The Unsung Inventor Who Chased the LED Rainbow

Walk through half a football field’s worth of low partitions, filing cabinets, and desks. Note the curved mirrors hanging from the ceiling, the better to view the maze of engineers, technicians, and support staff of the development laboratory. Shrug when you spot the plastic taped over a few of the mirrors to obstruct that view.

Go to the heart of this labyrinth and there find M. George Craford, R&D manager for the optoelectronics division of Hewlett-Packard Co., San Jose, Calif. Sitting in his shirtsleeves at an industrial beige metal desk piled with papers, amid dented bookcases, gym bag in the corner, he does not look like anybody’s definition of a star engineer.

Appearances are deceiving.

This article was first published as “M. George Craford.” It appeared in the February 1995 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The photographs appeared in the original print version.

“Take a look around during the next few days,” advised Nick Holonyak Jr., the John Bardeen professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the creator of the first LEDs. “Every yellow light-emitting diode you see—that’s George’s work.”

Holonyak sees Craford as an iceberg—showing a small tip but leaving an amazing breadth and depth unseen. Indeed, Craford does prove to be full of surprises—the gym bag, for example. He skips lunch for workouts in HP’s basement gym, he said, to get in shape for his next adventure, whatever that might be. His latest was climbing the Grand Teton; others have ranged from parachute jumping to whitewater canoeing.

His biggest adventure, though, has been some 30 years of research into light-emitting diodes.

The call of space

When Craford began his education for a technical career, in the 1950s, LEDs had yet to be invented. It was the adventure of outer space that called to him.

The Iowa farm boy was introduced to science by Illa Podendorf, an author of children’s science books and a family friend who kept the young Craford supplied with texts that suited his interests. He dabbled in astronomy and became a member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. He built rockets. He performed chemistry experiments, one time, he recalls with glee, generating an explosion that cracked a window in his home laboratory. When the time came, in 1957, to pick a college and a major, he decided to pursue space science, and selected the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, because space pioneer James Van Allen was a physics professor there.

Vital statistics

Name

Magnus George Craford

Date of birth

Dec. 29, 1938

Birthplace

Sioux City, Iowa

Height

185 cm

Family

Wife, Carol; two adult sons, David and Stephen

Education

BA in physics, University of Iowa, 1961; MS and PhD in physics, University of Illinois, 1963 and 1967

First job

Weeding soybean fields

First electronics job

Analyzing satellite data from space

Patents

About 10

People most respected

Explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Burton, photographer Galen Rowell, Nobel­ Prize winner John Bardeen, LED pioneer Nick Holonyak Jr.

Most recent book read

The Charm School

Favorite book

Day of the Jackal

Favorite periodicals

Scientific American, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Business Week

Favorite music

String quartets

Favorite composers

Mozart, Beethoven

Computer

“I don’t use one”

Favorite TV show

“NYPD Blue”

Favorite food

Thai, Chinese

Favorite restaurant

Dining room at San Francisco’s Ritz Carlton Hotel

Favorite movies

Bridge on the River Kwai, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Lion in Winter

Leisure activity

Hiking, walking, snow skiing, bicycling, tennis, and, most recently, technical mountain climbing.

Car

Sable Wagon (a company car)

Pet peeves

“People that work for me who don’t come to me with little problems, which fester and turn into big ones.”

Organizational membership

IEEE, Society for Information Display

Favorite awards

National Academy of Engineering, IEEE Fellow, IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award; but “everything you do is a team thing, so I have mixed feelings about awards.”

As the space race heated up, Craford’s interest in space science waned, in spite of a summer job analyzing data returned from the first satellites. He had learned a bit about semiconductors, an emerging field, and Van Allen pointed him toward the solid-state physics program at the University of Illinois, where Craford studied first for a master’s degree, then a PhD.

The glowing Dewar

For his doctoral thesis, Craford began investigating tunneling effects in Josephson junctions. He had invested several years in that research when Holonyak, a pioneer in visible lasers and light-emitting diodes, left his position at General Electric Co. and joined the Illinois faculty. Craford met him at a seminar, where Holonyak was ex­plaining his work in LEDs. Recalled Craford: “He had a little LED—just a red speck—and he plunged it into a Dewar of liquid nitrogen, and it lit up the whole flask with a bright red light.”

Entranced, Craford immediately spoke to his thesis adviser about switching, a fairly unusual proposal, since it involved dropping years of work. “My thesis adviser was good about it; he had been spending less time around the lab lately, and Holonyak was building up a group, so he was willing to take me on.”

Craford believes he persuaded the laser pioneer to accept him, the senior man recalls things differently.

Craford’s adviser “was running for U.S. Congress,” Holonyak said, “and he told me, ‘I’ve got this good student, but I’m busy with politics, and everything we do someone publishes ahead of me. I can’t take good care of him. I’d like you to pick him up.”’

However it happened, Craford’s career path was finally set—and the lure of the glowing red Dewar never dimmed.

Holonyak was growing gallium arsenide phosphide and using it successfully to get bright LEDs and lasers. He assigned his new advisee the job of borrowing some high-pressure equipment for experiments with the material. After finding a professor with a pressure chamber he was willing to lend, Craford set up work in the basement of the materials research building. He would carry GaAsP samples from the lab to the materials research basement, cool them in liquid nitrogen, increase the pressure to study the variation of resistivity, and see unexpected effects.

“Just cooling some samples would cause the resistance to go up several times. But add pressure, and they would go up several orders of magnitude,” Craford said. “We couldn’t figure out why.”

Eventually, Craford and a co-worker, Greg Stillman, determined that variations in resistance were related not only to pressure but also to light shining on the samples. “When you cooled a sample and then shone the light on it, the resistance went down—way down—and stayed that way for hours or days as long as the sample was kept at low temperature, an effect called persistent photoconductivity.” Further research showed that it occurred in samples doped with sulfur but not tellurium. Craford and Stillman each had enough material for a thesis and for a paper published in the Physical Review.

The phenomenon seemed to have little practical use, and Craford put it out of his mind, until several years later when researchers at Bell Laboratories found it in gallium aluminum arsenide. “Bell Labs called it the DX Center, which was catchy, studied it intensively, and over time, many papers have been published on it by various groups,” Craford said. Holonyak’s group’s contribution was largely forgotten.

“He doesn’t promote himself,” Holonyak said of Craford, “and sometimes this troubles me about George; I’d like to get him to be more forward about the fact that he has done something.”

