An anonymous reader writes: Karspesky security researcher Sergey Golovanov writes about recent cybertheft incidents involving hardware backdoors planted by criminals. Each attack had a common springboard: an unknown device directly connected to the company's local network. In some cases, it was the central office, in others a regional office, sometimes located in another country. At least eight banks in Eastern Europe were the targets of the attacks, which caused damage estimated in the tens of millions of dollars. Hardware backdoors are cheap and immune to antivirus. A firmware modified OpenWrt based router can provide covert remote access, painless packet captures, and secure VPN connections with the flip of a switch. Will a flashlight and a ladder be common tools of computer security someday? After the cybercriminals entered a organization's building, connected a device to the local network and scanned the local network seeking to gain access to the resources, they proceeded to stage three. "Here they logged into the target system and used remote access software to retain access," writes Golovanov. "Next, malicious services created using msfvenom were started on the compromised computer. Because the hackers used fileless attacks (PDF) and PowerShell, they were able to avoid whitelisting technologies and domain policies. If they encountered a whitelisting that could not be bypassed, or PowerShell was blocked on the target computer, the cybercriminals used impacket, and winexesvc.exe or psexec.exe to run executable files remotely."

Last December, Tesla switched on the world's biggest lithium ion battery in South Australia to feed the country's shaky power grid for the first day of summer. Neoen, the owner of the giant battery system, released a new report for the first full year of operation and revealed that the energy storage system saved about $40 million over the last 12 months. Electrek reports: The energy storage capacity is managed by Neoen, which operates the adjacent wind farm. They contracted Aurecon to evaluate the impact of the project and they estimate that the "battery allows annual savings in the wholesale market approaching $40 million by increased competition and removal of 35 MW local FCAS constraint." It is particularly impressive when you consider that the massive Tesla Powerpack system cost only $66 million, according to another report from Neoen. Here are the key findings from the report: - Has contributed to the removal of the requirement for a 35 MW local Frequency Control Ancillary Service (FCAS), saving nearly $40 million per year in typical annual costs - Has reduced the South Australian regulation FCAS price by 75% while also providing these services for other regions - Provides a premium contingency service with response time of less than 100 milliseconds - Helps protect South Australia from being separated from the National Electricity Market - Is key to the Australian Energy Market Operator's (AEMO) and ElectraNet's System Integrity Protection Scheme (SIPS) which protects the SA-VIC Heywood Interconnector from overload

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, with an update to watchOS, Apple is making its electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG) reading feature available to Apple Watch Series 4 owners. It's also releasing an irregular rate notification feature that will be available on Apple Watches going back to Series 1. Both are a part of watchOS 5.1.2. To take an EKG, you open up the EKG app on the Watch and lightly rest your index finger on the crown for 30 seconds. The Watch then acts like a single-lead EKG to read your heart rhythm and record it into the Health app on your phone. From there, you can create a PDF report to send to your doctor. The irregular heart rate monitoring is passive. Apple says that it checks your rhythm every two hours or so (depending on whether you're stationary or not), and if there are five consecutive readings that seem abnormal, it will alert you and suggest you reach out to a doctor. If you have been previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, Apple's setup process tells you not to use the feature. Apple tells me these features are most definitely not diagnostic tools. In fact, before you can activate either of them, you will need to page through several screens of information that try to put their use into context and warn you to contact your doctor if needed. They are also not the sort of features Apple expects users to really use on a regular basis. The EKG feature, in particular, should only really be used if you feel something abnormal going on, and then you should only share the resulting report with your doctor, not act on it directly. Angela Chen from The Verge notes that these features have only received "clearance" from the FDA, which is not the same thing as FDA "approval": The Apple Watch is in Class II. For Class II and Class I, the FDA doesn't give "approval," it just gives clearance. Class I and Class II products are lower-risk products -- as [Jon Speer, co-founder of Greenlight Guru] puts it, a classic Class I example is something like a tongue depressor -- and it's much easier to get clearance than approval.

Google is working to make Translate less gender-biased by giving both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word. "Previously, the service defaulted to the masculine options," reports CNET. "The new function is available when translating words from English into French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish and Spanish. It provides a similar function when translating into English." From the report: Google Translate learns from the hundreds of millions of already-translated examples available on the internet, creating an opportunity for the tool to incorporate the gender bias it encountered online, according to a Google blog post announcing the change. With the update, Google Translate will present translations for both genders. For example, if you translate "o bir doktor" from Turkish to English, you'll see "she is a doctor" and "he is a doctor" in the translation box. In November, Google also made Gmail's Smart Compose technology stop suggesting gender-based pronouns. Previously, it defaulted to masculine pronouns.

A new report (PDF) from the AINow Institute calls for the U.S. government to take general steps to improve the regulation of facial recognition technology amid much debate over the privacy implications. "The implementation of AI systems is expanding rapidly, without adequate governance, oversight, or accountability regimes," it says. The report suggests, for instance, extending the power of existing government bodies in order to regulate AI issues, including use of facial recognition: "Domains like health, education, criminal justice, and welfare all have their own histories, regulatory frameworks, and hazards." MIT Technology Review reports: It also calls for stronger consumer protections against misleading claims regarding AI; urges companies to waive trade-secret claims when the accountability of AI systems is at stake (when algorithms are being used to make critical decisions, for example); and asks that they govern themselves more responsibly when it comes to the use of AI. And the document suggests that the public should be warned when facial-recognition systems are being used to track them, and that they should have the right to reject the use of such technology. The report also warns about the use of emotion tracking in face-scanning and voice detection systems. Tracking emotion this way is relatively unproven, yet it is being used in potentially discriminatory ways -- for example, to track the attention of students. "It's time to regulate facial recognition and affect recognition," says Kate Crawford, cofounder of AINow and one of the lead authors of the report. "Claiming to 'see' into people's interior states is neither scientific nor ethical."

