Getting a COVID test can mean long lines and delayed results. Matt Dibble looks into recent breakthroughs that may have more of us performing a test at home.
Camera: Matt Dibble       Producer: Matt Dibble
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SpaceX launched its shiny, bullet-shaped, straight-out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the 6 1/2-minute test flight ended in an explosive fireball at touchdown.It was the highest and most elaborate flight yet for the rocket ship that Elon Musk says could carry people to Mars in as little as six years.This latest prototype — the first one equipped with a nose cone, body flaps and three engines — was shooting for an altitude of up to 12.5 kilometers. That’s almost 100 times higher than previous hops and skimming the stratosphere.Starship seemed to hit the mark or at least come close. There was no immediate word from SpaceX on how high it went.The full-scale, stainless steel model — 50 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter — soared out over the Gulf of Mexico. After about five minutes, it flipped sideways as planned and descended in a free-fall back to the southeastern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The Raptor engines reignited for braking and the rocket tilted back upright. Upon touching down, however, the rocket ship became engulfed in flames and ruptured, parts scattering.The entire flight — as dramatic and flashy as it gets, even by SpaceX standards — lasted just over six minutes and 40 seconds. SpaceX broadcast the sunset demo live on its website; repeated delays over the past week and a last-second engine abort Tuesday heightened the excitement among space fans.”Awesome test. Congratulations Starship team!” read a scroll across the screen.Musk kept expectations low going into this first high-altitude attempt by Starship, cautioning earlier this week there was “probably” a 1-in-3 chance of complete success.Two lower, shorter test flights earlier this year from Boca Chica, Texas — a quiet coastal village before SpaceX moved in — used more rudimentary versions of Starship. Essentially cylindrical cans with cone tops and single Raptor engines, these early vehicles reached altitudes of 150 meters. An even earlier model, the short and squat Starhopper, made a tiny, tethered hop in 2019, followed by two increasingly higher climbs.  
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YouTube said on Wednesday it would start removing content that falsely allege widespread fraud changed the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, in a change to its more hands-off stance on videos making similar claims.
The update, which applies to content uploaded from Wednesday, comes a day after “safe harbor,” a deadline set by U.S. law for states to certify the results of the presidential election.
YouTube said it would start enforcing the policy in line with its approach towards historical U.S. presidential elections.
Online platforms have been under pressure to police misinformation about the election on their sites.
YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, was widely seen as taking a more hands-off approach than Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, which started labeling content with election misinformation. YouTube labels all election-related videos.
After the November election, Reuters identified several YouTube channels making money from ads and memberships that were amplifying debunked accusations about voting fraud.
Last month, a group of Democratic senators asked YouTube to commit to removing content containing false or misleading information about the 2020 election outcome and the upcoming Senate run-off elections in Georgia.
Asked about how the policy would apply to Georgia elections, a YouTube spokeswoman said this policy only applied to the presidential election.
YouTube said in a blog post on Wednesday that since September it had removed over 8,000 channels and thousands of misleading election-related videos for violating its existing policies.
The company said more than 70% of recommendations on election-related topics came from authoritative news sources.
YouTube also said that since Election Day, fact-check information panels had been triggered over 200,000 times on election-related search results
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and nearly every U.S. state sued Facebook Inc. Wednesday, saying it broke antitrust law and should potentially be broken up.With the filing of the twin lawsuits, Facebook becomes the second big tech company to face a major legal challenge this fall.The FTC said in a statement that it would seek an injunction that “could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp.”In its complaint, the coalition of 46 states, Washington, D.C., and Guam also asked for Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to be judged to be illegal.FILE – New York State Attorney General Letitia James listens to a question at a press conference in New York City, Aug. 6, 2020.”For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.James said the company used vast amounts of money to acquire such rivals before they could threaten the company’s dominance. Facebook said it is reviewing the FTC and state antitrust complaints.The company said the government “now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day.”The U.S. Justice Department sued Alphabet Inc.’s Google in October, accusing the $1 trillion company of using its market power to fend off rivals.The lawsuits are the biggest antitrust cases in a generation, comparable to the lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. in 1998. The federal government eventually settled that case, but the yearslong court fight and extended antitrust scrutiny prevented the company from thwarting competitors and is credited with clearing the way for the explosive growth of the internet.Facebook shares fell as much as 3% after the news before paring losses and were last down 1.7%. 
 
