sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When humans first set foot in Australia more than 65,000 years ago, they faced the perilous task of navigating a landscape they'd never seen. Now, researchers have used supercomputers to simulate 125 billion possible travel routes and reconstruct the most likely "superhighways" these ancient immigrants used as they spread across the continent. The project offers new insight into how landmarks and water supplies shape human migrations, and provides archaeologists with clues for where to look for undiscovered ancient settlements.

It took weeks to run the complex simulations on a supercomputer operated by the U.S. government. But the number crunching ultimately revealed a network of "optimal superhighways" that had the most attractive combinations of easy walking, water, and landmarks. Optimal road map in hand, the researchers faced a fundamental question, says lead author Stefani Crabtree, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and the Santa Fe Institute: Was there any evidence that real people had once used these computer-identified corridors? To find out, the researchers compared their routes to the locations of the roughly three dozen archaeological sites in Australia known to be at least 35,000 years old. Many sites sat on or near the superhighways. Some corridors also coincided with ancient trade routes known from indigenous oral histories, or aligned with genetic and linguistic studies used to trace early human migrations. "I think all of us were surprised by the goodness of the fit," says archaeologist Sean Ulm of James Cook University, Cairns.

The map has also highlighted little-studied migration corridors that could yield future archaeological discoveries. For example, some early superhighways sat on coastal lands that are now submerged, giving marine researchers a guide for exploration. Even more intriguing, the authors and others say, are major routes that cut across several arid areas in Australia's center and in the northeastern state of Queensland. Those paths challenge a "long-standing view that the earliest people avoided the deserts," Ulm says. The Queensland highway, in particular, presents "an excellent focus point" for future archaeological surveys, says archaeologist Shimona Kealy of the Australian National University. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Indian telecom ministry on Tuesday said it has granted several telecom service providers permission to conduct a six-month trial for the use and application of 5G technology in the country. From a report: New Delhi has granted approval to over a dozen firm spanning multiple nationalities -- excluding China. Among the telecom operators that have received the grant include Jio Platforms, Airtel, Vodafone Idea, and MTNL. These firms, the ministry said, will work with original equipment manufacturers and tech providers Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and C-Dot. Jio Platforms, additionally, has been granted permission to conduct trials using its own homegrown technology. In a press note, the Department of Telecommunications didn't specify anything about China, but a person familiar with the matter confirmed that Chinese giants Huawei and ZTE aren't among those who have received the approval. [...] India's move on Tuesday follows similar decisions taken by the U.S., UK, and Australia, all of which have expressed concerns about Huawei and ZTE and their ties with the Chinese government.

Apple's App Store had operating margins of almost 78% in fiscal year 2019, according to testimony from an Epic Games expert witness based on documents obtained from the iPhone maker. From a report: The figure comes from Ned Barnes, a financial and economics researcher, who said he obtained documents "prepared by Apple's Corporate Financial Planning and Analysis group and produced from the files of Apple CEO Tim Cook." Apple is disputing the accuracy of Barnes's calculations -- and urging a judge to restrict public discussion of App Store profit -- as the companies head into a high-stakes trial Monday in Oakland, California. Epic, maker of the blockbuster game Fortnite, is trying to show that the App Store is run like a monopoly with its commission on developers of as much as 30%, while Apple insists it doesn't abuse its market power. Epic is also suing Apple in the U.K. and Australia while Apple faces scrutiny from antitrust regulators in the U.S. and abroad.

The companies are relying heavily on dueling economists as they make their case to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is conducting the three-week trial without a jury. As part of the pretrial information-sharing process, Barnes said that an Apple employee told him that the numbers from the company's internal documents don't show the full picture. Barnes said he then made additional calculations, which resulted in higher margin estimates of 79.6% for both 2018 and 2019. In a statement Saturday, the Cupertino, California-based technology giant said Epic experts' "calculations of the operating margins for the App Store are simply wrong and we look forward to refuting them in court." Barnes said he also obtained documents prepared inside Apple that show profit and loss estimates for fiscal year 2020. He said Apple had been tracking App Store profits for years and that he also obtained such statements for 2013 through 2015.

"After more than 25 years of Canadian governments pursuing a hands-off approach to the online world, the government of Justin Trudeau is now pushing Bill C-10, a law that would see Canadians subjected to the most regulated internet in the free world," argues the Vancouver Sun (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck): Although pitched as a way to expand Canadian content provisions to the online sphere, the powers of Bill C-10 have expanded considerably in committee, including a provision introduced last week that could conceivably allow the federal government to order the deletion of any Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter upload made by a Canadian. In comments this week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh indicated his party was open to providing the votes needed to pass C-10, seeing the bill as a means to combat online hate...