Move to Monsanto

After receiving his PhD, Craford had several job offers. The most interesting were from Bell Laboratories and the Monsanto Co. Both were working on LEDs, but Monsanto researchers were focusing on gallium arsenide phosphide, Bell researchers on gallium phosphide. Monsanto’s research operation was less well known than Bell Labs’ and taking the Monsanto job seemed to be a bit of a risk. But Craford, like his hero—adventurer Richard Burton, who spent years seeking the source of the Nile—has little resistance to choosing the less well-trodden path.

Besides, “Gallium phosphide just didn’t seem right,” said Craford, “but who knew?”

In his early days at Monsanto, Craford experimented with both lasers and LEDs. He focused on LEDs full time when it became clear that the defects he and his group were encountering in growing GaAsP on GaAs substrates would not permit fabrication of competitive lasers.

[He] didn’t toot his own horn. “When George [Craford] published the work, he put the names of the guys he had growing crystals and putting the things together ahead of his name.”
—Nick Holonyak

The breakthrough that allowed Craford and his team to go beyond Holonyak’s red LEDs to create very bright orange, yellow, and green LEDs was prompted, ironically, by Bell Labs. A Bell researcher who gave a seminar at Monsanto mentioned the use of nitrogen doping to make indirect semiconductors act more like direct ones. Direct semiconductors are usually better than indirect for LEDs, Craford explained, but the indirect type still has to be used because of band gaps wide enough to give off light in the green, yellow, and orange part of the spectrum. The Bell researcher indicated that the labs had had considerable success with Zn-O doping of gallium phosphide and some success with nitrogen doping of gallium phosphide. Bell Labs, however, had published early experimental work suggesting that nitrogen did not improve GaAsP LEDs.

Nonetheless, Craford believed in the promise of nitrogen doping rather than the published results. “We decided that we could grow better crystal and the experiment would work for us,” he said.

A small team of people at Monsanto did make it work. Today, some 25 years later, these nitrogen-doped GaAsP LEDs still form a significant proportion—some 5-10 billion—of the 20-30 billion LEDs sold annually in the world today.

“The initial reaction was, ‘Wow, that’s great, but our customers are very happy with red LEDs. Who needs other colors?’”
—George Craford

Again, Holonyak complains, Craford didn’t toot his own horn. “When George published the work, he put the names of the guys he had growing crystals and putting the things together ahead of his name.”

His peers, however, have recognized Craford as the creative force behind yellow LEDs, and he was recently made a member of the National Academy of Engineering to honor this work.

Craford recalls that the new palette of LED colors took some time to catch on. “The initial reaction,” he said, “was, ‘Wow, that’s great, but our customers are very happy with red LEDs. Who needs other colors?’”

Westward ho!

After the LED work was published, a Monsanto reorganization bumped Craford up from the lab bench to manager of advanced technology. One of his first tasks was to select researchers to be laid off. He recalls this as one of the toughest jobs of his life, but subsequently found that he liked management. “You have more variety; you have more things that you are semi-competent in, though you pay the price of becoming a lot less competent in any one thing,” he told IEEE Spectrum.

Soon, in 1974, he was bumped up again to technology director, and moved from Monsanto’s corporate headquarters in St. Louis to its electronics division headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Craford was responsible for research groups developing technology for three divisions in Palo Alto, St. Louis, and St. Peters, Mo. One dealt with compound semiconductors, another with LEDs, and the third with silicon materials. He held the post until 1979.

Even as a manager, he remained a “scientist to the teeth,” said David Russell, Monsanto’s director of marketing during Craford’s tenure as technology director. “He is a pure intellectual scientist to a fault for an old peddler like me.”

Though always the scientist, Craford also has a reputation for relating well to people. “George is able to express complicated technical issues in a way that all of us can understand,” said James Leising, product development manager for HP’s optoelectronics division.

Leising recalled that when he was production engineering manager, a position that occasionally put him in conflict with the research group, “George and I were always able to work out the conflicts and walk away friends. That wasn’t always the case with others in his position.” One time in particular, Leising recalled, Craford convinced the production group of the need for precise control of its processes by graphically demonstrating the intricacies of the way semiconductor crystals fit upon one another.

As an executive, Craford takes credit for no individual achievements at Monsanto during that time, but said, “I was proud of the fact that, somehow, we managed to be worldwide competitors in all our businesses.” Even so, Monsanto decided to sell off its optoelectronics business and offered Craford a job back in St. Louis, where he would have been in charge of research and development in the company’s silicon business.

Craford thought about this offer long and hard. He liked Monsanto; he had a challenging and important job, complete with a big office, oak furniture, a private conference room, and a full-time administrative assistant. But moving back to St. Louis would end his romance with those tiny semiconductor lights that could make a Dewar glow, and when the time came, he just couldn’t do it.

He did the Silicon Valley walk: across the street to the nearest competitor, in this case, Hewlett-Packard Co.

Instead, he did the Silicon Valley walk: across the street to the nearest competitor, in this case, Hewlett-Packard Co. The only job it could find that would let him work with LEDs was a big step down from technology director—a position as R&D section manager, directing fewer than 20 people. This meant a cut in salary and perks, but Craford took it.

The culture was different, to say the least. No more fancy office and private conference room; at HP Craford gets only “a cubby, a tin desk, and a tin chair.”

And, he told Spectrum, “I love it.”

He found the HP culture to be less political than Monsanto’s, and believes that the lack of closed offices promotes collaboration. At HP, he interacts more with engineers, and there is a greater sense that the whole group is pulling together. It is more open and communicative—it has to be, with most engineers’ desks merely 1.5 meters apart. “I like the whole style of the place,” he declared.

Now he has moved up, to R&D manager of HP’s optoelectronics division, with a larger group of engineers under him. (He still has the cubby and metal desk, however.)

As a manager, Craford sees his role as building teams, and judging which kinds of projects are worth focusing on. “I do a reasonably good job of staying on the path between being too conservative and too blue sky,” he told Spectrum. “It would be a bad thing for an R&D manager to say that every project we’ve done has been successful, because then you’re not taking enough chances; however, we do have to generate enough income for the group on what we sell to stay profitable.”

Said Fred Kish, HP R&D project manager under Craford: “We have embarked upon some new areas of research that, to some people, may have been questionable risks, but George was willing to try.”

