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Usama Jawad writes via Neowin: has been a proponent of passwordless technology for quite some time, saying that it wants traditional and unsafe passwords to die. To that end, it has invested in various solutions over the past few years such as Windows Hello, Microsoft Authenticator, FIDO2 security keys, and a palm vein authentication system, among other things. Now, the company has highlighted the strides it made to kill off passwords in 2020, and has stated that it plans to make them a thing of the past for all its customers in 2021. Microsoft noted that almost 80% of all cyberattacks target passwords, and one in 250 corporate accounts get compromised each month due to this. That said, the company is making an effort to transition people to passwordless solutions. In November 2019, 100 million people were using Microsoft's passwordless sign-in. This number grew to 150 million by May 2020, which goes to show how millions of people are ready to ditch passwords due to the inconvenience of remembering them, coupled with how insecure they can be. [...] 2021 is the year in which Microsoft plans to make passwords obsolete for all its customers. It is currently developing new APIs and a UX for managing FIDO2 security keys, and is also aiming to deliver a "converged registration portal," where customers can manage their passwordless credentials. While it hopes that 2021 marks a return to the "old normal," the company has emphasized that going passwordless will make online lives significantly easier.

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Microsoft is following Sony's move and offering Cyberpunk 2077 refunds to anyone who has purchased the game digitally. It is not however pulling the game from the Microsoft Store. The Verge reports: "We know the developers at CD Projekt Red have worked hard to ship Cyberpunk in extremely challenging circumstances," explains a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "However, we also realize that some players have been unhappy with the current experience on older consoles. To date, we have granted refunds to the vast majority of customers who have requested one. To ensure that every player is able to get the experience they expect on Xbox, we will be expanding our existing refund policy to offer full refunds to anyone who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 digitally from the Microsoft Store, until further notice." If you're interested in a Microsoft Store refund, you can follow the steps on Microsoft's support page.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadband and TV providers will finally be required to stop charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers own themselves, thanks to a new US law that takes effect on Sunday. The bogus fees were outlawed by the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which was approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in December 2019. The law was originally scheduled to take effect on June 20, but Congress gave the Federal Communications Commission leeway to delay enforcement by six months if the FCC "finds that good cause exists for such an additional extension." The FCC in April granted the six-month delay to ISPs, claiming that providers needed more time to comply because of the coronavirus pandemic. That decision delayed implementation of the new requirements until December 20, 2020. The law's implementation will "put an end to the unconscionable business practice of charging consumers a rental fee for cable modem routers even if consumers do not use them!" consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge said in a blog post. "This common-sense correction will permit consumers to continue to use their own equipment, and not be forced to pay for something they neither asked for nor needed." [...] The new law, passed as part of a budget bill, creates a "consumer right to accurate equipment charges" that prohibits TV and broadband providers from charging for "covered equipment provided by the consumer." Covered equipment is defined as "equipment (such as a router) employed on the premises of a person... to provide [TV service] or to provide fixed broadband Internet access service." The companies may not charge rental or lease fees in cases when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." The law also includes a right to transparency that requires TV providers to inform customers of the total monthly charges, including all company-imposed fees and a good-faith estimate of all government-imposed fees and taxes, before they enter into a contract. This notice must specify the amount of promotional discounts and when those discounts will expire. The law also gives customers a 24-hour period in which they can cancel new TV service without penalty. The new rule won't prevent TV providers from raising prices on existing customers, even when they're under contract. But the new transparency requirement is a step in the right direction.

