The US has warned the EU against pursuing "protectionist" technology policies that exclusively target American companies, ahead of Joe Biden's first presidential visit to Brussels. From a report: The National Security Council, an arm of the White House, wrote last week to complain about the tone of recent comments about the EU's flagship tech regulation, as debates are about to begin in the European parliament. "We are particularly concerned about recent comments by the European Parliament rapporteur for the Digital Markets Act, Andreas Schwab, who suggested the DMA should unquestionably target only the five biggest US firms," said the email, seen by the Financial Times and dated June 9. It added: "Comments and approaches such as this make regulatory co-operation between the US and Europe extremely difficult and send a message that the [European] Commission is not interested in engaging with the United States in good faith to address these common challenges in a way that serves our shared interests. Protectionist measures could disadvantage European citizens and hold back innovation in member-state economies. Such policies will also hinder our ability to work together to harmonize our regulatory systems," it said. The note was sent by the NSC to staff at the EU's delegation in the US capital, according to several people familiar with it, as part of routine communications between Washington and Brussels. It comes at a time when both the US and EU are keen to rebuild a relationship that was marred by acrimony during Donald Trump's presidency. On Tuesday Biden will attend an EU-US summit in Brussels to discuss trade, tech, and China.

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden's nominee to the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, the young progressive who helped launch a reckoning amongst antitrust scholars and enforcers, in a 69-28 vote. From a report: At 32, Khan will become the youngest commissioner ever confirmed to the agency. Her confirmation also signals a bipartisan desire to impose more regulations on Big Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet and Apple. Khan received the support of several Republicans, including Commerce Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who participated in her confirmation hearing. Still, others like Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, opposed her confirmation. Lee has tended to be cautious about certain types of regulation despite concerns about tech companies' influence and previously expressed apprehension about Khan's experience.

Khan became a well-known figure in antitrust circles after writing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" for the Yale Law Review in 2017, while a student at the university. The paper made the case for using a different framework for evaluating competitive harm than the popular consumer welfare standard. That standard essentially says that antitrust law violations can be determined based on harm to consumers, which is often measured based on prices. But Khan argued that standard could miss significant competitive harm in the modern economy, such as predatory pricing that lowers consumer prices in the short term but allows a company that can afford it to quickly gain market share. She also argued that both owning and selling on a marketplace, like Amazon does, could allow a business to exploit information across their ecosystem to undercut the competition. Update: Biden Names Lina Khan, a Big-Tech Critic, as F.T.C. Chair.

Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith criticized secret data subpoenas sent by the government to cloud providers like his company and Apple, saying gag orders on requests for personal information undermine freedoms and are hurting U.S. technology companies in Europe. From a report: Last week the New York Times reported that during the administration of former President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded records from Apple relating to two Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. CNBC reported Microsoft received a confidential request for the personal emails of a Congressional staffer. Both companies were under nondisclosure orders that prevented them from talking about or alerting the subjects of the data seizures.

The U.S. government should change the rules so that people whose data is being demanded can be informed and choose whether to file a legal challenge to the subpoenas, Smith said Monday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Microsoft in 2016 filed a case against the DOJ related to the gag orders, and a year later the department issued new guidelines it said would scale back the practice of these kinds of confidential requests. "If we fail to do so, we undermine longstanding fundamental freedoms in the country and, frankly, for those of us in the tech sector, we're put in the middle," Smith said. "This should be an issue where the government has to go most of the time to the individuals whose information they are seeking."

Reality Winner, a former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked a classified hacking report to the press in 2017, was released on Monday from prison for good behavior, her attorney said. From a report: Winner is not yet at large. She has been transferred from prison to a Residential Reentry Management facility in San Antonio, Texas, where she will remain until November 2021, when she will be fully released under supervised release, her lawyer said. Winner, who worked for NSA contractor Pluribus International Corporation, was initially arrested in June 2017 on charges that a month earlier, she leaked a classified NSA report to online news outlet The Intercept.

In the report, the NSA detailed a hacking campaign linked to Russia's military intelligence service, the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), which compromised the email accounts of multiple employees of election software maker VR Systems ahead of the 2016 US Presidential Election. The hack, which took place in August 2016, was used by the GRU hackers as a springboard to send spear-phishing emails with malware-laced documents to US government employees. Winner's leak, although not extensive, served as the base material for an article titled "Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election."

