According to a new study from Carnegie Mellon University, researchers have found that bots may account for between 45 and 60% of Twitter accounts discussing covid-19. The normal level of bot involvement for U.S. and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events is usually between 10 and 20%. MIT Technology Review reports: Many of those accounts were created in February and have since been spreading and amplifying misinformation, including false medical advice, conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, and pushes to end stay-at-home orders and reopen America. They follow well-worn patterns of coordinated influence campaigns, and their strategy is already working: since the beginning of the crisis, the researchers have observed a greater polarization in Twitter discourse around the topic.

A number of factors could account for this surge. The global nature of the pandemic means a larger swath of actors are motivated to capitalize on the crisis as a way to meet their political agendas. Disinformation is also now more coordinated in general, with more firms available for hire to create such influence campaigns. But it's not just the volume of accounts that worries [Kathleen M. Carley, the director of the University's Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity]. Their patterns of behavior have grown more sophisticated, too. Bots are now often more deeply networked with other accounts, making it easier for them to disseminate their messages widely. They also engage in more strategies to target at-risk groups like immigrants and minorities and help real accounts engaged in hate speech to form online groups. "Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions to this problem," the report concludes. "Banning or removing accounts won't work, as more can be spun up for every one that is deleted. Banning accounts that spread inaccurate facts also won't solve anything"

"Carley says researchers, corporations, and the government need to coordinate better to come up with effective policies and practices for tamping this down."

Google today announced a new seven-figure contract with DoD's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). "While the company would not get specific about the number, the new contract involves using Anthos, the tool the company announced last year to secure DIU's multi-cloud environment," reports TechCrunch. From the report: In spite of the JEDI contract involving a single vendor, the DoD has always used solutions from all three major cloud vendors -- Amazon, Microsoft and Google -- and this solution will provide a way to monitor security across all three environments, according to the company. "Multi-cloud is the future. The majority of commercial businesses run multi-cloud environments securely and seamlessly, and this is now coming to the federal government as well," Mike Daniels, VP of Global Public Sector at Google Cloud told TechCrunch.

The idea is to manage security across three environments with help from cloud security vendor Netskope, which is also part of the deal. "The multi-cloud solution will be built on Anthos, allowing DIU to run web services and applications across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure -- while being centrally managed from the Google Cloud Console," the company wrote in a statement. Daniels says that while this is a deal with DIU, he could see it expanding to other parts of DoD. "This is a contract with the DIU, but our expectation is that the DoD will look at the project as a model for how to implement their own security posture."

"AI has ushered in a new golden age of semiconductor innovation," reports Forbes: For most of the history of computing, the prevailing chip architecture has been the CPU, or central processing unit... But while CPUs' key advantage is versatility, today's leading AI techniques demand a very specific — and intensive — set of computations. Deep learning entails the iterative execution of millions or billions of relatively simple multiplication and addition steps... CPUs process computations sequentially, not in parallel. Their computational core and memory are generally located on separate modules and connected via a communication system (a bus) with limited bandwidth. This creates a choke point in data movement known as the "von Neumann bottleneck". The upshot: it is prohibitively inefficient to train a neural network on a CPU...

In the early 2010s, the AI community began to realize that Nvidia's gaming chips were in fact well suited to handle the types of workloads that machine learning algorithms demanded. Through sheer good fortune, the GPU had found a massive new market. Nvidia capitalized on the opportunity, positioning itself as the market-leading provider of AI hardware. The company has reaped incredible gains as a result: Nvidia's market capitalization jumped twenty-fold from 2013 to 2018.

Yet as Gartner analyst Mark Hung put it, "Everyone agrees that GPUs are not optimized for an AI workload." The GPU has been adopted by the AI community, but it was not born for AI. In recent years, a new crop of entrepreneurs and technologists has set out to reimagine the computer chip, optimizing it from the ground up in order to unlock the limitless potential of AI. In the memorable words of Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware...."

The race is on to develop the hardware that will power the upcoming era of AI. More innovation is happening in the semiconductor industry today than at any time since Silicon Valley's earliest days. Untold billions of dollars are in play.
Some highlights from the article:

• Google, Amazon, Tesla, Facebook and Alibaba, among other technology giants, all have in-house AI chip programs.

• Groq has announced a chip performing one quadrillion operations per second. "If true, this would make it the fastest single-die chip in history."

• Cerebras' chip "is about 60 times larger than a typical microprocessor. It is the first chip in history to house over one trillion transistors (1.2 trillion, to be exact). It has 18 GB memory on-chip — again, the most ever."

