mandiant's red team, has created and published on GitHub source code for injecting payloads into Windows event logs.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Notorious facial recognition company Clearview AI has agreed to permanently halt sales of its massive biometric database to all private companies and individuals in the United States as part of a legal settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union, per court records. Monday's announcement marks the close of a two-year legal dispute brought by the ACLU and privacy advocate groups in May of 2020 against the company over allegations that it had violated BIPA, the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. This act requires companies to obtain permission before harvesting a person's biometric information -- fingerprints, gait metrics, iris scans and faceprints for example -- and empowers users to sue the companies who do not. In addition to the nationwide private party sales ban, Clearview will not offer any of its services to Illinois local and state law enforcement agencies (as well as all private parties) for the next five years. "This means that within Illinois, Clearview cannot take advantage of BIPA's exception for government contractors during that time," the ACLU points out, though Federal agencies, state and local law enforcement departments outside of Illinois will be unaffected. That's not all. Clearview must also end its free trial program for police officers, erect and maintain an opt-out page for Illinois residents, and spend $50,000 advertising it online. The settlement must still be approved by a federal judge before it takes effect. "Fourteen years ago, the ACLU of Illinois led the effort to enact BIPA -- a groundbreaking statute to deal with the growing use of sensitive biometric information without any notice and without meaningful consent," Rebecca Glenberg, staff attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, said in a statement. "BIPA was intended to curb exactly the kind of broad-based surveillance that Clearview's app enables. Today's agreement begins to ensure that Clearview complies with the law. This should be a strong signal to other state legislatures to adopt similar statutes."

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Europe's first commercial facility for psychedelic drug trials is to open in London, with the goal of making the UK a global leader in psychedelics research and innovation. From a report: The British startup Clerkenwell Health aims to begin trials in its central London facility in August, initially focusing on the use of psilocybin to help people deal with the anxiety associated with a diagnosis of terminal illness, and to support them through their end-of-life care. The news comes as scientists and policymakers gather in London this Wednesday for the Agenda for Psych Symposium, a daylong programme to discuss the latest research and the future of the psychedelics industry in Europe.

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Match Group accused Alphabet's Google in a lawsuit of acting as a monopolist with its app store billing rules, the latest escalation in a brawl over the mobile-app industry. From a report: Match Group, which operates dating apps such as Tinder and OkCupid, alleged that Google breaks federal and state laws and abuses its power with a requirement that app developers use its billing system on Android devices. "Ten years ago, Match Group was Google's partner. We are now its hostage," Match Group said in a complaint filed Monday in northern California federal court. "Blinded by the possibility of getting an ever-greater cut of the billions of dollars users spend each year on Android apps, Google set out to monopolize the market for how users pay for their Android apps." Google, like Apple, has faced enormous recent legal and political scrutiny over the commission fees and billing restrictions both companies apply to paid services in their app stores. Congress is currently weighing a bill to force Google and Apple to change their business models.

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More than four dozen former national security leaders are calling on Congress to exempt international advanced technical degree holders from green card caps in a bid to maintain U.S. science and tech leadership, especially over China, according to a copy of a letter viewed by Axios. From the report: The America COMPETES Act passed by the Democrat-led House includes a provision to exempt foreign-born science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) doctoral degree recipients from green card caps. The exemption would be offered whether their degree is from a U.S. or foreign institution. Current U.S. immigration law limits the number of green cards issued per country, and people from populous countries like India and China are disproportionately affected. The Bipartisan Innovation Act Conference Committee is expected to begin this month to try to reconcile the House and Senate bills. Several Republican senators, including Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have said they're open to keeping the green card provision in final legislation. The letter, dated May 9, is addressed to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the conference committee. Signatories include former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu, former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security Kari Bingen and 46 others.

