The Department of Homeland Security wants Congress and other federal agencies to help it streamline 52 different cyber reporting requirements to protect critical infrastructure and ease regulatory burdens on hacking victims. On Tuesday, it released a 107-page report that it hopes will serve as a road map to smooth that process. From a report: More than 30 federal agencies and departments, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Comptroller of the Currency and US Secret Service, have met since June 2022 to hammer out how to reduce regulatory overlap as the federal government grapples with the messy state of cyber reporting rules. They are among members of the Cybersecurity Incident Reporting Council, which was set up as part of a new cyber reporting law passed last year and developed the report recommendations.

"Everybody is desperate for some harmonization and standardization here," Robert Silvers, DHS's under secretary for strategy, policy and plans who chairs the council, told Bloomberg News in an interview. "This is a first-of-its-kind effort." Federal agencies know well that cyber reporting requirements have become "too much of a patchwork," Silvers added. There are already 45 existing reporting requirements administered by 22 federal agencies, spanning national and economic security concerns to consumer and privacy protections, according to the report. Seven more requirements are expected, including the reporting law that created the council, and a further five are under consideration, according to the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Earlier this year, the U.S. government indicted Russian hacker Mikhail Matveev, also known by his online monikers "Wazawaka" and "Boriselcin," accusing him of being "a prolific ransomware affiliate" who carried out "significant attacks" against companies and critical infrastructure in the U.S. and elsewhere. The feds also accused him of being a "central figure" in the development and deployment of the notorious ransomware variants like Hive, LockBit, and Babuk. Matveev is such a prominent cybercriminal that the FBI designated him as one of its most wanted hackers. Matveev, who the FBI believes he remains in Russia, is unlikely to face extradition to the United States.

For Matveev, however, life seems to go on so well that he is now taunting the feds by making a T-shirt with his own most wanted poster, and asking his Twitter followers if they want merch. When reached by TechCrunch on X, formerly Twitter, Matveev verified it was really him by showing a picture of his left hand, which has only four fingers, per Matveev's FBI's most wanted page. Matveev also sent a selfie holding a piece of paper with this reporter's name on it.

After he agreed to do an interview, we asked Matveev a dozen questions about his life as a most wanted hacker, but he didn't answer any of them. Instead, he complained that we used the word "hacker." "I don't like this designation -- hacker, we are a separate type of specialist, practical and using our knowledge and resources without water and writing articles," he wrote in an X direct message. "I was interested only in terms of financial motivation, roughly speaking, I was thinking about what to do, sell people or become. it, [sic] let me tell you how I lost my finger?" At that point, Matveev stopped answering messages.

A federal judge has granted a request to block the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), a law that requires special data safeguards for underage users online. The Verge reports: In a ruling (PDF) issued today, Judge Beth Freeman granted a preliminary injunction for tech industry group NetChoice, saying the law likely violates the First Amendment. It's the latest of several state-level internet regulations to be blocked while a lawsuit against them proceeds, including some that are likely bound for the Supreme Court. The CAADCA is meant to expand on existing laws -- like the federal COPPA framework -- that govern how sites can collect data from children. But Judge Freeman objected to several of its provisions, saying they would unlawfully target legal speech. "Although the stated purpose of the Act -- protecting children when they are online -- clearly is important, NetChoice has shown that it is likely to succeed on the merits of its argument that the provisions of the CAADCA intended to achieve that purpose do not pass constitutional muster," wrote Freeman.

Freeman cites arguments made by legal writer Eric Goldman, who argued that the law would force sites to erect barriers for children and adults alike. Among other things, the ruling takes issue with the requirement that sites estimate visitors' ages to detect underage users. The provision is ostensibly meant to cut down on the amount of data collected about young users, but Freeman notes that it could involve invasive technology like face scans or analyzing biometric information -- ironically requiring users to provide more personal information.

The law offers sites an alternative of making data collection for all users follow the standards for minors, but Freeman found that this would also chill legal speech since part of the law's goal is to avoid targeted advertising that would show objectionable content to children. "Data and privacy protections intended to shield children from harmful content, if applied to adults, will also shield adults from that same content," Freeman concluded.

