The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyber-attack.
In a short two-paragraph statement posted on its website today, the agency discloses the security breach but said it couldn’t disclose any details about the intrusion due to an ongoing investigation.
in a follow-up statement released on its own website, BioNTech said that “some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed” during the attack, confirming that COVID-19 research was most likely the target of the attack.
Over the past months, numerous companies working on COVID-19 research and vaccines have been the targets of hackers, and especially of state-sponsored hacking groups.
Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, Genexine, Shin Poong Pharmaceutical, Celltrion, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Gilead have been targeted by hackers, according to reports from Reuters and the Wall Street Journal.
In November, OS maker and cyber-security giant Microsoft said it detected three nation-state hacking groups (known as APTs) targeting seven companies working on COVID-19 vaccines, singling out Russia’s Strontium (Fancy Bear) and North Korea’s Zinc (Lazarus Group) and Cerium for the attacks.
Facebook illegally crushed its competition and continues to do so to this day to maintain its monopoly, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the attorneys general of no fewer than 46 US states plus Guam and DC.
The lawsuit alleges that the social media giant “illegally acquired competitors in a predatory manner and cut services to smaller threats – depriving users from the benefits of competition and reducing privacy protections and services along the way – all in an effort to boost its bottom line through increased advertising revenue.”
America’s consumer watchdog the FTC is also suing the antisocial network in a parallel action, and making the same basic allegations: that Facebook has been “illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.”
It’s been a long time coming but the, as alleged, privacy-invading, competition-crushing Zuckerberg spin machine that is Facebook has finally been taken on by the United States.
The action is being led by New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, and she wasn’t holding back in her declaration of legal war. “For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” she said. “Today, we are taking action to stand up for the millions of consumers and many small businesses that have been harmed by Facebook’s illegal behavior.”
She also highlighted the biggest complaint against Facebook by its users, a complaint that has been commonplace for nearly a decade, that it has made “billions by converting personal data into a cash cow.”
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The 123-page lawsuit [PDF] dives into how what was once just a website among many others became an online monster devouring anything in its path. “Facebook illegally maintains that monopoly power by deploying a buy-or-bury strategy that thwarts competition and harms both users and advertisers. Facebook’s illegal course of conduct has been driven, in part, by fear that the company has fallen behind in important new segments and that emerging firms were ‘building networks that were competitive with’ Facebook’s and could be ‘very disruptive to’ the company’s dominance,” the lawsuit stated.
It quotes CEO Mark Zuckerberg directly and notes that the Silicon Valley goliath would ruthlessly buy up companies in order to “build a competitive moat” or “neutralize a competitor” in its bid for dominance. And notes that Facebook has “coupled its acquisition strategy with exclusionary tactics that snuffed out competitive threats and sent the message to technology firms that, in the words of one participant, if you stepped into Facebook’s turf or resisted pressure to sell, Zuckerberg would go into ‘destroy mode’ subjecting your business to the ‘wrath of Mark.’ As a result, Facebook has chilled innovation, deterred investment, and forestalled competition in the markets in which it operates, and it continues to do so.”
The lawsuit is a much tighter and angrier indictment of Facebook than a similar one lodged against Google in October by the Department of Justice. It still relies on traditional antitrust arguments, however, rather than trying to break new ground to deal with the modern internet era.
According to Politico offshoot Protocol, the felony streaming proposal is the work of Republican senator Thom Tillis, who has backed similar proposals previously. It is more or less exactly what it sounds like: A proposal to turn unauthorized commercial streaming of copyrighted material—progressive policy publication The American Prospectspecifically points to examples like “an album on YouTube, a video clip on Twitch, or a song in an Instagram story”—into a felony offense with a possible prison sentence. Currently, such violations, no matter how severe, are considered misdemeanors rather than felonies, because the law regards streaming as a public performance. With Twitch currently in the crosshairs of the music industry, such a change would turn up the heat on streamers and Twitch even higher—perhaps to an untenable degree. Other platforms, like YouTube, would almost certainly suffer as well.
“A felony streaming bill would likely be a chill on expression,” Katharine Trendacosta, associate director of policy and activism with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The American Prospect. “We already see that it’s hard enough in just civil copyright and the DMCA for people to feel comfortable asserting their rights. The chance of a felony would impact both expression and innovation.”
According to Protocol, House and Senate Judiciary Committees have agreed to package the streaming felony proposal with other controversial provisions that include the CASE act, which would establish a new court-like entity within the U.S. Copyright Office to resolve copyright disputes, and the Trademark Modernization Act, which would give the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office more flexibility to crack down on illegitimate claims from foreign countries.
Alongside the felony streaming proposal, these provisions have drawn ire from civil rights groups, digital rights nonprofits, and companies including the aforementioned Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the American Library Association, and the Center for Democracy & Technology. Collectively, these groups and others penned a letter to the U.S. Senate last week.
It’s incredible that not only does copyright stifle competition, but it allows a creator to create something once, get lucky and then sit on his / her arse for the rest of their lives – and their childrens’ doing sweet fuck all and raking in dosh. And that these laws get stronger and stronger for the people who do pretty much nothing.
SpaceX has conducted a test of the Starship it plans to use for flights to Mars, and while the experiment ended badly the flight was judged a success.
Wednesday’s flight used just the Starship – the second stage of SpaceX’s planned heavy lifter. Previous flights had seen the craft ascend to around 500 feet. This time around the goal was a high-altitude test that would take it to 41,000 feet, before returning to terra firma to prove its reusability.
As the video below shows, the vehicle lifted off (at around 1:48:00) and then came down belly-first before pivoting for landing (1:53:00).
SpaceX’s summary of the mission said that Starship “successfully ascended, transitioned propellant, and performed its landing flip maneuver with precise flap control to reach its landing point.”
But not everything went right. The vids above and below show the excitement. Spoiler: big ball of flame!
Despite that excitement, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk was chuffed with the outcome.
Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!
Why so upbeat despite the unhappy ending? Musk rated the chances of mission success as one in three, and SpaceX has other prototypes ready to fly. This one didn’t even have the engine configuration planned for the production model. So getting everything right bar the landing is a decent outcome.
Wall Street has begun trading water as a commodity, like gold or oil. The country’s first water market launched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this week with $1.1 billion in contracts tied to water prices in California, Bloomberg News reported.
The market allows farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities to hedge bets on the future price of water and water availability in the American West. The new trading scheme was announced in September, prompted by the region’s worsening heat, drought, and wildfires fueled by climate change. There were two trades when the market went live Monday.
“Climate change, droughts, population growth, and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come,” RBC Capital Markets managing director and analyst Deane Dray told Bloomberg. “We are definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops.”