DeepMind has created a system that can quickly master any game in the class that includes chess, Go, and Shogi, and do so without human guidance. "The system, called AlphaZero, began its life last year by beating a DeepMind system that had been specialized just for Go," reports IEEE Spectrum. "That earlier system had itself made history by beating one of the world's best Go players, but it needed human help to get through a months-long course of improvement. AlphaZero trained itself -- in just 3 days." From the report: The research, published today in the journal Science, was performed by a team led by DeepMind's David Silver. The paper was accompanied by a commentary by Murray Campbell, an AI researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. AlphaZero can crack any game that provides all the information that's relevant to decision-making; the new generation of games to which Campbell alludes do not. Poker furnishes a good example of such games of "imperfect" information: Players can hold their cards close to their chests. Other examples include many multiplayer games, such as StarCraft II, Dota, and Minecraft. But they may not pose a worthy challenge for long. DeepMind developed the self-training method, called deep reinforcement learning, specifically to attack Go. Today's announcement that they've generalized it to other games means they were able to find tricks to preserve its playing strength after giving up certain advantages peculiar to playing Go. The biggest such advantage was the symmetry of the Go board, which allowed the specialized machine to calculate more possibilities by treating many of them as mirror images. The researchers have so far unleashed their creation only on Go, chess and Shogi, a Japanese form of chess. Go and Shogi are astronomically complex, and that's why both games long resisted the "brute-force" algorithms that the IBM team used against Kasparov two decades ago.

While it’s true that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the world, it’s also clear that this hasn’t happened at the scale needed. As a result, 2018 will see global carbon emissions rise by at least 1.8%, and potentially by as much as 3.7%. That’s because the growth in energy demand outpaced the growth in clean-energy supply, forcing the world to use more fossil fuels instead. It will mark the second consecutive year that emissions have increased, after a period—from 2014 to 2016—where global carbon emissions remained flat. In 2017, carbon emissions rose 1.6%. “The growth in global CO2 emissions puts the goals set out in the Paris agreement in jeopardy,” write a group of researchers from around the world who published three separate studies accounting this year’s emissions in the journals Nature, Environmental Research Letters, and Earth System Science Data. The increase’s main culprits are growing use of coal in China and India, as well as oil and gas use in most of the world. Notably, the rich world, which has in recent years seen a decrease in emissions, recorded a small jump this year instead, according to a separate study by the International Energy Agency. The Paris agreement’s goal requires the world to keep global warming, compared to pre-industrial times, at under 2°C. To do that, the world needs to cut emissions by 20% by 2030 and hit net-zero emissions by 2075. The agreement also stipulates that, if possible, the world should try to keep warming under 1.5°C. That more ambitious goal would require a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 and net-zero by 2050. Although the difference between the two goals doesn’t seem substantial, the reduction in damages wrought by climate change in a 1.5°C world vs a 2°C world is huge. In financial terms, the planet would save $30 trillion in global economic growth by achieving the more ambitious target. While meeting either goal seems increasingly challenging, there are some positives. “We are at the beginning of new exponential curves on renewable energy, electric vehicles, and green finance, so while progress seems slow now, it is on track to deliver a very different decade and century ahead,” notes the report. As policymakers meet in Katowice, Poland at the UN climate-change summit, the authors also shared this message: “Our task now is to ensure the exponential curve of solutions outpaces that of climate impacts, and drives net emissions to zero by 2050. It’s necessary, desirable, and achievable.” Check out Quartz on Facebook. Follow us

