A software error in Denmark's government tax portal has accidentally exposed the personal identification (CPR) numbers for 1.26 million Danish citizens, a fifth of the country's total population. From a report: The error lasted for five years (between February 2, 2015, and January 24, 2020) before it was discovered, Danish media reported last week. The software error and the subsequent leak was discovered following an audit by the Danish Agency for Development and Simplification (Udviklings-og Forenklingsstyrelsen, or UFST). According to the UFST, the error occurred on TastSelv Borger, the Danish tax administration's official self-service portal where Danish citizens go to file and pay taxes online. Government officials said the portal contained a software bug that every time a user updated account details in the portal's settings section, their CPR number would be added to the URL.

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It's another sea of red ink for federal research funding programs in President Donald Trump's latest budget proposal. The 2021 budget request to Congress released today calls for deep, often double-digit cuts to R&D spending at major science agencies. From a report: At the same time, the president wants to put more money into a handful of areas -- notably artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS) -- to create the new technology needed for what the budget request calls "industries of the future." Here is a rundown of some of the numbers from the budget request's R&D chapter. (The numbers reflect the portion of each agency's budget classified as research, which in most cases is less than its overall budget.) 1. National Institutes of Health: a cut of 7%, or $2.942 billion, to $36.965 billion. 2. National Science Foundation (NSF): a cut of 6%, or $424 million, to $6.328 billion. 3. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science: a cut of 17%, or $1.164 billion, to $5.760 billion. 4. NASA science: a cut of 11%, or $758 million, to $6.261 billion. 5. DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy: a cut of 173%, which would not only eliminate the $425 million agency, but also force it to return $311 million to the U.S. Department of the Treasury. 6. U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Agricultural Research Service: a cut of 12%, or $190 million, to $1.435 billion. 7. National Institute of Standards and Technology: a cut of 19%, or $154 million, to $653 million. 8. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: a cut of 31%, or $300 million, to $678 million. 9. Environmental Protection Agency science and technology: a cut of 37%, or $174 million, to $318 million. 10. Department of Homeland Security science and technology: a cut of 15%, or $65 million, to $357 million. 11. U.S. Geological Survey: a cut of 30%, or $200 million, to $460 million.

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If there were any major sites that took a web traffic pummeling in 2019 Yahoo and Tumblr would top the list. That's according to a new report from SimilarWeb. The report looks back on key web trends in 2019. Among those trends were some pretty bad news for some sites: 1. Total web traffic is on the rise, growing 8% in 2019 to 223 billion visits per month to the top 100 websites worldwide. 2. Mobile is fueling much of that growth. While desktop web traffic decreased 3.3% since 2017, mobile web traffic shot up 30.6% over the same period. 3. But with the mobile web comes shrinking attention spans. The report says that visitors are spending 49 seconds less on websites per visit than they did three years ago. 4. The top 10 sites took 167.5 billion visits per month in 2019 -- a 10.7% increase. 5. Mobile visits claim the majority of visits made to "vice" sites -- those that involve porn and gambling. 6. The U.S. leads the world when it comes to visiting the websites. In 2019, over 300 billion visits per month to sites were made from America.

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U.S. prosecutors have charged four hackers said to be working for the Chinese military for the 2018 cyberattack at Equifax, which led to the theft of more than 147 million credit reports in a massive data breach. From a report: Attorney general William Barr accused the four members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army of hacking into the credit giant over a period of several months. The nine-charge indictment was announced Monday against Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei. "This is the largest theft of sensitive PII by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded," said FBI deputy director David Bowdich. Equifax revealed the data breach in September 2017, months after it discovered hackers had broken into its systems. An investigation showed the company failed to patch a web server it knew was vulnerable for weeks, which let hackers crash the servers and steal massive amounts of personal data.

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After capturing the U.S. television market with aggressively priced Roku TVs, China's TCL wants to replicate that success with inexpensive phones, IoT devices and connected appliances -- and in the process, turn its still relatively unknown brand into a household name. In other words: TCL wants to be the next Samsung. From a report: It won't be easy. The phone market, TCL's next target, is firmly dominated by Apple and Samsung and hard to penetrate for newcomers. The company also faces headwinds from the Trump administration's ongoing trade war with China, as well as political resistance to fellow Chinese tech companies like Huawei. And while TCL's partnership with Roku has been key to building its U.S. TV business, it has also forced the company to operate with razor-thin margins as Roku cashes in on a rapidly growing advertising business that's been a newfound source of revenue for other TV manufacturers. TCL was founded as an audiotape manufacturer in China's Guangdong province in 1981. It has since become a growing force in the consumer electronics industry, manufacturing phones, TVs and appliances that are sold worldwide under a number of brands. In 2019, TCL sold 32 million TVs globally, it recently told investors. Across all of its businesses, TCL's 2018 revenue amounted to $16.3 billion, with a net profit of $586 million. Two-thirds of TCL's TV revenue already comes from overseas, and the company is looking to grow its international business even further. TCL is set to officially enter the U.S. smartphone market under its own brand in the second quarter of this year. After spending the last few years slapping licensed names like BlackBerry on phones it manufactures, the company previewed its first line of TCL-branded handsets at CES in January. It's expected to reveal official launch dates, specs and carrier partnerships at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month.

