5/6/2021 Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory • The Register

{* BOOTNOTES *}

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control

microchip implant' conspiracy theory
He would say that… because he's not an actual supervillain
Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 24 Jul 2020 // 08:31 UTC SHARE

Philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates has denied that his
support for coronavirus vaccine research is cover for his plans to
dominate the world with 5G-activated mind control microchips.

In an interview with CBS News' Norah O'Donnell, Gates was highly

critical of the USA's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that
lack of leadership and opening before infections were falling have led to
the nation having among the world's worst responses.

The interview was mostly serious, but O'Donnell eventually turned to the
widespread conspiracy theory that Gates' research funding has evil
intent.

O'Donnell said Gates-related conspiracies have been rated "the most

widespread coronavirus falsehoods that exist," then asked Gates: "Do
you want a vaccine so you can implant microchips into people?"

In the video below Gates might perhaps suppress an exasperated smirk

before replying: "No. There is no connection between these vaccines and
any tracking type thing, at all. I don't know where that came from."

O'Donnell pressed on, citing polls that find widespread belief in the
conspiracy, before asking how the conspiracy started.

CBS News
@CBSNews

.@NorahODonnell: “The posts on social media about

you and coronavirus are considered the most
widespread coronavirus falsehoods that exist ... To be
clear, do you want a vaccine so that you can implant
microchips into people?”

Gates: “No… I don't know where that came from.”

7:00 AM · Jul 23, 2020

320 See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter

Gates said he didn't know before expressing frustration that his work to
improve health is being misrepresented.

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"We need to explain our values so that people understand why we are
involved in this work and why we are willing to put hundreds or billions to
accelerate the progress.

"It is a little unclear to me, but I hope it will die down as people get the
facts."

Sadly the facts are part of the problem: conspiracy theorists have
interpreted the Gates-funded Event 201 – a simulated pandemic in 2019
that presciently modelled a response "to a severe pandemic in order to
diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences" and chose a
coronavirus as its cause – as evidence of pre-planning for the pandemic.

Please don't go down that rabbit hole, people. The mere fact that Gates
was asked to deny the theory on national television is scary enough. ®

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213 Comments

‘Unauthorized API’ in VMware cost management

tool can be exploited to hijack appliances
Remote code execution possible on vRealize Business for Cloud – which
knows a lot about your private and public platforms
Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 6 May 2021 // 02:52 UTC

VMware has admitted its vRealize Business for Cloud product includes
an “unauthorised VAMI API” that can be exploited to achieve remote
code execution on the virtual appliance. The security flaw is rated critical,
scoring 9.8 on the ten-point Common Vulnerability Scoring System.

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VAMI is the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface, the tool
administrators use to drive its flagship vCenter Server Appliance and
manage fleets of virtual machines. For VAMI to have an "unauthorised"
API that can be abused by miscreants to gain unauthorized control of
systems over the network or internet is very scary indeed.

VMware’s advisory does not explain how an unauthorised API made its
way into such a sensitive product.

CONTINUE READING

Robo-taxis hit the streets of Beijing – albeit a small

fleet in a geo-fenced suburb
Code for the Baidu Apollo brains of the service is yours for the taking on
GitHub, too
Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Thu 6 May 2021 // 00:50 UTC

Chinese web giant Baidu has commenced operations of actual

autonomous taxis on the streets of Beijing.

The Apollo robo-taxi service only operates in Shougang Park, an area of

the capital city that will host some events in the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Just ten self-driving cars are rolling in this first commercial test of the
tech.

The cars are summoned with an Uber-like app and offer level-four
autonomy – meaning they can independently drive in predefined geo-
fenced areas, and allow humans to take the wheel if they feel it
necessary.

CONTINUE READING

Can your AI code be fooled by vandalized images or

clever wording? Microsoft open sources a tool to
test for that
Counterfit automatically creates adversarial inputs to find weaknesses
Katyanna Quach Wed 5 May 2021 // 23:27 UTC

Microsoft this week released a Python tool that probes AI models to see
if they can be hoodwinked by malicious input data.

And by that, we mean investigating whether, say, an airport's object-

recognition system can be fooled into thinking a gun is a hairbrush, or a
bank's machine-learning-based anti-fraud code can be made to approve
dodgy transactions, or a web forum moderation bot can be tricked into
allowing through banned hate speech.

The Windows giant's tool, dubbed Counterfit, is available on GitHub

under the MIT license, and is command-line controlled. Essentially, the
script can be instructed to delve into a sizable toolbox of programs that
automatically generate thousands of adversarial inputs for a given AI
model under test. If the output from the model differs from what was
expected from the input, then this is recorded as a successful attack.

CONTINUE READING

Signal banned for booking obviously targeted ads?

That story's too good to be true, Facebook claims
Antisocial giant dismisses chat app rival's 'stunt' in escalating war of
words
Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Wed 5 May 2021 // 20:54 UTC

Encrypted messaging service Signal on Tuesday made a show of trolling

Instagram and its parent company Facebook by creating ads that
incorporated audience targeting categories into its ad copy.

The ads address viewers by identifying targeting criteria like lifestyle

categories, occupation, geographic location, and personal interests
presumably gleaned through online data collection.

Apart from the marketing value of tweaking a dominant messaging rival,

Signal did so, it claims, to expose the inner workings of ad tech data
collection.

CONTINUE READING

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Basecamp CEO issues apology after 'no political

discussions at work' edict blows up in his face
30% of employees reportedly walked out following sudden rule change
Matthew Hughes Wed 5 May 2021 // 20:00 UTC

Jason Fried, CEO of project management tool Basecamp, has issued a

public apology following a major bust-up over new policies that
discouraged employees from discussing "societal politics" at work.