The users themselves may not necessarily be subject to direct CRTC regulation, but social media providers would have to answer to every post on their platforms as if it were a TV show or radio program. This might be a good time to mention that members of the current Liberal cabinet have openly flirted with empowering the federal government to control social media. In a September Tweet, Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said that if social media companies "can't regulate yourselves, governments will." Guilbeault, the prime champion of Bill C-10, has spoken openly of a federal regulator that could order takedowns of any social media post that it deems to be hateful or propagandistic...

Basically, if your Canadian website isn't a text-only GeoCities blog from 1996, Bill C-10 thinks it's a program deserving of CRTC regulation. This covers news sites, podcasts, blogs, the websites of political parties or activist groups and even foreign websites that might be seen in Canada...

The penalties prescribed by Bill C-10 are substantial. For corporations, a first offence can yield penalties of up to $10 million, while subsequent offences could be up to $15 million apiece. If TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are suddenly put in a situation where their millions of users must follow the same rules as a Canadian cable channel or radio station, it's not unreasonable to assume they may just follow Facebook's example [in Australia] and take the nuclear option.

schwit1 shares a report from Threatpost: Quick-response (QR) codes used by a COVID-19 contact-tracing program were hijacked by a man who simply slapped up scam QR codes on top to redirect users to an anti-vaccination website, according to local police. He now faces two counts of "obstructing operations carried out relative to COVID-19 under the Emergency Management Act," the South Australia Police said in a statement announcing the arrest. His arrest may just be a drop in the bucket: Reports of other anti-vax campaigners doing the same thing abound. Law enforcement added an additional warning to would-be QR code scammers: "Any person found to be tampering or obstructing with business QR codes will likely face arrest and court penalty of up to $10,000." The police said no personal data was breached, but the incident highlights that truly all an attacker needs is a printer and a pack of Avery labels to do real damage.

In this case, the QR codes were being used by the South Australian government's official CovidSafe app to access a device's camera, scan the code and collect real-time location data to be used for contact tracing in case of a COVID-19 outbreak, ABC News Australia reported. That's a lot of personal data linked to a single QR code just waiting to be stolen. "In this instance, people who scanned the illegitimate QR code were redirected to a website distributing misinformation from the anti-vaxxer community," Bill Harrod, vice president of public sector at Ivanti, told Threatpost. "While this is concerning, the outcome could have been far more perilous."

Dr Anthony Fauci, the White House's chief medical adviser, has said countries have failed to unite to provide an adequate global response to prevent the "tragic" coronavirus outbreak from overwhelming India, and singled out wealthier nations for failing to provide equitable access to healthcare around the world. From a report: Speaking to Guardian Australia from the US, Fauci said the situation in India had highlighted global inequality. "The only way that you're going to adequately respond to a global pandemic is by having a global response, and a global response means equity throughout the world," Fauci said. "And that's something that, unfortunately, has not been accomplished. Often when you have diseases in which there is a limited amount of intervention, be it therapeutic or prevention, this is something that all the countries that are relatively rich countries or countries that have a higher income have to pay more attention to."

India recorded 360,960 new cases in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning according to health ministry data, another new daily global record. The ministry also said that India's total number of fatalities had passed 200,000 to stand at 201,187. The latest epidemiological update from the World Health Organization (WHO) issued on Tuesday said Covid-19 cases increased globally for the ninth consecutive week, with nearly 5.7m new cases reported. India accounts for the majority of cases, with 2,172,063 new cases reported in the past week -- a 52% increase.

"Sydney university student Pablo Bonilla, 21, had his first academic paper published overnight and it might just change the shape of computing forever," writes Australia's national public broadcaster ABC: As a second-year physics student at the University of Sydney, Mr Bonilla was given some coding exercises as extra homework and what he returned with has helped to solve one of the most common problems in quantum computing. His code spiked the interest of researchers at Yale and Duke in the United States and the multi-billion-dollar tech giant Amazon plans to use it in the quantum computer it is trying to build for its cloud platform Amazon Web Services....

Assistant professor Shruti Puri of Yale's quantum research program said the new code solved a problem that had persisted for 20 years. "What amazes me about this new code is its sheer elegance," she said. "Its remarkable error-correcting properties are coming from a simple modification to a code that has been studied extensively for almost two decades...."

