An anonymous reader shares a report: In a worst-case scenario, Apple's annual iPhone shipments could decline by 25-30% if it is forced to remove WeChat from its App Stores around the world, according to a new research note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo viewed by MacRumors. The removal could occur due to a recent executive order aiming to ban U.S. transactions with WeChat and its parent company Tencent. Kuo lays out optimistic and pessimistic scenarios depending on whether Apple is only required to remove WeChat from the App Store in the United States or if the ban would apply to the App Store in all countries. WeChat is extremely popular with Chinese mobile device users, essentially operating as its own platform on top of iOS and Android for many users, and Kuo argues that a worldwide ban on WeChat in the App Store would be devastating due to the size of the Chinese market.

"Because WeChat has become a daily necessity in China, integrating functions such as messaging, payment, e-commerce, social networking, news reading, and productivity, if this is the case, we believe that Apple's hardware product shipments in the Chinese market will decline significantly. We estimate that the annual iPhone shipments will be revised down by 25-30%, and the annual shipments of other Apple hardware devices, including AirPods, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac, will be revised down by 15-25%," he wrote in a note. Under his optimistic scenario in which WeChat is only removed from the U.S. App Store, Kuo predicts iPhone shipments would be impacted by 3-6% with other Apple products being affected by less than 3%.

NASA is "reconsidering how we talk about space," reports CNET: NASA gave two examples of cosmic objects it'll no longer use nicknames for. Planetary nebula NGC 2392 has been called the "Eskimo Nebula." "'Eskimo' is widely viewed as a colonial term with a racist history, imposed on the indigenous people of Arctic regions," NASA explained. NASA already added a note to a 2008 image release showing NGC 2392 that explains the decision to retire the nickname.

The agency will also use only the official designations of NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 to refer to a pair of spiral galaxies that were known as the "Siamese Twins Galaxy."

This reexamination of cosmic names is ongoing.
CNN explains NASA's rationale: "Nicknames are often more approachable and public-friendly than official names for cosmic objects, such as Barnard 33, whose nickname 'the Horsehead Nebula' invokes its appearance," NASA said in a release this week. "But often seemingly innocuous nicknames can be harmful and detract from the science...."

The space agency says it "will use only the official, International Astronomical Union designations in cases where nicknames are inappropriate."

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC, said, "Science is for everyone, and every facet of our work needs to reflect that value."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Facebook has deleted a large group dedicated to sharing and discussing QAnon conspiracy theories. QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that a "deep state" network of powerful government, business and media figures are waging a secret war against Donald Trump. A Facebook spokeswoman said the group was removed for "repeatedly posting content that violated our policies." The deleted Facebook group, called Official Q/Qanon, had nearly 200,000 members. There are, however, many other QAnon groups that are currently still active on the platform. Reuters reports that Official Q/QAnon "crossed the line" on bullying, harassment, hate speech and the sharing of potentially harmful misinformation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to ban dealings with ByteDance, owner of video-sharing sensation TikTok, appears to codify what his administration has already been warning. A second edict targeting messaging app WeChat and its parent, Tencent, seems weirdly overdue. The executive orders issued by the White House go beyond stopping average Americans from becoming unwitting spies for the Communist Party through their postings and data. The implications could hurt not only the Chinese targets, but the U.S. companies they work with, including Apple and Alphabet's Google.

Though TikTok and WeChat have been getting all the recent attention, the orders state that American companies cannot work with ByteDance or Tencent (though an unnamed U.S. official later stated that Tencent transactions were still OK). That clarification notwithstanding, the wording of the orders does imply that regardless of intention such bans could extend further, to include Americans advertising on dozens of products offered by either Chinese company, or to selling them cloud-storage services, or perhaps the most nuclear option: distributing their apps, even within China. [...] Even though Chinese smartphone brands dominate their domestic market, iOS and Android remain the dominant platforms and Apple and Google cover almost the entire global ecosystem with their respective app stores. If they can't do business with ByteDance, for example, even after a TikTok spin off, then the Beijing company might be unable to distribute its own apps, even within China.

A massive attack has hit Reddit today after at least tens of Reddit channels (subreddits) have been hacked and defaced to show messages in support of Donald Trump's reelection campaign, ZDNet reports. From the report: The hacks are still ongoing at the time of writing, but we were told Reddit's security team is aware of the issue and has already begun restoring defaced channels. A partial list of impacted channels (subreddits) is available below, according to ZDNet's research: r/NFL, r/49ers, r/TPB (The Pirate Bay's Reddit channel), r/BlackMirror, r/Beer, r/Vancouver, r/Dallas, r/Gorillaz, r/Podcasts, r/freefolk, r/StartledCats, r/TheDailyZeitgeist, r/Supernatural, r/GRE, r/GMAT, r/greatbritishbakeoff, r/11foot8, r/truecrimepodcasts, r/Leafs, r/weddingplanning, r/Chadsriseup, r/bertstrips, r/CFB ...and many many other more.

