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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nikkei Asian Review: The debate on universal basic income has gained momentum in South Korea, as the coronavirus outbreak and the country's growing income divide force a rethink on social safety nets. The concept was thrust into the spotlight in the country when Gyeonggi Province Gov. Lee Jae-myung proposed a basic income of 500,000 won ($430) a year per person this year. He aims to gradually expand the figure until it reaches 500,000 won a month -- roughly the equivalent of South Korea's social welfare payments. An annual $430 payout means the program will cost $21.3 billion a year, which likely can be funded through budgetary adjustments. But a monthly $430 will cost $256 billion, which is over half the national budget. "We cannot get to 500,000 won a month right now," Lee said. "But we can get there in 15 to 20 years by bolstering taxes on land, which is a public asset, carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and digital services developed using data we have produced." Basic income "will be a major topic in South Korea's next presidential election," Lee said. Lee is advocating distributing basic income in the form of a regional currency -- an experiment Gyeonggi Province already tested with coronavirus-linked assistance. Each resident received 100,000 won, about $85, in a regional currency, which needed to be spent in three months, allowing the entire sum used for the program to be recirculated back into the local economy. "Fourteen progressive lawmakers submitted a bill last week that would create a new committee to discuss how basic income can be funded, with plans to start distributing 300,000 won a month in 2022 and at least 500,000 won a month in 2029," the report adds. "The lawmakers envision diverting some regional taxes to a special budget to fund basic income. Shortfalls could be addressed by streamlining redundant social benefits and reviewing tax relief programs."

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Alexander Nix, the former boss of Cambridge Analytica, has been banned from serving as a company director for seven years over "potentially unethical" behavior linked to his position at the center of a global scandal. The Guardian reports: The Insolvency Service said Nix had allowed companies to offer potentially unethical services, including "bribery or honey-trap stings, voter disengagement campaigns, obtaining information to discredit political opponents and spreading information anonymously in political campaigns." Nix did not dispute that he caused or permitted Cambridge Analytica's parent company SCL Elections to offer such services, behavior "demonstrating a lack of commercial probity," according to the Insolvency Service. The Old Etonian and former financial analyst will be disqualified from holding directorships, or from promoting, forming or managing a company, starting from October 5, the Insolvency Service said. "Following an extensive investigation, our conclusions were clear that SCL Elections had repeatedly offered shady political services to potential clients over a number of years," said the Insolvency Service chief investigator, Mark Bruce. "Company directors should act with commercial probity and this means acting honestly and correctly. Alexander Nix's actions did not meet the appropriate standard for a company director and his disqualification from managing limited companies for a significant amount of time is justified in the public interest."

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Ring's latest home security camera is an autonomous drone, called the Always Home Cam, that can fly around inside your home to give you a perspective of any room you want when you're not home. "Once it's done flying, the Always Home Cam returns to its dock to charge its battery," reports The Verge. "It is expected to cost $249.99 when it starts shipping next year." From the report: Jamie Siminoff, Ring's founder and "chief inventor," says the idea behind the Always Home Cam is to provide multiple viewpoints throughout the home without requiring the use of multiple cameras. In an interview ahead of the announcement, he said the company has spent the past two years on focused development of the device, and that it is an "obvious product that is very hard to build." Thanks to advancements in drone technology, the company is able to make a product like this and have it work as desired. The Always Home Cam is fully autonomous, but owners can tell it what path it can take and where it can go. When you first get the device, you build a map of your home for it to follow, which allows you to ask it for specific viewpoints such as the kitchen or bedroom. The drone can be commanded to fly on demand or programmed to fly when a disturbance is detected by a linked Ring Alarm system. The charging dock blocks the camera's view, and the camera only records when it is in flight. Ring says the drone makes an audible noise when flying so it is obvious when footage is being recorded. Ring also rolled out new hardware for the automotive market with three different devices focused on car owners: Ring Car Alarm, Car Cam, and Car Connect. The company also said they've added opt-in end-to-end video encryption, as well as the option to completely disable the "Neighbors" feed, which allows users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) finally acknowledged Wednesday that photos that were part of a facial recognition pilot program were hacked from a Customs and Border Control subcontractor and were leaked on the dark web last year. Among the data, which was collected by a company called Perceptics, was a trove of traveler's faces, license plates, and care information. The information made its way to the Dark Web, despite DHS claiming it hadn't. In a newly released report about the incident, the DHS Office of Inspector General admitted that 184,000 images were stolen and at least 19 of them were posted to the Dark Web. "CBP did not adequately safeguard sensitive data on an unencrypted device used during its facial recognition technology pilot," the report found. "This incident may damage the public's trust in the Government's ability to safeguard biometric data and may result in travelers' reluctance to permit DHS to capture and use their biometrics at U.S. ports of entry." According to the new report, DHS's biometric database "contains the biometric data repository of more than 250 million people and can process more than 300,000 biometric transactions per day. It is the largest biometric repository in the Federal Government, and DHS shares this repository with the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense." "A subcontractor working on this effort, Perceptics, LLC, transferred copies of CBP's biometric data, such as traveler images, to its own company network," the report found. "The DHS OIG made several recommendations in its report that all boil down to 'tighten up security and make sure this doesn't happen again,'" the report adds.

