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The NHS coronavirus contact-tracing app for England and Wales will be launched on 24 September following months of delays.

Celebrity video game streamer Ninja has returned to Twitch, the platform owned by Amazon, little more than a year after his high-profile move to Microsoft’s rival service Mixer.

President Trump says he will not be extending the 20 September deadline for TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the popular video-sharing app.

Hackers from China, Russia and Iran are attempting to spy on the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, according to Microsoft.
The tech giant says that the same group of cyber criminals from Russia that attempted to interfere in the 2016 US election are trying to break into email accounts belonging to staff members from across the political spectrum.

It adds that a group based in China has targeted Joe Biden’s election campaign, while a team of hackers in Iran are continuing to attack accounts related to Donald Trump, ahead of polling day on 3 November.

Image: Hackers have unsuccessfully targeted Joe Biden
Strontium, the Russian group, was “identified in the Mueller report as the organisation primary responsible for the attacks on the Democratic presidential campaign in 2016,” according to Microsoft’s head of cyber security, Tom Burt.
The firm said Strontium is trying to “harvest people’s login credentials or compromise their accounts”, and has targeted consultants, think tanks and political parties, including those in the UK.

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Strontium are said to have masked their activities by rotating more than 1,000 IP addresses every day, as well as engaging in “password spray”, which allows them to automate their activities.

A simple guide to the 2020 presidential race

The group in China, known as Zirconium, is specifically targeting Joe Biden’s presidential campaign “through non-campaign email accounts belonging to people affiliated with the campaign”, Mr Burt said.

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The group has so far been unsuccessful in their attempts to breach those accounts.
Phosphorus, based in Iran, has attempted to access accounts associated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over the summer, but Microsoft has been able to take control of the URLs used by the group, after being given permission by courts in Washington DC.
Mr Burt said: “We disclose attacks like these because we believe it is important the world knows about threats to democratic processes.

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“It is critical that everyone involved in democratic processes around the world, both directly or indirectly, be aware of these threats and take steps to protect themselves in both their personal and professional capacities.”
He also asked U Congress to approve funding to states to help them with cyber crime.
Speaking to NBC, Jamal Brown, Joe Biden’s press secretary, said: “We have known from the beginning of our campaign that we would be subject to such attacks and we are prepared for them.”
Thea McDonald, deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in an email to NBC that it was “not surprising to see malicious activity directed at the campaign.”
“We work closely with our partners, Microsoft and others, to mitigate these threats. We take cybersecurity very seriously and do not publicly comment on our efforts.”

Twitter has announced plans to label and remove messages that spread false information about how to vote, or that could intimidate or suppress voter turnout.
The rules will come into place on Thursday 17 September and come a few hours after another incident of US President Donald Trump falsely claiming, as he has done repeatedly, that the use of postal ballots would lead to electoral fraud.

Twitter said it will label or remove tweets that claim victory before the election results have been certified, and warned it would take similar action against messages that seek to “incite unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession”.

Sending out 80 MILLION BALLOTS to people who aren’t even asking for a Ballot is unfair and a total fraud in the making. Look at what’s going on right now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2020

Both Facebook and Twitter have now announced plans to address what Mark Zuckerberg described as “an increased risk of social unrest across the country” in the days following the election.
Twitter said it will label or remove tweets that claim victory before the election results have been certified, and warned it would take similar action against messages that seek to “incite unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession”.

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In July the president refused to state that he would accept the result of the election as he dismissed the validity of polls which showed him behind the Democratic candidate Joe Biden, prompting concerns he and his supporters would not comply with the results.

Twitter added, of particular importance during the 47 days until 3 November, it would focus on “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the electoral process”.

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As an example the company cited “unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results” which would match the claims made by President Trump, although he is not mentioned in the announcement.
In addition the company said it would take action against “false or misleading information that causes confusion about the laws and regulations of a civic process, or officials and institutions executing those civic processes”.
Twitter has previously taken action against the president’s tweets for glorifying violence against protesters during the civil unrest following the police killing of George Floyd.
The company has also previously labelled messages by Mr Trump which claimed that postal ballots will be “substantially fraudulent”, despite numerous studies providing evidence to the contrary.

