Daily Archives: December 7, 2023

Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows

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Profiteering has played a significant role in boosting inflation during 2022, according to a report that calls for a global corporation tax to curb excess profits.

Analysis of the financial accounts of many of the UK’s biggest businesses found that profits far outpaced increases in costs, helping to push up inflation last year to levels not seen since the early 1980s.

The report from the IPPR and Common Wealth thinktanks found that business profits rose by 30% among UK-listed firms, driven by just 11% of firms that made super-profits based on their ability to push through stellar price increases – often dubbed greedflation.

Excessive profits were even larger in the US, where many important sections of the economy are dominated by a few powerful companies.

This surge in profits happened as wage increases largely failed to keep pace with inflation, and workers suffered their largest fall in disposable incomes since the second world war.

Researchers said the energy companies ExxonMobil and Shell, mining firms Glencore and Rio Tinto, and food and commodities businesses Kraft Heinz, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Bunge all saw their profits far outpace inflation in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Because energy and food prices feed so significantly into costs across all sectors of the wider economy, this exacerbated the initial price shock – contributing to inflation peaking higher and lasting longer than had there been less market power,” the report said.

After the analysis of 1,350 companies listed on the stock markets in the UK, US, Germany, Brazil and South Africa, the report said firms in the technology sector, telecommunications and the banking industry also pushed through significant price increases that raised their profit margins.

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The report echoes research by the Unite union, which last year revealed how the biggest price increases affecting the UK consumer prices index (CPI) were driven by firms that either maintained or improved their profit margins.

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Four food companies – the listed suppliers Archer-Daniels-Midland and Bunge, plus the privately owned Cargill and Dreyfus – control an estimated 70%–90% of the world grain market.

“This has caused significant harm to the economy as a whole,” the report said. “Global GDP could be 8% higher than it is now had market power not risen.

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Last year, Isabel Schnabel, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, said that “on average, profits have recently been a key contributor to total domestic inflation, above their historical contribution”.

Jung and the Common Wealth economist Chris Hayes said a tax on the estimated $4tn of excess global profits was needed alongside moves to break up monopolistic practices that allowed firms to exploit their market power.

Jung said the Bank of England had fallen behind in the debate and needed to “catch up”.

Source: Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows | Inflation | The Guardian

Your Organs Might Be Aging at Different Rates

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The number of birthdays you’ve had—better known as your chronological age—now appears to be less important in assessing your health than ever before. A new study shows that bodily organs get “older” at extraordinarily different rates, and each one’s biological age can be at odds with a person’s age on paper.

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The team sampled the blood of more than 5,500 people, all with no active disease or clinically abnormal biomarkers, to look for proteins that originated from specific organs. The scientists were able to determine where those proteins came from by measuring their gene activity: when genes for a protein were expressed four times more in one organ, that designated its origin. Next the team measured the concentrations of thousands of proteins in a drop of blood and found that almost 900 of them—about 18 percent of the proteins measured—tended to be specific to a single organ. When those proteins varied from the expected concentration for a particular chronological age, that indicated accelerated aging in the corresponding organ.

“We could say with reasonable certainty that [a particular protein] likely comes from the brain and somehow ends up in the blood,” explains Tony Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University and co-author of the new study. If that protein concentration changes in the blood, “it must also likely change in the brain—and [that] tells us something about how the brain ages,” Wyss-Coray says.

By comparing study participants’ organ-specific proteins, the researchers were able to estimate an age gap—the difference between an organ’s biological age and its chronological age. Depending on the organ involved, participants found to have at least one with accelerated aging had an increased disease and mortality risk over the next 15 years. For example, those whose heart was “older” than usual had more than twice the risk of heart failure than people with a typically aging heart. Aging in the heart was also a strong predictor of heart attack. Similarly, those with a quickly aging brain were more likely to experience cognitive decline. Accelerated aging in the brain and vascular system predicted the progression of Alzheimer’s disease just as strongly as plasma pTau-181—the current clinical blood biomarker for the condition. Extreme aging in the kidneys was a strong predictor of hypertension and diabetes.

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Wyss-Coray anticipates this research could lead to a simple blood test that could guide prognostic work—in other words, a test that could help foretell future illness. “You could start to do interventions before that person develops disease,” he says, “and potentially reverse this accelerating aging or slow it down.”

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The momentum of commercial epigenetic testing is a “gold rush,” Shiels says. “There is a degree of oversell on what [the tests] can do.”

A single organ doesn’t tell the whole story of aging because deterioration processes are interconnected and affect an entire organism. “We understand a lot about the aging process on sort of a micro level,” Shiels says. “But a lot of the factors that drive age-related organ dysfunction are environmental. So it’s lifestyle, pollution, what you eat, microbes in your gut.”

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Source: Your Organs Might Be Aging at Different Rates | Scientific American

Nearly Every Windows and Linux Device Vulnerable To New LogoFAIL Firmware Attack

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“Researchers have identified a large number of bugs to do with the processing of images at boot time,” writes longtime Slashdot reader jd. “This allows malicious code to be installed undetectably (since the image doesn’t have to pass any validation checks) by appending it to the image. None of the current secure boot mechanisms are capable of blocking the attack.” Ars Technica reports: LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year’s worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs. The researchers unveiled the attack on Wednesday at the Black Hat Security Conference in London.

As its name suggests, LogoFAIL involves logos, specifically those of the hardware seller that are displayed on the device screen early in the boot process, while the UEFI is still running. Image parsers in UEFIs from all three major IBVs are riddled with roughly a dozen critical vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed until now. By replacing the legitimate logo images with identical-looking ones that have been specially crafted to exploit these bugs, LogoFAIL makes it possible to execute malicious code at the most sensitive stage of the boot process, which is known as DXE, short for Driver Execution Environment. “Once arbitrary code execution is achieved during the DXE phase, it’s game over for platform security,” researchers from Binarly, the security firm that discovered the vulnerabilities, wrote in a whitepaper. “From this stage, we have full control over the memory and the disk of the target device, thus including the operating system that will be started.” From there, LogoFAIL can deliver a second-stage payload that drops an executable onto the hard drive before the main OS has even started. The following video demonstrates a proof-of-concept exploit created by the researchers. The infected device — a Gen 2 Lenovo ThinkCentre M70s running an 11th-Gen Intel Core with a UEFI released in June — runs standard firmware defenses, including Secure Boot and Intel Boot Guard. LogoFAIL vulnerabilities are tracked under the following designations: CVE-2023-5058, CVE-2023-39538, CVE-2023-39539, and CVE-2023-40238. However, this list is currently incomplete.

“A non-exhaustive list of companies releasing advisories includes AMI (PDF), Insyde, Phoenix, and Lenovo,” reports Ars. “People who want to know if a specific device is vulnerable should check with the manufacturer.”

“The best way to prevent LogoFAIL attacks is to install the UEFI security updates that are being released as part of Wednesday’s coordinated disclosure process. Those patches will be distributed by the manufacturer of the device or the motherboard running inside the device. It’s also a good idea, when possible, to configure UEFIs to use multiple layers of defenses. Besides Secure Boot, this includes both Intel Boot Guard and, when available, Intel BIOS Guard. There are similar additional defenses available for devices running AMD or ARM CPUs.”