• Lightmatter believes using light instead of electricity "will enable its chip to outperform existing solutions by a factor of ten."

coondoggie writes: A glimpse into what that future means for IT networking professionals can be found in Cisco's 2020 Global Networking Trends Report. It was completed before COVID-19 changed the way company's do business, but the predicted impacts have been hastened by the pandemic's impact. From the networking study, Cisco put forward a number of new or developing roles it expects to see in the future, including:

Business translator: The business translator works to better turn the needs of business into service-level, security and compliance requirements that can be applied and monitored across the network. The translator also works to use network and network data for business value and innovation, and their knowledge of networking and application APIs will help them glue the business to the IT landscape.
Network guardian: A network guardian works to bridge network and security architectures. They build the distributed intelligence of the network into security architecture and the SecOps process. This is where networking and security meet, and the guardian is at the center of it all, pulling in and pushing out vast amounts of data, distilling it and then taking action to identify faults or adapt to shutdown attackers.
Network commander: Intent-based networking builds on controller-based automation and orchestration processes. The network commander takes charge of these processes and practices that ensure the health and continuous operation of the network controller and underlying network.
Network orchestrator: This position translates business needs into network policy. It focuses on policy translation and automation, and policy alignment across network and IT domains.
Network detective: A network detective uses and tunes network assurance tools that employadvanced analytics and AI to ensure that the network delivers on business intent. They work with IT service-management processes and SecOps teams to identify network anomalies and close potential security holes. Like the network guardian, they use data proactively to identify faults and attacks.

An anonymous reader quotes Infosecurity magazine: New research from Barracuda Networks has revealed that cyber-criminals are increasingly using official reCAPTCHA walls to disguise malicious content from email security systems and trick unsuspecting users... [S]ophisticated scammers are beginning to use the Google-owned service to prevent automated URL analysis systems from accessing the actual content of phishing pages, and to make phishing sites more believable in the eyes of the victim, Barracuda Networks warned.

In fact, the security solutions provider observed a single phishing campaign that sent out 128,000 emails to a variety of organizations and employees using reCAPTCHA walls to conceal fake Microsoft log-in pages. This campaign used the lure of a voicemail receipt to fool users into solving the reCAPTCHA wall before being redirected to the malicious page, with any log-in info entered then sent straight to the scammers.

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.

More than 150 investors and entrepreneurs in India are funding dozens of projects in a bid to help millions better combat the COVID-19 epidemic and help the nation's booming startup ecosystem withstand the economic devastation the pandemic has caused. From a report: The investors said they have contributed 1 billion Indian rupees -- or $13 million -- of their own money to the ACT Grants initiative, which was unveiled late last month. The group -- which includes several prominent industry figures, including Nandan Nilekani, Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Flipkart's Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Oyo's Ritesh Agarwal, Udaan's Sujeet Kumar, Freshworks' Girish Mathrubootham, CRED's Kunal Shah and Times Internet's Miten Sampat -- has funded 32 projects to date. These projects span six themes, including solutions that could help curtail the spread of the COVID-19 disease, development of testing and detection kits, building medical equipment such as ventilators and taking care of mental health. The group came together last month when India had just begun to see cases of the coronavirus disease. [...] There have been 29,435 known cases of coronavirus in India, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. As of Tuesday evening, at least 886 people had died.

Reuters reports: Google and Apple have sought to build public trust by emphasizing that the changes they are making to Bluetooth to allow the tracing apps to work will not tap phones' GPS sensors, which privacy activists see as too intrusive. But the states pioneering the apps -- North and South Dakota, and Utah -- say allowing public health authorities to use GPS in tandem with Bluetooth is key to making the system viable...

Apple and Google said on Friday that they still have not decided how to proceed. "I would encourage them to go for the 'and' and not the 'or' solution," North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum said of Apple and Google in an interview late Thursday. "During this new normal, there is a place for having solutions that protect privacy and enable more efficient contact tracing," said Burgum... "What Utah wanted to understand is not just who is spreading [the virus] to whom but also location zones," said Jared Allgood, chief strategy officer for Twenty, the startup which developed Utah's app for an initial $1.75 million. GPS location data allows authorities to decide which businesses may need to be closed because the virus is spreading there, and prioritize which contacts of diagnosed patients to test...

