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Kamala Harris: Facebook removes racist posts about US vice-president-elect

Facebook has taken down a string of racist and misogynistic posts, memes and comments about US Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris.
The social network removed the content after BBC News alerted it to three groups that regularly hosted hateful material on their pages. Facebook says it takes down 90% of hate speech before it is flagged. One media monitoring body described the pages as "dedicated to propagating racist and misogynistic smears". However, despite the pages being places where hate-speech is regularly directed towards the vice-president-elect, Facebook said it would not take action on the groups themselves. Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said: "Facebook's removal of this content only after it's been flagged to them by the media confirms that the rules and guidelines they establish are hollow because they put little to no effort into detection and enforcement.

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Moderna: Covid vaccine shows nearly 95% protection

A new vaccine that protects against Covid-19 is nearly 95% effective, early data from US company Moderna shows.
The results come hot on the heels of similar results from Pfizer, and add to growing confidence that vaccines can help end the pandemic. Both companies used a highly innovative and experimental approach to designing their vaccines. Moderna says it is a "great day" and they plan to apply for approval to use the vaccine in the next few weeks. However, this is still early data and key questions remain unanswered.

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Kickstarter replies to complaints from seven years ago

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has surprised some of its users by replying to complaints they made seven years ago.
These included complaints about a book which some felt encouraged sexual harassment. Users who received responses to long-expired projects from 2013 took to Twitter to congratulate the company on its response times. Kickstarter said the emails were "auto-generated in error". "The emails folks received yesterday was due to an unfortunate human error while working on a clean-up task completely unrelated to the ticket from 2013," a company spokeswoman said. "It's important to remember we are still a small team at Kickstarter and mistakes can happen."

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Ethiopia Tigray crisis: UN warns 'war crimes' may have happened

Reports of the mass killing of civilians in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region "would amount to war crimes" if confirmed, the UN human rights chief has warned.
Michelle Bachelet called for an inquiry into reports that scores and maybe hundreds of people had been stabbed and hacked to death in one town. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has accused forces loyal to Tigray's leaders of the massacre. Its officials have denied involvement. Tigray leader Debretsion Gebremichael told AFP news agency that the accusations were "baseless." Mr Abiy said that fighters backing Tigray's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), went on the rampage after federal troops had "liberated" the western part of Tigray, "brutally" killing innocent civilians in Mai-Kadra, a town in the South West Zone of Tigray. Witnesses blamed forces loyal to TPLF for Monday's killings - first reported by human rights group Amnesty International.

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Xbox and Call of Duty cause record broadband data use in UK

The UK's leading internet providers have experienced record broadband use as a result of new Xbox consoles and fresh releases to the Call of Duty games franchise.
BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone, City Fibre and Zen Internet said they had all coped with the spike in demand on Tuesday. Much of the activity was generated by video gamers downloading large files. Some people will have experienced slower speeds as a consequence. The internet service providers will be tested again on 19 November when the PlayStation 5 comes to the UK.

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Black people 'twice as likely to catch coronavirus'

Black people are twice as likely as white people to catch the coronavirus, a study of 18 million people suggests.
The research also indicates Asian people are 1.5 times more likely than white people to be infected - and may be more likely to need intensive care. Researchers say their findings are of "urgent public-health importance" and raise questions about how vaccines will be prioritised within at-risk groups. The work, in EClinical Medicine, adds support to other studies' findings.

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Amazon's Ring video doorbells catch fire because wrong screw used

Dozens of Amazon's Ring smart doorbells have caught fire or burned their owners after being fitted with the wrong screw.
The problem has prompted US and Canadian product safety officials to issue a formal notice, and Amazon to provide a revised instruction manual. The issue is that if a longer, sharper screw is used at the device's base, it can damage the battery pack. This causes it to overheat, which has led to property damage and injuries. However, despite a "recall notice" having been issued, users are not actually being asked to send the devices back. Instead, they are simply being urged to follow the new guidance.

