Science

• YouTube's recommendation engine is pretty naff, Mozilla study finds

  It even pushes videos that break the site's own content policies
  Katyanna Quach Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 11:32 UTC 2

  The majority of YouTube videos that netizens taking part in a study said they regretted watching were recommended by the website's space-age AI algorithms.

  “This problem with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is part of a bigger story about the opaque, mysterious influence that commercial algorithms can have on our lives,” the Mozilla-led study, released on Wednesday, concluded.

  “YouTube’s algorithm drives an estimated 700 million hours of watch time every single day, and yet the public knows very little about how it works. We have no official ways of studying it.”

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• Salesforce's Patterson blazes a trail for humble-braggers everywhere

  UK & I shindig has everything: Olympians, Bake-Off stars, and the ever-rising former BT boss
  Lindsay Clark Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 10:47 UTC 1

  Gavin Patterson got his break in marketing by heading up Procter & Gamble’s promotion of its Pantene line of shampoos and conditioners and, just like his voluminous glossy hair, the Salesforce president’s proclivity for self-promotion has never really lost its shine.

  It was on display for all to see at the Salesforce Live UK & Ireland online event. With hosts including TV personality and former judger of cakes Sue Perkins, and ivory-tinkler-for-hire Jools Holland, the event was dubbed Success Anywhere for users of the omnipresent $21bn-annual-revenue SaaSy CRM provider.

  Trailblazers, as those users are called in Salesforce-speak, and Patterson were here to make sure that this exclusive group of 11 million people understood who is most important in the room. The trick to self-promotion, according to the G-Patz playbook, is convincing the audience they are worthy of his gratitude.

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• Galaxy quest: Yet another sub-£500 phone comes to trouble mobile big dogs in the form of Realme GT 5G

  Big brand flagship performance, midrange price, 3.5mm earphone port
  Matthew Hughes Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 10:01 UTC 9

  Review Over the past five years or so, a trend has emerged in the Android space where devices priced towards the middle of the pack have specs that can compete with the most aspirational blowers.

  The Realme GT, which launched across Europe earlier this month, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

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• Dell bigwig: Expect another 6 months of supply woes. Oh, hello Windows 11

  It's partly for a good reason, though: vaccines
  Richard Speed Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 09:15 UTC 4

  Semicondcutor supply chain problems are set to continue for at least another six months, according to Dell UK senior vice president and GM, Dayne Turbitt, who pointed to a surprising culprit amid surging demand.

  "The silicon," he said, "has been consumed by all the vials for the vaccine," as he responded to a question from The Register concerning hardware supply constraints.

  He also mentioned IC manufacturing challenges caused by water shortages in Taiwan, but the demand for vaccine vials was a reason we'd not heard echoed by other hardware vendors or analysts.

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• In conversation with Gene Hoffman, co-creator of the internet's first ad blocker

  El Reg revisits those early days of the internet and learns of the NSA tipping off Boeing about French spying
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 08:30 UTC 2

  Interview Gene Hoffman is one of the founders of PrivNet, which in 1996 developed Internet Fast Forward, the internet's first commercial ad blocking software. He helped found the company as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with the help of fellow students Mark Elrod, Jeff Harrell, and James Howard.

  PrivNet released Internet Fast Forward in mid-1996 and by November of that year, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) announced that it was buying the startup.

  Hoffman has been involved in the creation and sale of two other companies, EMusic.com, sold to Vivendi Universal in June 2001, and Vindica, sold to Amdocs in 2016. He's currently president and COO of Chia Network, a cryptocurrency platform founded by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen.

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• India under attack by rapidly-evolving advanced persistent threat actor SideCopy, says Cisco Talos

  Gang is using custom RATs malware to target government employees, and has an interest in Pakistan, too
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 07:58 UTC

  Cisco’s Talos security unit says it has detected an increased rate of attacks on targets on the Indian subcontinent and named an advanced persistent threat actor named SideCopy as the source.

  The outfit on Wednesday posted that it has tracked “an increase in SideCopy’s activities targeting government personnel in India using themes and tactics similar to APT36 (aka Mythic Leopard and Transparent Tribe)”. SideCopy’s infrastructure, Talos opined, “indicates a special interest in victims in Pakistan and India,” as the malware used only initiates actions if it detects infections in those two countries.