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An anonymous reader shares an investigative report by LA Times: The plane had begun its descent into Boston. Inside the cockpit, the captain was slumped in his seat. Sitting beside him, copilot Eric Tellmann was starting to pass out. Tellmann managed to strap on his oxygen mask, then grabbed the captain's arm and forced him to follow suit. Reviving slowly, the captain looked at Tellmann through his mask, and his eyes grew wide with fear. A strange smell had permeated the plane that day. Passengers and flight attendants were coughing and wiping teary eyes. The pilots briefly lifted their masks and could still smell the odor as the runway drew nearer. Tellmann and the captain parked the Airbus A319 at the gate. But they had no memory of landing or taxiing Spirit Airlines Flight 708. Tellmann went to the hospital for treatment and spent the next week at home in bed, vomiting and shaking and feeling "like a freight train had run over us," he said in a letter to his union about the July 2015 event. A mysterious smell. Strange symptoms. A trip to the emergency room. The signs were all there: Something had gone seriously wrong with the plane's air supply. The air you breathe on airplanes comes directly from the jet engines. Known as bleed air, it is safe, unless there is a mechanical issue -- a faulty seal, for instance. When that happens, heated jet engine oil can leak into the air supply, potentially releasing toxic gases into the plane. For decades, the airline industry and its regulators have known about these incidents -- called fume events -- and have maintained that they are rare and that the toxic chemical levels are too low to pose serious health risks. But a Times investigation found that vapors from oil and other fluids seep into planes with alarming frequency across all airlines, at times creating chaos and confusion: Flight attendants vomit and pass out. Passengers struggle to breathe. Children get rushed to hospitals. Pilots reach for oxygen masks or gasp for air from opened cockpit windows. Such events are documented in airport paramedic records, NASA safety reports, federal aviation records and other filings reviewed by The Times. Tellmann, the Spirit Airlines pilot, was one of hundreds of airline crew members and passengers who reported being sickened or impaired on flights in recent years. A Times analysis of NASA safety reports from January 2018 to December 2019 identified 362 fume events that airline crew members reported to the agency, with nearly 400 pilots, flight attendants and passengers receiving medical attention. During at least 73 of those flights, pilots used emergency oxygen. Four dozen pilots were described as impaired to the point of being unable to perform their duties. Because they're made voluntarily, the NASA safety reports are the "tip of the iceberg," according to a recent study by a researcher from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

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Microsoft is working on in-house processor designs for use in server computers that run the company's cloud services, adding to an industrywide effort to reduce reliance on Intel's chip technology, Bloomberg News reports. From the report: The world's largest software maker is using Arm designs to produce a processor that will be used in its data centers, according to people familiar with the plans. It's also exploring using another chip that would power some of its Surface line of personal computers. The people asked not to be identified discussing private initiatives.

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U.S. prosecutors on Friday charged a China-based executive at Zoom Video Communications with disrupting video meetings commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown at the request of the Chinese government. From a report: Xinjiang Jin, 39, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of conspiring since January 2019 to use his company's systems to censor speech, the U.S. Department of Justice said. Zoom was not named in court papers, but its identity was confirmed by a person close to the matter. Papers filed in federal court in Brooklyn said Jin's employer is based in San Jose, California, where Zoom is headquartered. Prosecutors said Jin, a software engineer and his employer's main liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence, helped terminate at least four video meetings in May and June, including some involving dissidents who survived the June 4, 1989, student protests. Jin allegedly fabricated violations of Zoom's terms of service to justify his actions to his superiors.

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An award-winning Taiwanese horror game was removed from storefronts by the beleaguered developer CD Projekt Red amid a backlash from Chinese gamers, hours after it was put on sale. From a report: Devotion, a PC game that chronicles the life of a Taiwanese family in a religious cult in the 1980s, was released to critical acclaim in February 2019. But shortly after release, Chinese players found a poster hanging in the apartment that serves as the games' setting that said "Xi Jinping Winnie-the-Pooh moron." Almost 10,000 negative reviews soon flooded the game's review page. The developer, Red Candle Games, posted an apology saying it was "purely an accident" that the poster was left in the game. Within a week, however, the game was pulled from sale on the digital storefront Steam. It has not been available in English since, despite winning multiple game of the year awards at the end of 2019, and an ongoing campaign for it to return to sale. On Wednesday, Red Candle Games announced that was changing. The game would be published on Friday by GOG, the digital storefront run by the Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red, it said in a tweet at 10am. A fresh wave of opprobrium from Chinese internet users followed the announcement and less than six hours later, CDPR reversed its decision. "Earlier today, it was announced that the game Devotion is coming to GOG," the company tweeted. "After receiving many messages from gamers, we have decided not to list the game in our store." It gave no further explanation and did not respond to a request for comment. Like many PC gaming firms, GOG operates in a grey area in China.

