The mystery of why glass frogs have see-through skin has been solved, scientists say: the unusual feature is a type of camouflage. The Guardian reports: Glass frogs are found in tropical Central and South America, and get their name from their skin. However, the frogs are not truly transparent but translucent, with the skin on their backs typically a vivid green and their intestines and heart visible through their underbelly. This has led to a question that has kept scientists on the hop. "If predators cannot see straight though the frogs, why do glass frogs have transparent skin at all, and not the opaque camouflaged patterns of other tree frog species?" said Dr James Barnett, a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster University, Canada, who co-authored the study.

Barnett and colleagues say they have cracked the conundrum. "The frog is always green to generally match leaves, but leaves will differ in their brightness," said Barnett. The team say that while the color of the frog's body changes little against dark or light foliage, the legs are more translucent and hence shift in brightness, helping the amphibians to blend in. "By having translucent legs and resting with the legs surrounding the body, the frog's edge is transformed into a softer, less contrasting gradient from the leaf to the legs, and again from the legs to the body," said Barnett, noting that this makes the frog's outline less recognizable to predators. Writing in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Barnett and colleagues report how they carried out three experiments.

Long-time Slashdot reader jyosim writes: Students want their money back since their classes have moved online. Or they want partial refunds, and their calls have been getting louder. "Petition movements at more than 200 campuses are calling for partial refunds of tuition, typically asking for 50 percent back," reports EdSurge. "And some student protesters are now even filing class-action lawsuits to try to force colleges to return part of the tuition money."

Whether colleges should give back money depends on how you think about what colleges are selling. Is it a straight service like any other, so if students get less they should pay less? Is the most important thing simply getting into college, in which case the degree is the main thing, and students are still getting that? Or are colleges responsible for social mobility and helping students during this time by reducing tuition?

And is online education even worse than, say, sitting in the back of a large lecture hall with 300 students?
"I don't think we know enough about how much students were learning under the face-to-face model to calculate what an alleged loss might be under this new model," EdSurge is told by a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies higher education.

"He adds there has been a 'longstanding reluctance to try to figure out how much people learn,' and therefore 'it's quite difficult, if not impossible, to figure out what sort of drop off there might've been with the introduction of online.'"

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced Disney to postpone the release of its biggest movies, including Mulan and Black Widow, but will those movies actually end up heading straight to a streaming or digital-on-demand platform if the coronavirus pandemic drags on even longer? From a report: Disney says it might consider sending some major movies straight to streaming on a "case-by-case" basis. On Tuesday, Disney held its Q2 2020 earnings call for investors, with CEO Bob Chapek, CFO Christine McCarthy, and executive chairman Bob Iger in attendance (remotely) to give statements and take questions. [...] In the Q&A section of the call, investors asked if Disney had considered a "premium streaming" release for its postponed movies, like Mulan, Black Widow, and The Eternals. With the pandemic forcing theaters to close and people to say at home, is Disney willing to forgo theaters and instead release movies on digital platforms, as some studios have (i.e.: Trolls World Tour)? CEO Bob Chapek said it's a maybe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Electricity generated by renewable sources like solar, wind and hydro has exceeded coal-fired power in the United States for a record 40 straight days, according to a report based on U.S. government data released on Monday. The boost for renewables is due to a seasonal increase in low-cost solar and hydro power generation, alongside an overall slump in electricity demand caused by coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Coal tends to be the first power source to be cut by utilities when demand falls because subsidized renewable sources are cheaper to operate and often backed by state clean-energy mandates.

Every day between March 25 and May 3, solar, wind and hydro plants together produced more electricity than the nation's coal-fired plants -- accounting for about a fifth of the grid's power, IEEFA said. The longest back-to-back stretch previously was nine days in 2019. In total in 2019, renewables beat coal on just 38 days, IEEFA said. IEEFA added it is possible that renewable energy in the United States could exceed coal on an annual basis for the first time this year, a year earlier than it initially forecast, if the power consumption trends caused by the health crisis continue. The report says overall U.S. electricity consumption is projected to fall 3% this year, with coal-fired power demand falling 20%. Meanwhile, EIA forecasts renewable energy generation will grow 11% because it is dispatched by grid operators whenever it is available because of its low operating cost.