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echo123 writes: Twenty Internet providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, have agreed to provide high-speed service at a steep discount to low-income consumers, the White House announced Monday, significantly expanding broadband access for millions of Americans. The plan, a feature of the $1 trillion infrastructure package passed by Congress last year, would cost qualifying households no more than $30 per month. The discounts plus existing federal Internet subsidies mean the government will cover the full cost of connectivity if consumers sign on with one of the 20 participating companies. The White House estimates the program will cover 48 million households, or 40 percent of the country. The 100-megabit-per-second service is fast enough for a family to work from home, complete schoolwork, browse the Internet and stream high-definition movies and TV shows, the White House said. Households can qualify for the subsidies, called the Affordable Connectivity Program, if their income is at or below 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines, a member of the household participates in certain federal anti-poverty initiatives -- including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, federal housing assistance, Pell Grant tuition assistance, or free or reduced-price school meals -- or if the household already qualifies for an Internet provider's low-income service program. Consumers can check whether they qualify for discounted service at getinternet.gov.

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The algorithmic stablecoin UST briefly fell 2% below its peg to the US dollar on Monday, according to data from crypto exchange Binance -- the fourth significant drop below its peg in the last two days. From a report: UST is a stablecoin backed through its relationship with the LUNA token. A burning mechanism and the ability to always be able to sell $1 worth of LUNA for 1 UST are designed to keep it in check. Yet critics say the success of this operation depends on the strength of LUNA's price and on its key DeFi platform, Anchor, continuing to produce an up to 20% yield to incentivize liquidity -- something that's on track to run out soon barring any fixes.

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Lincoln College is scheduled to close its doors Friday, becoming the first U.S. institution of higher learning to shut down in part due to a ransomware attack. From a report: A goodbye note posted to the school's website said that it survived both World Wars, the Spanish flu and the Great Depression, but was unable to handle the combination of the Covid pandemic and a severe ransomware attack in December that took months to remedy. "Lincoln College was a victim of a cyberattack in December 2021 that thwarted admissions activities and hindered access to all institutional data, creating an unclear picture of Fall 2022 enrollment projections," the school wrote in its announcement. "All systems required for recruitment, retention, and fundraising efforts were inoperable. Fortunately, no personal identifying information was exposed. Once fully restored in March 2022, the projections displayed significant enrollment shortfalls, requiring a transformational donation or partnership to sustain Lincoln College beyond the current semester." The Illinois school, which is named after President Abraham Lincoln and broke ground on his birthday in 1865, is one of only a handful of rural American colleges that qualify as predominantly Black institutions by the Department of Education.

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Complex Games, the developers of the new Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate -- Daemonhunters, have issued a statement to frustrated players after running a campaign where certain in-game items were only available to those who sat through some Twitch streams. From a report: While Complex probably thought they were running a fairly standard (by 2022 standards anyway) release window promotional thing, the nature of the items and the fanbase and platform in question weren't having it. Here's an example of a negative review left on the game's Steam page as a result, one of many that presumably prompted the statement: "The game would have gotten a thumbs up but for one thing. The developers for some ridiculous reason decided to put 11 ingame items(not skins or cosmetics but actual weapons and armor) behind twitch drops on the day of release. In order to get these items you not only have to create and link a Frontier account and a Twitch account but you have to watch hours and hours of inane twitch streamers prattling on instead of actually playing the game you paid for. They also are timed so if you miss them you miss them forever. If there was another way to earn these ingame it would not be a big deal..." The Angry Joe stream was actually only 45 minutes, but their point remains. The items weren't anything fancy or game-breaking. Most of them were just very slight variations on early-game weapons and armour that you'll move past in a few hours anyway. But it's the spirit of the move -- and its mandates on player's time if they want to try out everything the game has to offer -- that has upset people as much as its practical consequences. As a result, Complex have said that every item offered during the streams will now be given away to free to all players later this month.

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Uber will cut back on spending and focus on becoming a leaner business to address a "seismic shift" in investor sentiment, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in an email obtained by CNBC. From the report: "After earnings, I spent several days meeting investors in New York and Boston," Khosrowshahi said in the email, which was sent out late Sunday. "It's clear that the market is experiencing a seismic shift and we need to react accordingly." [...] To address the shift in economic sentiment, the ride-hailing firm will slash spending on marketing and incentives and treat hiring as a "privilege," Khosrowshahi said. "We have to make sure our unit economics work before we go big," the Uber boss wrote. "The least efficient marketing and incentive spend will be pulled back... We will treat hiring as a privilege and be deliberate about when and where we add headcount," he added. "We will be even more hardcore about costs across the board."

