The Colonial Pipeline cyberattack has spurred new efforts in the U.S. Congress "to require critical companies to tell the government when they've been hacked." Politico reports: Even leading Republicans are expressing support for regulations after this week's chaos — a sharp change from past high-profile efforts that failed due to GOP opposition. The swift reaction from lawmakers reflects the disruptive impact of the ransomware attack on Colonial...

The vast majority of private companies don't have to report cyberattacks to any government entity — not even those, like Colonial, whose disruptions can wreak havoc on U.S. economic and national security. And often, they choose to keep quiet. That information gap leaves the rest of the country in the dark about how frequently such attacks occur and how they're perpetrated. It also leaves federal authorities without crucial information that could help protect other companies from similar attacks. Without reporting from companies, "the United States government is completely blind to what is happening," Brandon Wales, the acting director of DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told reporters on Thursday. "That just weakens our overall cyber posture across our entire country."

Wales said the solution was for Congress to require companies to report cyber incidents. Lawmakers of both parties told POLITICO they are crafting legislation to mandate cyberattack reporting by critical infrastructure operators such as Colonial, along with major IT service providers and any other companies that do business with the government. The planned legislation predates the pipeline attack — lawmakers began drafting it soon after learning about last year's massive SolarWinds espionage campaign, in which suspected Russian hackers infiltrated nine federal agencies and roughly 100 companies. But the Colonial strike has added urgency to the effort. The group expects to introduce the legislation within weeks, a Senate aide said. "You couldn't have a better reason" for such a mandate than seeing the economic impact of Colonial and SolarWinds, said Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.), one of the leaders of the legislation along with Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

Warner said the intent is to provide a "public-private forum where, with appropriate immunity and confidentiality, you can — mid-incident — report, so we can make sure that it doesn't spread worse..." In the case of Colonial, CISA's Wales said the company did not provide the administration with technical information about the breach until Wednesday night — five days after it was reported — and even then the data was not comprehensive... Companies typically choose not to voluntarily share data with the government for legal and reputational reasons. They fear that the notoriously leak-prone government won't protect their information, leading to embarrassing and potentially actionable revelations.
Politico adds that "The incident reporting situation has become untenable, many cybersecurity experts say,"

"Nation-state hackers are using vulnerable companies as springboards into their customers and partners, and criminal groups are attacking hospitals, schools and energy companies in ways that, if reported, could be tracked and prevented elsewhere."

Politico writes: President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered a sweeping overhaul of the federal government's approach to cybersecurity, from the software that agencies buy to the security measures that they use to block hackers, as his administration continues grappling with vulnerabilities exposed by a massive digital espionage campaign carried out by the Russian government... Biden's order requires agencies to encrypt their data, update plans for securely using cloud hosting services and enabling multi-factor authentication...

It also creates a cyber incident review group, modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board that investigates aviation, railroad and vehicle crashes, to improve the government's response to cyberattacks. And it sets the stage for requiring federal contractors to report data breaches and meet new software security standards.

The directive, which sets deadlines for more than 50 different actions and reports, represents a wide-ranging attempt by the new Biden administration to close glaring cybersecurity gaps that it discovered upon taking office and prevent a repeat of Moscow's SolarWinds espionage operation, which breached nine federal agencies and roughly 100 companies... In addition to requiring agencies to deploy multi-factor authentication, the order requires them to install endpoint detection and response software, which generates warnings when it detects possible hacks. It also calls for agencies to redesign their networks using a philosophy known as zero-trust architecture, which assumes that hackers are inside a network and focuses on preventing them from jumping from one computer to another... Officials say current federal monitoring programs are outdated — they can only spot previously identified malware, and they can't protect increasingly pervasive cloud platforms...

