Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him "like a bus" in March. From a report:"This is the revenge of the viruses," said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "I've made their lives difficult. Now they're trying to get me." Dr. Piot, 71 years old, is a legend in the battles against Ebola and AIDS. But Covid-19 almost killed him. "A week ago, I couldn't have done this interview," he said, speaking recently by Skype from his London dining room, a painting of calla lilies behind him. "I was still short of breath after 10 minutes." Looking back, ruefully, on being brought down by a virus after a life as a virus-hunter, Dr. Piot said he had misjudged his prey and had become the hunted.

"I underestimated this one -- how fast it would spread. My mistake was to think it was like SARS, which was pretty limited in scope. Or that it was like influenza. But it's neither." In 1976, as a graduate student in virology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Piot was part of the international team that investigated a mysterious viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. To avoid stigmatizing the town, team members named the virus "Ebola" after a nearby river. Later, in the 1980s, he was one of the scientists who proved that the wasting disease known as "slim" in Africa was caused by the same virus that was killing young gay men elsewhere. From 1991 to 1994, he was president of the International AIDS Society, and then the first director of U.N.AIDS, the United Nations' anti-H.I.V. program.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield claimed earlier this month that Microsoft Teams isn't a competitor to Slack. In an interview with The Verge, Butterfield has revealed that, inside Slack, the company feels that "Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that." From a report: Butterfield expands on why he thinks Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied" with Slack and compares Teams to more of a competitor to Zoom. Slack obviously has its own voice and video calling features, but it's not the primary focus of the app, and often, businesses integrate Zoom or Cisco's WebEx instead. Microsoft has been moving businesses from Skype for Business to Teams, which traditionally focused on voice and video calling. Ultimately, Butterfield thinks Microsoft is trying to force the Teams comparison because "Microsoft benefits from the narrative that Teams is very competitive with Slack. Even though the reality is it's principally a voice and video calling service."

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has shared few usage numbers since acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in October 2011. Skype's monthly active users, for example, haven't been updated since August 2015 -- 300 million has been the number for years. But the coronavirus has shaken up the communications space for everyone, even Skype. With usage exploding due to COVID-19 and working from home policies, the company has been eager to talk up Skype along with Microsoft Teams, its fastest-growing business app ever. Microsoft has now confirmed plans to invest in Skype, including adding new features, regardless of its plans with Teams.

With a large part of the working world doing jobs from home when possible these days, the focus right now is on how best to recreate the atmosphere of an office virtually, and how to replicate online essential work that used to be done in person. Today, LinkedIn announced a couple of big new feature updates that point to how it's trying to play a part in both of these. From a report: It's launching a new Polls feature for users to canvas opinions and get feedback; and it's launching a new "LinkedIn Virtual Events" tool that lets people create and broadcast video events via its platform. Despite now being owned by Microsoft, interestingly it doesn't seem that the Virtual Events service taps into Teams or Skype, Microsoft's two other big video products that it has been pushing hard at a time when use of video streaming for work, education and play is going through the roof. The polls feature -- you can see an example of one in the picture below, or respond to that specific poll here -- is a quick-fire and low-bar way of asking a question and encouraging engagement: LinkedIn says that a poll takes only about 30 seconds to put together, and responding doesn't require thinking of something to write, but gives the respondent more of a 'voice' than he or she would get just by providing a "like" or other reaction.

Canonical has released the newest version of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 20.04. This long-term-support (LTS) version is more than just the latest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions; it's a major update for desktop, server, and cloud users. From a news story: Called "Focal Fossa," it is an LTS version, meaning "Long Term Support." Just how long is that support? An impressive five years! Ubuntu 20.04 will feature many new visual cues and tweaks too thanks to a refreshed theme. "Ubuntu has become the platform of choice for Linux workstations. Canonical certifies multiple Dell, HP, and Lenovo workstations, and supports enterprise developer desktops. Machine learning and AI tools from a range of vendors are available immediately for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, along with 6,000 applications in the Snapcraft Linux App Store including Slack, Skype, Plex, Spotify, the entire JetBrains portfolio and Visual Studio Code. WireGuard is a new, simplified VPN with modern cryptography defaults. WireGuard is included in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and will be backported to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to support widespread enterprise adoption," says Canonical.

Motherboard reports on a new open source program "that superimposes someone else's face onto yours in real-time, during video meetings." Programmer Ali Aliev used the open-source code from the "First Order Motion Model for Image Animation," published on the arxiv preprint server earlier this year [and developed by researchers at the University of Trento in Italy as well as Snap]... With other face-swap technologies, like deepfakes, the algorithm is trained on the face you want to swap, usually requiring several images of the person's face you're trying to animate. This model can do it in real-time, by training the algorithm on similar categories of the target (like faces)...