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dkatana writes: The GSMA and Fira Barcelona announced today that next year's MWC Barcelona won't take place at the usual dates (early March). It has been postponed to late June to minimize the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. That has been a shock to Barcelona, as MWC is the most profitable event in the city. The biggest technology show brings over 500 million euro to the region's economy. GSMA CEO John Hoffman commented that "MWC is more than just an event. It's an experience that brings the whole industry together and provides a platform to unlock the power of connectivity so that people, industry, and society thrive."

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At its 2020 hardware event today, Amazon announced a cloud gaming platform called Luna. The news isn't too surprising: the service has been rumored since last year, previously codenamed "Tempo," while an Amazon-made game controller leaked out just ahead of today's event. From a report: It's not clear when Luna will launch widely, but it will initially be available on PC, Mac, Fire TV, and iPhone and iPad (via web apps), with an Android version planned for after launch. Amazon says that interested users in the US can request early access to the service starting today. There's no word on international availability. The service will be available for an "introductory price" of $5.99 a month during its early access phase, which gives subscribers the ability to play Luna Plus channel games across two devices simultaneously and offers 4K / 60fps resolution for "select titles." Naturally, it will be powered by AWS, Amazon's ubiquitous web platform.

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Last week, voters and election administrators who emailed Leanne Jackson, the clerk of rural Hamilton County in central Texas, received bureaucratic-looking replies. "Re: official precinct results," one subject line read. The text supplied passwords for an attached file. But Jackson didn't send the messages. From a report: Instead, they came from Sri Lankan and Congolese email addresses, and they cleverly hid malicious software inside a Microsoft Word attachment. By the time Jackson learned about the forgery, it was too late. Hackers continued to fire off look-alike replies. Jackson's three-person office, already grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, ground to a near standstill. "I've only sent three emails today, and they were emails I absolutely had to send," Jackson said Friday. "I'm scared to" send more, she said, for fear of spreading the malware. The previously unreported attack on Hamilton illustrates an overlooked security weakness that could hamper the November election: the vulnerability of email systems in county offices that handle the voting process from registration to casting and counting ballots. Although experts have repeatedly warned state and local officials to follow best practices for computer security, numerous smaller locales like Hamilton appear to have taken few precautionary measures. U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials have helped local governments in recent years to bolster their infrastructure, following Russian hacking attempts during the last presidential election. But desktop computers used each day in small rural counties to send routine emails, compose official documents or analyze spreadsheets can be easier targets, in part because those jurisdictions may not have the resources or know-how to update systems or afford security professionals familiar with the latest practices. A ProPublica review of municipal government email systems in swing states found that dozens of them relied on homebrew setups or didn't follow industry standards. Those protocols include encryption to ensure email passwords are secure and measures that confirm that people sending emails are who they purport to be. At least a dozen counties in battleground states didn't use cloud-hosted email from firms like Google or Microsoft. While not a cure-all, such services improve protections against email hacks.