Elad Gil, writing in a blog post: In most industries, regulation prevents competition. This famous chart of prices over time reflects how highly regulated industries (healthcare, education, energy) have their costs driven up over time, while less regulated industries (clothing, software, toys) drop costs dramatically over time. (Please note I do not believe these are inflation adjusted - so 60-70% may be "break even" pricing inflation adjusted.)

Regulation favors incumbents in two ways. First, it increase the cost of entering a market, in some cases dramatically. The high cost of clinical trials and the extra hurdles put in place to launch a drug are good examples of this. A must-watch video is this one with Paul Janssen, one of the giants of pharma, in which he states that the vast majority of drug development budgets are wasted on tests imposed by regulators which "has little to do with actual research or actual development." This is a partial explanation for why (outside of Moderna, an accident of COVID), no $40B+ market cap new biopharma company has been launched in almost 40 years (despite healthcare being 20% of US GDP).

Secondly, regulation favors incumbents via something known as "regulatory capture." In regulatory capture, the regulators become beholden to a specific industry lobby or group -- for example by receiving jobs in the industry after working as a regulator, or via specific forms of lobbying. There becomes a strong incentive to "play nice" with the incumbents by regulators and to bias regulations their way, in order to get favors later in life. Additional resource: All-In Summit: Bill Gurley Presents 2,851 Miles.

The United States' military is on the hunt for an F-35 fighter jet that has gone missing following an incident that forced the pilot to eject from the advanced stealth aircraft over South Carolina. Bloomberg News: Emergency response teams are trying to find what's left of the F-35B Lightning II jet, which suffered what the military called a "mishap" on Sunday afternoon, according to social media posts by Joint Base Charleston, an air base in South Carolina. The unidentified pilot ejected safely and was taken to a local hospital in a stable condition. Joint Base Charleston called on the public to cooperate with military and civilian authorities as the search for the F-35 jet continues. The air base said it was working with Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort to search for the plane north of North Charleston around Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, based on its last-known location.

Lockheed Martin is the manufacturer behind the F-35, a single-seat fighter craft used by militaries around the world. The aircraft was a vertical take-off version used by in the US Marine Corps, and the jet is popular for its stealth qualities that make it difficult to detect by radar. The F-35 program, the most expensive US weapons program ever, is projected to cost $400 billion in development and acquisition, plus an additional $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years. Each jet can cost more than $160 million, depending on the variant.

China appears to have suspended its global surveillance balloon program after a balloon was spotted drifting over the United States in February.

But now an anonymous reader shares this report from CBS News: Seven months later, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells "CBS News Sunday Morning" the balloon wasn't spying. "The intelligence community, their assessment — and it's a high-confidence assessment — [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon," he said.

So, why was it over the United States? There are various theories, with at least one leading theory that it was blown off-track. The balloon had been headed toward Hawaii, but the winds at 60,000 feet apparently took over. "Those winds are very high," Milley said. "The particular motor on that aircraft can't go against those winds at that altitude..."

After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon's sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States. But by then, the damage to U.S.-China relations had been done.
On the CBS News show Sunday Morning, the host had this exchange with America's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

CBS: "Bottom line, it was a spy balloon, but it wasn't spying?"

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "I would say it was a spy balloon that we know with high degree of certainty got no intelligence, and didn't transmit any intelligence back to China."

"Chaos and Concern in Sin City," read this morning's headline on a video report from ABC News about "the massive cyberattack in Las Vegas crippling several hotels and casinos, and putting a damper on getaways for thousands of tourists there." "Today marks a week since that cyberattack hit Las Vegas, and MGM hotels and casinos are still working on getting systems back up and running.. The online reservation site for MGM is still down, ATMs not working, and those playing the slot machines or even video poker having to wait for attendants to pay them out in cash. All of this fiasco leading to long lines at check-in, and now a cyber investigation with the FBI...

Other gaming resorts also having issues. Caesar's entertainment says they too were a victim of a cyberattack, but their online operations were not impacted. Then this weekend at the Venetian, an outage shutting down some slots, but the resort says they're back up, and that at least thankfully was not due to a cyber attack.
They report MGM properties were affected as far away as Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Thursday America's Energy Department released an interactive map showing America's clean energy investments, "for tracking the industrial revitalization happening across the country, fostered by a clean energy transition..."

The map aims to show how both the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act "are leading to announcements of historic levels of private sector investments in the United States," which the head of America's Energy Department credited for "a manufacturing renaissance across the U.S." A senior White House energy advisor specifically described it as "a clean energy boom" and called the map "a great resource for understanding the widespread and important impact this boom is having on communities all across our nation."

