But are all those products equally effective at stopping COVID-19? There is a growing scientific consensus that face coverings can help stop the spread of the virus. (Though doctors say you should keep washing your hands and social distancing as well.) Contagious people likely release COVID-19 germs when they speak, yell, sing, sneeze, or cough, especially indoors, where poor ventilation may allow the virus to linger in the air longer....
The good thing about using infrared thermometers is that they are quick, simple, and non-invasive. You can rapidly screen many people without inconveniencing them, for instance, travelers moving through an airport or people entering a sports stadium. But to be useful mass-screening tools, infrared thermometers also need to be accurate – and this is where problems arise. Although fever is a leading symptom of COVID-19, many infected people don’t have any symptoms, or they develop a fever after they have become infectious, got ill, and entered the hospital....
But while remote working provides much-needed protection against COVID-19, it will also open a Pandora’s box of cybersecurity and privacy threats. Among the growing threats are phishing scams, social engineering attacks that trick their victims into downloading malware or revealing sensitive information. Attackers usually take advantage of chaos and confusion to make their phishing emails look more convincing. And the coronavirus crisis is one of the most confusing times we’ve been going through in the past decades, creating the perfect storm for phishers....
Braun resigned last week after auditors failed to locate 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in revenue, money that the German fintech firm later admitted most likely “doesn’t exist.” Wirecard stock crashed almost 90% since the missing billions were first announced, with more than $12 billion wiped from its market value in just three days. [Read: Wirecard’s missing billions: Do they exist, or did Germany just get its own Enron?] Braun has been detained on suspicion of inflating Wirecard’s balance sheet and revenues in a bid to solicit more money from both customers and investors, according to DW....
One economic alternative lies just offshore. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) is a deep-sea trench spanning 4.5 million square kilometres in the central Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. On its seabed are potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules which contain nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese. These formed over centuries through the accumulation of iron and manganese around debris such as shells or sharks’ teeth. There are estimated to be around 21 billion tonnes of manganese nodules in this trench alone, and demand for these metals is likely to skyrocket as the world ramps up the development of batteries for electric vehicles and renewable power grids....
That’s right. It’s three years later and Xbox Game Pass is the Netflix of Gaming. And it’s all thanks to Microsoft’s excellent “Xbox Cloud Gaming” service, which recently entered beta. I’ve tested the service and ran it through some paces and, well, I have some thoughts. The short version is this: Here’s a more nuanced take: Microsoft’s been telling us for years that “Project X Cloud,” now Xbox Cloud Gaming, would be a big deal....
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman addressed the claims brought against the company in a pending class action lawsuit by addressing how the company conducts business. As he explained the situation, though, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to take potshots at the plaintiffs by saying that they had hired, “the Orly Taitz of internet lawyers who may or may not have read about our recent funding round.” Based on the overwhelmingly positive response many business owners have to Yelp, Stoppelman’s story sounds more plausible than the lawsuit’s doom and gloom....
The block mentioning this feature was available on both iOS and iPad OS slides. While there’s not much information available on the feature, it means that you’ll be able to set Chrome, Firefox, or Brave as your default browser, and you can set Gmail, Outlook, or any email app as your default email app. For years, Apple has only allowed Safari and Mail app to be default apps for browsing and email....
Data analysis. Deep learning. If you’re interested in learning about either topic, you probably already realize that with the scope and complexity of each, you’re likely looking at an uphill climb. But…there’s a reason that even during a global pandemic, hiring for high-paying jobs in both data analysis and machine learning roles continues at a fiery pace. Both will likely fuel wide-ranging innovation and opportunity over the next few decades — so getting in now on the training in The Deep Learning and Data Analysis Certification Bundle could immediately jumpstart your IT career....
For the uninitiated, Coinbase — a cryptocurrency exchange — ran a 60 second spot that featured a QR code bouncing around in a way reminiscent of old DVD screensavers. It was a roaring success. Coinbase claims it witnessed over 20 million hits in a single minute on its special offer of $15 of free Bitcoin for new sign-ups. Of course, take the visitors figure with a pinch of salt. The number comes from the company itself, meaning the story could be summed up as “Coinbase says its own advert was actually super, duper popular, thank you very much....