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Google is rethinking its long-term work options for employees, as most of them say they don't want to come back to the office full-time. From a report: Sixty-two percent of Google employees want to return to their offices at some point, but not every day, according to a recent survey of employee office preferences the company released this week. So Google is working on "hybrid" models, including rearranging its offices and figuring out more long-term remote work options, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Time magazine on Wednesday. "I see the future as being more flexible," Pichai said in the interview. "We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having a sense of community is super important when you have to solve hard problems and create something new so we don't see that changing. But we do think we need to create more flexibility and more hybrid models."

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The European Union is weighing legislation that could force Apple to open iPhone payment technology to competitors. From a report: The potential rules would grant other payment services a right of access to infrastructure such as near-field communication technology embedded in smartphones, the European Commission said Thursday. While the EU didn't explicitly name Apple, it said the "most commonly reported issue" related to mobile device manufacturers restricting third-party access to NFC chips. The components handle wireless signals that allow users to pay via their smartphones or watches at store terminals. At present, iPhone and Apple Watch users can only make NFC payments using Apple Pay. Banks and other competitors have said they want the same functionality for their own iPhone apps but that Apple refuses access to the chip. By contrast, Google's Android phone allows rival apps to use NFC technology. Only one application is allowed access to it at a time for a given transaction to keep data secure.

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The European Commission will team up with the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP) to launch a new regulatory sandbox focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain by 2022, according to an announcement published today. From a report: The commission is the executive branch of the European Union and the initiative is part of its newly adopted Digital Finance Package that aims to provide greater clarity for cryptocurrency companies. "By making rules safer and more digital friendly for consumers, the Commission aims to boost responsible innovation in the EU's financial sector, especially for highly innovative digital start-ups, while mitigating any potential risks related to investor protection, money laundering and cyber-crime," the commission stated. According to the commission, some digital assets already fall under EU legislation, however, these rules "most often predate the emergence of crypto-assets and DLT." This could result in various roadblocks on the way of innovations and make it difficult to apply existing frameworks to blockchain and cryptocurrencies in the financial sector.

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At an event hosted by Slush, the Spotify CEO said: "I will devote 1 billion euro of my personal resources to enable the ecosystem of builders to achieve [the] European dream over the next decade." From a report: "I will do so by funding so-called moonshots focusing on the deep technology necessary to make a significant positive dent, and work with scientists, investors, and governments to do so," he added. The pledge came after Ek explained his desire to see more big European companies, saying "Europe needs to raise its ambition." When questioned on which areas he'll be investing in, Ek highlighted health care, education, machine learning, biotechnology, material sciences and energy. "The types of moonshots that I'm talking about, at least when I talk to the scientists and the entrepreneurs, they often face no [funding] options, because these ideas may be too early to bring in venture capital," he said, "so I definitely think we can do a lot more for those types of opportunities here."

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As India's economy reels in the aftermath of one of the world's strictest lockdowns, a rural employment program has emerged as a lifeline for some of the tens of millions left jobless. From a report: The government program -- which aims to guarantee 100 days of unskilled work in rural areas -- was intended to combat poverty and reduce the volatility of agricultural wages. Now it is a potent symbol of how the middle-class dreams of millions of Indians are unraveling. The program is serving as a last resort for university graduates as well as former white-collar workers who find themselves with no other safety net. More than 17 million new entrants applied to access the program from April through mid-September. Nearly 60 million households participated during that time -- higher than the total for all of last year and the most in the program's 14-year history. The need is dire. India's economic output shrank by 24 percent in the three months to June compared to the same period last year, worse than any other major economy. During the nationwide lockdown, more than 120 million jobs were lost, most of them in the country's vast informal sector. Many of those workers have returned to work out of sheer necessity, often scraping by on far lower wages.