Co-author of the paper, the University of Sydney's Ben Brown, said the brilliance of Pablo Bonilla's code was in its simplicity... "We just made the smallest of changes to a chip that everybody is building, and all of a sudden it started doing a lot better. It's quite amazing to me that nobody spotted it in the 20-or-so years that people have been working on that model."

Australia's federal court found that Google misled users about personal location data collected through Android mobile devices between 2017 and 2018, the country's competition regulator said Friday. From a report: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) -- which launched legal proceedings against Google in 2019 -- said the ruling was an "important victory for consumers" with regard to the protection of online privacy. Google misled Android users into thinking the search giant could collect personal data only if the "location history" setting was on, the ACCC said. The court found that Google could still collect, store and use personally identifiable location data if the setting for "web and application activity" was on -- even if "location history" was turned off. "This is an important victory for consumers, especially anyone concerned about their privacy online, as the Court's decision sends a strong message to Google and others that big businesses must not mislead their customers," ACCC Chair Rod Sims said in a statement.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On November 7, 2018, Leong Sze Hian, a financial advisor and blogger, shared an article on his Facebook page, without comment. The article, published by Malaysian website The Coverage, alleged that Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had become a target of ongoing investigations in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, a massive case of graft in Malaysia that drew in banks in Singapore, Hollywood stars, and Saudi royalty. The article claimed that Malaysia, under former Prime Minister Najib Razak, had signed unfair deals with Singapore in return for help to launder stolen funds. These were serious allegations, particularly in Singapore, where the government is ultra-sensitive to any suggestion of corruption.

The response, unsurprisingly, was strong and swift: the law and home affairs minister issued a clear rebuttal, Singapore's High Commission in Kuala Lumpur described the article as libelous, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore lodged a police report against the author of a similar article published in the States Times Review, a website run by a Singaporean in Australia who is highly critical of Singapore's ruling People's Action Party. The Infocomm Media Development Authority, Singapore's media regulator, told Leong to remove the link from his Facebook page; he did. But it was already too late to save him from trouble. Two days later, he found out that Prime Minister Lee was going to sue him for defamation. Last month, the High Court ruled that Leong did defame Lee and ordered him to pay almost $100,000 (133,000 Singapore dollars) in damages. It's an extraordinary sum for a simple Facebook link that stayed up for only three days. But there's a particular legal precedent in Singapore: public leaders are usually awarded higher damages when they win defamation suits related to their character or integrity. In his judgment, Justice Aedit Abdullah quoted a previous case in which the courts stated that public "leaders are generally entitled to higher damages also because of their standing in Singapore society and devotion to public service."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Good news, disabled Australians! You'll soon be getting an app that will implement a welfare compliance regime designed by the people who brought you robo-debt. But don't worry, it'll have blockchain. No, this isn't good news at all. What makes it worse is that it's clear the government wants to extend technology-driven compliance to all Australians, with an emphasis on cracking down on your mistakes, not theirs. Kathryn Campbell, Secretary of the Department of Social Services, says the long-term plan is to have one app for all Commonwealth government services. "One to rule the world," she said last month, apparently oblivious to how evil that sounds.

Senators are already worried that the disability app, intended to be used by participants in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to claim expenses against their support plan, will go the way of COVIDSafe: Millions of dollars spent on technology that doesn't really do the job. The intention was to fix a poor web experience, and allow claims to be made from a mobile device. But instead of simply creating a better website, in 2018, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) joined forces with CSIRO's Data61 and the Commonwealth Bank to trial blockchain-based smart money that would magically know whether the expense was legitimate or not. According to the CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), Martin Hoffman, that pilot app has been "very popular and well-received," and the feedback has been "extremely positive." The app will be "fully available in the coming months, first on Google Play and then Apple's app store," he said. "Given the horrendously complex NDIS environment, defective processes and vulnerable people, there needs to be considerable caution in the application of blockchain technology," wrote former NDIS Technology Authority chief Marie Johnson in a submission [PDF] to the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS. "Blockchain in itself -- as with other technology innovations -- does not address fundamental design and human rights issues. Ethics is paramount. The involvement of the Commonwealth Bank itself raises further ethics issues, given the value of participant data; the size of the market; and the yet to be realized emarket honey pot of data, funds and services."

