An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
The security firm Checkpoint on Thursday uncovered dozens of Android applications that infected users’ devices with malicious ad-click software. In at least one case, an app bearing the malware was available through the Google Play app store for more than a year. While the actual extent of the malicious code’s spread is unknown, Checkpoint says it may have reached as many as 36.5 million users, making it potentially the most widely-spread malware yet found on Google Play… The nefarious nature of the programs went unnoticed in large part, according to Checkpoint, because its malware payload was downloaded from a non-Google server after the programs were installed. The code would then use the infected phone to click on Google ads, generating fraudulent revenue for the attacker.

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Source: Slashdot – Malicious Apps Brought Ad-Clicking ‘Judy’ Malware To Millions Of Android Phones

Orome1 quotes Help Net Security: Even though many IoT devices for smart homes encrypt their traffic, a passive network observer — e.g. an ISP, or a neighborhood WiFi eavesdropper — can infer consumer behavior and sensitive details about users from IoT device-associated traffic rate metadata. A group of researchers from the Computer Science Department of Princeton University have proven this fact by setting up smart home laboratory with a passive network tap, and examining the traffic rates of four IoT smart home devices: a Sense sleep monitor, a Nest Cam Indoor security camera, a WeMo smart outlet, and an Amazon Echo smart speaker… “Once an adversary identifies packet streams for a particular device, one or more of the streams are likely to encode device state. Simply plotting send/receive rates of the streams revealed potentially private user interactions for each device we tested,” the researchers noted. [PDF] In addition, the article notes, “Separating recorded network traffic into packet streams and associating each stream with an IoT device is not that hard.”

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Source: Slashdot – New Privacy Vulnerability In IOT Devices: Traffic Rate Metadata

A Silicon Valley Congressman “is pushing for a plan that has been described as a first step toward universal basic income…a long-shot $1 trillion expansion to the earned income tax credit that is already available to low-income families.” An anonymous reader quotes the Mecury News:
Stanford University also has created a Basic Income Lab to study the idea, and the San Francisco city treasurer’s office has said it’s designing pilot tests — though the department told this news organization it has no updates on the status of that project… The problem is that giving all Americans a $10,000 annual income would cost upwards of $3 trillion a year — more than three-fourths of the federal budget, said Bob Greenstein, president of Washington, D.C.-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Some proponents advocate funding the move by cutting programs like food stamps and Medicaid. But that approach would take money set aside for low-income families and redistribute it upward, exacerbating poverty and inequality, Greenstein said… Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, is skeptical that basic income can do much lasting good in Oakland. What the city needs is more high-paying jobs and affordable housing, she said… The idea, [Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator] said at the Commonwealth Club, tackles the question not enough people are asking: “What do we as the tech industry do to solve the problem that we’re helping to create?”
This summer Y Combinator is expected to announce a larger Universal Basic Income program, though the article also describes “small pilot studies” in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada and in several U.S. states including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa and Indiana, where “Some studies showed improvements in participants’ physical and mental health, and found children performed better in school or stayed in school longer. But some also showed that people receiving a basic income were inclined to spend fewer hours working.”

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Source: Slashdot – Silicon Valley Continues To Explore Universal Basic Incomes

hackingbear writes:
Researchers at U.C. Berkeley found a birth control that was hormone-free, 100 percent natural, resulted in no side effects, didn’t harm either eggs nor sperm, could be used in the long-term or short-term, and — perhaps the best part of all — could be used either before or after conception, from ancient Chinese folk medicine… “Because these two plant compounds block fertilization at very, very low concentrations — about 10 times lower than levels of levonorgestrel in Plan B — they could be a new generation of emergency contraceptive we nicknamed ‘molecular condoms,'” team leader Polina Lishko.

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Source: Slashdot – Researchers Found Perfect Contraceptives In Traditional Chinese Medicine

Tech analyst James Governor argues that Amazon’s cloud business is “demolishing the cult of youth.”
It just announced it is hiring James Gosling, one of the original inventors of Java… Meanwhile James Hamilton continues to completely kick ass in compute, network, and data center design for AWS… He’s in his 50s. Tim Bray, one of the inventors of XML, joined Amazon in 2014. He’s another Sun alumni. He’s 61 now. He still codes. When you sit down with one of the AWS engineering teams you’re sitting down with grownups… Adrian Cockcroft joined AWS in October 2016. He graduated in 1982, not 2002. He is VP Cloud Architecture Strategy at AWS, a perfect role for someone that helped drive Netflix’s transition from on-prem Java hairball to serious cloud leadership.

Great engineering is not maths — it involves tradeoffs, wisdom and experience… The company puts such a premium on independent groups working fast and making their own decisions it requires a particular skillset, which generally involves a great deal of field experience. A related trend is hiring seasoned marketing talent from the likes of IBM. Some other older companies have older distinguished engineers because they grew up with the company. AWS is explicitly bringing that experience in. It’s refreshing to the see a different perspective on value.

In a later post the analyst acknowledges engineering managers are generally older than their reports, but adds that “If AWS sees value in hiring engineering leadership from folks that are frankly a bit older than the norm in the industry, isn’t that worth shining a light on?” In response to the article, XML inventor Tim Bray suggested a new acronym: GaaS. “Geezers as a service,” while Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted “There is no compression algorithm for experience.”

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Source: Slashdot – Is Amazon’s AWS Hiring ‘Demolishing The Cult Of Youth’?