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.

Elon Musk is now the third-richest person in the world. Musk passed Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg Monday as shares of Tesla continued their unrelenting rally after undergoing a forward stock split. Musk is now worth $115.4 billion compared with $110.8 billion for Zuckerberg. Yahoo Finance reports: Also Monday, Jeff Bezos's ex-wife MacKenzie Scott became the world's richest woman, passing L'Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. Scott, 50, who received a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. as part of her divorce from founder Bezos, is now worth $66.4 billion. Musk, 49, has seen a meteoric rise in his wealth, with his net worth growing by $87.8 billion this year as Tesla shares surged almost 500%. Also helpful: an audacious pay package -- the largest corporate pay deal ever struck between a chief executive officer and a board of directors -- that could yield him more than $50 billion if all goals are met. Tesla's $464 billion market value now exceeds that of retail behemoth Walmart Inc., the largest company in the U.S. by revenue. Last week, Musk joined Zuckerberg, Bezos and Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates in the rarefied centibillionaire club as tech stocks rose.

Yahoo News reports: On Friday, Chadwick Boseman's family posted a final tweet on his Twitter account, announcing that he had died after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Twitter confirmed on Saturday afternoon that this tweet from Boseman's account is now the most-liked tweet on Twitter of all time...
"The 43-year-old's death shocked many in Hollywood who were unaware he had spent the last four years fighting colon cancer," notes the Los Angeles Times. But the tweet confirmed that the nine movies he'd filmed over the last four years — including four Marvel movies — "all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy."

That tweet has now risen to over 7.1 million likes — 65% more than the previous record-holder. Variety reports: Previously, the most-liked tweet on Twitter was from former President Barack Obama, who shared the Nelson Mandela quote, "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion." The tweet was posted on Aug. 12, 2017, the same day as the deadly Charlottesville, Va., car attack at a protest against white supremacists. Obama's former record-holding tweet has 4.3 million likes and 1.6 million retweets.

After Boseman's death, Obama was one of the countless people to post a tribute to the actor, who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42. "Chadwick came to the White House to work with kids when he was playing Jackie Robinson," the former president wrote. "You could tell right away that he was blessed. To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain — what a use of his years."
CNET reports: Many on social media expressed both shock and admiration that the actor continued to produce films during his illness, and many were deeply touched by a video circulating widely Saturday in which Boseman speaks of Ian and Taylor, two children with terminal cancer he'd been in touch with during filming for Black Panther. The kids' parents, Boseman said in the video, relayed that Ian and Taylor were trying to hold on until the 2018 Marvel superhero film came out. We now know Boseman was waging his own cancer fight as he spoke of the children, making the footage all the more poignant.
Twitter has now restored its #BlackPanther emoji for fans organizing watch parties of the 2018 movie, reports Variety, and while some remembered his commencement address at Howard or his impact on other actors, others are sharing stories closer to home: "I keep thinking about my 3-year-old in his Black Panther costume," the writer Clint Smith tweeted. "How he wore it almost every day when he got it, refused to take it off. The way he walked around saying. 'I'm the Black Panther.' How happy it made him. What Chadwick gave us was immeasurable. What an enormous loss."

The stock market is setting new records, with some tech companies at "the steepest premium ever versus cheap shares," reports Bloomberg. (Even Tesla "is trading at more than 800-times earnings while an electric-truck peer, which made just $36,000 last quarter by installing solar panels for its founder, is valued at $16 billion.")

So is it like the great dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, they asked Ryan Jacob, founder of a tech-focused asset management firm. "The only people who say, 'Yes, it's like the 1990s' are hedge-fund managers who are net short and annoyed," he responds. "To say it's like the late 1990s — they have no idea." The global head of equities at JPMorgan Asset Management has been with the firm since 1992, and recalls the dot-com era as a period when investors bet on hoped-for earnings, in contrast to the current environment. "Today, at least for the big companies, the long-term profits have arrived," said New York-based Quinsee. "I would be surprised if there was a similarly spectacular decline. But the market's leadership could change."

The market of 2020 is a very different place than it was two decades ago. The number of domestic U.S. stocks has nearly halved from its 1998 peak to about 3,700 today, with much of the decline driven by disappearing micro-caps... At the height of the dot-com bubble, the median age of a firm going public was five years-old. It's been double that for most of the past decade, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter at the University of Florida. That suggests the kind of fledgling tech companies that imploded in the dot-com era now tend to stay private for longer, and the ones that do go public are usually more mature... As the modern equivalent of dot-coms learned to stay private, growth stocks in the market began to look very different. The Russell 3000 Growth Index currently has a net debt to earnings ratio of just slightly above 1. It was about 2.3 at the end of 1999. And back then, debt was a bigger burden. Around the time firms found themselves hurriedly removing "dot-com" from their names, the Federal Reserve was raising rates. Now, borrowing costs are nearly zero and look likely to stay there for a while...