Walking through the forest in Guam is unsettling. Unlike tropical forests pretty much anywhere else in the world, it’s almost dead silent. It’s quiet because there are virtually no birds. Brown tree snakes, an invasive species that was thought to have come to the island in the 1950s as a stowaway on a ship, feasted on the eggs of the island’s birds. Within just a few decades, nearly all of the 12 native species were pushed to the brink of extinction. The birds played a critical role in the small island’s ecosystem. In their absence, Guam’s ecology has transformed in ways both dramatic and subtle. When integral species disappear, ecosystems become more unstable. That’s bad news for Guam, but it could also be a cautionary tale for animals (and the people that rely on them) elsewhere in the world. Huge populations of animals are already dying off around the planet, and just how that loss plays out, or what kinds of interventions should be taken to counteract that die-off, will depend on how well scientists understand its effects. “Islands in general are good foretelling the future of mainlands because things that take a really long time on the mainland happen really fast here,” says Haldre Rogers, an ecology professor at Iowa State University who studies the Marianas. Ecologists long ago coined the term “keystone species” to describe the species without which an ecosystem could cease to function. Rogers, who let me stay in her field house on a recent visit to Guam, calls the island’s birds a “keystone functional group.” They, along with the threatened Mariana fruit bat, are essential because they move seeds around. Birds and bats eat the fruit from trees, but don’t fully digest the seeds. Instead, the seeds pass through their digestive systems, which removes seeds’ tough outer coats and pathogens. Then, the seeds are dropped, in a nutrient-rich pile of excrement, wherever the animals happen to be at the time. That means the seeds are more likely to germinate than if they’d just fallen off a tree. In addition, being farther away from their parents gives the seedlings a better chance of success (PDF) because they’re not competing with their tall, mature parents for resources like space, light, and water. Much of that wouldn’t have been possible without the flying animals’ help. Without any birds and very few bats, you get a forest full of gaps—fewer seeds are there to replace trees that fall. “[Seed dispersal] is the engine that keeps the forest going,” Rogers says. “Without that process happening, without seeds being moved around, you get the slow degradation of the forest.” The forest has changed in other ways since the birds started dying out. Fewer plant species now grow in Guam’s forest (this is also in part because invasive pig and deer eat some native species). And a person walking through the forest would find themselves constantly swatting spider webs from their face, because the (unsettlingly large) creators of those webs aren’t getting eaten by their natural predators: birds. A spider in its web in a forest in Guam. A less robust forest in Guam is at risk for profound disruption. Trees are more likely to fall during typhoons, which hit the island every few years. Since birds aren’t dispersing the trees’ seeds as efficiently, there are fewer trees left of reproductive age, so the forest will take much longer to recover from a damaging event like a typhoon. In short, the absence of keystone species leaves the forest more vulnerable to irrevocable damage, changing in ways that kill off or force out other animals that still live there. And because Guam is so small and isolated, animals that lose their habitat really have nowhere else to go. These disastrous scenarios aren’t guaranteed to happen. In fact, Rogers has been impressed with how resilient ecosystems can be—even on Guam, which she says is an “extreme” example of how profoundly ecosystems can be disrupted and still more or less function. Even when a particular species or type of organism disappears, the ecosystem often can often carry on. Forests may continue to provide a habitat for the organisms that are left—even if it’s a much less ideal habitat than existed before. Sometimes, in ecosystems that lose ecologically important species, other species—new ones, or ones already present— fill the gaps. But in Guam’s forest, no other species has stepped in to take the birds’ place. We’ve known for a while that top predators like wolves and tigers are disappearing from landscapes; only more recently have researchers realized that animals that had once been abundant, such as insects, frogs, and bats (all of which can be keystone species), are disappearing, too. Species don’t have to go extinct for them to no longer be able to fill their ecological niche, Rogers points out. Losing a big enough proportion of the individuals in the population might be enough to reduce its ability to fulfill its ecological role. Laws intended to protect plants and animals, like the US Endangered Species Act, aren’t designed to take their ecological functions into account. As more of the world’s ecosystems start to look more like Guam’s forests, scientists may push to change that. There are ways to make a difference without waiting for legal restructuring. On Guam, to get rid of the brown tree snake, researchers and government employees are experimenting with baited traps and have launched rapid response teams when locals spot them (they’re encouraged to call 1-671-777-HISS). Scientists are working with the US military to section off an area of forest on the Air Force base and ensure that it becomes and stays completely devoid of the invasive snakes. There’s talk of bringing the birds back to Guam; Rogers is optimistic. If it’s possible to resuscitate Guam’s forests, maybe we could do the same for other disrupted ecosystems elsewhere in the world.