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.

Trolls World Tour won't be the last major-studio release to bypass movie theatres altogether. An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Universal gets a greater cut of revenue from digital services than at the box office, which means the film has made the same amount of profit in its first three weeks as the first Trolls film did during its entire five-month run in U.S. cinemas.... "Universal has cast the first stone," said Jeff Bock, an analyst at research firm Exhibitor Relations. "This is exactly what the theatrical exhibition world had always feared -- proof that bypassing theatres could be a viable model of distribution for studios.

"Like it or not, the floodgates have opened. This is just the beginning, and the longer it takes for theatres to open on a worldwide scale, we're going to see the premium-video-on-demand schedule become more and more populated."

That schedule is now filling up. Universal announced last week that Judd Apatow's new comedy The King of Staten Island would scrap its planned cinema release on 19 June and premiere on-demand instead. And Warner Bros is doing the same with Scoob!, the first full-length animated Scooby-Doo film, which was meant to hit cinemas on 15 May...

The straight-to-digital strategy is only considered to be viable for mid- and lower-budget films forecast to earn at most a few hundred million at the global box office.

"Toshiba has just published a full list of all the consumer HDDs in their lineup that use SMR (shingled magnetic recording) technology," writes Slashdot reader williamyf. "This comes after the whole submarine consumer SMR HDDs fiasco, and fresh on the heels of Western Digital publishing a full list of all their consumer HDDs using SMR. With this, Seagate is the only HDD vendor which has not yet published a full list of their consumer HDDs using SMR." Blocks and Files reports: Toshiba uses SMR technology -- previously undocumented -- in several desktop drives and in some video surveillance HDDs: P300 6TB, P300 4TB, DT02 6TB, DT02 4TB, DT02-V 6TB and DT02-V 4TB. Certain notebook PC, game consoles, and external consumer drives also use SMR: L200 2TB, L200 1TB, MQ04 2TB and MQ04 1TB. The company does not use SMR in the N300, a NAS drive intended for the consumer market -- unlike Western Digital which uses SMR in some low-end WD Red NAS devices.

News emerged last week that WD, Seagate and Toshiba are all shipping hard drives using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), a slower form of HDD technology that can result in reduced performance in some types of workloads, but without disclosing that critical bit of information in marketing materials or specification sheets. The backlash has been swift, and now WD is striking a conciliatory tone with its customers in an update to its blog. The company also divulged that it is also shipping SMR technology in some of its WD Blue and WD Black hard drives for desktop PCs and laptops. Tom's Hardware reports: The new disclosure comes on the heels of WD's blog post yesterday that outlined its stance on using SMR drives. The company contends that SMR technology is adequate for the applications the drives are designed for, but that is certainly an open matter of debate with many users claiming the drives cause problems in RAID arrays. The issues purportedly stem from the slow random write speeds, which do cause a measurable reduction in performance, and background activities that are purportedly responsible for the drives dropping from RAID arrays. In either case, The WD blog advised users they should step up to more expensive models designed for heavier workloads if they have more demanding needs.

Today the company updated its blog with a more conciliatory tone, and also disclosed all of its drive models that are shipping with SMR tech. In addition to the WD Red NAS drives that the company previously admitted used SMR tech, WD is also shipping the tech into its 2.5"and 3.5" WD Blue and 2.5" WD Black lineups. Both models are designed for desktop PCs and laptops, with the former coming as a value drive while the latter is designed for high-performance users. WD acknowledged the recent brouhaha surrounding the fact it was shipping drives without disclosing they use the slower recording technology, stating: "The past week has been eventful, to say the least. As a team, it was important that we listened carefully and understood your feedback about our WD Red NAS drives, specifically how we communicated which recording technologies are used. Your concerns were heard loud and clear..." Importantly, the blog states, "...Thank you for letting us know how we can do better. We will update our marketing materials, as well as provide more information about SMR technology, including benchmarks and ideal use cases." WD also said that they will share further data in the future, including benchmarks that might prove otherwise.