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Prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye said Tuesday that foreign government hackers with “world-class capabilities” broke into its network and stole offensive tools it uses to probe the defenses of its thousands of customers, who include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.The hackers “primarily sought information related to certain government customers,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said in a statement, without naming them. He said there was no indication they got customer information from the company’s consulting or breach-response businesses or threat-intelligence data it collects.FireEye is a major cybersecurity player — it responded to the Sony and Equifax data breaches and helped Saudi Arabia thwart an oil industry cyberattack — and has played a key role in identifying Russia as the protagonist in numerous aggressions in the burgeoning netherworld of global digital conflict.Neither Mandia nor a FireEye spokeswoman said when the company detected the hack or who might be responsible. But many in the cybersecurity community suspect Russia.“I do think what we know of the operation is consistent with a Russian state actor,” said former NSA hacker Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec. “Whether or not customer data was accessed, it’s still a big win for Russia.”FireEye’s Mandia said he had concluded that “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities” was behind the attack.The stolen “red team” tools — which amount to real-world malware — could be dangerous in the wrong hands. FireEye said there’s no indication they have been used maliciously. But cybersecurity experts say sophisticated nation-state hackers could modify them and wield them in the future against government or industry targets.The hack was the biggest blow to the U.S. cybersecurity community since a mysterious group known as the “Shadow Brokers” in 2016 released a trove of high-level hacking tools stolen from the National Security Agency. The U.S. believes North Korea and Russia capitalized on the stolen tools to unleash devastating global cyberattacks.The nation’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that “unauthorized third-party users” could similarly abuse FireEye’s stolen red-team tools.Milpitas, California-based FireEye, which is publicly traded, said in Tuesday’s statement that it had developed 300 countermeasures to protect customers and others from them and was making them immediately available.FireEye has been at the forefront of investigating state-backed hacking groups, including Russian groups trying to break into state and local governments in the U.S. that administer elections. It was credited with attributing to Russian military hackers mid-winter attacks in 2015 and 2016 on Ukraine’s energy grid. Its threat hunters also have helped social media companies including Facebook identify malicious actors.Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins cyberconflict scholar, said that if the Kremlin were behind the hack it could have been seeking to learn what FireEye knows about Russia’s global state-backed operations — doing counterintelligence. Or it might have seeking to retaliate against the U.S. government for measures including indicting Russian military hackers for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and other alleged crimes. FireEye is, after all, a close U.S. government partner that has “exposed many Russian operations,” he said.FireEye said it is investigating the attack in coordination with the FBI and partners including Microsoft, which has its own cybersecurity team. Mandia said the hackers used “a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past.”Matt Gorham, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said the hackers’ “high level of sophistication (was) consistent with a nation state.”The U.S. government is “focused on imposing risk and consequences on malicious cyber actors, so they think twice before attempting an intrusion in the first place,” Gorham said. That has included what U.S. Cyber Command terms “defending forward” operations such as penetrated the networks of Russia and other adversaries.U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the Senate’s intelligence committee, applauded FireEye for quickly disclosing the intrusion, saying the case “shows the difficulty of stopping determined nation-state hackers.”Cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch said security companies like FireEye are top targets, with big names in the field including Kaspersky and Symantec breached in the past.“Every security company is being targeted by nation-state actors. This has been going on got over a decade now,” said Alperovitch, the co-founder and former chief technical officer of Crowdstrike, which investigated the 2016 Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.He said the release of the “red-team” tools, while a serious concern, was “not the end of the world because threat actors always create new tools.”“This could have been much worse if their customer data had been hacked and exfiltrated. So far there is no evidence of that,” Alperovitch said, citing hacks of other cybersecurity companies — RSA Security in 2011 and Bit9 two years later — that contributed to the compromise of customer data.Founded in 2004, FireEye went public in 2013 and months later acquired Virginia-based Mandiant Corp., the firm that linked years of cyberattacks against U.S. companies to a secret Chinese military unit. It had about 3,400 employees and $889.2 million in revenue last year, though with a net loss of $257.4 million.The company’s 8,800 customers last year included more than half of the Forbes Global 2000, companies in telecommunications, technology, financial services, healthcare, electric grid operators, pharmaceutical companies and the oil-and-gas industry.Its stock fell more than 7% in after-hours trading Tuesday following news of the hack.
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U.S. glassmaker Corning has become the dominant provider of glass covers for smartphones worldwide. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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Legislation to make Facebook and Google pay media organizations for news content will be introduced in the Australian parliament on Wednesday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Tuesday.
 