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Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis. Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like "The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power" and "A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind." From a report: While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books, the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon's vast virtual shelves. Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules. "Amazon reserves the right to determine whether content provides an acceptable experience," said one recent removal notice that the company sent to a bookseller. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been roiled in recent years by controversies that pit freedom of speech against offensive content. Amazon has largely escaped this debate. But with millions of third-party merchants supplying much of what Amazon sells to tens of millions of customers, that ability to maintain a low profile may be reaching its end.

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Speaking with journalists after winning his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi had other things on his mind. When asked what he thought writers should be demanding in the next round of discussions with producers, Waititi put Apple's controversial laptop keyboards on blast. A report adds: "Apple needs to fix those keyboards," he said. "They are impossible to write on -- they've gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs. Because PC keyboards, the bounce-back for your fingers is way better. Hands up who still uses a PC? You know what I'm talking about. It's a way better keyboard. Those Apple keyboards are horrendous." "I've got some shoulder problems," Waititi continued. "I've got OOS [Occupational Overuse Syndrome, a term used in New Zealand for RSI] -- I don't know what you call it over here, this sort of thing here (gestures to arm), that tendon which goes down your forearm down into the thumb? You know what I'm talking about, if you guys are ever writing. And what happens is you open the laptop and you're like this (makes uncomfortable hunched-over-laptop pose) -- we've just got to fix those keyboards. The WGA needs to step in and actually do something." Tech columnist John Gruber adds: I've been saying for years now that Apple has done severe reputational harm to the MacBook brand, which effectively is the Mac brand for most people, especially writers. Yes, there's a new keyboard with scissor-switch mechanisms in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It's a pleasure to type on. But we're still months away from the rest of the MacBook lineup being updated to use that new keyboard. And that's a presumption on my part, that all MacBooks will get the new keyboard sooner rather than later. It certainly wouldn't make any sense if they didn't -- but the whole butterfly-switch saga has never made any sense.

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Software called TextFooler can trick natural-language processing (NLP) systems into misunderstanding text just by replacing certain words in a sentence with synonyms. From a report: In tests, it was able to drop the accuracy of three state-of-the-art NLP systems dramatically. For example, Google's powerful BERT neural net was worse by a factor of five to seven at identifying whether reviews on Yelp were positive or negative. The software, developed by a team at MIT, looks for the words in a sentence that are most important to an NLP classifier and replaces them with a synonym that a human would find natural. For example, changing the sentence "The characters, cast in impossibly contrived situations, are totally estranged from reality" to "The characters, cast in impossibly engineered circumstances, are fully estranged from reality" makes no real difference to how we read it. But the tweaks made an AI interpret the sentences completely differently.

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Amazon has asked a federal court for permission to get testimony from President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper as part of its ongoing protest over the Defense Department's handling of a multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract, according to a court filing unsealed Monday. From a report: The document also seeks permission to depose former Defense Secretary James Mattis and what he may have known about Trump's attitude toward the contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. The decision on the motion to depose is expected in the coming weeks. It is incredibly rare, if not unprecedented, for a sitting US president to be deposed in a contract protest. In a footnote of the court filing, Amazon notes that "a deposition of a sitting President of the United States presents unique circumstances." Amazon argues in the document that the Pentagon's explanation for awarding the contract to Microsoft left out "crucial information and details that led to this flawed and potentially detrimental decision regarding DoD's future cloud infrastructure."

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I'm doing some work on instantoutliner.com this afternoon, so you may see intermittent outages. Dig we must! ;-)

North Korea has vastly expanded its use of the internet in ways that enable its leader, Kim Jong-un, to evade a "maximum pressure" American sanctions campaign and turn to new forms of cybercrime to prop up his government, according to a new study. From a report: The study concludes that since 2017 -- the year President Trump threatened "fire and fury like the world has never seen" against the country -- the North's use of the internet has surged about 300 percent. Nearly half of that traffic now flows through a new connection in Russia, avoiding the North's longtime dependency on a single digital pipeline through China. The surge has a clear purpose, according to the report released Sunday by Recorded Future, a Cambridge, Mass., group known for its deep examinations of how nations use digital weaponry: circumventing financial pressure and sanctions by the West. Over the past three years, the study concluded, North Korea has improved its ability to both steal and "mine" cryptocurrencies, hide its footprints in gaining technology for its nuclear program and cyberoperations, and use the internet for day-to-day control of its government. "What this tells you is that our entire concept of how to control the North's financial engagement with the world is based on an image of the North that is fixed in the past," said Priscilla Moriuchi, a former National Security Agency analyst who directed the study and has long focused on North Korea and Iran. "They have succeeded at an easy-to-replicate model of how to move large amounts of money around the world, and do it in a way our sanctions do not touch. Our sanctions system needs a radical update," she concluded. The report helps solve the mystery of why the country's economy appears to have survived, and in some sectors actually grown, as the United States and its allies have talked about their success in choking off oil supplies and cracking down on North Korea's skillful production of counterfeit American currency.