Writing on the company's blog, Fried said: "Last week was terrible. We
started with policy changes that felt simple, reasonable, and principled,
and it blew things up culturally in ways we never anticipated. David
[Heinemeier Hansson, CTO] and I completely own the consequences,
and we're sorry. We have a lot to learn and reflect on, and we will."

The furore began on 26 April, when Fried published a list of changes to

working conditions at Basecamp.

CONTINUE READING

AWS to cut Python 2.7 off at the knees in July with

'minor version update' for Chalice
Seriously, it's time to move on
Richard Speed Wed 5 May 2021 // 19:03 UTC

Amazon is the latest to drive a knife into the twitching corpse of Python 2
with an announcement that AWS Chalice will follow Lambda in nudging
customers to later versions.

15 July is the cut-off date, which is generous considering the Python

Software Foundation pulled the plug on fixes and support for Python 2 on
1 January 2020. AWS Lambda was supposed to follow suit on 1 June
2020 but, well, stuff happened in 2020 (in October support was stretched
a little further until "at least 1 June 2021"). It took until 24 March 2021 for
Amazon to settle on a death date for the tech.

Chalice is a framework for Lambda, and so will follow suit with what the
cloud behemoth described as a "minor version update" that will require
Python 3.6 or above (the Lambda crew recommends 3.8).

CONTINUE READING

Aerospike adds set indexing and SQL expressions

to make the distributed NoSQL database more ML-
friendly
New Spark 3.0 connector will appeal to users too, analyst says
Lindsay Clark Wed 5 May 2021 // 18:10 UTC

Distributed NoSQL database Aerospike is introducing set indexes and

SQL operations within expressions in the pursuit of greater machine
learning efficiency via its Apache Spark 3.0 connector.

Speaking to The Register, chief product officer Srini Srinivasan claimed

the combined tweaks could help reduce the feedback cycle to improve
ML models from days to hours.

A key-value and multi-modal database, Aerospike can run on the edge to

support so-called real-time decisions based on pre-existing ML models in
applications such as fraud detection. It is also used to feed data back into
the ML model management commonly used by data pipeline platform
Apache Spark to ensure models reflect changes to data patterns in the
real world.

CONTINUE READING

21 nails in Exim mail server: Vulnerabilities enable

'full remote unauthenticated code execution',
millions of boxes at risk
Nearly 4 million to be exact, say researchers
Tim Anderson Wed 5 May 2021 // 17:20 UTC

Researchers at security biz Qualys discovered 21 vulnerabilities in Exim,

a popular mail server, which can be chained to obtain "a full remote

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unauthenticated code execution and gain root privileges on the Exim
Server."

Exim is a mail transfer agent (MTA), responsible for receiving and

forwarding email messages. It runs primarily on Unix or Linux and is the
default MTA on Debian - though Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
use Postfix by default.

Some hosting companies use Exim to provide email services to their

customers, and it was also popular in universities and other educational
institutions (it was initially developed at the University of Cambridge in
1995) though many of these have transitioned to Office 365 or Google
email, not least Cambridge itself.

CONTINUE READING

Microsoft's Edge browser for Linux hits the Beta

Channel... if you're into that kind of thing
Add yet another Chromium browser to your collection
Richard Speed Wed 5 May 2021 // 15:30 UTC

Microsoft's Edge browser has taken another step to stability on Linux with
the addition of the operating system to its Beta Channel.

Quite why anyone would actually want Microsoft's latest attempt at a

browser on Linux is open to question. From the perspective of the
Windows giant, getting developers to test their code on the platform is
the name of the game and the move from the Dev Channel to Beta
signifies a stable edition is on the way.

The first preview builds of Edge for Linux turned up in 2020. Penguinistas
have not been treated to the daily updates of the Canary Channel – only
Windows, HoloLens 2, and MacOS users get those – but they have been
receiving regular drops on the Dev Channel. In March, for example, lucky
Linux fans were able to synchronise their settings using their Microsoft
account.

CONTINUE READING

Facebook Oversight Board upholds decision to ban

Trump, asks FB to look at own 'potential
contribution' to 'narrative of electoral fraud'
Looks like you can safely ignore that friend request... forever
Matthew Hughes Wed 5 May 2021 // 14:59 UTC

The Facebook Oversight Board has upheld former President Donald

Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram - but not before advising the
platform to look at its own role in the Capitol-storming mess.

The social media giant was the first major platform to ban Trump
following the January 6 insurrection, when hundreds of his supporters
stormed the US capitol with the aim to disrupt the certification of the 2020
election results.

In its ruling, the Oversight Board, which has been described as “the
Supreme Court for Facebook,” affirmed the decision to ban Trump,
although it criticised the social platform for failing to adhere to its existing
content moderation policies.

CONTINUE READING

East London council blurts thousands of residents'

email addresses in To field blunder
'Was a Mailchimp sub too hard?!' asks Reg reader
Gareth Corfield Wed 5 May 2021 // 14:01 UTC

A local authority in East London has committed a classic privacy blunder

by emailing what appear to be thousands of residents – while forgetting
to use the BCC field and exposing all of the email addresseses to each
recipient.

The cockup, which happened on Monday, had locals in the borough of

Tower Hamlets receive emails with hundreds of addresses visible.

Register reader Patrick, who was the unlucky recipient of one such
message, told us: "The email I received had 400 recipients in the To:

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field, I assume because Outlook has a limit of 500... Just assuming that I
received all the Bs and Cs (and I probably only received a chunk) – then
that's ~5,000 email addresses they leaked."

CONTINUE READING

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