Cheaper debt and less of it, healthy profits, and a virus-based boost to business. But not everything is different about technology shares in 2020. Predicting the outlook for companies when traditional valuation models do not necessarily apply was a huge challenge during the dot-com bubble, and remains so today... But Jacob can't help feeling his job has become just a little duller. "As a public company investor in today's environment, it's a bit frustrating," he said. "You're not going to replicate what happened in the late 1990s, it was basically the dawning of the Internet."

"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.

For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked...

Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface...

In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said.
Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."

"Steve Saleen claims that China has stolen 40 years' worth of intellectual property from him in launching the Saleen brand in China," reports the site Carscoops.

More information from the Los Angeles Times: Saleen's Chinese backers have accused his business partner of fraud and embezzlement and taken over the company, freezing its accounts and forcing hundreds of employees out of work. Police raided the sprawling new factory emblazoned with Saleen's name. Two senior executives were detained, and a court order sealed its Shanghai showroom... "What I'm trying to do is to bring to light how American companies will contribute IP, brands and knowhow to the China market — and overnight they will change direction, kick you out and keep the IP," Saleen said...

Whatever the outcome, Saleen's bid to bring his high-powered cars to China has crashed, leaving the 71-year-old filled with regret. "When it came to taking my brand on a global basis, it really seemed to offer me an opportunity that I could not refuse," Saleen said. "In hindsight I realize the deal was too good to be true...." Saleen said his experience should convince Washington to enact tougher protections for U.S. investors, deny Chinese firms that steal trade secrets access to capital markets and prohibit the use of Chinese asset valuations that could be subject to manipulation.
Carscoops has some more background: Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Saleen claims "the deal was a sham." According to the racing legend, the joint venture applied for 510 Chinese patents based on his designs, technologies, trade secrets and engineering developments. He adds that most of these patent filings didn't list him as an inventor. The company, known as Jiangsu Saleen Automotive Technologies (JSAT), unveiled a range of models 12 months ago.

Saleen asserts that the government of Rugao is attempting to take over the joint venture now that it has his intellectual property and patents. He claims that the director of corporate affairs for JSAT, Grace Yin Xu, has been missing since June 22 when she entered a government building shortly after refusing to lie to local law enforcement who wanted her to state Saleen's business partner had provided false information and embezzled money. In addition, the company's vice president of manufacturing, Frank Sterzer, was allegedly detained for six hours by the authorities.

In his op-ed, Saleen states that "China can no longer go unchecked", citing a 2019 survey that 20 per cent of North American corporations say the People's Republic has stolen their intellectual property in the past year.

"For the first time ever, the world's largest companies are telling hundreds of thousands of workers to stay away from the office for a full year, or longer," notes the Atlantic.

"If, in five years, these edicts have no lingering effects on office culture, that would be awfully strange..." Ambitious engineers, media makers, marketers, PR people, and others may be more inclined to strike out on their own, in part because they will, at some point, look around at their living room and realize: I am alone, and I might as well monetize the fact of my independence. A new era of entrepreneurship may be born in America, supercharged by a dash of social-existential angst.

Or, you know, maybe not. If companies find that remote work is a mess, they might decide to prematurely scrap the experiment, like IBM and Yahoo famously did. It is certainly curious that the most prestigious tech companies now proclaiming the future of working from home were, just seven months ago, outfitting their offices with the finest sushi bars, yoga rooms, and massage rooms...

Nothing is certain, and every new trend incurs a backlash. Telepresence could crush some downtown businesses; but cheaper downtown real estate could also lead to a resurgence in interesting new restaurants. Working from home could lead to more free-agent entrepreneurship; but if companies notice that they're bleeding talent, they'll haul their workforces back to headquarters. Still, even a moderate increase in remote work could lead to fundamental changes in our labor force, economy, and politics. Remote workers will spend more money and time inside their houses; they will spend more time with online communities than with colleagues; and many will distribute themselves across the country, rather than feel it necessary to cluster near semi-optional headquarters.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Arm Ltd., the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp., accused the ousted head of its China joint venture of hurting its business there, escalating a dispute that's becoming a test of Beijing's willingness to protect foreign investment in the world's second-largest economy.

The U.K. chip giant in June announced it was firing Allen Wu, the head of its Chinese unit, over undisclosed breaches of conduct, but the executive has refused to step down and remains in control of the strategically important operation. Rather than the peaceful, rapid resolution that both sides have said they want, the situation has deteriorated. Wu has hired his own security and won't let representatives of Arm Ltd. or his board on the premises, said a person familiar with the situation. He's refused to hold a planned event to connect Chinese chipmakers with Arm Ltd. and avoided negotiations despite public statements to the contrary, said the person, who asked not to be named...