Ticketmaster is finalizing a plan to begin offering refunds to concertgoers who purchased tickets to an event canceled or indefinitely postponed by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Vulture reports: Starting May 1, per Billboard, ticket-holders will be alerted to their concert or show's new date, then given 30 days to request a refund. If they don't seek a refund, their ticket will be valid for the event on its new date. If their event has been straight-up canceled, well, then their refund will be returned to them either way.

If that's not enough options for you, however, Live Nation has two other suggestions for those fans whose shows have been canceled: receive credit for a future ticket through their "Rock When You Are Ready" program, up to 150% of your initial ticket's value, or donate the value of your refunded ticket to health-care employees battling COVID-19 through the company's Hero Nation program. As for when we'll all actually be packed into a stadium again, singing along to Taylor Swift's "Lover," truly, only time will tell. The plan comes after the company came under fire by concertgoers for quietly changing its refund policy to cover only canceled events -- not the many functions that promoters have indefinitely "postponed" or rescheduled to a date/time that some ticketholders cannot make.

In ordinary times, they moved among us largely unnoticed. Now we can't get enough of them. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust once-anonymous IT support workers into a new role: corporate saviors. From a report: As millions of employees make the transition from well-maintained office equipment to jury-rigged kitchen table setups, information technology departments have been called upon to keep companies online and connected. Requests range in size and scale, from replacing employees' $5 mouses, to speeding up networks, to keeping multimillion-dollar data centers up and running. For many departments, the result has been virtually unprecedented workloads. On March 12, Qualcomm told all staff to prepare to start working remotely in three days. Vice president of IT infrastructure, Zeeshan Sabir, and his team then worked about 72 hours straight trying to prepare a lot of laptops for secure, remote access and get other corporate systems ready. "I just saw heroics," he said. "I didn't see a blip of complaint from anyone."

[...] The way most IT departments are set up has meant many directors have been juggling major issues alongside relatively minor ones. At Bay Area transit agency SamTrans, IT manager Edward Kelly got help from AT&T to quickly increase the speed of connections to the agency's networks once its 200 employees made the switch to remote work. At the same time, Kelly's team of five was flooded by calls from employees who'd forgotten their computer password and guessed wrong too many times. He said he's also hoping people learn to use the "reply-all" button on group emails more sparingly. As many employees' home computers infuriate them, tensions can run high, said Jennifer Reed, a consultant at IT outsourcing firm Viqtor Davis North America.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Last week, when the Internet Archive announced its "National Emergency Library," expanding access to more than a million digitized works, the group explained the move as a goodwill gesture in the time of coronavirus. With so many brick-and-mortar libraries forced to close their doors, in other words, the group was opening up its lending program: Now, instead of its usual policy of just one digital copy per reader for a 14-day period, many frustrated readers could borrow copies of the same book during the same time -- and could do so through the end of June or the end of the global pandemic, whichever came sooner.

But there's one major issue that several media outlets, including NPR, failed to mention in covering the decision: Many writers and publishers say the website, even before the creation of this National Emergency Library, has been sharing full digital copies of their books without their permission. And over the weekend, dozens of prominent authors, from Colson Whitehead and Neil Gaiman to Alexander Chee, made clear that they were upset with the Internet Archive's model -- and doubly so now, with the expansion of lending services and its timing. "With mean writing incomes of only $20,300 a year prior to the crisis, authors, like others, are now struggling all the more â" from cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work, income supplementing jobs, and speaking engagements," the Authors Guild, a professional group that provides legal assistance to writers, said in a statement released Friday. "And now they are supposed to swallow this new pill, which robs them of their rights to introduce their books to digital formats as many hundreds of midlist authors do when their books go out of print, and which all but guarantees that author incomes and publisher revenues will decline even further."

