Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy unveiled a slew of forthcoming Star Wars projects at Disney's Investor Day. (credit: Lucasfilm)

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy gave updates on a slew of forthcoming Star Wars film and TV projects at Disney's Investor Day—including a behind-the-scenes teaser for Rogue One-spinoff series, Andor, set five years before the events of the 2016 blockbuster film.

"With The Mandalorian on Disney+, we've ushered in an entirely new era for Star Wars," Kennedy said. "These interconnected shows, along with future stories, will excite new audiences, embrace our most passionate fans, and will culminate in a climatic story event."

(Some spoilers below.)

Enlarge / An illustration picture shows vials with Covid-19 Vaccine stickers attached, with the logo of US pharmaceutical company Pfizer, on November 17, 2020. (credit: Getty | JUSTIN TALLIS)

The COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech should be granted an Emergency Use Authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration, according to a committee of independent experts advising the agency.

The committee—the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC)—made the recommendation today in a vote of 17 in favor, 4 against, and 1 abstain. Specifically, committee members voted in the affirmative to the question:

Based on the totality of scientific evidence available, do the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine outweigh its risks for use in individuals 16 years of age and older?

If the FDA follows the recommendation and grants authorization, the vaccine will be widely accessible to people 16 years and older and distribution of the vaccine will likely to begin in the coming days.

Enlarge / Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) is the lead sponsor of the Open Courts Act in the House. (credit: Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the Open Courts Act. The bill aims to modernize PACER, the website that provides public access to federal court records. It also aims to eliminate PACER's paywall by 2025.

The PACER system represented a big advance for judicial transparency when it went online in the 1990s. But the system hasn't kept up with the times, with a user interface that has changed little since the days of dial-up Internet.

Each federal trial and bankruptcy court—around 200 courts in total—has its own distinct PACER website, with limited capabilities to search across multiple sites. Not only is this inconvenient for users, but maintaining dozens of separate websites is an administrative headache.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

An ongoing malware campaign is blasting the Internet with malware that neuters the security of Web browsers, adds malicious browser extensions, and makes other changes to users’ computers, Microsoft said on Thursday.

Adrozek, as the software maker has dubbed the malware family, relies on a sprawling distribution network comprising 159 unique domains with each one hosting an average of 17,300 unique URLs. The URLs, in turn, host an average of 15,300 unique malware samples. The campaign began no later than May and hit a peak in August, when the malware was observed on 30,000 devices per day.

Not your father’s affiliate scam

The attack works against the Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Yandex browsers, and it remains ongoing. The end goal for now is to inject ads into search results so the attackers can collect fees from affiliates. While these types of campaigns are common and represent less of a threat than many types of malware, Adrozek stands out because of malicious modifications it makes to security settings and other malicious actions it performs.

We are très désolé to report that YouTube cat-video sensation Henri, le Chat Noir has died at the ripe old age of 17. His collaborator Will Braden, aka the "thieving filmmaker," announced Henry's passing in a moving Facebook post. Apparently, Henri had a deteriorating spinal condition and had been rendered largely immobile as a result. Despite the pandemic, a local vet made a home visit to "help him pass peacefully, surrounded by those that loved him," Braden wrote.

Henri (née Henry) was not actually Braden's cat; the Facebook post identifies Braden's mother as Henri's real-life caretaker. Henri lived in an undisclosed location in Seattle's North End, largely oblivious to his online celebrity. He was a rescue cat, adopted from a local animal shelter as a kitten, who shared his living space with a second white cat, known to his fans as 'l'Imbecile Blanc," who survives him. While a student at the Seattle Film Institute, Braden noted Henri's "regal presence and distinguished personality," and he featured the cat in a short film for class. The video hit YouTube on May 24, 2007, and Henri's existential musings soon began winning enthusiastic fans.

It was the 2012 sequel (embedded below), Henri 2: Paws de Deux, that went truly viral and turned Henri into an Internet celebrity, with many declaring it to be the best cat video on the Internet. Indeed, the short film won the Golden Kitty Award at the Walker Art Center's Internet Cat Video Festival. Henri gave a suitably world-weary statement on his win via Braden: "That I have received this golden, smiling idol for a film documenting my metaphysical torment speaks volumes about the spiritual void of humanity. Shiny and meaningless, life marches on."

Enlarge / An iPhone assembly worker works with Apple supplier Pegatron in an image distributed by Apple. (credit: Apple)

A new report in The Information cites both former Apple employees and internal presentations and data to make the case that Apple has failed to keep its manufacturing partners in China accountable after the Chinese government passed a new law limiting the use of temporary workers at factories.

The former Apple employees included three from Apple's supplier responsibility team, and one who was "a senior manager familiar with its operations in China."

In the mid-2010s, China introduced a new labor law that required factories to limit the portion of their workforces made up of temporary workers (also called dispatch workers) to 10 percent.