Less than 24 hours after it was reported that Uber was considering layoffs of 20% of staff, its big rival Lyft said it would be reducing its staff by 17%, working out to 982 employees, and furloughing an additional 288, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. TechCrunch reports: It also will put in place salary reductions of 30% for executive leadership, 20% for vice presidents and 10% for all other employees, while members of Lyft's board of directors will forego 30% of their cash compensation for the second quarter of 2020. Lyft said that it will take a restructuring charge of between $28 million and $36 million as a result, which will come through in its Q2 financials. Transportation has been hit in a particularly tough way, in part because people are not moving around as much due to stay-at-home orders; and in part because of the worries of infection that people have around driving in vehicles in close quarters where others have been.

The Lyft layoffs are only a part of the labor discussion. Drivers for Lyft (and other ride-hailing platforms around the globe) are likely seeing similarly reduced incomes. If demand is high, drivers can profit through increased platform spend. If Lyft is cutting staff, it's easy to presume that platform spend (GMV) is sharply down. This is expected, given the company's withdrawn 2020 guidance, but worth considering from the perspective of the self-employed driver with a car note to cover. Lyft has promised $6.5 million in "initiatives that support drivers and vulnerable communities" impacted by COVID-19, and Uber has made efforts to support some drivers during the pandemic. Both companies have also publicly discussed how their platform might help during the crisis, with Uber looking into delivering medications and Lyft working on delivery efforts for support orgs.

Before life can safely return to normalcy, we'll need an enormous increase in our ability to perform contact tracing -- identifying and contacting everyone who's been in contact with a person infected with COVID-19 so that they in turn can hunker down in quarantine and avoid infecting others. But, as Ars Technica reports, there are two huge problems with the massive contact-tracing platform that Google and Apple are working on. "First, billions of phones won't be able to use the tech," reports Ars. "And second: even among those who could, a solid half of Americans would refuse to because they don't trust insurers or tech companies with their health data." From the report: The 82 percent of US adults who have smartphones are exactly split on the issue, according to poll data released today by The Washington Post and University of Maryland. Half of the poll respondents said they probably or definitely would use a contact-tracing app, and the remaining half said they probably or definitely would not. While a majority of respondents (57 percent) expressed a reasonable amount of trust in public health agencies, less than half (47 percent) said they trust health insurance firms, and only 43 percent said they trust tech firms such as Google or Apple. Overall, the poll indicates that only 41 percent of American adults have both the technological capacity and the will to use a contact-tracing app. That's a problem, as research suggests that digital tracing would have to reach about 60 percent of the population to be most effective.

Facebook today reported earnings for its first fiscal quarter of 2020, including revenue of $17.74 billion, and net income of $4.9 billion, compared to revenue of $15.1 billion, and net income of $2.43 billion billion in Q1 2019. Year-over-year revenue is up 17%. From a report: In a call with analysts after the close of markets today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "For the first time ever, there are now more than 3 billion people actively using Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger each month." That's up from 2.99 billion people on March 31. Use of the main Facebook app grew 10% up from 2.38 billion in Q1 2019 to 2.6 billion. Daily active users are also up 11%. Facebook earnings beat analyst estimates that predicted Facebook would earn $17.5 billion in revenue and report earnings per share of $1.74. Alphabet, which also draws the majority of its revenue from advertising, also announced earnings above analysts estimates on Tuesday.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As more and more people desire higher-quality video communication over internet while working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for webcams has increased dramatically, triggering incredibly high prices, sometimes three to four times over MSRP. And that's if you can find one at all. To help bridge a growing gap, Canon has announced the release of the EOS Webcam Utility Beta, a program for that will, with a single USB cable, turn compatible Canon EOS interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) and PowerShot cameras into dedicated webcams on PCs running the 64-bit version of Windows 10. "In unprecedented times, it's imperative for Canon to provide our customers with useful, simple and accessible solutions to assist them in whatever imaging needs they have," said Tatsuro Kano, executive vice president of the Canon U.S.A., Inc. Imaging Technologies & Communications Group in the press release.

