Daily Archives: April 14, 2020

Foreign Spies Target Zoom, U.S. Intel Officials Say

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As much of the world works from home, an explosion of video conference calls has provided a playground not just for Zoombombers, phishermen and cybercriminals, but also for spies. Everyone from top business executives to government officials and scientists are using conferencing apps to stay in touch during the new coronavirus lockdowns and U.S. counterintelligence agencies have observed the espionage services of Russia, Iran, and North Korea attempting to spy on Americans’ video chats, three U.S. intelligence officials tell TIME.

But the cyberspies that have moved fastest and most aggressively during the pandemic, the intelligence officials say, have been China’s. “More than anyone else, the Chinese are interested in what American companies are doing,” said one of the three. And that, in turn, has some U.S. counterintelligence officials worrying about one video conference platform in particular: Zoom. While the Chinese, Russians, and others are targeting virtually every tool Americans and others are using now that they’re forced to work from home, Zoom is an attractive target, especially for China, the intelligence officials and internet security researchers say.

Source: Foreign Spies Target Zoom, U.S. Intel Officials Say | Time

Redox-Flow Cell Stores Renewable Energy as Hydrogen

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The solution, some propose, is to store energy chemically—in the form of hydrogen fuel—rather than electrically. This involves using devices called electrolyzers that make use of renewable energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.

“Hydrogen is a very good carrier for this type of work,” says Wei Wang, who is the chief scientist for stationary energy storage research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. It’s an efficient energy carrier, and can be easily stored in pressurized tanks. When needed, the gas can then be converted back into electrical energy via a fuel cell and fed into the grid.

But water electrolyzers are expensive. They work under acidic conditions which require corrosion-resistant metal plates and catalysts made from precious metals such as titanium, platinum, and iridium. “Also, the oxygen electrode isn’t very efficient,” says Kathy Ayers, vice-president of R&D at Nel Hydrogen, an Oslo-based company that specializes in hydrogen production and storage. “You lose about 0.3 volts just from the fact that you’re trying to convert water to oxygen or vice versa,” she says. Splitting a water molecule requires 1.23 V of energy.

In a bid to overcome this problem, Nel Hydrogen and Wang’s team at Pacific Northwest joined forces in 2016, after receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The solution they’ve come up with is a fuel cell that acts as both a battery and hydrogen generator.

“We call it a redox-flow cell because it’s a hybrid between a redox-flow battery and a water electrolyzer,” explains Wang.

A redox-flow battery, in essence a reversible fuel cell, is typically made up of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the tanks, a redox reaction occurs, and generates electricity at the battery’s electrodes.

By comparison, the new invention has only one electrolyte, comprised of an iron salt (rather than the more commonly used vanadium) dissolved in acid. When hydrogen ions react with the iron salt (Fe2+), hydrogen gas is produced at the platinum-coated carbon cathode in the battery stack.

“We introduce iron as a middleman, so we can separate electrolysis into two reactions,” says Wang. Doing so allows one to control where and when to reverse the reaction to produce electrical energy to supply to the grid. “The system gives you flexibility… you could do the regeneration during evening time when electricity prices are at a peak,” he says.

Regenerating Fe2+ in the reverse reaction also allows for the continuous production of hydrogen gas, he says. “And because the hydrogen-iron cell uses about half the voltage of a traditional electrolyzer, you can generate hydrogen at a much cheaper cost if you do everything right.”

It also helps that iron is much cheaper and more abundant compared with vanadium.

Qing Wang, a materials scientist at the National University of Singapore, sees another benefit. “If you care more about purity and want to have ultra-pure hydrogen, then maybe it’s a good solution,” he says. Cross-contamination can sometimes occur during electrolysis because the hydrogen and oxygen gases produced are so small that they are able to traverse the membrane separator.

The new redox-flow cell performed well in lab tests, exhibiting a charge capacity of up to one ampere per square centimeter, a ten-fold increase over normal flow batteries. It was also able to withstand “several hundred cycles” of charging, which has never been demonstrated before in hydrogen ion flow batteries, says Wang, who has a number of patents for the invention, with a few more pending.

While the PNNL team experimented on a single cell measuring 10 square centimeters, Ayers and her colleagues at Nel Hydrogen proved that the technology could work even when scaled up to a five-cell stack measuring 100 square centimeters. They plan to spend the next few months fine-tuning the system and eliminating kinks, such as how to minimize damage to the pumps caused by the acidic electrolyte, before commercializing it.

Source: Redox-Flow Cell Stores Renewable Energy as Hydrogen – IEEE Spectrum

ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close

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With just seven days left until it has to make a decision on the $1.13bn sale of the .org registry to a private equity firm, DNS overseer ICANN appears in chaos.

In a series of communications from senior executives, ICANN has embarked on a public negotiation with potential buyer Ethos Capital over the sale of the domain, while at the same time aggressively questioning its corporate structure.

A blog post from ICANN’s CEO Goran Marby late last week highlighted revised “public interest commitments” (PICs) that Ethos Capital had published as a way to resolve ongoing concerns over the sale, and gave the clear signal that ICANN is intending to approve the deal on April 20.

