"Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth," reports Scientific American: The sales pitch can be stunning. As Ryan Shearman, the founder and CEO of a New York-based company called Aether, recently explained to a reporter for Vogue magazine: Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year. With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, "you're essentially offsetting 2 and a half years of your life." It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks. Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power. Or, as Shearman sometimes puts it, "we're committed to the unprecedented modern alchemy of turning air pollution into precious stones." Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements. Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond...

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Eli Lilly and Company's experimental intravenous drug donanemab "could slow the cognitive decline of patients with Alzheimer's disease," reports CNN, citing early clinical trial results, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine: The study included 257 patients with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease; 131 received donanemab, while 126 received a placebo. The researchers found donanemab slowed the decline of cognition and daily function in Alzheimer's patients by 32% after 76 weeks, compared to those who received a placebo. Taken over 18 months, that 32% slowing of decline could be noticeably impactful for Alzheimer's patients, noted Maria Carrillo, chief science officer at the Alzheimer's Association, who was not involved in the study. "Out of 18 months, in comparison to the people that did not get the drug, these folks were declining six months slower," Carrillo said. "That's six more months of better cognition, better memories, better enjoyable times with your family...." "This has a lot of potential," Carrillo added. "It could be a first step towards slowing more significantly, or stopping, cognitive decline in these earlier stages, which would really be transformational for our field..." The researchers also looked at the drug's impact on the buildup of amyloid beta plaque and tau proteins, which are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. At 52 weeks, almost 60% of participants had reached amyloid-negative status, meaning their levels were at those of otherwise healthy people. At 76 weeks, amyloid plaque levels — measured in centiloids — decreased by 85 centiloids more than in those who received the placebo, the researchers reported... "We are extremely pleased about these positive findings for donanemab as a potential therapy for people living with Alzheimer's disease, the only leading cause of death without a treatment that slows disease progression," Dr. Mark Mintun, Eli Lilly's vice president of pain and neurodegeneration, said in a January statement announcing the trial results... Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, and currently affects 6.2 million Americans age 65 and older, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

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Salesforce canceled its 325,000-square-foot lease at the unbuilt Parcel F tower in San Francisco's Transbay neighborhood, reports SFGate: The company announced in February that more than half of its workforce will continue working remotely or on a flexible schedule after the pandemic is over... The lease termination is just the latest blow to San Francisco's downtown office footprint as more companies shrink or offload leases because of the persistence of remote work. The lease on Yelp's 161,876-square-foot office space at 140 New Montgomery St. is up in October 2021 and the entire space has been listed for rent. WeWork confirmed it would be scaling back its Bay Area locations and is closing five downtown locations. Just this week, the Mission Bay headquarters once leased by Dropbox is being sold for $1.08 billion. The company adopted a remote work policy in October 2020... In August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to terminate its lease for 88 Bluxome.

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"Tens of millions of doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca are sitting idly in American manufacturing facilities," reports the New York Times, "awaiting results from its U.S. clinical trial while countries that have authorized its use beg for access." schwit1 shares their report: The fate of those doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine is the subject of an intense debate among White House and federal health officials, with some arguing the administration should let them go abroad where they are desperately needed while others are not ready to relinquish them, according to senior administration officials... About 30 million doses are currently bottled at AstraZeneca's facility in West Chester, Ohio, which handles "fill-finish," the final phase of the manufacturing process during which the vaccine is placed in vials, one official with knowledge of the stockpile said. Emergent BioSolutions, a company in Maryland that AstraZeneca has contracted to manufacture its vaccine in the United States, has also produced enough vaccine in Baltimore for tens of millions more doses once it is filled into vials and packaged, the official said. But although AstraZeneca's vaccine is already authorized in more than 70 countries, according to a company spokesman, its U.S. clinical trial has not yet reported results, and the company has not applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization. AstraZeneca has asked the Biden administration to let it loan American doses to the European Union, where it has fallen short of its original supply commitments and where the vaccination campaign has stumbled badly. The administration, for now, has denied the request, one official said... Johnson & Johnson, which has authorization for its vaccine in the United States but fell behind on its production targets in both the United States and Europe, recently asked the United States to loan 10 million doses to the European Union, but the Biden administration also denied that request, according to American and European officials... The administration has focused on Johnson & Johnson's one-shot vaccine, brokering a deal to have the pharmaceutical giant Merck manufacture and bottle the shot and announcing plans to secure 100 million additional doses... Privately, two senior administration officials said that by helping Johnson & Johnson scale up with the Merck deal, the White House is laying the groundwork for the company to eventually make its vaccine available overseas.

