Newton Mail, a subscription-based email client with an impressively large fanbase, is being reincarnated by new owners: long-time fans Maitrik Kataria and Justin Mitchell. From a report: After Newton's owner Essential announced it would be shutting down in February -- for the second time, Kataria and Mitchell reached out to the company to figure out how they could save their favorite email client. And somehow they've done it. Newton, which was originally produced under the name CloudMagic, has been shut down and given new life more times than most companies are afforded. CloudMagic rebranded as Newton in 2016 and did pretty well for itself -- by the time it first shut down in the summer of 2018, the service had more than 40,000 paid subscribers. The purchase of Newton Mail by Kataria and Mitchell brings the mail client back to its roots as a company free of venture capital funding. Newton will need to bank on its long-standing fan base's willingness to pay subscription fees for a mail client if it wants to survive. Otherwise, history is doomed to repeat itself once again.

Twitter announced Monday it will warn users when a tweet contains disputed or misleading information about the coronavirus. From a report: The new rule is the latest in a wave of stricter policies that tech companies are rolling out to confront an outbreak of virus-related misinformation on their sites. Twitter will take a case-by-case approach to how it decides which tweets are labeled and will only remove posts that are harmful, company leaders said Monday. Some tweets will run with a label underneath that directs users to a link with additional information about COVID-19. Other tweets might be covered entirely by a warning label alerting users that "some or all of the content shared in this tweet conflict with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19." The new labels will be available in roughly 40 languages and should begin appearing on tweets as soon as today. The warning could apply retroactively to past tweets.

Microsoft and Intel have collaborated on a new research project that explores a new approach to detecting and classifying malware. From a report: Called STAMINA (STAtic Malware-as-Image Network Analysis), the project relies on a new technique that converts malware samples into grayscale images and then scans the image for textural and structural patterns specific to malware samples. The Intel-Microsoft research team said the entire process followed a few simple steps. The first consisted of taking an input file and converting its binary form into a stream of raw pixel data. Researchers then took this one-dimensional (1D) pixel stream and converted it into a 2D photo so that normal image analysis algorithms can analyze it.

"The high-profile discrimination dispute between Google and one of its former software engineers has quietly come to an end," reports USA Today. "Ex-Google employee James Damore has moved to dismiss his lawsuit against the internet giant two years after alleging discrimination against conservative white men." Damore worked as an engineer at Google before being fired in 2017 after criticizing the company's efforts to improve diversity among its workforce... On Thursday, Damore and three other men involved in the suit made a written request to the Santa Clara Superior Court in California to drop the charges. Google also signed the motion, which was first spotted by Bloomberg.

"This matter is dismissed in its entirety," Judge Brian Walsh wrote in the order. A lawyer for the men told Bloomberg his clients are prohibited from saying anything beyond what's in the court filing.
Bloomberg provides some context: In 2018, Damore suffered a setback when a National Labor Relations Board attorney concluded the engineer's use of biological stereotypes in his widely circulated memo was offensive enough to cause disruption in the workplace, making his firing lawful...

In August Google posted internal rules that discourage employees from debating politics, a shift away from the company's famously open culture.

"Mobile phone masts in the UK are still being attacked by arsonists on a daily basis," reports Wired, "because of a conspiracy theory linking 5G to the spread of coronavirus." New data seen by WIRED UK reveals that dozens of attacks have taken place in the last fortnight, with conspiracy theorists targeting both infrastructure and key workers in the misguided belief that they are somehow spreading coronavirus... Since March 30, there have been 77 arson attacks on mobile phone masts across the UK, with staff working on mobile infrastructure also reporting 180 incidents of abuse. There have been 13 additional incidents of sabotage reported, ranging from failed arson attacks to attempts to damage mobile network infrastructure in other ways. From April 20 through May 5, more than a week after the supposed peak of attacks in early April, there were 16 arson or sabotage attacks on mobile phone masts. When failed or attempted attacks are added to the tally, that number increases to 74...

The continued abuse of key workers and attacks on critical infrastructure hint at how widely this conspiracy theory continues to circulate online. In the last seven days alone, more than 54,000 posts referencing 5G and coronavirus have appeared on Facebook, generating over two million interactions. The most popular of these posts, featuring an image of Bill Gates with devil horns, has received more than 4,600 shares, comments and interactions. Two posts protesting the removal of conspiracy theorist David Icke's Facebook page have together generated more than 7,000 shares, comments and other interactions.

