Apple on Monday began adding labels that reveal what user data is gathered by games, chat or other software offered in the App Store for its popular mobile devices. The iPhone maker announced plans for such privacy labels when it first unveiled the new version of its iOS mobile operating system, which it released in September. “App Store product pages will feature summaries of developers’ self-reported privacy practices, displayed in a simple, easy-to-read format,” Apple said in a blog post when iOS 14 launched. “Starting early next year, all apps will be required to obtain user permission before tracking.” Apple began pushing out the labels Monday, with the rule applying to new apps for iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac computers. The labels will contain information provided by developers when they submit apps for approval to appear on the App Store’s virtual shelves, according to the Silicon Valley-based company. Apple last week began requiring developers to submit privacy information for use in labels. “Apple recently required that all apps distributed via their App Store display details designed to show people how their data may be used,” Facebook-owned smartphone messaging service WhatsApp said in a blog post explaining what data the app gathers. “We must collect some information to provide a reliable global communications service,” it said. The aim, according to Apple, is for users to be able to easily see and understand what apps do with their data, from lists of contacts to where they are. Data types added to labels will include tracking in order to target advertising or sharing with data brokers, as well as information that could reveal user identity. Apple and Android mobile operating systems provide tools for controlling the kinds of data apps can access once they are installed. 
 
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After nearly an hour of widespread global outages of Google services, most users were again able to access their Gmail, Google Drive and YouTube accounts Monday morning.
 
“Update — We’re back up and running! You should be able to access YouTube again and enjoy videos as normal,” YouTube tweeted once service was restored.
 
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., has not said what caused the outage.
 
Some users of Google Home Services, which can control lighting and other smart devices, reported outages, as well.
 
“I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking … a lot right now,” tweeted one user.I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking… a lot right now.— Joe Brown (@joemfbrown) December 14, 2020 
According to Bloomberg, Google search and advertisements were not affected by the down time.
 
