An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve announced today that it won't automatically update games in customers' libraries as regularly as before to help preserve bandwidth during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Starting this week, Valve says Steam will only immediately auto-update games you've played in the last three days. Otherwise, Valve says Steam will be spreading out updates over several days. Steam had already been scheduling game updates for "the next off-peak local time period," according to Valve, though if you want to update a game manually, you can still initiate that yourself. Valve already lets you schedule auto-update windows and even self-throttle your connection to Steam if you want to additionally optimize how much of your bandwidth Steam uses at any given time.

The New York Times has made one of the most comprehensive datasets of coronavirus cases in the United States publicly available in response to requests from researchers, scientists, government officials and businesses who would like access to the data to better understand the virus and model what may come next. From a report: The Times initially began tracking cases in late January after it became clear that no federal government agency was providing the public with an accurate, up-to-date record of cases, tracked to the county level, of people in the U.S. who had tested positive for the virus. The Times led effort has grown from a handful of correspondents to a team of several dozen journalists, including data scientists and student journalists from Northwestern University, the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, working around the clock to record details about every case. The Times is committed to collecting as much data as possible in connection with the outbreak and is collaborating with the University of California, Berkeley, on an effort in California. By Friday, March 27, The Times had tracked more than 85,000 cases in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories, over the past eight weeks. More than 1,200 people in the U.S. have died so far.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Facebook plans to donate 720,000 masks — a combination of the coveted N95 respirators and more basic surgical masks — and 1.5 million pairs of gloves to health care workers around the world. Facebook officials said they bought the masks for their offices' emergency disaster kits following wildfires in California. Facebook has already donated 375,000 masks and 867,000 pairs of gloves to county officials in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, who are expected to distribute them to hospitals...

Facebook also said it has donated $650,000 worth of food to more than a dozen Bay Area senior centers, schools and other organizations, including Food Runners SF, Peninsula Volunteers Meals on Wheels and the East Palo Alto Senior Center. Meanwhile, the company sent $250,000 to the Sequoia Union High School District in San Mateo County to pay for 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots and a year of Wi-Fi for low-income students who need to complete their work online during shelter in place but don't have a reliable connection.

The company, which is the dominant employer in its headquarters city but also has large offices in San Francisco, Mountain View and other Bay Area cities, also pledged to give $500,000 to multiple homelessness prevention organizations in the Bay Area — and promised more local support.
The article notes America's scarcity of masks and other gear "became so dire in Washington state that medical workers made 500 masks out of vinyl, tape, foam and elastic purchased at Home Depot."

And it also has an update on how other companies are pitching in around America. "[F]actories that crank out cars and trucks were looking into making much-needed ventilators. Distilleries intended for beer, whiskey and rum transformed to instead turn out hand sanitizers and disinfectants. And an electronics maker that builds display screens was repurposed for surgical masks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An emergency medicine physician says she and a colleague invented a way to connect four patients to a single ventilator, a hack that could significantly increase the capacity of overburdened hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic. Doctors Greg Neyman and Charelene Irvin Babcock published a pilot study of the technique in Academic Emergency Medicine in 2006. Babock is now an emergency medicine physician at a hospital in Detroit, Michigan and posted a YouTube video on March 14 describing the technique.

The technique is remarkably simple. "Four sets of standard ventilator tubing were connected to a single ventilator via two flow splitters," the study said. "Each flow splitter was constructed of three Briggs T-Tubes which included connection adapters with the valves removed." In Babock's video, she said the adapters were 22mm in size. Basically, any kind of T-shaped tube can be adapted to extend the ventilator to more than one patient. Babock's video has gone viral, and she told Motherboard in a phone interview that she put together the four way adapter set in her YouTube video in 15 minutes using supplies her hospital already had. In an interview with Motherboard, Babcock said that actually using it on coronavirus patients is a tough call, but a potentially life-saving one in a last-resort situation. "It's only been done in test lungs," she said over the phone. "But it's probably better than nothing in dire circumstances. We don't know how bad it's gonna get. [Italy] is so overwhelmed with people that will die without ventilators and they don't have enough ventilators. Sometimes trying something almost MacGyverish is better than doing nothing."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NFC is usually only used to for quick text transfers, like a tap-and-pay transaction at a register or a quick data transfer from an NFC sticker. A company called "Waveshare" is really pushing the limits of NFC, though, with a 7.5-inch e-ink display that gets its data, and its power, from an NFC transfer. The $70 display doesn't have a battery and doesn't need a wired power connection. E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

