Moderna’s Covid vaccine appears to work against new, more infectious variants of the pandemic virus found in the UK and South Africa, say scientists from the US pharmaceutical company. The BBC reports: Early laboratory tests suggest antibodies triggered by the vaccine can recognize and fight the new variants. More studies are needed to confirm this is true for people who have been vaccinated. Current vaccines were designed around earlier variants, but scientists believe they should still work against the new ones, although perhaps not quite as well. There are already some early results that suggest the Pfizer vaccine protects against the new UK variant.

For the Moderna study, researchers looked at blood samples taken from eight people who had received the recommended two doses of the Moderna vaccine. The findings are yet to be peer reviewed, but suggest immunity from the vaccine recognizes the new variants. Neutralizing antibodies, made by the body’s immune system, stop the virus from entering cells. Blood samples exposed to the new variants appeared to have sufficient antibodies to achieve this neutralizing effect, although it was not as strong for the South Africa variant as for the UK one. Moderna says this could mean that protection against the South Africa variant might disappear more quickly. Moderna says it’s investigating whether a redesigned vaccine would be more effective against the new variants. It’s also testing whether giving a third booster shot might be beneficial.

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Source: Slashdot – Moderna Vaccine Appears To Work Against Variants

A Vancouver seaplane company says its retro-fitted all electric airplane is set to take to the skies for more test flights this year, as it pushes forward with its plans to make commercial air travel cheaper and greener. CBC.ca reports: “There’s no wavering in our confidence and determination and interest in getting this done,” said Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall. Founded by McDougall in 1982, Harbour Air uses small propeller planes to fly commercial flights between the Lower Mainland, Seattle, Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and Whistler.

In the last few years it has turned its attention to becoming a leader in green urban mobility, which would do away with the need to burn fossil fuels for air travel. In December 2019, McDougall flew one of Harbour Air’s planes, a more than 60-year-old DHC-2 de Havilland Beaver float plane, which had been outfitted with a Seattle-based company’s electric propulsion system, for three minutes over Richmond B.C.

Harbour Air joined with Seattle-based company MagniX in early 2019 to design the e-plane’s engine, which was powered by NASA-approved lithium-ion batteries that were also used on the International Space Station. At the time, based on the success of that inaugural flight, McDougall had hoped to be using the plane to fly passengers on its routes, such as between downtown Vancouver and downtown Victoria, by the end of this year. Now, that timeline has been pushed back at least one year due to the pandemic.

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Source: Slashdot – Vancouver Seaplane Company To Resume Test Flights With Electric Plane

Google says its new machine learning algorithms could replace cookie-based ad targeting without invading your privacy. Axios reports: Google has been testing a new API (a software interface) called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that acts as an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies. The API exists as a browser extension within Google Chrome. The company said Monday that tests of FLoC to reach audiences show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent on ads when compared to cookie-based advertising. FLoC uses machine learning algorithms to analyze user data and then create a group of thousands of people based off of the sites that an individual visits. The data gathered locally from the browser is never shared. Instead, the data from the much wider cohort of thousands of people is shared, and that is then used to target ads.

It’s a big deal that Google says it’s close to coming up with a technology that will replace cookies, because one of the toughest parts of phasing cookies out of internet ad-targeting is that there hasn’t been a great solution for what to replace them with. […] Google has other proposals to replace cookies in the works, so it’s not guaranteed that FLoC will be the answer, but the company said it’s highly encouraged by what it has seen so far.

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Source: Slashdot – Google Says It May Have Found a Privacy-Friendly Substitute To Cookies

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A well-known hacker has leaked the details of more than 2.28 million users registered on MeetMindful.com, a dating website founded in 2014, ZDNet has learned this week from a security researcher. The dating site’s data has been shared as a free download on a publicly accessible hacking forum known for its trade in hacked databases. The leaked data, a 1.2 GB file, appears to be a dump of the site’s users database.

The content of this file includes a wealth of information that users provided when they set up profiles on the MeetMindful site and mobile apps. Some of the most sensitive data points included in the file include: Real names; Email addresses; City, state, and ZIP details; Body details; Dating preferences; Marital status; Birth dates; Latitude and longitude; IP addresses; Bcrypt-hashed account passwords; Facebook user IDs; and Facebook authentication tokens. Messages exchanged by users were not included in the leaked file; however, this does not make the entire incident less sensitive. The data leak, which is still available for download, was released by a threat actor who goes by the name of ShinyHunters. They also were responsible for leaking the details of millions of users registered on Teespring.

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Source: Slashdot – Hacker Leaks Data of 2.28 Million Dating Site Users