"Bitcoin is now trading near $18,000, up almost 100% in six months," notes Bloomberg columnist Lionel Laurent, "and it's flirting with an all-time high reached in 2017 (which, given it was followed by an ugly crash, faithful Bitcoiners would rather forget)..." .

But what exacty does that mean? He challenges the notion that Bitcoin is the new wealth-protecting investment like gold, asking "is this really being driven by people seeking protection from a more uncertain world...?"

If anything, Bitcoin looks much more like the stock market on steroids than it does a digital version of gold, which has barely budged since the end of October as confidence about a Covid cure has gradually improved. You can see why hedge fund skeptics like Ray Dalio are dubious of Bitcoin's charms. The cryptocurrency's recent above-average correlation with equities is fine when everything's going up, but not in times of stress: In mid-March, for example, a flight to safety triggered by Covid cut Bitcoin's price in half. A recent Kansas City Fed study comparing bonds, gold and Bitcoin between 1995 and Feb. 2020 found Treasuries behaved "consistently" as a safe haven, gold "occasionally" and Bitcoin "never."

Behind the talk of digital gold is the reality of an erratic, still-speculative asset with the potential for big price swings...

While digital payment firms such as PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc. have launched Bitcoin applications, this price jump is not about people buying cappuccinos. Data from Chainalysis estimates merchants made up only about 1% of crypto activity in North America between mid-2019 and mid-2020, while exchanges accounted for almost 90%... Crypto is still a heady bet on life-changing wealth, not a disruptor of how normal people use money.

Mars is a dead planet — "Or is it?" asks the New York Times: Previous research has hinted at volcanic eruptions on Mars 2.5 million years ago. But a new paper suggests an eruption occurred as recently as 53,000 years ago in a region called Cerberus Fossae, which would be the youngest known volcanic eruption on Mars. That drives home the prospect that beneath its rusty surface pocked with gigantic volcanoes that have gone silent, some volcanism still erupts to the surface at rare intervals. "If this deposit is of volcanic origin then the Cerberus Fossae region may not be extinct and Mars may still be volcanically active today," scientists at the University of Arizona and Smithsonian Institution, write in their paper — which was posted online ahead of peer review and has been submitted to the journal Icarus...

If it holds up to scrutiny, the discovery would have large implications for Mars. In geological terms, 53,000 years is the blink of an eye, suggesting Mars might well still be volcanically active now. It could also have big implications for the search for life on Mars. Such volcanic activity could melt subsurface ice, providing a potential habitable environment for living things.

"To have life, you need energy, carbon, water and nutrients," said Steven Anderson, an earth sciences professor at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, who was not involved in the paper. "And a volcanic system provides all of those."

Global internet companies Facebook, Google and Twitter and others have banded together and threatened to leave Pakistan after the South Asian nation granted blanket powers to local regulators to censor digital content. From a report: Earlier this week, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan granted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority the power to remove and block digital content that pose "harms, intimidates or excites disaffection" toward the government or in other ways hurt the "integrity, security, and defence of Pakistan." Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), the tech firms said that they were "alarmed" by the scope of Pakistan's new law targeting internet firms." In addition to Facebook, Google, and Twitter, AIC represents Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, SAP, Expedia Group, Yahoo, Airbnb, Grab, Rakuten, Booking.com, Line, and Cloudflare.

If the message sounds familiar, it's because this is not the first time these tech giants have publicly expressed their concerns over the new law, which was proposed by Khan's ministry in February this year. After the Pakistani government made the proposal earlier this year, the group had threatened to leave, a move that made the nation retreat and promise an extensive and broad-based consultation process with civil society and tech companies. That consultation never happened, AIC said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating that its members will be unable to operate in the country with this law in place.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Marissa Mayer shoves her iPhone toward her MacBook's webcam until it overwhelms the screen on the Google Meet video call we are sharing. "I admire Apple," she declares. "They are the best at what they do. But the fact that the biggest and most successful company on Earth by some measures -- and certainly the best at design, bar none -- thinks that when you meet someone new, that this is an ideal interface is mind-blowing. It's like bad nerd humor." What Mayer is critiquing is the New Contact feature in iOS's Contacts app -- an exceedingly generic screen with fields for you to type first and last names, phone numbers, and other information. It's not uniquely uninspired. Actually, it's comparable to Google's equivalent on an Android phone -- and reminiscent of nearly every other piece of software for managing contacts we've seen throughout the history of smartphones and PCs.