NFC data transfers max out at a whopping 424 kbit/s. While that's enough for an instant transfer of credit card data or a URL, the 800x400 image the display needs will take several seconds. Waveshare says the display takes five seconds just to refresh, and that doesn't count the data transfer, which will vary depending on how complex your image is. The video shows a start-to-finish refresh that takes 10 seconds. If you want to use a phone, an Android app will convert your image into several different black-and-white styles and beam it to the display. Sadly, there's no iOS app yet. iOS apps didn't have the ability to write to NFC devices for the longest time. Writing to NFC was added with the launch of iOS 13, which only happened a few months ago.

For decades, physicists have dreamed of this perfect amorphous solid. They desire ideal glass not so much for its own sake (though it would have unique, useful properties) but because its existence would solve a deep mystery. From a report: It's the mystery posed by every window and mirror, every piece of plastic and hard candy, and even the cytoplasm that fills every cell. All of these materials are technically glass, for glass is anything that's solid and rigid but made of disordered molecules like those in a liquid. Glass is a liquid in suspended animation, a liquid whose molecules curiously cannot flow. Ideal glass, if it exists, would tell us why. Inconveniently, ideal glass would take so long to form that it may not have done so in all of cosmic history. Physicists can only seek indirect evidence that, given unlimited time, it would. Ramos, an experimental physicist at the Autonomous University of Madrid, hoped that after 110 million years of aging, the Spanish amber might have started to show glimmers of perfection. If so, he would know what the molecules in ordinary glass are really doing when they appear to do nothing.

Ramos's amber measurements are part of a surge of interest in ideal glass. In the past few years, new methods of making glass and simulating it on computers have led to unexpected progress. Major clues have emerged about the nature of ideal glass and its connection to ordinary glass. "These studies provide renewed support for the hypothesis of the existence of an ideal-glass state," said Ludovic Berthier, a physicist at the University of Montpellier who was centrally involved in the recent computer simulations. But the emerging picture of ideal glass only makes sense if we set aside one piece of evidence. "Indeed," Berthier said, "the amber work stands out as difficult to rationalize."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Banjo, an artificial intelligence firm that works with police used a shadow company to create an array of Android and iOS apps that looked innocuous but were specifically designed to secretly scrape social media, Motherboard has learned. The news signifies an abuse of data by a government contractor, with Banjo going far beyond what companies which scrape social networks usually do. Banjo created a secret company named Pink Unicorn Labs, according to three former Banjo employees, with two of them adding that the company developed the apps. This was done to avoid detection by social networks, two of the former employees said.

Three of the apps created by Pink Unicorn Labs were called "One Direction Fan App," "EDM Fan App," and "Formula Racing App." Motherboard found these three apps on archive sites and downloaded and analyzed them, as did an independent expert. The apps -- which appear to have been originally compiled in 2015 and were on the Play Store until 2016 according to Google -- outwardly had no connection to Banjo, but an analysis of its code indicates connections to the company. This aspect of Banjo's operation has some similarities with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, with multiple sources comparing the two incidents. [...] The company has not publicly explained how it specifically scrapes social media apps. Motherboard found the apps developed by Pink Unicorn Labs included code mentioning signing into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Russian social media app VK, FourSquare, Google Plus, and Chinese social network Sina Weibo. The apps could have scraped social media "by sending the saved login token to a server for Banjo to use later, or by using the app itself to scrape information," reports Motherboard, noting that it's not entirely clear which method Banjo used. "Motherboard found that the apps when opened made web requests to the domain 'pulapi.com,' likely referring to Pink Unicorn Labs, but the site that would provide a response to the app is currently down."

