Nasa has announced 18 astronauts who will travel to the Moon under the agency's Artemis programme.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyber-attack. From a report: In a short two-paragraph statement posted on its website today, the agency discloses the security breach but said it couldn't disclose any details about the intrusion due to an ongoing investigation. EMA is currently in the process of reviewing applications for two COVID-19 vaccines, one from US pharma giant Moderna, and a second developed in a collaboration between BioNTech and Pfizer. An EMA spokesperson did not return a request for comment seeking information if the attack targeted its vaccine approval process or if it was a financially-motivated attack like ransomware. Nonetheless, in a follow-up statement released on its own website, BioNTech said that "some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed" during the attack, confirming that COVID-19 research was most likely the target of the attack.

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How people spend their time is similar in many ways across countries: we all sleep, work, eat, and enjoy leisure. But there are also important differences in the freedom people have to spend time on the things they value most. Studying how people across the world spend their time provides an important perspective for understanding living conditions, economic opportunities, and general well-being. A study by Our World in Data: Consider sleeping, for example. From this sample of countries, South Koreans sleep the least -- averaging 7 hours and 51 minutes of sleep every day. In India and the US, at the other end of the spectrum, people sleep an hour more on average. Work is another important activity where we see large differences. Countries are sorted by paid work hours in the chart (check the source link) -- from highest to lowest. In China and Mexico people spend, on an average day, almost twice as much time on paid work as people in Italy and France do. This is a general pattern: People in richer countries can afford to work less. Keep in mind that this chart shows the average for all people in the working age bracket, from 15 to 64 years, whether they are actually employed or not. Differences in demographics, education and economic prosperity all contribute to these inequalities in work and time use. But what's clear in the chart here (check the source link) is that there are also some differences in time use that are not well explained by economic or demographic differences. In the UK, for example, people spend more time working than in France; but in both countries people report spending a similar amount of time on leisure activities. Cultural differences are likely to play a role here. The French seem to spend much more time eating than the British -- and in this respect the data actually goes in line with stereotypes about food culture. People in France, Greece, Italy and Spain report spending more time eating than people in most other European countries. The country where people spend the least time eating and drinking is the USA (63 minutes).

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The Federal Trade Commission today sued Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct. FTC: Following a lengthy investigation in cooperation with a coalition of attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam, the complaint alleges that Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy -- including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers -- to eliminate threats to its monopoly. This course of conduct harms competition, leaves consumers with few choices for personal social networking, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition. The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions. "Personal social networking is central to the lives of millions of Americans," said Ian Conner, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition. "Facebook's actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition. Our aim is to roll back Facebook's anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive."

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At Chrome Dev Summit 2020 today, Google announced it will change how extensions access data and how extension permissions work in 2021. On January 18, a day before the release of Chrome 88, Google will require that every extension publicly display its privacy practices and will limit what developers can do with the data they collect. From a report: The first change means that Chrome users next year will determine which websites an extension can access when they browse the web. Once you grant an extension permission to access a website's data, that preference can be saved for that domain. Today, the extension makes that call. In 2021, you will still be able to grant an extension access to all the websites you visit, but that won't be the default. Google outlined the second change last month: "each extension's detail page in the Chrome Web Store will show developer-provided information about the data collected by the extension, in clear and easy to understand language." The company also updated its user data privacy policy with an addition to how extension developers use data they collect.

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Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]: In 2014, Apple executives became alarmed when China enacted a new labor law meant to protect workers' rights. The law required that no more than 10% of a factory's workforce be temporary workers. Typically these employees have fewer benefits and legal protections than permanent ones, but Apple's suppliers increasingly relied on them in China's tightening labor market. Apple surveyed 362 of its supplier factories in China that year and discovered that nearly half were over the quota for temporary workers. Eighty factories used temporary workers for more than half their labor force, according to an internal Apple presentation reviewed by The Information. Apple asked its suppliers to come up with plans to reduce their use of temporary workers by a March 2016 deadline, when a two-year grace period for the law expired. However, by the time the law went into effect, little progress had been made. According to four former Apple employees familiar with its labor issues, Apple for years took no major action against its suppliers for violating the temp-worker labor law out of concerns it would create costs, drain resources and delay product launches. Three of the ex-Apple employees were members of its supplier responsibility team, which is in charge of monitoring violations and enforcing penalties, while the fourth was a senior manager familiar with its operations in China. The former employees, as well as a review of internal Apple presentations and the company's own data on factory hiring between 2013 and 2018, suggests that Apple's strategy for managing its supply chain made it difficult for its three biggest contract manufacturers -- Foxconn Technology, Quanta Computer and Pegatron -- to remain compliant with the labor restrictions. The issue surfaced again publicly last year when Apple admitted that Foxconn had broken the law at its massive iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which can employ as many as 300,000 workers. Apple says it requires suppliers to abide by local laws and pledges to remove those that won't comply.

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I have a very pragmatic problem with the religious zeal people have for Apple products. I can't tell when I should take their advice if they always gush about everything.

Two recent examples.

