An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Lockdowns restricting travel and industry imposed to halt the spread of coronavirus have resulted in unprecedented reductions in deadly air pollution around the world, new analysis shows. Major cities that suffer from the world's worst air pollution have seen reductions of deadly particulate matter by up to 60% from the previous year, during a three-week lockdowns period. Researchers from IQAir -- a global air quality information and tech company -- studied 10 major cities around the world which have relatively high numbers of coronavirus cases and Covid-19 lockdown measures.

The study compared levels of harmful microscopic particulate matter known as PM 2.5. The pollutant, which is smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, is considered particularly dangerous as it can lodge deep into the lungs and pass into other organs and the bloodstream, causing serious health risks. Seven out of the 10 cities studied, including New Delhi, Seoul, Wuhan and Mumbai, saw significant improvements in air quality. Those with historically higher levels of PM2.5 pollution witnessed the most substantial drops in pollution. The report was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, which this year is focused on climate action. The report's authors say that while they do expect air pollution to rise again when economies restart after coronavirus, "out of these extraordinary circumstances, we can see how changes in our society's activities can have a momentous impact on our environment and the air we breathe," said IQAir's marketing specialist Kelsey Duska.

One of the largest VPN companies, NordVPN, is rolling out NordLynx -- it's first mainstream WireGuard virtual private network for its Windows, Mac, Android and iOS client-software applications. ZDNet reports: NordVPN's own tests have shown NordLynx easily outperforms the other protocols, IKEv2/IPsec and OpenVPN. How much faster? According to NordVPN's 256,886 speed tests, "When a user connects to a nearby VPN server and downloads content that's served from a content delivery network (CDN) within a few thousand miles/kilometers, they can expect up to twice higher download and upload speed." While speed is what customers will notice, security experts like WireGuard for its code's simplicity. With only about 4,000 lines of code, WireGuard's code can be comprehensively reviewed by a single individual.

Besides WireGuard, NordVPN adds in its double Network Address Translation (NAT) system to protect users' privacy. This enables users to establish a secure VPN connection while storing no identifiable user data on a server. You're assigned a dynamic local IP address that remains assigned only while the session is active. User authentication is done with the help of a secure external database. To switch to NordLynx, users need to update their NordVPN app to the latest version. The NordLynx protocol can be chosen manually from the Settings menu.

As cities across the United States continue shelter-in-place orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some in-person court proceedings are now taking place over Zoom. "It's an unprecedented moment for the justice system, which is typically slow to adapt to new technology," writes Zoe Schiffer from The Verge. "No one is sure if that's a good thing." From the report: Critics worry the change has made it more difficult for the public to access court proceedings. Court watchers -- volunteers who monitor hearings to hold judges and prosecutors accountable -- say their access has evaporated during the pandemic. There's also concern that remote hearings can unfairly advantage fancy law firms that can pay for good lighting and stable internet connections. Zoom has also had major security flaws, including default settings that didn't include meeting passwords (a problem the company has now fixed) and a misleading definition of end-to-end encryption. (The company claimed meetings were end-to-end encrypted; they are not.) But supporters say going online is critical for protecting public health. For those in detention, postponing a hearing means potentially spending more time in jail, while appearing in person could put the individual and those around them at risk.

[Judge Vince Chhabria said] that while conducting remote trials makes sense during the pandemic, he's wary of extending this beyond the crisis. "So much of trying a case from the lawyers' perspective is having a feel for the courtroom and for the people in the courtroom and what is interesting to them," he says. "So much of presiding over a trial, as a judge, has to do with feel. I think it would be unfortunate if the new normal became too reliant on remote proceedings." His concern is echoed by Alan Rupe, [employment lawyer at Lewis Brisbois]. "A lot of what I do involves witness credibility," he says. "When you're assessing someone's credibility you have to be in the same room as them."