Last weekend, Motherboard reported that Banjo signed a $20.7 million contract with Utah in 2019 that granted the company access to the state's traffic, CCTV, and public safety cameras. "Banjo promises to combine that input with a range of other data such as satellites and social media posts to create a system that it claims alerts law enforcement of crimes or events in real-time."

A growing proportion of women in M.B.A. programs has yielded greater gender parity in classes -- and more business-school weddings. From a report: Liza Merolla and her husband, Justin Merolla, are among a growing number of couples who met through one of the world's most expensive dating sites. They were students at the business school of Columbia University in New York City, where two years of tuition and fees total more than $200,000. It paid off. The Merollas, ages 34 and 36, graduated in 2015 and are living happily ever after in Brooklyn. On Monday, they had their first child, Avery Merolla. Roughly half of Americans ages 18 to 28 say they use online dating sites, according to Pew Research. Others are finding romance at business schools.

Glenn Hubbard, former dean of Columbia Business School, said he has lost count of the number of business-school weddings he has attended. Statistics seem to support his observations. Women made up less than 30% of students enrolled in M.B.A. programs during 2005, the year the nonprofit Forte Foundation started to tally gender. Today, about 40% of the students at the top 50 programs are women. The shift makes for a more gender parity during classes, study groups, recruiting events and boozy nighttime gatherings. No surprise that's a recipe for romance, Mr. Hubbard said: "Business-school students are pretty social." Sarina Richard, who got her M.B.A. at Harvard in 2016, said the rigorous admissions process increases the chance of meeting an interesting, eligible companion. "You've already been vetted through the admissions process, so you know this person is legitimate," she said. "You have this immediate connection around intellectual rigor."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Sensor Tower, a popular analytics platform for tech developers and investors, has been secretly collecting data from millions of people who have installed popular VPN and ad-blocking apps for Android and iOS, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. These apps, which don't disclose their connection to the company or reveal that they feed user data to Sensor Tower's products, have more than 35 million downloads. Since 2015, Sensor Tower has owned at least 20 Android and iOS apps. Four of these -- Free and Unlimited VPN, Luna VPN, Mobile Data, and Adblock Focus -- were recently available in the Google Play store. Adblock Focus and Luna VPN were in Apple's App Store. Apple removed Adblock Focus and Google removed Mobile Data after being contacted by BuzzFeed News. The companies said they continue to investigate.

Once installed, Sensor Tower's apps prompt users to install a root certificate, a small file that lets its issuer access all traffic and data passing through a phone. The company told BuzzFeed News it only collects anonymized usage and analytics data, which is integrated into its products. Sensor Tower's app intelligence platform is used by developers, venture capitalists, publishers, and others to track the popularity, usage trends, and revenue of apps. Randy Nelson, Sensor Tower's head of mobile insights, said the company's apps do not collect sensitive data or personally identifiable information and that "the vast majority of these apps listed are now defunct (inactive) and a few are in the process of sunsetting." But, as BuzzFeed points out, most of the apps are no longer available "because they were removed due to policy violations."

Fast Company just published a 4,000 appreciation of Wikipedia's volunteer editors: [W]hile places like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter struggle to fend off a barrage of false content, with their scattershot mix of policies, fact-checkers, and algorithms, one of the web's most robust weapons against misinformation is an archaic-looking website written by anyone with an internet connection, and moderated by a largely anonymous crew of volunteers. "I think there's a part of that that is encouraging, that says that a radically open, collaborative worldwide project can build one of the most trusted sites on the internet," says Ryan Merkley, the chief of staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, the 400-person nonprofit that provides support to Wikipedia's community of editors.