Anonymized GPS location data is already playing a key role in an early version of Care19, an app that about 40,000 people have signed up for in North and South Dakota. Authorities currently ask Care19 users to give them permission for timestamped GPS location data, which allows officials to manually call places where users could have spread the virus and ask for names and numbers of others who may have been there at the same time.
North Dakota's governor suggests that not everyone is concerned about sharing their GPS data. "Some people are completely opposed to an intrusion on privacy," he told Reuters, "but there's a younger generation sharing their location on dozens of apps. There may be a set of people highly social, young and going out to bars who may see this tool as fantastic."

And Yahoo News reports another concern about contact tracing. "Some argue the information should be pushed out to a central server managed by a trustworthy government or health care entity, while others insist that data remain on individual devices."

Remember when BlackBerry reported Advanced Persistent Threat groups have been infiltrating critical Linux servers for at least eight years? What's the lesson to be learned?

LinuxSecurity Founder Dave Wreski argues "Although it may be easy to blame the rise in attacks targeting Linux in recent years on security vulnerabilities in the operating system as a whole, this is simply not the truth. The majority of exploits on Linux systems can be attributed to misconfigured servers and poor administration."

Writing for Linux Security, Slashdot reader b-dayyy gathered some additional responses: Some experts argue that it is the popularity of Linux that makes it a target. Joe McManus, Director of Security at Canonical, explains: "Linux and, particularly Ubuntu, are incredibly secure systems but, that being said, it is their popularity that makes them a target." Ian Thornton-Trump, a threat intelligence expert and the CISO at Cyjax, adds: "From an economic and mission perspective, it makes sense for a threat actor to invest in open-source skills for flexibility and the ability to target the systems where the good stuff is happening."

Despite the increasing number of threats targeting Linux systems, there is still a sound argument for the inherent security of Linux, which can be attributed to the core fundamentals of Open Source. Due to the transparency of open-source code and the constant scrutiny that this code undergoes by a vibrant global community, vulnerabilities are identified and remedied quicker than flaws that exist in the opaque source code of proprietary software and operating systems. Threat actors recognize this, and are still directing the majority of their attacks at proprietary operating systems.

These attacks do; however, serve as a much-needed wakeup call for the security community that more needs to be done to protect Linux servers. BlackBerry's report reveals that security solutions and defensive coverage available within Linux environments is "immature at best". Endpoint protection, detection and response products are inadequately utilized by too many Linux users, and endpoint solutions available for Linux systems are often insufficient in combating advanced exploits. Eric Cornelius, Chief Product Officer at BlackBerry, evaluates: "Security products and services that support Linux, offerings that might detect and give us insight into a threat like this, are relatively lacking compared to other operating systems, and security research about APT use of Linux malware is also relatively sparse."

This week U.S. president Donald Trump suspended America's $900 million annual contribution to the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, called Trump's move a "crime against humanity...."

The Hill reports: "Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity," he added...

The American Medical Association (AMA) late Tuesday called Trump's decision a "dangerous step in the wrong direction" and urged him to reconsider. "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO — rather than focusing on solutions — is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," the AMA said in a statement. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, meanwhile, said Wednesday that there was "no reason justifying" Trump's move...

And Bill Gates said in a tweet that halting funding to the WHO amid a world health crisis "is as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist added. "The world needs @WHO now more than ever."
Agreeing with Bill Gates was 95-year-old former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Newsweek quotes Carter's newly-released statement calling the WHO "the only international organization capable of leading the effort to control this virus."

The head of the United Nations also called the WHO "absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

While criticizing the WHO, this week an article in the Atlantic called president Trump's moves "a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic." The Democrats speaker of the House added that Trump's decision "is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged."

But the science magazine Nature still published an editorial harshly criticizing Trump's attempt to defund the WHO. "[E]ven talk of doing so in the middle of a global health and economic crisis cannot be condemned strongly enough." They argue that withholding America's funds "will place more lives at risk and ensure that the world takes longer to emerge from this crisis... It is right that researchers, funders and governments have been protesting against Trump's decision, and they must continue to do so in the strongest terms."

And Newsweek also published the comments of the WHO's Director-General, who had this message for its critics. "[O]ur focus, my focus, is on stopping this virus and saving lives... This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy.

"When we're divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is set to approve a new 5G cellular network despite claims from the Department of Defense that it will interfere with Global Positioning System (GPS) services. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today asked fellow commissioners to approve an "application to deploy a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-Band that would primarily support 5G and Internet of Things services." The application is from Ligado, formerly known as LightSquared, which for nearly a decade has sought permission to build a wireless network using frequencies near those used for GPS. A previous failure to obtain FCC approval helped push LightSquared into bankruptcy.

