Australia's wildfires have already burned at least 12 million acres, reports NBC News, with more than 100 blazes still active. "And the season has yet to reach its peak." The ability of animals to recover from Australia's wildfires is also a concern. Scientists are estimating that more than half a billion animals have already died in the fires, a figure that Stuart Blanch, a forest and woodland conservation policy manager at the World Wildlife Fund-Australia, called conservative... Blanch said animals generally recover over the subsequent years and decades, but he added that Australia has not dealt with fires of this size and intensity before, and there are concerns that entire species or subspecies will be wiped out. "Ecologists have much lower confidence that wildlife populations -- particularly the 1,000 threatened species across the continent -- will recover from such widespread and utter forest devastation," he told NBC News in an email... The impact of these fires is also providing a stark warning about the kinds of natural disasters that can be exacerbated by climate change, which is lengthening wildfire seasons in Australia, according to Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "It's really shocking and really horrible and as much as I hate to say 'I told you so,' climate scientists have been warning about this for a very long time -- especially in Australia," she said. "We knew that if we have drought and a heat wave, the whole country is a tinderbox. We knew it was going to happen." She said the biggest wildfires of the season typically break out in January or February, rather than in the spring. These earlier-than-usual blazes could portend a worrisome trend that is echoed around the world. "If you look at places like Portugal and Spain, they are seeing fires during the year when they didn't historically see them," Stevens-Rumann said. "In California, it's hard to find a month where there isn't a bad fire. This is one of those big concerns with climate change, that these fires are going to continue to be an issue."

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A proportional response by Iran would be to assassinate one of Trump's direct reports, for example, the VP or Secretary of State, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense.

"One misstep from developers at Starbucks left exposed an API key that could be used by an attacker to access internal systems and manipulate the list of authorized users," reports Bleeping Computer: Vulnerability hunter Vinoth Kumar reported the oversight on October 17 and close to three weeks later Starbucks responded it demonstrated "significant information disclosure" and that it qualified for a bug bounty... Along with identifying the GitHub repository and specifying the file hosting the API key, Kumar also provided proof-of-concept (PoC) code demonstrating what an attacker could do with the key. Apart from listing systems and users, adversaries could also take control of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, execute commands on systems, and add or remove users with access to the internal systems. Once Starbucks was content with the remediation steps taken, the company paid Kumar a $4,000 bounty for the disclosure, which is the maximum reward for critical vulnerabilities. Most bounties from Starbucks are between $250-$375. The company solved 834 reports since launching the bug bounty program in 2016, and 369 of them were reported in the past three months. For them, Starbucks spent $40,000.

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"A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect's phone went dark," reports the Wall Street Journal: WhatsApp, Facebook Inc.'s popular messaging tool, had just notified about 1,400 users -- among them the suspected terrorist -- that their phones had been hacked by an "advanced cyber actor." An elite surveillance team was using spyware from NSO Group, an Israeli company, to track the suspect, according to a law-enforcement official overseeing the investigation. A judge in the Western European country had authorized investigators to deploy all means available to get into the suspect's phone, for which the team used its government's existing contract with NSO. The country's use of NSO's spyware wasn't known to Facebook... WhatsApp's Oct. 29 message to users warned journalists, activists and government officials that their phones had been compromised, Facebook said. But it also had the unintended consequence of potentially jeopardizing multiple national-security investigations in Western Europe about which Facebook hadn't been alerted -- and about which government agencies can't formally complain, given their secret nature... NSO has faced criticism for selling its products to government agencies in the Middle East, Mexico and India, which Facebook and human-rights research group Citizen Lab, among others, allege used them to spy on dissidents, religious leaders, journalists and political opponents. Among the 1,400 WhatsApp users notified in October, more than 100 fell into these categories, Citizen Lab said. The group, which is based at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, worked with Facebook on identifying these people... Citizen Lab has issued reports for several years linking NSO's spyware to governments with a history of human-rights abuses, and said that record should put NSO out of the running for government contracts from Western agencies, said Ronald Deibert, Citizen Lab's director. "What we have been trying to do with our research is to raise alarm bells...." On the day WhatsApp sent its alert, the official overseeing the terror investigation in Western Europe said, he was stuck in traffic on his way to work when a call came in from Israel. "Have you seen the news? We've got a problem," he said he was told. WhatsApp was notifying suspects whom his team was tracking that their phones had been hacked. "No, that can't be right. Why would they do that?" the official said he asked his contact, thinking it a joke. The most immediate concern was a suspected terrorist investigators linked to Islamic State. They had received a tip he was part of a group plotting an attack around Christmas. Once they saw the suspect's phone receive WhatsApp's alert, the phone went dark, the official said. The sleuths soon lost access to the suspect's messages, the official said, indicating he had discarded or disabled the phone. "We only had that one phone," the official said. Though that suspect was still under traditional surveillance, "He's not the only suspect we have to follow..." the official complained to the Wall Street Journal, adding that their counterparts in other Western European countries told him more than 10 other investigations "may have been" compromised by WhatsApp's alert. The Journal also notes that tech companies "have come under growing pressure in the U.S. and Europe to give law enforcement a back door into encrypted messages. But they are also under fire for not doing enough to protect the privacy of their users and, in some jurisdictions, they have legal obligations to disclose security breaches."