[...] Now Mayer is back in the product business -- and as you may have already guessed, she thinks she has a better way to wrangle contacts. That would be Sunshine Contacts, the new iPhone app (Android is in the works) from her latest company, Sunshine. If you've previously heard of the largely stealthy startup, it was under the name Lumi Labs, which Mayer, its CEO, says was a placeholder all along. The app is launching as an invite-only closed beta; you can download it from the App Store and sign up for an alert when it's ready to let you in. Joining Mayer as cofounder and president is Enrique Munoz Torres, whose entire career has been intertwined with hers. An MIT senior when Mayer hired him as a Google associate product manager in 2004, he left that company in 2013 to join her at Yahoo, where he eventually led the advertising and search businesses. Though both Mayer and Munoz Torres have copious experience creating and ramping up successful products, they are first-time founders. Their company currently has about 20 employees, making it the same size as Google was when Mayer joined it.

Hmmmmmm shares a report: U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Steve Dickson is "100% confident" in the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX but says the airplane maker has more to do as it works to improve its safety culture. Dickson on Wednesday signed an order to allow the best-selling plane to resume flights after it was grounded worldwide in March 2019 following two crashes that killed 346 people and led to Boeing's biggest crisis in decades. The order will end the longest grounding in commercial aviation history and paves the way for Boeing to resume U.S. deliveries and commercial flights by the end of the year. "We've done everything humanly possible to make sure" these types of crashes do not happen again," FAA Administrator Dickson told Reuters in a 30-minute telephone interview, adding the design changes "have eliminated what caused these particular accidents." The FAA is requiring new training to deal with a key safety system called MCAS that is faulted for the two fatal crashes as well as significant new safeguards and other software changes. "I feel 100% confident," said Dickson, a former airline and military pilot, who took over as FAA administration in August 2019 and took the controls for a 737 MAX test flight in September. In a video message released on Wednesday, he said that the 20-month review was "long and grueling, but we said from the start that we would take the time necessary to get this right." Dickson said he emphasized to Boeing the importance of safety. "I understand they have a business to run but they don't have anything if they don't have a safe product," Dickson said. Dickson suggested Boeing has more to do to improve safety.

Disney+, the streaming service that launched one year ago today, grew to 73.7 million paid subscribers as of early October. TechCrunch reports: That's according to The Walt Disney Company's fourth-quarter earnings report, which covers the company's finances through October 3. The company previously said Disney+ had 60.5 million subscribers as of August 3. The release also includes subscriber numbers for Disney's other streaming services -- Hulu had 36.6 million (including 4.1 million subscribers to Hulu + Live TV), while ESPN had 10.3 million (more than doubling from 3.5 million a year earlier).

Overall, Disney's direct-to-consumer segment saw revenue grow 41% year-over-year to $4.9 billion, while its operating loss fell from $751 million in Q4 2019 to $580 million this year. Disney attributed the shrinking losses to "improved results at Hulu and ESPN+, partially offset by higher costs at Disney+, driven by the ongoing rollout." It was a tough quarter for Disney overall, with the pandemic forcing the company to keep some parks closed and the rest operating at reduced capacity. Disney's revenue fell to $14.7 billion (compared to $19.1 billion during Q4 2019), with a loss of $0.39 per share.

Compal, a Taiwanese electronics company that builds laptops for some of the world's largest computer brands, suffered a ransomware attack over the weekend. From a report: Responsible for the breach is believed to be the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang, according to a screenshot of the ransom note shared by Compal employees with Yahoo Taiwan reporters. According to Taiwanese media, the incident was discovered on Sunday morning and is believed to have impacted around 30% of Compal's computer fleet. Employees arriving at work were greeted by a memo from Compal's IT staff, asking workers to check the status of their workstations and back up important files on systems that were not impacted.