You can view the detailed "Making Money Smart: Empowering NDIS participants with Blockchain technologies" report here (PDF).

Zachary Horwitz never made it big on the Sunset Strip -- there was the uncredited part in Brad Pitt's "Fury" and a host of roles in low-budget thrillers and horror flicks. But federal charges suggest he had acting talent, duping several financial firms out of hundreds of millions of dollars and enabling him to live the Hollywood dream after all. From a report: That meant chartered flights and a $6 million mansion -- replete with wine cellar and home gym. Horwitz even included a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, which retails for more than $200, as a gift to investors along with his company's "annual report."

The claims are outlined in legal documents that U.S. prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission released this week alleging Horwitz, 34, was running a massive Ponzi scheme. His scam: a made-up story that he had exclusive deals to sell films to Netflix and HBO. Dating back to 2014, the SEC said he raised a shocking $690 million in fraudulent funds. On Tuesday, Horwitz was arrested. Horwitz, who went by the screen name "Zach Avery," used fabricated contracts and fake emails to swindle at least five firms, according to the government. Investors were issued promissory notes through his firm 1inMM Capital to acquire the rights to movies that would be sold to Netflix and HBO for distribution in Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and other locations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: IOUpay, a fintech firm that went into overdrive on a social media-backed retail trading frenzy, has plummeted in the past two months. The stock is set for more declines as the firm's newly launched buy-now-pay-later services -- which allows customers to purchase goods and then pay for them in installments -- faces intensified competition in Southeast Asia from larger Australian rival Afterpay, say analysts. IOUpay had drawn comparisons to U.S. videogame retailer GameStop after surging 6,400% in the past year as it has been the subject of several discussion threads on Reddit. The Reddit-fueled day-trading crowd turned the first quarter of 2021 into one of the wildest periods of stock market frenzy in modern history. Despite a more than 40% slump since mid-February, IOUpay remains Asia's top-performing interactive media and services stock over the past year.

The wild ride by IOUpay, which lists Standard Chartered Plc and Citigroup as its clients, began in June after it was touted by investors on Reddit. Its shares continued gaining on a "buy now, pay later" deal with Malaysian online marketplace Easystore. That partnership inked in February sparked a more than 200% rally in its stock over a three-day period. "We may see the price subdued for a long period of time as retail investors get bored waiting and sell out to find something more exciting," said Carl Capolingua, an analyst at online brokerage ThinkMarkets Australia. "The question will be if they can get traction in the Asian markets they're targeting before the bigger players come in."

NBC News reports: Facebook said Wednesday that hackers based in China used the social media platform as part of a campaign to hack and spy on diasporas of Uyghurs, the minority group the country has been accused of putting in "re-education" camps. The hackers used Facebook to identify, track and send malicious links to Uyghur activists, dissidents and journalists living in the U.S., Australia, Canada and Turkey, among other countries, Facebook said.

Facebook stopped short of directly blaming the Chinese government for sponsoring the campaign. "We can see geographic attribution based on the activity, but we can't actually prove who's behind the operation," the company's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a phone call with journalists. But Facebook did say the hackers are part of the same operation that the cybersecurity company Volexity cited in 2019 as being affiliated with the Chinese government. It published research that revealed that the country's hackers had gone to extreme measures to hack and spy on Uyghurs. They used sophisticated, previously unknown tools to load malicious code into multiple Uyghur news sites so that they would hack and spy on nearly any smartphone that visited.

"Who else would have the resources, the time and effort to go after these people? If you told me it was Iceland I'd be pretty surprised," Volexity CEO Steven Adair said in a phone call Wednesday...

Facebook's head of cyberespionage, Mike Dvilyanski, said on the call that while it had found and removed fewer than 500 accounts that sent malicious links to Uyghurs, it was "an extremely targeted operation... We were seeing them create personas on Facebook that are designed to look like journalists that focus on issues critical to the Uyghur community, that are designed to look like activists that might be standing up for the Uyghur community, designed to look like members of the community," Dvilyanski said. "Then use that as a way to trick them into clicking into these links to expose their devices."
The article also cites "multiple investigative reports" showing China "maintains re-education camps that detain an estimated 1 million Uyghurs...

"With omnipresent cameras, face recognition technology and intense collection of residents' data, it's one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the world."