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OneWeb is back. The company on Friday made its fourth launch of a batch of satellites to build up its constellation in low-Earth orbit that eventually will provide broadband internet access around the globe. From a report: The latest group of 36 satellites headed to orbit atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Vostochny Cosmodrome, ending a long delay since the last OneWeb launch, on Feb. 6. The nine months since then have seen the company file for bankruptcy at the start of the coronavirus pandemic only to re-emerge under new ownership led by the British government and India's Bharti Global. OneWeb is now flying over 100 satellites of a planned 648-bird constellation.

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There's a narrative that the tech industry's future lies in Texas and Florida. That tech workers and executives -- sick of California's oppressive policies and sky-high real estate costs -- are moving en masse to Miami and Austin this year. That these cities are building dominant talent foundations that will persist for years due to the pandemic. That narrative is wrong. From a report: The story crumbles when placed next to new LinkedIn data showing where tech workers are actually moving in 2020. The key beneficiaries of this year's tech migration are less buzzy cities like Madison, Wisconsin; Richmond, Virginia; and Sacramento, California. These places don't get much play in the news, but they're attracting tech talent at significantly higher rates than they were last year. Austin, conversely, is gaining tech workers more slowly. The new LinkedIn data, which Big Technology is first publishing here, examines several hundred thousand tech workers in the U.S. It breaks down the ratio at which they're moving into a city vs. moving out, something LinkedIn calls the inflow/outflow ratio. The data ranges from April to October, comparing 2020 with 2019. It encompasses the core months people left their cities due to the pandemic. The country's biggest tech migration increase took place in Madison. The city was gaining 1.02 tech workers for each one that left last year, and it's now gaining 1.77, a 74% jump. Sacramento and Richmond, meanwhile, were losing tech workers before the pandemic and have turned it around. Sacramento was adding a fraction of a tech worker -- 0.87 -- for each one that left last year, and now it's adding 1.02. Richmond was adding 0.95 last year, and it's adding 1.06 this year. Other Midwest cities, including Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cleveland, Ohio, have significantly reduced the rate at which tech workers were leaving their cities.

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Rebellion is in the air at Polish video game publisher CD Projekt after the company's highly anticipated, and thrice-delayed, latest title was released to scathing reviews about glitches. Bloomberg News reports: Frustrated and angry staff fired questions at the board during an internal video meeting Thursday that opened with management apologizing for Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch, according to two people who were present. It was a fitting atmosphere for a company whose slogan, plastered on posters all around its Warsaw office, is "We are rebels." Developers asked blunt questions about the company's reputation, the game's unrealistic deadlines and the relentless overtime in the months and years leading up to the game's Dec. 10 release. The meeting took place before Sony's shocking announcement that it was pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and will offer full refunds to any customer who requests one. During the staff meeting, CD Projekt's directors said they had come to an arrangement with Sony but didn't offer specifics. In a Twitter post on Friday, the company said that "following our discussion with PlayStation, a decision was made to temporarily suspend digital distribution" of the game.

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Terence Eden: I am concerned that -- despite the hard work of the AC -- Google has limited interest in that goal. When I joined, I wondered whether I could make a difference. I hope that I have been a critical friend. The AC has encouraged AMP to think more about user needs -- rather than Google's needs. And changes to the search carousel were also a concern of the committee which have been partly addressed. Google's thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps -- therefore making the web faster and more app-like will retain users. Google doesn't publish data about this, so I can't directly criticise their motives. But I do not think AMP, in its current implementation, helps make the web better. I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web. I am glad that I tried to make it better, but I'm sad to have failed.

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The little-known Texas software company that's been attacked by suspected Russian hackers has a sprawling reach among U.K. government agencies, potentially putting clients from the National Health Service to police forces at risk. From a report: SolarWinds, which fell victim to hackers who put a "backdoor" in the software giving them access to users' computer networks, has been deployed by the U.K.'s Ministry of Justice and the intelligence and security organization GCHQ. Procurement records also show that police forces from Scotland to Cornwall have also used the software. The Home Office, which oversees policing, posted a job opening for a software engineer for the "implementation of a fully resilient platform and architecture SolarWinds Orion monitoring system based upon the upgrade of the existing installation" in 2018. "We are continuing to investigate this incident and have produced guidance for SolarWinds' Orion suite customers," said a spokesperson for the U.K. National Cybersecurity Centre. Representatives for the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice referred requests for comment to the NCSC. "We have issued a high severity alert to the NHS which explains the action to take to mitigate this threat," a spokesperson for NHS said in a statement. "We have been working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre to investigate this issue robustly. So far, we have no indication of any malicious activity, but our investigation is ongoing."