….living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

The president subsequently accused the company – and the entire social media industry – of censorship and anti-conservative bias, before signing an executive order aimed at curbing protections for the sites as publishers.
US Attorney General William Barr, who was appointed by President Trump, has supported the president’s claim that mail-in ballots could be vulnerable to tampering.
Despite these claims, Ellen Weintraub, the commissioner of the US Federal Election Commission, said there was “simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud”.
Nearly one in four voters mailed in their ballots in the 2016 election and an even higher proportion of postal ballots are expected this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Voting procedures are controlled by states independently of the federal government and most states are encouraging voters to use postal ballots to reduce gatherings at polling stations.
Studies, such as those by the Brennan Centre for Justice, have found that electoral fraud is exceedingly rare accounting for between 0.00004% and 0.00009% of the votes cast – equivalent to at most 225 votes in the context of the roughly 250 million which were cast in the 2016 election.

Huawei has announced six new products – two laptops, two watches, and two earbud devices – although questions about its ability to continue to source US computer chips loomed over the launch.
American restrictions on Huawei, stated to be based on security grounds, will prohibit US technology companies from providing components such as computer chips to the company, which are used across its product lines.

Despite the potential impact of this, which is leading to redundancies in the company’s enterprise business in the UK, Huawei is launching a range of consumer products – and is introducing a new mobile operating system too amid the threats its phones would be banned from licensing Google’s Android.

Image: Huawei’s MateBook X is lighter than the MacBook Air. Pic: Huawei
Among the products announced at the company’s developers’ conference on Thursday are two new laptops, the MateBook X and the MateBook 14.
The MateBook X is thinner and lighter than Apple’s MacBook Air, weighing just 1kg thanks to a magnesium aluminium alloy, while the portable MateBook 14 weighs just under 1.5kg.

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Both laptops come with the company’s new Huawei Share multi-screen technology, allowing Huawei phones to be peered with the laptops just by tapping them on the touchpad.

The touchpad for the MateBook X is an improvement on the last generation too, with a larger surface area and eight piezoelectric plates beneath it increasing sensitivity and offering haptic feedback from all four corners.

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The MateBook X has a 13″ screen with a 3000×2000 display at 278 pixels per inch, and functions as a touchscreen – while the MateBook 14 has a 14″ display with a 2160×1440 resolution at 185 ppi.
Where the MateBook 14 really offers something different is in the processors powering it, having a top-shelf option of an AMD Ryzen 4800H CPU with 16GB of RAM.
Huawei is also introducing four new wearables, including the next generation Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro which comes in two versions mainly differentiated by bands, a professional-looking leather version and a sports version with a rubber strap.
The Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro supports performance tracking and measuring for more than 100 sports, including golf driving and skiing, which is potentially indicative of the market the company is aiming at.
The smartwatch can also be charged wirelessly from a Huawei smartphone, which will effectively donate its own battery life to the watch using reverse charging.

Image: The Huawei Watch Fit (L) and Watch GT 2 Pro have been launched. Pic: Huawei
Also available is the Huawei Watch Fit, a cheaper smartwatch with a display a bit more similar to the Apple Watch’s, which comes with 96 workout modes and has generally a few features less than the flagship GT 2 Pro.
The two near earphones are Huawei’s wireless FreeBuds Pro and FreeLace Pro, the latter of which connects wirelessly to its users’ smartphones but comes with a lace strap to catch the buds if they fall out of the ear.
Both have active noise cancellation embedded, and the FreeBuds Pro come with a more cubic stem than rivals, which allows for a few more touch gestures to control the volume as well as pausing or playing a song, and skipping a track if desired.
Huawei did not make any reference to US sanctions in the launch, despite the threat that Microsoft may be prohibited from licensing any software to the company in the future.
This potentially means Huawei itself will have to replicate and update any security issues discovered in Windows 10 – just as it may have to do for its phones which run on Google’s Android OS – if those companies are permanently banned from licensing software to it.
The company is set to release a new operating system called HarmonyOS which can function across its laptop and mobile devices, which could replace Windows and Android in the case of a ban – ultimately reducing revenue for the US technology companies.