On Monday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published a decision that claims artificial intelligences cannot be inventors. Only "natural persons" currently have the right to get a patent. From a report: Last year, two relatively mundane patents -- one for a shape-shifting food container and another for an emergency flashlight -- posed an existential question for international patent regulations around the world: Does an inventor have to be a human? These two inventions were the work of DABUS, an artificial intelligence system created by physicist and AI researcher Stephen Thaler. Now, the USPTO has decided that DABUS and any other AI cannot be listed as an inventor on a patent filing. Until now, US patent law was vague about whether machines could invent, referring to "individuals" as eligible inventors. Thaler, along with a group of patent law experts, argued that because Thaler didn't have any expertise in containers or flashlights, and didn't help DABUS make the inventions, it wouldn't be right for him to be listed as the inventor.

WhatsApp, which began testing its mobile payments feature in India two years ago, could offer at least one more financial service to people in its biggest market. From a report: In a filing with the local regulator in India, the Facebook-owned service has listed credit as one of the areas it will pursue in the country. The Facebook -owned service declared with the local regulator earlier this month providing credit or loans as one of the "main objects to be pursued by it in the country." No other financial service is listed in the filing. At an event in Bangalore late last year, Abhijit Bose, WhatsApp's head in India, said he believed that the mobile payments market in India, which has attracted dozens of local and international firms in recent years, is still at a very early stage in the country and may eventually see firms move beyond just offering a way for people to send money to one another. WhatsApp has yet to receive approval from New Delhi for a nationwide rollout of Pay in India.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Facebook in 2018 beat back federal prosecutors seeking to wiretap its encrypted Messenger app. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to find out how. The entire proceeding was confidential, with only the result leaking to the press. Lawyers for the ACLU and the Washington Post on Tuesday asked a San Francisco-based federal court of appeals to unseal the judge's decision, arguing the public has a right to know how the law is being applied, particularly in the area of privacy. "It's already publicly known that the Justice Department can't wiretap Facebook's messaging services," Jennifer Granick, an attorney representing the ACLU, told the judges. "What isn't known is the reason why." The three judges didn't tip their hand at the hearing conducted by video conference and said they would rule at a later date. "The Facebook case stems from a federal investigation of members of the violent MS-13 criminal gang. Prosecutors tried to hold Facebook in contempt after the company refused to help investigators wiretap its Messenger app, but the judge ruled against them," adds Bloomberg. "If the decision is unsealed, other tech companies will likely try to use its reasoning to ward off similar government requests in the future."

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a surge in sales for consumer technology in the U.S., even as spending declines overall, an NPD analyst is reporting. The Verge reports: For the week ending April 18th, NPD's Stephen Baker notes that consumer tech sales increased by 23 percent year-over-year. In contrast, the group tracked an overall decline in spending of 23 percent across the industries it tracks. NPD's data also suggests that people are buying more tech to keep themselves entertained, not just to work or learn remotely.

TV sales are up by a massive 86 percent and are selling at the highest volume ever outside a holiday, according to Baker. People are also buying accessories like soundbars (up by 69 percent) and streaming players (42 percent). DVD and Blu-ray players were also up by 27 percent, showing that even physical media is getting a boost. That's not surprising given that last week the NPD reported that nearly a third of US households are without broadband access, which could limit their ability to stream video. Sales of monitors increased by 73 percent compared to last year, PCs were up 53 percent, printers were up by 61 percent, and microphones were up by a massive 147 percent. Chromebook sales are also reportedly seeing triple-digit sales increases, which makes sense given how popular they are in classrooms. Underpinning all this tech is a 70 percent increase in the sale of networking equipment.

The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license. ianVisits reports: Under the new agreement the majority of the 1.9 million images are being made available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. Users no longer need to register to use these photographs, and can now download them directly from the British Museum. Under the terms of the Creative Commons license, you are free to share and adapt the images for non-commercial use, but must include a credit to the British Museum. The relaunch also sees 280,000 new object photographs and 85,000 new object records published for the very first time, many of them acquisitions the Museum has made in recent years, including 73 portraits by Damian Hirst, a previously lost watercolour by Rossetti, and a stunning 3,000-year-old Bronze age pendant. You can view the whole online collection here.

