General Motors became the latest automaker hit by the global shortage of semiconductor chips as the U.S. automaker said on Wednesday it will take down production next week at four assembly plants. From a report: GM said it will cut production entirely during the week of Feb. 8 at plants in Fairfax, Kansas; Ingersoll, Ontario; and San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It will also run its Bupyeong 2 plant in South Korea at half capacity that week. GM did not disclose how much volume it would lose or which supplier was affected by the chip shortage, but said the focus has been on keeping production running at plants building the highest-profit vehicles -- full-size pickup trucks and SUVs as well as the Chevrolet Corvette sports car. GM said it intends to make up as much lost production as possible.

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About one in four of India's 1.35 billion people may have been infected with the coronavirus, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing a source with direct knowledge of a government serological survey, suggesting the country's real caseload was many times higher than reported. From the report: India has confirmed 10.8 million COVID-19 infections, the most anywhere outside the United States. But the survey, whose findings are much more conservative than a private one from last week, indicates India's actual cases may have crossed 300 million. The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which conducted the survey, said it would only share the findings at a news conference on Thursday. The source declined to be named ahead of the official announcement. It was not immediately clear how many people participated in the latest survey.

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Sony shipped more than 4.5 million PlayStation 5s from the console's Nov. 12 launch to the end of the year, but it took a loss on those sales because the PS5's "strategic price point" is lower than what it cost to manufacture it. From a report: The disclosure was part of Sony's quarterly report to investors, delivered in Japan earlier today. The losses on PS5 sales were not specifically broken out -- and they were part of an overall Game & Network Services Segment that saw a 26.7 billion yen ($2.5 billion) increase in operating income over the same quarter in 2019. Sony's PlayStation revenue from game sales (both PS4 and PS5, add-on content included) plus larger profit margins on the outgoing PlayStation 4 more than made up any shortfall, the company said. By comparison, the PlayStation 4 sold more than 4.2 million units from its November 2013 launch to the end of that year. The company in November said the new PlayStation 5 is facing "unprecedented" demand, making its availability scarce, even though more PS5s have been available, in whole numbers, than their predecessor. Microsoft's Xbox Series X has faced the same issue, with the company's chief financial officer telling investors back in November that a console shortage could last until April.

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A British security researcher has discovered this week that a recent security flaw in the Sudo app also impacts the macOS operating system, and not just Linux and BSD, as initially believed. From a report: The vulnerability, disclosed last week as CVE-2021-3156 (aka Baron Samedit) by security researchers from Qualys, impacts Sudo, an app that allows admins to delegate limited root access to other users. Qualys researchers discovered that they could trigger a "heap overflow" bug in the Sudo app to change the current user's low-privileged access to root-level commands, granting the attacker access to the whole system. The only condition to exploit this bug was that an attacker gain access to a system, which researchers said could be done by either planting malware on a device or brute-forcing a low-privileged service account. In their report last week, Qualys researchers said they only tested the issue on Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. They said that are UNIX-like operating systems are also impacted, but most security researchers thought the bug might impact BSD, another major OS that also ships with the Sudo app.

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Astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover floated back outside the International Space Station Monday and completed solar array battery replacement work that began four years ago. They also installed three new video cameras and made preparations for upcoming work to install new roll-out solar blankets to upgrade the lab's power system. From a report: The work took less time than expected and the astronauts were able to carry out a variety of lower-priority "get-ahead" tasks before returning to Quest airlock and calling it a day, closing out a five-hour 20-minute spacewalk. Taking one last look around before entering the airlock, Hopkins said simply, "Beautiful view." The excursion began at 7:56 a.m. EST when the two men switched their spacesuits to battery power, officially kicking off the 234th spacewalk, or EVA, devoted to station assembly and maintenance since construction began 23 years ago in 1998. "OK, it's a beautiful day. Let's go for a walk outside," astronaut Bob Hines radioed from mission control in Houston. The first priority was electrically connecting a replacement battery in the station's solar power system. The batteries are critical to station operation. They are recharged by the arrays when the lab is in sunlight and then provide that stored power during periods of orbital darkness. Starting in 2017, spacewalking astronauts began work to replace all 48 of the station's original nickel-hydrogen batteries with 24 smaller, more powerful lithium ion units. During battery replacement work in March 2019, one of the new lithium ion power packs used by the station's left-side inboard set of arrays failed and was replaced with one of the older nickel hydrogen batteries that had been removed. All of the other older batteries were replaced as planned during multiple spacewalks. Over the weekend, flight controllers operating the station's robot arm by remote control disconnected the one remaining nickel hydrogen battery and robotically installed a fresh lithium ion unit. Hopkins and Glover electrically connected the battery, finally completing the power system upgrade four years after the work began.

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Poll: Are the people who write NYT op-eds better than you?

The newly appointed chief executive of SolarWinds is still trying to unravel how his company became a primary vector for hackers in a massive attack revealed last year, but said evidence is emerging that they were lurking in the company's Office 365 email system for months. From a report: The hackers had accessed at least one of the company's Office 365 accounts by December 2019, and then leapfrogged to other Office 365 accounts used by the company, Sudhakar Ramakrishna said in an interview Tuesday. "Some email accounts were compromised. That led them to compromise other email accounts and as a result our broader [Office] 365 environment was compromised," he said. It is the latest development in the eight-week investigation into one of the worst breaches in U.S. history. SolarWinds, previously a little-known but critical maker of network-management software, is still trying to understand how the hackers first got into the company's network and when exactly that happened. One possibility is that the hackers may have compromised the company's Office 365 accounts even earlier and then used that as the initial point of entry into the company, although that is one of several theories being pursued, Mr. Ramakrishna said.