Biden's executive order attempts to prevent another SolarWinds by requiring information technology service providers to meet new security requirements in order to do business with the federal government. These contractors will need to alert the government if they are hacked and share information about the intrusion.
The order "reflects a fundamental shift in our mindset from incident response to prevention, from talking about security to doing security," one senior administration official told reporters. The order notes "persistent and increasingly sophisticated malicious cyber campaigns" that "threaten the public sector, the private sector, and ultimately the American people's security and privacy," calling for "bold changes and significant investments."

But the order also argues that "In the end, the trust we place in our digital infrastructure should be proportional to how trustworthy and transparent that infrastructure is..." warning that "The development of commercial software often lacks transparency, sufficient focus on the ability of the software to resist attack, and adequate controls to prevent tampering by malicious actors." To that end, the order also requires guidelines for a "Software Bill of Materials" or "SBOM," a "formal record containing the details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software... analogous to a list of ingredients on food packaging." [A]n SBOM allows the builder to make sure those components are up to date and to respond quickly to new vulnerabilities. Buyers can use an SBOM to perform vulnerability or license analysis, both of which can be used to evaluate risk in a product. Those who operate software can use SBOMs to quickly and easily determine whether they are at potential risk of a newly discovered vulnerability. A widely used, machine-readable SBOM format allows for greater benefits through automation and tool integration. The SBOMs gain greater value when collectively stored in a repository that can be easily queried by other applications and systems. Understanding the supply chain of software, obtaining an SBOM, and using it to analyze known vulnerabilities are crucial in managing risk.
ZDNet reports that "the Linux and open-source community are already well on their way to meeting the demands of this new security order," citing security projects in both its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and from the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

Delaware State University -- also known as DSU -- "is cancelling more than $700,000 in student loans for recent graduates hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic," reports CNN: DSU will cancel $730,655 for more than 220 people, the school announced this week...

"Too many graduates across the country will leave their schools burdened by debt, making it difficult for them to rent an apartment, cover moving costs, or otherwise prepare for their new careers or graduate school," said Antonio Boyle, DSU's Vice President for strategic enrollment management. "While we know our efforts won't help with all of their obligations, we all felt it was essential to do our part."

DSU is paying for the expenses through the federal American Rescue Plan for COVID-19 relief, university officials said in the statement Wednesday.
The school says that the average eligible student will qualify for about $3,276 in debt relief, according to a Delaware newspaper. They quote a statement from the School President that "Our students don't just come here for a quality college experience. Most are trying to change the economic trajectory of their lives for themselves, their families, and their communities.

"Our responsibility is to do everything we can to put them on the path."

The New York Times reports on misinformation that's further inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas.

At least that is what Mr. Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundreds of times as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated, was not from Gaza. It was not even from this week. Instead, the video that he shared, which can be found on many YouTube channels and other video-hosting sites, was from 2018. And according to captions on older versions of the video, it showed militants firing rockets not from Gaza but from Syria or Libya.

The video was just one piece of misinformation that has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media this week about the rising violence between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israeli military ground forces attacked Gaza early on Friday. The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region, with posts baselessly claiming early this week that Israeli soldiers had invaded Gaza, or that Palestinian mobs were about to rampage through sleepy Israeli suburbs. The lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The effect of the misinformation is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions between Israelis and Palestinians when suspicions and distrust have already run high.

The Indian government has told doctors to look out for signs of mucormycosis or "black fungus" in COVID-19 patients as hospitals report a rise in cases of the rare but potentially fatal infection. From a report: The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said at the weekend that doctors treating COVID-19 patients, diabetics and those with compromised immune systems should watch for early symptoms including sinus pain or nasal blockage on one side of the face, one-sided headache, swelling or numbness, toothache and loosening of teeth.