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The United States confirmed on Friday it will add dozens of Chinese companies, including the country's top chipmaker, SMIC, to a trade blacklist. From a report: The move, which was first reported by Reuters, is seen as the latest in President Donald Trump's efforts to cement his tough-on-China legacy. It comes just weeks before Democratic President-elect Joe Biden is set to take office on Jan. 20. The U.S. Commerce Department confirmed the decision early Friday, saying the action "stems from China's military-civil fusion (MCF) doctrine and evidence of activities between SMIC and entities of concern in the Chinese military industrial complex." Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement that the department would "not allow advanced U.S. technology to help build the military of an increasingly belligerent adversary." Ross said the government would presumptively deny licenses to prevent SMIC from accessing technology to produce semiconductors at advanced technology levels -- 10 nanometers or below.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Ads are the worst, yet we see them everywhere. They fund the content we consume, for free, on a daily basis. It's one thing to receive ads on a website you are going to for free, but it's quite another when an OEM goes out of its way to force an app onto your phone in order to serve you more ads. Sadly, that is exactly what Samsung just did with its new Samsung Visit In update through the Galaxy Store. On December 15, Samsung in the United States updated a system app called "IPS Geofencing" with the new Samsung Visit In app. This offers and coupons app has been rolling out in other countries and regions over the past year, but just hit the United States. IPS Geofencing was previously unused, or at least it was not user-accessible, and its function was unknown. As part of Visit In, it will be used to track your location, see when you're in a store that sells Samsung products or services, then serve you related ads. While you do need to opt-in for this service, the update allowing the functionality was installed automatically in the background of devices via the Galaxy Store. Further reading: Ads Are Taking Over Samsung's Galaxy Smartphones.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Of the 18,000 organizations that downloaded a backdoored version of software from SolarWinds, the tiniest of slivers -- possibly as small as 0.2 percent -- received a follow-on hack that used the backdoor to install a second-stage payload. The largest populations receiving stage two were, in order, tech companies, government agencies, and think tanks/NGOs. The vast majority -- 80 percent -- of these 40 chosen ones were located in the US. These figures were provided in an update from Microsoft President Brad Smith. Smith also shared some insightful and sobering commentary on the significance of this almost unprecedented attack. His numbers are incomplete, since Microsoft sees only what its Windows Defender app detects. Still, Microsoft sees a lot, so any difference with actual numbers is likely a rounding error. Smith said: It's critical that we step back and assess the significance of these attacks in their full context. This is not "espionage as usual," even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world's critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation's intelligence agency. While the most recent attack appears to reflect a particular focus on the United States and many other democracies, it also provides a powerful reminder that people in virtually every country are at risk and need protection irrespective of the governments they live under.

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SpamSlapper shares a report from The Australian Broadcasting Corporation: A company commercializing a CSIRO-developed, seaweed feed product, which slashes the amount of greenhouse gases cattle burp and fart into the atmosphere, has won a $1 million international prize for its work reshaping the food system. CSIRO-affiliated company Future Feed said it would use its Food Planet Prize winnings to create an international commercial fund to help First Nations communities generate income from cultivating and selling the seaweed. Methane emissions from livestock make up around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and one cow produces on average as much gas emission as one car. "As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 28 times more potent in terms of global warming potential than carbon dioxide and lasts much longer in the atmosphere," the CSIRO said on its website. Future Feed director and CSIRO scientist Michael Battaglia said that when added to cattle feed, the product, which contains Australian "super seaweed" Asparagopsis, virtually eliminated methane from the animals' bodily emissions. "We know that just a handful [of the product] per animal per day, or 0.2 percent of their diet can virtually eliminate 99.9 percent of methane," Dr Battaglia said.