On Dec. 3, 1967, doctors performed the world’s first heart transplant. They took the heart out of a deceased donor and surgically implanted it in an ill recipient in South Africa. Just over 51 years after scientists created the field, they’re on the verge of transforming it—this time, with pig organs. In a landmark study published today (Dec. 5), scientists based in Germany report that baboons with transplanted hearts from genetically-engineered pigs can survive for over six months. “It is time to reconsider what preclinical results should be required before pig-to-human clinical trials can be initiated,” Christoph Knosalla, a heart surgeon at the German Heart Center in Berlin who was not involved with the study but reviewed the work, wrote in an accompanying commentary. The possibility of xenotransplantation, involving animal-to-human transplants, has been on the minds of the medical community for centuries. Although there have been short-term successes—including one case of a patient surviving with a chimpanzee kidney for nine months—xenotransplants are still considered too risky for clinical use. However, xenoplantation is a tantalizing option given the current organ shortage in the US. The problem is particularly acute for those in need of a heart transplant, who must receive an organ from a donor who was declared brain-dead in a hospital setting (some organs like kidneys or parts of livers can be given from people who are still alive). Right now, there are over 114,000 people on the waitlist for organs in the US, almost 4,000 of which are for new hearts, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a US-based nonprofit. The same organization estimates that about 7,000 people will die waiting for an organ annually. Anywhere between 1.6% and 16% of patients waiting for hearts may die before they receive one, depending on other risk factors like age and kidney health. In theory, xenotransplants from pigs, which have hearts similar in size to those of humans, could alleviate this shortage. However, so far pig-heart transplants in baboons have only kept the animals alive for a maximum of 57 days—much shorter than guidelines set almost two decades ago by the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT), and still in use today. In 2000, the organization stated that clinical trials for xenotransplantation “should be considered when approximately 60% survival of life-supporting pig organs in non-human primates has been achieved for a minimum of three months, with at least 10 animals surviving for this minimum period.” There should be some indication that the organs could last for longer, too, and the procedure should only be considered as a last resort. The study published today reports that baboons survived with genetically-modified pig hearts for over six months, edging closer to the ISHLT guidelines. The team surgically implanted 16 baboons with hearts that had been removed from pigs that had been genetically modified to have more in common with a primate’s body. The baboons were divided into three groups to test out different transplant techniques. In the first group, the longest-surviving baboon only made it 30 days. The scientists believe this is because the hearts had been damaged due to temperature and other environmental factors before they were implanted. In the second group, surgeons kept the hearts in better condition at cooler temperatures in a blood-based solution, but didn’t give the baboons the right combinations of immunosuppressants; although the transplant recipients in some cases survived 40 days, the transplanted hearts swelled up to an average of 249% their original size, which led to other organ failures. In the third group, the surgeons effectively protected the organ before the transplant, tweaked the immunosuppressant regimen, and prepped the baboons’ bodies by giving the primates medication to lower their blood pressure to similar levels as a pig to help counteract the possibility of swelling. One baboon in this group was euthanized after 50 days, because it developed fluid in the chest cavity, and two more were euthanized after three months in order to examine how their transplanted hearts were doing. After the scientists determined that those two baboons were relatively healthy, they continued the remaining two animals’ medications until days 161 and 175. They died roughly three weeks later. The ability for a patient to survive with a heart from another person once seemed impossible. In less than a century, science has lunged forward to make living with a heart from another species a possibility in our lifetimes.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2019, the minimum wage for US federal contract employees—that is, the workers hired by contractors for government jobs—will rise to $10.60 from $10.35. It’s a scheduled $0.25 increase from 2014, when then-president Barack Obama signed an executive order raising the hourly minimum wage for people working for federal contractors to $10.10, with annual adjustments thereafter. (All workers, according to the regulations, are to receive an additional $4.48 per hour in health-and-welfare benefits.) Last month, Amazon announced it would begin paying every one of its 350,000 US employees a minimum wage of $15 per hour. This covered not only full-time workers, but part-time, temporary, and seasonal ones, as well. In New York City, the Taxi and Limousine Commission just set the nation’s first-ever minimum wage for Uber, Lyft, and other rideshare drivers, which will guarantee them take-home pay of $15 per hour, in line with the city’s standard minimum wage rate. The policy is expected to raise the average driver’s income by $9,600 per year. No minimum wage in the country can dip below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, a figure that has not changed since 2009. Many states, counties, and cities, like New York, set their own higher minimum wages, which employers are required to pay. But Amazon and Uber workers will be slightly worse off than some of those working for the federal government this coming year. There are about 3.7 million federal contract workers, who make up roughly 40% of the total US government workforce. The top 25 hourly pay rates on the federal schedule for the coming year cover a broad swath of occupations, as do the bottom 25. There are many similar job titles and pay rates within categories, which cover most, if not all, possible job titles the government may ever require—including carnival workers and umpires. Below is a selection from the highest and lowest compensation bands: Top 25 Flight Instructor: $52.81 Engineering Technician VI: $52.76 Test pilot: $48.84 Registered nurse IV: $48.10 Dental hygienist: $45.97 Air traffic control specialist: $42.40 Registered Nurse III, Anesthetist: $40.13 Nuclear medicine technologist: $39.79 Unexploded Ordnance Technician III: $39.07 Librarian: $38.38 Latent fingerprint technician II: $38.22 Aerospace Structural Welder: $36.21 Marketing analyst: $35.01 Cable splicer: $34.63 Mortician: $34.10 Photographer V: $33.76 Police officer II: $33.66 Telephone lineman: $33.62 Boiler tender: $33.55 Administrative assistant: $33.16 Airplane pilot: $32.60 Tool and die maker: $31.12 Blocker and bracer: $30.78 Certified Occupational Therapist Assistant: $30.76 Embalmer: $30.69 Bottom 25 Carnival worker $9.27 ($10.35 in 2018) Cleaner, vehicles: $10.58 Cashier: $10.85 Waiter/waitress: $11.30 Nursing assistant I: $11.75 Lifeguard: $11.59 Parking and lot attendant: $11.90 Maid or houseman: $12.23 Pruner: $12.66 Presser, machine, shirts: $12.55 Elevator operator: $12.97 Child care attendant: $13.12 Laboratory animal caretaker I: $13.24 Store worker I: $13.32 Carnival equipment operator: $13.59 Sports official: $14.03 Furniture handler: $14.06 Baker: $14.14 Taxi driver: $14.23 Trail maintenance worker: $14.28 Tire repairer: $14.44 Window cleaner: $14.63 Carnival equipment repairer: $14.63 Bicycle repairer: $14.90 Vending machine attendant: $15.48

The physics of wind power favor two things: turbine size and wind strength. The bigger the turbine, and the stronger the wind, the more energy that can be harvested. Yet bigger is more expensive, and most of the priciest bits merely support the energy-generating blades themselves: the towers, nacelles, central hub, and the foundation. Given 80% of the energy comes from the outermost 30% of a blade, why not dispense with the most expensive parts? If you did, you’d end up with something that looks like a kite. “Energy kites” are now inching their way to market. Google (now a subsidiary of Alphabet) purchased wind energy company Makani in 2013, and has worked for years designing flying kites as power plants (it’s testing in Hawaii right now). A second company, Minesto, is now making progress on harnessing energy in a different environment: seawater. The Swedish company has gone through five prototypes since the idea was conceived in 2004. Minesto is now moving from prototypes to generating electricity. In August, sea trials showed how the wing performed in real-world conditions about eight kilometers off the coast of North Wales in the United Kingdom. By October, a utility-scale project had deployed a device capable of generating about 500KW of electricity. Minesto wants a fleet of more than a hundred these to supply 80 MW of capacity. The physics of underwater kites are similar to those in the air. High-flying “wings” are tethered to the seabed with a cable. Each kite flies a massive figure eight pattern. As water flows over its 12-meter wingspan, the kite swoops through the current producing kinetic energy (movement). Turbines attached to the wing spin, converting this into electricity. As it “flies” at least 20 meters below the surface, the kite can move at several times the speed of the current. Flaps allow the wing to steer and achieve the best angle relative to the current. MINESTO So far, energy kite systems have yet to prove (pdf) themselves economical. Alphabet’s Makani is not yet generating commercial electricity with its airborne kites after a decade. A Canadian company, HydroRun Technologies, shut down in 2015 after failing to commercialize its own underwater systems. The barriers are formidable. Corrosive seawater is brutal on equipment. Swift currents are needed at suitable sites. Cheap electricity from solar, wind and natural gas is depressing prices. But Minesto argues physics is on its side. Its wing design reportedly gives it the capacity to generate 216 times the power of a comparable stationary turbine. Even at low speeds, the company says it can tap tidal and current power in places where it’s too expensive or impractical to build conventional power generation. A 2017 paper in the journal Mechanical Engineering found underwater tethered kites could theoretically generate electricity slightly cheaper than today’s offshore wind turbines, and at half the current cost of today’s fixed turbines on the seafloor. If the economics pencil out, researchers estimate 100,000 underwater energy kites—less than half the number of wind turbines already in operation—could generate a theoretical maximum of 30 GW of power (although the actual electricity generated would be less). Minesto announced a power purchase agreement with the Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, to sell electricity generated with its technology this November. Minesto expects to install two of its 100-kilowatt models with a wing-span of up to 20 feet (six meters). But they’ll have to move fast. The cost of solar and wind energy continues to fall. New energy kites are finding their old competition for the cheapest energy source (coal, gas, and nuclear power plants) are being replaced by their increasingly cheap renewable counterparts like solar panels and offshore wind turbines.