"Mark Kelly will soon be the fourth NASA astronaut to serve in the U.S. Congress," writes People magazine.

DevNull127 shares their report: In a tweet posted Wednesday, he said he was "deeply honored" to have been elected and to serve in the seat once held by the late Sen. John McCain. A retired U.S. Navy captain and astronaut, Kelly has flown in four space missions, including the final mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2011. He is married to former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, [who] was shot and nearly killed in 2011.

His identical twin Scott Kelly is also a retired astronaut. The two participated in NASA's landmark "twins study," in which Scott spent a year aboard the space station while scientists collected Mark's physiological data back home for comparison...

When he is sworn in, Kelly will be the only active member of Congress to have flown in space. He is preceded by three former NASA astronauts: former Sens. John Glenn and Jack Schmitt and Rep. Jack Swigert. Two other former members of Congress — Sen. Jake Garn and Rep. Bill Nelson — have flown in space as payload specialists. Apollo 13 astronaut John "Jack" Swigert was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, but died of cancer before he could take office.
Saturday Kelly tweeted, "Congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We've got some challenges ahead of us, and I'm looking forward to working together to tackle them."

And the same day his brother Scott Kelly tweeted a memory about the moment he left the International Space Station after 500 days, "looked out the window of our space capsule at the truss, and was struck with awe at how we came together & accomplished this great feat.

"And that if we can do this, we can do anything if we commit ourselves and work together."

An anonymous reader quotes Time: The United States has reached a new record high in the number of daily COVID-19 infections, surpassing the peak in mid-July during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic's domestic toll. As of Oct. 24, there was a weekly average of 23.0 infections per 100,000 residents, up from 20.5 on July 19 and ticking rapidly upward. The country also set a new single-day record on Oct. 23 with 83,757 new cases.

There have been clear signs for weeks of a third wave of the pandemic in the U.S. as the weather gets colder and the virus has migrated from metropolitan regions to more rural settings. But it was far from certain, at the beginning of October, that the resurgence would surpass that of the summer...

We know now that the third wave will be worse than the second, which was far worse than the first, when cases peaked at 9.7 per 100,000 on April 7.
Reuters reports that France has also "registered a record 52,010 new confirmed coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, following a record 45,422 on Saturday, the health ministry said in a statement on Sunday... The new cases took the total to 1,138,507, with France now ahead of Argentina and Spain to register the world's fifth highest number of cases after the United States, India, Brazil and Russia.

"In the past three days, France has registered over 139,000 new cases, which is more than the 132,000 cases registered during the two-month lockdown from mid-March to mid-May."

"We're in a new world where governments are more concerned about the security of their digital infrastructure and the resiliency of their supply chains," Jimmy Goodrich, vice president of global policy with the Washington-based Semiconductor Industry Association, tells Bloomberg.

"The techno-nationalist trends gaining traction in multiple capitals around the world are a challenge to the semiconductor industry." At once highly globalized and yet concentrated in the hands of a few countries, the industry has choke points that the U.S. under the presidency of Donald Trump has sought to exploit in order to thwart China's plans to become a world leader in chip production. Washington says Beijing can only achieve that goal through state subvention [funding] at the expense of U.S. industry, while furthering Communist Party access to high-tech tools for surveillance and repression. China rejects the allegations, accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy and acting out of political motivation. For both sides, Taiwan, which is responsible for some 70% of chips manufactured to order, is the new front line...

Citing the need to promote "digital sovereignty," the European Commission is exploring a 30 billion-euro ($35 billion) drive to raise Europe's share of the world chip market to 20%, from less than 10% now. Japan is also looking to bolster its domestic capacity. At least one Japanese delegation traveled to Taiwan in May and June this year in the hope of convincing TSMC to invest in Japan, a person with knowledge of the visit said. But TSMC announced in May that it was building a $12 billion facility in Arizona, and the company declined to receive any foreign visitors seeking to woo it, said another person familiar with the company's thinking....

