The former director of the University of Arkansas' High Density Electronics Center, a research facility that specialises in electronic packaging and multichip technology, has been jailed for a year for failing to disclose Chinese patents for his inventions.
Professor Simon Saw-Teong Ang was in 2020 indicted for wire fraud and passport fraud, with the charges arising from what the US Department of Justice described as a failure to disclose "ties to companies and institutions in China" to the University of Arkansas or to the US government agencies for which the High Density Electronics Center conducted research under contract.
At the time of the indictment, then assistant attorney general for national security John C. Demers described Ang's actions as "a hallmark of the China's targeting of research and academic collaborations within the United States in order to obtain U.S. technology illegally." The DoJ statement about the indictment said Ang's actions had negatively impacted NASA and the US Air Force.
The fraud charges were dropped after the FBI caught Ang in a lie: when asked if any patents in China bore his name, he replied in the negative. Ang agreed to plead guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI.
On Thursday, the case reached its sentencing phase and Judge Timothy L. Brooks of the United States District Court in Fayetteville sent Ang down for a year and a day for making a false statement about those patents – all 24 of them.
As a University employee, Ang's obligation was to disclose inventions to the University of Arkansas, so it – and not Chinese entities - could enjoy IP rights to the former Professor's innovations. Ang also failed to disclose what the DoJ described as "numerous talent awards" awarded by China's government.
China is credibly accused of using many means to illegally obtain technology. On such matters, and on issues regarding cybersecurity, Beijing often tries to level similar allegations against other nations. But those counter-actions can sometimes fall flat: this week China accused US national security agencies of mass data harvesting by citing research from a "cybersecurity information platform" named "Anzer" – but researchers have struggled to find any trace of Anzer, or the report it supposedly created. ®
Episode 11 The Boss is – not to put too fine a spin on it – crapping himself.
Apparently, there's a rumour about some legal action in the wind and that the substance of his email conversations is now being asked about.
At the moment it's just some questions from HR, but who knows how far this could go?
On Call Every disaster recovery plan needs to contain the "hit by a bus" scenario. But have you ever retrieved a password from beyond the grave? One Register reader has. Welcome to On Call.
Today's tale, told by a reader Regomized as "Mark" takes us back some 15 years when he was handling the IT needs for a doctor's office. The job was relatively simple and involved keeping the systems up and running as well as taking the odd call when things went wrong and he wasn't on-site.
His contact at the practice worked at the reception desk, and Mark would exchange pleasantries with this individual on his way to deal with whatever that day's needs were. This went on for some time until there was a mysterious lull in contact. There was not a peep from the office until, after a few months, the on-call phone rang. It wasn't his usual contact, and Mark was asked if there any chance he could pop by?
Canonical's Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.
This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it's based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.
Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.
Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and other tech companies and publishers have agreed to fight disinformation online in accordance with the European Commission's latest Code of Practice rules, which were published on Thursday.
The code [PDF] lists a broad set of commitments that signatories can choose to adhere to in the fight against digital fakery. Among the options are taking steps to demonetize disinformation; businesses should avoid placing ads next to fake news or profiting off the spread of false information online; and clearly labeling political advertisements.
Other concerns include making data from social media platforms more transparent and available for researchers and supporting the work of fact checkers. The EU updated these guidelines to tackle the rise of fake bots accounts and AI-generated deepfakes too. Signatories promise to outline their internal policies for dealing with manipulated content, and have to show their algorithms used for detecting and moderating deepfakes are trustworthy.
Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it's completed a massive migration of its own apps to its own cloud.
The company started thinking about this in 2018 after realising that its many services had each built their own technology silos.
Plenty of those services – among them WeChat, social network, qq.com, games like Honour of Kings and YouTube-like Tencent Video – have tens or hundreds of millions of users. Each service appears to have built infrastructure to cope with peak traffic requirements, leaving plenty of unused capacity across Tencent's operations.
Law enforcement agencies around the world have arrested about 2,000 people and seized $50 million in a sweeping operation crackdown of social engineering and other scam operations around the globe.
In the latest action in the ongoing "First Light", an operation Interpol has coordinated annually since 2014, law enforcement officials from 76 countries raided 1,770 call centers suspected of running fraudulent operations such as telephone and romance scams, email deception scams, and financial crimes.
Among the 2,000 people arrested in Operation First Light 2022 were call center operators and fraudsters, and money launderers. Interpol stated that the operation also saw 4,000 bank accounts frozen and 3,000 suspects identified.
Brave CEO Brendan Eich took aim at rival DuckDuckGo on Wednesday by challenging the web search engine's efforts to brush off revelations that its Android, iOS, and macOS browsers gave, to a degree, Microsoft Bing and LinkedIn trackers a pass versus other trackers.
Eich drew attention to one of DuckDuckGo's defenses for exempting Microsoft's Bing and LinkedIn domains, a condition of its search contract with Microsoft: that its browsers blocked third-party cookies anyway.
"For non-search tracker blocking (e.g. in our browser), we block most third-party trackers," explained DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg last month. "Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon."
Another day, another legal claim against Apple for deliberately throttling the performance of its iPhones to save battery power.
This latest case was brought by Justin Gutmann, who has asked the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to approve a collective action that could allow as many as 25 million Brits to claim compensation from the American technology giant. He claims the iGiant secretly degraded their smartphones' performance to make the battery power last longer.
Apple may therefore have to cough up an eye-popping £768 million ($927 million), Gutmann's lawyers estimated, Bloomberg first reported this week.
A former Google video producer has sued the internet giant alleging he was unfairly fired for blowing the whistle on a religious sect that had all but taken over his business unit.
The lawsuit demands a jury trial and financial restitution for "religious discrimination, wrongful termination, retaliation and related causes of action." It alleges Peter Lubbers, director of the Google Developer Studio (GDS) film group in which 34-year-old plaintiff Kevin Lloyd worked, is not only a member of The Fellowship of Friends, the exec was influential in growing the studio into a team that, in essence, funneled money back to the fellowship.
In his complaint [PDF], filed in a California Superior Court in Silicon Valley, Lloyd lays down a case that he was fired for expressing concerns over the fellowship's influence at Google, specifically in the GDS. When these concerns were reported to a manager, Lloyd was told to drop the issue or risk losing his job, it is claimed.
RSA Conference Quick show of hands: who came home from this year's RSA Conference without COVID-19?
The cybersecurity event's organizers say they're not keeping count of attendees who say they've been hit with the coronavirus. Meanwhile, a growing number of folks have taken to Twitter to post photos and reports of positive test results after attending the conference.
If you thought you were over the hump with Patch Tuesday then perhaps think again: Cisco has just released fixes for seven flaws, two of which are not great.
First on the priority list should be a critical vulnerability in its enterprise security appliances, and the second concerns another critical bug in some of its outdated small business routers that it's not going to fix. In other words, junk your kit or somehow mitigate the risk.
Both of these received a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10 in severity. The IT giant urged customers to patch affected security appliances ASAP if possible, and upgrade to newer hardware if you're still using an end-of-life, buggy router. We note that miscreants aren't actively exploiting either of these vulnerabilities — yet.
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