The response from social networks has been spasmodic at best. While figures such as Icke have been banned, other Facebook groups with huge followings that peddle similar conspiracy theories are still active... On YouTube, conspiracy theory videos revealing "the truth" about 5G and coronavirus are still getting tens of thousands of views. The worry for industry figures is that despite a widespread and concerted effort to debunk the dangerous 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory, it continues to thrive both online and in the real world.

Tom's Hardware "put five of the most popular desktop environments up against each other in a no-holds-barred, seven-round face-off. We've rated GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Awesome and Regolith on a 10-point scale based on Installation, Applications, User Experience, User Documentation, Performance, Extensions and Configurability."

It's a good read, with a detailed and thoughtful 3,700-word analysis, especially about memory performance: When you use the standard desktops, Gnome and KDE, you will likely notice that you are using a lot of memory... If you haven't noticed yet, try running htop in a separate window while you try out your choices. You should see a substantial difference with Awesome, i3 and, if you are elite, dwm. The difference in memory footprint is staggering when you start measuring. GNOME starts with somewhere in the region of 3GB at boot. This can be trimmed down by serious tweaking, but not very much. In comparison, the Awesome window manager weighs in at around 600MB... You can put a lot of eye candy and daemons before you weigh down your system as much as the others...

Getting the advantage comes at a cost, though: you need to learn a few new habits to use Awesome desktop environment.
Among GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon, the article ultimately calls KDE "the most polished... decorative and versatile of the bunch. This comes at a cost, though." Cinnamon has the best balance between extensions and ease of use, while it is also fast and responsive. At the same time, it is not that heavy on resources. You can also add a wide range of extensions in the shape of widgets that send you ongoing and updated information.

Regolith requires a bit more training, but it does set itself up for you so you can continue as you did with GNOME. Adding extensions and other gadgets is a bit more tricky, however... With Awesome you have to set up and practice to use it! It's easily the hardest in the group to get started with. When you are up and running, Awesome does deliver the most benefits from a resource point of view...

Overall Winner: Cinnamon...because of its strong combination of user experience, performance and customization.

Click through to read reactions and share your own thoughts. (And to see a short list of some of the article's other highlights.)

Microsoft has begun rolling out a new feature in Office 365 to help IT staff stop the scourage that is "Reply-All email storms." ZDNet reports: The feature started rolling out this week to all Office 365 users worldwide. In its current form, Microsoft says the "Reply All Storm Protection" feature will block all email threads with more than 5,000 recipients that have generated more than 10 Reply-All sequences within the last 60 minutes. Once the feature gets triggered, Exchange Online will block all replies in the email thread for the next four hours, helping servers prioritize actual emails and shut down the Reply-All storm.

Microsoft said it would also continue working on the feature going forward, promising to add controls for Exchange admins so they can set their own storm detection limits.Other planned features also include Reply-All storm reports and real-time notifications to alert administrators of an ongoing email storm so that they can keep an eye on the email server's status for possible slowdowns or crashes.
The article notes Microsoft has experienced two different "Reply-All email storms" internally witin the last 18 months which included more than 52,000 employees, "who ended up clogging the company's internal communications for hours."

A post on Microsoft's Exchange blog now says "We're already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft."

The newly-created U.S. Space Force has released its first recruitment video, CNET reports: In a video posted Wednesday to Twitter showing rockets, mission control-types rooms and U.S. Space Force members in spacesuits, a voice-over says, "maybe your purpose on this planet isn't on this planet." Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said during a livestream Wednesday that so far recruitment hasn't been a problem for the Space Force. "There's been an avalanche of applicants." This sixth branch of the US military was established in December 2019 and will be operational by mid-2021.
CNET notes the video appeared "a day after Netflix dropped a trailer for its upcoming comedy Space Force. And the leader of the U.S. Space Force says he's looking forward to the Netflix comedy co-created by Steve Carell.

"The one piece of advice I'd give to Steve Carell is to get a haircut," Gen. Jay Raymond, the U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations, said Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Space Foundation. Raymond is bald, and joked that Steve Carell is "looking a little too shaggy if he wants to play the Space Force chief."

Emacs "predates Linux, and was once far more popular," writes LWN.net, while adding that the text editor "has fallen into relative obscurity over the years."

Then it reports on a "mega-thread" on the emacs-devel mailing list about how to make Emacs more appealing and attractive to users: The discussion started with a post from "ndame" asking why Emacs is "so square"; the appearance of things like buttons could be improved with rounded corners, they said. Richard Stallman, one of the original authors of Emacs, seemed somewhat dismissive in his reply: "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." But Stefan Kangas thought there was more to it than that:

I think it's unfortunate if we assume that this is all bells and whistles. Graphical design elements can also improve usability. I also don't know that it's helpful to assume that the rest of the world will take the enlightened stance....

