During a Twitter discussion this week about the company's new vehicle, the all-electric Model Y SUV, CEO Elon Musk suggested the company could take its experience building the car to develop an HVAC system. From a report The acronym stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. Musk suggested that the idea could build on the work done to develop a heat pump for the Model Y. "Sure would love to do home hvac that's quiet and efficient, with humidity control & HEPA filter," Musk wrote on his Twitter page. When asked whether it would do cooling or heating, Musk replied "both." The idea could expand on some of Tesla's existing wins, taking its existing product portfolio and expanding it in a logical way.

While Tesla is known to most as a car company, Musk's "house of the future" presentation in October 2016 painted a more holistic picture: a Model 3 sedan charging in a garage, powered by a Tesla Powerwall battery. That battery is topped up with power from a Tesla Solar Roof, creating a zero-emissions energy system for both home and travel. It's easy to see how an HVAC, a high-energy product that draws on systems built into Tesla vehicles, could fit into this strategy. Musk suggested a number of ideas for this new product. He suggested the system could work with the vehicle to reach the perfect temperatures: "House could talk to car & know when you're expected home, so temp and humidity would be perfect just as you arrive. No wasted energy."

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announcing in a blog post: As the coronavirus outbreak continues to worsen around the world, it's taking a devastating toll on lives and communities. To help address some of these challenges, today we're announcing a new $800+ million commitment to support small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), health organizations and governments, and health workers on the frontline of this global pandemic. Our commitment includes:

$250 million in ad grants to help the World Health Organization (WHO) and more than 100 government agencies globally provide critical information on how to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other measures to help local communities. This is an increase from our initial $25 million announced last month. In addition, we're providing $20 million in ad grants to community financial institutions and NGOs specifically to run public service announcements on relief funds and other resources for SMBs.

A $200 million investment fund that will support NGOs and financial institutions around the world to help provide small businesses with access to capital. As one example, we're working with the Opportunity Finance Network in the U.S. to help fill gaps in financing for people and communities underserved by mainstream financial institutions. This is in addition to the $15 million in cash grants Google.org is already providing to nonprofits to help bridge these gaps for SMBs.

$340 million in Google Ads credits available to all SMBs with active accounts over the past year. Credit notifications will appear in their Google Ads accounts and can be used at any point until the end of 2020 across our advertising platforms. We hope it will help to alleviate some of the cost of staying in touch with their customers.

A pool of $20 million in Google Cloud credits for academic institutions and researchers to leverage our computing capabilities and infrastructure as they study potential therapies and vaccines, track critical data, and identify new ways to combat COVID-19. Learn how to apply for credits on the Google for Education site.

Direct financial support and expertise to help increase the production capacity for personal protective equipment (PPE) and lifesaving medical devices. We're working with our longtime supplier and partner Magid Glove & Safety, with the goal of ramping up production of 2-3 million face masks in the coming weeks that will be provided to the CDC Foundation. Additionally, employees from across Alphabet, including Google, Verily and X, are bringing engineering, supply chain and healthcare expertise to facilitate increased production of ventilators, working with equipment manufacturers, distributors and the government in this effort.

People staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic appear to be listening to more radio rather than music apps, figures suggest. The BBC reports: Global, which owns Capital FM and talk station LBC, said online radio listening had risen by 15%. The BBC said streaming of its radio stations had risen 18% since last week. Meanwhile, data from two US analytics companies suggested use of music-streaming apps such as Spotify had dipped by about 8%.

According to trusted music industry monitor BuzzAngle, US music streaming between 13-19 March fell by 8.8% compared with the previous week. Rolling Stone magazine, which uses a different data provider, Alpha Data, said streams were down 7.8%. But not all services are equally affected. Classical music site Primephonic said streaming had gone up by about 20% since isolation measures had been introduced in Europe. "There are likely to be multiple causes," said BBC News music reporter Mark Savage. "Fewer people are commuting to work or going to the gym and shops that use Spotify for their in-store music are closing their doors. People who stream music in the office also seem to be turning off and watching Netflix instead and there's a big rise in radio listening - suggesting we're seeking companionship alongside our music."