The FCC said its draft order would "ensure that adjacent band operations, including GPS, are protected from harmful interference." Pai said the FCC has "compiled an extensive record, which confirms that it is in the public interest to grant Ligado's application while imposing stringent conditions to prevent harmful interference." He continued: "Although I appreciate the concerns that have been raised by certain Executive Branch agencies, it is the Commission's duty to make an independent determination based on sound engineering. And based on the painstaking technical analysis done by our expert staff, I am convinced that the conditions outlined in this draft order would permit Ligado to move forward without causing harmful interference. For example, the draft order would authorize downlink operations at a power level that represents a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application." The base-station power reduction is "from 32dBW to 9.8dBW," and Ligado committed to a 23MHz "guard-band using its own licensed spectrum to further separate its terrestrial base station transmissions from neighboring operation," the FCC said. "As such, Ligado is now only seeking terrestrial use of the 1526-1536MHz, 1627.5-1637.5MHz, and 1646.5-1656.5MHz bands."

Ligado isn't competing directly against the big telecom giants. Instead, the company "plans to deliver custom private networks for industrial firms, service for [IoT] devices and unmanned systems, and connectivity for other business and government use cases," reports Ars. "Ligado could also supply capacity to the major wireless carriers."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: To make small-scale gravity measurements, researchers rely on conceptually simple experiments: measure the changes in rotational speed of an oscillating disc that is subject to a periodically changing gravitational force. The periodic force is supplied by a spinning disc. Both discs have wedges cut out so that the force due to gravity varies as the gaps spin past each other. The two discs are arranged right on top of each other. One is attached to a thin cable and is set in motion by twisting the cable, while the other rotates at a constant rotational speed. As the oscillating disc changes its direction of rotation, it is still subject to a periodic torque from the rotating disc. These torque changes are highly periodic and can be measured very accurately. The wedged disc design gives a set of three rotational frequencies, so the instrumentation errors can be filtered out by examining changes that are common to all three frequencies. The researchers have gone through several iterations to slowly improve their sensitivity over the last decade. Their experiment eliminates -- so far as possible -- all forces due to electrical and magnetic fields. The researchers have a set of three test masses that sit on top of the experiment to allow them to calibrate their analysis against a larger signal.

The major improvement, however, was in the analysis. To extract the force due to gravity, careful modeling is required. The researchers changed the design of the pattern cut out of the test mass so that analytical solutions to the model were obtainable for the torques involved. This eliminated many of the uncertainties due to computer modeling. This and many other experimental refinements have allowed them to measure gravitational attraction down to a distance of just 52 micrometers. Once they add additional stabilization against vibration, they will be able to measure at even smaller separations. In the meantime, they have verified that the inverse-square law holds for distances shorter than 50m, and therefore we have no New Physics. The findings have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"The Eclipse Foundation just released version 1.0 of an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code called Eclipse Theia," reports SD Times: Theia is an extensible platform that allows developers to create multi-language cloud and desktop IDEs, allowing them to create entirely new developer experiences.

According to the Eclipse Foundation, the differences between Theia and Visual Studio Code are that Theia has a more modular architecture, Theia was designed from the ground to run on desktop and cloud, and Theia was developed under community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation. The Theia project was started by Ericsson and TypeFox in 2016, and since then it has become an integral part of cloud solutions globally. The project approached the Eclipse Foundation about becoming a potential host in 2019.

Early contributors to the project include ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox.
"We are thrilled to see Eclipse Theia deliver on its promise of providing a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating custom and white-labeled developer products," announced Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director. "Visual Studio Code is one of the world's most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience. Congratulations to all the Theia committers and contributors on achieving this milestone."

InfoWorld points out that "thus far Theia is intended to be fitted into third-party products. An end-user version is on the roadmap for release later this year."

But programming columnist Mike Melanson notes that "Chances are, you've already run into Theia without even realizing it, as it already serves as the basis for Red Hat's CodeReady Workspaces, the Eclipse Foundation's own Eclipse Che, and Google Cloud Shell."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: D-Wave today made its quantum computers available for free to researchers and developers working on responses to the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. D-Wave partners and customers Cineca, Denso, Forschungszentrum Julich, Kyocera, MDR, Menten AI, NEC, OTI Lumionics, QAR Lab at LMU Munich, Sigma-i, Tohoku University, and Volkswagen are also offering to help. They will provide access to their engineering teams with expertise on how to use quantum computers, formulate problems, and develop solutions.