"Acting as a piracy site -- of which there already are too many -- the Internet Archive tramples on authors' rights by giving away their books to the world," the guild added.

The Internet Archive pushed back against this characterization with a lengthy rebuttal. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive said the group "uses the same controls limiting access to these works as the publishers themselves, with encrypted files that are meant to disappear from the user's computer after a brief period," reports NPR. "The copies the group lends, Kahle said, are owned by the Internet Archive -- either through donations, straight-up purchases or collaborations with brick-and-mortar libraries."

The narration begins customarily, with the play-by-play announcer enthusiastically welcoming his audience live to a competition unfolding on the screen. But this is no ordinary competition. From a report: "It's the final of the two lonely blokes in a park contest," the announcer, Nick Heath, begins, setting the scene of two men idly kicking a ball in a park. When one of the men clips the ball and sends it rolling in the opposite direction, Mr. Heath observes: "Oh, that was absolutely terrible. It's what we've come to expect really from these two." He finishes the video with "Looking forward to the third- and fourth-place playoff later." Without live sports to cover because of the coronavirus outbreak, Mr. Heath, a freelance rugby commentator, has turned to covering everyday life in London.

His 20- to 30-second videos capture people in his neighborhood doing mundane tasks, like shoppers at a market ("Regional Qualifiers Market Bartering") or people pushing strollers ("International 4x4 Pushchair Formation Final. Live.") Marked with the hashtag #LifeCommentary, the clips have become a fun social media distraction for his more than 70,000 followers on Twitter. The clips blend irreverence and a sense of the absurd with a veneer of straight narration reminiscent of Monty Python's "Upper Class Twit of the Year" competition. Fans have found the videos wildly amusing thanks to Mr. Heath's over-the-top rapid delivery.

"Thousands of full-time rideshare drivers are still out on the streets trying to carve out a living," notes The Hustle, interviewing more than 50 full-time rideshare drivers facing a difficult choice: "Stay home and sacrifice a livelihood, or keep driving in a depressed market and risk contracting the virus." As independent contractors, rideshare drivers don't receive sick leave, unemployment insurance, or the many other benefits enjoyed by W-2 employees. During a pandemic, this has proven to be especially problematic... [Uber and Lyft are now offering 14 days of paid sick leave, but only to drivers who have contracted COVID-19 or are quarantined by a public health authority] Deemed "essential" workers, Uber and Lyft drivers have been encouraged to continue business as usual. But the current state of affairs has polarized drivers: In a survey of nearly 400 full-time Uber and Lyft drivers The Hustle conducted last week, 57% said they will continue to work at the peril of their health, while 43% have decided to stay home and sacrifice their sole source of income.

Many drivers told us that, while aware of the inherent exposure risks in carting strangers around in an enclosed metal box all day, they have no choice but to work... "I have a 6-month-old daughter, a family, and apartment rent on my head. I have bills to pay. I've been making about $40 a day since last Monday..." "They are vectors for this disease," Veena Dubal, a professor of law at U.C. Hastings, says of the drivers. "And they have no training in health and safety."

In early March, Uber and Lyft pledged to do their best to provide drivers with basic sanitation products like hand sanitizer and wipes. But the companies have struggled to find supplies during a global shortage and have since closed down the driver hubs where they were meant to be dispensed. (Uber and Lyft told us they are actively working to change this.) Many drivers we spoke with have turned to fellow drivers for help, using WhatsApp groups to swap Lysol cans, gloves, and masks.
With more potential passengers staying home, the drivers' real earnings are now averaging around $5.50 an hour. (One Uber driver, who rents his car, tells the site that "I'm not even breaking even.") Yet they're still braving the risks.