Aliev made a video of himself as Elon Musk, pretending to join the wrong meeting, to demonstrate the tech. It's pretty clear that it's a fake, but the eyes and head move around well enough that it'd be a neat trick for a few seconds, before the rest of the call looks any closer.
He's released his program on GitHub, naming it "Avatarify". But Motherboard warns it requires "a bit of programming knowledge" plus a powerful gaming PC.

"You have to run Zoom or Skype, as well as streaming software and Avatarify at the same time, which takes a decent amount of computing power."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Several major apps and websites, such as Paypal and Venmo have a flaw that lets hackers easily take over users' accounts once they have taken control of the victim's phone number. Earlier this year, researchers at Princeton University found 17 major companies, among them Amazon, Paypal, Venmo, Blizzard, Adobe, eBay, Snapchat, and Yahoo, allowed users to reset their passwords via text message sent to a phone number associated with their accounts. This means that if a hacker takes control of a victim's cellphone number via a common and tragically easy to perform hack known as SIM swapping, they can then hack into the victim's online accounts with these apps and websites.

Last week, two months after their initial outreach to the companies to report this flaw in their authentication mechanisms, the Princeton researchers checked again to see if the companies had fixed the problem. Some, including Adobe, Blizzard, Ebay, Microsoft, and Snapchat, have plugged the hole. Others have yet to do it. Paypal and Venmo, given that they are apps that allow users to exchange money and are linked to bank accounts or credit cards, may be the most glaring examples. Motherboard verified this week that it's possible to reset passwords on Paypal and Venmo via text message. Fear not, there is a solution. "The easiest way to make it impossible for SIM swappers to take over your accounts after they hijack your number is to unlink your phone number with those accounts, and use a VoIP number -- such as Google Voice, Skype, or another -- instead," reports Motherboard. "Google Voice numbers, given that they're not actually linked to a real SIM card, are much harder to hijack."

A Microsoft program to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with "no security measures," according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company. From a report: The recordings, both deliberate and accidentally invoked activations of the voice assistant, as well as some Skype phone calls, were simply accessed by Microsoft workers through a web app running in Google's Chrome browser, on their personal laptops, over the Chinese internet, according to the contractor. Workers had no cybersecurity help to protect the data from criminal or state interference, and were even instructed to do the work using new Microsoft accounts all with the same password, for ease of management, the former contractor said. Employee vetting was practically nonexistent, he added.

"There were no security measures, I don't even remember them doing proper KYC [know your customer] on me. I think they just took my Chinese bank account details," he told the Guardian. While the grader began by working in an office, he said the contractor that employed him "after a while allowed me to do it from home in Beijing. I judged British English (because I'm British), so I listened to people who had their Microsoft device set to British English, and I had access to all of this from my home laptop with a simple username and password login." Both username and password were emailed to new contractors in plaintext, he said, with the former following a simple schema and the latter being the same for every employee who joined in any given year.

Microsoft has developed an automated system to identify when sexual predators are trying to groom children within the chat features of video games and messaging apps, the company announced Wednesday. From a report: The tool, codenamed Project Artemis, is designed to look for patterns of communication used by predators to target children. If these patterns are detected, the system flags the conversation to a content reviewer who can determine whether to contact law enforcement. Courtney Gregoire, Microsoft's chief digital safety officer, who oversaw the project, said in a blog post that Artemis was a "significant step forward" but "by no means a panacea."

"Child sexual exploitation and abuse online and the detection of online child grooming are weighty problems," she said. "But we are not deterred by the complexity and intricacy of such issues." Microsoft has been testing Artemis on Xbox Live and the chat feature of Skype. Starting Jan. 10, it will be licensed for free to other companies through the nonprofit Thorn, which builds tools to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. The tool comes as technology companies are developing artificial intelligence programs to combat a variety of challenges posed by both the scale and the anonymity of the internet. Facebook has worked on AI to stop revenge porn, while Google has used it to find extremism on YouTube.

Apple said it will ease some restrictions on developers of third-party apps, responding to news reports about the rise of in-house software that gets prized default status on iPhones and iPads. From a report: The Cupertino, California-based company plans to release a software update later this year that will help outside messaging applications work better with the Siri digital assistant. Right now, when iPhone users ask Siri to call or message a friend, the system defaults to Apple's Phone or iMessage apps. If you want to use WhatsApp or Skype, you have to specifically say that.

When the software refresh kicks in, Siri will default to the apps that people use frequently to communicate with their contacts. For example, if an iPhone user always messages another person via WhatsApp, Siri will automatically launch WhatsApp, rather than iMessage. It will decide which service to use based on interactions with specific contacts. Developers will need to enable the new Siri functionality in their apps. This will be expanded later to phone apps for calls as well.