Google's Play Store for Android apps has never had a reputation for the strictest protections from malware. Shady adware and even banking trojans have managed over the years to repeatedly defy Google's security checks. Now security researchers have found what appears to be a more rare form of Android abuse: state-sponsored spies who repeatedly slipped their targeted hacking tools into the Play Store and onto victims' phones. From a report: At a remote virtual version of its annual Security Analyst Summit, researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky today plan to present research about a hacking campaign they call PhantomLance, in which spies hid malware in the Play Store to target users in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. Unlike most of the shady apps found in Play Store malware, Kaspersky's researchers say, PhantomLance's hackers apparently smuggled in data-stealing apps with the aim of infecting only some hundreds of users; the spy campaign likely sent links to the malicious apps to those targets via phishing emails. "In this case, the attackers used Google Play as a trusted source," says Kaspersky researcher Alexey Firsh. "You can deliver a link to this app, and the victim will trust it because it's Google Play."

Kaspersky says it has tied the PhantomLance campaign to the hacker group OceanLotus, also known as APT32, widely believed to be working on behalf of the Vietnamese government. That suggests the PhantomLance campaign likely mixed spying on Vietnam's Southeast Asian neighbors with domestic surveillance of Vietnamese citizens. Security firm FireEye, for instance, has linked OceanLotus to previous operations that targeted Vietnamese dissidents and bloggers. FireEye also recently spotted the group targeting China's Ministry of Emergency Management as well as the government of the Chinese province of Wuhan, apparently searching for information related to Covid-19.

The Register reports that Sheffield City Council's automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) system exposed to the internet 8.6 million records of road journeys made by thousands of people. From the report: The ANPR camera system's internal management dashboard could be accessed by simply entering its IP address into a web browser. No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system -- which logs where and when vehicles, identified by their number plates, travel through Sheffield's road network. Britain's Surveillance Camera Commissioner Tony Porter described the security lapse as "both astonishing and worrying," and demanded a full probe into the snafu. He told us: "As chair of the National ANPR Independent Advisory Group, I will be requesting a report into this incident. I will focus on the comprehensive national standards that exist and look towards any emerging compliance issues or failure thereof."

The unsecured management dashboard could have been used by anyone who found it to reconstruct a particular vehicle's journey, or series of journeys, from its number plate, right down to the minute with ease. A malicious person could have renamed the cameras or altered key metadata shown to operators, such as a camera's location, direction, and unique identifying number. A total of 8,616,198 records of vehicle movements, by time, location, and number plate, could be searched through the dashboard last week, The Register understands. This number constantly grew as more and more number plates were captured by the 100 live cameras feeding the system, and locations of vehicles were logged along with timestamps. The dashboard was taken offline within a few hours of The Register alerting officials.

schwit1 shares a report from Quartz: A group of volunteers in China who worked to prevent digital records of the coronavirus outbreak from being scrubbed by censors are now targets of a crackdown. Cai Wei, a Beijing-based man who participated in one such project on GitHub, the software development website, was arrested together with his girlfriend by Beijing police on April 19. The couple were accused of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," a commonly used charge against dissidents in China, according to Chen Kun, the brother of Chen Mei, another volunteer involved with the project. Chen Mei has been missing since that same day. On April 24, the couple's families received a police notice that informed them of the charge, and said the two have been put under "residential surveillance at a designated place." There is still no information about Chen Mei, said his brother. It is unclear whether the arrest of the couple and the disappearance of Chen are directly linked to their GitHub project, named "Terminus2049."

Chinese citizens had been turning to Microsoft-owned GitHub after the outbreak began, as it remains one of the few major foreign websites that can still be accessed in China. Now, volunteers linked to these GitHub pages are facing the growing risk of reprisals from authorities. Another GitHub page, #2020 nCov memory, which was initiated by seven volunteers around the world to chronicle personal accounts and news stories of the outbreak, is no longer publicly available. The team behind #2020 nCov memory said in an email to Quartz that they will suspend operation of the page and collection of submissions due to the "situation" in China, and that they hope to see "sunshine tomorrow."