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More than a dozen app makers and other companies have joined together to form the Coalition for App Fairness, a nonprofit group that's taking aim at Apple and its App Store rules. Among the founding members are Spotify, Epic Games, ProtonMail, and Match Group, all of which have been vocal critics of the fees Apple charges developers. From a report: "As enforcers, regulators, and legislators around the world investigate Apple for its anti-competitive behavior, The Coalition for App Fairness will be the voice of app and game developers in the effort to protect consumer choice and create a level playing field for all," said Horacio Gutierrez, head of global affairs at Spotify, in a release on Thursday. The coalition comes as Apple is locked in a public battle with Fortnite developer Epic Games. Fortnite was kicked off both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in August after Epic attempted to bypass the 30% fee Apple and Google charge developers. Epic countered by filing lawsuits against both companies. Apple earlier this month raised the stakes further by requesting monetary damages if it convinces a judge that it was within its rights to kick Fortnite off its more than 1.5 billion active iPhones and iPads.

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In a blog post announcing the next version of its Exchange Server, Microsoft has slipped in a single line that's bound to make those who hate paying subscription fees for Office apps happy. From a report: "Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021," the tech giant's Exchange team wrote, confirming that a new version of Office you can purchase with a one-time payment is coming next year. The company has been pushing Microsoft 365 for years now as the main way to get its Office apps. This subscription-based version of its suite gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps for a monthly payment. While you can use some of those apps for free online with a Microsoft account, you won't be able to install them on your PC like you'd be able to if you pay for a subscription. Further reading: Microsoft Really Doesn't Want You To Buy Office 2019.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Stomach ulcers and other gastric wounds afflict one in eight people worldwide, but common conventional therapies have drawbacks. Now scientists aim to treat such problems by exploring a new frontier in 3-D printing: depositing living cells directly inside the human body. [...] In their effort to treat stomach lesions less invasively, scientists in China wanted to develop a miniature bioprinting robot that could enter the human body with relative ease. The researchers used existing techniques for creating dexterous electronic devices, such as mechanical bees and cockroach-inspired robots, says the study's senior author Tao Xu, a bioengineer at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The resulting micro robot is just 30 millimeters wide -- less than half the width of a credit card -- and can fold to a length of 43 millimeters. Once inside a patient's body, it unfolds to become 59 millimeters long and can start bioprinting. "The team has constructed clever mechanisms that make the system compact when entering the body yet unfurl to provide a large working area once past the tight constrictions at entry," says David Hoelzle, a mechanical engineer at the Ohio State University, who did not take part in the study. In their experiments, the researchers in China fitted the micro robot onto an endoscope (a long tube that can be inserted through bodily openings) and successfully snaked it through a curved pipe into a transparent plastic model of a stomach. There, they used it to print gels loaded with human stomach lining and stomach muscle cells (which were grown in culture by a commercial laboratory) onto a lab dish. The printed cells remained viable and steadily proliferated over the course of 10 days. "This study is the first attempt to combine micro robots and bioprinting together," Xu says. The study has been published in the journal Biofabrication.

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A team of scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design discovered that, using simple chemistry, the organic polymer chitin -- contained in the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans -- can easily be transformed into a viable building material for basic tools and habitats. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. Ars Technica reports: "The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments," said co-author Javier Fernandez. "But due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite." [T]he authors of the current paper point out that most terrestrial manufacturing strategies that could fit the bill typically require specialized equipment and a hefty amount of energy. However, "Nature presents successful strategies of life adapting to harsh environments," the authors wrote. "In biological organisms, rigid structures are formed by integrating inorganic filler proceed from the environment at a low energy cost (e.g., calcium carbonate) and incorporated into an organic matrix (e.g., chitin) produced at a relatively high metabolic cost." Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote. "Rather, it is a byproduct of it."

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With space junk piling up around our planet, the International Space Station needed to perform a last-minute avoidance maneuver Tuesday to steer clear of an "unknown piece of space debris expected to pass within several kilometers." From a report: Mission Control in Houston conducted the move at 2:19 p.m. PT using the Russian Progress resupply spacecraft docked to the ISS to help nudge the station out of harm's way. "Out of an abundance of caution, the Expedition 63 crew will relocate to their Soyuz spacecraft until the debris has passed by the station," NASA said in a statement prior to the move. The maneuver went off smoothly, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine reported. "The astronauts are coming out of safe haven," he tweeted after the ISS relocated.