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theodp writes: Q. How many AP Computer Science Principles 'exam takers' would you have if you cancelled the AP CSP exam due to the coronavirus? A. More than 116,000! That's according to the math behind a new College Board press release, which boasts, "In 2020, more than 116,000 students took the AP CSP Exam -- more than double the number of exam takers in the course's first year, and a 21% increase over the previous year. In 2020, 39,570 women took the AP CSP exam, nearly three times the number who tested in 2017." Which is somewhat confusing, since the College Board actually cancelled the 2020 AP CSP Exam last spring, explaining to students, "This year, there will be no end-of-year multiple-choice exam in Computer Science Principles [the exam was to have counted for 60% of students' scores] -- your AP score will be computed from the Create and Explore performance tasks only." Still, Sunday's Washington Post reported the good PR news, as did tech-bankrolled College Board partner Code.org, which exclaimed, "Young women set records in computer science exams, again!" In 2018, Code.org lamented that many students enrolled in AP CSP wouldn't get college credit for the course "because they don't take the exam", so perhaps an increase in AP CSP scores awarded -- if not AP CSP exams taken -- should be added to the list of silver linings of the pandemic.

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Earlier this week, a team of researchers announced that they successfully teleported qubits of photons across approximately 27 miles of fiber-optic cable. Engadget reports: While other scientists have worked on similar projects, this group is the first to beam quantum information across such a great distance. What's more, they did so across two separate networks and with a fidelity greater than 90 percent. One of the researchers on the team told Motherboard they built the networks using "off-the-shelf" components, and that their tech is compatible with existing telecommunications equipment. In PRX Quantum, where the team published its findings, they say their work provides "a realistic foundation for a high-fidelity quantum Internet with practical devices." They added, "this is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication." Experts believe a quantum internet could revolutionize a variety of computing fields, including cryptography and search. [...] With two 13-mile networks under their belts, the Caltech and Fermilab teams plan to build a city-scale network called the Illinois Express Quantum Network in Chicago next.

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Following a 2018 study demonstrating how disrupted sleep can accelerate the buildup of toxic plaques associated with the disease, scientists from Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis have now identified a protein implicated in the progression of the disease that appears highly regulated by the circadian rhythm, helping them join the dots and providing a potential new therapeutic target. New Atlas reports: In their previous research, the WUSM team set out to explore how disruptions to our natural sleep cycles, or circadian rhythm, may accelerate the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain, which are strongly linked to Alzheimer's disease. Through studies on humans and in mice, the team was able to show a strong correlation between the two, and now through follow up work, the team has identified a brain protein that appears to play a role in this relationship. The brain protein in question is called YKL-40 and for years has served as a biomarker for Alzheimer's, as high levels of it have been found in the cerebrospinal fluid of those suffering from the disease and these levels rise as the disease progresses. The researchers were screening for genes that are regulated by the circadian rhythm, and were intrigued to see the gene for this brain protein pop up. From there, the team investigated this connection between YKL-40 and Alzheimer's, which is characterized by chronic inflammation, by exploring how much of the protein is made under inflammatory conditions both with and without a key circadian gene. Indeed, this demonstrated that the circadian rhythm controls how much YKL-40 is produced. Next up, the team worked with mice prone to developing amyloid plaques, and genetically modified one group of them to be lacking the gene for YKL-40. As the mice reached old age, the team analyzed their brains and found that those without the YKL-40 protein exhibited around half the amyloid plaques of the control group. Digging deeper into the reasons why, the team found that the mice lacking the YKL-40 gene featured more microglia, which are immune cells that surround amyloid plaques and prevent them from spreading. Essentially, this meant that those mice had more hungry immune cells prepared to gobble up the amyloid. [...] The team also examined this idea in human subjects, drawing on genetic data on 778 subjects from aging and dementia studies and finding only a quarter of them featured a genetic variant that lowers levels of YKL-40, and that cognitive function declined 16 percent more slowly in that group. The research was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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Sony is pulling Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store and offering full refunds for anyone who bought the game from the digital storefront, the company said on Thursday. The Verge reports: If you want to start a refund, Sony says to visit this site and sign into your PlayStation account to submit a request. The game has already been removed from the PlayStation Store for a few Verge staffers on their PS5s, and the game doesn't come up in a search for "Cyberpunk 2077" on the web version of the store. Players have found that Cyberpunk 2077, which has only been out for a week, has been riddled with bugs. The game looks good on PS5, but in my few hours with the game, I've run into a few complete crashes to the PS5's home screen and a number of distracting visual glitches. On PS4, the game fares a lot worse -- Eurogamer reported poor performance, low framerate, and texture pop-in. Further reading: 'Cyberpunk 2077' Players Are Fixing Parts of the Game Before CD Projekt

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