While outages among Big Tech companies are not uncommon, this outage was notable because it impacted so many different Google products, Bloomberg reported. 
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The U.S. added China’s biggest computer chipmaker SMIC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies last week, a move that will further widen the gap between China’s chip technology and the rest of the world.Despite its status as the world’s factory, China has never figured out how to make advanced chips. In recent years, Beijing has been planning a series of sweeping government policies and pouring billions of dollars into the industry to fulfill its chip self-sufficiency goal.So far, under ever-tightening international export controls, however, the country has only found itself mired in some of the most embarrassing industrial failures in its recent history. Most notably, one of the nation’s most high-profile chipmakers was taken over by municipal authorities in its home city of Wuhan, and a Beijing-based chipmaker, the Tsinghua Unigroup, defaulted on a corporate bond.FILE – A Chinese microchip is seen through a microscope set up at the booth for the state-controlled Tsinghua Unigroup project which is driving China’s semiconductor ambitions during the 21st China Beijing International High-tech Expo in Beijing.In this highly internationally integrated industry, experts say, no country can manufacture chips on its own, and China’s efforts to develop its semiconductor sector remains out of reach.Highly globalized chainSemiconductor production is considered one of the most sophisticated manufacturing processes in the world, involving more than 50 disciplines. Billions of transistor structures must be built within a few millimeters.The core equipment used to manufacture computer chips includes lithography machines. A Dutch company called ASML is the only company in the world currently capable of producing high-end extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. Of its 17 core suppliers, though, more than half are from the United States, and the rest are companies located throughout Europe.The company is jointly owned by shareholders from dozens of countries. According to its official website, among the top three major shareholders, two are from the United States and one is from the United Kingdom. Capital Research and Management Co. is the largest shareholder, and the second largest is the BlackRock Group; both are in the U.S. Additionally, Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung also hold shares in ASML, allowing these two manufacturers to enjoy the priority right to purchase the machine.   In Bid to Rely Less on US, China Firms Stockpile Taiwan Tech HardwareChina wants to become technologically self-reliant in 10 years but needs help for nowWhile ASML may dominate the chipmaking machine market, it is only one part of the long chain in the industry. The lens of its lithography machine is manufactured by Zeiss of Germany, the laser technology is owned by Cymer of the United States, and a French company provides key valves.Jan-Peter Kleinhans, a senior researcher at the Berlin think tank New Responsibility Foundation and director of the Technology and Geopolitics Project, said no country can make chips without foreign companies’ technology. He told VOA in a telephone interview that it took ASML more than two decades to develop their machines, and “they rely themselves on a network of around 5,000 suppliers to build this machine.”Kleinhans said that without the participation of any one of these companies, the entire global semiconductor chain would break.Kobe Goldberg, a researcher at the New American Security Research Center, told VOA that what China is trying to do is to build a totally nationalized supply chain in a highly internationalized industry. “That is much more difficult in an industry like semiconductors since it is so internationally integrated.”John Lee, a senior researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a think tank in Germany, said several Chinese firms already have the capacity to manufacture or fabricate some semiconductors. But they can easily face a crackdown by the U.S. government since American companies have a very strong dominance in the upstream segment of the supply chain, such as chip design.
 Huawei’s Survival at Stake as US Sanctions LoomStarting Sept. 15, China’s telecom giant Huawei will be cut off from essential supplies of semiconductors and without those chips, Huawei cannot make smartphones or 5G equipment on which its business depends, business analysts say”The dominance of U.S.-origin technology in upstream sectors of the global semiconductor supply chain means that Chinese ICT [information and communications technology] firms across the board are exposed to U.S. export controls, regardless of what happens to SMIC or Huawei as individual companies,” Lee added.Multilateral export controlThe multilateral export control implemented by democratic countries can be traced back to the informal multilateral regime called the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom).  