It all began when a CEO and founder "was thinking about identity and the peppy phrases that female professionals use to describe themselves online: 'girl bosses' and the like," reports the New York Times: "I worry about the negative impact of that," Ashley Sumner, 32, said. "I worry that it allows investors to see founders who are women as a separate class from the rest of the founders. I worry it allows investors to write women founders smaller checks. I do believe that women need to help inspire other women but also that identity can be used as labels to separate us."

Ms. Sumner is the chief executive officer of Quilt, an audio platform for conversations about self-care topics like wellness in the workplace, PTSD and astrology. (In prepandemic days, the company organized work gatherings and group discussions in people's homes.) She has felt marginalized in the woman section of founders' circles. "I am always asked to speak on the female founders panel," Ms. Sumner said. "I want to be asked to speak on the panel...."

On LinkedIn, she had never done more than repost someone else's articles or musings. But given that platform's focus on professional life, she thought it was a reasonable place to first share her handiwork. Ms. Sumner's post has drawn nearly 20,000 comments, from men and women in the United States, Australia, Africa, Latin America, India and beyond; from executives, construction workers, health care employees, professors and military professionals...

More than 150 female founders posted similar photos of themselves, crossing out the word "female," and then shared what was now credibly a meme on the internet.
Although not everyone in the Times' article agrees with that position, Sumner is arguing that "putting my gender in front of what I am belittles what I've accomplished."

Sam Blake, writing at Wolfram Blog: The Zodiac Killer (an unidentified American serial killer active during the 1960s and 70s) sent numerous taunting letters to the press in the San Francisco area with regard to a local murder spree. In these letters, the killer took responsibility for the crimes and threatened to commit further murders. He also included three ciphers, each containing one-third of a 408-character cryptogram. The killer claimed that this cryptogram would reveal his identity when deciphered. The killer sent the fourth and final cipher (discussed in the linked post) to the San Francisco Chronicle after the 408-character cryptogram, deciphered in 1969, did not reveal the killer's identity.

In 2020, Melbourne, Australia, had a 112-day lockdown of the entire city to help stop the spread of COVID-19. The wearing of masks was mandatory and we were limited to one hour a day of outside activity. Otherwise, we were stuck in our homes. This gave me lots of time to look into interesting problems I'd been putting off for years. I was inspired by a YouTube video by David Oranchak, which looked at the Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher (Z340), which is pictured below. This cipher is considered one of the holy grails of cryptography, as at the time the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution were truly a moonshot.

As it faces a barrage of probes and investigations regarding the App Store and the distribution of apps on its devices, Apple has told Australia's consumer watchdog that developers have "multiple" ways to reach iOS users and claims that they are "far from limited" to simply using the App Store. From a report: In a new filing responding to concerns from the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission that it exploits "alleged market power in its role as a distributor of apps," Apple highlights multiple avenues that developers can take to reach customers. Specifically, Apple points out that the "whole web" exists as an alternative means of distribution, arguing that the web has become a platform unto itself. Apple supports this claim by noting that iOS devices have "unrestricted and uncontrolled" access to the web, allowing users to download web apps. Apple says: Web browsers are used not only as a distribution portal but also as platforms themselves, hosting "progressive web applications" (PWAs) that eliminate the need to download a developer's app through the App Store (or other means) at all. PWAs are increasingly available for and through mobile-based browsers and devices, including on iOS. [...] As explained further below, Apple faces competitive constraints from distribution alternatives within the iOS ecosystem (including developer websites and other outlets through which consumers may obtain third-party apps and use them on their iOS devices) and outside iOS. Prominent iOS developer Marco Arment commented on Apple's argument, saying: LOL

For 30 years David E. Sanger has been covering foreign policy and nuclear proliferation for The New York Times — twice working on Pulitzer Prize-winning teams. But now as American and Chinese officials meet in Alaska, Sanger argues that China's power doesn't come from weapons — nuclear or otherwise: Instead, it arises from their expanding economic might and how they use their government-subsidized technology to wire nations be it Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe, with 5G wireless networks intended to tie them ever closer to Beijing. It comes from the undersea cables they are spooling around the world so that those networks run on Chinese-owned circuits. Ultimately, it will come from how they use those networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese could export some of their authoritarianism by, for example, selling other nations facial recognition software that has enabled them to clamp down on dissent at home.

Which is why Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden's national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, warned in a series of writings in recent years that it could be a mistake to assume that China plans to prevail by directly taking on the United States military in the Pacific. "The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership," he wrote, "and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a necessary precondition for sustaining such leadership...."

