The Trump administration on Friday declared a public healthy emergency over the coronavirus outbreak and said any foreign national who has traveled within China in the last 14 days will not be allowed to enter the country. The Wall Street Journal reports: The announcement [from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar] came as stock markets tumbled amid concern about how the impact of the virus could slow global growth. At the same time, Mr. Azar sought to minimize fears about the virus spreading further in the U.S. "I hope that people will see that their government is taking responsible steps to protect them," he said at a White House briefing. "The risk is low... but our job is to keep that risk low." There are six confirmed cases in the U.S. and 191 people are under investigation, officials said. Meantime, Americans who were evacuated from the epicenter of the China coronavirus outbreak will be quarantined for 14 days at a U.S. military base to prevent any spread of the infectious disease, federal health authorities said Friday. The quarantine -- the first in the U.S. ordered by the federal government in roughly 50 years -- came as the U.K. and Russia each reported their first cases of the dangerous virus, while other countries moved to limit air traffic with China as the number of people infected there approached 10,000. The quarantine applies to 195 U.S. citizens evacuated Wednesday from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak, and brought to the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, Calif., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The State Department also on Friday advised Americans in China to consider leaving and requested all nonessential U.S. government personnel to postpone travel there. The State Department's "Do Not Travel" advice placed China on the same list as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. It follows the WHO's designation Thursday of the coronavirus as a global public-health emergency. Additionally, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the outbreak. Delta's suspensions will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30.

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An anonymous reader writes: Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed the No. 2 smartphone vendor spot in 2019, behind Samsung and ahead of Apple. Both firms have similar global market share numbers for 2019, with Samsung around 20 percent, Huawei at 16 percent, Apple at 13 percent, and Xiaomi and Oppo around eight percent each. Counterpoint credits Huawei's success in its hometown of China for its success, saying, "This was the result of an aggressive push from Huawei in the Chinese market, where it achieved almost 40 percent market share." According to the firm, China makes up 60 percent of Huawei's shipments. "For what it's worth, Canalys has Q4 2019 as Huawei's first quarterly decline -- down seven percent from Q3 -- in two years, which it blames on the [Trump Administration's Huawei export ban]," adds Ars. "Together with the annual Apple Q4 surge thanks to the launch of a new iPhone, Huawei fell to third place again within that time period."

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai told lawmakers Friday he intends to propose fines against at least one U.S. wireless carrier for sharing customers' real-time location data with outside parties without the subscribers' knowledge or consent. From a report: The FCC has been investigating for more than a year following revelations that subscriber location data from AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint made its way to a resale market used by bounty hunters. Pai said in letters to several lawmakers that the agency's investigation has found that "one or more wireless carriers apparently violated federal law."

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Ahead of the Democratic presidential primaries that begin Monday with the Iowa caucus, presidential candidate Andrew Yang called for a global ban on the use of autonomous weaponry. In a tweet, Yang called for U.S. leadership to implement a ban on automated killing machines, then shared a link to a Future of Life Institute video titled "Slaughterbots," which offers a cautionary and dystopian vision of the future. From a report: [...] In the video, the fictional CEO promises the ability to target and wipe out "the bad guys" or people with "evil ideology" or even entire cities. The video then imagines the breaking out of partisan political warfare. The drones are used to assassinate 11 U.S. Senators of one political party at the U.S. Capitol building. In the wake of the hypothetical attack, it's unclear after assessment from the intelligence community what state, group, or individual carried it out, but in the confusion calls for war and violent crime ratchet up. There is some precedent in reality. Russian company Kalishnakov is developing a kamikaze drone, and though it was most likely piloted by a human, the world saw one of the first targeted political assassination attempts with a drone in history in 2018 in Venezuela. DARPA is developing ways for swarms of drones to take part in military missions, and the U.S. Department of Defense developed hardware to guard against weaponized drone attacks.