Frydenberg said the measure would be reviewed by a parliamentary committee after its introduction and before legislators vote on it next year.
 
If the measure becomes law, Frydenberg said the internet giants must negotiate payments for content with local publishers and broadcasters. A government-appointed mediator would decide the payment terms if a deal is not reached.
 
Facebook has said it may block Australian news content instead of paying for it.
 
Google has warned the legislation would lead to “dramatically worse” search results on Google and YouTube and jeopardize free services.
 
Until recently, most countries watched companies shift advertising money to the world’s largest social media website and search engine, depriving news outlets of their primary revenue source. The dramatic decline in advertising revenue sparked a wave of closures and job losses.
 
Regulators, however, are beginning to rein in the two corporate giants, which Frydenberg said receive 80% of Australia’s online advertising spending.
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Six months ago, Apple and Google introduced a new smartphone tool designed to notify people who might have been exposed to the coronavirus, without disclosing any personal information. But for the most part, Americans haven’t been all that interested.
Fewer than half of U.S. states and territories — 18 in total — have made such technology widely available. And according to a data analysis by The Associated Press, the vast majority of Americans in such locations haven’t activated the tool.
Data from 16 states, Guam and the District of Columbia shows that 8.1 million people had utilized the technology as of late November. That’s about one in 14 of the 110 million residents in those regions.
In theory, such apps could bolster one of the most difficult tasks in pandemic control: Tracing the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus in order to test and isolate them if necessary. In practice, however, widespread COVID-19 misinformation, the complexity of the technology, overwhelmed health workers needed to quickly confirm a diagnosis, and a general lack of awareness have all presented obstacles, experts and users say.
“There’s a lot of things working against it,” said Jessica Vitak, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. “Unfortunately, in the U.S., COVID has been politicized far more than in any other country. I think that’s affecting people’s willingness to use tools to track it.”
Charlotte, North Carolina, lawyer Evan Metaxatos was thrilled to learn in November about his state’s tracking app, called SlowCOVIDNC. He immediately downloaded it and got his parents and pregnant wife to follow suit.
But they’re still outliers in the state, which launched the app in September with little fanfare. Of roughly 10.5 million state residents, only 482,003 had installed it through the end of November.
“It won’t work great until everyone’s using it, but it’s better than nothing,” Metaxatos said.
Apple and Google co-created the primary technology behind such apps, which use Bluetooth wireless signals to anonymously detect when two phones have spent time in close proximity. If an app user tests positive for the virus, that person’s phone can trigger a notification to other people they’ve spent time near — without revealing names, locations, or any other identifying information.
In states such as Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland and Washington, as well as Washington, D.C., iPhone users don’t even have to download an app. In fact, Apple prompts users via pop-ups to activate the notification system by adjusting their phone settings.
In these states, adoption rates are notably higher. But even in the most successful state, Connecticut, only about a fifth of all residents have opted into this tracking. On Friday, Washington said that more than 1 million state residents — roughly 13% of its population — had activated the technology in its first four days.
Virginia’s COVIDWISE app launched on Aug. 5 and was the first to go live. Since then, fewer than one in ten residents have downloaded it, though the state estimates almost 20% of Virginians between the ages of 18 and 65 with a smartphone have done so. Delaware’s app downloads account for about 7% of the state’s population.
All other U.S. states analyzed have much lower adoption rates.
New York launched its app on Oct. 1. It recently surpassed 1 million downloads, which amounts to about 5% of the population. New Jersey and Pennsylvania have seen less use, with a 4% download rate.
Adoption is even lower in Wyoming, North Dakota, Michigan, Nevada and Alabama, with users representing only 1% to 3% of their state populations. The apps, which are free, can be found in Apple’s app store and the Google Play store for Android devices; they’re also typically available on state health-department websites.
Irish app developer NearForm says more than one-quarter of Ireland’s population uses its COVID-19 app. It’s been harder to get such traction in the four U.S. states where it’s built similar apps: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
In Ireland, “all sides of the political divide came together with a consistent message on this is what we need to do,” said Larry Breen, NearForm’s chief commercial officer. “That debate continues to rage on your side of the pond.”
Elsewhere in Europe, the uptake has been mixed. Germany and Britain have penetration rates similar to Ireland’s; in Finland the figure is 45%, according to data compiled by MIT Technology Review. In France, however, less than 4% of the population is using the official COVID app, which shuns the Apple-Google approach for a more intrusive data collection system that raised privacy concerns and technical issues.