Part of the goal of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden administration is determined to compete with Beijing across the board to offer competitive technology, like semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, even if that means spending billions on government-led research and development projects, and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia... But it will take months, at best, to publish a broad new strategy, and it is unclear whether corporate America or major allies will get behind it.

Today much of the world honors an annual tradition: setting their clocks backwards by one hour. "I hope you enjoy it," writes Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby.

In an essay titled "Heed the science and abolish daylight saving time," Jacoby writes "I also hope this is the last year we have to go through this business of shifting our clocks ahead, and that by this time next year we'll be back on standard time for good." I am not a fan of daylight saving time, and if the polls are accurate, neither are most Americans. According to a 2019 survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of the public wants to put an end to the twice-yearly practice of changing clocks... Most of the rest of the world doesn't want it either. In Asia, Africa, and South America, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of Australia and many of the nations of the South Pacific eschew it, as do Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. The European Parliament voted by a large margin to end daylight saving time across the European Union, though whether to implement that change is left up to each EU member state...

The point of "saving" daylight was to save fuel: Congress believed that by shifting the clock so daylight extended later into the evening, the law would reduce demand for electricity and thereby conserve oil. But researchers attempting to measure the effects of clock-changing on energy savings have found them pretty elusive... But daylight saving time doesn't just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. All of which helps explain the growing chorus of scientists calling for an end to daylight saving time. The public-health problems stem not just from the loss of an hour of sleep once a year but from the ongoing disruption to the human circadian clock...

We should no longer be thinking about "springing forward" and "falling back" in terms of personal preference or convenience but should be focusing instead on the proven degradation to human well-being. Scientists now understand vastly more about the workings and importance of circadian rhythm than they did when clock-shifting was instituted decades ago. There is a growing medical consensus that what we've been doing with our clocks each spring is unhealthy.

It's time to stop doing it.

Google and Microsoft engineers might collaborate on the Chromium browser code, but that hasn't stopped corporate politics between the pair. From a report: Google has launched a scathing attack on Microsoft today, accusing it of trying "to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival." Google is upset about what it believes is an attack by Microsoft to undermine the company's efforts to support journalism and publishers.

In January, Google threatened to remove its search engine from Australia, in response to a law that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. Australia passed the law in February, just days after Google caved and cut a deal with News Corp. and other publishers that ensured its services continue to be available in Australia. In the middle of all of this, Microsoft was very public about its support of Australia's new law, and it even teamed up with European publishers to call for online platforms to reach deals to pay news outlets for content. Google isn't happy about Microsoft getting involved and this is the first big public spat we've seen since the Scroogled era. "They are now making self-serving claims and are even willing to break the way the open web works in an effort to undercut a rival," says Kent Walker, Google's head of global affairs, in a blog post. "This latest attack marks a return to Microsoft's longtime practices. Walker links to the Wikipedia entry for Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), and accuses Microsoft of muddying the waters to distract from recent security issues."

"It's no coincidence that Microsoft's newfound interest in attacking us comes on the heels of the SolarWinds attack and at a moment when they've allowed tens of thousands of their customers ... to be actively hacked via major Microsoft vulnerabilities," says Walker. "Microsoft was warned about the vulnerabilities in their system, knew they were being exploited, and are now doing damage control while their customers scramble to pick up the pieces from what has been dubbed the Great Email Robbery. So maybe it's not surprising to see them dusting off the old diversionary Scroogled playbook."

With the News Media Bargaining Code out of the way, the Australian government has moved its tech giant battle to the browser scene, keeping Google in its crosshairs while putting Apple under the microscope. From a report: Led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the new battle is focused on "choice and competition in internet search and web browsers." The consumer watchdog on Thursday put out a call for submissions, with a number of questions posed in a discussion paper , centred on internet browser defaults. It claimed Apple's Safari is the most common browser used in Australia for smartphones and tablets, accounting for 51% of use. This is followed by Chrome with 39%, Samsung Internet with 7%, and with less than 1%, Mozilla Firefox. This shifts on desktop, with Chrome being the most used browser with 62% market share, followed by Safari with 18%, Edge 9%, and Mozilla 6%.

The ACCC said it's concerned with the impact of pre-installation and default settings on consumer choice and competition, particularly in relation to online search and browsers. It's also seeking views on supplier behaviour and trends in search services, browsers, and operating systems, and device ecosystems that may impact the supply of search and browsers to Australian consumers. It wants views also on the extent to which existing consumer harm can arise from the design of defaults and other arrangements.