Month: June 2021

Enlarge / MELBOURNE, FLORIDA, 2021/05/17: A nurse gives a 16-year-old a COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination clinic a (credit: Getty | Paul Hennessy)

Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a committee of independent expert advisors convened Wednesday to lay out and discuss everything they know about rare cases of myocarditis—inflammation of the heart muscle—in people who have recently received an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, which is either Moderna’s vaccine or the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The experts focused on adolescents and young adults, who have had the highest rates of vaccine-linked myocarditis cases of any vaccinated age group. Though, to be clear, all of the rates here—even the relatively high ones—are actually very low.

Still, data on this possible side effect is accumulating at a precarious time for the country’s vaccination efforts. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for use in adolescents 12 to 15 years old just last month. So far, CDC data suggests those ages 12 to 17 have the highest rates of myocarditis cases by vaccine doses given. And the FDA is poised to review vaccine authorizations for even younger age groups in the coming months.

Enlarge (credit: Western Digital)

Western Digital, maker of the popular My Disk external hard drives, is recommending customers unplug their devices from the Internet until further notice while company engineers investigate unexplained compromises that have completely wiped data from devices around the world.

The mass incidents of disk wiping came to light in this thread on Western Digital’s support forum.

All my data is gone

“I have a WD mybook live connected to my home LAN and worked fine for years,” the person starting the thread wrote. “I have just found that somehow all the data on it is gone today, while the directories seems there but empty. Previously the 2T volume was almost full but now it shows full capacity.”

Enlarge (credit: Avi Levin and Ilan Theiler, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University)

It's long past time to stop thinking of humanity's nearest relatives as forming a family tree. Our close relatives like the Neanderthals and Denisovans clearly interbred both with us and each other. There are also indications that an older African lineage contributed to our ancestry; Neanderthals seem to have picked up some DNA from an even older lineage as well. All of that makes humanity's ancestry look more like a river delta, with multiple channels separating and reuniting over time.

In today's issue of Science, a group of researchers argue that they have found yet another channel that may sit at a key point in our past. A small collection of bones from a site in the Mideast seems to have a mix of archaic and Neanderthal-like features, suggesting that the bones may be related to the source of archaic DNA in the Neanderthal lineage. But the bones come from well after the Neanderthal lineage was distinct, and the artifacts found with them suggest extensive interactions with other human lineages.

A bit of a mix

The site, located in Israel, is called Nesher Ramla. Extensive dating of materials found there suggests that the newly described bones date from roughly 120,000 to 140,000 years ago. That was a complicated time in our species' history, to say the least. Neanderthals and Denisovans had already inhabited Eurasia, which they shared with other archaic human lineages, along with Homo erectus. Modern humans were present in Africa and shared the continent with various archaic lineages, many of which had some modern features. And there is evidence that a lot of these groups crossed paths in the Mideast.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | MichaelJay)

The House Judiciary Committee approved antitrust legislation that could prohibit platform operators like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook from favoring their own products and services, and the legislation could even break up industry giants by forcing them to eliminate or sell certain divisions. Companies could also face fines of 15 percent of their annual revenue.

Bills introduced by Democrats were approved in a hearing that began Wednesday morning, recessed at 5 am EDT Thursday, reconvened late Thursday morning, and finished around 3 pm. The final and most controversial bill approved was the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, which "eliminates the ability of dominant platforms to leverage their control over across multiple business lines to self-preference and disadvantage competitors in ways that undermine free and fair competition," a press release from Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline (D-R.I.) on June 11 said.

The 21-20 vote went mostly along party lines, but Republicans Ken Buck (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) supported the bill. Democrats who opposed it were Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.); Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.); Lou Correa (D-Calif.); and Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.).

Enlarge (credit: Zyxel)

Network device maker Zyxel is warning customers of active and ongoing attacks that are targeting a range of the company’s firewalls and other types of security appliances.

In an email, the company said that targeted devices included security appliances that have remote management or SSL VPN enabled, namely in the USG/ZyWALL, USG FLEX, ATP, and VPN series running on-premise ZLD firmware. The language in the email is terse, but it appears to say that the attacks target devices that are exposed to the Internet. When the attackers succeed in accessing the device, the email further appears to say, they are then able to connect to previously unknown accounts hardwired into the devices.

Batten down the hatches

“We’re aware of the situation and have been working our best to investigate and resolve it,” the email, which was posted to Twitter, said. “The threat actor attempts to access a device through WAN; if successful, they then bypass authentication and establish SSL VPN tunnels with unknown user accounts, such as ‘zyxel_silvpn,’ ‘zyxel_ts,’ or ‘zyxel_vpn_test,’ to manipulate the device's configuration.”

Enlarge / Vivaldi's graphic on FLoC. (credit: Vivaldi)

Google's plan to upend web advertising and user tracking by dropping third-party cookie support in Chrome has been delayed. Most browsers block third-party tracking cookies now, but Google—the world's largest advertising company—wasn't going to follow suit without protecting its business model first. The company's replacement plan for cookies is a controversial system called "FLoC," but after many big Internet players came out against the idea (and the EU launched an antitrust investigation into the plan) Google now says that "it's become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right." The new timeline pushes back the death of third-party cookies by about a year and a half.

Back in January 2020, Google announced a plan to drop support for third-party cookies in Chrome "within two years." The Chrome "Privacy Sandbox" would block the third-party cookies typically used for ad targeting, but given Google's multibillion-dollar ad business, "not tracking users at all" is not an option. A replacement tracking system called "FLoC," or "Federated Learning of Cohorts," was the primary alternative floated by the Chrome team. The simple FLoC explanation is that, instead of having individual companies hide a third-party cookie on your computer that tracks what websites you visit for ad interest tracking, Google would now have Chrome build an ad profile locally on your computer and ship that profile to advertisers whenever they ask. Google says this plan is better than third-party cookies because it will take individual identification out of the ad-tracking process by combining people into groups, though many opponents of the idea have disputed this idea.

Google's infographic on how FLoC works. (credit: Google)

Everyone who isn't an advertising company seems to have come out against FLoC. The EFF, Brave, Vivaldi, and DuckDuckGo have all put out strong statements against the idea. Meanwhile, other browser vendors—like Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft—have floated more tepid "no plans to implement" statements. Amazon is already blocking FLoC on Amazon.com, Wholefoods.com, and Zappos.