One New York City driver admits "I've literally been driving people to the hospital. I had one guy get into my car who was hacking for 10 minutes straight. I pulled over and cleaned my car for 20 minutes after."

As COVID-19 spreads rapidly around the world, people are eager to keep up with developments at its epicentre in Wuhan, China. But government censorship, partisan media and misinformation have led many to feel the public isn't seeing a full picture of life in a city on lockdown. So some have developed a creative solution to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the source: Tinder. From a report: Most Tinder users use the app to match with people nearby, for obvious reasons. But the world's most used dating app has a premium feature, Passport, that allows a user with Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold memberships to choose to swipe in any location -- like, say, Wuhan -- no matter where they are. And despite Tinder being banned in China, users say they're having luck setting their location to Wuhan, allowing them to match with and chat to residents to hear their perspective on the global story. US-based Twitter user @drethelin tweeted "Setting my tinder to Wuhan so I can get the real scoop on what's going on" on Jan. 28 -- just before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 was a public health emergency.

Sonos is reversing course on a plan to brick all trade-in devices, so if someone wants to give or sell you a used speaker, it will still work. For now. Ars Technica reports: Sonos launched its "trade up" program last October. Consumers who owned a handful of older devices would receive a 30 percent discount on newer models if they traded in their old versions -- a fairly typical program for expensive electronics, all things considered. The company drew customers' ire with one important deviation from others' trade-in programs, though. Although the company does indeed sell refurbished equipment, devices users traded in through the program were destined not to become part of that cycle. Instead, Sonos straight up bricked them.

Completing the trade-in process required putting your device in "recycle mode," which not only wipes all of the user's personal data but also permanently deactivates the product. Once a Sonos product has been deactivated, the company says, "the product cannot be re-added to any system or used to set up a new Sonos system, even if the product has been reset to its factory settings," and the decision to deactivate it is irreversible. Instead of bringing in old products and refurbishing or reselling them, Sonos tells users to bring them to an e-waste center or send it back to Sonos for component recycling. In recent days, however, Sonos quietly removed the recycle mode option from its app, replacing it with a prompt to call customer service. Additionally, the company now says it's working on posting a new trade-in flow to its website, which will remove recycle mode from the process.

DevNull127 writes: Let me get this straight. Peloton's main product is a stationary bicycle costing over $2,000 with a built-in touchscreen for streaming exercise classes. ("A front facing camera and microphone mean you can interact with friends and encourage one another while you ride," explained the Kickstarter campaign which helped launch the company in 2013, with 297 backers pledging $307,332.) Soon after they went public last summer, Bloomberg began calling them "the unprofitable fitness company whose stock has been skidding," adding "The company is working on a new treadmill that will cost less than the current $4,000 model, as well as a rowing machine."

Last March they were also sued for $150 million for using music in workout videos without proper licensing, according to the Verge — which notes that the company was then valued at $4 billion. And then this week Vice reported on what happened to one of their competitors.

"Flywheel offered both in-studio and in-home stationary bike classes similar to Peloton. Peloton sued Flywheel for technology theft, claiming Flywheel's in-home bikes were too similar to Peloton's. Flywheel settled out of court and, as part of that settlement, it's pointing people to Peloton who is promising to replace the $2,000 Flywheel bikes with refurbished Pelotons... When Peloton delivers these replacement bikes, it'll also haul away the old Flywheels."

The Verge reports that one Flywheel customer who'd been enjoying her bike since 2017 "received an email from Peloton, not Flywheel, informing her that her $1,999 bike would no longer function by the end of next month."

"It wasn't like Flywheel gave us any option if you decide not to take the Peloton," she says. "Basically it was like: take it or lose your money. They didn't even attempt to fix it with their loyal riders. It felt like a sting."

schwit1 writes: Purdue President Mitch Daniels announced Saturday night the university would freeze tuition for the 9th straight year, holding it at 2012 levels through 2021-22.

If Purdue can do it, why can't everyone else?