Craford walks that path between conservatism and risk in his personal life as well, although some people might not believe it, given his penchant for adventurous sports: skydiving, whitewater canoeing, marathon running, and rock climbing. These are measured risks, according to Craford: ‘‘The Grand Teton is a serious mountain, but my son and I took a rock-climbing course, and we went up with a guy who is an expert, so it seemed like a manageable risk.”

Holonyak recalls an occasion when a piece of crystal officially confined to the Monsanto laboratory was handed to him by Craford on the grounds that an experiment Holonyak was attempting was important. Craford “could have gotten fired for that, but he was willing to gamble.”

“I hope to see the day when LEDs will illuminate not just a Dewar but a room.”
—George Craford

Craford is also known as being an irrepressible asker of questions.

“His methods of asking questions and looking at problems brings people in the group to a higher level of thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving,’’ Kish said.

Holonyak described Craford as “the only man I can tolerate asking me question after question, because he is really trying to understand.”

Craford’s group at HP has done work on a variety of materials over the past 15 years, including gallium aluminum arsenide for high-brightness red LEDs and, more recently, aluminum gallium indium phosphide for high-brightness orange and yellow LEDs.

The latest generation of LEDs, Craford said, could replace incandescent lights in many applications. One use is for exterior lighting on automobiles, where the long life and small size of LEDs permit car designers to combine lower assembly costs with more unusual styling. Traffic signals and large-area display signs are other emerging applications. He is proud that his group’s work has enabled HP to compete with Japanese LED manufacturers and hold its place as one of the largest sellers of visible-light LEDs in the world.

Craford has not stopped loving the magic of LEDs. “Seeing them out and used continues to be fun,” he told Spectrum. “When I went to Japan and saw the LEDs on the Shinkansen [high-speed train), that was a thrill.”

He expects LEDs to go on challenging other forms of lighting and said, “I still hope to see the day when LEDs will illuminate not just a Dewar but a room.”

Editor’s note: George Craford is currently a fellow at Philips LumiLEDs. He got his wish and then some.

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Ukraine’s Nuclear Peril Compounded by Internal Struggle

Russia has committed unprecedented acts of nuclear terrorism at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. In March, Russia’s seizing of the Zaporizhzhia power plant—Europe’s largest—veered dangerously close to disaster. Since then, Zaporizhzhia’s grounds and even its turbine halls have been used to shelter troops, military equipment, and munitions. Russia has also fired cruise missiles over two more nuclear power stations.

Still, recent evidence suggests that a more opaque threat may also be stalking Ukraine’s four nuclear generating stations: a cloak-and-dagger struggle for control of state nuclear energy firm Energoatom, pitting activist nuclear professionals against alleged Russian agents.

It’s an unstable situation that—like Russia’s military actions—increases the risk of accidents that could spread radiation across Europe and threatens Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Ukraine's 15 reactors generate over half of its electricity and, thanks to Ukraine’s rapid postinvasion synchronization with Europe’s power grid, the government is ramping up exports to finance the war.

Already Ukraine faces the loss of Zaporizhzhia’s power generation, with Russia vowing to hold the surrounding territory indefinitely and rebuilding wrecked transmission lines to reroute its power to occupied Crimea.

Oleg Boyarintsev is here, back at work after detention and questioning by Ukrainian counterintelligence agents. Energoatom

The murky internal battle for Ukraine’s nuclear power popped into sight briefly in late March when a few Ukrainian news outlets and IEEE Spectrum reported that Ukrainian counterintelligence officers had detained and questioned Energoatom director of personnel Oleg Boyarintsev. That cast a shadow over officials across Energoatom that Boyarintsev had appointed.

The conflict quickly slipped back behind the scenes when other journalists judged the divisive issue unripe for covering while Ukraine struggled to contain Russian advances.

But Energoatom and its leadership are back in the spotlight. Battle lines have stabilized, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is leading a campaign to out Russian agents. This month Zelenskyy affirmed pervasive infiltration of Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, which has officials implanted at Energoatom headquarters and its plants.

At the same time, moves by SBU counterintelligence agents, deputies in Ukraine’s parliament, and company officials have heightened concerns about the security and safety of Energoatom’s operations.

SBU spy hunters said they pierced an “extensive agent network” last month allegedly led by Boyarintsev’s longtime political patron and business partner Andriy Derkach, whom the SBU and U.S. intelligence agencies say is a Russian agent.

Then, early this month, Energoatom CEO Petro Kotin stunned a panel of deputies probing Energoatom personnel issues. Asked why Boyarintsev was not present as requested, Kotin told the energy committee he had the day off. Then Kotin gave contradictory answers when asked why he recently dismissed the director of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, which lies just under 60 kilometers from Belarus and is the largest still under Ukraine’s control.

Under CEO Petro Kotin, Energoatom has faced repeated accusations of corruption and sliding back toward Russian influence. Ukrinform/Alamy

Kotin said Rivne’s director was suspected of hiding safety violations. At the same time Kotin insisted he was also needed to run the subsidiary racing to start up a facility to store spent nuclear fuel that was previously sent to Russia. Without the storage facility, Ukraine can’t refuel its reactors, prompting the panel’s chair to note that Kotin assigned an allegedly dodgy official a surprisingly critical mission.

Ukrainian news site Glavcom’s take from the hearing was that Ukraine’s nuclear plants were “in danger,” and that a “hunt for collaborators” was on. The panel’s deputy chairman concurred, posting that “Russian ears are sticking out now from all sides.”

Codename “Veteran”

Energoatom did not respond to IEEE Spectrum’s requests to reach Boyarintsev and Kotin. But back in March, the firm attacked its loudest critic, Olga Kosharna, a former advisor to Ukraine’s nuclear regulator. Energoatom said it was Kosharna who was under Russian influence and spreading Russian disinformation.

A defamation suit filed by Kosharna against Energoatom will be heard in October according to her lawyer, who heads the energy-law committee for Ukraine’s bar association.

Kosharna maintains her March 2022 claim that officials planted by Boyarintsev facilitated the Zaporizhzhia plant’s seizure, including a new plant director appointed eight days before the 24 February invasion. In exchanges with IEEE Spectrum this week, she extended that allegation to include Alexander Prismitsky, an SBU officer serving as the plant’s deputy director for physical protection, who she said is the subject of an SBU investigation.

Boyarintsev did not act alone, according to Kosharna. Andriy Derkach, a Russian agent codenamed “Veteran” according to the SBU, is suspected of directing his work at Energoatom. Derkach is a long-serving Ukrainian deputy, a media owner and pro-Russian media commentator, and a former Energoatom CEO. His whereabouts are unknown since the invasion.