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Bleeping Computer reports: The most well-known and popular blogging platform, WordPress, is considering dropping support for Internet Explorer 11 as the browser's usage dips below 1%. Using three metrics to determine the number of people still using IE 11, WordPress has found that its cumulative usage is below 1%... WordPress is not alone in dropping support for IE 11. In August 2020, Microsoft announced that they would no longer support Internet Explorer on the Microsoft Teams web app, and Microsoft 365 would no longer support it starting on August 17th, 2021. "Dropping support would result in smaller scripts, lower maintenance burden, and decrease build times," notes a post on the Wordpress blog. "For instance, a recent exploration by @youknowriad demonstrated that not transpiling the scripts to IE11 immediately resulted in a net reduction of nearly 84kB in the Gutenberg JavaScript [Wordpress Editor interface] built files, representing a 7,78% total decrease in size; these scripts have seen a size contraction up to 60%, with an average reduction of 24%... "Moreover, dropping support would ultimately make WordPress' currently included polyfill script obsolete, decreasing the enqueued scripts size up to 102kB more."

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The more they try to rush Cuomo's resignation, the more I want it to stop. I'm a NY voter, btw.

"The cracking of a previously-unbreakable encrypted messaging service popular with criminals involved in drug trafficking and organised crime delivered a major victory for the justice system on Tuesday," writes the Brussels Times, in a story shared by DI4BL0S: The cracking of the expensive messaging app, called "Sky ECC," was what allowed over 1,500 police officers across Belgium to be simultaneously deployed in at least 200 raids, many of which were centred around Antwerp and involved special forces. Investigators succeeded in cracking Sky ECC at the end of last year, according to reporting by De Standaard, and as a result were able to sort through thousands of messages major criminals were sending each other over the course of a month. Information gained from those conversations is what led to Tuesday's historic operation, two years in the making. Sky ECC became popular with drug criminals after its successor Encrochat was cracked in 2020 by French and Dutch investigators, who were able to intercept over 100 million messages sent via the app. That led to over a hundred suspects being arrested in the Netherlands, uncovering a network of laboratories where crystal meth and other drugs were being produced and allowing police to seize 8,000 kilos of cocaine and almost €20 million.... In a press conference by Belgium's federal public prosector's office on Tuesday afternoon, authorities stated that 17 tonnes of cocaine and €1.2 million were seized, and that 48 suspects were arrested. Critics of Sky ECC "say more than 90% of its customers are criminals," according to the Brussels Times. Days later America's Justice Department indicted the CEO of Sky Global "for allegedly selling their devices to help international drug traffickers avoid law enforcement," reports Vice. They call it "only the second time the DOJ has filed charges against an encrypted phone company, and signals that the DOJ will continue to prosecute the heads and associates of companies that they say cater deliberately to facilitating criminal acts." Earlier the Brussels Times had quoted the app's makers statement that they "strongly believe that privacy is a fundamental human right." The newspaper also reported that Sky ECC calls itself "the world's most secure messaging app" — and "had previously said 'hacking is impossible'" — though in fact investigators have already decrypted almost half a billion messages.

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"Microsoft-owned GitHub has removed a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for critical ProxyLogon bugs in Microsoft Exchange, causing a backlash from security researchers," reports Inside.com's Developer newsletter: The exploit has recently led to infections of as many as 100,000 servers. Microsoft rushed out patches last week for the vulnerabilities in response to a number of Chinese groups exploiting the bugs. "This is huge, removing a security researcher's code from GitHub against their own product and which has already been patched. This is not good," Dave Kennedy, founder of TrustedSec, tweeted. "It's unfortunate that there's no way to share research and tools with professionals without also sharing them with attackers, but many people (like me) believe the benefits outweigh the risks," tweeted Tavis Ormandy, a member of Google's Project Zero.

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Attacks that leverage Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities "have escalated," warns CNN. They cite a senior White House official saying the window for updating exposed servers is incredibly short -- "measured in hours, not days." On Thursday, Microsoft and security researchers warned that the vulnerabilities are now being combined with another potent cybersecurity threat: ransomware, which locks up a computer or a network's files and holds them hostage until the victim pays a fee. "We have detected and are now blocking a new family of ransomware being used after an initial compromise of unpatched on-premises Exchange Servers," Microsoft said in a tweet. Security experts at Palo Alto Networks estimated Thursday that at least 20,000 US-based Exchange servers remain unpatched and vulnerable to exploitation, and as many as 80,000 around the globe. Other security researchers say the pace of attacks against Exchange servers is rising as opportunistic hackers seek to take advantage of the opening found by Hafnium, the group Microsoft has said is responsible for the original breaches and is "assessed to be state-sponsored and operating out of China." The number of attempted attacks against organizations has been doubling every two to three hours, according to Check Point Research, which monitors the internet for malicious activity.