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The first official mission for the new U.S. Space Force lifted off from Florida at 4:18 p.m. EDT on Thursday into a virtually cloudless sky with a military communications satellite aboard. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket emblazoned with the Space Force chevron logo carried the satellite toward orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Stations Complex 41.

The payload on board is the sixth in a constellation of next-generation satellites known as Advanced Extremely High Frequency or AEHF. The satellite system, developed by Lockheed Martin, has upgraded anti-jamming capability. Northrop Grumman is the manufacturer. The new network provides global coverage for national leaders and tactical warfighters operating on the ground, at sea or in the air, Lockheed said. The anti-jam system also serves international allies such as Canada, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Australia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The impacts of telecommuting, shelter-in-place laws and home quarantines resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak are starting to impact broadband speeds across a number of U.S. cities, a new report has found. According to broadband analysis site BroadbandNow, 88 out of the top 200 most populous U.S. cities analyzed have now experienced some form of network degradation over the past week, compared with the 10 weeks prior, as more people are going online to work from home, video chat and stream movies and TV to keep themselves entertained. In a small handful of cities over the past week, there have even been significant degradations with download speeds dropping more than 40%, compared with the 10 weeks prior. It's not necessarily the areas hit hardest by the spread of the novel coronavirus that are experiencing the worst problems.

Cities including LA, Chicago, Brooklyn and San Francisco have seen little or no disruption in download speeds, the report claims. Seattle is also holding up well. But New York City, now considered the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., saw download speeds drop by 24% last week, compared to the previous 10-week range. That said, NYC home network connections, which have a median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, are managing. The good news is that in the majority of markets, network speeds are holding up. But of the 88 out of 200 cities that saw declines, more than two dozen saw dips of either 20% below range or more, the data indicates. The three cities seeing network degradations over 40% include: Austin, TX (-44%), Winston Salem, NC (-41%), and Oxnard, CA (-42%). San Jose, CA was nearing this range, with a drop of 38%.

Engineers from Stanford University developed a motorized exoskeleton rig that attaches around the ankle and foot and found that it made running 15 percent easier. "They explained that when the exoskeleton's motor is switched on, it reduces the energy cost of running and allows the user to run longer than they're usually capable of," reports Engadget. "The device can also boost a runner's speed by as much as 10 percent." From the report: Here's how the exoskeleton works: Its motors tug a cable running through the back of the rig from the heel to the calf. That pulls the foot upward during the toe-off, extending the ankle at the end of every step. Team member and Stanford grad student Delaney Miller said: "Powered assistance took off a lot of the energy burden of the calf muscles. It was very springy and very bouncy compared to normal running. Speaking from experience, that feels really good. When the device is providing that assistance, you feel like you could run forever."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A currently unpatched security vulnerability affecting iOS 13.3.1 or later prevents virtual private network (VPNs) from encrypting all traffic and can lead to some Internet connections bypassing VPN encryption to expose users' data or leak their IP addresses. While connections made after connecting to a VPN on your iOS device are not affected by this bug, all previously established connections will remain outside the VPN's secure tunnel as ProtonVPN disclosed.

The bug is due to Apple's iOS not terminating all existing Internet connections when the user connects to a VPN and having them automatically reconnect to the destination servers after the VPN tunnel is established. "Most connections are short-lived and will eventually be re-established through the VPN tunnel on their own," ProtonVPN explains. "However, some are long-lasting and can remain open for minutes to hours outside the VPN tunnel." During the time the connections are outside of the VPN secure communication channels, this issue can lead to serious consequences. For instance, user data could be exposed to third parties if the connections are not encrypted themselves, and IP address leaks could potentially reveal the users' location or expose them and destination servers to attacks. Until Apple provides a fix, the company recommends using Always-on VPN to mitigate this problem. "However, since this workaround uses device management, it cannot be used to mitigate the vulnerability for third-party VPN apps such as ProtonVPN," the report adds.