Derkach gained global notoriety delivering kompromat on U.S. President Joe Biden in 2019. In spite of that, he is widely credited with driving Boyarintsev’s inclusion when Zelenskyy appointed Kotin and a new leadership team in 2020. Why else, ask people like Kosharna, could someone with unsavory associates in organized crime win a job so crucial to Ukraine’s security?

Alleged Russian spy Andriy Derkach [right] meeting in Kiev with former President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani in 2019.Andriy Derkach

Since Kotin’s team arrived, journalists, activists, and government watchdogs have documented a series of suspicious activities at Energoatom, including the dumping of electricity on the market, the illegal dismissal of Energoatom’s independent anticorruption official, and embezzlement of funds for the spent-fuel repository.

Meanwhile, international and domestic experts have noted a slide back toward Russian influence over Ukraine’s Russian-designed and largely Russian-serviced nuclear plants. Ukrainian security analyst Pavel Kost, who several years ago praised Energoatom as one of the “quiet heroes” of post-Yanukovich Ukraine, last year called out the growing influence of “pro-Russian circles” and “silent sabotage” of crucial projects such as the spent-fuel repository.

It’s no surprise then that over half of Ukraine’s parliamentarians called last year for new leadership to improve Energoatom’s operations and assure nuclear safety. Transparency International followed up with a similar call, telling Zelenskyy that a “criminal group” was running Energoatom.

Jeff Merrifield, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission member and international nuclear consultant, likened the situation facing Ukraine’s nuclear plants to a ”multilayer set of chess.” While he declined to address the specific accusations against Energoatom leaders, Merrifield said they “were not entirely surprising” based on some of the “unsavory” activity he’s observed in 20 years of work in both Ukraine and Russia.

Kosharna, meanwhile, is not the only Ukrainian professional asking tough questions. When asked if many nuclear staff in Ukraine are concerned about Russian agents, Women in Nuclear Ukraine founder Margaryta Rayets messaged IEEE Spectrum that, “Russia did its best in terms of the lobbying its interests by attracting its agents into all the spheres! So, our task for today is to detect them all as soon as possible.”

Rivne on the edge

The loudest critical voice among engineers and scientists (at least in writing) is Georgiy Balakan, a former top Energoatom engineer who led collaborations with U.S. national labs, Westinghouse Electric, and European agencies to upgrade safety at Ukraine’s plants. Since April he has posted a series of risk assessments, warnings, and questions aimed at securing Ukraine’s nuclear plants against internal and external attack.

On 10 July, Balakan posted a pointed essay titled “How to avoid nuclear ‘Bucha’ at the nuclear power plants of Ukraine?”—a reference to Russian forces’ scorched-earth devastation of Bucha that shocked the world in April. In it he calls for terminating senior plant officials who are past or present SBU officers, a moratorium on dismissing plant directors, and more.

The panel’s deputy chairman concurred, posting that “Russian ears are sticking out now from all sides.”

An accompanying post emphasized the risks facing the Rivne station. Balakan warns that Russia could seize Rivne via an airborne assault, noting increased Russian activity nearby in Belarus and stepped-up airborne training.

Balakan also argued that the attacks on Rivne's director, Pavlo Pavlyshyn, weaken Rivne by demoralizing plant personnel. Energoatom officials scattered from its headquarters when Russian troops and missiles surged over the border in February and March, but Rivne’s embattled director stood his ground, meeting journalists to condemn Russia’s irresponsible nuclear aggression and garnering international support for Ukraine’s nuclear installations.

“From the first days of the war, his steadfast patriotic position united everyone,” agreed the City Council of Varash, Rivne’s satellite city, in a recent appeal to Zelenskyy to stop the plant’s “destabilization.” The letter echoed Balakan’s concerns about a “high probability of an armed attack,” and disputed Kotin’s allegations against Pavlyshyn and the plant’s safety.

Ilona Zayets, a journalist and former Energoatom communications aide, told IEEE Spectrum this week that Kotin and his supporters “need to discredit” Pavlyshyn before he gets to Zelenskyy, because Pavlyshyn has the inside scoop on Energoatom’s troubled projects.

If she’s right, they may be too late. Pavlyshyn posted a video this week suggesting that he’s already working against Kotin: ”Dear curators of my resignation. Your involvement in unlawful actions not in the interests of the Ukrainian state will certainly be exposed.”

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How Tor is fighting—and beating—Russian censorship

Enlarge (credit: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/Getty)

For years, the anonymity service Tor has been the best way to stay private online and dodge web censorship. Much to the ire of governments and law enforcement agencies, Tor encrypts your web traffic and sends it through a chain of computers, making it very hard for people to track you online. Authoritarian governments see it as a particular threat to their longevity, and in recent months, Russia has stepped up its long-term ambition to block Tor—although not without a fight.

In December 2021, Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, enacted a 4-year-old court order that allows it to order Internet service providers (ISPs) to block the Tor Project website, where the Tor Browser can be downloaded, and restrict access to its services. Since then, censors have been locked in a battle with Tor’s technical team and users in Russia, who are pushing to keep the Tor network online and allow people to access the uncensored web, which is otherwise heavily restricted in the country.

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Recreation.gov, the National Park Booking App, Leaves Users Feeling Lost in the Woods

Little availability for campsites. Confusing booking windows. Traveler and travel industry frustration is growing with Recreation.gov, the online portal to book accommodations and access on federal lands.

As Congress Debated Landmark China Bill, Beijing Surged Ahead

Experts are still assessing how China apparently leapfrogged ahead in its effort to manufacture a semiconductor that rivals those made in Taiwan, which supplies both China and the West.

Big Tech Is Proving Resilient as the Economy Cools

Tech companies are slowing their frenetic hiring, but a combination of dominance and diversity is turning out to be — yet again — an overwhelming asset.

Comcast stock falls as company fails to add Internet users for first time ever

Enlarge / Comcast CEO Brian Roberts at an event in Beijing on October 17, 2019.

Comcast is the largest Internet provider in the US with over 29.8 million residential broadband customers, but the company's long streak of adding Internet subscribers each quarter is finally over.

In Q2 2022 earnings announced today, Comcast said it has 29,826,000 residential broadband customers, a drop of 10,000 since Q1 2022, and 2,337,000 business broadband customers, a gain of 10,000. The overall tally of 32,163,000 residential and business Internet customers remained unchanged.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said the company's cable division is experiencing "a unique and evolving macroeconomic environment that is temporarily putting pressure on the volume of our new customer connects." Comcast also lost cable-TV and VoIP phone customers in the quarter but added wireless phone subscribers.