He wondered if there was "any reason not to improve the default look". Stallman said that there are some technical barriers in finding someone interested in and capable of doing the work needed, but there is an overarching problem that needs to be addressed first:

The code to interface Emacs to X-based GUIs needs rewriting by an expert, and has needed it for decades. Until it gets that rewrite, changes in it are likely to break something.

Stallman did agree that the graphical design could improve usability, "but I have a feeling that the changes that would help are deeper issues than the shape of corners".
It was a long and interesting discussion, touching on the popularity of both Vim and Visual Studio Code, while another post questioned whether Emacs should even be prioritizing its menu bar and tool bar.

One post suggested "starter kits" to make the text editor more friendly to newcomers, another suggested making Cntrl-C cut-and-paste the default key binding, and one asked whether it was Emacs' terminology and keyboard shortcuts that might be confusing to users coming from Microsoft Word. "You are basically making a commitment to being or becoming a power user..." argued another post.

"If you just want to do 'casual' text editing emacs is a very weird choice in 2020."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference. When the FCC approved Ligado's plan last month, the agency required a 23MHz guard band to provide a buffer between the Ligado cellular network and GPS. Deasy argued that this guard band won't prevent interference with GPS signals. Results from tests by federal agencies show that "conditions in this FCC order will not prevent impacts to millions of GPS receivers across the United States, with massive complaints expected to come," Deasy said.

The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved."

"Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.

Google's move to put Javier Soltero, VP and GM of G Suite, in charge of Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android, puts all of Google's major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero's team. Dieter Bohn reports via The Verge: Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google's apps, so don't get your hopes up for that (yet). "We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes," Soltero says. Still, Google's communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development, and Soltero could very well be the right person to provide that direction. Prior to joining Google, he had a long career that included creating the much-loved Acompli email app, which Microsoft acquired and essentially turned into the main Outlook app less than two months after signing the deal.

Soltero has also moved rapidly (at least by the standards of Google's communication apps) to clean up the Hangouts branding mess, converting Hangouts Video to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat -- at least on the enterprise side. Google Meet also became free for everybody far ahead of the original schedule because of the pandemic. Cleaning up the consumer side of all that is more complicated, but Soltero says, "The plan continues to be to modernize [Hangouts] towards Google Meet and Google Chat." "Soltero will remain on the cloud team but will join Hiroshi Lockheimer's leadership team," Dieter adds. While Lockheimer believes there are opportunities to better integrate Google's apps into its platforms, he says it doesn't make sense to force integration or interoperability too quickly.

"It's not necessarily a bad thing that there are multiple communications applications if they're for a different purpose," Lockheimer says. "Part of what might be confusing, what we've done to confuse everyone, is our history around some of our communications products that have gone from one place or another place. But we're looking forward now, in a way that has a much more coherent vision."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country. The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records. But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient. Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished. "It's so painful because what it's showing is that the plans we have in place, they don't work," said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health. "We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it."

But the nation's governors -- who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding -- said they're relieved these facilities didn't get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus. "All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. "And that's a very, very good thing." Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said: "These 1,000-bed alternate care sites are not necessary; they're not filled. Thank God." Senior military leaders also said the effort was a success -- even if the beds sit empty.

Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up."

On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

In a blog post yesterday, Samsung announced plans to launch a Samsung Pay debit card this summer. The Verge reports: Samsung will launch the card, which will be backed by a cash management account, in partnership with personal finance company SoFi, Ahn said. Samsung is also developing a "mobile-first money management platform," according to Ahn. His blog doesn't detail what features that money management platform or the upcoming debit card may have, but he does say that Samsung will share more details "in the coming weeks." Samsung joins Apple in offering a branded payment card. Google is reportedly working on its own branded payment card as well, though Google's will apparently be a debit card, like Samsung's. Google will also supposedly offer spending-tracking tools for the card.

IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue. From a report: "While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter," said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday. McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach. The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services.

Google and Facebook want their staff to stay home for all of 2020. From a report: Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive officer, told employees on Thursday to prepare to work remotely through October and possibly to the end of the year, according to people familiar with the decision. A spokeswoman confirmed that the majority of staff is expected to work from home until 2021. Two weeks ago, Pichai wrote an email to his workforce that said some offices would open as soon as June. This week, employees were told returns would vary by division and location but that most Google staff would not return until at least the end of October, according to the people who were not authorized to speak publicly. On Thursday, Facebook told employees that they can work remotely through 2020 if they like. The social media company doesn't expect to open most offices until July 6 at the earliest. The edicts from the internet giants come as states and corporations grapple with ways to reopen as the virus pandemic rages on. California, Google's home state, is letting some businesses open in limited ways, including some manufacturing.