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'Murder hornets': More nests likely to be found in US

Washington is unlikely to have seen its last Asian giant hornets, the state's agricultural department has said, after scientists found 200 queens in one nest.
The nest - the first in the US - of the so-called murder hornets was captured with a vacuum from a tree in October. Researchers believe more queens - which are responsible for establishing colonies - could remain at large. But they are confident the population can be brought under control. Asian giant hornets are an invasive species in the Pacific North-West. They target honeybees, which pollinate crops. The insect, which is native to Japan and South Korea, can slaughter a bee colony in a matter of hours.

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Facebook: Biden aide Bill Russo attacks post-election role

One of Joe Biden's senior aides has attacked Facebook over its handling of conspiracy theories, calls to violence and disinformation in the days following the US election.
"Our democracy is on the line. We need answers," tweeted Bill Russo, who is deputy press secretary to the US president-elect. Facebook declined to directly respond. However, it has introduced "probation" as a measure to tackle the spread of disinformation within its groups. This involves tasking the administrators of some politically themed groups with checking that all posts made within them follow Facebook's rules. They have been warned that failure to comply could lead to their groups being shut down.

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US election: Justice lawyer quits after attorney general orders 'vote fraud' inquiries

US attorney general William Barr has allowed federal prosecutors to probe alleged irregularities in the presidential election, prompting a top justice department official to quit.
The official, Richard Pilger, would have overseen such investigations. Any such cases would normally be the remit of individual states, but Mr Barr said this was not a hard and fast rule. Donald Trump refuses to accept Joe Biden's projected victory, and has made unsubstantiated fraud claims. The president's campaign is seeking an emergency injunction in Pennsylvania to prevent Mr Biden's victory being certified in the state. The president-elect's projected win there on Saturday took him over the threshold of 270 electoral college votes needed to secure victory nationwide.

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Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

Democrats blast FTC/Zoom settlement because users won't get compensation.
Zoom has agreed to upgrade its security practices in a tentative settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges that Zoom lied to users for years by claiming it offered end-to-end encryption. "[S]ince at least 2016, Zoom misled users by touting that it offered 'end-to-end, 256-bit encryption' to secure users' communications, when in fact it provided a lower level of security," the FTC said today in the announcement of its complaint against Zoom and the tentative settlement. Despite promising end-to-end encryption, the FTC said that "Zoom maintained the cryptographic keys that could allow Zoom to access the content of its customers' meetings, and secured its Zoom Meetings, in part, with a lower level of encryption than promised."

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Donald Trump fires Defence Secretary Mark Esper

President Donald Trump has sacked Defence Secretary Mark Esper, announcing on Twitter that the top US official has been "terminated"
Christopher Miller, the current head of the National Counterterrorism Center, will take on the role immediately. It follows a public falling-out between Mr Trump and Mr Esper in recent weeks. Mr Trump has so far not conceded the US election to President-elect Joe Biden, and has vowed to challenge the projected result in court. In the weeks before Mr Biden takes office on 20 January, Mr Trump is still empowered to make decisions.

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Vienna shooting: Anti-terror chief suspended over intelligence bungle

Austrian officials have revealed new intelligence failings ahead of the murder of four people in Vienna on Monday night, prompting the city's anti-terror chief to step aside.
Erich Zwettler was being suspended at his own request, police said. It has already emerged the Austrians were told in July that the suspect had tried to buy ammunition in Slovakia. Now, the Austrians have admitted the gunman met two people from Germany who were already under observation. Interior Minister Karl Nehammer has spoken of "obvious, and in our view intolerable mistakes". In a further development, a mosque and a mosque association frequented by the 20-year-old have been closed, which Integration Minister Susanne Raab said had contributed to his radicalisation. He had repeatedly visited the mosques in the suburbs of Ottakring and Meidling. The Ottakring mosque association was notorious for its links to militant Islamists: a preacher there is said to have led a German-speaking brigade to Syria before being killed in a drone strike.