The announcement notes 500 "planned investments in at least 450 new or expanded clean energy manufacturing facilities, totaling over $160 billion in announced private and public sector investments" in solar, battery, and offshore wind manufacturing projects — as well as in electric vehicle assembly, components, and chargers. Ford received over $12 billion for battery pack/cell projects and EV assembly, along with billions more for Ford's joint venture with BlueOval SK to build a battery plant. And six of the projects are Tesla — totalling over $2 billion for projects in battery materials, cells, packs, and EV assembly.

In late August the blog of Harvard professor Avi Loeb declared he had "Wonderful news! For the first time in history, scientists analyzed materials from a meter-size object that originated from outside the solar system."

In July Loeb retrieved parts of a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. A local New York newscast describes the find as "metallic marbles, less than a millimeter in diameter," while Loeb called them "beautiful spheres that were colored — blue, brown or gold."

Now USA Today reports: Early analysis shows that some spherules from the meteor path contain "extremely high abundances" of an unheard-of composition of heavy elements. Researchers on the team say the composition of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, labeled as a "BeLaU" composition, does not match terrestrial alloys natural to Earth or fallout from nuclear explosions. Additionally, the composition is not found in magma oceans of Earth, nor the moon, Mars or other natural bodies in the solar system.

Other elements are thought to have been lost by evaporation during IM1's passage through the Earth's atmosphere, researchers said, leading them to theorize that the spherules could originate in a magma ocean on an exoplanet with an iron core outside the solar system.
Long-time Slashdot reader Okian Warrior writes that "Technical details can be found here, and a readable accounting of the analysis and results can be found on Avi Loeb's blog." Loeb writes that the exact composition of those spheres are now being studied at three separate laboratories, including one at Harvard.

In July the New York Times published reactions to Loeb's claim that "It's most likely a technological gadget with artificial intelligence." "People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb's wild claims," said Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University. "It's polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room." Dr. Desch added that several of his colleagues were now refusing to engage with Dr. Loeb's work in peer review, the process by which scholars evaluate one another's research to ensure that only high-quality studies are published... "What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn't go away thinking that."
Last week Salon also had a few questions for Loeb: In your book, you called Carl Sagan's adage that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" a "logical fallacy." How and why do you think that statement is somewhat flawed or a logical fallacy?

It's used as an excuse for people who don't want to deal with an exciting possibility. They don't seek the evidence and they argue, "Well, we don't have any evidence...."

If or when we encounter extraterrestrial life, do you think we'll find it or it will find us? Why?

I think we will find it near us because most stars [formed] billions of years before the sun, so it's more likely that some other civilizations preceded us because their star, if it's like the sun, already went through what we in the future might go through. We just need to be humble and modest, not assume that we are unique and special — that Albert Einstein was the smartest scientist who ever lived since the Big Bang — and engage in the search.

That's what I'm trying to do, and the pushback is really strange under these circumstances because the people who argue against it have very strong opinions. But if you look at the history of science, they were very often wrong: the people [who] thought that the earth was the center of the universe, for example.
From Loeb's blog post: During my routine jog at sunrise on the deck of Silver Star, I was asked: "Are you running away from something or towards something?" My answer was: "Both. I am running away from colleagues who have strong opinions without seeking evidence, and I am running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Firefly Aerospace just set a new responsive-launch record. The company's Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Thursday (Sept. 14) at 10:28 p.m. EDT (7:28 p.m. local California time; 0228 GMT on Sept. 15), kicking off a mission for the U.S. Space Force called Victus Nox. The rocket roared off the pad just 27 hours after the U.S. Space Force gave the order -- less time than on any previous national security mission. The wheels for Victus Nox (Latin for "conquer the night") began turning in September 2022, when the Space Force awarded contracts to Texas-based Firefly and Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary headquartered in the Los Angeles area that built the mission's payload.

