Month: March 2020

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump points to a reporter during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, at the White House on March 22, 2020, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Eric Baradat)

Two weeks have now gone by since the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has held a press briefing to update the media and the public on the COVID-19 pandemic and the agency's response efforts.

In those two weeks, the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has blazed through communities across the country and begun ravaging local healthcare systems. There have been over 42,800 detected cases and at least 579 deaths as of March 23. The true number of cases is thought to be much higher due to a nationwide lag in testing.

On March 9, the day of the CDC's last telebriefing, there were around 500 cases and just 19 deaths. Up to that point, the CDC had been providing regular briefings, usually led by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 60 Starlink satellites launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 29, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

SpaceX has received government approval to deploy up to 1 million user terminals in the United States for its Starlink satellite-broadband constellation.

SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for the license in February 2019, and the FCC announced its approval in a public notice last week. The FCC approval is for "a blanket license for the operation of up to 1,000,000 fixed earth stations that will communicate with [SpaceX's] non-geostationary orbit satellite system." The license is good for 15 years.

As SpaceX's application said, the earth stations are "user terminals [that] employ advanced phased-array beam-forming and digital-processing technologies to make highly efficient use of Ku-band spectrum resources by supporting highly directive, steered antenna beams that track the system's low-Earth orbit satellites."

Enlarge / Fraudulent websites never actually look like this, really, but if you come across one that does, maybe don't put in your credit card information. (credit: boonchai wedmakawand | Getty Images )

The US Department of Justice is keeping busy during the coronavirus crisis: the agency has filed its first—but unfortunately, almost certainly not last—suit to take down a fraudulent scheme allegedly trying to profit off Americans' fears about the virus.

The DOJ said late Sunday that it filed suit in Austin against the operators of website coronavirusmedicalkit.com and issuing a restraining order requiring the registrar to block access to it. (As of this writing the site is indeed offline.)

The site operators were engaging in a "predatory wire fraud scheme," the suit (PDF) alleges. When it was online, the site claimed that the World Health Organization was offering free vaccine kits for COVID-19. All users had to do to get these "free" kits was enter their credit card information and pay $4.95 for shipping. The site also featured an image of Dr. Anthony Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and current leading US expert in infections disease—to make itself look more official.

Enlarge (credit: Windows)

Attackers are actively exploiting a Windows zero-day vulnerability that can execute malicious code on fully updated systems, Microsoft warned on Monday.

The font-parsing remote code-execution vulnerability is being used in “limited targeted attacks,” the software maker said in an advisory published on Monday morning. The security flaw exists in the Adobe Type Manager Library, a Windows DLL file that a wide variety of apps use to manage and render fonts available from Adobe Systems. The vulnerability consists of two code-execution flaws that can be triggered by the improper handling of maliciously crafted master fonts in the Adobe Type 1 Postscript format. Attackers can exploit them by convincing a target to open a booby-trapped document or viewing it in the Windows preview pane.

“Microsoft is aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to leverage this vulnerability,” Monday’s advisory warned.

Enlarge / Partial view of the Dead Sea Temple Scroll, one of the longest biblical texts found since the 1940s. (credit: Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images)

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, opened to great fanfare in November 2017. Among its most prized acquisitions featured at the opening were 16 purported fragments of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. But in a blow to the fledgling museum, an independent scientific analysis has now revealed that all 16 of those fragments are modern forgeries. While the identity of the forgers remains unknown, it seems all 16 came from the same source, although they were purchased from four different sellers. The full report from Art Fraud Insights is available here.

"After an exhaustive review of all the imaging and scientific analysis results, it is evident that none of the textual fragments in Museum of the Bible's Dead Sea Scroll collection are authentic," Colette Loll, founder and director of Art Fraud Insights, wrote in the final report. "Moreover, each exhibits characteristics that suggest they are deliberate forgeries created in the 20th century with the intent to mimic authentic Dead Sea Scroll fragments." 

"We're victims," museum CEO Harry Hargrove told National Geographic. "We're victims of misrepresentation, we're victims of fraud."