Resolving the conflict will be crucial to SoftBank's reported plans to sell Arm, a lynchpin in the global smartphone and computing industry that the Japanese firm bought for $32 billion in 2016.

Yesterday, the FCC approved Amazon's plans for its ambitious Kuiper constellation of 3,236 internet-beaming satellites. We have now learned that Amazon will invest $10 billion into the space-based internet delivery system. From a report: The U.S. tech giant said on Thursday it is moving forward with its Project Kuiper, one of several systems planned to bring internet to customers without land-based connections. Project Kuiper aims to deliver satellite-based broadband services in the United States, and eventually around the world, and may offer connectively for wireless carriers and 5G networks. Amazon offer no timetable for the project but said it would begin deployment of its 3,236 satellites after the Federal Communications Commission approved the project.

"We have heard so many stories lately about people who are unable to do their job or complete schoolwork because they don't have reliable internet at home," said Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp. "There are still too many places where broadband access is unreliable or where it doesn't exist at all. Kuiper will change that. Our $10 billion investment will create jobs and infrastructure around the United States that will help us close this gap."

Yahoo has replaced the comments section under its articles with a survey. Now, there's a message that reads: "Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting. In the meantime, we welcome your feedback to help us enhance the experience."

Many readers who frequently comment on Yahoo News articles are quite upset. Some feel as though they're being censored and that Yahoo has made a huge mistake. "Yahoo News nuked all of their comment sections! Guess they were tired of people pushing back against their narratives," one person wrote. "Yahoo just block[ed] their comment section as well. When you read thru them it was 90% conservative veiws [sic]. Guess they can't allow that type of 'free speech,'" said another. Others were thrilled to see Yahoo finally do away with a comment section that often contained messages of hate and vitriol. "Kudos to Yahoo for finally doing something about the comment threads on their articles," one person wrote. "I support the removal of comments. Share articles as is and people can share/comment on their preferred platform," another said.

Do you agree with Yahoo's decision to temporarily disable comments?

U.S. Attorney General William Barr took aim at Hollywood companies, including Walt Disney on Thursday as well as large technology firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft over company actions with China. From a report: "Corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple have shown themselves all too willing to collaborate with the (Chinese Communist party)," Barr said. He added that Hollywood has routinely caved into pressure and censored their films "to appease the Chinese Communist Party. I suspect Walt Disney would be disheartened to see how the company he founded deals with the foreign dictatorships of our day," Barr said in a speech at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan.

Barr chided U.S. companies for being too willing to take steps to ensure access to the large Chinese market. "The Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report," Barr said. "America's big tech companies have also allowed themselves to become pawns of Chinese influence." Barr suggested that Apple iPhones "wouldn't be sold (in China) if they were impervious to penetration by Chinese authorities." He suggested American tech companies were imposing a "double standard."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers at IBM's X-Force security team revealed today that they've obtained roughly five hours of video footage that appears to have been recorded directly from the screens of hackers working for a group IBM calls ITG18, and which other security firms refer to as APT35 or Charming Kitten. It's one of the most active state-sponsored espionage teams linked to the government of Iran. The leaked videos were found among 40 gigabytes of data that the hackers had apparently stolen from victim accounts, including U.S. and Greek military personnel. Other clues in the data suggest that the hackers targeted U.S. State Department staff and an unnamed Iranian-American philanthropist.

The IBM researchers say they found the videos exposed due to a misconfiguration of security settings on a virtual private cloud server they'd observed in previous APT35 activity. The files were all uploaded to the exposed server over a few days in May, just as IBM was monitoring the machine. The videos appear to be training demonstrations the Iran-backed hackers made to show junior team members how to handle hacked accounts. They show the hackers accessing compromised Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts to download their contents, as well as exfiltrating other Google-hosted data from victims. This sort of data exfiltration and management of hacked accounts is hardly sophisticated hacking. It's more the kind of labor-intensive but relatively simple work that's necessary in a large-scale phishing operation. But the videos nonetheless represent a rare artifact, showing a first-hand view of state-sponsored cyberspying that's almost never seen outside of an intelligence agency.

The UK retail arm of Apple paid just $7.7m in taxes last year despite raking in almost $1.7bn in sales, according to the company's latest accounts. From a report: Revenue at Apple Retail UK, which operates 38 of the company's stores in the UK, rose by more than 15% in the 12 months to 28 September. But after costs and expenses of around $1.7bn, the firm reported before-tax profits of just $47m, slashing its tax bill significantly. In a statement describing itself as "the largest taxpayer in the world," Apple said that it always paid the taxes that it owed.