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During a campaign event on Monday, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden "suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to 'jobs of the future,'" reports Newsweek: "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," he said... "Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake..." Many Twitter users criticized Biden's comments as reductive. "Telling people to find other work without a firm plan to help them succeed will never be popular," communications professional Frank Lutz wrote... Congressional candidate Brianna Wu tweeted that she was "glad to see the recognition that you don't need to be in your 20s to do this as a profession," but also called Biden's suggestion "tone-deaf and unhelpful." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the response this speech got from New York magazine's Sarah Jones: "Please Stop Telling Miners To Learn To Code." And in comments on the original submission, at least two Slashdot readers seemed to agree. "Not everyone can code and certainly not every coal miner or coal worker," wrote Slashdot reader I75BJC. "Vastly different skills." Slashdot reader Iwastheone even shared a Fox News article in which rival presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued "Maybe Americans don't all want to learn how to code... Let them do the kind of work they actually want to do, instead of saying to a group of people that you all need to become coders." But is there something elitist in thinking that coal miners couldn't learn to do what coders learned to do? It seems like an interesting question for discussion -- so leave your own thoughts in the comments. Should coal miners be encouraged to learn to code?

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"Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it," reports Ars Technica. Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shared their report: This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn't also targeted. From this perspective, the immune system's inability to eliminate tumor cells isn't only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It's also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells... A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a "cold" immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a "hot" one that is able to attack a tumor... [More recently] researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn't get the flu. For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice... Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn't limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn't infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well. All of this is consistent with the immune stimulation provided by a pathogen. The stimulation causes a general activation of the immune system that releases it from limits on its activity that prevent it from attacking tumor cells.... [T]he researchers obtained this year's flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.... [T]he story does fit in well with the general consensus that the immune system can be a powerful tool against cancer, provided it can be mobilized properly. And, in at least some cases, a flu vaccine just might do the trick.

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Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is.

BTW, this isn't the first time the US has assassinated an Iranian leader. In Iran they remember that we killed a democratically elected president, in 1953, and installed a puppet. We never admitted the Mossadegh assassination. This time, we rushed, because of Trump's naive narcissism and failure to think a couple of steps ahead, to claim credit for Solemani's death.

Most people are good, and most people are on Facebook.

26-year-old Sean Samitt faked his own stabbing, and is now facing a felony charge and up to four years in prison, according to a Michigan police department -- which says it solved the case with help from his own Apple Watch. Samit reported he was attacked and stabbed in the abdomen by an unknown man in the parking lot at the Temple Kol Ami, where he worked as a cantorial soloist, which is a music director. He reported the crime on December 15, telling police that he was confronted about 7 p.m. as he was leaving work by a white male in his late 30s to early 40s... Police said officers searched the parking lot for a weapon, blood or any other piece of evidence but came back negative. K-9 officers were not able to locate a scent on the suspect. While searching Temple Kol Ami, detectives found bloody tissues in Samitt's office and the men's bathroom. They also located a knife in the kitchen area with blood on the tip of the blade. Suspecting Samitt's wounds were self-inflicted, officers obtained surveillance footage from a house across the street and confirmed that no assault took place. Police said Samitt admitted to making up the attack and said he lost consciousness and accidentally stabbed himself while he was washing dishes at the synagogue. He said he lied about the incident because he was being harassed at work about his medical condition. The second story also turned out to be fabricated, police said. Officers were able to obtain information from Samitt's cellphone health application that was synced to his Apple Watch, confirming he did not lose consciousness. Samitt then admitted to intentionally stabbing himself. "We are very disturbed to hear of incidents like these. Not only is it a crime to file a false police report, but those who commit such acts take vital resources away from the folks who need help from law enforcement," said Carolyn Normandin, Regional Director of Anti Defamation League Michigan.