Winter through spring, the French Alps are wrapped in austere white snow. But as spring turns to summer, the stoic slopes start to blush. Parts of the snow take on bright colors: deep red, rusty orange, lemonade pink. Locals call this "sang de glacier," or "glacier blood." Visitors sometimes go with "watermelon snow." From a report: In reality, these blushes come from an embarrassment of algae. In recent years, alpine habitats all over the world have experienced an uptick in snow algae blooms -- dramatic, strangely hued aggregations of these normally invisible creatures. While snow algae blooms are poorly understood, that they are happening is probably not a good sign. Researchers have begun surveying the algae of the Alps to better grasp what species live there, how they survive and what might be pushing them over the bleeding edge. Some of their initial findings were published this week in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Tiny yet powerful, the plantlike bacteria we call algae are "the basis of all ecosystems," said Adeline Stewart, an author of the study who worked on it as a doctoral student at Grenoble Alpes University in France. Thanks to their photosynthetic prowess, algae produce a large amount of the world's oxygen, and form the foundation of most food webs. But they sometimes overdo it, multiplying until they throw things out of balance. This can cause toxic red tides, scummy freshwater blooms -- or unsettling glacier blood. While it's unclear exactly what spurs the blooms, the color -- often red, but sometimes green, gray or yellow -- comes from pigments and other molecules that the snow algae use to protect themselves from ultraviolet light. These hues absorb more sunlight, causing the underlying snow to melt more quickly. This can change ecosystem dynamics and hasten the shrinking of glaciers.

Back in 2009, then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger requested $4.7 billion in federal stimulus money to help build an 800-mile bullet train system from San Diego to San Francisco. "We're traveling on our trains at the same speed as 100 years ago," the governor said. "That is inexcusable. America must catch up."

Nearly 12 years later, "a $929-million federal grant for the California bullet train project was restored Thursday," reports the Los Angeles Times, "reversing a decision by the Trump administration to terminate the funding." But their story (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1) notes this grant has a very long history: The grant was originally made in 2010 after other states backed out of high-speed rail projects and declined to take the federal support. The California project already had won another $2.5-billion grant from the Obama administration's stimulus program, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Trump action to take back the money was highly controversial, and federal grant experts said such terminations were rare in cases that did not involve fraud but were merely behind schedule.

Ronald Batory, then chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, cited California's multiple failures to forecast accurate schedules, among other problems, in taking the action. Along with House Republicans from California, Trump officials were highly critical of the California project, with former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao calling it a "bait and switch" on promises made to taxpayers. Chao and Trump had issued an even bigger threat, to claw back the much larger $2.5-billion grant that had already been spent. Despite such rhetoric, the Trump administration never made an attempt to get back the funds.

The $929 million is part of a planned $22.8-billion effort aimed at building a 171-mile partial operating system between Bakersfield and Merced [part of the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles], as well as completing environmental planning and making some high-speed rail investments in Southern California and the Bay Area.
In a statement, America's Federal Rail Agency said the settlement "reflects the federal government's ongoing partnership in the development of high-speed rail." And they called their restoration of funding "an important step in advancing an economically transformational project in California."

The Times adds that "Some bullet train advocates believe $10 billion or more from the state and federal government could be added to the project, allowing an expansion of the current construction. But even that much money would not close a roughly $80-billion shortfall needed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: The Biden administration launched an initiative Thursday aiming to make more government data available to artificial intelligence researchers, part of a broader push to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge of the crucial new technology. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, a group of 12 members from academia, government, and industry led by officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation, will draft a strategy for potentially giving researchers access to stores of data about Americans, from demographics to health and driving habits. They would also look to make available computing power to analyze the data, with the goal of allowing access to researchers across the country. The task force, which Congress mandated in the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, is part of an effort across the government to ensure the U.S. remains at the vanguard of technological advancements.

