Month: January 2021

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC: President Joe Biden speaks before signing an executive order related to American manufacturing in the South Court Auditorium of the White House complex on January 25, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The federal government owns more than 600,000 civilian vehicles—trucks, vans, and passenger vehicles—with a large large majority running on gasoline or diesel fuel. On Monday, Joe Biden vowed to change that.

"The federal government owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which we're gonna to replace with clean electric vehicles made right here in America," Biden said at a press conference to announce a new "Buy American" initiative.

This won't be easy. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, the federal government owned fewer than 3,000 battery electric vehicles—less than one half of one percent of the federal vehicle fleet.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump listens as Moncef Slaoui, the former head of GlaxoSmithKlines vaccines division, speaks about coronavirus vaccine development in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Moncef Slaoui, the former head scientist for the Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed, is proud of his team’s work in helping to develop and distribute vaccine in an unprecedented timeframe amid the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. But when it comes to immunizing the population, “overall, we’re failing,” he says.

The immunologist and former head of vaccines for GlaxoSmithKline resigned from his role on Warp Speed at the request of the Biden Administration nearly two weeks ago. Though the Administration also quickly scrubbed away the “Warp Speed” name—which was repeatedly criticized for giving the impression that vaccines would be hastily developed without proper testing—Slaoui agreed to stay on into February to help with the transition. With his time in the federal position dwindling, he sat down for an interview with Science magazine to review how things have gone.

Overall, Slaoui is proud of his work, his team, and the monumental tasks they accomplished, he said. “Between May [2020] and now, we’ve moved five vaccines into Phase III trials, two have been authorized, two are completing Phase III—and one of those could be approved imminently… By all standards, this is absolutely exceptional,” he said.

Enlarge / Cyber threat from North Korea. North Korean hacker at the computer, on a background of binary code, the colors of the flag of the DPRK. DDoS attack (credit: Dmitry Nogaev | Getty Images)

Google has warned it has uncovered an “ongoing” state-backed hacking campaign run by North Korea targeting cyber security researchers.

The Silicon Valley group said its threat analysis team found that cyber attackers posing as researchers had created numerous fake social media profiles on platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. To gain credibility, they also had set up a fake blog for which they would get unwitting targets to write guest posts about actual software bugs.

After establishing communication with an actual researcher, the attackers would ask the target to work together on cyber vulnerability research and then share collaboration tools containing malicious code to install malware on the researcher’s systems.

Enlarge / CentOS Linux will be sleeping with the fishes in 2022. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

This morning, The Register's Tim Anderson published excerpts of an interview with the CentOS project's Brian Exelbierd. Exelbierd is a member of the CentOS board and its official liaison with Red Hat.

Exelbierd spoke to Anderson to give an insider's perspective on Red Hat's effective termination of CentOS Linux in December, in which the open source giant announced CentOS Linux was to be deprecated immediately—with security upgrades to CentOS Linux 8 ending later in 2021 rather than the 2029 end of support date CentOS users expected.

The tail mustn’t wag the dog

"CentOS is a [Red Hat] sponsored project," Exelbierd told the Register. "We are the funding agent (the entity which receives and disburses grants), and we also happen to be a heavy contributor. We have learned that open source communities do well with independence. We let those governing bodies govern."