Yesterday, Facebook’s deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman, explained the how and why in a letter to senators Christopher Coons (D-Del.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), after they asked about the company’s policies on location tracking. no? well here you go anyways and there’s 5 more pages where that came from pic.twitter.com/tzaSQ2mU6H — Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e) December 17, 2019 The social network can use your IP address, check-ins, and photos in which you’re tagged to learn where you are — and use that information to target you with relevant ads and content in your News Feed....
As acybersecurity researcher, I track the threat posed by digital footprints on cybersecurity. Hackers are able to use personal information gathered online to suss out answers to security challenge questions like “in what city did you meet your spouse?” or to hone phishing attacks by posing as a colleague or work associate. When phishing attacks are successful, they give the attackers access to networks and systems the victims are authorized to use....
Smartphone-based tests have been developed for detecting HIV, malaria, TB and various food contaminants. Work is now also underway to use smartphones to detect COVID-19 – though there are various questions about the practicality and usefulness of using technology in this manner. We’ve been involved in developing ways of using smartphones to monitor food contamination as part of the EU project FoodSmartphone. Here, we weigh up the potential of using this exciting technology to fight the virus....
I wouldn’t go as far as saying that leaders at startups hold such a strong disregard for privacy, but I do find many taking the stance that the world’s strictest data privacy laws don’t apply to them. If you fall into this category, you ought to know that privacy isn’t dead, and a new era of privacy is being quietly ushered in across Europe. Earlier this year the European Commission (EC) issued its long-awaited update to ‘Standard Contractual Clauses’ (SCCs), which represents the most frequently used mechanism to transfer your customers’ personal data out of the EU, including to the US....
You can read the breakdown of Google’s financial results here. In addition to the $15.1 billion it earned from the ad revenue, it accrued another $3 billion in paid subscriptions, such as YouTube Premium and YouTubeTV. Ruth Porat, CFO of parent company Alphabet, said in a call to analysts (via AdAge) that “We pay out a majority of our revenue to our creators.” Assuming she’s got right about that, that would mean the company pays around $8 billion of its money out to the people who host its lucrative ads....
According to Zuckerberg, “there has been a trend across society that a lot of things have become politicized and politics have had a way of creeping into everything.” He noted “one of the top pieces of feedback” that Facebook is hearing is that “people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience.” To mitigate so the company is looking to reduce the amount of political content that shows up on people’s feeds....
The victims of this exposure are two founders of Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). The NFT collection has generated over $1 billion in sales, but the creators of Yuga Labs had been pseudoanonymized — until now. The duo, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, showed their faces publicly on Friday after BuzzFeed News revealed their identities. The revelations sparked a fiery mix of condemnation and admiration....
But it’s clear that the police are struggling to keep pace with fraudsters. A 2018 Which? report found that an estimated 96% of fraud cases reported to Action Fraud go unsolved. And with scams seemingly on the rise, 54% of which involve the internet, the problem of online fraud appears to be getting worse. There are romance scammers forming bogus online relationships with their victims, pet scammers setting up thousands of websites selling animals that don’t exist, and phishing scammers using fear and urgency to obtain sensitive personal information from victims....
The system gives soft robots a greater awareness of their movements by analysing motion and position data through a ‘sensorized’ skin. It works by collecting feedback from sensors on the robot’s body. A deep learning model then analyses the data to estimate the robot’s 3D configuration. [Read: Scientists used stem cells to create a new life-form: Organic robots] The sensors are comprised of conductive silicone sheets, which the researchers cut into patterns inspired by kirigami — a variation of origami that that involves cutting as well as folding paper....
If you’re deep in the throes of a truly saccharine-y exchange with your significant other and your phone dies, that can lead to trouble. What if they think you got mad and rage-quit the conversation? Or what if they take your silence as abandonment? Your dead phone could be the beginning of the end of your entire relationship. Now, we hope your significant other isn’t prone to flying off the handle quite that easily....