Many researchers, particularly in academia, simply don't have access to these computational resources and data, and this is hampering innovation. One example: The Transportation Department has access to a set of data gathered from vehicle sensors about how people drive, said Erwin Gianchandani, senior adviser at the National Science Foundation and co-chairman of the new AI task force. "Because you have very sensitive data about individuals, there are challenges in being able to make that data available to the broader research community," he said. On the other hand, if researchers could get access, they could develop innovations designed to make driving safer. Census data, medical records, and other data sets could also potentially be made available for research by both private companies and academic institutions, officials said. They said the task force will evaluate how to make such data available while protecting Americans' privacy and addressing other ethical concerns.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: California has unleashed an army of goats to munch away at overgrown brush and grass throughout the state in hopes of reducing the risk of wildfires this summer. State agencies have deployed the animals to roam, eat, and wipe out highly flammable vegetation. Recently, in an area near Lake Oroville in Northern California, between 350 and 400 goats cleared nearly five acres of land. And on Sunday, 1,500 goats are scheduled to begin clearing 34 more acres in the area -- by eating everything from invasive species to poison oak to thistle. The animals have also been contracted out to different cities around the state concerned about wildfires, including Anaheim, Oakland, and Los Angeles.

The initiative is part of the state's "Fuel Load Management Plan," started in 2012, which is aimed at reducing large patches of overgrowth throughout the state -- a major source of fuel to wildfire spread. Originally, the state used boots-on-the-ground crews of people armed with chainsaws and wood chippers to clear brush. But California has decided that in some areas, it's goats, not humans, that can help the most. "They eat everything," Kryssy Mache, an environmental scientist at the California Department of Water Resources, told VICE News. And they can also reach up to five feet in the air to nibble tree branches. "It's just another cool concept that we're using. It's not just humans going out and making the difference -- we can also use goats." But the goats are usually just Phase One. In the fall, human crews will come in and trim up area that goats cleared to ensure it remains less vulnerable to fire, according to the DWR.

A federal judge granted a preliminary order blocking New York state from enforcing a law that requires internet service providers to offer high-speed broadband service to low-income customers at a discount. From a report: U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley in Central Islip, New York, sided with telecom industry groups representing AT&T and Verizon, which sued to block the law. The legislation was enacted in April as part of the state's 2022 budget.

A third member of a panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has resigned in protest over the agency's decision to approve Biogen's Alzheimer's disease treatment despite the committee's recommendation against doing so. Reuters reports: Aaron Kesselheim, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School who had served on the FDA's advisory committee for nervous system drugs since 2015, told Reuters on Thursday he was stepping down from the panel. "My rationale was that the FDA needs to re-evaluate how it solicits and uses the advisory committees ... because I didn't think that the firm recommendations from the committee in this case ... were appropriately integrated into the decision-making process," Kesselheim said in an email. He cited FDA's decision to approve Sarepta Therapeutic's drug, eteplirsen, for Duchenne muscular dystrophy in 2016 as another example of the regulator approving a drug against the recommendations of its advisory committee.

On Tuesday, a member of the advisory group who voted against the approval, Washington University neurologist Dr. Joel Perlmutter, resigned from the committee, citing the FDA's approval of Aduhelm. Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. David Knopman said he resigned on Wednesday. The 11-member committee voted nearly unanimously in November that Biogen's drug should not be approved, citing inconclusive evidence that the drug was effective.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon and a who's who of online-only retailers are trying to kill proposed federal and state legislation that would make the companies disclose contact information for third-party sellers. The bills would force Amazon and others to verify the identities of third-party sellers and provide consumers with ways to contact the stores. The proposed legislation is pitting brick-and-mortar retailers -- including Home Depot, Walgreens, and JC Penney, which support the bills -- against online retailers like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Poshmark, and others, which argue that the legislation would harm small sellers. [...] The online retailers argue that the bills would compromise the privacy of third-party sellers. On some platforms, the majority of merchants run their businesses out of their homes. Etsy, for example, says 97 percent of its sellers do. A survey of Amazon sellers found that 70 percent have work outside of their Amazon businesses, suggesting that they, too, run the business from their homes.