The coronavirus pandemic has gutted the so-called sharing economy. Its most valuable companies, which started the year by promising that they would soon become profitable, now say consumer demand has all but vanished. It is not likely to return anytime soon. From a report: In earnings reports this week, Uber and Lyft disclosed the depth of the financial damage. The companies said their ride-hailing businesses all but collapsed in March, the last month of the first quarter, as shelter-in-place orders spread through Europe and the United States. The red ink extends beyond ride hailing. The home-sharing company Airbnb, which investors valued at $31 billion, had planned to go public this year. Instead, the company has slashed costs and raised emergency funding, and on Tuesday it laid off 1,900 employees, about 25 percent of its staff. It also reduced its revenue forecast for this year to half of what it brought in last year. "While we know Airbnb's business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived," Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, wrote in a memo to employees.

theodp shares a report from The Washington Post: New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) rocked the education world -- and drew strong criticism from teachers and others -- by questioning why school buildings still exist and announcing that he would work with Microsoft founder Bill Gates to 'reimagine education' (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), with technology at the forefront. Cuomo, who in the past has angered educators by supporting controversial Gates-funded school reforms, said Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic offers an opportunity to change how students are educated, and he called Gates "a visionary" whose "thoughts on technology and education" should be advanced. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent billions of dollars on education reform projects it has conceded did not work as hoped. "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been chosen to 'revolutionize' online learning for the fall and was asked by Cuomo on Tuesday to develop a 'blueprint' for how to do so," adds Vox. Cuomo has also tapped Google CEO Eric Schmidt to help not only "reimagine" New York's school system, but the state's economy and health care system too.

While details are scarce about what exactly these groups have in mind, Schmidt said during Cuomo's daily news conference on Wednesday he would focus on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband access.

The NHS has released the source code behind its coronavirus contact-tracing app. The BBC reports: The NHS Covid-19 app is designed to use people's smartphones to keep track of when they come close to each other and for how long, by sending wireless Bluetooth signals. More than 40,000 people have installed the smartphone software so far. NHSX, the health service's digital innovation unit, has opted for a centralized system to power the app, so the contact-matching process happens on a UK-based computer server rather than individuals' smartphones. And there has been a lot of speculation this decision would mean the app was doomed to work badly on iPhones.

Apple limits the extent to which third-party apps can use Bluetooth when they are off-screen and running in the background, although it has promised to relax this rule for contact-tracing apps that use a decentralised system it is co-developing with Google. But NHSX had said it had come up with its own solution. Pen Test Partners installed the app on a handful of "jailbroken" iPhones - altered to allow them to monitor activity normally hidden from users. [...] There will be further scrutiny of the app now the source code has been published to Github, allowing others to see how the workarounds were achieved.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little after 6 pm ET on Wednesday, the system started blinking red for iOS developer Clay Jones. Like many devs, Jones uses a Google product called Crashlytics to keep tabs on when his app stops working. Out of nowhere, it registered tens of thousands of crashes. It also pointed to the cause: a chunk of code that Jones' app incorporates to let people log in with their Facebook accounts. By 6:30 pm, Jones had filed a bug report about the flaw in Facebook's software development kit on GitHub, the code repository. He wasn't alone. According to widespread reports and the web monitoring service Down Detector, prominent iOS apps like TikTok, Spotify, Pinterest, Venmo, and more experienced issues on Wednesday. Many users found that they crashed whenever they tried to open the apps, whether or not they used Facebook to log in.

"Yesterday, a new release of Facebook included a change that triggered crashes in some apps using the Facebook iOS SDK for some users. We identified the issue quickly and resolved it," Facebook said in a statement. That change was quite small, given its outsized impact. "It was something like a server value -- which was supposed to provide a dictionary of things -- was changed to providing a simple YES/NO instead, without warning," says iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith. "A change that simple can break an app that isn't prepared for it."

"Pretty much all these apps -- Pinterest, Spotify, a lot of the big ones -- use the Facebook SDK for the login button," says Jones. "You'll see 'Login With Facebook.' Everyone has it, super common, great for sign-up rates because it's just a one-click thing." And lots of apps that don't use Login With Facebook still use the SDK, which is why the issue Wednesday was so widespread. [...] The good news is that Facebook did fix the issue with haste, as far as these things go. Jones says it took about two hours for things to return to normal.