The disease, which can lead to blackening or discolouration over the nose, blurred or double vision, chest pain, breathing difficulties and coughing blood, is strongly linked to diabetes. And diabetes can in turn be exacerbated by steroids such as dexamethasone, used to treat severe COVID-19. "There have been cases reported in several other countries - including the UK, U.S., France, Austria, Brazil and Mexico, but the volume is much bigger in India," said David Denning, a professor at Britain's Manchester University and an expert at the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections (GAFFI) charity. Further reading about the 'black fungus': BBC; NPR, the New York Times, and the Guardian.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard. Senator Wyden's office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.

Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time, but believes it would meaningfully inform the debate around how the DoD is interpreting the law and its purchases of data. "I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans," the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads. Wyden and his staff with appropriate security clearances are able to review classified responses, a Wyden aide told Motherboard. Wyden's office declined to provide Motherboard with specifics about the classified answer. But a Wyden aide said that the question related to the DoD buying internet metadata.

"Are any DoD components buying and using without a court order internet metadata, including 'netflow' and Domain Name System (DNS) records," the question read, and asked whether those records were about "domestic internet communications (where the sender and recipient are both U.S. IP addresses)" and "internet communications where one side of the communication is a U.S. IP address and the other side is located abroad." Netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. DNS records relate to when a user looks up a particular domain, and a system then converts that text into the specific IP address for a computer to understand; essentially a form of internet browsing history. Wyden's new letter to Austin urging the DoD to release that answer and others says "Information should only be classified if its unauthorized disclosure would cause damage to national security. The information provided by DoD in response to my questions does not meet that bar."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Binance Holdings Ltd. is under investigation by the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service, ensnaring the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange in U.S. efforts to root out illicit activity that's thrived in the red-hot but mostly unregulated market. As part of the inquiry, officials who probe money laundering and tax offenses have sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the probe is confidential. Led by Changpeng Zhao, a charismatic tech executive who relishes promoting tokens on Twitter and in media interviews, Binance has leap-frogged rivals since he co-founded it in 2017.

The firm, like the industry it operates in, has succeeded largely outside the scope of government oversight. Binance is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and has an office in Singapore but says it lacks a single corporate headquarters. Chainalysis Inc., a blockchain forensics firm whose clients include U.S. federal agencies, concluded last year that among transactions that it examined, more funds tied to criminal activity flowed through Binance than any other crypto exchange. [...] While the Justice Department and IRS probe potential criminal violations, the specifics of what the agencies are examining couldn't be determined, and not all inquiries lead to allegations of wrongdoing. The officials involved include prosecutors within the Justice Department's bank integrity unit, which probes complex cases targeting financial firms, and investigators from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle. The scrutiny by IRS agents goes back months, with their questions signaling that they're reviewing both the conduct of Binance's customers and its employees, another person said.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has also been investigating Binance over whether it permitted Americans to make illegal trades, Bloomberg reported in March. In that case, authorities have been examining whether Binance let investors buy derivatives that are linked to digital tokens. U.S. residents are barred from purchasing such products unless the firms offering them are registered with the CFTC. [...] Along with the CFTC, the Justice Department is likely to examine steps that Binance has taken to keep U.S. residents off its exchange. One person familiar with Binance's operations said that prior to the establishment of Binance.US, Americans were advised to use a virtual proxy network, or VPN, to disguise their locations when seeking to access the exchange. "We take our legal obligations very seriously and engage with regulators and law enforcement in a collaborative fashion," Binance spokeswoman Jessica Jung said in an emailed statement. "We have worked hard to build a robust compliance program that incorporates anti-money laundering principles and tools used by financial institutions to detect and address suspicious activity."

New data compiled by the E.P.A. shows how global warming is making life harder for Americans in myriad ways that threaten their health, safety and homes. From a report: Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner. Climate change is already happening around the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday. And in many cases, that change is speeding up. The freshly compiled data, the federal government's most comprehensive and up-to-date information yet, shows that a warming world is making life harder for Americans, in ways that threaten their health and safety, homes and communities. And it comes as the Biden administration is trying to propel aggressive action at home and abroad to cut the pollution that is raising global temperatures. "There is no small town, big city or rural community that is unaffected by the climate crisis," Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said on Wednesday. "Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close, with increasing regularity."