Pesky environmentalists might say this isn’t the best time to build a gigantic new city in the sea—Hong Kong’s leaders would beg to disagree. The local government wants to build a series of costly artificial islands totaling 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres)—the largest engineering project it has ever attempted—to house up to 1.1 million people. This development is slated to take place on and around Hong Kong’s biggest island, Lantau, mostly made up of country parks. A precious green lung of mangroves and forested areas, Lantau is a reminder of another kind of Hong Kong life, free of the high-rises clustered together in more cramped parts of the city, and home to small villages that manage to linger on. The project is slated to cost about HK$500 billion (US$60 billion)—about half of Hong Kong’s fiscal reserves of HK$1.1 trillion (US$140 billion)—if it doesn’t go over budget in its quest to make room for more businesses, recreational centers and other infrastructure. While the idea is not short of ambition, currently it lacks pretty much everything else—including public support. GOOGLE MAPS “This is Hong Kong people’s money,” Jeremy Tam, a legislator of the opposition Civic Party, told Quartz. “Generations of Hong Kong people have built up healthy reserves. Which government puts more than half its total reserves into just one single project?” A poll conducted by Tam’s party found that 60% of respondents were worried the plan would exhaust the city’s reserves. The proposal to expand on and around Lantau, a development plan long held dear by the Hong Kong government, has been floated vaguely since the mid-1980s. Then in 2014, the government came out with a project to reclaim 1,000 hectares near the island under the name East Lantau Metropolis, or ELM. A public consultation exercise was launched in 2016 after massive opposition to the idea, but the results of that exercise have not yet been made public. Even so, in October, Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam announced in her annual policy speech that she’s going to push for the creation of ELM under the name Lantau Tomorrow Vision, now nearly double in size. Lam said the new land development is needed for both population increase, and “to thin out” dense areas in a city known for expensive, small flats. The government plans to seek funding in the new year for feasibility studies. Lam described the future of Lantau as a “Double Gateway,” connecting Hong Kong via a new bridge to the southern mainland, where Chinese authorities are trying to develop an innovation hub called the Greater Bay Area (paywall) to rival San Francisco’s Bay Area (the other gateway is the international airport Lantau is home to). A key backer of the development, a politically connected group called Our Hong Kong Foundation, has proposed to make the land reclamation even bigger, at 2,200 hectares (5,400 acres). The foundation is composed of pro-establishment politicians and business and real-estate tycoons, some of whom could end up benefiting directly from an enterprise of this nature. The foundation commissioned consulting firm McKinsey and others to research their plan, and announced in August that in the “best-case” scenario the first inhabitants could move into housing in 11 years. While Hong Kong has often turned to reclamation in the past for housing, and to build the current airport and Hong Kong Disneyland, which is also located in Lantau, the scale of the ELM plan is something quite different. Two days after the announcement, 6,000 people took to the streets to voice their disagreement. Former government workers called the plan “crazy,” while newspaper editorials questioned every point of the proposal. Pro-democracy parties, including the Civic Party, are canvassing to get 100,000 signatures against the plan in order to prompt more government debate over it. There’s concern over the ecological impact of the reclamation work that would be involved, which would include putting massive quantities of cement and filler materials into the sea. It’s also unclear how the newly created islands would fare in the face of something like September’s typhoon Mangkhut, the strongest storm Hong Kong had seen in decades, or as rising sea levels make flooding more commonplace. Lantau’s also one of the very last habitats for endangered species like the pink dolphin, and the white-bellied sea eagle. Tam, the legislator, points out that existing studies of the plan “have been considering a wave height of just 2 meters (7 feet), when the current waves during typhoons and the projections for the future are for waves of 10 meters and more.” There is another, political, reason for opposition: Hong Kong’s population, now at 7.3 million inhabitants, is supposed to peak at 8.2 million in 25 years and then decline. Lantau’s own population is only about 100,000 right now, meaning the plan envisions a tenfold increase for the new metropolis, leaving people wondering if the new housing is intended to accommodate many more newcomers from the Chinese mainland. Since its return under Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong has allowed up to 150 people from mainland China to settle in Hong Kong every day—a number that doesn’t include those who move here for work, study, or who gain residency through investment. The arrivals have been a source of friction, both in terms of competition for space and opportunities, as well as cultural differences. The plans for the new project come as Lantau’s growing role as a gateway is already chipping away at its tranquility. The 55-kilometer (34 miles) sea bridge linking Hong Kong to mainland China and Macau opened in late October, and has brought thousands of day trippers to north Lantau on weekends. The Lantau Tomorrow plan would make the island unrecognizable, warns Tom Yam, a member of the concern group Citizens Task Force on Land Resources, who has noted previously that “the scale of the development will make it impossible to preserve Lantau’s beaches, woodlands, wetlands, highlands, rural areas and villages.”