A focus of Beijing is to accelerate research into so-called third-generation semiconductors — circuits made of materials such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, a fledgling technology where no country dominates. Yet without silicon capabilities it will be difficult for China to build a proper semiconductor industry, said a senior TSMC official. Another person from a company involved in third-generation chip production said designing them is an art, and even poaching a team of designers won't necessarily guarantee success. The consensus is it won't be easy for China to catch up, especially at the cutting-edge where TSMC and Samsung are producing chips whose circuits are measured in single-digit nanometers, or billionths of a meter. SMIC [a partially state-owned Chinese semiconductor foundry] would have to double annual research spending in the next two-to-three years just to prevent its technology gap with those companies widening, says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Charles Shum.

The tussle raises the prospect of a broader decoupling of the global industry with two distinct supply chains.

Blooming algae was behind a recent mass death of sea animals that saw octopuses and seals wash up on the shore off a Russian peninsula, scientists said on Friday in the final conclusion to their probe. From a report: Locals in Kamchatka, a volcanic peninsula in Russia's Far East, raised the alarm in September after the animals were found dead and surfers complained of stinging eyes. Scientists later said that up to 95 percent of marine life living along the seabed in the affected area had died. Environmental campaigners said they were conducting their own inquiries and were not yet able to confirm the official probe's findings. Andrei Adrianov, vice president of Russia's Academy of Sciences, announced the probe's conclusions on Friday, saying the mass death was due to the effects of toxins from single-cell algae. Speaking at the same meeting, Svetlana Radionova of environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor said her agency conducted over 5,000 tests. She said the agency did not see a way the situation could have been caused by humans. In a separate criminal probe, investigators announced they had eliminated oil spills and toxic waste as possible causes. They added that the previously reported high levels of phenol and petroleum products were "not critical" and had been observed in the bay for decades.

Intel shares are off around 10% in after-hours trading after the chip company reported its Q3 data. TechCrunch explains why: Investors had expected Intel to report an adjusted $1.11 in per-share profit, off around 22% from the year-ago period. They also expected it to report revenues of $18.26 billion in Q3, down a more modest 5% compared to the year-ago Q3. Notably, Intel beat revenue expectations with top line of $18.3 billion, and met earnings-per-share estimates of $1.11, on an adjusted basis. So, why are Intel shares sharply lower?

Quick consensus appears to point to weakness in the company data-focused business unit, the smaller of Intel's two halves (the other focuses on PC chips). Inside the data-side of Intel, its Data Center Group (DCG) had mixed results, including cloud revenue growth of 15%. However, at the same time, the DCG's "Enterprise & Government" business shrank 47% compared to the year-ago period, following what Intel described as "two quarters of more than 30 percent growth." Off that weakness, the resulting top line miss was sharp, with the market expecting $6.22 billion in revenue and DCG only delivering $5.9 billion.

Intel blamed COVID-19 for the weak economics conditions at play in the result. The company also highlighted COVID-19 when it discussed results from its internet of things business and memory operation, which declined 33% and 11% on a year-over-year basis, respectively. Perhaps due to COVID-19's recent resurgence in both North America and Europe, investors are concerned that the macroeconomic issues harming Intel's growth could continue. If so, growth could be negative for a longer period than anticipated. That perspective could have led to some selling of Intel's equity after the earnings report.

You may have noticed a rash of provocative headlines this week suggesting that mouthwash can "inactivate" coronaviruses and help curb their spread. While the news is based on a new study from researchers at the Penn State College of Medicine, it's important to note that the study focused on a coronavirus that causes common colds -- not the one that causes COVID-19. "Not only did the study not investigate this deadly new virus, but it also did not test whether mouthwash affects how viruses spread from person to person," adds Katherine J. Wu via The New York Times. From the report: "I don't have a problem with using Listerine," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. "But it's not an antiviral." The study, which was published last month in the Journal of Medical Virology, looked only at a coronavirus called 229E that causes common colds -- not the new coronavirus, which goes by the formal name of SARS-CoV-2, and causes far more serious disease. Researchers can study SARS-CoV-2 only in high-security labs after undergoing rigorous training. The two viruses are in the same family, and, in broad strokes, look anatomically similar, which can make 229E a good proxy for SARS-CoV-2 in certain experiments. But the two viruses shouldn't be thought of as interchangeable, Dr. Rasmussen said.