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Investors are divided about whether technology companies are set for a deep retrenchment or if growth is simply slowing from pandemic highs. From a report: The technology industry, which powered the U.S. economy during the pandemic and grew at tremendous scale during a decade of ultralow interest rates, is confronting one of the most punishing stretches in years. Global powerhouses and fledgling startups are feeling pain from a variety of economic, industry and market factors, spawning postpandemic turbulence in e-commerce, digital advertising, electric vehicles, ride-hailing and other segments. Companies that emerged as job-creating juggernauts in the past two years -- collectively adding hundreds of thousands of workers to their payrolls in engineering, warehouse and delivery jobs -- have begun to freeze hiring or even lay off employees. Concerned that some of the forces that have propelled tech ever upward have begun to fade, investors have sent share prices for a number of companies, including Lyft and Peloton plunging on disappointing financial results or other news. The stocks of Netflix, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Amazon.com all are down more than 30% this year, exceeding the more-than-13% drop in the S&P 500. Investors are divided on the question of whether the slowdown is temporary -- as well-positioned companies work through a period of stagnation after expanding ultrafast in recent years -- or if these are the early signs of a deeper retrenchment for the industry and its investors.

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Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that the platform is going to start testing NFTs with select creators in the United States this week. From a report: Mosseri noted that there will be no fees associated with posting or sharing a digital collectible on Instagram. At launch, the supported blockchains for showcasing NFTs on Instagram are Ethereum and Polygon, with support for Flow and Solana coming soon. The third-party wallets compatible for use will include Rainbow, Trust Wallet and MetaMask. Creators and people who are part of the test can now share NFTs that they've made or that they've bought. You can share these NFTs in your main Feed, Stories, or in messages. Mosseri outlined that only a limited number of people have access to the test, but the company plans to roll out more functionality related to NFTs in the future once it gets feedback from its initial testing.

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Congress may soon require government agencies to vet tech startups seeking federal funding, after a Defense Department study found China is exploiting a popular program that funds innovation among small American companies. From a report: The study, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, found China is using state-sponsored methods to target companies that have received Pentagon funding from the Small Business Innovation Research program. The SBIR program for decades has sought to promote innovation through a competitive U.S. government award process. The April 2021 report, which has been circulating among lawmakers on Capitol Hill, details eight case studies it says have "national and economic security implications." The studies include examples of program participants who dissolve their American companies, join Chinese government talent programs and continue their work at institutions that support the People's Liberation Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party. The report also documents instances of SBIR recipients taking venture-capital money from Chinese state-owned firms and of working with Chinese entities that support the country's defense industry. The report concludes that the SBIR program needs a due-diligence process to identify entities of potential concern that would then receive a more detailed review.

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Israeli spyware company NSO Group has stonewalled questions over whether it is operating legally, according to consultants acting on behalf of the controversial company's owners. From a report: Berkeley Research Group, the US consultancy that was last year put in charge of the private equity fund that owns 70 per cent of NSO, has told EU lawmakers that its inquiries about NSO's "lawfulness" have been "ignored and/or frustrated by NSO Group's management team." Concerns remain about âoethe historical management of the NSO Group" and "possible ongoing activities in relation to which [BRG is] being kept in the dark," BRG's lawyers wrote in a letter to MEPs. BRG's complaint is a further escalation of the controversy surrounding NSO, which was once a highly prized asset that Israel used as a diplomatic calling card, but is now facing lawsuits from Meta and Apple and has been blacklisted by the US. NSO's Pegasus software can infiltrate a smartphone and mirror its encrypted contents. It was last year found to have been used to target smartphones belonging to 37 journalists, human rights activists and other prominent figures.

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