For something that was largely considered a fad less than a decade ago, the wellness industry is continuing to balloon. According to updated numbers from the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness industry grew to be a $4.2 trillion market in 2017, up 12.8% from $3.7 trillion in 2015. “Personal Care, Beauty & Anti-Aging” is the industry’s largest sector, and accounts for almost $1.1 trillion in expenditures. The category’s growth is unsurprising: There’s an increasing overlap between the wellness and beauty industries, and in the past year the latter has fully pivoted towards skincare—which is dominated by the anti-aging category—and away from color cosmetics and makeup. Among the bellwether businesses in this category are existing beauty giants that have moved towards skincare (L’Oréal, Estée Lauder), alongside newer players like Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness and lifestyle company, which doubles as an e-commerce platform for beauty, wellness, and anti-aging products and services. As of now, it’s valued at $250 million and is expanding internationally (this is in spite of criticisms that Goop peddles products based on pseudoscience, and recently settled a $145,000 consumer protection lawsuit over one of its most infamous items, “yoni eggs” meant for the vagina). The second biggest sector is “Healthy Eating, Nutrition & Weight Loss,” which accounts for $702 billion of the market, per the institute. It makes sense, therefore, that weight loss companies and programs are rebranding towards wellness and “holistic” approaches to health, rather than focusing marketing purely on weight loss. A recent example of this (mostly superficial) rebranding move came from the company formerly known as Weight Watchers, which announced in September that it would henceforth be known as “WW,” alongside the new tagline “Wellness That Works™.” With the change, WW rolled out several wellness-related features, including some that are not directly related to weight loss (a partnership with meditation app Headspace, and a “healthy habit” program for users who don’t want to focus on weight loss), but the core Weight Watchers program and its metrics of success or failure remain intact. Indeed, it’s no surprise that other, more niche industries are attempting to align themselves with a growing demand for wellness. The Glossy reports that over the past few years, the wearable industry—which previously focused on performance—has pivoted towards a more holistic approach to health. New brands like Bellabeat, Oura, and Motiv have the usual sleep and pedometer functions, but also offer things like guided meditation and menstrual tracking. Likewise, sex products are rejiggering their offerings—like vaginal washes and lubes—to address sexual and personal health. New formulations by companies like Nécessaire are aligning with wellness by adhering to “clean beauty” standards by like only using natural, non-irritating, and pH-optimized ingredients. The legal weed industry is also adopting the branding and language of wellness to sell products. In any case, the wellness industry itself does not seem to be slowing down: its expenditures are over half as large as total global health expenditures ($7.3 trillion), and it alone accounts for 5.3% of global economic output. Still, it remains to be seen whether jumping on the wellness bandwagon will serve parallel industries in the long term.

There’s a lot a CEO can do and still get an out-of-court settlement and a $120 million check—like, say, harass or assault 12 women. But Les Moonves has found something that just won’t fly: misleading corporate lawyers. Today the New York Times reported that Moonves destroyed evidence of his sexual misconduct and misled attorneys hired by CBS to investigate his behavior. The paper uncovered a draft report from the lawyers saying that, because of Moonves’ dishonesty, CBS “would have multiple bases upon which to conclude that the company was entitled to terminate Moonves for cause”—and strip him of his massive severance package. You might wonder why multiple allegations of sexual misconduct didn’t already count as “cause” to fire Moonves. In fact, Moonves’ contract with CBS specifically lists sexual harassment as a justification for termination for cause. But employment lawyer Alex Granovsky tells Quartz companies would often rather pay a severance package than try to prove sexual misconduct allegations in court. “It’s easier,” Granovsky says, “and the company isn’t handing away money. They’re getting a lot in return: a legally binding promise from the employee not to sue, confidentiality, a non-disparagement agreement.” Instead, Moonves is more likely to lose that $120 million over another cause for termination listed in his contract: “willful failure to cooperate fully with a bona fide company investigation.” “Even if they can’t prove the underlying allegations, they probably can definitively prove that he’s being materially dishonest and just lying to investigators,” Granovsky says. Most US workers don’t have as much leverage as Moonves when they’re getting fired. If an employee’s contract doesn’t specify severance terms and they get accused of sexual harassment, Granovsky says, “their employer can fire them for good reason, bad reason, no reason at all—it doesn’t even have to be true.” Granovsky says high wage earners and “99.9%” of c-suite executives have contracts like Moonves’ that stipulate the conditions under which they can be fired with cause. But the list of causes included in these contracts is growing in the #MeToo era, according to business and entertainment attorney Shaliz Sadig. As contracts come up for renegotiation, she says, employers are including a wider range of possible causes for termination. “More language is being added to address harassment, sexual misconduct, inappropriate behavior with colleagues,” Sadig says. “Language that used to be looked over is now being scrutinized and broadened.” The new contract clauses won’t make sexual misconduct claims any easier to prove. But Sadig says they should act as a deterrent—that if executives know sexual misconduct won’t be tolerated, maybe they’ll think twice before participating in it. “Knowing from day one that this will not be tolerated and having it explicitly written in a contract should put everyone on notice, even if they may not have thought about it before.” Sadig says. “You can’t use that excuse anymore. It’s not assumed to be okay.”