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U.S. prosecutors have charged four hackers said to be working for the Chinese military for the 2018 cyberattack at Equifax, which led to the theft of more than 147 million credit reports in a massive data breach. From a report: Attorney general William Barr accused the four members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army of hacking into the credit giant over a period of several months. The nine-charge indictment was announced Monday against Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei. "This is the largest theft of sensitive PII by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded," said FBI deputy director David Bowdich. Equifax revealed the data breach in September 2017, months after it discovered hackers had broken into its systems. An investigation showed the company failed to patch a web server it knew was vulnerable for weeks, which let hackers crash the servers and steal massive amounts of personal data.

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minstrelmike shares a report. From the article: The best way to get a feel for what NASA's job was like is to read some of the code, now immortalized in a GitHub repository. Choose a file at random. GROUND_TRACKING_DETERMINATION_PROGRAM.agc, for instance, has 204 lines and more than 85 of them are comments. Each of the lines consists of only one operation, unlike modern languages, which can pack dozens of operations with multiple options into one line. The simplicity becomes obvious .... The Apollo Guidance Computer had only 36k of ROM to hold the compiled version." You didn't need security, function was the only thing that counted, and you only had to do one thing. A Go app compiled with version 1.7 that only prints "Hello World" is 1.6 megabytes alone, and the Go world was totally thrilled with this news because it was 2.3 megabytes before." And you didn't need to deal with lawyers. There are 22 thousand words in the basic Terms of Service for renting a machine in Amazon's cloud. There is also an entirely different TOS for using the website to rent the machine. Then each individual product often has its own TOS, like this one for Activate. Add them up and they're much longer than the 36 thousand instruction words in the ROM in the Lunar Lander's computer.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Around Thanksgiving, it looked like this could have been Netflix's year to win it all at the Oscars. Critics were heaping praise on the epic scale of Martin Scorsese's mob movie "The Irishman," which felt destined to be the streaming giant's best shot at the elusive best picture trophy. The Los Gatos-based tech company put its weight behind the $159-million film, with its big stars and intricate age-altering effects, and pushed it hard through awards season with billboards along Sunset Boulevard. And yet, on Sunday at the Dolby Theatre, Netflix came up short. In total, Netflix's movies had 24 Oscar nominations, the most of any studio. [...] Still, Netflix ended up winning just two awards, including supporting actress for Laura Dern's turn as a divorce lawyer in "Marriage Story." Netflix also won for documentary feature "American Factory," which was supported by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions. It wasn't for lack of trying. Hollywood executives estimate that Netflix spent at least $70 million (WSJ pegs $100 million) to promote its eight awards contenders to academy voters. For most studios, an awards season budget of $15 million is considered an ample war chest for a best-picture contender. Netflix was hoping to succeed this year where it ultimately failed in 2019 in its quest to take home the big prize for Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma." Instead, best picture went to "Parasite," Bong Joon Ho's South Korean satirical thriller, which was released by the scrappy upstart New York distributor Neon and cost about $11 to make. "Parasite" also won for director, original screenplay and international film and became the first foreign-language film to win the academy's top honor.

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Charles Pierce, a columnist at Esquire, asks why suddenly James Carville is relevant (again). This my friends is exactly what's wrong with journalism and politics. Carville isn't any more or less relevant now. He did however do an interview on MSNBC where he said exactly what the Democrats are doing to lose the election, and correctly stated what the election is about and what the consequences would be of losing. It was a passionate wakeup call that apparently rippled out to Pierce's perch in the hierarchy of punditry, who hears it as the question he asks. Why is Carville relevant, he asks. Better question, why is Pierce such an idiot? It doesn't matter who sees the truth and yells it loud enough to pierce through the fog of your self-importance, what matters is that it's the truth. We are, as Carville says, on our way to electing Trump to another term, when what we need to do is win so decisively that we have the power to undo the damage he did. We need to be very smart, focused and not worry about Pierce's pecking order. Yet our pundits and political leaders are mostly just worried about doing what they always do, being well paid and as Pierce puts it, relevant.