"China's hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike," said FBI Director Christopher Wray in a prepared testimony before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. NBC News reports: Wray also argued that "there has been far too little public focus" that Chinese hackers are targeting critical infrastructure in the U.S. such as water treatment plants, electrical grids, oil and natural gas pipelines, and transportation systems, according to the prepared remarks. "And the risk that poses to every American requires our attention -- now," his prepared testimony said.

As Wray testified, the Justice Department and FBI announced they had disabled a Chinese hacking operation that had infected hundreds of small office and home routers with botnet malware that targeted critical infrastructure. The DOJ said the hackers, known to the private sector as "Volt Typhoon," used privately owned small routers that were infected with "KV botnet" malware to conceal further Chinese hacking activities against U.S. and foreign victims. Wray addressed the malware in his testimony, emphasizing that it targets critical infrastructure in the U.S. [...]

At Wednesday's hearing, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, testified that Americans should expect efforts by China to wage influence campaigns online relating to the 2024 election. However, Easterly added that she was confident that voting systems and other election infrastructure are well-defended. "To be very clear, Americans should have confidence in the integrity of our election infrastructure because of the enormous amount of work that's been done by state and local election officials, by the federal government, by vendors, by the private sector since 2016," Easterly said in her testimony.

Wray emphasized in the remarks that the "cyber onslaught" of Chinese hackers "goes way beyond prepositioning for future conflict," saying in the prepared remarks that every day the hackers are "actively attacking" U.S. economic security, engaging in "wholesale theft of our innovation, and our personal and corporate data." "And they don't just hit our security and economy. They target our freedoms, reaching inside our borders, across America, to silence, coerce, and threaten our citizens and residents," the excerpts said.

It is the end of an era for Big Oil in California, as the most populous U.S. state divorces itself from fossil fuels in its fight against climate change. From a report: California's oil output a century ago amounted to it being the fourth-largest crude producer in the U.S., and spawned hundreds of oil drillers, including some of the largest still in existence. Oil led to its car culture of iconic highways, drive-in theaters, banks and restaurants that endures today. On Friday, however, the marriage will officially end. The two largest U.S. oil producers, Exxon Mobil and Chevron will formally disclose a combined $5 billion writedown of California assets when they report fourth-quarter results.

"They are definitely getting a divorce," said Jamie Court, president of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which said the companies long ago stopped investing in California production, and now want to hive off their old wells there. "They've been separated for more than a decade, now they are just signing the papers," he said. Exxon Mobil last year exited onshore production in the state, ending a 25-year-long partnership with Shell when they sold their joint-venture properties. The state's regulatory environment has impeded efforts to restart offshore production, Exxon said this month, leading to an exit that includes financing a Texas company's purchase of its offshore properties. The No.1 U.S. oil producer's asset writedown will cost about $2.5 billion and officially end five decades of oil production off the coast of Southern California.

Starbucks is taking its extra virgin olive oil-infused drinks -- which some customers previously complained of sending them straight to the bathroom ï-- nationwide beginning Tuesday. CNN: The lineup, called Oleato, launched in a few US cities last year before slowly expanding to more stores. Tuesday's launch across its US and Canada locations signifies that the chain stands behind the beverage despite subpar reviews from customers and critics. On the Oleato menu are two drinks: An oat milk latte infused with the extra virgin olive oil; and a new toffeenut iced shaken espresso with golden foam, which is vanilla sweet cream infused with extra virgin olive oil into a cold foam. The drinks debuted in Italy in 2023, with a Starbucks executive previously telling CNN that it's one of its "biggest launches we've had in decades."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced today that it'll start reimbursing local governments for installing solar panels and more efficient appliances after a disaster strikes. From a report: The move can help communities prepare for another calamity by equipping them with tools that just might keep the lights on when they would otherwise suffer a power outage. It's also a way for the US to deploy technologies that cut greenhouse gas emissions and stave off worsening climate disasters like storms, heatwaves, and wildfires.

[...] This is the first time FEMA is funding "net-zero energy projects, including solar, heat pumps and efficient appliances" through its biggest grant program, called Public Assistance. It's available to communities recovering from a major event that the president has declared an emergency or disaster. Under the program, FEMA reimburses state, tribal, territorial, and local governments 75 percent of the cost of eligible recovery efforts. That's typically been to pay for "emergency protective measures," debris removal, and to rebuild public infrastructure.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Citibank on Tuesday, alleging the big bank failed to do enough to protect and reimburse victims of fraud. From a report: The lawsuit argues that New York customers lost millions of dollars -- in some cases their entire lifesavings -- to scammers and hackers because of Citi's weak security and anti-fraud measures. According to the NY AG, Citi does not do enough to prevent unauthorized account takeovers, illegally refuses to reimburse fraud victims and "misleads" customers about their rights after their accounts are hacked.

The lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Citi has "overpromised and underdelivered on security" and failed to respond appropriately to red flags. "Banks are supposed to be the safest place to keep money, yet Citi's negligence has allowed scammers to steal millions of dollars from hardworking people, James said in a statement. There is no excuse for Citi's failure to protect and prevent millions of dollars from being stolen from customers' accounts and my office will not write off illegal behavior from big banks."

The U.S. government in recent months launched an operation to fight a pervasive Chinese hacking operation that successfully compromised thousands of internet-connected devices, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing two Western security officials and another person familiar with the matter. From the report: The Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation sought and received legal authorization to remotely disable aspects of the Chinese hacking campaign, the sources told Reuters. The Biden administration has increasingly focused on hacking, not only for fear nation states may try to disrupt the U.S. election in November, but because ransomware wreaked havoc on Corporate America in 2023.

The hacking group at the center of recent activity, Volt Typhoon, has especially alarmed intelligence officials who say it is part of a larger effort to compromise Western critical infrastructure, including naval ports, internet service providers and utilities. While the Volt Typhoon campaign initially came to light in May 2023, the hackers expanded the scope of their operations late last year and changed some of their techniques, according to three people familiar with the matter. The widespread nature of the hacks led to a series of meetings between the White House and private technology industry, including several telecommunications and cloud commuting companies, where the U.S. government asked for assistance in tracking the activity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Reeling from one of the most catastrophic recalls in decades, Philips Respironics said it will stop selling sleep apnea machines and other respiratory devices in the United States under a settlement with the federal government that will all but end the company's reign as one of the top makers of breathing machines in the country. The agreement, announced by Philips early Monday, comes more than two years after the company pulled millions of its popular breathing devices off the shelves after admitting that an industrial foam fitted in the machines to reduce noise could break apart and release potentially toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients.

It could be years before Philips can resume sales of the devices, made in two factories outside Pittsburgh. The company said all the conditions of the multiyear consent decree -- negotiated in the wake of the recall with the Department of Justice on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration -- must be met first. The move by a company that aggressively promoted its machines in ad campaigns and health conferences -- in one case with the help of an Elvis impersonator -- follows relentless criticism about the safety of the machines. A ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found the company held back thousands of complaints about the crumbling foam for more than a decade before warning customers about the dangers. Those using the machines included some of the most fragile people in the country, including infants, the elderly, veterans and patients with chronic conditions.

"It's about time," said Richard Callender, a former mayor in Pennsylvania who spent years using one of the recalled machines. "How many people have to suffer and get sick and die?" Philips said the agreement includes other requirements the company must meet before it can start selling the machines again, including the marquee DreamStation 2, a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, device heralded by Philips when it was unveiled in 2021 for the treatment of sleep apnea. The settlement, which is still being finalized, has to be approved by a court and has not yet been released by the government. It remains unclear how the halt in sales will impact patients and doctors. The company's U.S. market share for sleep apnea devices in 2020 was about 37% -- behind only one competitor, medical device maker ResMed, according to an analysis by iData Research. Philips has dominated the market in ventilator sales, the data shows.

David Pierce reports via The Verge: A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, "What happened in the Chiefs game?" That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I'd Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the "Browse for me" button instead. Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years, went to work. It scoured the web -- reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today -- and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later. I got the headline: Chiefs win. I got the final score, the key play, a "notable event" that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, a bunch of related links, and some more bullet points about the game.

Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company's big idea about the future of web browsers -- that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren't different things. They're all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app. [...] But from a pure product perspective, this feels closer to the way AI search should work than anything I've tried. Products like Copilot and Perplexity AI are cool, but they're fundamentally just chatbots with web access. Arc Search imagines something else entirely: AI that explores websites by building you a new one every time you ask.