That anonymity, though, provides cover for fraudsters. It's not uncommon to find counterfeit and potentially harmful items on marketplace sites. In 2018, the Government Accountability Office ordered 47 items, including shoes, travel mugs, cosmetics, and phone chargers, from third-party sellers on "popular consumer websites" and determined that 20 of them were counterfeit. Even non-counterfeit items bought from third-party sellers have been implicated in consumer harm. In April 2018, a 19-month-old in Texas was injured after ingesting a battery that fell out of a loose battery compartment in a third-party Apple TV remote. The parents asked Amazon to stop selling the defective product and requested contact information for Hu Xi Jie, who ran the Amazon store "USA Shopping 7693" that sold the remote. Hu Xi Jie never responded, and Amazon was not able to locate the individual. The parents sued Amazon in Texas state court, arguing that the retailer is liable for the defective product. Amazon, on the other hand, says it serves as a middleman and bears no liability. It's that argument, among others, that has brick-and-mortar retailers pushing for changes. Consumer product laws hold businesses like Target and Home Depot liable for injuries if the stores do not take sufficient measures to keep defective products from reaching consumers. Online marketplaces haven't been subject to those rules since they don't control third-party sellers.

Prosecutors in the Trump administration Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of House Intelligence Committee Democrats -- including Chairman Adam Schiff -- along with their staff and family members as part of a leak investigation, an Intelligence Committee official and a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN. From a report: Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, another Democrat on the committee, told CNN's Don Lemon on Thursday evening that he was notified that his data had been seized as part of the probe as well. The prosecutors, the New York Times first reported, were looking for the sources behind news stories about contacts between Russia and Trump associates. The leak hunt began with the FBI sending a subpoena to Apple in February 2018, which included a gag order, seeking metadata on more than 100 accounts as part of an investigation into the disclosure of classified information, the person familiar with the matter said.

The gag order was renewed three times before it expired this year and Apple notified the customers. The House Intelligence Committee determined that along with members of the panel and staff, the dragnet collected the records of family members, including at least one minor, the person said. Records seized included those from staff members who had nothing to do with issues related to Russia or former FBI Director James Comey, including Schiff's personal office staff, a House Intelligence Committee source told CNN. Democratic committee leadership is relying on self-reporting to know who has been impacted at this point -- both members and staff, the source said. Swalwell confirmed to CNN that records of family members and a minor had been obtained.

Amazon will pay almost $62 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it avoided handing over the full pay and tips it promised to delivery drivers, according to the agency. From a report: The company is giving back the amount it kept, according to a complaint released earlier this year by the agency, after it told Amazon Flex drivers and customers in 2015 it would pay $18 to $25 hourly plus tips. Instead, beginning the following year, it used tips to supplement lower base pay rates, and tried to hide the changes, according to the FTC.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday said he is initiating a review of recent high-profile cyber attacks on governments and businesses to find out whether a legislative response is needed. From a report: "Today I am asking Chairman Gary Peters of our Homeland Security Committee and our other relevant committee chairs to begin a government-wide review of these attacks and determine what legislation may be needed to counter the threat of cyber crime and bring the fight to the cyber criminals." Schumer noted that the New York City subway system was the victim of a computer hack in early June. This came on the heels of Colonial Pipeline having to shut down some operations, resulting in disrupted fuel supplies in the U.S. Southeast, as a result of a cyber attack.

Amid an intensifying drought, Lake Mead in Nevada, the nation's largest reservoir by volume, reached its lowest level since the 1930s late Wednesday. From a report: The record low is due to a combination of years of punishing drought that's worsening across the Southwest, as well as challenges in managing water resources for a burgeoning population. The record-low reading, as well as expected subsequent drops in the lake, are almost certain to trigger a federal "water shortage" declaration later this summer, which would set off cuts in water allocations to several states. Lake Mead, which sits along the border between Nevada and Arizona, is part of the vast Colorado River basin that provides water for agriculture and human consumption to seven states, and also generates electricity at the massive Hoover Dam.

Cuts in water supplies, to be determined in August, would affect the region's farmers, residents of sprawling cities such as Las Vegas, and others. Already, the Hoover Dam is operating below its maximum capacity, and it could see a further reduction in power generation as the summer goes on. Years of unusually dry conditions along with a growing population and water resource decisions have helped lead to the situation. As of Thursday morning, the Bureau of Reclamation showed Lake Mead's hourly water levels dipped to 1,071.48 feet Thursday, and remained below the previous record set on July 1, 2016.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: JBS, the world's largest meat supplier, confirmed Wednesday that it paid the equivalent of $11 million in ransom to hackers who targeted and temporarily crippled its business. The company confirmed making the payment in a statement Wednesday, saying it did so after most of its plants started operating again last week. The company consulted with its own tech workers and external cybersecurity experts, it said, and decided to pay to make sure no data was stolen. "This was a very difficult decision to make for our company and for me personally," JBS USA CEO Andre Nogueira said in a statement.

