An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for emergency use as outlined in the agency’s COVID-19 guidelines a new ventilator designed by engineers working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The ventilator, which has an acronym because this is NASA we’re talking about, is called “VITAL” (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), and its design is being offered for free, licensed use for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The JPL-developed emergency use ventilator is an intubation ventilator, meaning that a patient has to be sedated, with a breathing tube inserted all the way down their airway to assist their breathing. It’s reserved for COVID-19 patients exhibiting the most serious symptoms, and even then is really designed for use only to free up availability of existing, fully approved ventilator hardware in the case of extreme shortages.

What makes VITAL most interesting is that it is made of “far fewer” parts than existing traditional ventilators, according to NASA, and it also can be assembled much more quickly, and maintained with less expertise and effort over time. The design provides for use for between three or four months, however, rather than years for traditional hardware, and is meant specifically for COVID-19 patient use, hence its simpler design versus models that are made to serve in a number of different medical situations. NASA’s JPL is seeking commercial manufacturing partners for the hardware now that it has its authorization, however, in order to get it built in large numbers for distribution to hospitals in need.

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Source: Slashdot – FDA Authorizes NASA-Developed Ventilator For Use In COVID-19 Treatment

According to an exclusive report from Forbes, cybersecurity researcher Gabi Cirlig discovered that his Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 smartphone was watching much of what he was doing and sending that data to remote servers hosted by Chinese tech giant Alibaba, which were ostensibly rented by Xiaomi. From the report: The seasoned cybersecurity researcher found a worrying amount of his behavior was being tracked, whilst various kinds of device data were also being harvested, leaving Cirlig spooked that his identity and his private life was being exposed to the Chinese company. When he looked around the Web on the device’s default Xiaomi browser, it recorded all the websites he visited, including search engine queries whether with Google or the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo, and every item viewed on a news feed feature of the Xiaomi software. That tracking appeared to be happening even if he used the supposedly private “incognito” mode.

The device was also recording what folders he opened and to which screens he swiped, including the status bar and the settings page. All of the data was being packaged up and sent to remote servers in Singapore and Russia, though the Web domains they hosted were registered in Beijing. Meanwhile, at Forbes’ request, cybersecurity researcher Andrew Tierney investigated further. He also found browsers shipped by Xiaomi on Google Play — Mi Browser Pro and the Mint Browser — were collecting the same data. Together, they have more than 15 million downloads, according to Google Play statistics. Cirlig thinks that the problems affect many more models than the one he tested. In response to the findings, Xiaomi said, “The research claims are untrue,” and “Privacy and security is of top concern,” adding that it “strictly follows and is fully compliant with local laws and regulations on user data privacy matters.” A spokesperson did however confirm it was collecting browsing data, claiming the info was anonymized and users had consented to it.

Cirlig and Tierney pointed out that Xiaomi “was also collecting data about the phone, including unique numbers for identifying the specific device and Android version,” reports Forbes. “Cirlig said such ‘metadata’ could ‘easily be correlated with an actual human behind the screen.'”

The researchers also say they found their Xiaomi apps to be sending data to domains that appeared to reference Sensor Analytics, which Xiaomi says “provides a data analysis solution for Xiaomi,” adding that that the collected anonymous data “are stored on Xiaomi’s own servers and will not be shared with Sensor Analytics, or any other third-party companies.”

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Source: Slashdot – Xiaomi Found Recording ‘Private’ Web and Phone Use, Researchers Claim

UnknowingFool writes: Intel released more information about their next generation CPUs, codenamed Comet Lake. Overall, CPUs will get more cores and threads and slight speed boosts. Price wise, Intel is cutting prices to be more competitive with AMD’s Rzyen processors. Some of the downsides include requiring new socket (thus new MBs), LGA 1200 and lack of PCIE 4.0 compatibility. No specific benchmarks were released, however Intel claims to have the fastest gaming CPUs. “[T]he top Comet Lake chip is the same price as the top Coffee Lake at $488, and the cheapest Core i3 is $122,” reports PC Gamer. They expect the release date to be sometime in May, though no official date has been confirmed.

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Source: Slashdot – Intel Unveils 10th Gen ‘Comet Lake’ CPUs, Pricing

VESA has announced that USB 4 will fully support the massive bandwidth available for the DisplayPort 2.0 standard, including support for 8K 60Hz HDR or even 16K 60Hz monitors. Engadget reports: Since USB 4 works at 40Gbps and DisplayPort 2.0 supports 80Gbps speeds, how will this work? USB 4 can actually send and receive at 40Gbps at the same time, so VESA took advantage of that with a new spec called DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0. Since DisplayPort is primarily used for video, which only sends data one way from your PC to a monitor, the Alt Mode 2.0 standard remaps USB-C’s data pins to work in one direction only — giving you double the speeds.

According to Anandtech, Alt Mode 2.0 will support regular USB 4 cables. At the same time, monitors won’t need to have USB 4 controllers, which should simplify display designs. Since it also supports the Thunderbolt 3 standard, USB 4 will become a universal connection standard for both smartphones and PCs, supporting things like “docking, gaming, AR/VR HMDs, and professional HDR displays,” VESA said.

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Source: Slashdot – USB 4 Will Fully Support DisplayPort 2, Including 8K HDR Monitors

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Millions of people gave their email addresses to Quibi, JetBlue, Wish and other companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) — and those email addresses got away. They ended up in the hands of advertising and analytics companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, leaving the people with those email addresses more easily targeted by advertisers and able to be tracked by companies that study shopping behavior, according toa reportpublished on Wednesday. The customers unwittingly exposed their email addresses when signing up for apps or clicking on links in marketing emails, said the researcher Zach Edwards, who runs the digital strategy firm Victory Medium. In the report, he described the giveaway of personal data as part of a “sloppy and dangerous growth hack.”

Mr. Edwards, a contributor to a recent studythat examined potential privacy violations by dating services like Grindr and OkCupid, wrote in the new report that one of the “most egregious” leaks involvedQuibi, a short-form video platform based in Los Angeles that is run by the veteran executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman. Quibi went live on April 6, long after new data privacy regulations went into effect in Europe and California. People who downloaded the Quibi app were asked to submit their email addresses. Then they received a confirmation link. Clicking on the link made their email addresses available to Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, according to the report.
Quibi said in a statement on Wednesday that data security “is of the highest priority” and that “the moment the issue on our webpage was revealed to our security and engineering team, we fixed it immediately.” “Mr. Edwards said customers were probably unaware of leaks at Wish, an e-commerce platform where hundreds of millions of email addresses were most likely exposed starting in 2018,” the report adds. “When users clicked on links in marketing emails from the company, their email addresses were shared with Google, Facebook, Pinterest, PayPal and others, he wrote.”

Other companies that suffered limited leaks included The Washington Post, JetBlue, and Mailchimp.

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Source: Slashdot – Quibi, JetBlue and Others Gave Away Email Addresses, Report Says