Ford and its luxury brand Lincoln have canceled an all-electric SUV that was going to be powered by technology provided by EV startup Rivian, the companies told Automotive News on Tuesday. The Verge reports: Lincoln says it is still working closely with Rivian, including an "alternative vehicle" that will also be based on Rivian's electric vehicle skateboard platform. "Given the current environment, Lincoln and Rivian have decided not to pursue the development of a fully electric vehicle based on Rivian's skateboard platform. Our strategic commitment to Lincoln, Rivian and electrification remains unchanged and Lincoln's future plans will include an all-electric vehicle," a spokesperson from Lincoln told The Verge in a statement.

Lincoln declined to say what specifically about the pandemic led to the cancellation. "This was a decision that was mutually made by Lincoln and Rivian given the rapidly changing environment and after a review of product plans," the spokesperson said. "As we moved through the development cycle, we determined that it would be better to pivot from the Rivian's skateboard platform and focus our development efforts on Lincoln's own fully-electric vehicle." This is a pretty big blow, considering Ford invested $500 million in Rivian last year, just two months after Amazon led a $700 million investment in the Michigan-based startup.

CNBC reports that Ford "lost $632 million during the first quarter and warned investors that it expects an adjusted pretax loss of $5 billion during the second quarter as the company grapples with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic that's shuttered factories and devastated sales."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: A bug has been discovered in Apple's macOS Image Capture app that needlessly eats up potentially gigabytes of storage space when transferring photos from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac. Discovered by the developers of media asset management app NeoFinder and shared in a blog post called "Another macOS bug in Image Capture," the issue occurs when Apple's Mac tool converts HEIF photos taken by iOS to more standard JPG files. This process happens when users uncheck the "Keep Originals" option in Image Capture's settings, which converts the HEIC files to JPG when copied to Mac. However, the app also inexplicably adds 1.5MBs of empty data to every single file in the process.

It's worth noting that the bug only occurs when transferring photos from Apple devices, not when importing photos from digital cameras using Image Capture. NeoFinder's team says it has notified Apple of the bug, and the developers suggest anyone plagued by the issue can try using a new beta version of the third-party utility Graphic Converter, which includes an option to remove the unwanted empty data from the JPEG files.

Zoom selected Oracle to expand its cloud on Tuesday, bypassing major cloud leaders Amazon Web Services, Alphabet's Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft's Azure Cloud. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. CNBC reports: "We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users," Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a press release. "We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support."

Zoom already uses Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services, but went with Oracle for its latest expansion. Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison praised Zoom earlier this month, calling it an "essential service" during the coronavirus pandemic. Oracle said in a release that Zoom chose its service for Oracle's "advantages in performance, scalability, reliability and superior cloud security." It's a surprising move from Zoom, as it chose Oracle over its larger competitors. According to research firm Canalys, Amazon had the largest cloud market share at the end of 2019 with 32.4%, followed by Microsoft, with 17.6%, and Google, with 6%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After promising 60 days without data caps and overage fees for all customers, Comcast has decided to extend the data-cap waiver until at least June 30. Comcast announced the data-cap waiver on March 13, saying the waiver would last until May 13 to help customers deal with the pandemic. Today, Comcast said it will extend the data-cap waiver and other pandemic-related changes "through June 30 to help ensure students can finish out the school year from home and remain connected to the Internet during the COVID-19 crisis."

Also extended to June 30 is Comcast's promise not to disconnect Internet, mobile, or home phone service and to waive late fees if customers "contact us and let us know that they can't pay their bills during this period." Comcast also previously made its $10-per-month Internet Essentials plan free to new low-income customers for two months. With today's announcement, that offer for new low-income customers will remain on the table until June 30. Additionally, Comcast will keep its Wi-Fi hotspots open to anyone who needs them through June 30. Comcast has a 1TB monthly data cap in 27 states, except for the Northeast where Comcast faces strong competition from Verizon's uncapped fiber-to-the-home FiOS service, the report notes. "In capped areas, Comcast charges an extra $10 for each additional block of 50GB, or $50 more each month for unlimited data."