On Aug. 30 of this year, Firefly and Millennium entered the mission's "hot standby" phase, a six-month period during which they could receive a launch-alert notice at any time. After receipt of that notice, Millennium and Firefly would have 60 hours to get the satellite from Millennium's Southern California facilities to Vandenberg, fuel it up and mate it to the Alpha rocket's payload adapter. The alert came through recently, and the mission teams hit their ambitious timeline. "Upon activation, the space vehicle was transported 165 miles [266 kilometers] from Millennium's El Segundo facility to Vandenberg Space Force Base where it was tested, fueled and mated to the launch adapter in just under 58 hours, significantly faster than the typical timeline of weeks or months," Space Force officials said in the emailed statement.

The teams then had to wait for the launch order, which would give them Victus Nox's orbital requirements. They would then have just 24 hours to update Alpha's trajectory and guidance software, encapsulate the satellite in its payload fairing, get the payload to the pad, mate it to Alpha and get the rocket ready to launch, Firefly wrote in a statement. The teams managed that task as well. They were ready to launch as soon as the first window opened, which was 27 hours after the Space Force gave the order. Victus Nox's speed goals didn't end with the successful liftoff. The teams now aim to get the satellite up and running within 48 hours of its deployment. The report notes that the previous response-launch record for a U.S. national security mission was 21 days, which was set in June 2021.

Thousands of people in Oregon have signed up to experience tripping on magic mushrooms at America's first license psilocybin service center. The Associated Press reports: Epic Healing Eugene -- America's first licensed psilocybin service center -- opened in June, marking Oregon's unprecedented step in offering the mind-bending drug to the public. The center now has a waitlist of more than 3,000 names, including people with depression, PTSD or end-of-life dread. No prescription or referral is needed, but proponents hope Oregon's legalization will spark a revolution in mental health care. The Oregon Psilocybin Services Section, charged with regulating the state's industry, has received "hundreds of thousands of inquiries from all over the world," Angela Allbee, the agency's manager, said in an interview. "So far, what we're hearing is that clients have had positive experiences," she said.

First, customers must have a preparation session with a licensed facilitator who stays with clients as they experience the drug. The facilitator can deny access to those who have active psychosis, thoughts of harming anyone, or who have taken lithium, which is used to treat mania, in the past month. The clients can't buy mushrooms to go, and they must stay at the service center until the drug wears off. Oregon Psilocybin Services spent two years establishing regulations and began accepting license applications in January. There are now 10 licensed service centers, four growers, two testing labs and dozens of facilitators. [...] The report notes that costs can be high, with some clients paying over $2,000 and annual licenses for service centers and growers costing $10,000, with a half-price discount for veterans.

As for doses, state regulations allow up to 50 milligrams but it will ultimately depend on the facility and client. One of the facility's first clients took 35 milligrams and described seeing a "kind of infinite-dimension fractal that just kept turning and twisting."

The cloud-based system the Air Force is co-developing with Canada to enable instantaneous combat data-sharing is just about ready for prime time, although the looming threat of a budget gap may slow its global deployment. The Drive reports: Cloud-based command-and-control (CBC2), a pillar of the service's Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), will hit initial operating capability roughly on schedule next month, Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, integrating program officer for Command, Control, Communications and Battle Management, told The War Zone and other outlets this week at the Air, Space, and Cyber conference near Washington, D.C. It's headed to three unspecified base locations within the first half of 2024, Cropsey said, with others to follow at "more scale" as what's anticipated to be a five-year rollout plan gets underway. [...] CBC2 is designed to replace the hardware-based Battle Control System-Fixed, which provides command-and-control for Canada and the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii. Officially made a program in 2022, CBC2 is "a set of microservice applications," according to an Air Force release, that can take in more than 750 radar feeds and deliver them to a single user interface. "The system then allows operators to create machine-generated courses of action to help shorten the tactical C2 kill chain and send a desired effect via machine-to-machine connections," the release adds.

In addition to delivering data faster and streamlining communication, CBC2 will build in new artificial intelligence elements. A January Government Accountability Office report states that it will build upon Pathfinder, an AI-empowered prototype that ingests "data that would in the past have been ... left on the cutting room floor," as North American Aerospace Defense Command chief Gen. Glen VanHerck put it in remarks reported by C4ISRNet. A September 2020 paper (PDF) from the Canada Institute described Pathfinder as "giving new life to old sensors" for NORAD's defense. "In a recent demonstration," the paper stated, "The Pathfinder system was tied to Federal Aviation Administration radars, and without any modification to the radars themselves, consistently demonstrated an ability to effectively detect and track very small unmanned aircraft, previously thought to be beyond the capability of the system."