Rei writes: A paper recently published by The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene adds further support to recent CDC guidelines for minimizing the use of invasive ventilators. As physicians had been voicing concern that doctors were being too eager to put patients on invasive ventilation and may be doing more harm than good, the investigators looked into outcomes of intubated patients vs. non-intubated patients experiencing hypoxia. Unlike with other forms of pneumonia, they found that COVID-19 patients were unusually damaged by invasive ventilation but also able to tolerate higher levels of anoxia -- to the point that one doctor recalls having to tell patients to get off their cellphones so that they could be intubated. The recommendation is that guidelines be adjusted to discourage invasive ventilation unless a patient is physically struggling to breathe, rather than relying strictly on oxygen levels; otherwise, the use of non-invasive ventilation, such as CPAP and BiPAP, should be encouraged. When invasive ventilation is used, oxygen levels should be minimized in order to reduce the risk of damaging healthy tissue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Motorola hasn't had a true flagship on the market in a few years after its Moto Z line was downgraded to mid-range status. Today, though, the company has officially unveiled the Motorola Edge and Edge+ with the Snapdragon 865, crazy cameras, and more. Here's what you need to know. The Motorola Edge+ is the true flagship of the two, offering a Snapdragon 865 processor, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 6.7-inch FHD AMOLED display that has a "waterfall" curve on either side, a hole-punch containing the 24MP selfie shooter, and a 90Hz refresh rate. The Motorola Edge+ also features wireless charging, 18W wired charging, and a triple camera system. There's a 108MP sensor to headline that array, but also a 16MP ultrawide shooter and 8MP telephoto lens. There's also a 5,000 mAh battery to ensure plenty of power. It even offers reverse wireless charging.

What about the regular Motorola Edge? That device makes pretty smart cuts to keep a lower price. It has the same display and overall design but uses a Snapdragon 765 to keep 5G and good performance. It's paired with Android 10 and either 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage on all models. There's also a 64MP camera backed up by the same 16MP ultrawide and 8MP telephoto shooters. The regular Edge does lose wireless charging, though for its 4,500 mAh battery. Here's one fun part of both of these phones. They still have headphone jacks. Both the Edge and Edge+ also feature 5G support (only sub-6 for the Edge), offer red or black colors, and use their curved displays for a few neat software tricks. Both are also promised at least one major Android upgrade, too. As for pricing, the Motorola Edge+ will be available exclusively via Verizon for $1,000, or $41.66/month. The price of the regular Edge hasn't been announced yet, but it should be considerably cheaper and more broadly available.

"The source code for Team Fortress 2 has apparently been leaked, leading to hackers reportedly able to deliver malware through Remote Code Execution to other players," reports TechRadar. However, Valve assures users that playing on official servers is perfectly safe. From the report: This leak was initially reported by @SteamDB on Twitter, with the source code in question dating back to 2017 and 2018, affecting Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. According to a report on the issue from PCGamesN, several Team Fortress 2 server communities have advised players to avoid the game until further notice.

Valve has reached out with a comment, saying "We have reviewed the leaked code and believe it to be a reposting of a limited CS:GO engine code depot released to partners in late 2017, and originally leaked in 2018. From this review, we have not found any reason for players to be alarmed or avoid the current builds (as always, playing on the official servers is recommended for greatest security)." Valve goes on to clarify that it's investigating the problem and anyone who has any information can report it on Valve's security page, which will explain how to fix the issue.

The first American to die of COVID-19 took place in early and mid-February, according autopsies at the Santa Clara Medical Examiner-Coroner. "Until the new revelations, the first COVID-19 death had been identified as a man in his 50s in Washington state who died Feb. 29," reports The Hill. From the report: The two people died at home on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17, making them the earliest-known victims of the coronavirus in the United States, the Santa Clara County public health department confirmed in a statement on Tuesday. The county health department said both individuals "died at home during a time when very limited testing was available only through the CDC." "Testing criteria set by the CDC at the time restricted testing to only individuals with a known travel history and who sought medical care for specific symptoms," it added. "As the Medical Examiner-Coroner continues to carefully investigate deaths throughout the county, we anticipate additional deaths from COVID-19 will be identified."

Santa Clara County officials did not identify either of the two individuals who died, whether they had traveled to Wuhan or elsewhere, or whether they had contact with the few people who had been diagnosed with the disease before they died. But reclassifying their deaths as related to the coronavirus suggests the virus had been spreading through the United States for much longer than was initially thought -- potentially for weeks or even months longer.

AT&T lost another 897,000 premium TV subscribers in Q1 2020, as the DirecTV owner's string of massive customer losses continued. An AT&T executive today said the company is moving ahead with a company-wide cost-cutting program. From a report: AT&T's earnings announcement today said the 897,000-customer net loss reduced the total number of premium TV subscribers to 18.6 million. AT&T said the latest customer loss was "due to competition and customers rolling off promotional discounts as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Milan is to introduce one of Europe's most ambitious schemes reallocating street space from cars to cycling and walking, in response to the coronavirus crisis. The northern Italian city and surrounding Lombardy region are among Europe's most polluted, and have also been especially hard hit by the Covid-19 outbreak. Under the nationwide lockdown, motor traffic congestion has dropped by 30-75%, and air pollution with it. City officials hope to fend off a resurgence in car use as residents return to work looking to avoid busy public transport.