There has been a clear negotiation between the two sides: Marby’s post came one day after an email from Ethos’ lawyer (since published [PDF] noted that the new changes were in direct response to a letter from ICANN sent just a few days earlier. “In making these changes, they specifically focused on changes that go to the clarity and enforceability of the PICs as you mentioned,” Ethos noted.

At the same time as it is moving forward on a deal, however, ICANN continues to dig [PDF] into Ethos Capital’s unusual corporate structure: something that critics say is no more a corporate shell game designed to hide the true owners of the company.

ICANN is also looking at its financing of the deal, which financial experts have warned is typical of a debt-leveraged buyout where a founding firm is saddled with debt after the financiers walk away with a healthy profit.

Debt pile

“Can you please provide more detail on PIR’s current plans with respect to the repayment of the $360m term loan at the maturity date in light of Ethos Capital’s ten plus investment horizon for PIR?,” reads just one of dozens of pointed questions in a letter from ICANN to the company nominally in charge of .org, Public Interest Registry (PIR).

Another makes it plain that ICANN believes information is being hidden: “ICANN has specifically requested that PIR provide the entities and individuals that will ‘control’ PIR post-transaction as that is defined in PIR’s registry agreements. PIR has provided some information regarding share ownership but has not provided the specific information regarding ‘control’.”

There are no less than six different companies involved on the Ethos side of the transaction, all of them based in Delaware, a common base for shell companies, and all but one was incorporated on the same day, October 24, 2019.

In addition to Ethos Capital LLC, which was incorporated in May – the day after ICANN made it clear it was planning to remove price caps on .org domains in a decision worth tens of millions of dollars – there is also Ethos Purpose GP, LLC, and then four “Purpose Domains” companies: Purpose Domains Direct, Feeder, Holdings and Investments.

ICANN has asked for the directors of each of these companies and the structural connections between them but from published letters from Ethos and ICANN is it clear that Ethos has been withholding specific pieces of information.

Public interest

In addition to this mixed message, ICANN has still not outlined its decision-making process despite repeat calls from the internet community, including the world’s governments, to do so.

There is an obvious public interest in the sale of millions of .org domains but ICANN has repeatedly failed to say how or whether it will factor that in its decision. At a recent public meeting its general counsel failed to use the term “public interest” when discussing how a decision would be made; an omission that prompted the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) to pointedly note [PDF] that the ICANN Board had told it that “all options remain open and that the Board will consider the public interest in its decision-making.”

However, when PIR argued that ICANN only had grounds to reject the sale on issues of “security, reliability, or stability of services,” ICANN pushed back saying that it would not accept “any artificial restriction,” and noted “the obvious importance to the public interest of its operation.”

ICANN changes tune however when other groups point to “public interest” as a key reason for denying the sale. In his most recent letter to the GAC [PDF], ICANN’s chair Maarten Bottermann said that the organization “will apply a standard of reasonableness in making its determination on whether to provide or withhold its consent to the request.”

In a second sentence, he then notes that “the ICANN Board will continue to consider the public interest in all its decision-making using the totality of the information received.”

The difference between “apply” and “consider” is not lost on those watching the process; nor is the fact that ICANN has failed to define the term “reasonableness,” despite it now being the main factor of consideration.

[…]

Source: ICANN suffers split-personality disorder as deadline for .org sale decision draws close • The Register

Amazon hiring 75,000 more workers as demand rises due to coronavirus, after hiring 100k more last month

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Amazon is hiring an additional 75,000 workers at its facilities, on top of the 100,000 new positions it created last month, the company said Monday.

In March, the company said it would hire additional warehouse and delivery workers across the country amid a surge in online shopping during the coronavirus outbreak. Since then, Amazon said it has hired more than 100,000 new employees and, as a result, is staffing up even more to help fulfill orders.

“We continue to see increased demand as our teams support their communities, and are going to continue to hire, creating an additional 75,000 jobs to help serve customers during this unprecedented time,” the company said.

As it continues to hire more workers, Amazon has also raised employees’ hourly pay and doubled overtime pay for warehouse workers. Through the end of April, warehouse and delivery workers can earn an additional $2 per hour in the U.S., 2 pounds per hour in the U.K., and approximately 2 euros per hour in many EU countries. Amazon currently pays $15 per hour or more in some areas of the U.S. for warehouse and delivery jobs.

Amazon has announced several benefits changes on top of the pay increases. The company has allowed workers to take unlimited unpaid time off and provides two weeks of paid leave for workers who tested positive for the virus or are in quarantine.

Amazon said it expects to continue investing in pay increases, benefits and safety improvements for warehouse and delivery workers. The company previously expected to spend $350 million on pay increases, but now estimates it will spend more than $500 million on those efforts.

Despite the pay increases and benefits changes, Amazon workers from at least three facilities have staged protests to call for the company to better protect workers amid the coronavirus outbreak. A dozen workers told CNBC they felt Amazon needed to provide employees with paid time off, among other concerns.

Source: Amazon hiring 75,000 more workers as demand rises due to coronavirus