Established in 1949, the 17-member organization, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Australia, attempted to coordinate controls over the export of strategic materials and technology to communist countries. In 1952, a separate group was established to scrutinize exports to China.US Imposes Curbs on Exports by China’s Top Chipmaker SMICNew Commerce Department requirements mean American suppliers of certain technology products to SMIC must apply for individual licenses before they can exportAlthough CoCom ceased to function on March 31, 1994, the list of prohibited items it formulated was later inherited by another multilateral export agreement, the Wassenaar Arrangement, which was signed in 1996. As many as 42 European, American and Asian countries joined the program, which allows member states to exercise control over their own technology exports, and China is again included in the list of targeted countries.Last December, the group reached an agreement to add chip manufacturing technology to the list of items subject to export controls.  While this revision does not explicitly target China, it points out that export restrictions are targeted at nonmember states, while China, along with Iran and North Korea, are not member states. Some Chinese observers called the jointly implemented move a “collective action” against China by countries that dominate the chip manufacturing supply chain.The Bureau of Industrial Security of the U.S. Commerce Department also announced in October of this year that six emerging technologies would be included in a new export control under the Wassenaar Agreement. All these technologies are directly related to chip manufacturing, including extreme ultraviolet lithography necessary for advanced chip manufacturing.Martijn Rasser, a senior researcher at the Center for New American Security’s Technology and National Security Project, told VOA the world’s liberal democracies have a huge advantage in their network of alliances and partnerships, adding: “It’s something that China just completely lacks, and that’s a big, a big headwind for them.”
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The head of the European Union’s medical agency confirmed Friday it had been the subject of a cyberattack for the past two weeks but said it will not impact its ongoing evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines.The cyberattack was originally announced Wednesday, with the agency providing few details. During an online meeting with the European Parliament, European Medicines Agency (EMA) executive director, Emer Cooke, said the agency had “launched a full investigation in close cooperation with the law enforcement officials and other relevant entities.”In a brief statement on its website, Pfizer partner BioNTech said it had been informed that some of the documents related to regulatory submission for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been “unlawfully accessed.” The company said it did not believe any personal data of trial participants had been compromised.Cooke said Friday, “We can assure you that the timelines for the evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are not impacted. And the agency as you see today continues to be fully functional.”The Amsterdam–based agency is evaluating the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine already approved by Britain and Canada, as well as the vaccine candidate from Moderna. The agency said it will make a decision on conditional approval at a meeting to be held by December 29, while a decision on Moderna’s version should follow by January 12.Cooke said based on the data for the two vaccines so far, “the safety and efficacy look very promising, and we have not seen the adverse events coming up that would be a concern.”Earlier this week, Cooke said the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca is also being considered but complete data for that vaccine has not yet been submitted. 
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Getting a COVID test can mean long lines and delayed results. Matt Dibble looks into recent breakthroughs that may have more of us performing a test at home.
Camera: Matt Dibble       Producer: Matt Dibble
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The head of the European Union’s medical agency confirmed Friday it had been the subject of a cyberattack for the past two weeks but said it will not impact its ongoing evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines.The cyberattack was originally announced Wednesday, with the agency providing few details. During an online meeting with the European Parliament, European Medicines Agency (EMA) executive director, Emer Cooke, said the agency had “launched a full investigation in close cooperation with the law enforcement officials and other relevant entities.”In a brief statement on its website, Pfizer partner BioNTech said it had been informed that some of the documents related to regulatory submission for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been “unlawfully accessed.” The company said it did not believe any personal data of trial participants had been compromised.Cooke