1. A friend, a VC, told me that the XS Max was totally worth the $1500. So I got one. No way it was worth that. I replaced it this year with a new SE for $350, and I love it, actually more than the XS Max because it's only $350. I'm cheap that way.
2. Another friend told me last month I had to get the new earpods. $250. A little steep, but the way he was talking, it sounded like Moses had arrived with the secret to human happiness, and I could get it for only $250. So I did it, on an impulse. Well, they're nice enough, but there's absolutely nothing special about them. I like my Sony overear headphones better. I buy headphones on a whim, so I know what's good. These are ok, but didn't not deserve the review they got.

So all this ends up backfiring for people who want to help Apple sell product, which btw, I'm happy about since I bought Apple shares in 1997, and have watched them make me rich,. But as a user, I am offended by the way people go on and on about such bullshit. Headphones and iPhones aren't sex toys or drugs. They're products. They're good products, but they also suck like all products do.

YouTube is taking belated action on election misinformation: The company said it would now remove misleading videos that claim widespread fraud or other errors changed the outcome of the US presidential election. From a report: Google-owned YouTube announced that it would begin enforcing against this content on Wednesday, citing Tuesday's safe harbor deadline for the US election, which is the date after which state election results cannot effectively be challenged. YouTube said that enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. National news outlets have universally projected that Joe Biden will be the next President. As an example of content that would be banned, YouTube said it would take down videos claiming that a presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or errors in counting votes. It will begin enforcing the policy starting Wednesday, and said it would "ramp up" efforts in the weeks to come. It will still allow videos including news coverage and commentary to remain on the platform if they have enough context. Any videos in violation of the policy that were posted prior to Wednesday, will remain up even though they now break YouTube's rules. They will feature an information panel that says election results have been certified.

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Noteworthy: Scroll, which I reviewed in February, has gotten McClatchy to trust them. As I said then, it's a big chicken and egg thing. Once the pubs sign on, they will be gold, we need Scroll to succeed. Well they scored with a big publisher. Good for them, and maybe good for us (people who want to be able to read everything on the web, without subscribing to every publication with a paywall, which is obviously not possible).

Why didn’t Firefox implement an identity system baked into their browser. Let devs build apps with that identity. Missed opportunity imho. [Turns out they did, but they never deployed it. The whole point is deploying! It's like the Doomsday Machine in Dr Strangelove.]

BTW, yesterday Jack Dorsey liked one of my tweets. Not quite a RT, that would have been amazing, but in Silicon Valley I bet it's a funding event. People used to say that about John Doerr. If you ran into him at Robert's or Buck's, people would talk about it. It was a good tweet for Jack to call attention to. The Dems are horrible at communicating with the people. You'd think that would be something a political party would be great at. But most Dems suck, even Obama, and definitely Clinton, going all the way back to Dukakis, which was the first presidential campaign I tried to give a free idea to (and a good one it was, in hindsight). Al Sharpton is great, as is Mayor Pete, and of course they're shipping him off to China. See how ridiculous they are. Oy!

Google changed the icon for Chrome? It's as stupid a thing to do as a cigarette maker changing the taste or packaging of their product. It's an addiction you don't even know you have until they make you conscious of it. Going to the web is programmed so deep into my neurons, it's at the base of my spine, a total reflexive thing, addict behavior. Now I think about it every damn time. And the Safari icon is next to it, and btw it hasn't changed. Which browser you use is something they want you not to think about, as long as it's their browser. Maybe it's a bug, in which case never mind. But if it was deliberate, it's a stupid move. Read Positioning for the importance of what's in peoples' minds.

sciencehabit writes: It's not just your storage unit that's packed to the gills. According to a new study, the mass of all our stuff -- buildings, roads, cars, and everything else we manufacture -- now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet. And the amount of new material added every week equals the total weight of Earth's nearly 8 billion people. "If you weren't convinced before that humans are dominating the planet, then you should be convinced now," says Timon McPhearson, an urban ecologist at the New School who was not involved with the research. "This is an eye-catching comparison," adds Fridolin Krausmann, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, who also was not involved in the work. There are many measures of humanity's impact on the planet. Fossil fuels have sent greenhouse gases soaring to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years. Agriculture and dwellings have altered 70% of land. And humans have wiped out untold numbers of species in an emerging great extinction. The transformations are so great that researchers have declared we're living in a new human-dominated age: the Anthropocene.

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I got some headlamps, very nice to have. Esp for taking out the garbage at night. You can carry all the bags and still see where you're going. One special feature is that the spy cam can't see your face, as illustrated in this video.

theodp writes: As the 8th annual Hour of Code kicked off this week, the College Board released 2020 AP national and state score breakouts for AP CS program participants. As in past years, this year's results still showed striking gaps in performance and participation across gender and ethnicity segments. Passing rates across major ethnic group segments ranged from 39.8%-78.6% for the Java-based AP CS A course, and 52%-83% for the newer "language agnostic" AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course. Across gender segments, females accounted for 25% of AP CS A scores (16.2K of 64.9K total students) and 33.9% of AP CSP scores (38.6K of 113.9K students). Asian students accounted for 47% of all passing female AP CS A students. Due to pandemic-related school closures, the overall number of students completing AP STEM-related courses in 2020 declined for all subjects except CS. AP CS A, which had an abbreviated taken-at-home final exam, saw a modest 1.5% YOY increase in completions, while AP CSP saw a whopping 21.5% YOY increase in completions, no doubt helped by the cancellation of its end-of-course exam, which was to have counted for 60% of scores (students were instead assessed only by their portfolio submissions).

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