Google has announced the general availability of a long-awaited feature -- the ability to manage Windows 10 devices through G Suite. From a report: Until today, companies that used G Suite to manage corporate endpoints could only enroll Android, iOS, Chrome, and Jamboard devices. Once enrolled in a G Suite enterprise plan, system administrators at these companies would have full control over the enrolled devices, to ensure that company data was safeguarded from sloppy employees. G Suite admins could enforce security policies related to login operations, file storage, encryption, and other features. Starting this week, the same features are now also available for working with Windows 10 devices, Google announced in a blog post. These include the ability to, among other things: Log into Windows 10 systems using a Google account, control Windows 10 update rules, and change Windows 10 settings remotely.

Today, Fedora 32 becomes available for download. From a report: It comes with GNOME 3.36 which you can read more about here. If you don't like GNOME, it isn't the end of the world -- you can instead choose KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, MATE, and more. There is even a special ARM variant of Fedora 32 that will work with Raspberry Pi devices. "Fedora 32 includes new features aimed at addressing issues facing modern developers and IT teams. Highlights include key updates to Fedora's desktop-focused edition, Fedora 32 Workstation, and a new computational neuroscience lab image, aimed at bringing those working in science fields to open source software. Each Fedora edition is designed to address specific use cases for modern developers and IT teams with Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server providing open operating systems built to meet the needs of forward-looking developers and server projects," says The Fedora Project development team.

The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in many countries in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope AI could speed up patient screening and ease the strain on clinical staff. But a study from Google Health -- the first to look at the impact of a deep-learning tool in real clinical settings -- reveals that even the most accurate AIs can actually make things worse if not tailored to the clinical environments in which they will work. From a report: Existing rules for deploying AI in clinical settings, such as the standards for FDA clearance in the US or a CE mark in Europe, focus primarily on accuracy. There are no explicit requirements that an AI must improve the outcome for patients, largely because such trials have not yet run. But that needs to change, says Emma Beede, a UX researcher at Google Health: "We have to understand how AI tools are going to work for people in context -- especially in health care -- before they're widely deployed." Google's first opportunity to test the tool in a real setting came from Thailand. The country's ministry of health has set an annual goal to screen 60% of people with diabetes for diabetic retinopathy, which can cause blindness if not caught early. But with around 4.5 million patients to only 200 retinal specialists -- roughly double the ratio in the US -- clinics are struggling to meet the target. Google has CE mark clearance, which covers Thailand, but it is still waiting for FDA approval. So to see if AI could help, Beede and her colleagues outfitted 11 clinics across the country with a deep-learning system trained to spot signs of eye disease in patients with diabetes.

In the system Thailand had been using, nurses take photos of patients' eyes during check-ups and send them off to be looked at by a specialist elsewhere -- a process that can take up to 10 weeks. The AI developed by Google Health can identify signs of diabetic retinopathy from an eye scan with more than 90% accuracy -- which the team calls "human specialist level" -- and, in principle, give a result in less than 10 minutes. The system analyzes images for telltale indicators of the condition, such as blocked or leaking blood vessels. Sounds impressive. But an accuracy assessment from a lab goes only so far. It says nothing of how the AI will perform in the chaos of a real-world environment, and this is what the Google Health team wanted to find out. Over several months they observed nurses conducting eye scans and interviewed them about their experiences using the new system. The feedback wasn't entirely positive.

XXongo writes: Monitoring parolees released from prison by an app on their smartphone sounds like a good idea, right? The phone has facial recognition and biometric ID, and a GPS system that knows where it is. But what if the app doesn't work? In a story on Gizmodo, the [Telmate Guardian] app's coding is "sloppy" and "irresponsible" and its default privacy settings are wildly invasive, asking for "excessive permissions" to access device data. And the app isn't even accurate on recognizing parolees, nor on knowing location, with one parolee noting that the app set off the high-pitched warning alarm and sent a notification to her parole officers telling him that she was not at home multiple times in the middle of the night, when she was in fact at home and in bed. The device also serves as a covert surveillance bug, with built-in potential to covertly record ambient audio from the phone, even in standby mode -- a feature which is not even legal in many states. "But there's nothing you can do," according to one parolee. "If you don't accept it, then you go back to prison. You're considered their property. That's how they see it."