Microsoft is staffing up a new 'Data Dignity' team in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. The team is researching ways to give users more control of their personal data, possibly even one day enabling them to buy and sell it to third-party entities. From a report: Microsoft has run afoul of privacy mavens, especially as a result of its collection of data in the name of telemetry with Windows 10, and more recently, for using human contractors to transcribe Skype conversations. An initiative like Data Dignity could further the company's quest to make itself look like a champion of users' privacy (at least in theory). I knew Microsoft had been investigating ways to give users more control of their own data after I unearthed some information about the company's "Project Bali" earlier this year.

Bali, a Microsoft Research incubation project that seemingly was in private testing as of January, is a "new personal data bank which puts users in control of all data collected about them." The idea is to give usrs a way to store, visualize, manage, control, share and monetize the data, according to the "About" page for the project, which Microsoft has since hidden. This week, The New York Times ran an interactive feature about Jaron Lanier that is focused on data privacy. Lanier is a virtual-reality pioneer and a chief scientist at Microsoft.

Contractors working for Microsoft have listened to audio of Xbox users speaking in their homes in order to improve the console's voice command features, Motherboard has learned. From a report: The audio was supposed to be captured following a voice command like "Xbox" or "Hey Cortana," but contractors said that recordings were sometimes triggered and recorded by mistake. The news is the latest in a string of revelations that show contractors working on behalf of Microsoft listen to audio captured by several of its products. Motherboard previously reported that human contractors were listening to some Skype calls as well as audio recorded by Cortana, Microsoft's Siri-like virtual assistant.

"Xbox commands came up first as a bit of an outlier and then became about half of what we did before becoming most of what we did," one former contractor who worked on behalf of Microsoft told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources in this story anonymity as they had signed non-disclosure agreements. The former contractor said they worked on Xbox audio data from 2014 to 2015, before Cortana was implemented into the console in 2016. When it launched in November 2013, the Xbox One had the capability to be controlled via voice commands with the Kinect system.

U.S. wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time. From a report: Researchers from Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 650,000 tests in the U.S. and found that from early 2018 to early 2019, AT&T throttled Netflix 70% of the time and Google's YouTube service 74% of the time. But AT&T didn't slow down Amazon's Prime Video at all. T-Mobile throttled Amazon Prime Video in about 51% of the tests, but didn't throttle Skype and barely touched Vimeo, the researchers say in a paper [PDF] to be presented at an industry conference this week.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple, Google, Amazon, and most recently Facebook have been found hiring human workers to transcribe audio captured by their own products. Motherboard found Microsoft does the same for some Skype calls, and is still doing so despite other companies suspending their reliance on contractors. A cache of leaked documents obtained by Motherboard gives insight into what the human contractors behind the development of tech giants' artificial intelligence services are actually doing: laborious, repetitive tasks that are designed to improve the automated interpretation of human speech. This means tasks tech giants have promised are completed by virtual assistants and artificial intelligence are trained by the monotonous work of people.

The work is magnified by the large footprint of speech recognition tools: Microsoft's Cortana product, similar to Apple's Siri, is implemented in Windows 10 machines and Xbox One consoles, and is also available as on iOS, Android, and smart speakers. The instruction manuals on classifying this sort of data go on for hundreds of pages, with a dizzying number of options for contractors to follow to classify data, or punctuation style guides they're told to follow. The contractor said they are expected to work on around 200 pieces of data an hour, and noted they've heard personal and sensitive information in Cortana recordings. A document obtained by Motherboard corroborates that for some work contractors need to complete at least 200 tasks an hour. The pay for this work varies. One contract obtained by Motherboard shows pay at $12 an hour, with the possibility of contractors being able to reach $13 an hour as a bonus. A contract for a different task shows $14 an hour, with a potential bonus of $15 an hour. A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an emailed statement, "We're always looking to improve transparency and help customers make more informed choices. Our disclosures have been clear that we use customer content from Cortana and Skype Translator to improve these products, we engage third party expertise to assist in this process, and we take steps to de-identify this content to protect people's privacy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Electron development platform is a key part of many applications, thanks to its cross-platform capabilities. Based on JavaScript and Node.js, Electron has been used to create client applications for Internet communications tools (including Skype, WhatsApp, and Slack) and even Microsoft's Visual Studio Code development tool. But Electron can also pose a significant security risk because of how easily Electron-based applications can be modified without triggering warnings. At the BSides LV security conference on Tuesday, Pavel Tsakalidis demonstrated a tool he created called BEEMKA, a Python-based tool that allows someone to unpack Electron ASAR archive files and inject new code into Electron's JavaScript libraries and built-in Chrome browser extensions. The vulnerability is not part of the applications themselves but of the underlying Electron framework -- and that vulnerability allows malicious activities to be hidden within processes that appear to be benign. Tsakalidis said that he had contacted Electron about the vulnerability but that he had gotten no response -- and the vulnerability remains.