Car and Driver tested a $1,000 aftermarket autonomous driving add-on from Comma.ai against the best factory systems currently on the market. Slashdot reader schwit1 shares the report: If the self-driving car is the promised land, then today's ever proliferating driver-assist features are the desert. Diminished claims and "it's harder than we thought" mea culpas from self-driving's loudest advocates suggest we'll be wandering here for many years to come. At least the technology is meandering in the right direction, though. Thanks to recent software updates, the most sophisticated systems -- Cadillac's Super Cruise and Tesla's Autopilot -- are more capable today than they were initially. This report on those systems includes a lesser known third player. For $998, upstart Comma.ai sells an aftermarket dash cam and wiring harness that taps into and overrides the factory-installed assistance systems in many Honda and Toyota models as well as some Chrysler, Kia, and Lexus vehicles, among others. When activated, Comma.ai's Openpilot software assumes control over the steering, brakes, and throttle, and it reduces the frequent reminders to keep your hands on the wheel. As you might imagine, automakers do not endorse this hack.

Any one of these systems could confidently track the center of a lane for hours with minimal driver input on reasonably straight highways. Although no automaker admits that infotainment is part of its system's machine learning, right after we went hands-free, Hinder's "Get Stoned" started playing through the Cadillac's speakers. We ignored that suggestion and threw the three systems at the toughest highway kinks, interchanges, and two-lane roads surrounding our Ann Arbor home base until either they or we flinched. There was some of each.

Cadillac Super Cruise
Highs: Locked-on-its-lane control, handles the difficult maneuvers with aplomb.
Lows: Works only on mapped limited-access highways, steering control not as confident at night, very little information shown to the driver.
Verdict: A capable and conservative commuting ally.

Tesla Autopilot
Highs: Best user interface, most versatile, extremely capable.
Lows: Dramatic steering inputs when it makes an occasional mistake, no more hands-free capability.
Verdict: One of the best, but can it really evolve all the way to self-driving?

Comma.ai Highs: Capable steering, brake, and throttle control.
Lows: A too-large and unadjustable gap from cars ahead, slows substantially for curves, flashes unnecessary warnings.
Verdict: If this is what's possible with a single camera, perhaps the hardware required for self-driving won't be as extensive as expected.

Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games, is leaving the company in March after taking an "extended break" in the spring of 2019. "Rockstar Games was founded in 1998, and Dan Houser contributed prominently to the company's successful franchises, including Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, Red Dead Redemption, and more," notes The Verge. From the report: Take-Two Interactive is the holdings company for Rockstar Games, and it hasn't officially announced the departure yet. Here's the snippet in full, straight from [an SEC document registered by publisher Take-Two Interactive, which first confirmed the news]: "After an extended break beginning in the spring of 2019, Dan Houser, Vice President, Creative at Rockstar Games, will be leaving the company. Dan Houser's last day will be March 11, 2020. We are extremely grateful for his contributions. Rockstar Games has built some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful game worlds, a global community of passionate fans and an incredibly talented team, which remains focused on current and future projects."

Google Photos is now trialing a "monthly photo prints" subscription program where the company will send you 10 prints that will be "automatically selected from your last 30 days of photos." 9to5Gogole reports: This subscription program is a way to "get your best memories delivered straight to your home every month." For $7.99 per month, subscribers get 4x6 pictures printed on matte, white cardstock that features a 1/8-inch border. While an automatic process leverages Google Photos' smarts, you'll be able to pick one of three themes for your monthly prints. Google touts the first "people and pets" option as being the "most popular." Additionally, you can edit the photos before they're printed.

Delivered in a cardboard envelope, Google imagines these prints as being "perfect to put on the fridge, in a frame, or to give as gifts to the important." Similar to efforts with Smart Displays, this program adds an interesting tactility to images that most people only experience virtually today. Currently, this Google Photos print subscription is classified as a "trial program" in the US. Those selected will see a "You're invited to the monthly photo prints trial" banner to join at the top of Google Photos on the web.