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Facebook has removed a post from Donald Trump's page for spreading false information about the coronavirus, a first for the social media company that has been harshly criticized for repeatedly allowing the president to break its content rules. The post included video of Trump falsely asserting that children were "almost immune from Covid-19" during an appearance on Fox News. There is evidence to suggest that children who contract Covid-19 generally experience milder symptoms than adults do. However, they are not immune, and some children have become severely ill or died from the disease.

The Twitter account for Trump's re-election campaign, @TeamTrump, also posted the video, which Twitter said violated its rules. "The account owner will be required to remove the Tweet before they can Tweet again," a company spokesperson said of @TeamTrump. During a press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Trump repeated his false claims about children and the disease.

Twenty state attorneys general on Wednesday called on Facebook to better prevent messages of hate, bias and disinformation from spreading, and said the company needed to provide more help to users facing online abuse. From a report: In a letter [PDF] to the social media giant, the officials said they regularly encountered people facing online intimidation and harassment on Facebook. They outlined seven steps the company should take, including allowing third-party audits of hate content and offering real-time assistance to users. "We hope to work with you to ensure that fewer individuals suffer online harassment and discrimination, and that it is quickly and effectively addressed when they do," said the letter, which was addressed to Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The officials who signed the letter, all of them Democrats, represent states including New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, as well as the District of Columbia. The letter adds to the rising pressure facing Mr. Zuckerberg and his company to stop disinformation and harassment on Facebook. Civil rights leaders, advertisers and some of the company's own employees have criticized Facebook for failing to curtail the spread of noxious content. Extremists and conspiracists have turned to social media -- most often Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- to circulate falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic, the coming presidential election and Black Lives Matter protests.

Facebook and other social media companies have made some changes to dismantle misinformation and hate on their services. Last month, Twitter announced that it would remove thousands of accounts associated with the fringe conspiracy movement QAnon, saying their messages could lead to harm and violated Twitter policy. In June, Facebook took down a network of accounts tied to boogaloo, an antigovernment movement in the United States that encourages violence. That same month, YouTube banned six channels for violating its policies, including those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer. But according to the attorneys general, Facebook in particular has not done enough. The officials pointed to Facebook's recent Civil Rights Audit -- which found that advertisers could still run ads that painted a religious group as a threat to the "American way of life" -- as evidence that the social network had fallen short. "Facebook has a hate speech, discrimination, disinformation problem," Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal, of New Jersey, who led the letter, said in an interview. "The way I view it, as an attorney general, is that it directly affects public safety in my state, that the groups that are allowed to find community online, on Facebook, allow hate to be normalized."

A virus has brought the world's most powerful country to its knees. From a report: A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are simply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these people's villages and roost in their homes, creating opportunities for the bats' viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of people every year. "Most infected people don't know about it, and most of the viruses aren't transmissible," Daszak says. But it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic.

Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a human -- and another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun. [...] Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, "so that when something like this happens, you're moving quickly," Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. "By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken." Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

schwit1 writes: President Trump announced the removal of Tennessee Valley Authority's chair James Thompson and board member Richard Howoth and called for the removal of their CEO Bill Johnson. This was in response to the company laying off employees and hiring H1-B visa holders. [TVA announced it would outsource 20% of its technology jobs to companies based in foreign countries, which could cause more than 200 highly skilled American tech workers in Tennessee to lose their jobs to foreign workers, according to the White House.] During the round table discussion, it was announced the company is willing to reverse course and rehire previously laid off employees. The president also said he would not ban the TikTok app if Microsoft or another company bought it before September 15th. "The TVA is a federally owned corporation created in 1933 to provide flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing and economic development to the Tennessee Valley, a region that was hard hit by the Great Depression," reports The Associated Press. "The region covers most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky as well as small sections of Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia."

Trump said the new chief executive officer must "[put] the interests of Americans first," adding: "The new CEO must be paid no more than $500,000 a year. We want the TVA to take action on this immediately. [...] Let this serve as a warning to any federally appointed board: If you betray American workers, you will hear two words: 'You're fired.'"

The announcement was made as Trump signed an executive order to require all federal agencies to complete an internal audit to prove they are not replacing qualified American workers with people from other countries. According to the White House, the order will help prevent federal agencies from unfairly replacing American workers with lower cost foreign labor.