As people work and socialize from home, video conferencing software Zoom has exploded in popularity. What the company and its privacy policy don't make clear is that the iOS version of the Zoom app is sending some analytics data to Facebook, even if Zoom users don't have a Facebook account, according to a Motherboard analysis of the app. From the report: This sort of data transfer is not uncommon, especially for Facebook; plenty of apps use Facebook's software development kits (SDK) as a means to implement features into their apps more easily, which also has the effect of sending information to Facebook. But Zoom users may not be aware it is happening, nor understand that when they use one product, they may be providing data to another service altogether. "That's shocking. There is nothing in the privacy policy that addresses that," Pat Walshe, an activist from Privacy Matters who has analyzed Zoom's privacy policy, said in a Twitter direct message. Upon downloading and opening the app, Zoom connects to Facebook's Graph API, according to Motherboard's analysis of the app's network activity. The Graph API is the main way developers get data in or out of Facebook.
UPDATE: On Friday March 27, Zoom updated its iOS app to stop sending data to Facebook. "We originally implemented the 'Login with Facebook' feature using the Facebook SDK in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform," Zoom told Motherboard. "However, we were recently made aware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data. We sincerely apologize for this oversight..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google paused Chrome updates last week when it canceled the Chrome 81 release in order to avoid causing severe disruptions to web developers, system administrators, and its own engineers, most working from home or having resources strained due to ever-worsening coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. In a blog post on the Chrome blog today, Google said it is now ready to resume work on Chrome. The company said that starting next week, the current Chrome 80 release will start receiving security updates once again. Chrome v81, initially scheduled to be released on March 17, was rescheduled for April 7, at which time, web developers and system administrators would have had the time to adapt to their new working conditions.

Thirty-four state attorneys general are calling on companies like Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, eBay and Walmart to take a harder stance of price gouging in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The letters to each company cite specific examples, like a Craigslist ad for a 2-liter bottle of Purell Advanced hand sanitizer with a $250 price tag. While the attorneys general acknowledge that these companies have taken steps toward curtailing price gouging, the latter calls for further action.

"When consumers cannot get what they need to protect their homes and loved ones -- or in this case, help prevent the spread of the virus -- consumers suffer not only economic harm, but serious health consequences as well," the letter reads. Specifically, the letter lists three steps companies can take including setting policies and restrictions around price gouging, triggering those protections ahead of an emergency declaration and creating and maintaining a "fair pricing" page or portal.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading of Zoom Technologies on Thursday, partly because investors are confusing it with Zoom Video, which has seen a surge share price due to COVID-19. It will resume trading April 9. From a report: Zoom Video, which provides videoconferencing services and trades under the ticker symbol "ZM," is a key component for many businesses shifting to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic. That's led to the company, which went public last year, to see a surge in users and stock price rise of more than 112% this year so far -- a rarity in the current coronavirus-induced down market. It's now got a market cap north of $40 billion. However, traders have also bid up the much smaller Zoom Technologies, which has the ticker symbol "ZOOM." Its stock is up more than 50% this month and nearly 900% this year. The company has not disclosed financial information since 2015, the SEC says.

A US hospitality provider has recently been the target of an incredibly rare BadUSB attack, ZDNet has learned from cyber-security firm Trustwave. From a report: The attack happened after the company received an envelope containing a fake BestBuy gift card, along with a USB thumb drive.The receiving company was told to plug the USB thumb drive into a computer to access a list of items the gift card could be used for. But in reality, the USB thumb drive was what security experts call a "BadUSB" -- a USB thumb drive that actually functions as a keyboard when connected to a computer, where it emulates keypresses to launch various automated attacks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of current and upcoming graphics hardware, some of which had been posted online before they were taken down. While AMD was shy on details, the claimed intruder told TorrentFreak that the material included source code for Navi 10 (think Radeon RX 5700 series), the future Navi 21 and the Arden GPU inside the Xbox Series X.

The self-proclaimed hacker added that she wanted $100 million for the source code and threatened to "leak everything" if there was no buyer. She reportedly found the GPU data in a "hacked computer" in November, although AMD said it hadn't been approached until December. AMD doesn't appear to be bowing under pressure. It believed the stolen code was "not core to the competitiveness or security" of its products, and said there was an "ongoing criminal investigation."