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US election: Bannon Twitter account banned amid clampdown

President Trump's former top advisor, Steve Bannon, has been suspended from Twitter over the "glorification of violence" amid the election aftermath.
Mr Bannon said a re-elected Mr Trump should fire the top infectious disease expert and the FBI director, and called for violence against them. It comes as the tech firms continue a clampdown on misinformation. Facebook has shut down a large group which alleges fraud, and announced new measures to amplify genuine results. Mr Bannon, once widely thought of as one of the most powerful men in Washington, served as the boss of Mr Trump's 2016 campaign, and as a top presidential advisor for the first several months of his presidency.

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US election results 2020: When might we get a winner?

You might have reasonably expected to have some kind of clue about the results of the US presidential election by now.
We're into our second day of counting. The huge number of postal votes cast during this pandemic election and different states' laws about how to count them, meant this always was going to take longer if the result was close. And it is. Hasn't Joe Biden won the popular vote? Yes, so far, but that's not what decides who gets to be president. Instead, a candidate has to win the majority in a system called the electoral college, where each state gets a certain number of votes or "electors" roughly in proportion to its population. If you win a state, you win all its votes (except Nebraska and Maine, but that's complicated). There are 538 state votes and the person who gets 270 wins the prize.

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Bitcoin: $1bn seized from Silk Road account by US government

More than $1bn (£772m) in Bitcoin linked to the notorious Silk Road website has been seized by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
Earlier this week, crypto-currency watchers noticed about 70,000 bitcoins being moved from an account believed to be linked to the illicit marketplace. Silk Road was an online black market, selling everything from drugs to stolen credit cards and murderers-for-hire. It was shut down by the US government in 2013. The sum is the largest amount of crypto-currency seized to date by the Department of Justice. On Thursday, US Attorney David Anderson confirmed that the officials had seized the crypto-currency assets. "Silk Road was the most notorious online criminal marketplace of its day," he said in a statement.

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5G: Using drones to beam signals from the stratosphere

Plans to beam 5G signals to the public via drones that stay airborne for nine days at a time have been announced by two UK firms.
They want to use antenna-equipped aircraft powered by hydrogen to deliver high-speed connectivity to wide areas. Stratospheric Platforms and Cambridge Consultants say they could cover the whole of the UK with about 60 drones. But telecoms analysts question whether the economic case for this scheme is quite as simple as it sounds. The Cambridge-based companies say they would run the service in partnership with existing mobile operators. They are already backed by Deutsche Telekom, which hopes to trial the technology in rural southern Germany in 2024.

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US Election 2020: Americans choose between Trump and Biden

Americans are voting in one of the most divisive presidential polls in decades, pitting incumbent Republican Donald Trump against Democrat Joe Biden.
Polls have opened in the east of the country after a long and bitter campaign amid the coronavirus pandemic. More than 100 million people have already cast their ballots in early voting, putting the country on course for its highest turnout in a century. Both rivals spent the final hours of the race rallying in key swing states. National polls give a firm lead to Mr Biden, but it is a closer race in the states that could decide the outcome.

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Raspberry Pi 400: A computer for the coronavirus age?

A whole computer contained in a keyboard - just connect it to a monitor and you are ready to go.
It sounds like an idea from the 1980s. Remember the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore Amiga or the BBC Micro? Well, the 2020 version is the Pi 400. It's the latest product from Raspberry Pi, the organisation founded to get children coding. And the £67 device - or £95 with a mouse and cables - may help answer the challenge of getting cheap computing to youngsters affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The idea, says the organisation's founder Eben Upton, is to mirror the simplicity of those 1980s devices. "It gets into your life as a utility device, as a thing that you buy to do your schoolwork or play games on," he explains.

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Casualties in Vienna 'terrorist' shooting

Several people are injured with several "believed dead" after a shooting in central Vienna, according to the Austrian interior minister.
Karl Nehammer described the incident as a terror attack and said that one attacker had died in the Austrian capital. Another attacker was "on the run", he said. A large-scale security operation is under way. The incident took place near the central Schwedenplatz square. Police have urged people to avoid the area and not to take public transport. Road blocks have been set up around the city centre. Footage posted on social media showed people running as what was reported to be gunshots could be heard.