JBS was hit by a ransomware attack last week that temporarily halted operations at its nine beef processing plants in the United States and caused disruptions at other facilities. The FBI attributed the attack to a Russian-linked ransomware group known as both REvil and Sodinokibi. The payment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. JBS got many of its plants operating again by the end of last week, but Nogueira said it decided to make the payment to "prevent any potential risk" for customers. JBS said Wednesday that it spends more than $200 million annually on information technology and employs more than 850 IT workers worldwide. The company said experts are still investigating the hack, but preliminary findings indicate that no employee or customer data was compromised.

Americans got richer off bitcoin than any other country last year -- pocketing $4.1 billion in profits as the price of the volatile cryptocurrency soared to $29,000 from under $10,000, according to a new analysis. The New York Post reports: The US was followed by China, which cashed out some $1.1 billion in profits in 2020, according to data published Monday by blockchain firm Chainalysis. Japan came in third with $900 million, followed by the United Kingdom with $800 million and Russia with $600 million. The figures only cover realized gains, meaning that profits still held in cryptocurrencies or in exchange accounts are not included.

According to Chainalysis, Americans appear to have stepped up their bitcoin investments last year, despite nationwide lockdown orders and record unemployment. US crypto investors then cashed out toward the end of the year when the price of bitcoin has soared more than three times its $9,000 price tag. While cryptocurrency profits can be hard to track due to the currencies' intentionally decentralized nature, Chainalysis produced its estimate by collecting data including deposits, withdrawals and web traffic from cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase.

The White House announced this week that it will establish a task force to address supply chain challenges in key sectors where "a mismatch between supply and demand has been evident." From a report: The task force will focus on "homebuilding and construction, semiconductors, transportation, and agriculture and food" and will be led by the secretaries of commerce, agriculture and transportation, the White House said. As the U.S. has reopened its economy, changes in demand have caused the disruptions, the White House said.

"While these short-term supply chain disruptions are temporary, the president has directed his administration to closely monitor these developments and take actions to minimize the impacts on workers, consumers, and businesses in order to bolster a strong economic recovery," it said. The actions come as the White House released the findings of a 100-day review of critical U.S. supply chain issues in a 250-page report Tuesday. The report includes recommendations that the White House said "will not only strengthen the four prioritized supply chains, but will rebuild the U.S. industrial base and restart our innovation engine."

President Biden on Wednesday will revoke a Trump-era executive order that sought to ban the popular app TikTok and replace it with one that calls for a broader review of a number of foreign-controlled applications that could pose a security risk to Americans and their data. From a report: According to a memo circulated by the Commerce Department and obtained by The New York Times, the order will address a number of applications and bolster recent actions the Biden administration has taken to curb the growing influence of Chinese technology companies.

It is the first significant step Mr. Biden has taken to address a challenge left for him by President Donald J. Trump, whose administration fought to ban TikTok and force its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. Legal challenges immediately followed and the app is still available as the battle languishes in the courts. Mr. Biden's order "will direct the secretary of commerce to use a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis to evaluate and address the risks" posed by foreign-operated applications, according to the memo. "As warranted, the secretary will determine appropriate actions based on a thorough review of the risks posed by foreign adversary connected software applications."

According to the BBC, details claiming to reveal how little U.S. billionaires pay in income tax have been leaked to investigative website ProPublica. From the report: ProPublica says it has seen the tax returns of some of the world's richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. The website alleges Amazon's Mr Bezos paid no tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla's Mr Musk's paid nothing in 2018. The FBI and tax authorities are looking into the source of the leak. ProPublica said it was analyzing what it called a "vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data" on the taxes of the billionaires, and would release further details over coming weeks.

ProPublica said the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax -- an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income -- than most mainstream US workers. The website said: "Using perfectly legal tax strategies, many of the uber-rich are able to shrink their federal tax bills to nothing or close to it." The wealthy, as with many ordinary citizens, are able to reduce their income tax bills via such things as charitable donations and drawing money from investment income rather wage income.