"As governments around the world have pushed their citizens away from populated places to slow the spread of Covid-19, they may not have realized that they were also combatting other infectious diseases, such as the seasonal flu," reports Quartz. The data comes from Kinsa Health, a company that collects anonymized thermometer readings from its active user base to estimate the share of people that are ill in different geographies. From the report: By comparing current thermometer readings to historical trends, researchers have used Kinsa's data to predict flu outbreaks weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's surveillance program, which uses hospitalization records. Recent data clearly show the spread of Covid-19. On March 19, the share of Americans with temperatures indicating they had flu-like symptoms was about 4.9% when it typically would be expected to be about 4.0%. This was likely a result of the spread of Covid-19, according to Kinsa's researchers.

But by March 23, it was down to 3.3%, when it would typically be at 3.7% (the share of fevers decreases quickly at this time of year because of the end of winter). The drop -- from 0.9% above typical flu-like illness rates to 0.4% below -- in just four days is the largest one Kinsa has ever observed in such a short period of time, according to Kinsa CEO Inder Singh. "There is no known precedent for this type of extensive social distancing in recent time," said Singh. "We have nothing to compare this to, but this extreme drop is exactly what we would hope and expect with the measures currently in place."

jmcbain writes: When Facebook launched its Portal hardware product line for in-home video communication in 2018, people accused the company of being tonedeaf to the privacy uproar stemming from the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Tech reviewers almost universally dismissed the product, saying "No one should buy the Facebook Portal TV," "Trust Fail," and "Is it really a good idea to pitch people on a Facebook-powered camera and microphone in your home?" However, during this period of shelter-in-place, Facebook's previously-beleaguered product has found an opportunity to shine. CNBC reports that "with people stuck indoors and seeking the best way to stay in touch with family and friends, the Portal TV is completely sold out on Facebook's website and from retailers such as Best Buy." Facebook further mentions that "We're pleased that we can help people connect with family, friends and colleagues during this time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the Center for Translational Atomaterials (CTAM) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new graphene-based film that can absorb sunlight with an efficiency of over 90 percent, while simultaneously eliminating most IR thermal emission loss -- the first time such a feat has been reported. The result is an efficient solar heating metamaterial that can heat up rapidly to 83 degrees C (181 degrees F) in an open environment with minimal heat loss. Proposed applications for the film include thermal energy harvesting and storage, thermoelectricity generation, and seawater desalination.

The 3D structured graphene metamaterial (SGM) is composed of a 30-nanometer-thick film of alternating graphene and dielectric layers deposited on a trench-like nanostructure that does double duty as a copper substrate to enhance absorption. More importantly, the substrate is patterned in a matrix arrangement to enable flexible tunability of wavelength-selective absorption. The graphene film is designed to absorb light between 0.28- to 2.5-micrometer wavelengths. And the copper substrate is structured so that it can act as a selective bandpass filter that suppresses the normal emission of internally generated blackbody energy. This retained heat then serves to further raise the metamaterial's temperature. Hence, the SGM can rapidly heat up to 83 degrees C. Should a different temperature be required for a particular application, a new trench nanostructure can be fabricated and tuned to match that specific blackbody wavelength. "The new material also uses less graphene by significantly reducing the film thickness to one third, and its thinness aids in transferring the absorbed heat more efficiently to other media such as water," the report adds. "Additionally, the film is hydrophobic, which fosters self-cleaning, while the graphene layer effectively protects the copper layer from corrosion, helping to extend the metamaterial's lifetime."