said Friday, “We can assure you that the timelines for the evaluation of the COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are not impacted. And the agency as you see today continues to be fully functional.”The Amsterdam–based agency is evaluating the Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine already approved by Britain and Canada, as well as the vaccine candidate from Moderna. The agency said it will make a decision on conditional approval at a meeting to be held by December 29, while a decision on Moderna’s version should follow by January 12.Cooke said based on the data for the two vaccines so far, “the safety and efficacy look very promising, and we have not seen the adverse events coming up that would be a concern.”Earlier this week, Cooke said the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca is also being considered but complete data for that vaccine has not yet been submitted. 
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Getting a COVID test can mean long lines and delayed results. Matt Dibble looks into recent breakthroughs that may have more of us performing a test at home.
Camera: Matt Dibble       Producer: Matt Dibble
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SpaceX launched its shiny, bullet-shaped, straight-out-of-science fiction Starship several miles into the air from a remote corner of Texas on Wednesday, but the 6 1/2-minute test flight ended in an explosive fireball at touchdown.It was the highest and most elaborate flight yet for the rocket ship that Elon Musk says could carry people to Mars in as little as six years.This latest prototype — the first one equipped with a nose cone, body flaps and three engines — was shooting for an altitude of up to 12.5 kilometers. That’s almost 100 times higher than previous hops and skimming the stratosphere.Starship seemed to hit the mark or at least come close. There was no immediate word from SpaceX on how high it went.The full-scale, stainless steel model — 50 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter — soared out over the Gulf of Mexico. After about five minutes, it flipped sideways as planned and descended in a free-fall back to the southeastern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The Raptor engines reignited for braking and the rocket tilted back upright. Upon touching down, however, the rocket ship became engulfed in flames and ruptured, parts scattering.The entire flight — as dramatic and flashy as it gets, even by SpaceX standards — lasted just over six minutes and 40 seconds. SpaceX broadcast the sunset demo live on its website; repeated delays over the past week and a last-second engine abort Tuesday heightened the excitement among space fans.”Awesome test. Congratulations Starship team!” read a scroll across the screen.Musk kept expectations low going into this first high-altitude attempt by Starship, cautioning earlier this week there was “probably” a 1-in-3 chance of complete success.Two lower, shorter test flights earlier this year from Boca Chica, Texas — a quiet coastal village before SpaceX moved in — used more rudimentary versions of Starship. Essentially cylindrical cans with cone tops and single Raptor engines, these early vehicles reached altitudes of 150 meters. An even earlier model, the short and squat Starhopper, made a tiny, tethered hop in 2019, followed by two increasingly higher climbs.  
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and nearly every U.S. state sued Facebook Inc. Wednesday, saying it broke antitrust law and should potentially be broken up.With the filing of the twin lawsuits, Facebook becomes the second big tech company to face a major legal challenge this fall.The FTC said in a statement that it would seek an injunction that “could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp.”In its complaint, the coalition of 46 states, Washington, D.C., and Guam also asked for Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to be judged to be illegal.FILE – New York State Attorney General Letitia James listens to a question at a press conference in New York City, Aug. 6, 2020.”For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals, snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.James said the company used vast amounts of money to acquire such rivals before they could threaten the company’s dominance. Facebook said it is reviewing the FTC and state antitrust complaints.The company said the government “now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day.”The U.S. Justice Department sued Alphabet Inc.’s Google in October, accusing the $1 trillion company of using its market power to fend off rivals.The lawsuits are the biggest antitrust cases in a generation, comparable to the lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. in 1998. The federal government eventually settled that case, but the yearslong court fight and extended antitrust scrutiny prevented the company from thwarting competitors and is credited with clearing the way for the explosive growth of the internet.Facebook shares fell as much as 3% after the news before paring losses and were last down 1.7%. 
 