The researchers tested the virus-destroying effects of several products, including a watered-down mixture of Johnson's baby shampoo -- which is sometimes used to flush out the inside of the nose -- and mouthwashes made by Listerine, Crest, Orajel, Equate and C.V.S. They flooded 229E coronaviruses, which had been grown in human liver cells in the lab, with these chemicals for 30 seconds, 1 minute or 2 minutes -- longer than the typical swig or spritz into a nose or mouth. Around 90 to 99 percent of the viruses could no longer infect cells after this exposure, the study found.

But because the study didn't recruit any human volunteers to gargle the products in question, the findings have limited value for the real world, other experts said. The human mouth, full of nooks and crannies and a slurry of chemicals secreted by a diverse cadre of cells, is far more complicated than the inside of a laboratory dish. Nothing should be considered conclusive "unless human studies are performed," said Dr. Maricar Malinis, an infectious disease expert at Yale University. [...] Even if people did a very thorough job coating the inside of their mouths or noses with a coronavirus-killing chemical, a substantial amount of the virus would still remain in the body. The new coronavirus infiltrates not only the mouth and nose, but also the deep throat and lungs, where mouthwash and nasal washes hopefully never enter. Viruses that have already hidden away inside cells will also be shielded from the fast-acting chemicals found in these products.

In an interview with Kotaku, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that Microsoft doesn't need to ship future Bethesda games on PlayStation in order to recoup the $7.5 billion it spent acquiring Bethesda's parent company, Zenimax Media, last month. Spencer also explained that the deal wasn't specifically signed to take games away from the platform. Pure Xbox reports: "This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: 'How do we keep other players from playing these games?' We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games. But I'll also say in the model -- I'm just answering directly the question that you had -- when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don't have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means."

Previously, Spencer noted to Yahoo Finance that the Xbox community should feel the Bethesda acquisition is a "huge investment in the experiences they are going to have in the Xbox ecosystem," and he wants that ecosystem to "absolutely be the best place to play, and we think game availability is absolutely part of that." However, the Xbox boss has also confirmed that decisions on whether games will be exclusive to Xbox will ultimately be made on a "case-by-case basis", so it might still be a while before we know more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: In a new study published Wednesday, researchers in Canada found that, among 95 critically ill COVID-19 patients, 84 percent of those with the blood types A and AB required mechanical ventilation compared to 61 percent of patients with type O or type B, CNN reports. The former group also remained in the intensive care unit for a median of 13.5 days, while the latter's median stay was nine days.

Dr. Mypinder Sekhon, an intensive care physician at Vancouver General Hospital and the author of the study, said blood type has been "at the back of my mind" when treating patients, but "we need repeated findings across many jurisdictions that show the same thing" before anything definitive is established. It's still unclear what may be behind the possible distinction; Sekhon said one explanation could be that people with blood type O are less prone to blood clotting, which can often lead to more severe cases. Either way, Sekhon doesn't believe blood type will supersede other "risk factors of severity" like age or comorbidities, and he said people should not behave differently based on their group. The two studies were published in the journal Blood Advances.

As Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google are being targeted by the House Judiciary Committee for abusing American antitrust law, one major company has managed to escape the glare: Microsoft. That's because they are now "the adult in the room in some ways on this issue," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), a Democratic member of the House Antitrust subcommittee, which has been diving into Big Tech's practices for the last 16 months. Yahoo Finance reports: Jayapal's Seattle district includes Amazon's headquarters and the company's practices, specifically how it uses data from third-party sellers, has been one of her major focuses. It's Congress's job to make sure "a company like Amazon can't just put a small business that produces diapers out of business by taking all of that market information that nobody else has access to, and using it to subsidize losses and push small companies out," Jayapal told Yahoo Finance.

She has also had a less-than-cordial relationship with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. During a Yahoo Finance interview this summer, Jayapal said she had never before met the billionaire. They did talk virtually in July when she grilled him during the hearings, but she said this week that communication since then has been sparse. "I've had an open door policy to speaking with Mr. Bezos and have invited him many times," she said. Though she has met with Amazon senior managers.