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"Iranian officials are likely considering a cyber-attack against the U.S. in the wake of an airstrike that killed one of its top military officials," reports Bloomberg: In a tweet after the airstrike on Thursday, Christopher Krebs, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, repeated a warning from the summer about Iranian malicious cyber-attacks, and urged the public to brush up on Iranian tactics and to pay attention to critical systems, particularly industrial control infrastructure... John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc., said Iran has largely resisted carrying out attacks in the U.S. so far. But "given the gravity of this event, we are concerned any restraint they may have demonstrated could be replaced by a resolve to strike closer to home." Iranian cyber-attacks have included U.S. universities and companies, operators of industrial control systems and banks. Iranian hackers tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign, and they have launched attacks against current and former U.S. government officials and journalists. The U.S., meanwhile, has employed cyberweapons to attack Iran's nuclear capabilities and computer systems used to plot attacks against oil tankers, according to the New York Times.... James Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said Iranian retaliation may include the use of force, but the government is also likely asking hackers for a list of options. "Cyber-attacks may be tempting if they can find the right American target," Lewis said. "The Iranians are pretty capable and our defenses are uneven, so they could successfully attack poorly defensed targets in the U.S. There are thousands, but they would want something dramatic." Mother Jones shares another perspective: There's little reason to think that Iran could pull off a truly spectacular attack, such as disabling major electric grids or other big utilities, said Robert M. Lee, an expert in industrial control systems security and the CEO of Dragos. "People should not be worried about large scale attacks and impacts that they can largely think about in movies and books like an electric grid going down." Instead, Iran might choose targets that are less prominent and less secure. "The average citizen should not be concerned," he said, "but security teams at [U.S.] companies should be on a heightened sense of awareness."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames. But in a lab deep in the basement of Imperial College in London, a young team has built what it believes is the future of air travel. H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely. Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tire. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression. "The pressure involved is similar to what you'd get in a coffee machine," she says. The university paired her with materials scientist, Luke Sperrin, to try to find commercial applications for the innovation -- and H2Go Power was born. The company partnered with Canadian hydrogen fuel cell maker Ballard to create a drone which used their reactor to safely store hydrogen for flight. The aluminum reactor weighs less than a bag of sugar and features a small gas cylinder with an intricate network of 3D-printed aluminum tubes inside. "The hydrogen remains stable and solid in these structures until 'coolant' is pumped through the tubes, warming them and releasing hydrogen gas to the drone's fuel cell," reports the BBC. "Hydrogen (H2) is pumped into one side of the fuel cell through a catalyst which frees electrons, creating electricity. Oxygen (O) is then pumped into the other side of the fuel cell and combines with the left over, positively-charged hydrogen atoms (H+). The only final waste product is water vapor (H2O)."

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Apple will once again license technology from Imagination Technologies, the chip designer that used to provide graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad, the UK-based company announced today. The Verge reports: In a short statement posted on its website, Imagination said that it had entered into a multiyear license agreement with Apple, under which the Cupertino, California-based firm will have access to "a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees." Apple announced its split from Imagination back in April 2017 when it said that it would start designing its own graphics chips, and it would stop licensing the company's technology within two years. After the split was announced, Imagination expressed skepticism that Apple could design its own chips "without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property, and confidential information."

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New submitter jasonbuechler writes: Related to the Xiaomi post the other day, Google has entirely disabled Google Assistant/Home integration with Xiaomi devices pending further testing. Google issued the following statement: Hi everyone, Late night on January 1st, we were made aware of an issue where a Reddit user posted that their Nest Hub was able to access other people's Xiaomi camera feeds. We've been working with Xiaomi and we're comfortable that the issue was limited to their camera technology platform. While we worked on this issue with Xiaomi, we made the decision to disable all Xiaomi integrations on our devices. We understand this had a significant impact on users of Xiaomi devices but the security and privacy of our users is our priority and we felt this was the appropriate action. We're re-enabling Xiaomi device integrations for everything but camera streaming after necessary testing has been completed. We will not reinstate camera functionality for Xiaomi devices until we are confident that the issue has been fully resolved. We'll keep you updated with information as more becomes available to share. UPDATE: Speaking to Engadget, Xiaomi says that the issue occurred due to a cache update, which made the stills pop up if a user had that camera and that display under poor network conditions. According to the company, only 1,044 users had this setup with a "few" experiencing the poor network connection that would make it appear, and they have fixed the issue on their end. The full statement is available on Engadget's report.

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