  The name SideCopy appears to have first been used by security firm Seqrite in a September 2020 analysis of previous attacks on Indian military targets. Seqrite said it has seen SideCopy activity from 2019.

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• Belgian boffins dump Starlink dish terminal's firmware, gain root access and a few ideas

  Extra-terrestrial service probed
  Matthew Hughes Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 07:27 UTC 4

  Belgian boffins have published a teardown of the Starlink user terminal – also known as Dishy McFlatface – in which they managed to dump the device's firmware that was housed on a eMMC card upon the PCB.

  For the the academics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), actually getting their hands on the firmware for later analysis proved to be a somewhat fraught process.

  Although the hardware came with a UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter) port for USB debugging, SpaceX opted — perhaps for obvious reasons — to restrict access to those entrusted with development credentials. Still, it revealed some clues, particularly when it came to the boot process, with integrity and authenticity checks used to ensure the kernel had not been tampered with.

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• White hats reported key Kaseya VSA flaw months ago. Ransomware outran the patch

  So close, and yet so far
  Gareth Corfield Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 06:19 UTC 3

  One of the vulnerabilities in Kaseya's IT management software VSA that was exploited by miscreants to infect up to 1,500 businesses with ransomware was reported to the vendor in April – and the patch just wasn't ready in time.

  As we've covered this week, deployments of Kaseya's flagship Virtual System Administrator (VSA) product were hijacked at the start of the month to inject REvil extortionware into networks around the world. Kaspersky Lab said it saw evidence of 5,000 infection attempts in 22 countries in the three days since the first attack was spotted.

  Kaseya pulled the plug on its software-as-a-service offering of VSA, and urged all of its customers to switch off their VSA servers to avoid being hit by the ransomware. Kaseya's customers are primarily managed service providers looking after the IT estates of their own customers, and so by compromising VSA deployments, miscreants can hijack large numbers of downstream systems.

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• Not a baaa-d idea: Embracing the eunuch lifestyle slows ageing – for sheep anyway

  Too big a price to pay for decelerating your epigenetic clock?
  Gareth Halfacree Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 05:04 UTC 21

  If you're a gentleman looking to counteract the effects of ageing, a new study on sheep may have the answer – but you're going to have to say goodbye to your family jewels in return for a slowdown of your DNA's ageing process.

  "Both farmers and scientists have known for some time that castrated male sheep live on average much longer than their intact counterparts," explained first author Victoria Sugrue, an anatomy PhD student at the University of Otago. "However, this is the first time anyone has looked at DNA to see if it also ages slower."

  Key to the study – more key than knife-wielding boffins lopping sheep's bollocks off hither and thither, anyway – was the concept of an "epigenetic clock," a means of measuring the ageing of creatures' DNA. In sheep, the researchers found, the clock ticks slower for castrated males than those left intact in the nether regions.

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• Tencent uses facial recognition to enforce China’s curfew on gaming kids

  Accounts held in grown-ups’ names targeted if they stay up late
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 03:58 UTC 8

  Chinese web giant Tencent has started using facial recognition tech to boot kids out of its games.

  As explained in a post to Chinese social media service qq.com, the new feature sees the company check accounts registered in adults’ names if they are playing games between 10:00PM and 8:00AM.

  The company will then run a facial recognition test and, if it identifies someone who is not the account holder, they’ll be booted offline.

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• The James Webb Space Telescope, a project dating back to the late 1900s, may launch this very century

  Europeans still hoping for Halloween lift-off
  Katyanna Quach Thu 8 Jul 2021 // 03:32 UTC 9

  After years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope may actually launch this year, having passed a "final mission analysis review," we're told.

  Work began on the space telescope, once called the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), in 1996 with a planned launch date of 2007. That slipped almost immediately due to budget cuts and technological problems. An influx of funding helped get it closer on track, though the project just has this darn habit of blowing past deadlines, even to this day.

  In the past year, the mission to launch the $10bn space observatory, the most advanced of its kind, has suffered multiple setbacks amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As the novel coronavirus spread around the world, work on the telescope was paused as scientists and engineers at NASA were sent home under shelter-in-place orders.

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