The data released Wednesday came after a four-year gap. Until 2016, the E.P.A. regularly updated its climate indicators. But under President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly questioned whether the planet was warming, the data was frozen in time. It was available on the agency's website but was not kept current. The Biden administration revived the effort this year and added some new measures, pulling information from government agencies, universities and other sources. The E.P.A. used 54 separate indicators which, taken together, paint a grim picture.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed a bill that would ban U.S. federal workers from downloading the popular app TikTok onto U.S. government devices, Senator Josh Hawley, a bill sponsor, said in a press statement on Wednesday. Reuters reports: The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a similar measure in August 2020. Representative Ken Buck has introduced a similar bill in the House. The app, which is popular with teens eager to show off dance moves, has come under fire in the United States because of concerns over its Chinese owner, ByteDance. TikTok has sought to distance itself from Beijing with mixed success. Hawley called the company "an immediate security threat." "This should not be a partisan issue and I'm glad to see my colleagues in the Senate act together to address Beijing's covert data collection campaign," Hawley said in a statement after the vote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Auditor-General of Western Australia on Wednesday tabled a report into the computer systems used at 50 local government entities, revealing 328 control weakness across the group. It was Auditor-General Caroline Spencer's intention to list the entities, but given the nature of her findings, all case studies included in Local Government General Computer Controls [PDF] omit entity, and system, names.

The report states that none of the 11 entities that the Auditor-General performed capability maturity assessments on met minimum targets. For the remaining 39, general computer controls audits were conducted. The audit probed information security, business continuity, management of IT risks, IT operations, change control, and physical security. Of the 328 control weaknesses, 33 rated as significant and 236 as moderate. Like last year, nearly half of all issues were about information security. The capability assessment results, meanwhile, showed that none of the 11 audited entities met the auditor's expectations across the six control categories, with 79% of the audit results below the minimum benchmark. [...] The report provided six recommendations, one for each of the security types audited. These included implementing appropriate frameworks and management structures, identifying IT risks, and patching.

Long-awaited proposals in the UK to regulate social media are a "recipe for censorship," campaigners have said, which fly in the face of the government's attempts to strengthen free speech elsewhere in Britain. From a report: The online safety bill, which was introduced to parliament on Wednesday, hands Ofcom the power to punish social networks which fail to remove "lawful but harmful" content. The proposals were welcomed by children's safety campaigns, but theyhave come under fire from civil liberties organisations. "Applying a health and safety approach to everybody's online speech combined with the threat of massive fines against the platforms is a recipe for censorship and removal of legal content," said Jim Killock, the director of the Open Rights Group. "Facebook does not operate prisons and is not the police. Trying to make platforms do the job of law enforcement through technical means is a recipe for failure."

The centre-right CPS thinktank was similarly critical. "It is for parliament to determine what is sufficiently harmful that it should not be allowed, not for Ofcom or individual platforms to guess," it said. "If something is legal to say, it should be legal to type," CPS's director, Robert Colvile, added. In its update to the bill from the white paper first drafted by Theresa May's government in 2019, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport added sections intended to prevent harm to free expression. Social networks will now need to perform and publish "assessments of their impact on freedom of expression."

Xiaomi and the U.S. government have text to set aside a Trump administration blacklisting that could have restricted American investment in the Chinese smartphone maker. From a report: The Chinese smartphone giant had sued the government earlier this year, after the U.S. Defense Department under former President Donald Trump issued an order designating the firm as a Communist Chinese Military Company, which would have led to a de-listing from U.S. exchanges and deletion from global benchmark indexes. The U.S. Defense Department has now agreed that a final order vacating the designation "would be appropriate," according to a filing to the U.S. courts Tuesday. Xiaomi declined to comment. Pentagon representatives weren't immediately available for comment after normal hours. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular press briefing in Beijing she wasn't aware of any deal the firm may have reached with the U.S. "The Parties have agreed upon a path forward that would resolve this litigation without the need for contested briefing," according to the filing, which didn't state whether the agreement included any conditions for removal. The parties involved are negotiating over specific terms and will file a separate joint proposal before May 20.