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A.I. Predicts the Shape of Nearly Every Protein Known to Science

DeepMind has expanded its database of microscopic biological mechanisms, hoping to accelerate research into all living things.

The Word of the Year Is ‘Uncertainty’

Did tech win the pandemic or not? We likely won’t be able to tell for a while.

Doug Mastriano Faces Criticism Over His Backing From Antisemitic Ally

The founder of Gab, a far-right social media network, recently made bigoted remarks defending his ties with Mr. Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania.

Meta Reports First Revenue Decline and 36 Percent Profit Drop

It was the first time the social media giant’s revenue had fallen since it went public a decade ago, as it confronts increased regulatory scrutiny and a turbulent economy.

0-days sold by Austrian firm used to hack Windows users, Microsoft says

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft said on Wednesday that an Austria-based company named DSIRF used multiple Windows and Adobe Reader zero-days to hack organizations located in Europe and Central America.

Multiple news outlets have published articles like this one, which cited marketing materials and other evidence linking DSIRF to Subzero, a malicious toolset for “automated exfiltration of sensitive/private data” and “tailored access operations [including] identification, tracking and infiltration of threats.”

Members of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, or MSTIC, said they have found Subzero malware infections spread through a variety of methods, including the exploitation of what at the time were Windows and Adobe Reader zero-days, meaning the attackers knew of the vulnerabilities before Microsoft and Adobe did. Targets of the attacks observed to date include law firms, banks, and strategic consultancies in countries such as Austria, the UK, and Panama, although those aren’t necessarily the countries in which the DSIRF customers who paid for the attack resided.

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Senate Passes $280 Billion Industrial Policy Bill to Counter China

The bipartisan vote reflected a rare consensus in the otherwise polarized Congress in favor of investing federal resources into a broad industrial policy to counter China.

Newly found Lightning Framework offers a plethora of Linux hacking capabilities

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The software framework has become essential to developing almost all complex software these days. The Django Web framework, for instance, bundles all the libraries, image files, and other components needed to quickly build and deploy web apps, making it a mainstay at companies like Google, Spotify, and Pinterest. Frameworks provide a platform that performs common functions like logging and authentication shared across an app ecosystem.

Last week, researchers from security firm Intezer revealed the Lightning Framework, a modular malware framework for Linux that has gone undocumented until now. Lightning Framework is post-exploit malware, meaning it gets installed after an attacker has already gained access to a targeted machine. Once installed, it can provide some of the same efficiencies and speed to Linux compromises that Django provides for web development.

“It is rare to see such an intricate framework developed for targeting Linux systems,” Ryan Robinson, a security researcher at Intezer, wrote in a post. “Lightning is a modular framework we discovered that has a plethora of capabilities, and the ability to install multiple types of rootkit, as well as the capability to run plugins.”

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Necrobotics: Dead Spiders Reincarnated as Robot Grippers

Bugs have long taunted roboticists with how utterly incredible they are. Astonishingly mobile, amazingly efficient, super robust, and in some cases, literally dirt cheap. But making a robot that's insect equivalent is extremely hard—so hard that it’s frequently easier to just hijack living insects themselves and put them to work for us. You know what’s even easier than that, though?

Hijacking and repurposing dead bugs. Welcome to necrobotics.

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Spiders are basically hydraulic (or pneumatic) grippers. Living spiders control their limbs by adjusting blood pressure on a limb-by-limb basis through an internal valve system. Higher pressure extends the limb, acting against an antagonistic flexor muscle that curls the limb when the blood pressure within is reduced. This, incidentally, is why spider legs all curl up when the spider shuffles off the mortal coil: There's a lack of blood pressure to balance the force of the flexors.

This means that actuating all eight limbs of a spider that has joined the choir invisible is relatively straightforward. Simply stab it in the middle of that valve system, inject some air, and poof, all of the legs inflate and straighten.

Our strategy contrasts with bioinspired approaches in which researchers look to the spider’s physical morphology for design ideas that are subsequently implemented in complex engineered systems, and also differs from biohybrid systems in which live or active biological materials serve as the basis for a system, demanding careful and precise maintenance.

We repurposed the cadaver of a spider to create a pneumatically actuated gripper that is fully functional following only one simple assembly step, allowing us to circumvent the usual tedious and constraining fabrication steps required for fluidically driven actuators and grippers

This work, from researchers at the Preston Innovation Lab at Rice University is described in a paper just published in Advanced Science. In the paper, the team does a little bit of characterization of the performance of the deceased-spider gripper, and it’s impressive: It can lift 1.3 times its own weight, exert a peak gripping force of 0.35 millinewton, and can actuate at least 700 times before the limbs or the valve system start to degrade in any significant way. After 1000 cycles, some cracks appear in the dead spider’s joins, likely because of dehydration. But the researchers think that by coating the spider in something like beeswax, they could likely forestall this breakdown a great deal. The demised-spider gripper is able to successfully pick up a variety of objects, likely because of a combination of the inherent compliance of the legs as well as hairlike microstructures on the legs that work kind of like a directional adhesive.

We are, unfortunately (although somewhat obviously), unable to say that no spiders were harmed over the course of this research. According to the paper, “the raw biotic material (i.e., the spider cadaver) was obtained by euthanizing a wolf spider through exposure to freezing temperature (approximately -4 °C) for a period of 5–7 days.” The researchers note that “there are currently no clear guidelines in the literature regarding ethical sourcing and humane euthanasia of spiders,” which is really something that should be figured out, considering how much we know about the cute-but-still-terrifying personalities some spiders have.

The wolf spider was a convenient choice because it exerts a gripping force approximately equal to its own weight, which raises the interesting question of what kind of performance could be expected from spiders of different sizes. Based on a scaling analysis, the researchers suggest that itty bitty 10 milligram jumping spiders could exert a gripping force exceeding 200 percent of their body weight, while very much not itty bitty 200- gram goliath spiders may only be able to grasp with a force that is 10 percent of their body weight. But that works out to 20 g, which is still kind of terrifying. Goliath spiders are big.