Regulators put limits on Boeing 737 MAX production; grounded MAX 9 jets have resumed flying after required inspections. From a report: Bolts needed to secure part of an Alaska Airlines jet that blew off in midair appear to have been missing when the plane left Boeing's factory. Boeing and other industry officials increasingly believe the plane maker's employees failed to put back the bolts when they reinstalled a 737 MAX 9 plug door after opening or removing it during production, according to people familiar with the matter. The increasingly likely scenario, according to some of these people, is based partly on an apparent absence of markings on the Alaska door plug itself that would suggest bolts were in place when it blew off the jet around 16,000 feet over Oregon on Jan. 5.

They also pointed to paperwork and process lapses at Boeing's Renton, Wash., factory related to the company's work on the plug door. The National Transportation Safety Board has been conducting metallurgical analysis of the plug door but hasn't released the results of the testing. Laboratory tests might show whether the bolts were in place or not there at all. An update in the NTSB probe is expected as soon as this week. New evidence could later emerge before accident investigators reach final conclusions. It couldn't be determined how many people were involved with work on the plug door at Boeing's 737 factory. Supplier Spirit AeroSystems delivered the 737 fuselage to Boeing's factory with the door plug installed. The plug door itself was constructed in Spirit's Malaysian factory, while the fuselage was assembled in Wichita, Kan. Boeing opened or removed the door plug after the 737 MAX 9 jet's fuselage arrived at the plane maker's Renton, Wash., factory for final assembly, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets have reported.

Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it's about what's hiding in plain sight [non-paywalled link] . From a report: A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that's starting to change. In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community's approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community's national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson.

Barrett's appointment, which hasn't previously been reported publicly, comes after more than a year of work on the strategy led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has for years headed up the government's efforts on OSINT. The challenge with other forms of intelligence-gathering, such as electronic surveillance or human intelligence, can be secretly collecting enough information in the first place. With OSINT, the issue is sifting useful insights out of the unthinkable amount of information available digitally. "Our greatest weakness in OSINT has been the vast scale of how much we collect," says Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise division. Nixon's office has developed a tool similar to ChatGPT that uses AI to sift the ever-growing flood of data. Now available to thousands of users within the federal government, the tool points analysts to the most important information and auto-summarizes content. Government task forces have warned since the 1990s that the US was at risk of falling behind on OSINT. But the federal intelligence community has generally prioritized information it gathers itself, stymying progress.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "a motley crew of AM radio advocates," including conservative talk show hosts and federal emergency officials, are lobbying Congress to stop carmakers from dropping AM radio from new vehicles: Lawmakers say most car companies are noncommittal about the future of AM tuners in vehicles, so they want to require them by law to keep making cars with free AM radio. Supporters argue it is a critical piece of the emergency communication network, while the automakers say Americans have plenty of other ways, including their phones, to receive alerts and information. The legislation has united lawmakers who ordinarily want nothing to do with one another. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.) are leading the Senate effort, and on the House side, Speaker Mike Johnson — himself a former conservative talk radio host in Louisiana — and progressive "squad" member Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are among about 200 co-sponsors...

A spring 2023 Nielsen survey, the most recent one available, showed that AM radio reaches about 78 million Americans every month. That is down from nearly 107 million in the spring of 2016, one of the earliest periods for which Nielsen has data... Automakers say the rise of electric vehicles is driving the shift away from AM, because onboard electronics create interference with AM radio signals — a phenomenon that "makes the already fuzzy analog AM radio frequency basically unlistenable," according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a car-industry trade group. Shielding cables and components to reduce interference would cost carmakers $3.8 billion over seven years, the group estimates.

Markey and other lawmakers say they want to preserve AM radio because of its role in emergency communications. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says that more than 75 radio stations, most of which operate on the AM band and cover at least 90% of the U.S. population, are equipped with backup communications equipment and generators that allow them to continue broadcasting information to the public during and after an emergency. Seven former FEMA administrators urged Congress in a letter last year to seek assurances from automakers that they would keep broadcast radio available. The companies' noncommittal response spurred legislation, lawmakers said.

Automakers increasingly want to put radio and other car features "behind a paywall," Markey said in an interview. "They see this as another profit center for them when the American driving public has seen it as a safety resource for them and their families...." He compared the auto industry's resistance to the bill to previous opposition to government mandates like seat belts and air bags. "Leaving safety decisions to the auto industry is very dangerous," Markey said.
Lawmakers have heard from over 400,000 AM radio supporters, according to the president of the National Association of Broadcasters.

But the article also cites an executive at the Consumer Technology Association, who says automakers and tech advocacy groups have told lawmakers that requiring AM radio "would be "inconsistent with the principles of a free market.... It's strange that Congress is focused on a 100-year-old technology."