The Biden administration gave approval Tuesday to the nation's first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, which is scheduled to begin construction this summer. The New York Times reports: he Vineyard Wind project calls for up to 84 turbines to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean about 12 nautical miles off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Together, they could generate about 800 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 400,000 homes. The administration estimates that the work will create about 3,600 jobs. The project would dwarf the scale of the country's two existing wind farms, off the coasts of Virginia and Rhode Island. Together, they produce just 42 megawatts of electricity. In addition to Vineyard Wind, a dozen other offshore wind projects along the East Coast are now under federal review. The Interior Department has estimated that by the end of the decade, some 2,000 turbines could be churning in the wind along the coast from Massachusetts to North Carolina.

Electricity generated by the Vineyard Wind turbines will travel via cables buried six feet below the ocean floor to Cape Cod, where they would connect to a substation and feed into the New England grid. The company said that it expects to begin delivering wind-powered electricity in 2023. The Biden administration said that it intended to fast-track permits for other projects off the Atlantic Coast and that it would offer $3 billion in federal loan guarantees for offshore wind projects and invest in upgrades to ports across the United States to support wind turbine construction. [...] The administration has pledged to build 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030. It's a target the White House has said would spark $12 billion in capital investments annually, supporting 77,000 direct and indirect jobs by the end of the decade. If Mr. Biden's offshore wind targets are met, it could avoid 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, while creating new jobs and even new industries along the way, the administration said.

Southern California has adopted a new air pollution rule aimed at slashing noxious emissions from warehouse trucks that move goods sold by Amazon and other e-commerce retailers. Ars Technica reports: Diesel pollution from heavy trucks causes everything from asthma to heart attacks, and even Parkinson's disease. Previously, such pollution tended to be concentrated around shipping ports and highways, but the growth of e-commerce has created a new source that is affecting neighborhoods farther inland. There are nearly 34,000 warehouses enclosing 1.17 billion square feet of space in the Los Angeles region alone. The rule, which was adopted late last week by a 9-4 vote of the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD), would cover around 3,300 warehouses that are larger than 100,000 square feet. The rule seeks to reduce the amount of diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides produced by trucks serving these facilities. The district covers more than 17 million people, or nearly half the state's population.

The way the South Coast AQMD is approaching warehouse-related pollution is novel. Rather than attempting to control traffic flow to and from the facilities, the regulator will require warehouse owners to take various steps to reduce pollution in the area. That could include buying electric or fuel-cell trucks, adding solar panels to the building roofs, or installing air filters at nearby homes, hospitals, and schools. Each of these measures is assigned a point value, and warehouse operators must achieve a certain total to offset the emissions from their truck traffic. If they cannot meet the goal through mitigation measures, they can pay a fee instead. South Coast AQMD is phasing in compliance depending on the size of the facility. Warehouses that are over 250,000 square feet must meet their goals by June 30, 2022. Warehouses over 150,000 square feet must comply by the same day the following year, and those over 100,000 square feet get until June 30, 2024. Amazon's typical warehouses, for example, range in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet. [...] The new rule is expected to save 150 to 300 lives and prevent 2,500 to 5,800 asthma attacks between 2022 and 2031. Overall, the public health benefits could be as large as $2.7 billion over the same timeframe.