"There's another piece of that that is quite sad," he adds, "because it's clear that part of being one of the most trusted sites on the internet is because everything else has collapsed around us...."

[U]nlike parts of the web where toxic information tends to spread, the encyclopedia has one big advantage: Its goal is not to "scale." It's not selling anything, not incentivizing engagement, not trying to get you to spend more time on it. Thanks to donations from thousands of donors around the world, there are no advertisers or investors to please, no algorithms to gather data or stir up emotions or personalize pages; everyone sees the same thing. That philanthropic spirit drives Wikipedia's volunteers, too, who come to the website not to share memes or jokes or even discuss the news but, marvelously, to build a reliable account of reality....

Despite the trolls and propagandists, the majority of errors, especially on controversial and highly trafficked pages, go away within minutes or hours, thanks to its phalanx of devoted volunteers. (Out of Wikipedia's 138 million registered users, about 138,000 have actively edited in the past month.) The site is self-governed according to a Byzantine body of rules that aim for courtesy and a "show your work" journalistic ethics built on accurate and balanced reporting. Vigilant community-built bots can alert Wikipedians to some basic suspicious behavior, and administrators can use restrictions to temporarily lock down the most vulnerable pages, keeping them safe from fly-by editors who are not logged in.
"Most of these edits are small improvements to phrasing or content," says a 73-year-old retired physicist from Massachusetts who's done hundreds of edits himself.

He adds that "a few are masterpieces, and some are vandalism."

The Verge takes a 5,000-word look at a Kickstarter campaign "that raised more than half a million dollars, only to never ship and leave behind thousands of angry backers."

"The difference in this story, however, is that for only the second time, the Federal Trade Commission is coming for the creator." The agency claims Doug Monahan took his backpack funds and spent them on "personal expenses," including bitcoin purchases, ATM withdrawals, and credit card debt. The agency says he threatened backers who pursued him for their bags. The state of Texas is suing him, too. A lot of people want a piece of Monahan, but he's not going down without a fight. He's serving as his own lawyer to dispute the claims in court, and he invited me down to Texas to clear his name and reputation...

He sold iBackpack as a high-tech wonder that would "revolutionize" backpacks and improve people's lives, whether they're eight or 80. On Indiegogo in 2015 and again on Kickstarter in 2016, Monahan advertised the backpack as the bag of people's dreams: it'd feature more than 50 pockets, include multiple external battery packs, RFID-blocking pouches, a precipitation hood, a USB hub, charging cables, a Bluetooth speaker, and a mobile hotspot for a portable Wi-Fi connection. That's a lot of stuff in one bag that you could seemingly be talked into believing is useful...

He got addicted to pain pills, too. At the same time, the batteries that were supposed to go in the bag represented a liability. The iBackpack drama occurred around the same time that Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, and he didn't feel comfortable shipping lithium-ion batteries. Someone could have died, he says.... Monahan says they just don't understand him or crowdfunding, in general. He's not a bad guy, he says. It's just that businesses fail sometimes, which is what he invited me to Texas to prove.

Poking at Monahan's past, however, suggests this isn't a man with a one-time flub, but rather someone with a trail of failures. Is he a con-artist? An irresponsible businessman? Does the difference even matter?
The Verge also investigates a claim that the whole backpack idea was stolen from another company -- and talks to a former employee who says their manager at Monahan's company was a 14-year-old.

And at one point, Monahan "essentially crank calls the FTC's lawyers with me in the room."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter said on Thursday it is banning posts that "dehumanize" people because they have a disease or disability or because of their age, a step that happens to correspond to an explosion of tweets about the spreading coronavirus. The company told Reuters that the policy change was not a reaction to the outbreak of the virus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19, but was part of its continual effort to update its rules against hateful conduct.