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sciencehabit writes: A mini-arms race is unfolding in the supposed field of quantum radar, spurred by press reports in 2016 that China had built one -- potentially threatening the ability of stealthy military aircraft to hide from conventional radars. Governments around the world have tasked physicists to look into the idea. Whereas a conventional radar searches for objects by detecting pulse of microwaves reflected from them, quantum radar would utilize pulses of microwaves linked by a quantum connection called entanglement. The system would retain one pulse and measure it in concert with the one reflected from the object. Correlations between the two would make it easier to spot an object through the glare of the surroundings. Or so researchers hoped. Groups have demonstrated elements of a quantum radar, but only in limited experiments that a nonquantum system can still match. And fundamental physical limits suggest the scheme can't beat ordinary radar for long-range detection. Even one of the inventors of the basic concept thinks it won't work when applied to radar.

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Mike Morhaime, the cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment, has launched a new game company called Dreamhaven, and it has established two new game studios: Moonshot and Secret Door. VentureBeat reports: The Irvine, California-based company is a pretty good clue that Morhaime and his wife Amy Morhaime weren't quite done with games when they left Activision Blizzard in 2018. Mike will be the CEO of Dreamhaven, while Amy will head operations. They have hired a number of (mostly former Blizzard) industry veterans to help run their studios, which will work on separate games. That's an ambitious startup, as working on two games at once is a handful. But it's not without precedent, as Harold Ryan's Probably Monsters startup in Seattle also has two studios working on two games at once. What makes the Morhaimes' company unique so far is that they're funding it themselves. [...] So far, the company has 27 employees across all three entities, and it's hiring more staff. The artwork on the company's homepage combines aspects of both fantasy and science fiction, but the company isn't yet saying what games it is working on, nor is it talking about genres. But it is working on a familiar model, as it closely resembles the way Morhaime ran things at Blizzard, with an emphasis on quality, iteration, and giving creative staff enough time. The parent company's role is to provide guidance and funding, as well as central services that each studio will need, such as communications and human resources. But each studio will make its own decisions about how to make the best games, Morhaime said. The founders have equity in the parent company. Moonshot's leaders are Jason Chayes, Dustin Browder, and Ben Thompson. Chayes was previously an executive producer at Blizzard Entertainment, where he worked on the Hearthstone team. He also worked at Electronic Arts and Disney. Browder's 25-year career includes roles as the game director for StarCraft II, Heroes of the Storm, Command & Conquer, and The Lord of the Rings. Thompson's credits include creative director for Hearthstone and art director for the World of Warcraft trading card game, with additional credits on Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. Moonshot is also home to a team of seasoned developers who've worked on some of gaming's most popular franchises. Dreamhaven's second game studio, Secret Door, has a leadership team of Chris Sigaty, Alan Dabiri, and Eric Dodds. Sigaty's roles have included executive producer on Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and Heroes of the Storm, as well as lead producer on the original Warcraft III. Dodds was the original game director of Hearthstone and veteran game designer on World of Warcraft and StarCraft. Dabiri has filled both technical director and game director roles and has worked on Warcraft III, StarCraft II, and Heroes of the Storm. Sigaty was at Blizzard for almost 24 years, working closely with Chayes on games like StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. He left Blizzard at the end of 2019 and to devote some time to family. He also talked with Morhaime and Chayes.

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Legendary horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs is now open source, meaning that modders can dig in and see what lies underneath the hood of both games. Polygon reports: The full source code for The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs has been released on Github for folks who want to take a crack at modifying the game. It's relatively rare for developers to post their game codes themselves, though sometimes proprietary code can make its way online via leaks. "This doesn't mean that the game is suddenly free," Amnesia developer Frictional Games said in a blog post. "It just means that people are free to use the source however they want as long as they adhere to the GPL3 licence. The game and all of its content is still owned by Frictional Games. Just like before." Seeing how these classic games are built will also mean seeing things like flaws, and inefficiencies Frictional Games warned -- but it's all still functional and potentially useful to anyone learning game development. "I also hope this release can be of help to anyone wanting to create their own engine or just wanting to learn more about game programming," Frictional Games said. "While the code is not the greatest in places and the tech used is not the latest, it is a fully contained game engine in a fairly easy-to-understand package. It is also a testament that it is possible to do this sort of thing, even with a very limited team."

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