China's ruling Communist Party has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media. From a report: Liu Xiaoming, who recently stepped down as China's ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the party's most successful foot soldiers on this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, as scores of Chinese diplomats surged onto Twitter and Facebook, which are both banned in China. Since then, Liu has deftly elevated his public profile, gaining a following of more than 119,000 as he transformed himself into an exemplar of China's new sharp-edged "wolf warrior" diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action movie. "As I see it, there are so-called 'wolf warriors' because there are 'wolfs' in the world and you need warriors to fight them," Liu, who is now China's Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs, tweeted in February. His stream of posts -- principled and gutsy ripostes to Western anti-Chinese bias to his fans, aggressive bombast to his detractors -- were retweeted more than 43,000 times from June through February alone. But much of the popular support Liu and many of his colleagues seem to enjoy on Twitter has, in fact, been manufactured.

A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, found that China's rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people -- often without disclosing the fact that the content is government-sponsored. More than half the retweets Liu got from June through January came from accounts that Twitter has suspended for violating the platform's rules, which prohibit manipulation. Overall, more than one in ten of the retweets 189 Chinese diplomats got in that time frame came from accounts that Twitter had suspended by Mar. 1. But Twitter's suspensions did not stop the pro-China amplification machine. An additional cluster of fake accounts, many of them impersonating U.K. citizens, continued to push Chinese government content, racking up over 16,000 retweets and replies before Twitter kicked them off late last month and early this month, in response to the AP and Oxford Internet Institute's investigation.

Some of the world's biggest chip buyers, including Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google, are joining top chip-makers such as Intel to create a new lobbying group to press for government chip manufacturing subsidies. From a report: The newly formed Semiconductors in America Coalition, which also includes Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services, said Tuesday it has asked U.S. lawmakers to provide funding for the CHIPS for America Act, for which President Joe Biden has asked Congress to provide $50 billion. "Robust funding of the CHIPS Act would help America build the additional capacity necessary to have more resilient supply chains to ensure critical technologies will be there when we need them," the group said in a letter to Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses of the U.S. Congress.

A global chip shortage has hit automakers hard, with Ford Motor saying it could halve second-quarter production. Automotive industry groups have pressed the Biden administration to secure chip supply for car factories. But Reuters last week reported administration officials were reluctant to use a national security law to redirect computer chips to automakers because doing so could hurt other industries. The new coalition includes some of those other chip-consuming industries, with members such as AT&T, Cisco Systems, General Electric, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Verizon Communications. It cautioned against government actions to favor a single industry such as automakers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: China's population grew at its slowest pace in decades, according to government data released on Tuesday. The average annual growth rate was 0.53% over the past 10 years, down from a rate of 0.57% between 2000 and 2010 -- bringing the population to 1.41 billion. The results add pressure on Beijing to boost measures for couples to have more babies and avert a population decline. The results were announced in a once-a-decade census, which was originally expected to be released in April. The census was conducted in late 2020 where some seven million census takers had gone door-to-door to collect information from Chinese households. Given the sheer number of people surveyed, it is considered the most comprehensive resource on China's population, which is important for future planning.

Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics revealed that 12 million babies were born last year -- a significant decrease from the 18 million newborns in 2016. However he added that it was "still a considerable number." [...] China's working-age population -- which it defines as people aged between 16 and 59 -- has also declined by 40 million as compared to the last census in 2010. But chief methodologist Zeng Yuping said that the total size "remains big" with 880 million. "We still have an abundant labour force," he said. However, [principal economist from The Economist Intelligence Unit, Ms Yue Su] warned that going forward, continued drops in the labour force "will place a cap on China's potential economic growth." She added: "The demographic dividend that propelled the country's economic rise over recent decades is set to dissipate quickly." Last month, the Census Bureau reported that the United States population grew at the slowest rate since the 1930s, "a remarkable slackening that was driven by a leveling off of immigration and a declining birthrate," reports The New York Times.