Quantum computing leverages qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult, or simply not feasible, for a classical computer. Based in Burnaby, Canada, D-Wave was the first company to sell commercial quantum computers, which are built to use quantum annealing. D-Wave says the move to make access free is a response to a cross-industry request from the Canadian government for solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Free and unlimited commercial contract-level access to D-Wave's quantum computers is available in 35 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia via Leap, the company's quantum cloud service. Just last month, D-Wave debuted Leap 2, which includes a hybrid solver service and solves problems of up to 10,000 variables.

The state of New York hopes to "amplify" its response to COVID-19 by launching tech-driven products with top companies, and it's looking for professional volunteers with experience in software development, hardware deployment/end-user support, and data science (as well as areas like product management, design, operations management).

Meanwhile, IBM's 2020 "Call for Code Global Challenge" is a virtual hackathon with a $200,000 prize, and they've now "expanded its focus" to include the effects of COVID-19.

Tech columnist Mike Melanson writes: But this is just the beginning of the COVID-19 hackathon boom, which now includes efforts organized by tech giants, state governments, and grassroots initiatives alike. For example, the World Health Organization got together with technology companies and platforms such as AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Salesforce, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat to launch the COVID-19 Global Hackathon 1.0, which is running as we speak with a deadline for submissions of March 30th at 9 AM PST. If you're too late, fret not, for there are many more, such as the CODEVID-19 hackathon we mentioned last week that has a weekly rolling deadline. And deadlines aside, the U.S. Digital Response for COVID-19 is working to pair technology, data, and government professionals with those who need them, in a form of nationwide, technological mutual aid...

[T]he COVID-19 open-source help desk is "a fast-track 'stack overflow' where you can get answers from the very people who wrote the software that you use or who are experts in its use." And if you happen to be either an open source author or expert, feel free to pitch in on answering questions...

On the open data side of things, for example, GitHub offers a guide on open collaboration on COVID-19, while StackOverflow looks at the myriad ways to help the fight against COVID-19 from home. ProgrammableWeb has a list of developer hackathons to combat COVID-19, and even the Golang team offers some guidance for Go, the Go community, and the pandemic, with Erlang also joining in.

Sony has announced that it would be spinning off its entire "Electronics Products & Solutions" (EP&S) segment -- including its imaging and mobile businesses -- into an intermediate holding company called "Sony Electronics Corporation." From a report: The change will take place effective April 1st, and no, it doesn't seem to be an early April Fools joke. In a press release announcing the change, the Sony parent company outlined the plan in broad strokes, explaining that its Imaging Products & Solutions, Home Entertainment & Sound, and Mobile Communications businesses would all now be run under a new name. "Through the establishment of Sony Electronics Corporation, Sony will not only accelerate the integrated operation of the EP&S businesses," reads the release, "but also aim to optimize its organizational structure, talent and business portfolio, while further enhancing competitiveness and creating new business."

A new consortium of top scientists will be able to use some of the world's most advanced supercomputers to look for solutions. From a report: Advanced computers have defeated chess masters and learned how to pick through mountains of data to recognize faces and voices. Now, a billionaire developer of software and artificial intelligence is teaming up with top universities and companies to see if A.I. can help curb the current and future pandemics. Thomas M. Siebel, founder and chief executive of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence company in Redwood City, Calif., said the public-private consortium would spend $367 million in its initial five years, aiming its first awards at finding ways to slow the new coronavirus that is sweeping the globe. "I cannot imagine a more important use of A.I.," Mr. Siebel said in an interview.

Known as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, the new research consortium includes commitments from Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft. It seeks to put top scientists onto gargantuan social problems with the help of A.I. -- its first challenge being the pandemic. The new institute will seek new ways of slowing the pathogen's spread, speeding the development of medical treatments, designing and repurposing drugs, planning clinical trials, predicting the disease's evolution, judging the value of interventions, improving public health strategies and finding better ways in the future to fight infectious outbreaks.

Venezuela's first and only state-owned communications satellite has been out of service since March 13 when a series of maneuvers left it tumbling in an unusable orbit. SpaceNews reports: The VeneSat-1 satellite, built by China Great Wall Industry Corp. and launched in late 2008 on a 15-year mission to provide television and broadband services to Venezuela, has been stuck for 10 days in an elliptical orbit above the geostationary arc, according to telescopic observations from two U.S. companies that track satellites. VeneSat-1's operator, the Venezuelan space agency ABAE, had issued no status reports on the satellite as of March 23 and could not be reached for comment March 22 or March 23. In January, ABAE said Venezuela and China planned to develop a replacement satellite, VeneSat-2, that would continue service after VeneSat-1 retired.

