Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Flaw in iPhone, iPads may have allowed hackers to steal data for years By Christopher Bing and Joseph Menn Wednesday, 22 April 2020 16:52 GMT WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO, April 22 (Reuters) - Apple Inc is planning to fix a flaw that a security firm said may have left more than half a billion iPhones vulnerable to hackers. The bug, which also exists on iPads, was discovered by ZecOps, a San Francisco-based mobile security forensics company, while it was investigating a sophisticated cyberattack against a client that took place in late 2019. Zuk Avraham, ZecOps' chief executive, said he found evidence the vulnerability was exploited in at least six cybersecurity break-ins. An Apple spokesman acknowledged that a vulnerability exists in Apple's software for email on iPhones and iPads, known as the Mail app, and that the company had developed a fix, which will be rolled out in a forthcoming update on millions of devices it has sold globally. Apple declined to comment on Avr...

Can Colleges Survive Coronavirus? 'The Math Is Not Pretty' Heard on   All Things Considered ELISSA NADWORNY April 20, 2020 4:23 PM ET Most campuses in the United States are sitting empty. Courses are online, students are at home. And administrators are trying to figure out how to make the finances of that work. "The math is not pretty," says Robert Kelchen, who studies higher ed finance at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. "Colleges are stressed both on the revenue side and on the expenditure side." On one end of the equation, colleges are spending money to take classes online, in some situations purchasing software, training professors or outsourcing to online-only institutions. That's on top of refunds for room and board and parts of tuition. On the other side, money isn't coming back in, in the form of expected tuition and revenue from events such as athletics, conferences on campus and summer camps. College endowments, which can s...

China Rolls Out Pilot Test of Digital Currency Milestone for world’s biggest central banks in path toward launching electronic payment system By   Jonathan Cheng April 20, 2020 8:22 am ET BEIJING—China’s central bank has introduced a homegrown digital currency across four cities as part of a pilot program, marking a milestone on the path toward the first electronic payment system by a major central bank. Internal tests of the digital currency are being conducted in four large cities around China—Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu and Xiong’an, a satellite city of Beijing—to improve the currency’s functionality, the digital currency research institute under the People’s Bank of China confirmed Monday, in response to a request for comment. Chinese domestic and state-run media outlets reported on the trials over the weekend. The trials followed years of research by the central bank dating back to 2014. The new currency, which doesn’t have an official name but is known by it...

Facebook is tracking coronavirus symptoms by county to identify hotspots Jessica Bursztynsky @JBURSZ PUBLISHED MON, APR 20 2020 9:28 AM EDT UPDATED KEY POINTS Facebook released its first map that tracks coronavirus symptoms county-by-county. The company plans to update it daily. CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed that social media platforms have an advantage when it comes to helping health researchers, since they can access large groups of people. Facebook  on Monday released its first  map that tracks coronavirus symptoms  county by county and plans to update it daily throughout the outbreak. Facebook partnered with  Carnegie Mellon University  researchers to create an opt-in survey designed to help identify  Covid-19  hotspots before the cases are confirmed. The map breaks down the percentage of people per county who have self-reported coronavirus symptoms, such as loss of smell, cough and fever. It ...

Mark Zuckerberg: Lockdown Protests Are ‘Misinformation,’ Facebook Will Ban Organizers ALLUM BOKHARI 20 Apr 2020 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that posts and pages attempting to organize protests against stay-at-home orders will be banned as “misinformation.” The Facebook CEO confirmed that the posts would be banned to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on a segment of  Good Morning America. Stephanopoulos asked Zuckerberg how the company deals “with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a lot of these protests to defy social distancing guidelines in states. If somebody trying to organize something like that, does that qualify as harmful misinformation?” “We do classify that as harmful misinformation and we take that down,” confirmed Zuckerberg, while at the same time saying that it’s important “that people can debate policies.” A Facebook spokesman confirmed to CNN that planned protests in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska were having their pages r...

For the first time ever, a robotic spacecraft caught an old satellite and extended its life Michael Sheetz @THESHEETZTWEETZ PUBLISHED FRI, APR 17 20209:18 AM EDT KEY POINTS A small spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman succeeded in docking with Intelsat’s IS-901 satellite and returning it to service for another five years. The feat is a space industry first, as extending the life of spacecraft already in orbit has only been done with human help before. “Intelsat is proud to have pioneered this innovative first with Northrop Grumman,” the company’s chief services officer Mike DeMarco said in a statement. Intelsat ’s IS-901 satellite is nearly 20 years old, and well beyond its expected lifespan, but a small spacecraft built by  Northrop Grumman  succeeded in docking with the satellite and giving it another five years of service, the companies announced on Friday. The feat is a space industry first, as extending the life of spacec...

Scientific machine learning paves way for rapid rocket engine design Austin TX (SPX) Apr 17, 2020 "It's not rocket science" may be a tired cliche, but that doesn't mean designing rockets is any less complicated. Time, cost and safety prohibit testing the stability of a test rocket using a physical build "trial and error" approach. But even computational simulations are extremely time consuming. A single analysis of an entire SpaceX Merlin rocket engine, for example, could take weeks, even months, for a supercomputer to provide satisfactory predictions. One group of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin is developing new "scientific machine learning" methods to address this challenge. Scientific machine learning is a relatively new field that blends scientific computing with machine learning. Through a combination of physics modeling and data-driven learning, it becomes possible to create reduced-order models - simulations ...