For better or worse, insects seem likely to offer the most necrobotic potential, because fabricating pneumatics and joints and muscles at that scale can be very challenging, if not impossible. And spiders (as well as other spider-like insects) in particular offer biodegradable, eco-friendly on-demand actuation with capabilities that the researchers hope to extend significantly. A capacitive proximity sensor could enable autonomy, for example, to “discreetly capture small biological creatures for sample collection in real-world scenarios.” Independent actuation of limbs could result in necrobotic locomotion. And the researchers are also planning to explore high-speed articulation with whip scorpions as well as true microscale manipulation with patu digua spiders. I’ll let you Google whip scorpion on your own because they kind of freak me out, but here’s a picture of a patu digua, with a body measuring about a quarter of a millimeter:

Squee!

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How Mark Zuckerberg Is Leading Meta Into Its Next Phase

Facebook’s founder is setting a relentless pace as he pushes his company through a tech transformation during a global economic slowdown.

Alibaba Seeks a Hong Kong Primary Listing

The Chinese e-commerce giant’s application could give it better access to Chinese capital and a safety net against U.S. regulations.

Russia is quietly ramping up its Internet censorship machine

Enlarge (credit: Kremlin official photo)

Since 2019, Vladimir Putin has supercharged his plan to separate Russia from the global Internet. The country's sovereign Internet law, which came into force that November, gives officials the power to block access to websites for millions of Russians. The law was used to hit Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with blocks and followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February.

Since then, Russian officials have continuously dripped out new policies and measures to further control the Internet, boosting the state's censorship and surveillance powers. Each small move continues to push Russia toward a more isolated, authoritarian version of the web—restricting the rights of those inside its border and damaging the foundational ideas of an open web.

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Tesla will spend more to increase production at two new factories.

Tesla said it expected capital expenditures to be $6 billion to $8 billion in 2022, up from an April forecast of $5 billion to $7 billion.

Gen Z Designers Made It Big on Depop. Now They’re Graduating.

Depop, a social shopping app, was a springboard for many young designers during the pandemic. Some are now taking their success elsewhere.

As Jan. 6 Panel’s Evidence Piled Up, Conservative Media Doubled Down

Many of Donald J. Trump’s allies in the media believe the reports about violence and criminal conduct committed by Trump supporters have been exaggerated.

Google Fires Engineer Who Claims Its A.I. Is Conscious

The engineer, Blake Lemoine, contends that the company’s language model has a soul. The company denies that and says he violated its security policies.

How Robots Can Help Us Act and Feel Younger

By 2050, the global population aged 65 or more will be nearly double what it is today. The number of people over the age of 80 will triple, approaching half a billion. Supporting an aging population is a worldwide concern, but this demographic shift is especially pronounced in Japan, where more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older by midcentury.

Toyota Research Institute (TRI), which was established by Toyota Motor Corp. in 2015 to explore autonomous cars, robotics, and “human amplification technologies,” has also been focusing a significant portion of its research on ways to help older people maintain their health, happiness, and independence as long as possible. While an important goal in itself, improving self-sufficiency for the elderly also reduces the amount of support they need from society more broadly. And without technological help, sustaining this population in an effective and dignified manner will grow increasingly difficult—first in Japan, but globally soon after.

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Toyota Research Institute

Gill Pratt, Toyota’s Chief Scientist and the CEO of TRI, believes that robots have a significant role to play in assisting older people by solving physical problems as well as providing mental and emotional support. With a background in robotics research and five years as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, during which time he oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2015, Pratt understands how difficult it can be to bring robots into the real world in a useful, responsible, and respectful way. In an interview earlier this year in Washington, D.C., with IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman, he said that the best approach to this problem is a human-centric one: “It’s not about the robot, it’s about people.”

What are the important problems that we can usefully and reliably solve with home robots in the relatively near term?

Gill Pratt: We are looking at the aging society as the No. 1 market driver of interest to us. Over the last few years, we’ve come to the realization that an aging society creates two problems. One is within the home for an older person who needs help, and the other is for the rest of society—for younger people who need to be more productive to support a greater number of older people. The dependency ratio is the fraction of the population that works relative to the fraction that does not. As an example, in Japan, in not too many years, it’s going to get pretty close to 1:1. And we haven’t seen that, ever.

Solving physical problems is the easier part of assisting an aging society. The bigger issue is actually loneliness. This doesn’t sound like a robotics thing, but it could be. Related to loneliness, the key issue is having purpose, and feeling that your life is still worthwhile.

What we want to do is build a time machine. Of course we can’t do that, that’s science fiction, but we want to be able to have a person say, “I wish I could be 10 years younger” and then have a robot effectively help them as much as possible to live that kind of life.

There are many different robotic approaches that could be useful to address the problems you’re describing. Where do you begin?

Pratt: Let me start with an example, and this is one we talk about all of the time because it helps us think: Imagine that we built a robot to help with cooking. Older people often have difficulty with cooking, right?

Well, one robotic idea is to just cook meals for the person. This idea can be tempting, because what could be better than a machine that does all the cooking? Most roboticists are young, and most roboticists have all these interesting, exciting, technical things to focus on. And they think, “Wouldn’t it be great if some machine made my meals for me and brought me food so I could get back to work?”

But for an older person, what they would truly find meaningful is still being able to cook, and still being able to have the sincere feeling of “I can still do this myself.” It’s the time-machine idea—helping them to feel that they can still do what they used to be able to do and still cook for their family and contribute to their well-being. So we’re trying to figure out right now how to build machines that have that effect—that help you to cook but don’t cook for you, because those are two different things.

A robot for your home may not look much like this research platform, but it’s how TRI is learning to make home robots that are useful and safe. Tidying and cleaning are physically repetitive tasks that are ideal for home robots, but still a challenge since every home is different, and every person expects their home to be organized and cleaned differently.Toyota Research Institute

How can we manage this temptation to focus on solving technical problems rather than more impactful ones?

Pratt: What we have learned is that you start with the human being, the user, and you say, “What do they need?” And even though all of us love gadgets and robots and motors and amplifiers and hands and arms and legs and stuff, just put that on the shelf for a moment and say: “Okay. I want to imagine that I’m a grandparent. I’m retired. It’s not quite as easy to get around as when I was younger. And mostly I’m alone.” How do we help that person have a truly better quality of life? And out of that will occasionally come places where robotic technology can help tremendously.

A second point of advice is to try not to look for your keys where the light is. There’s an old adage about a person who drops their keys on the street at night, and so they go look for them under a streetlight, rather than the place they dropped them. We have an unfortunate tendency in the robotics field—and I’ve done it too—to say, “Oh, I know some mathematics that I can use to solve this problem over here.” That’s where the light is. But unfortunately, the problem that actually needs to get solved is over there, in the dark. It’s important to resist the temptation to use robotics as a vehicle for only solving problems that are tractable.