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering." In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners — six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies — or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in.

"I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'"
Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities... However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable."

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal.
One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies — including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun — tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want — or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge." Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them...

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not — or would not — pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans — and in solar's case, also leases — were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%.

The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free — or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge.
Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%." The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs — California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand.

It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales.
"Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."

California lawmakers are drawing up multiple plans to require watermarks on content created by AI to curb the abuses within the emerging technology, which has affected sectors from political races to the stock market. From a report: At least five lawmakers have promised or are considering different proposals that would require AI companies to implement some type of verification that a video, photo, or written work was made by the technology. The activity comes as advanced AI has rapidly evolved to create realistic images or audio on an unprecedented level. Advocates worry the technology could be ripe for abuse and lead to a wider proliferation of deepfakes, where a person's likeness is digitally manipulated to typically misrepresent them -- with it already being used in the presidential race. But such measures are likely to face scrutiny by the tech sector.

Amid a pivotal election year and an online world full of disinformation, the ability to know what's real or not is crucial, said Drew Liebert, director of the California Initiative for Technology and Democracy. The harm from AI is already happening, with Liebert noting the aftermath of an AI-generated photo that went viral in May of last year that falsely portrayed another terrorist attack in the US. "The famous photograph now that was put on the internet that alleged that the Pentagon was attacked, that actually caused momentarily a [$500 billion] dollar loss in the stock market," he said. The loss would not as been as severe, he said, "if people would have been able to instantly determine that it was not a real image at all." Ask Slashdot:Could a Form of Watermarking Prevent AI Deep Faking?

Global regulators, aviation security specialists and manufacturers failed to reach an agreement on a quick technical fix to the problem of GPS spoofing near war zones, instead calling for better training of pilots to deal with the issue, Reuters reports, citing sources briefed on the talks. From the report: Airlines have been urging quick action after a series of incidents where navigation systems were disrupted to show a false location or wrong time, though aircraft flight controls remained intact. Spoofing might involve one country's military sending false Global Positioning System signals to an enemy plane or drone to hinder its ability to function, which has a collateral effect on nearby airliners.

GPS jamming and spoofing have grown worse in Eastern Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East, according to industry group OpsGroup. GPS is a growing part of aviation infrastructure as it replaces traditional radio beams used to guide planes towards landing. The first international meeting bringing together the sector was held on Thursday in Cologne, Germany, organized by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and international trade group the International Air Transport Association (IATA). GPS interference "can pose significant challenges to aviation safety," and requires that airlines increase data-sharing on jamming and spoofing events, EASA and IATA said in a joint statement.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm can relate to Americans' anxiety over electric vehicles. The former governor of Michigan and longtime EV owner (who currently drives a Ford Mach-E) says she has experienced her own challenges with public charging on road trips. She has heard from drivers who are reluctant to give up their eight-cylinder engines and large trucks and SUVs for an electric model. But she is convinced that more Americans will soon realize the benefits of owning one, helping to change the current anti-EV rhetoric in this country. [...] "All of those factories that I was talking about regarding building electric vehicles and electric vehicle batteries, 60% of them are going into red states. So, you know, people in red states love their EVs, too, and are working at these factories," Granholm said. "I just think that over time, the political nonsense about it will die down and people's experience will speak much more loudly."

The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans' domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency. The New York Times: The letter [PDF], addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications. Still, the revelation is the latest disclosure to bring to the fore a legal gray zone: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies sometimes purchase potentially sensitive and revealing domestic data from brokers that would require a court order to acquire directly.

It comes as the Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on companies that trade in personal location data that was gathered from smartphone apps and sold without people's knowledge and consent about where it would end up and for what purpose it would be used. In a letter to the director of national intelligence dated Thursday, the senator, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, argued that "internet metadata" -- logs showing when two computers have communicated, but not the content of any message -- "can be equally sensitive" as the location data the F.T.C. is targeting. He urged intelligence agencies to stop buying internet data about Americans if it was not collected under the standard the F.T.C. has laid out for location records. "The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans' privacy are not just unethical, but illegal," Mr. Wyden wrote.