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Pretty sure we all want the same thing, what's fair, to be ourselves, for people to care about us. I don't think it matters what our identity is, at the core, we're pretty similar.

Another thing we have in common is that we believe and share lies about each other. That keeps us isolated and from working with each other.

The golden rule I believe is our salvation. Respect the differences, but treat each other with respect, and always when you can, the benefit of the doubt.

If someone says someone else is evil, focus on what you know not what they say.

Why Cuomo matters. First, being fair to everyone matters. And when you see someone rushed off to oblivion, as is happening with Cuomo, and what happened to Franken, and other people you probably never heard of, this has a nasty side-effect with people who identify with Cuomo and Franken and the others. They think you're going to do the same to them. Some would say if you did nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about. Hah. You know where that comes from. That's the kind of shit Joseph McCarthy used to say about people who worried about being purged in one of his un-American trials. It's a common thread, and totally anti-democratic. We believe in due process here, not in mob rule. And what's happening here is mob rule, even if you aren't willing to say so publicly, you know it is. Take a close look at why you're not willing to say it publicly. What does that say about where you live. And what does it say about you.

"Three recently unearthed vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, located in the iSCSI module used for accessing shared data storage facilities, could allow root privileges to anyone with a user account," reports SC Media: "If you already had execution on a box, either because you have a user account on the machine, or you've compromised some service that doesn't have repaired permissions, you can do whatever you want basically," said Adam Nichols, principal of the Software Security practice at GRIMM. While the vulnerabilities "are in code that is not remotely accessible, so this isn't like a remote exploit," said Nichols, they are still troublesome. They take "any existing threat that might be there. It just makes it that much worse," he explained. "And if you have users on the system that you don't really trust with root access it, it breaks them as well." Referring to the theory that 'many eyes make all bugs shallow,' Linux code "is not getting many eyes or the eyes are looking at it and saying that seems fine," said Nichols. "But, [the bugs] have been in there since the code was first written, and they haven't really changed over the last 15 years...." That the flaws slipped detection for so long has a lot to do with the sprawl of the the Linux kernel. It "has gotten so big" and "there's so much code there," said Nichols. "The real strategy is make sure you're loading as little code as possible." The bugs are in all Linux distributions, Nichols said, although the kernel driver is not loaded by default. Whether a normal user can load the vulnerable kernel module varies. They can, for instance, on all Red Hat based distros that GRIMM tested, he said. "Even though it's not loaded by default, you can get it loaded and then of course you can exploit it without any trouble...." The bugs have been patched in the following kernel releases: 5.11.4, 5.10.21, 5.4.103, 4.19.179, 4.14.224, 4.9.260, and 4.4.260. All older kernels are end-of- life and will not receive patches.

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I pay for the Washington Post. Reading an article carefully, word for word, one I care about a lot, the text scrolls at random times and the place I was reading is now a screen away, in either direction. This is a bullshit way to treat a paying customer.

The Washington Post reports: Tesla's Bay Area production plant recorded hundreds of covid-19 cases following CEO Elon Musk's defiant reopening of the plant in May, according to county-level data obtained by a legal transparency website. The document, obtained by the website PlainSite following a court ruling this year, showed Tesla received around 10 reports of covid-19 in May when the plant reopened, and saw a steady rise in cases all the way up to 125 in December, as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus peaked around the country. The revelation follows The Washington Post's reporting in June that there had been multiple covid-19 cases reported at Tesla's facilities in Fremont, Calif., after Musk decided to reopen despite a countywide stay-at-home order, daring officials to arrest him. The data, covering the months between May and December, showed there were around 450 total reported cases. Roughly 10,000 people work at the plant... Despite around 10 cases in May, according to the data, the health department told The Post in early June that there were no known cases of workplace infections affecting county residents. Tesla and the Alameda County Public Health Department and representatives did not respond to a request for comment... Tesla also came under fire for its treatment of workers. It had promised they could remain home if they felt uncomfortable returning to the line. The Post reported in late June and July that workers concerned about covid exposure received termination notices after they did not return to work. The data released by Alameda County shows there were 19 reported cases in June and 58 reported cases at the plant in July.

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Has anyone polled New York voters on whether they want Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign? I haven’t seen any results. The journalists and politicians pushed Al Franken out just like they’re pushing Cuomo out now. Why not have a somewhat democratic process? Wouldn’t the cause be better served?