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

iFixit tore apart the updated MacBook Air and found that Apple made a few changes making for a more repairable notebook than the last generation. All in all, the new 2020 MacBook Air got a 4/10 repairability score from iFixit, which is one point higher than the previous-gen model which scored 3/10. 9to5Mac reports: iFixit highlights in its full teardown that the update to the reliable Magic Keyboard only added 0.5mm to the thick end of the new MacBook Air... a more than worth it trade-off: "More than anything, that 0.5 mm illustrates the sheer unnecessary-ness of the five painful years that Mac fans spent smashing on unresponsive butterfly keyboards. Knowing that Apple's thinnest-and-lightest notebook accommodates a scissor-switch keyboard so gracefully makes us wonder what it was all for. We understand as well as anyone the urge to fix things, but Apple's insistence on reworking and re-reworking the troubled butterfly design came at such a high cost -- financially, environmentally, and to the Mac's reputation -- and for what? We'll probably never know all the factors that led to the creation and persistence of the butterfly keyboard, but this Magic keyboard is a reminder that sometimes the difference between usable and unusable, or repairable and unrepairable, can be as small as half a millimeter."

Past the keyboard update, iFixit found a nice improvement to how Apple has implemented the trackpad cable: "Where last year the trackpad cables were trapped under the logic board, they are now free to be disconnected anytime -- meaning trackpad removal can happen as soon as the back cover comes off. And since the battery rests under these same cables, this new configuration also greatly speeds up battery removal by leaving the logic board in place. That's two very tasty birds, one stone, for those of you counting. This is one of those happy (but all too rare) occasions where we can identify a hardware change from Apple that's squarely aimed at improving serviceability in the existing design. Sometimes they do listen!"

couchslug shares an excerpt from Ars Technica: When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn't get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month's merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7 -- and Paragon doesn't seem happy about it. Yesterday, Paragon issued a press release about European gateway-modem vendor Sagemcom adopting its version of exFAT into an upcoming series of Linux-based routers. Unfortunately, it chose to preface the announcement with a stream of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that wouldn't have looked out of place on Steve Ballmer's letterhead in the 1990s.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The first internet streaming and usage figures are coming in as the coronavirus pandemic places a quarter of the world's population under lockdown. As millions of people go online for entertainment and more, total internet hits have surged by between 50% and 70%, according to preliminary statistics. Streaming has also jumped by at least 12%, estimates show. [Maria Rua Aguete of Omdia, the tech research arm of Informa Tech] said the annual figures are revealing: "Ecommerce will be the other sector that will see a revenue boost as a result of the pandemic, adding $175 billion in revenue in 2020, which represents a 5% increase."

Omdia predicts $11 billion losses for the movie industry with a 25% decline and a 15% drop in TV advertising, especially for ads promoting events such as concerts that can no longer take place. The surge in demand comes coupled with a warning from the company that paid TV advertising may decline by 15%. Omdia also predicted that industry recovery will start in 18 to 24 months. While official figures from Google's YouTube and other internet giants are awaited, Omdia's figures accord with other analysts. "Broadband providers are thus far experiencing a traffic surge between 30% and 50% across their mobile and fixed networks," said Alfonso Marone, who is head of media at KPMG U.K.: "Where self-isolation policies are at their peak in Europe, the spike in internet traffic has reached as high as 70%, which is indicative of what the traffic surge could look like in other regions in just two to three weeks' time. The most bandwidth-hungry are the online entertainment applications, especially those in high-definition like 4K movies and TV. For broadband providers, this spike may be seen as more a source of headache."

An anonymous reader shares a column: The United States economy is grinding to a halt as the country grapples with the novel coronavirus pandemic, and one of the first major actions President Trump has floated is having the government bail out the cruise line industry, which he says is a "prime candidate." He shouldn't do it. There are myriad reasons not to bail out the cruise industry's biggest players.

Here are just a few: 1. They're not really US companies. [...] 2. They pay basically zero federal income tax. [...]
3. They're bad corporate actors: These companies use the protections offered by the countries they are incorporated in as a shield. They make passengers sign over a ton of rights before they even come aboard. Many employees often face long hours and brutal working conditions.
4. They pollute the air and oceans. Every fossil fuel-powered mode of transportation pollutes the air, but cruise ships are among the worst. They emit more sulfur dioxide than all of the passenger vehicles in Europe combined. Cruise ships also pollute the oceans by dumping waste. Not just illegally, for which these companies have been repeatedly fined, but also in some cases with impunity, again thanks to protections afforded by the laws of the countries where they're incorporated. And where they've been caught, there have been coverups.
5. They are not necessary. [...]