Dominic Gates, reporting for Seattle Times: The fuselage panel that blew off an Alaska Airlines jet earlier this month was removed for repair then reinstalled improperly by Boeing mechanics on the Renton final assembly line, a person familiar with the details of the work told The Seattle Times. If verified by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation, this would leave Boeing primarily at fault for the accident, rather than its supplier Spirit AeroSystems, which originally installed the panel into the 737 MAX 9 fuselage in Wichita, Kan.

That panel, a door plug used to seal a hole in the fuselage sometimes used to accommodate an emergency exit, blew out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it climbed out of Portland on Jan. 5. The hair-raising incident drew fresh and sharp criticism of Boeing's quality control systems and safety culture, which has been under the microscope since two fatal 737 MAX crashes five years ago. Last week, a different person -- an anonymous whistleblower who appears to have access to Boeing's manufacturing records of the work done assembling the specific Alaska Airlines jet that suffered the blowout -- on an aviation website separately provided many additional details about how the door plug came to be removed and then mis-installed.

"The reason the door blew off is stated in black and white in Boeing's own records," the whistleblower wrote. "It is also very, very stupid and speaks volumes about the quality culture at certain portions of the business." The self-described Boeing insider said company records show four bolts that prevent the door plug from sliding up off the door frame stop pads that take the pressurization loads in flight, "were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane." the whistleblower stated. "Our own records reflect this." NTSB investigators already publicly raised the possibility that the bolts had not been installed. Further reading:
Alaska Air CEO Says Loose Bolts Found in 'Many' Boeing Jets.
Delta Air Lines Boeing 757 Lost Nose Wheel Before Takeoff, FAA Says.
FAA Calls for Door-Plug Checks on Second Boeing Jet.

A Boeing 757 plane operated by Delta Air Lines lost a nose wheel as it prepared to take off from Atlanta's main airport on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It was the latest troubling episode involving one of the manufacturer's aircraft. The New York Times: Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was preparing to take off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for a trip to BogotÃ, Colombia, at about 11:15 a.m. Saturday when a "nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill," the agency said in a preliminary report. More than 170 passengers who were aboard had to deplane, but no one was hurt, the report said. The F.A.A. said that it was continuing its investigation.

It's been a turbulent period for Boeing, which has been fraught in recent years with safety concerns after deadly catastrophes. The manufacturer faces renewed scrutiny after a door plug blew off a new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane at 16,000 feet on Jan. 5 just after it took off from the Portland International Airport in Oregon. No one was seriously injured then, but passengers were exposed to whipping winds on the plane's harrowing return to Portland. The F.A.A. then ordered about 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 planes to be grounded in the United States until they could be inspected. The plane that lost a wheel in Atlanta on Saturday, a Boeing 757, is a different model.

Alaska Air Group found loose bolts on "many" of its Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft following the midair blowout of a panel on one of its planes earlier this month, the carrier's chief executive officer said in an interview with NBC. Bloomberg: The accident has prompted some "very tough, candid conversations" with Boeing about the planemaker's operations, Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci told NBC in the interview, which aired late Tuesday. "I am angry. I'm more than frustrated and disappointed," he said. "My demand on Boeing is what are they going to do to improve their quality programs in-house?"

US safety regulators ordered all Max 9 planes grounded following the Jan. 5 incident, which left a gaping hole in the side of a jet and forced an emergency landing. No one was seriously injured. Minicucci said there was a "guardian angel" on the flight. Manufacturing quality at Boeing is facing deep scrutiny from regulators, customers and the planemaker itself in the wake of the blowout. While Alaska and United Airlines Holdings, another large operator of the Max model, have performed inspections on some of the aircraft, they're awaiting final specifications from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing before the planes can fly again. "Boeing is better than this," Minicucci said. "Flight 1282 should never have happened."

The Biden administration is preparing an executive order that seeks to prevent foreign adversaries from accessing troves of highly sensitive personal data about Americans and people connected to the US government, Bloomberg News reported, citing documents. From the report: The administration plans to soon unveil the new executive order, which will direct the US Attorney General and Department of Homeland Security to issue new restrictions on transactions involving data that, if obtained, could threaten national security, according to three people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named as the details are still private.

The draft order focuses on ways that foreign adversaries are gaining access to Americans' "highly sensitive" personal data -- from genetic information to location -- through legal means. That includes obtaining information through intermediaries, such as data brokers, third-party vendor agreements, employment agreements or investment agreements, according to a draft of the proposed order. In addition, organizations owned, controlled or operated by "countries of concern" are often obligated to hand such data over to the government when asked.