It sounds like social robots could potentially address some of these needs. What do you think is the right role for social robots for elder care?

Pratt: For people who have advanced dementia, things can be really, really tough. There are a variety of robotic-like things or doll-like things that can help a person with dementia feel much more at ease and genuinely improve the quality of their life. They sometimes feel creepy to people who don’t have that disability, but I believe that they’re actually quite good, and that they can serve that role well.

There’s another huge part of the market, if you want to think about it in business terms, where many people’s lives can be tremendously improved even when they’re simply retired. Perhaps their spouse has died, they don’t have much to do, and they're lonely and depressed. Typically, many of them are not technologically adept the way that their kids or their grandkids are. And the truth is their kids and their grandkids are busy. And so what can we really do to help?

Here there’s a very interesting dilemma, which is that we want to build a social-assistive technology, but we don’t want to pretend that the robot is a person. We’ve found that people will anthropomorphize a social machine, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s very important to not cross a line where we are actively trying to promote the idea that this machine is actually real—that it’s a human being, or like a human being.

So there are a whole lot of things that we can do. The field is just beginning, and much of the improvement to people's lives can happen within the next 5 to 10 years. In the social robotics space, we can use robots to help connect lonely people with their kids, their grandkids, and their friends. We think this is a huge, untapped potential.

A robot for your home may not look much like this research platform, but it’s how TRI is learning to make home robots that are useful and safe. Perceiving and grasping transparent objects like drinking glasses is a particularly difficult task.Toyota Research Institute

Where do you draw the line with the amount of connection that you try to make between a human and a machine?

Pratt: We don’t want to trick anybody. We should be very ethically stringent, I think, to not try to fool anyone. People will fool themselves plenty—we don't have to do it for them.

To whatever extent that we can say, “This is your mechanized personal assistant,” that’s okay. It’s a machine, and it’s here to help you in a personalized way. It will learn what you like. It will learn what you don’t like. It will help you by reminding you to exercise, to call your kids, to call your friends, to get in touch with the doctor, all of those things that it's easy for people to miss on their own. With these sorts of socially assistive technologies, that’s the way to think of it. It’s not taking the place of other people. It’s helping you to be more connected with other people, and to live a healthier life because of that.

How much do you think humans should be in the loop with consumer robotic systems? Where might it be most useful?

Pratt: We should be reluctant to do person-behind-the-curtain stuff, although from a business point of view, we absolutely are going to need that. For example, say there's a human in an automated vehicle that comes to a double-parked car, and the automated vehicle doesn’t want to go around by crossing the double yellow line. Of course the vehicle should phone home and say, “I need an exception to cross the double yellow line.” A human being, for all kinds of reasons, should be the one to decide whether it’s okay to do the human part of driving, which is to make an exception and not follow the rules in this particular case.

However, having the human actually drive the car from a distance assumes that the communication link between the two of them is so reliable it’s as if the person is in the driver’s seat. Or, it assumes that the competence of the car to avoid a crash is so good that even if that communications link went down, the car would never crash. And those are both very, very hard things to do. So human beings that are remote, that perform a supervisory function, that’s fine. But I think that we have to be careful not to fool the public by making them think that nobody is in that front seat of the car, when there’s still a human driving—we’ve just moved that person to a place you can’t see.

In the robotics field, many people have spoken about this idea that we’ll have a machine to clean our house operated by a person in some part of the world where it would be good to create jobs. I think pragmatically it’s actually difficult to do this. And I would hope that the kinds of jobs we create are better than sitting at a desk and guiding a cleaning machine in someone’s house halfway around the world. It’s certainly not as physically taxing as having to be there and do the work, but I would hope that the cleaning robot would be good enough to clean the house by itself almost all the time and just occasionally when it’s stuck say, “Oh, I’m stuck, and I’m not sure what to do.” And then the human can help. The reason we want this technology is to improve quality of life, including for the people who are the supervisors of the machine. I don’t want to just shift work from one place to the other.

These bubble grippers are soft to the touch, making them safe for humans to interact with, but they also include the necessary sensing to be able to grasp and identify a wide variety of objects.Toyota Research Institute

Can you give an example of a specific technology that TRI is working on that could benefit the elderly?

Pratt: There are many examples. Let me pick one that is very tangible: the Punyo project.

In order to truly help elderly people live as if they are younger, robots not only need to be safe, they also need to be strong and gentle, able to sense and react to both expected and unexpected contacts and disturbances the way a human would. And of course, if robots are to make a difference in quality of life for many people, they must also be affordable.

Compliant actuation, where the robot senses physical contact and reacts with flexibility, can get us part way there. To get the rest of the way, we have developed instrumented, functional, low-cost compliant surfaces that are soft to the touch. We started with bubble grippers that have high-resolution tactile sensing for hands, and we are now adding compliant surfaces to all other parts of the robot's body to replace rigid metal or plastic. Our hope is to enable robot hardware to have the strength, gentleness, and physical awareness of the most able human assistant, and to be affordable by large numbers of elderly or disabled people.

What do you think the next DARPA challenge for robotics should be?

Pratt: Wow. I don’t know! But I can tell you what ours is [at TRI]. We have a challenge that we give ourselves right now in the grocery store. This doesn't mean we want to build a machine that does grocery shopping, but we think that trying to handle all of the difficult things that go on when you’re in the grocery store—picking things up even though there’s something right next to it, figuring out what the thing is even if the label that’s on it is half torn, putting it in the basket—this is a challenge task that will develop the same kind of capabilities we need for many other things within the home. We were looking for a task that didn’t require us to ask for 1,000 people to let us into their homes, and it turns out that the grocery store is a pretty good one. We have a hard time helping people to understand that it’s not about the store, it’s actually about the capabilities that let you work in the store, and that we believe will translate to a whole bunch of other things. So that’s the sort of stuff that we're doing work on.

As you’ve gone through your career from academia to DARPA and now TRI, how has your perspective on robotics changed?

Pratt: I think I’ve learned that lesson that I was telling you about before—I understand much more now that it’s not about the robot, it’s about people. And ultimately, taking this user-centered design point of view is easy to talk about, but it’s really hard to do.

As technologists, the reason we went into this field is that we love technology. I can sit and design things on a piece of paper and feel great about it, and yet I’m never thinking about who it is actually going to be for, and what am I trying to solve. So that’s a form of looking for your keys where the light is.