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Today's song: Cruisin.

Google, together with its partner SubCom, today announced that the company's privately owned Dunant subsea cable between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast is now operational. From a report: Google first announced this project, which was named after the first Noble Peach Price winner and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant, back in the middle of 2018. At the time it expected the project to go live in 2020, but besides dealing with the complications of spanning a long cable between continents, the project leaders probably didn't budget for a global pandemic at the time. The almost 4,000-mile cable has a total capacity of 250 terabits per second -- or enough to transmit the "entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second" (though maybe using Library of Congress data size references is starting to feel a bit antiquated at this point?). Unlike some older cables, Dunant uses 12 fiber pairs, coupled with a number of technical innovations around maximizing its bandwidth, to achieve these numbers. "Google is dedicated to meeting the exploding demand for cloud services and online content that continues unabated," said Mark Sokol, senior director of Infrastructure, Google Cloud. "With record-breaking capacity and transmission speeds, Dunant will help users access content wherever they may be and supplement one of the busiest routes on the internet to support the growth of Google Cloud. Dunant is a remarkable achievement that would not have been possible without the dedication of both SubCom and Google's employees, partners, and suppliers, who overcame multiple challenges this year to make this system a reality."

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Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), the commercial version of the ubiquitous Defender antivirus and Microsoft's top enterprise security solution, is currently having a bad day and labeling yesterday's Google Chrome browser update as a backdoor trojan. From a report: The detections are for Google Chrome 88.0.4324.146, the latest version of the Chrome browser, which Google released last night. As per the screenshot (embedded in the linked story), but also based on reports shared on Twitter by other dismayed system administrators, Defender ATP is currently detecting multiple files part of the Chrome v88.0.4324.146 update package as containing a generic backdoor trojan named "PHP/Funvalget.A." The alerts have caused quite a stir in enterprise environments in light of recent multiple software supply chain attacks that have hit companies across the world over the past few months. System administrators are currently awaiting a formal statement from Microsoft to confirm that the detection is a "false possitive" and not an actual threat.

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PS: I did a blog-like stream on Twitter this morning. As I often say, 280 is a much better number of chars than 140. You can express more ideas in 280.

I'm pissed I didn't know about the Jewish space laser. What am I chopped liver.

Microsoft has moved to capitalise on Google's threat to shut its search engine in Australia, throwing its weight behind efforts to make Big Tech pay for news content and offering to transfer small businesses to its rival service Bing at no cost. From a report: The Seattle-based company on Wednesday slammed Google's threat to exit Australia [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] over the news media bargaining code and said it fully supported a draft law aimed at forcing technology groups to pay news providers for content. "One thing is clear: while other tech companies may sometimes threaten to leave Australia, Microsoft will never make such a threat," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, in a statement. "We are committed to supporting the country's national security and economic success." Canberra's proposed news media bargaining code would introduce binding arbitration and non-discrimination clauses to protect publishers and force Google and Facebook to negotiate payments for carrying their content. Google has a 94.5 per cent market share in search in Australia, while Microsoft's Bing search engine holds 3.6 per cent, according to StatCounter, a web analytics company. Microsoft's decision to throw down the gauntlet will complicate Google's aggressive lobbying campaign against the draft legislation, which it has called "unworkable" and "unreasonable." Mel Silva, Google Australia's chief executive, said last month that if the code became law, Google would have "no real choice but to stop providing search in Australia."

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Doc Searls: "The last flight I ever took was a spectacular pano across the continent on March 11, 2020, while escaping from New York via Newark Airport, where the departing planes were full and the ticketing and security spaces were already emptied. If you page through the photos, you'll see I've captioned every one; and in some cases have also made notes on the images as well."

In a brief discussion about Global Voices on Twitter, I mentioned the idea that news has been unbundled, today no single publication delivers the news, as they used to. A story to illustrate. As a student at UW-Madison in the late 70s, I'd often go to the Memorial Union with a copy of the Chicago Tribune, on a sunny afternoon perhaps, and sit on the patio by Lake Mendota, people-watch, and read the news. Today I'd do it in a minute if I could, but today I'd read news on an iPad or laptop using RSS feeds. I'd have an all-in-one bundled news experience as I did in the 70s. But: My system kind of sucks, I never put any effort into maintaining it, and my system is vastly better than what most people get as a news experience. No wonder the truth has trouble getting out. The news industry blames Facebook, but as a former entrepreneur, I blame them. They've invested so little in understanding how their readers use their product. Their system is based on an incomplete understanding of their roles. The news industry product needs to be re-bundled. I believe the rewards will be huge for the first publication that bets on this idea. They wouldn't be the first, btw -- My.Yahoo did it in the 00's. Have the guts to point to your competition. And if you have a paywall, send them some money and some readers. Now that Jeff Bezos is retired, and owns such a platform, I would stand up and applaud if they had the guts to try this out. I'd also line up to hook my blog into such a network. Not because my writing depends on making money from it, it doesn't, but to help disrupt the news industry that's daydreaming itself to death over distribution, competition and economics.