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YouTube said on Wednesday it would start removing content that falsely allege widespread fraud changed the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, in a change to its more hands-off stance on videos making similar claims.
The update, which applies to content uploaded from Wednesday, comes a day after “safe harbor,” a deadline set by U.S. law for states to certify the results of the presidential election.
YouTube said it would start enforcing the policy in line with its approach towards historical U.S. presidential elections.
Online platforms have been under pressure to police misinformation about the election on their sites.
YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, was widely seen as taking a more hands-off approach than Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, which started labeling content with election misinformation. YouTube labels all election-related videos.
After the November election, Reuters identified several YouTube channels making money from ads and memberships that were amplifying debunked accusations about voting fraud.
Last month, a group of Democratic senators asked YouTube to commit to removing content containing false or misleading information about the 2020 election outcome and the upcoming Senate run-off elections in Georgia.
Asked about how the policy would apply to Georgia elections, a YouTube spokeswoman said this policy only applied to the presidential election.
YouTube said in a blog post on Wednesday that since September it had removed over 8,000 channels and thousands of misleading election-related videos for violating its existing policies.
The company said more than 70% of recommendations on election-related topics came from authoritative news sources.
YouTube also said that since Election Day, fact-check information panels had been triggered over 200,000 times on election-related search results
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Prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye said Tuesday that foreign government hackers with “world-class capabilities” broke into its network and stole offensive tools it uses to probe the defenses of its thousands of customers, who include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.The hackers “primarily sought information related to certain government customers,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said in a statement, without naming them. He said there was no indication they got customer information from the company’s consulting or breach-response businesses or threat-intelligence data it collects.FireEye is a major cybersecurity player — it responded to the Sony and Equifax data breaches and helped Saudi Arabia thwart an oil industry cyberattack — and has played a key role in identifying Russia as the protagonist in numerous aggressions in the burgeoning netherworld of global digital conflict.Neither Mandia nor a FireEye spokeswoman said when the company detected the hack or who might be responsible. But many in the cybersecurity community suspect Russia.“I do think what we know of the operation is consistent with a Russian state actor,” said former NSA hacker Jake Williams, president of Rendition Infosec. “Whether or not customer data was accessed, it’s still a big win for Russia.”FireEye’s Mandia said he had concluded that “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities” was behind the attack.The stolen “red team” tools — which amount to real-world malware — could be dangerous in the wrong hands. FireEye said there’s no indication they have been used maliciously. But cybersecurity experts say sophisticated nation-state hackers could modify them and wield them in the future against government or industry targets.The hack was the biggest blow to the U.S. cybersecurity community since a mysterious group known as the “Shadow Brokers” in 2016 released a trove of high-level hacking tools stolen from the National Security Agency. The U.S. believes North Korea and Russia capitalized on the stolen tools to unleash devastating global cyberattacks.The nation’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that “unauthorized third-party users” could similarly abuse FireEye’s stolen red-team tools.Milpitas, California-based FireEye, which is publicly traded, said in Tuesday’s statement that it had developed 300 countermeasures to protect customers and others from them and was making them immediately available.FireEye has been at the forefront of investigating state-backed hacking groups, including Russian groups trying to break into state and local governments in the U.S. that administer elections. It was credited with attributing to Russian military hackers mid-winter attacks in 2015 and 2016 on Ukraine’s energy grid. Its threat hunters also have helped social media companies including Facebook identify malicious actors.Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins cyberconflict scholar, said that if the Kremlin were behind the hack it could have been seeking to learn what FireEye knows about Russia’s global state-backed operations — doing counterintelligence. Or it might have seeking to retaliate against the U.S. government for measures including indicting Russian military hackers for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and other alleged crimes. FireEye is, after all, a close U.S. government partner that has “exposed many Russian operations,” he said.FireEye said it is investigating the attack in coordination with the FBI and partners including Microsoft, which has its own cybersecurity team. Mandia said the hackers used “a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past.”Matt Gorham, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said the hackers’ “high level of sophistication (was) consistent with a nation state.”The U.S. government is “focused on imposing risk and consequences on malicious cyber actors, so they think twice before attempting an intrusion in the first place,” Gorham said. That has included what U.S. Cyber Command terms “defending forward” operations such as penetrated the networks of Russia and other adversaries.U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the Senate’s intelligence committee, applauded FireEye for quickly disclosing the intrusion, saying the case “shows the difficulty of stopping determined nation-state hackers.”Cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch said security companies like FireEye are top targets, with big names in the field including Kaspersky and Symantec breached in the past.“Every security company is being targeted by nation-state actors. This has been going on got over a decade now,” said Alperovitch, the co-founder and former chief technical officer of Crowdstrike, which investigated the 2016 Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.He said the release of the “red-team” tools, while a serious concern, was “not the end of the world because threat actors always create new tools.”“This could have been much worse if their customer data had been hacked and exfiltrated. So far there is no evidence of that,” Alperovitch said, citing hacks of other cybersecurity companies — RSA Security in 2011 and Bit9 two years later — that contributed to the compromise of customer data.Founded in 2004, FireEye went public in 2013 and months later acquired Virginia-based Mandiant Corp., the firm that linked years of cyberattacks against U.S. companies to a secret Chinese military unit. It had about 3,400 employees and $889.2 million in revenue last year, though with a net loss of $257.4 million.The company’s 8,800 customers last year included more than half of the Forbes Global 2000, companies in telecommunications, technology, financial services, healthcare, electric grid operators, pharmaceutical companies and the oil-and-gas industry.Its stock fell more than 7% in after-hours trading Tuesday following news of the hack.
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Legislation to make Facebook and Google pay media organizations for news content will be introduced in the Australian parliament on Wednesday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Tuesday.
 
Frydenberg said the measure would be reviewed by a parliamentary committee after its introduction and before legislators vote on it next year.
 
If the measure becomes law, Frydenberg said the internet giants must negotiate payments for content with local publishers and broadcasters. A government-appointed mediator would decide the payment terms if a deal is not reached.
 
Facebook has said it may block Australian news content instead of paying for it.
 
Google has warned the legislation would lead to “dramatically worse” search results on Google and YouTube and jeopardize free services.
 
Until recently, most countries watched companies shift advertising money to the world’s largest social media website and search engine, depriving news outlets of their primary revenue source. The dramatic decline in advertising revenue sparked a wave of closures and job losses.
 
Regulators, however, are beginning to rein in the two corporate giants, which Frydenberg said receive 80% of Australia’s online advertising spending.
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