The hard thing to do is to search where it’s dark, and where it doesn’t feel so good, and where you actually say, “Let me first of all talk to a lot of people who are going to be the users of this product and understand what their needs are. Let me not fall into the trap of asking them what they want and trying to build that because that’s not the right answer.” So what I’ve learned most of all is the need to put myself in the user’s shoes, and to really think about it from that point of view.

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Video Friday: ARTEMIS

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

IEEE CASE 2022: 20 August–24 August 2022, MEXICO CITY

CLAWAR 2022: 12 September–14 September 2022, AZORES, PORTUGAL

ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals: 4 November–5 November 2022, LOS ANGELES

CoRL 2022: 14 December–18 December 2022, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND

Enjoy today's videos!

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Introducing ARTEMIS: The next generation humanoid robot platform to serve us for the next 10 years. This is a sneak peek of what is to come. Stay tuned!

[ RoMeLa ]

We approach the problem of learning by watching humans in the wild. We call our method WHIRL: In the Wild Human-Imitated Robot Learning. In WHIRL, we aim to use human videos to extract a prior over the intent of the demonstrator and use this to initialize our agent's policy. We introduce an efficient real-world policy learning scheme, that improves over the human prior using interactions. We show one-shot generalization, and success in real-world settings, including 20 different manipulation tasks in the wild.

[ CMU ]

I cannot believe that this system made it to the commercial pilot stage, but pretty awesome that it has, right?

[ Tevel ]

My favorite RoboCup event, where the world championship robots take on the RoboCup trustees!

[ RoboCup ]

WeRobotics is coordinating critical cargo drone logistics in Madagascar with Aerial Metric, Madagascar Flying Labs and PSI. This project serves to connect hard-to-reach rural communities with essential, life-saving medicines, including the delivery of just-in-time COVID19 vaccines.

[ WeRobotics ]

With the possible exception of an octopus tentacle, the trunk of an elephant is the robotic manipulator we should all be striving for.

[ Georgia Tech ]

I don't know if this ornithopter is more practical than a traditional drone, but it's much more beautiful to watch.

[ GRVC ]

While I certainly appreciate the technical challenges to making drones that can handle larger payloads, I still feel like the actual challenge that Wing should be talking about is whether suburban drone delivery of low value consumer goods is a sustainable business.

[ Wing ]

Microsoft Project AirSim provides a rich set of tools that enables you to rapidly create custom machine learning capabilities. Realistic sensor models, pre-trained neural networks, and extensible autonomy building blocks accelerate the training of aerial agents.

[ AirSim ]

DEEP Robotics recently announced the official release of the Jueying X20 hazard detection and rescue robot dog solution. With the flexibility to deliver unmanned detection and rescue services, Jueying X20 is designed for the complex terrain of a post-earthquake landscape, the insides of vulnerable debris buildings, tunnel traffic accidents, as well as toxic, hypoxia, and high-density smoke environment created by chemical pollution or a fire disaster event.

[ Deep Robotics ]

Highlights from the RoboCup 2022 MSL Finals: Tech United vs Falcons.

And here's an overview of the wider event, from Tech United Eindhoven.

[ Tech United ]

One copter? Two copters!

[ SUTD ]

The Humanoid AdultSize RoboCup league is perhaps not the most dynamic, but it's impressive anyway.

[ Nimbro ]

First autonomous mission for the PLaCE drone at sea, performing multispectral surveys and water column measurements directly in-situ, measuring characteristic biological parameters such as PH, Chlorophyll, PAR, temperature, salinity.

[ PRISMA Lab ]

Here's one of the most interesting drones that I've seen in a while: a sort of winged tricopter that can hover very efficiently by spinning.

[ Hackaday ]

Keep in mind that this is a paid promotion (and it's not very technical at all), but it's interesting to watch a commercial truck driver review an autonomous truck.

[ Plus ]

Curiosity has now been exploring Mars for 10 years (!) of its two year mission.

[ JPL ]

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Hardcoded password in Confluence app has been leaked on Twitter

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

What's worse than a widely used Internet-connected enterprise app with a hardcoded password? Try said enterprise app after the hardcoded password has been leaked to the world.

Atlassian on Wednesday revealed three critical product vulnerabilities, including CVE-2022-26138 stemming from a hardcoded password in Questions for Confluence, an app that allows users to quickly receive support for common questions involving Atlassian products. The company warned the passcode was "trivial to obtain."

The company said that Questions for Confluence had 8,055 installations at the time of publication. When installed, the app creates a Confluence user account named disabledsystemuser, which is intended to help admins move data between the app and the Confluence Cloud service. The hardcoded password protecting this account allows for viewing and editing of all non-restricted pages within Confluence.

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Jay Carney, Amazon’s Top Policy Executive, to Join Airbnb

Mr. Carney, who was press secretary to former President Obama, had joined Amazon in 2015.

Twitter’s Earnings Falter as It Fights with Elon Musk

The social media company swung to a loss in the second quarter and cited “uncertainty” over its pending takeover by the billionaire Tesla chief executive as a factor.

Snap Reports User Growth But a Wider Loss in the Second Quarter

The company declined to forecast its future financial performance, citing “uncertainties related to the operating environment.”

Zero-day used to infect Chrome users could pose threat to Edge and Safari users, too

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A secretive seller of cyberattack software recently exploited a previously unknown Chrome vulnerability and two other zero-days in campaigns that covertly infected journalists and other targets with sophisticated spyware, security researchers said.

CVE-2022-2294, as the vulnerability is tracked, stems from memory corruption flaws in Web Real-Time Communications, an open source project that provides JavaScript programming interfaces to enable real-time voice, text, and video communications capabilities between web browsers and devices. Google patched the flaw on July 4 after researchers from security firm Avast privately notified the company it was being exploited in watering hole attacks, which infect targeted websites with malware in hopes of then infecting the users known to frequent them. Microsoft and Apple have since patched the same WebRTC flaw in their Edge and Safari browsers, respectively.

Avast said on Thursday that it uncovered multiple attack campaigns, each delivering the exploit in its own way to Chrome users in Lebanon, Turkey, Yemen, and Palestine. The watering hole sites were highly selective in choosing which visitors to infect. Once the watering hole sites successfully exploited the vulnerability, they used their access to install DevilsTongue, the name Microsoft gave last year to advanced malware sold by an Israel-based company named Candiru.

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