News outlet 9to5Mac, which tracks Apple news, has gotten hold of an iOS 14 build that uncovers a range of hardware details and software features that Apple intends to reveal later this year. The devices are: 1. An upcoming iPad Pro will include three cameras -- like the iPhone Pro -- plus an additional time-of-flight sensor for help with AR. 2. An iPhone with Touch ID is in the works. This is presumably the lower-end iPhone 9 or iPhone SE 2. 3. A new Apple TV box is in the works along with a new Apple TV remote. 4. AirTags, Apple's rumored Tile-like item tracker, will have user-replaceable batteries. Software features: 1. The iOS home screen will get a new list view, letting you more easily find and filter through your apps. It's not clear exactly where this screen will appear, but it'd offer a major change from the grid. 2. A new AR app will let you point your phone's camera at objects in the real world and have the phone display more information about what you're seeing. At an Apple store, for instance, it could display pricing information and product features. Apple is reportedly working with Starbucks to support the feature, too. 3. Third-party apps will be able to integrate wallpapers into the wallpapers section of the Settings app. This should make it easier to switch wallpapers and could finally open dynamic wallpapers up to outside developers. 4. HomeKit will be able to change the color temperature of lights throughout a day to match the sunlight. 5. An accessibility feature will let phones identify sounds like alarms and doorbells for people with hearing loss.

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The 2020 election will be "the most secure, most protected election in the history of the United States of America," Christopher Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said on Tuesday. From a report: State and local officials, even before the start of party primaries, have voiced concerns that outside interference could disrupt elections in 2020. The recent outbreak of coronavirus has also impacted some state primaries. "People need to keep in mind that [election security] is something that we've been plugging away at for a long time. Get out there and vote. That's the best defense against any sort of interference," said Krebs. Krebs said the Trump administration is working with state and local election officials to develop contingencies for elections in communities affected by the virus.

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Mozilla today launched Firefox 74 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Firefox 74 includes stricter rules for add-ons, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 disabled by default, and a handful of developer features.

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Just over a month after Uber received a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) license to test driverless cars on public roads, the company has resumed autonomous testing in San Francisco. From a report: Uber says it will limit its time on the road to a "few weeks" while it completes a codebase and infrastructure update and that two of its Volvo XC90 prototypes will be deployed initially, each with a pair of safety drivers in the front seats. Previously, Uber was manually testing up to eight cars in San Francisco with safety drivers and copilots. The testing will no doubt be closely watched by industry observers, as it marks Uber's return to autonomous driving in California years after the company postponed further tests following a fatal accident. In March 2018, one of Uber's cars struck and killed a pedestrian while driving in autonomous mode, prompting a firestorm of criticism from legislators, regulators, and the public.

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To combat resistant bacteria and refill the trickling antibiotic pipeline, scientists are getting help from deep learning networks. From a report: Once-powerful antibiotics are losing their efficacy at a disconcerting pace as bacteria evolve immunity to our drugs. At least 700,000 people around the world now die each year from infections that could formerly be treated with antibiotics. A report last year from the United Nations Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance warned that if no new major advances are made by 2050, mortality could leap to 10 million deaths a year. What makes this prognosis all the more dire is that the antibiotic pipeline has slowed to a trickle. In the past two decades, only a few new antibiotics have been found that kill bacteria in novel ways, and rising resistance is a problem for all of them. Meanwhile, traditional methods of identifying antibiotics by screening natural compounds continue to come up short. Because of this, some researchers are now turning from the wet lab to silicon power in hopes of finding an answer. In the February 20 issue of Cell, one team of scientists announced that they -- and a powerful deep learning algorithm -- had found a totally new antibiotic, one with an unconventional mechanism of action that allows it to fight infections that are resistant to multiple drugs. The compound was hiding in plain sight (as a possible diabetes treatment) because humans didn't know what to look for. But the computer did. Using computers and machine learning to make sense of mountains of biomedical data is nothing new. But the team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by James Collins, who studies applications of systems biology to antibiotic resistance, and Regina Barzilay, an artificial intelligence researcher, achieved success by developing a neural network that avoids scientists' potentially limiting preconceptions about what to look for. Instead, the computer develops its own expertise.

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A federal judge said in court documents that Amazon's protest lawsuit over rival Microsoft being awarded a highly lucrative defense project was "likely to succeed on the merits" of one of its main arguments. From a report: In October, Microsoft was awarded the Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract after the Trump administration and other lawmakers intervened on the tech giant's behalf. The document provides some insight into how U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith might rule on the case. To the chagrin of Microsoft and the Department of Defense, Campbell-Smith last month halted production on the JEDI cloud system, saying in her decision that the Pentagon erred in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from the two tech companies.

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I might be starting to love Joe Biden.

The species was uncovered during a watercourse survey being carried out in north Highland.

The "wonder plant" absorbs carbon dioxide faster than trees and supports wildlife, scientists say.

Warning that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States was expected to grow, the Trump administration on Monday evening said that testing for the virus would ramp up quickly in the coming weeks while declining to estimate how many Americans had already been tested for the virus. From a report: The evening news conference at the White House came as the stock market plunged and an increasing number of Americans wondered how the official count of virus cases in the country, still in the mid-three-figures, could remain so low despite the aggressive spread of coronavirus elsewhere. Trump addressed economic concerns, telling reporters his administration would ask Congress to pass payroll tax relief and other quick measures. He also said he was seeking help for hourly-wage workers to ensure they're "not going to miss a paycheck" and "don't get penalized for something that's not their fault."

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Microsoft announced today a coordinated takedown of Necurs, one of the largest spam and malware botnets known to date, believed to have infected more than nine million computers worldwide. From a report: The takedown effort came after Microsoft and industry partners broke the Necurs DGA -- the botnet's domain generation algorithm, the component that generates random domain names. Necurs authors register DHA-generated domains weeks or months in advance and host the botnet's command-and-control (C&C) servers, where bots (infected computers) connect to receive new commands. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months," said Tom Burt, Microsoft Vice President for Customer Security & Trust. Breaking the DGA allowed Microsoft and its industry partners to create a comprehensive list of future Necurs C&C server domains that they can now block and prevent the Necurs team from registering.

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We should make a list of activities that should come to a stop now. For example, movie theaters are done. In-person sports events. Offices, schools, mass transit. You can help build the list by replying to this tweet.

Think about it this way. What if you got a 2-week advance notice that something really shitty was about to happen, and you actually know a lot about what will happen. I listened to a podcast with an expert on this stuff, and he said we got lucky this time. Imagine that. We got lucky, weird, but yes we did.

Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps today to disrupt one of the world's most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which has infected more than nine million computers globally. Microsoft, in a blog post: This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks. A botnet is a network of computers that a cybercriminal has infected with malicious software, or malware. Once infected, criminals can control those computers remotely and use them to commit crimes. Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012 and have seen it distribute several forms of malware, including the GameOver Zeus banking trojan. The Necurs botnet is one of the largest networks in the spam email threat ecosystem, with victims in nearly every country in the world. During a 58-day period in our investigation, for example, we observed that one Necurs-infected computer sent a total of 3.8 million spam emails to over 40.6 million potential victims.

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A team of academics from universities across the world, along with vulnerability researchers from Bitdefender, today disclosed a new security flaw in Intel processors. From a report: Named Load Value Injection, or LVI for short, this is a new class of theoretical attacks against Intel CPUs. While the attack has been deemed only a theoretical threat, Intel has released firmware patches to mitigate attacks against current CPUs, and fixes will be deployed at the hardware (silicon design) level in future generations.

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