While making these changes required administrator access on Linux and MacOS, it only requires local access on Windows. Those modifications can create new event-based "features" that can access the file system, activate a Web cam, and exfiltrate information from systems using the functionality of trusted applications -- including user credentials and sensitive data. In his demonstration, Tsakalidis showed a backdoored version of Microsoft Visual Studio Code that sent the contents of every code tab opened to a remote website. The problem lies in the fact that Electron ASAR files themselves are not encrypted or signed, allowing them to be modified without changing the signature of the affected applications. A request from developers to be able to encrypt ASAR files was closed by the Electron team without action.

Contractors working for Microsoft are listening to personal conversations of Skype users conducted through the app's translation service, according to a cache of internal documents, screenshots, and audio recordings obtained by Motherboard. From a report: Although Skype's website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform's services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans. The Skype audio obtained by Motherboard includes conversations from people talking intimately to loved ones, some chatting about personal issues such as their weight loss, and others seemingly discussing relationship problems. Other files obtained by Motherboard show that Microsoft contractors are also listening to voice commands that users speak to Cortana, the company's voice assistant.

Long-time Slashdot reader Faizdog writes: The "sensitivity" conjecture stumped many top computer scientists, yet the new proof is so simple that one researcher summed it up in a single tweet.

"This conjecture has stood as one of the most frustrating and embarrassing open problems in all of combinatorics and theoretical computer science," wrote Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin, in a blog post. "The list of people who tried to solve it and failed is like a who's who of discrete math and theoretical computer science," he added in an email.

The conjecture concerns Boolean functions, rules for transforming a string of input bits (0s and 1s) into a single output bit. One such rule is to output a 1 provided any of the input bits is 1, and a 0 otherwise; another rule is to output a 0 if the string has an even number of 1s, and a 1 otherwise. Every computer circuit is some combination of Boolean functions, making them "the bricks and mortar of whatever you're doing in computer science," said Rocco Servedio of Columbia University.

"People wrote long, complicated papers trying to make the tiniest progress," said Ryan O'Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University.

Now Hao Huang, a mathematician at Emory University, has proved the sensitivity conjecture with an ingenious but elementary two-page argument about the combinatorics of points on cubes. "It is just beautiful, like a precious pearl," wrote Claire Mathieu, of the French National Center for Scientific Research, during a Skype interview. Aaronson and O'Donnell both called Huang's paper the "book" proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erds' notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. "I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this," Aaronson wrote.

"Tech workers' favorite communications tool, Slack, is losing ground to its biggest rival, Microsoft Teams, which has copied its way into popularity," writes Rani Molla for Recode. "In other words, Slack has the same problem as Snapchat, which has suffered from its bigger rival Facebook's relentless appropriation." From the report: Slack's market share among the world's largest companies is mostly flat, adoption rates are declining, and a bigger portion of these companies indicate they plan on leaving the service, according to a new survey by market research firm ETR, which asks chief information officers and other leaders at the world's biggest organizations* where they plan to spend their company's tech budget. Meanwhile, Teams is seeing increased market share, relatively higher adoption rates, and low rates of defection, according to the data.

Slack, which is currently trading below its first-day opening price, has been beset both by smaller companies hoping to improve upon it and tech giants trying to copy and replace it. Microsoft, at one point, had even considered buying Slack. Instead, nearly four years after Slack's debut, Microsoft launched Teams, which has since adopted many of its competitor's functions, including the basic premise of creating an online office space for coworkers to collaborate and communicate. The situation was similar with Facebook, which after failing to buy Snapchat began to copy it, feature by feature. Facebook did this with impunity because it's not really possible to copyright what software does -- you can only copyright the code itself. Since products like Slack and Microsoft Teams or Facebook and Snapchat are built on different platforms, the code for each is likely distinct, so copying features is fair game.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The official Skype Snap app for Linux has not been updated in nearly six months, and Microsoft is yet to say why. When introducing the cross-distro build in early 2018, the company said the Skype Snap app would give it the "... ability to push the latest features straight to our users, no matter which device or distribution they happen to use." Clearly, not. Because at the time of writing this post the Skype Snap app sits on version 8.34.0.78, which the Snapcraft store reports was 'last updated' in November 2018. However, the "regular" Linux version available to download from the Skype website is on version 8.47.0.73, released June 2019.

AmiMoJo writes: The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge will impersonate other browsers depending on the site being visited. This is may be done for compatibility reasons, like properly rendering pages or how video will be streamed and played back. When the new Microsoft Edge starts, it will connect to config.edge.skype.com and download a JSON configuration for the browser. One section of the JSON configuration file is called EdgeDomainActions and is a series of rules that specify what browser Microsoft Edge should impersonate when visiting a particular site.