California-based ExoAnalytic Solutions, which operates a network of satellite- and debris-tracking telescopes, spotted a "significant orbit change" for VeneSat-1 on March 13 at 3:15 a.m. Eastern, when the satellite left its position at 78 degrees West longitude over Venezuela, Bill Therien, ExoAnalytic's vice president of engineering, told SpaceNews. Approximately three hours later, the satellite conducted another maneuver that sent it tumbling westward, he said. Telescope observations from ExoAnalytic and Pennsylvania-based AGI show VeneSat-1 tumbling in an elliptical orbit that at its lowest point is 50 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc where most large communications satellites reside. Venesat-1's highest point, or apogee, is roughly 36,300 kilometers -- or about 525 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc, according to the companies. Bob Hall, AGI technical director for space situational awareness, said VeneSat-1 has drifted 30 degrees from its original orbital slot since March 13. If the satellite drifts another 40 degrees, it will be beyond line of sight from Venezuela, complicating any efforts to restore control of the spacecraft unless Venezuela relies on ground stations in other countries. VeneSat-1 will likely be maneuvered into a so-called graveyard orbit around 300 to 500 kilometers above the geosynchronous belt, where inactive or dead satellites are expected to orbit for thousands of years without colliding with active satellites.

UPS' Flight Forward subsidiary focused on drone delivery is partnering with German drone-maker Wingcopter to develop the next generation of package delivery drones for a variety of use cases in the United States and internationally. GPS World reports: UPS chose Wingcopter for its unmanned aircraft technology and its track record in delivering a variety of goods over long distances in multiple international settings. As part of this collaboration -- UPSFF's first new relationship with a drone manufacturer since its formation -- both companies will work toward earning regulatory certification for a Wingcopter unmanned aircraft to make commercial delivery flights in the United States. It also is a critical step toward building a diverse fleet of drones with varying capabilities to meet potential customer needs.

The Wingcopter drones feature vertical takeoffs and landings in tight spaces, transitioning to efficient, high-speed horizontal flight, enabling ranges suitable for a variety of uses. These capabilities will allow UPSFF to begin developing solutions that, if approved, will go well beyond the healthcare and retail industries to solve long-standing challenges for high-tech, industrial manufacturing, hospitality, entertainment and other customers. [Wincopter's] electric vertical takeoff and landing drones have a patented tilt-rotor mechanism, which enables a seamless transition between two drone modes: multicopter for hovering and fixed-wing for low-noise forward flight. The aerodynamic Wingcopter aircrafts operate with stability even in harsh weather conditions. "Drone delivery is not a one-size-fits-all operation," said Bala Ganesh, vice president of the UPS Advanced Technology Group. "Our collaboration with Wingcopter helps pave the way for us to start drone delivery service in new use-cases. UPS Flight Forward is building a network of technology partners to broaden our unique capability to serve customers and extend our leadership in drone delivery."

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has thrown the release schedule of cultural products into chaos, as now is an exceptionally bad time to drop anything that isn't a government check for lost wages. Jeremy Gordon, writing for The Outline: Our cultural producers -- movie studios, publishing houses, television networks, and so forth -- must decide whether to go ahead with previously made plans, or wait until all of this is over. The new Fast and Furious movie, for example, has been pushed back from its May 2020 release date to April 2021, in hopes that mass gatherings will be back on the table by then (maybe!) and we'll all be in a better mood to watch some big cars go boom. But as more people are driven inside for the time being, it's also true that everyone is looking for something to do at home. As a result, unconventional solutions have emerged: Last week, Universal Pictures announced it'll make several of its current film releases available to stream on-demand at home, as movie theaters around the world are being closed. Beginning Friday, movies like The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt will be rentable for $19.99 apiece, with Trolls: World Tour set for a similar release.

Emma and The Invisible Man were finished products already in theaters, so Universal just had to skip the typical waiting period between when a movie is released, and when it's available for purchase. But there are so many more finished products waiting to be released in the coming weeks, which publishers may now consider delaying until a time when everyone can go back outside. While they may be reticent to promote anything in the current climate, I would submit an opposite suggestion: Release that shit. While everyone is sitting at home stewing in anxiety, people have never been more desperate for distraction. We have all become a captive audience with the free time to give that show or game a try.