"We couldn't have predicted that this would happen in terms of the coronavirus," Jerrel Peterson, Twitter's head of trust and safety policy, said in a phone interview. Twitter's hateful conduct policy already bans attacking or threatening others on the basis of categories such as race, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious disease. This update will mean that those attacks do not need to be targeted to an individual or specific group. Now, even "if it's a tweet that doesn't have an @mention that likens a group based on their age, disability or disease to viruses or microbes or maggots, something that's less than human, that can be in violation of our policy now," Peterson said. Twitter went on to say that any offending tweets must be removed. Tweets sent before Thursday would also need to be deleted, but would not directly result in account suspensions, it said.

TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (its predecessor in the West was even called Musically). Now at long last, TikTok's owner, China's ByteDance, is doubling down on the music connection with the release of its first standalone full music streaming app, starting first in India. From a report: Today, the company is launching Resso, which describes itself as a "social music streaming app": users are encouraged to share lyrics, comments and other user-generated content with each other, alongside full-length tracks of music that they can consume and also share with others. And the music begins to auto-play as soon as you open the app. Unlike its sister app TikTok, which is free to use and is built on an ad-based model, Resso is following the freemium route that a number of other big music apps, such as Spotify, have taken. A free tier includes ads and limits streaming quality to 128 Kbps; a premium, ad-free tier boosts streaming to 256 Kbps, includes downloads and the ability to skip tracks and costs INR 99/month ($1.35/month) on Android and INR 119/month ($1.62) on iOS.

AT&T has launched its newest video service brand, called AT&T TV, and it could be the beginning of the end for AT&T's DirecTV offering. From a report: That's because AT&T TV is like DirectTV in many ways: It allows you to watch more than 100 live TV channels, but whereas DirecTV requires you to have a satellite dish, AT&T TV only requires that you have an internet connection. AT&T TV also goes further than DirectTV. Not only can you watch hundreds of live TV channels, the service, which is housed in a set-top box much like the Roku or Apple TV, allows you to also access third-party streaming services such as Netflix and Disney Plus. AT&T TV's remote also comes with Google Assistant built in, Chromecast support, and can even allow you to control smart home devices. But with the introduction of AT&T TV on a nationwide scale (the service has been in testing for months), AT&T's offerings get even more confusing. The Wall Street Journal has a rundown of all the video brands the company offers now, including U-verse, DirectTV, AT&T TV Now, AT&T WatchTV, the new AT&T TV, HBO Go, HBO Now, and the upcoming HBO Max streaming service.

LetterRip (Slashdot reader #30,937) shares a report from Ars Technica: More than 34,000 people have deluged the Federal Aviation Administration with comments over a proposed regulation that would require almost every drone in the sky to broadcast its location over the Internet at all times. The comments are overwhelmingly negative, with thousands of hobbyists warning that the rules would impose huge new costs on those who simply wanted to continue flying model airplanes, home-built drones, or other personally owned devices...

The new rules are largely designed to address safety and security concerns raised by law enforcement agencies. They worry that drones flying too close to an airport could disrupt operations or even cause a crash. They also worry about terrorists using drones to deliver payloads to heavily populated areas. To address these concerns, the new FAA rule would require all new drones weighing more than 0.55 pounds to connect over the Internet to one of several location-tracking databases (still to be developed by private vendors) and provide real-time updates on their location. That would enable the FAA or law enforcement agencies to see, at a glance, which registered drones are in any particular area...

The rules require that the drone itself have an Internet connection. That will instantly render many existing drones obsolete, forcing hobbyists to upgrade or discard them. And it will also make it significantly more expensive to own a drone, since you'll need to sign up for a data plan.... Apparently anticipating a backlash, the FAA does offer a workaround for people with existing or custom-built aircraft: special FAA-designated areas where people could fly non-compliant aircraft. These would be run by "community-based organizations" — most likely existing model airplane clubs that already operate fields for hobbyists to fly their aircraft.