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The creator of one of the world's most famous mysteries is giving obsessive fans a new clue. From a report: Kryptos, a sculpture in a courtyard at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va., holds an encrypted message that has not fully yielded to attempts to crack it. It's been nearly 30 years since its tall scroll of copper with thousands of punched-through letters was set in place. Three of the four passages of the sculpture have been decrypted (the first, though unacknowledged at the time, was solved by a team from the National Security Agency). But after nearly three decades, one brief passage remains uncracked. And that has been a source of delight and consternation to thousands of people around the world. The sculptor, Jim Sanborn, has been hounded for decades by codebreaking enthusiasts. And he has twice provided clues to move the community of would-be solvers along, once in 2010 and again in 2014. Now he is offering another clue. The last one, he says. It is a word: "NORTHEAST." Why do people care so much about a puzzle cut into a sheet of copper in a courtyard after so much time? It's not just that the piece itself has a kind of brooding, powerful beauty, or the fact that it has been referred to in novels by the thriller writer Dan Brown. It is something deeper, something that involves the nature of the human mind, said Craig Bauer, a professor of mathematics at York College of Pennsylvania and a former scholar in residence at the N.S.A.'s Center for Cryptologic History. "We have many problems that are difficult to resolve -- intimidating, perhaps even scary," he said. "It gives people great pleasure to pick up on one that they think they have a chance of solving." [...] Why now? Did we mention Mr. Sanborn is 74? Holding on to one of the world's most enticing secrets can be stressful. Some would-be codebreakers have appeared at his home. Many felt they had solved the puzzle, and wanted to check with Mr. Sanborn. Sometimes forcefully. Sometimes, in person. NPR spoke with Sanborn (4-min).

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Scientists put their concerns about giant satellite networks directly to the companies involved.

Last Saturday, Voyager 2's software shut down all five of the scientific instruments onboard because the spacecraft was consuming way too much power. Engineers at NASA don't know what triggered this energy spike and are currently trying to get the interstellar probe, which was launched in 1977, back to normal operations. Its primary mission was supposed to last five years. In 2018, it officially left the solar system. In order to keep the spacecraft running properly 42 years later, NASA has had to carefully manage power consumption for the instruments and the probe's heaters. From a report: About 11.5 billion miles away, Voyager 2 was supposed to make a scheduled 360-degree rotation that would help calibrate its magnetometer (used to measure magnetic fields). The spacecraft delayed this move for still unknown reasons, leaving two other internal systems running at high power. The onboard software decided to offset this power deficit by shutting down the five scientific instruments still working. NASA engineers shut down one of the power-hungry systems and turned the science instruments back on. But the spacecraft is still not cleared for normal operations and is not collecting any new data for now. [...] It takes 17 hours for data from Earth to get to Voyager 2, and vice versa. This lag means it will take several days to solve the spacecraft's woes. As it is, the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which powers the spacecraft, is only expected to last another five years before the plutonium-238 can no longer provide enough heat to power the probe's instruments, so Voyager 2 is on its last hurrah anyway.

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Add a gun that can't shoot straight to the problems that dog Lockheed Martin's $428 billion F-35 program, including more than 800 software flaws. From a report: The 25mm gun on Air Force models of the Joint Strike Fighter has "unacceptable" accuracy in hitting ground targets and is mounted in housing that's cracking, the Pentagon's test office said in its latest assessment of the costliest U.S. weapons system. The annual assessment by Robert Behler, the Defense Department's director of operational test and evaluation, doesn't disclose any major new failings in the plane's flying capabilities. But it flags a long list of issues that his office said should be resolved -- including 13 described as Category 1 "must-fix" items that affect safety or combat capability -- before the F-35's upcoming $22 billion Block 4 phase. The number of software deficiencies totaled 873 as of November, according to the report obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its release as soon as Friday. That's down from 917 in September 2018, when the jet entered the intense combat testing required before full production, including 15 Category 1 items. What was to be a year of testing has now been extended another year until at least October. "Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number" and leaving "many significant" ones to address, the assessment said.

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The UK government sacks the woman it appointed to run the crucial UN climate summit in November.

Amazon disclosed new details about its U.S. taxes for 2019 in public financial documents and a blog post Friday morning, saying its federal income tax expense for the year was more than $1 billion, in addition to more than $2 billion in other types of federal taxes. From a report: The disclosures appear designed to push back against assertions from politicians and researchers that Amazon does not pay any federal income tax. However, the federal income tax is still a small fraction of the company's profits, representing about 6 percent of the $14.5 billion in operating income that Amazon reported Thursday in its year-end financial report. "Like most governments that try to encourage economic investment by companies, the U.S. Congress has written a tax code that incentivizes the type of job creation, capital investment, development of technology, and employee ownership that Amazon does because these are critical drivers of a prosperous economy," the company says in its post. "We follow all applicable federal and state tax laws, and our U.S. taxes are a reflection of our continued investments, compensation of our employees, and the current tax rules." Federal tax laws also allow the company to delay payment of the bill. According to regulatory filings, Amazon will pay $162 million in federal income taxes for 2019 now, and an additional $900 million over time due to deferrals for which the company is eligible. That adds up to the $1 billion federal income tax expense Amazon says it's on the hook for in 2019. Amazon will pay an additional $2.4 billion in other federal taxes, like payroll and custom duties, the company said, and $1.6 billion to state and local governments for the year. In addition, Amazon paid $9 billion in sales and duty taxes last year, the company said.