Security experts praise the Apple-Google system for protecting users’ anonymity, but it’s been a tough sell for many people. American users say partisanship, privacy concerns and stigma surrounding COVID-19 have kept participation low. A lack of state and federal efforts to boost awareness hasn’t helped.
Neither have technological and bureaucratic issues.
Lee McFarland, a loan officer from Grand Forks, North Dakota, was eager to download his state’s Care19 Alert app but said he couldn’t push a “Notify Others” button after getting the virus in late October.
“If you test positive, a public health official will call and verify your code,” said a message on McFarland’s app. “This ensures that only verified positive COVID-19 people can send notifications.”
McFarland said he forgot to tell the health worker he had the app installed on his phone. He was unsuccessful in following up with the worker to get the needed code, and has since deleted the app.
Even when that process works, however, many North Dakotans don’t actually push the button to notify others.
Tim Brookins, CEO of app developer ProudCrowd, said 91 of North Dakota’s 14,000 active users had their “Notify Others” button enabled after the state confirmed them as positive. Of the 91 users, only 29 pushed the button, which prompted 50 notifications.
Still, many users say they’ll keep the app in hopes others will see its potential benefits.
“You can say that about just about anything that not enough people are doing this or that, but everybody that does something is helping,” said David Waechter, a general contractor from Lenoir, North Carolina. “I think that the United States could use a good strong dose of E pluribus unum and stop thinking about self and start thinking about our countrymen.”
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The Trump administration has chosen not to extend again an order requiring ByteDance, a Chinese company, to divest TikTok’s U.S. assets, but talks will continue over the video-sharing app’s fate, two sources briefed on the matter said.A Treasury Department representative said late Friday that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was “engaging with ByteDance to complete the divestment and other steps necessary to resolve the national security risks.”Last week, CFIUS granted TikTok parent ByteDance a one-week extension until Friday to shed TikTok’s U.S. assets.President Donald Trump’s August order gave the Justice Department the power to enforce the divestiture order once the deadline expired, but it was unclear when or how the government might seek to compel divestiture.Trump’s decisionTrump personally decided not to approve any additional extensions at a meeting of senior U.S. officials, according to a person briefed on the meeting. The government had previously issued a 15-day and seven-day extension of the initial 90-day deadline, which was November 12, on Trump’s order.The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while the White House did not comment. TikTok declined to comment.The Trump administration contends TikTok poses national security concerns because the personal data of U.S. users could be obtained by China’s government. TikTok, which has more than 100 million U.S. users, denies the allegation.FILE – Women wearing masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus chat as they pass by the headquarters of ByteDance, owners of TikTok, in Beijing, China, Aug. 7, 2020.Under pressure from the U.S. government, ByteDance has been in talks for months to finalize a deal with Walmart Inc. and Oracle Corp. to shift TikTok’s U.S. assets into a new entity aimed to satisfy the divestiture order.ByteDance made a new proposal aimed at addressing the U.S. government’s concerns, Reuters reported last week.ByteDance made the proposal after disclosing on November 10 that it submitted four prior proposals, including one in November, that sought to address U.S. concerns by “creating a new entity, wholly owned by Oracle, Walmart and existing U.S. investors in ByteDance, that would be responsible for handling TikTok’s U.S. user data and content moderation.”Preliminary dealIn September, TikTok announced it had a preliminary deal for Walmart and Oracle to take stakes in a new company to oversee U.S. operations. Trump said the deal had his blessing.On November 11, ByteDance filed a petition with a U.S. appeals court challenging the divestiture order and said it planned to file a request “to stay enforcement of the divestment order only if discussions reach an impasse and the government indicates an intent to take action to enforce the order.”ByteDance said the Trump order seeks “to compel the wholesale divestment of TikTok, a multibillion-dollar business built on technology developed by” ByteDance, “based on the government’s purported national security review of a 3-year-old transaction that involved a different business.”The Trump administration has been stymied in its efforts to restrict TikTok in the United States.A federal judge in Washington on September 27 blocked a ban on Apple Inc. and Alphabet’s Google offering TikTok for download in U.S. app stores, while another judge on October 30 blocked government restrictions scheduled to take effect November 12 that ByteDance said would have effectively barred TikTok from operating in the United States.A U.S. appeals court will hear arguments on the app store ban on December 14.
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