Canada has arrested Huawei's chief financial officer on suspicion of violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. "Wanzhou Meng, who is also the deputy chair of Huawei's board and the daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Vancouver at the request of U.S. authorities," reports The Globe and Mail. From the report: "Wanzhou Meng was arrested in Vancouver on December 1. She is sought for extradition by the United States, and a bail hearing has been set for Friday," Justice department spokesperson Ian McLeod said in a statement to The Globe and Mail. "As there is a publication ban in effect, we cannot provide any further detail at this time. The ban was sought by Ms. Meng. A Canadian source with knowledge of the arrest said U.S. law enforcement authorities are alleging that Ms. Meng tried to evade the U.S. trade embargo against Iran but provided no further details. Since at least 2016, U.S. authorities have been reviewing Huawei's alleged shipping of U.S.-origin products to Iran and other countries in violation of U.S. export and sanctions laws.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A healthy baby girl has been born using a womb transplanted from a dead person. The 10-hour transplant operation -- and later fertility treatment -- took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2016. The mother, 32, was born without a womb. There have been 39 womb transplants using a live donor, including mothers donating their womb to their daughter, resulting in 11 babies. But the 10 previous transplants from a dead donor have failed or resulted in miscarriage. In this case, reported in The Lancet, the womb donor was a mother of three in her mid-40s who died from bleeding on the brain. The recipient reportedly had Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, which affects about one in every 4,500 women and results in the vagina and uterus (womb) failing to form properly. The baby girl was delivered by Caesarean section on December 15, 2017, weighing 6 pounds (2.5kg).

An anonymous reader writes from a report via ZDNet: Three academics from Northeastern University and three researchers from IBM Research have discovered a new variation of the Spectre CPU vulnerability that can be exploited via browser-based code. The vulnerability, which researchers codenamed SplitSpectre, is a variation of the original Spectre v1 vulnerability discovered last year and which became public in January 2018. The difference in SplitSpectre is not in what parts of a CPU's microarchitecture the flaw targets, but how the attack is carried out. Researchers say a SplitSpectre attack is both faster and easier to execute, improving an attacker's ability to recover code from targeted CPUs. The research team says they were successfully able to carry out a SplitSpectre attack against Intel Haswell and Skylake CPUs, and AMD Ryzen processors, via SpiderMonkey 52.7.4, Firefox's JavaScript engine. The good news is that existing Spectre mitigations would thwart the SplitSpectre attacks.

Google has launched Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of its open source, cross-platform UI toolkit and SDK. "Flutter lets developers share a single code base across Android and iOS apps, with a focus on speed and maintaining a native feel," reports Ars Technica. From the report: Flutter enables cross-platform app code by sidestepping the UI frameworks of both Android and iOS. Flutter apps run on the Flutter rendering engine and Flutter framework, which are shipped with every app. The Flutter platform handles communication with each OS and can spit out Android and iOS binaries with native-looking widgets and scrolling behavior if desired. It's kind of like applying a "video game" style of development to apps: if you write for a game engine like Unity or Unreal, those engines are packaged with your game, allowing it to run on multiple different platforms. It's the same deal with Flutter. Flutter apps are written in Dart, and the SDK offers programmers nice quality-of-life benefits like the "stateful hot reload," a way to instantly make code changes appear in the emulator. For IDEs, there are plugins for Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, and IntelliJ. Apps come with their own set of Flutter UI widgets for Android and iOS, with the iOS widgets closely following Apple's guidelines and the Android widgets following Google's Material Design. Flutter is designed to be fast, with its custom app engine running on Google's hardware-accelerated Skia engine. This means 60fps apps on Android and iOS and a path for 120fps apps in the future. This is a bigger deal on Android than it is on iOS. The Google Ads app is already built on Flutter, which means Google "thinks Flutter is ready for prime time," writes Ron Amadeo. There's a list of other apps built on Flutter, too. Amadeo goes on to suggest that Flutter may be the path to Android's replacement. "Flutter ships its own app engine on Android and iOS, but in secret, Google is also developing an OS called 'Fuchsia' that runs these Flutter apps natively," writes Amadeo. "With Fuchsia, Google would switch from the Android apps written in Java to Flutter apps written in Dart..."

On December 1, 2013, Amazon announced its plans to deliver packages by drone in just "four or five years" on a 60 Minutes episode with then-host Charlie Rose. As The Associated Press reports, it's officially been five years and drone deliveries seem to be nowhere in sight. "Bezos made billions of dollars by transforming the retail sector," reports The Associated Press. "But overcoming the regulatory hurdles and safety issues posed by drones appears to be a challenge even for the world's wealthiest man." From the report: The day may not be far off when drones will carry medicine to people in rural or remote areas, but the marketing hype around instant delivery of consumer goods looks more and more like just that -- hype. Drones have a short battery life, and privacy concerns can be a hindrance, too. Amazon says it is still pushing ahead with plans to use drones for quick deliveries, though the company is staying away from fixed timelines. "We are committed to making our goal of delivering packages by drones in 30 minutes or less a reality," says Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish. The Seattle-based online retail giant says it has drone development centers in the United States, Austria, France, Israel and the United Kingdom.