Iranian hackers have hacked dozens of companies in the defense, satellite and pharmaceutical sectors this year using a fairly unsophisticated, blunt hacking technique, Microsoft warned in a new report. From a report: Many of these companies are based in the U.S., and the breaches come amid heavy U.S. sanctions targeting Iranian oil and petrochemical sales. Microsoft said Thursday that Iranian hacking group Peach Sandstorm -- which other firms also refer to as APT33, Elfin or Refined Kitten -- has been breaking into these companies by trying to guess multiple user accounts' passwords.

The password-spraying campaign took place between February and July this year, Microsoft found. In some cases, the hackers were able to exfiltrate data, and in others, they just lurked on the networks to see what intelligence they could gather. The Iranian group targeted thousands of companies as part of this monthslong campaign -- but was able to access only a small percentage of those organizations, Microsoft said.

California, the home to many of tech's biggest companies and the nation's most populous state, is pushing ahead with a right-to-repair bill for consumer electronics and appliances. From a report: After unanimous votes in the state Assembly and Senate, the bill passed yesterday is expected to move through a concurrence vote and be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. "Since Right to Repair can pass here, expect it to be on its way to a backyard near you," said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens in a statement. iFixit, a seller of repair parts and tools and advocate for right-to-repair laws, based in San Luis Obispo, California, was joined in its support for the California repair law by another California company with a history of opposing repair laws: Apple. The consumer tech giant's letter urging passage of the bill was surprising, to say the least, though Apple said that the bill's stipulations for "individual users' safety" and "product manufacturers' intellectual property" were satisfactory.

California's bill goes further than right-to-repair laws in other states. Rather than limiting its demand that companies provide parts, tools, repair manuals, and necessary software for devices that are still actively sold, California requires that vendors provide those items for products sold after July 1, 2021, starting in July 2024. Products costing $50 to $99.99 must be accompanied by those items for three years, and items $100 and more necessitate seven years. The bill also provides for stronger enforcement mechanisms, allowing for municipalities to bring superior court cases rather than contact the state attorney general.

The Justice Department will press its argument Thursday that Google sought to strike agreements with mobile carriers to win powerful default positions on smartphones to dominate search in an antitrust trial that could change the future of the internet. From a report: The government will wrap up questioning Thursday of Antonio Rangel, who teaches behavioral biology at the California Institute of Technology. Other witnesses will be James Kolotouros, for Google, and Brian Higgins, from Verizon Communications. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. The government has also alleged that Google illegally took steps to protect communications about the payments.

The government called witnesses on Tuesday and Wednesday to show that Google, as far back as the mid-2000s, sought to attract a large number of search queries by winning default status on mobile devices. Another witness, Rangel, discussed how powerful default status was, although data he used to show this was largely redacted. Google's clout in search, the government alleges, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Search is free so Google makes money through advertising.

The Justice Department sought on Wednesday to show how Google did all it could to get people to use its search engine and build itself into a $1 trillion search and advertising giant on the second day of a once-in-a-generation antitrust trial. From a report: First out of the gate, the government questioned a former Google executive, Chris Barton, about billion-dollar deals with mobile carriers and others that helped make Google the default search engine. Barton, who was at Google from 2004 to 2011, said the number of Google executives working to win default status with mobile carriers grew dramatically when he was with the company, recognizing the potential growth of handheld devices and early versions of smartphones.

Google's clout in search, the government argues, has helped Google build monopolies in some aspects of online search advertising. Since search is free, Google makes money through advertising. The government says the Alphabet unit paid $10 billion annually to wireless companies like AT&T, device makers like Apple and browser makers like Mozilla to fend off rivals and keep its search engine market share near 90%. In revenue-sharing deals with mobile carriers and Android smartphone makers, Google pressed for its search to be the default and exclusive. If Microsoft's search engine Bing was the default on an Android phone, Barton said, then users would have a "difficult time finding or changing to Google."

Barton said on his LinkedIn profile that he was responsible for leading Google's partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T, estimating that the deals "drive hundreds of millions in revenue." Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, told the court that scale, or the number of search queries Google received, was important, but pushed back during questioning on how important. He also acknowledged giving a speech in which he said certain search queries, for instance for a tennis racquet, were important in effectively advertising to the person who made the query and to subsequent ad revenues.