"The lesson here is self-regulation doesn't work," said Jayapal. She points to Microsoft as an example that Amazon should follow, of successfully working with the government. In 1998, Microsoft was the subject of Congressional antitrust inquiries and many wanted to break the company up. In the end, Bill Gates was able to avoid a breakup by promising to change his company's ways. The company had to "change its culture, change its lines of business," Jayapal said. The process of government involvement led to Microsoft creating a "platform for other small companies to thrive," she said. Jayapal also pointed to the Microsoft example as to why breaking up a company isn't always the best option. "Perhaps in retrospect, Amazon, after we've regulated them, after we've put through some of the recommendations that are in the report, we'll look back and say, "You know what? It's a good thing that that happened," she said.

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. From a report: Sir Roger, 89, who won the honour for his seminal work proving that black holes exist, said he had found six 'warm' points in the sky (dubbed 'Hawking Points') which are around eight times the diameter of the Moon. They are named after Prof Stephen Hawking, who theorised that black holes 'leak' radiation and eventually evaporate away entirely. The timescale for the complete evaporation of a black hole is huge, possibly longer than the age of our current universe, making them impossible to detect. However, Sir Roger believes that 'dead' black holes from earlier universes or 'aeons' are observable now. If true, it would prove Hawking's theories were correct.

Sir Roger shared the World Prize in physics with Prof Hawking in 1988 for their work on black holes. Speaking from his home in Oxford, Sir Roger said: "I claim that there is observation of Hawking radiation. The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future. We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points. We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points." Sir Roger has recently published his theory of 'Hawking Points' in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Amazon has teamed up with Universal Music and Warner Music to remaster thousands of popular streaming tracks to better-than-CD audio quality [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], as the music industry tries to lure listeners to pricier subscriptions. From a report: In addition to a standard $10 a month streaming service comparable to Spotify, Amazon offers a high-definition option that delivers songs to smartphones at CD sound quality or better. This service costs $15 a month, or $13 a month for members of its Prime shipping programme. The ecommerce group has spent the past year working to boost its pricier streaming service with albums from stars including Lady Gaga, Nirvana, Ariana Grande and Bob Marley in what it calls "ultra high-definition." To do so, Universal Music went back to the original recordings of albums such as Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's Diana & Marvin and worked with sound engineers to remaster them. Amazon says the audio will "reveal nuances that were once flattened in files compressed for digital streaming or CD manufacturing." The move comes as the inflow of cash from music streaming has slowed over the past year as the market matures

Gen. Keith Alexander is joining Amazon's board of directors, the company revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today. The Verge reports: A former director of the National Security Agency and the first commander of the US Cyber Command, Alexander served as the public face of US data collection during the Edward Snowden leaks, but he retired from public service in 2013. Alexander is a controversial figure for many in the tech community because of his involvement in the widespread surveillance systems revealed by the Snowden leaks. Those systems included PRISM, a broad data collection program that compromised systems at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook -- but not Amazon.

Alexander was broadly critical of reporting on the Snowden leaks, even suggesting that reporters should be legally restrained from covering the documents. [...] Alexander's board spot will also give Amazon new expertise in defense contracting, an area of particular focus for the company in recent years.

The National Security Agency program that swept up details on billions of Americans' phone calls was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. From a report: However, the unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the role the so-called telephone metadata program played in a criminal terror-fundraising case against four Somali immigrants was so minor that it did not undermine their convictions. The long-awaited decision is a victory for prosecutors, but some language in the court's opinion could be viewed as a rebuke of sorts to officials who defended the snooping by pointing to the case involving Basaaly Moalin and three other men found guilty by a San Diego jury in 2013 on charges of fundraising for Al-Shabaab. Judge Marsha Berzon's opinion, which contains a half-dozen references to the role of former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in disclosing the NSA metadata program, concludes that the "bulk collection" of such data violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The call-tracking effort began without court authorization under President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A similar program was approved by the secretive FISA Court beginning in 2006 and renewed numerous times, but the 9th Circuit panel said those rulings were legally flawed.