Facebook will now freely allow developers to build competitors to its features upon its own platform. Today Facebook announced it will drop Platform Policy section 4.1, which stipulates "Add something unique to the community. Don't replicate core functionality that Facebook already provides." TechCrunch reports: Facebook had previously enforced that policy selectively to hurt competitors that had used its Find Friends or viral distribution features. Apps like Vine, Voxer, MessageMe, Phhhoto and more had been cut off from Facebook's platform for too closely replicating its video, messaging or GIF creation tools. The move will significantly reduce the risk of building on the Facebook platform. It could also cast it in a better light in the eyes of regulators. Anyone seeking ways Facebook abuses its dominance will lose a talking point. And by creating a more fair and open platform where developers can build without fear of straying too close to Facebook's history or road map, it could reinvigorate its developer ecosystem. In a statement to TechCrunch, a Facebook spokesperson said: "We built our developer platform years ago to pave the way for innovation in social apps and services. At that time we made the decision to restrict apps built on top of our platform that replicated our core functionality. These kind of restrictions are common across the tech industry with different platforms having their own variant including YouTube, Twitter, Snap and Apple. We regularly review our policies to ensure they are both protecting people's data and enabling useful services to be built on our platform for the benefit of the Facebook community. As part of our ongoing review we have decided that we will remove this out of date policy so that our platform remains as open as possible. We think this is the right thing to do as platforms and technology develop and grow."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Volkswagen AG expects the era of the combustion car to fade away after it rolls out its next-generation gasoline and diesel cars beginning in 2026. "Our colleagues are working on the last platform for vehicles that aren't CO2 neutral," Michael Jost, strategy chief for Volkswagen's namesake brand, said Tuesday at an industry conference near the company's headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. "We're gradually fading out combustion engines to the absolute minimum." The world's largest automaker has started to introduce its first wave of electric cars, including next year's Porsche Taycan. The rollout across its stable of 12 automotive brands is forecast to comprise about 15 million vehicles, as the company earmarks $50 billion over the next five years to spend on its transformation to self-driving, electric cars. Production of the VW brand's I.D. Neo hatchback will start in 12 months in Germany, followed by other models from the I.D. line assembled at two sites in China as of 2020. VW plans to launch fully or partly electric versions across its lineup of more than 300 cars, vans, trucks and motorbikes by 2030. The company "will continue to modify its combustion engine technology after the new platform is introduced next decade," reports Bloomberg. "After 2050, there may still be some gasoline and diesel models in regions where there is insufficient charging infrastructure, according to Jost."

Australia is set to give its police and intelligence agencies the power to access encrypted messages on platforms such as WhatsApp, becoming the latest country to face down privacy concerns in the name of public safety. From a report: Amid protests from companies such as Facebook and Google, the government and main opposition struck a deal on Tuesday that should see the legislation passed by parliament this week. Under the proposed powers, technology companies could be forced to help decrypt communications on popular messaging apps, or even build new functionality to help police access data. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the legislation is needed to help foil terrorist attacks and organized crime. Critics say it is flawed and could undermine security across the Internet, jeopardizing activities from online voting to market trading and data storage.

Russia's Yandex has launched its first ever smartphone as the company seeks to leverage its dominant position in apps and services into hardware sales. Yandex, which runs the most popular search engine in Russia, hopes its Yandex.Phone will bind users closer to its suite of products, from food delivery and taxi hailing apps to marketplace and music streaming platforms, as competition rises for online services. From a report: The Yandex.Phone is a 5.65-inch Android-powered phone that will cost 17,990 rubles ($270) when it goes on sale tomorrow. In terms of specifications, Yandex.Phone is a fairly mid-range device, sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of expandable storage, and a 16-megapixel / 5-megapixel dual rear camera. In place of Google Assistant, which is standard on most Android phones, the company is also pushing its own intelligent assistant, Alice. This isn't the first piece of Yandex hardware to sport Alice since it was unveiled in 2017 -- earlier this year, Yandex launched a $160 smart speaker that also included the virtual assistant. It's not entirely clear what the default apps on the phone will be, but judging by the official photos it seems pretty clear Yandex is positioning its own services at the forefront of the device and favoring its own search engine. That said, Google's apps are also bundled.

Get ready for lots of 5G phones in time for the holidays next year. From a report: The first devices for the fast, next-generation network will hit the market in early 2019. Samsung, for one, said it will have a phone for Verizon, AT&T and other networks in the first half of the year. By the holidays next year, every flagship handset -- at least when it comes to those running Google's Android software and using Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor -- will tap into 5G, said Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon. "When we get to exactly this time of year one year from now ... we will see every [handset maker] on the Android ecosystem, their flagship across all US carriers will be a 5G device," he told CNET in an interview Tuesday at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii. "Every Android vendor is working on 5G right now."

Members of Google's "shadow workforce" of temporary workers and contractors is demanding higher wages and equal benefits to full employees in an open letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai. From a report, submitted by an anonymous reader: It's the latest in a series of public stands made by Google employees against aspects of the company culture. A coordinated walkout by employees around the globe protesting discrimination and sexual harassment at Google led the company to end forced arbitration for claims. Last month, several hundred employees signed onto a letter protesting the company's censored search efforts in China. A Bloomberg report in July said Alphabet had more contractors than direct employees this year, for the first time ever. Google's mission is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.' But the company fails to meet this standard within its own workplace. Google routinely denies [temporary, vendor, and contract workers] access to information that is relevant to our jobs and our lives," the letter published Wednesday says. The latest letter is signed only by "TVCs at Google" and does not indicate the number of employees backing the effort. Google did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.