IBM announced during its Think 2021 conference on Monday that its researchers have crafted a Rosetta Stone for programming code. Engadget reports: In effect, we've taught computers how to speak human, so why not also teach computers to speak more computer? That's what IBM's Project CodeNet seeks to accomplish. "We need our ImageNet, which can snowball the innovation and can unleash this innovation in algorithms," [Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist at IBM Research, said during his Think 2021 presentation]. CodeNet is essentially the ImageNet of computers. It's an expansive dataset designed to teach AI/ML systems how to translate code and consists of some 14 million snippets and 500 million lines spread across more than 55 legacy and active languages -- from COBOL and FORTRAN to Java, C++, and Python.

"Since the data set itself contains 50 different languages, it can actually enable algorithms for many pairwise combinations," Puri explained. "Having said that, there has been work done in human language areas, like neural machine translation which, rather than doing pairwise, actually becomes more language-independent and can derive an intermediate abstraction through which it translates into many different languages." In short, the dataset is constructed in a manner that enables bidirectional translation. That is, you can take some legacy COBOL code -- which, terrifyingly, still constitutes a significant amount of this country's banking and federal government infrastructure -- and translate it into Java as easily as you could take a snippet of Java and regress it back into COBOL.

CodeNet can be used for functions like code search and clone detection, in addition to its intended translational duties and serving as a benchmark dataset. Also, each sample is labeled with its CPU run time and memory footprint, allowing researchers to run regression studies and potentially develop automated code correction systems. Project CodeNet consists of more than 14 million code samples along with 4000-plus coding problems collected and curated from decades' of programming challenges and competitions across the globe. "The way the data set actually came about," Puri said, "there are many kinds of programming competitions and all kinds of problems -- some of them more businesslike, some of them more academic. These are the languages that have been used over the last decade and a half in many of these competitions with 1000s of students or competitors submitting solutions." Additionally, users can run individual code samples "to extract metadata and verify outputs from generative AI models for correctness," according to an IBM press release. "This will enable researchers to program intent equivalence when translating one programming language into another." [...] IBM intends to release the CodeNet data to the public domain, allowing researchers worldwide equal and free access.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Department of Homeland Security has begun implementing a strategy to gather and analyze intelligence about security threats from public social media posts, DHS officials said. The goal is to build a warning system to detect the sort of posts that appeared to predict an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 but were missed or ignored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the officials said. The focus is not on the identity of the posters but rather on gleaning insights about potential security threats based on emerging narratives and grievances. So far, DHS is using human beings, not computer algorithms, to make sense of the data, the officials said. "We're not looking at who are the individual posters," said a senior official involved in the effort. "We are looking at what narratives are resonating and spreading across platforms. From there you may be able to determine what are the potential targets you need to protect."

The officials didn't describe what criteria or methods the analysts would use to parse the data. They said DHS officials have been consulting with social media companies, private companies and nonprofit groups that analyze open-source social media data. Law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts are legally entitled to examine -- without warrants -- what people say openly on Twitter, Facebook and other public social media forums, just as they can take in information from reading newspapers. But civil liberties groups generally oppose government monitoring of social media, arguing that it doesn't produce much intelligence and risks chilling free speech.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Electric cars and vans will be cheaper to produce than conventional, fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2027, and tighter emissions regulations could put them in pole position to dominate all new car sales by the middle of the next decade, research has found. By 2026, larger vehicles such as electric sedans and SUVs will be as cheap to produce as petrol and diesel models, according to forecasts from BloombergNEF, with small cars reaching the threshold the following year. The falling cost of producing batteries for electric vehicles, combined with dedicated production lines in carmarkers' plants, will make them cheaper to buy, on average, within the next six years than conventional cars, even before any government subsidies, BloombergNEF found.

The new study, commissioned by Transport & Environment, a Brussels-based non-profit organization that campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe, predicts new battery prices will fall by 58% between 2020 and 2030 to $58 per kilowatt hour. A reduction in battery costs to below $100 per kWh, is viewed as an important step towards greater take-up of fully electric vehicles, and would largely remove the financial appeal of hybrid electric vehicles, which combine a battery with a conventional engine.