The White House, weighing in for the first time on concerns about a Chinese backlash against Apple, said it is monitoring reports of a growing government ban of iPhones and believes the move is a reprisal against the US. From a report: "It seems to be of a piece of the kinds of aggressive and inappropriate retaliation to US companies that we've seen from the PRC in the past," said John Kirby, the council's spokesman, referring to the People's Republic of China. Bloomberg News reported this month that China plans to expand a ban on the use of iPhones to a plethora of state-backed companies and agencies, a sign of growing challenges for Apple in the country. Several Chinese agencies have begun instructing staff not to bring their iPhones to work.

But the situation grew more muddled Wednesday, when Beijing pushed back on reports about iPhone restrictions while also raising concerns about security problems with the device. "China has not issued laws and regulations to ban the purchase of Apple or foreign brands' phones," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. It marked the government's first comments on the issue, but didn't seem to refer directly to workplace bans of the device.

An unnamed CIA whistleblower has made the dramatic allegation that half a dozen analysts there were bribed to reject the theory that COVID-19 resulted from a research-related leak of a new coronavirus, according to a press release today from the office of the Republican leading a congressional investigation into the pandemic. The allegation was strongly rejected in a CIA statement released hours later. Science.org: A majority of U.S. intelligence agencies has so far concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic mostly likely started when SARS-CoV-2 jumped from an infected animal host into people; a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, has received intense attention from researchers as the potential source. But the Department of Energy and FBI so far have favored the so-called lab-leak hypothesis, even though none of the agencies has expressed high confidence in their conclusions on COVID-19's origin. CIA, for example, had reportedly said it was "unable to determine" whether SARS-CoV-2 made a direct jump from animals to humans -- or came from a lab.

Now, Representative Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), who chairs the House of Representatives's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, says his panel and the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have heard testimony from a whistleblower "who presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer." According to the press release, the whistleblower testified that only the most senior analyst of a seven-member CIA team investigating the origin of COVID-19 supported the zoonotic transmission theory. The whistleblower alleged the other six team members supporting the lab origin then received "a significant monetary incentive to change their position," wrote Wenstrup and Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), who chairs the intelligence panel.

In response to emailed questions from Science, CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp challenged the whistleblower's account: "At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed," she wrote in the agency's statement...

A few researchers have revealed how they cooperated with some of the intelligence agencies. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University, who have co-authored studies supporting the zoonotic origin and testified before Wenstrup's committee, both met with CIA agents probing the COVID-19 origin over the past few years. Andersen said that "several scientists were part of their team and they knew their stuff." He asserts that the new whistleblower allegation "obviously is bullshit."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The US accounts for more than a third of the expansion of global oil and gas production planned by mid-century, despite its claims of climate leadership, research has found. Canada and Russia have the next biggest expansion plans, calculated based on how much carbon dioxide is likely to be produced from new developments, followed by Iran, China and Brazil. The United Arab Emirates, which is to host the annual UN climate summit this year, Cop28 in Dubai in November, is seventh on the list.

The data, in a report from the campaign group Oil Change International, also showed that five "global north countries" -- the US, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK -- will be responsible for just over half of all the planned expansion from new oil and gas fields to 2050. Greenhouse gas emissions from all of the oil and gas expansion that is planned in the next three decades would be more than enough to drive global temperatures well beyond the limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels that countries agreed in 2021 at Cop26 in Glasgow, the report found.

Companies choose Alphabet's Google as the default search engine for their browsers and smartphones because it is the best one, and not because of a lack of competition, a Google lawyer said Tuesday at the start of a high-stakes antitrust trial in Washington. From a report: Consumers use Google "because it delivers value to them, not because they have to," John Schmidtlein, a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP who is representing the company, said during his opening statements on the first day of the trial. "Users today have more search options and ways to access information online than ever before."

Schmidtlein pushed back on claims by US Justice Department antitrust enforcers that Google has used its market power -- and billions of dollars in exclusive deals with web browsers -- to illegally block rivals. Users have choices, and it's easy to switch, he said. For example, Microsoft pre-selects its own search engine, Bing, on Windows PCs, yet most PC users switch to Google because it's a better product, he said. Web browsers offered by Apple and Mozilla, which makes Firefox, have long chosen a default search engine in exchange for a revenue-share that helps pay for innovations, Schmidtlein said.