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Braintrust query: It appears that Electron changed how the core dialog routines work. Breakage galore, or so it seems.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, writing for EFF: If you follow security on the Internet, you may have seen articles warning you to "beware of public Wi-Fi networks" in cafes, airports, hotels, and other public places. But now, due to the widespread deployment of HTTPS encryption on most popular websites, advice to avoid public Wi-Fi is mostly out of date and applicable to a lot fewer people than it once was. The advice stems from the early days of the Internet, when most communication was not encrypted. At that time, if someone could snoop on your network communications -- for instance by sniffing packets from unencrypted Wi-Fi or by being the NSA -- they could read your email. Starting in 2010 that all changed. Eric Butler released Firesheep, an easy-to-use demonstration of "sniffing" insecure HTTP to take over people's accounts. Site owners started to take note and realized they needed to implement HTTPS (the more secure, encrypted version of HTTP) for every page on their site. The timing was good: earlier that year, Google had turned on HTTPS by default for all Gmail users and reported that the costs to do so were quite low. Hardware and software had advanced to the point where encrypting web browsing was easy and cheap. However, practical deployment of HTTPS across the whole web took a long time. One big obstacle was the difficulty for webmasters and site administrators of buying and installing a certificate (a small file required in order to set up HTTPS). EFF helped launch Let's Encrypt, which makes certificates available for free, and we wrote Certbot, the easiest way to get a free certificate from Let's Encrypt and install it. Meanwhile, lots of site owners were changing their software and HTML in order to make the switch to HTTPS. There's been tremendous progress, and now 92% of web page loads from the United States use HTTPS. In other countries the percentage is somewhat lower -- 80% in India, for example -- but HTTPS still protects the large majority of pages visited. [...] What about the risk of governments scooping up signals from "open" public Wi-Fi that has no password? Governments that surveill people on the Internet often do it by listening in on upstream data, at the core routers of broadband providers and mobile phone companies. If that's the case, it means the same information is commonly visible to the government whether they sniff it from the air or from the wires.

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I was reviewing my blog for November 2016, to see how we dealt with the shock of Trump's election and I came across a video of the unbelievably fantastic DNC 2012 speech of Jennifer Granholm. We need more of this.

Here's the piece I wrote on election night in 2016.

This is one of those days I've written four posts without publishing. They'll all go out at once, in various states of completion. But it's a day of ideas. I am depressed, in the same way I was the day after the 2016 election. But I had a good night's sleep, and the coffee is good. It's cold outside, but warm inside. I have all my material needs taken care of, and I have a powerful publishing platform, and the best tools, so I'm on-balance doing ok I guess.

Prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against two security professionals who were arrested and jailed last September for breaking into an Iowa courthouse as part of a contract with Iowa's judicial arm. From a report: The dismissal, which was announced on Thursday, is a victory not only for Coalfire Labs, the security firm that employed the two penetration testers, but the security industry as a whole and the countless organizations that rely on it. Although employees Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn had written authorization to test the physical security of the Dallas County Courthouse in Iowa, the men spent more than 12 hours in jail on felony third-degree burglary charges. The charges were later lowered to misdemeanor trespass. The case cast a menacing cloud over an age-old practice that's crucial to securing buildings and the computers and networks inside of them. Penetration testers are hired to hack or break into sensitive systems or premises and then disclose the vulnerabilities and techniques that made the breaches possible. Owners and operators then use the information to improve security. "I'm very glad to hear this," said a professional pentester when I told him the charges were dropped (he prefers to use only his handle: Tink). "Clients and security firms have an obligation to protect their pentesters and consultants. Pentesters are not criminals. Pentesters help organizations protect against criminals."

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Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said on Friday that they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak. Delta on Friday said its China service suspension will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30, but it will continue to operate the service until then to "ensure customers looking to exit China have options to do so." From a report: Dozens of carriers including United, Cathay Pacific, British Airways and others have slashed or suspended service to China because of the outbreak. Delta was the first in the U.S. to suspend service altogether. Large companies spanning industries from technology to packaged food have suspended business trips to the country because of coronavirus, driving down demand for flights to China. Time has a more comprehensive list.

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