After initial success, Japan is facing a reality check on the coronavirus. From a report: The country garnered global attention after containing the first wave of Covid-19 with what it referred to as the "Japan Model" -- limited testing and no lockdown, nor any legal means to force businesses to close. The country's finance minister even suggested a higher "cultural standard" helped contain the disease. But now the island nation is facing a formidable resurgence, with Covid-19 cases hitting records nationwide day after day. Infections first concentrated in the capital have spread to other urban areas, while regions without cases for months have become new hotspots. And the patient demographic -- originally younger people less likely to fall seriously ill -- is expanding to the elderly, a concern given that Japan is home to the world's oldest population.

Experts say that Japan's focus on the economy may have been its undoing. As other countries in Asia, which experienced the coronavirus earlier than those in the West, wrestle with new flare ups of Covid-19, Japan now risks becoming a warning for what happens when a country moves too fast to normalize -- and doesn't adjust its strategy when the outbreak changes. While Japan declared a state of emergency to contain the first wave of the virus, it didn't compel people to stay home or businesses to shut. That was ended in late May and officials quickly pivoted to a full reopening in an attempt to get the country's recessionary economy back on track. By June, restaurants and bars were fully open while events like baseball and sumo-wrestling were back on -- a stark contrast to other places in the region like Singapore which were re-opening only in cautious phases.

President Trump said Monday that TikTok will be shut down in the U.S. if it hasn't been bought by Microsoft or another company by Sept. 15, and claimed that the U.S. Treasury should get "a very substantial portion" of the sale fee. From a report: Trump appears to have backed off his threat to immediately ban TikTok after speaking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said Sunday that the company will pursue discussions with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to purchase the app in the U.S. TikTok has come under intense scrutiny in the U.S. due to concerns that the vast amounts of data it collects could be accessed by the Chinese government, potentially posing a national security threat.

slack_justyb shares a report from Ars Technica: As COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US approach the highest levels seen in the pandemic so far, national efforts to track patients and hospital resources remain in shambles after the federal government abruptly seized control of data collection earlier this month. Watchdogs and public health experts were immediately aghast by the switch to the HHS database, fearing the data would be manipulated for political reasons or hidden from public view all together. However, the real threat so far has been the administrative chaos. The switch took effect July 15, giving hospitals and states just days to adjust to the new data collection and submission process.

As such, hospitals have been struggling with the new data reporting, which involves reporting more types of data than the CDC's previous system. Generally, the data includes stats on admissions, discharges, beds and ventilators in use and in reserve, as well as information on patients. For some hospitals, that data has to be harvested from various sources, such as electronic medical records, lab reports, pharmacy data, and administrative sources. Some larger hospital systems have been working to write new scripts to automate new data mining, while others are relying on staff to compile the data manually into excel spreadsheets, which can take multiple hours each day, according to a report by Healthcare IT News. The task has been particularly onerous for small, rural hospitals and hospitals that are already strained by a crush of COVID-19 patients. "It seems the obvious of going from a system that is well tested, to something new and alien to everyone is happening exactly as everyone who has ever done these kinds of conversions predicted," adds Slashdot reader slack_justyb.

ProcMon for Linux is Microsoft's newest open-source Linux software. ProcMon is a rewritten and re-imagined version of its Processor Monitor found on Windows within their Sysinternals suite. From a report: Microsoft explains, "The Procmon is a Linux reimagining of the classic Procmon tool from the Sysinternals suite of tools for Windows. Procmon provides a convenient and efficient way for Linux developers to trace the syscall activity on the system."

The US Department of Commerce added 11 Chinese companies to its list of firms implicated in human rights violations, including China's reported campaign against Muslim minority groups from an area of the country known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. At least one of those companies, Nanchang O-Film Tech, is listed as a supplier or undefined "partner" with nearly two dozen tech and car companies, including Amazon, Apple, Dell, GM and Microsoft. From a report: The Commerce Department said the group of 11 companies that supported "mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, involuntary collection of biometric data and genetic analysis" targeted at Uighurs and other minority groups will face restrictions on US products, including technology. "Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labor and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens," Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a statement Monday. "This action will ensure that our goods and technologies are not used in the Chinese Communist Party's despicable offensive against defenseless Muslim minority populations."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, under fire for allowing President Trump to post inflammatory statements on his platform, tells Axios there's no truth to whispers that the two have a secret understanding. From a report: Zuckerberg, facing a growing ad boycott from brands that say Facebook hasn't done enough to curtail hate speech, has become increasingly public in criticizing Trump. "I've heard this speculation, too, so let me be clear: There's no deal of any kind," Zuckerberg told Axios. "Actually, the whole idea of a deal is pretty ridiculous. I do speak with the president from time to time, just like I spoke with our last president and political leaders around the world," he added.