The city has announced that 35km (22 miles) of streets will be transformed over the summer, with a rapid, experimental citywide expansion of cycling and walking space to protect residents as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted. The Strade Aperte plan, announced on Tuesday, includes low-cost temporary cycle lanes, new and widened pavements, 30kph (20mph) speed limits, and pedestrian and cyclist priority streets. The locations include a low traffic neighborhood on the site of the former Lazzaretto, a refuge for victims of plague epidemics in the 15th and 16th centuries. Work could start on an 8km stretch of Corso Buenos Aires, one of the city's most important shopping streets, by the beginning of May -- with a new cycle lane and expanded pavements. The remainder of the work will be completed by the end of the summer, officials say.

SpaceX has launched another big batch of Starlink satellites, the low Earth orbit spacecraft that will provide connectivity for its globe-spanning high-bandwidth broadband internet network. This brings the total number of Starlink satellites on orbit to 422, though the company plans to de-orbit two of those (the first two prototypes launched) shortly. From a report: Already, SpaceX is the largest private satellite operator in existence -- by a wide and growing margin. It's also managed to keep up the frequent pace of its Starlink launches despite the global COVID-19 crisis, with its last launch taking place March 18. In total, it has flown four such missions since the start of the year, just four months into 2020. The company has good reason to want to keep up that aggressive pace: Each launch brings it closer to the eventual launch of the Starlink broadband service that the satellites will provide the network backbone for. SpaceX wants that network to be live with coverage available in Canada and the Northern U.S. by sometime later this year, and because of the way its approach works, with small satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than traditional geostationary internet satellites and handing off the connection to one another as they pass the coverage area, they need a whole lot of them to provide stable, reliable, low-latency connections for consumers and businesses.

To commemorate Earth Day, Intel -- in partnership with Accenture and Sulubaai Environmental Foundation, a Philippine-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting Palawan's natural resources -- detailed Project Corail, an AI-powered platform that monitors and analyzes the resiliency of coral reefs. From a report: Since its launch in May 2019, it's collected 40,000 images of the reef surrounding Pangatalan Island, which researchers have leveraged to gauge reef health in real time. If the pilot program in Palawan is successful, Project Corail could be used to monitor more of the world's at-risk reef population. (Stresses such as pollution, overfishing, and global climate change will kill an estimated 90% of reefs in the next century.) It's a worthwhile mission considering that reefs not only protect coastlines from tropical storms, but that they provide food and income for 1 billion people, generating $9.6 billion from tourism and recreation alone each year. Project Corail consists of a buoy equipped with marine-grade solar panels, batteries, and a transmitting device (either Wi-Fi or 4G), as well as a camera attached to the mooring line. An Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 plugged into a Raspberry Pi handles on-buoy computing, while an onshore PC processes images with an Intel Arria 10 FPGA.

Magic Leap, the augmented-reality startup that raised more than $2 billion from high-profile investors including Alphabet and Alibaba Group, is cutting about half of its workforce as part of a major restructuring. From a report: About 1,000 employees will be affected, the people added. The company is planning to wind down its consumer business and will instead focus on its enterprise products, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. The decision to abandon its consumer ambitions represents a dramatic retreat for a company that was at one time seen as the future of at-home augmented reality. "While our leadership team, board, and investors still believe in the long-term potential of our IP, the near-term revenue opportunities are currently concentrated on the enterprise side," Chief Executive Officer Rony Abovitz said in a statement posted on the company's website, confirming the earlier Bloomberg News report.

Social distancing and stay-home orders have led to booming demand for grocery delivery services. In some big cities, people report not being able to find an open delivery time slot for days or weeks at a time. And now Motherboard has found a series of bots that automatically give some people an upper hand when limited delivery time slots are available on Amazon Fresh or Wholefoods. From a report: A slew of developers have made bots and other tools that, in some cases, automatically hunt for a free delivery slot, grab it, and then complete the user's food order, making sure they have a much better chance of buying food before other people snatch up the slot. While some of the developers told Motherboard they designed their bots to help those in need, such as senior citizens who may need to stay inside as exposure to the coronavirus could be more serious for them, others are dealing with the ethical issue of releasing a tool that can clearly be abused, by allowing those who can figure out how to use a technical tool to buy food while others go without.

"Yes, it's an unfair advantage over others who aren't tech-savvy but may still need to purchase items urgently. However, I try my best to reduce the abused [sic] problem," Manfong, the developer behind a Chrome extension that notifies users when a delivery slot is available, told Motherboard in an email. Checkout bots, often reserved for buying things like limited edition sneakers or concert tickets, are in particularly high demand at the moment for other items. Last week Motherboard reported how one developer had created a bot dedicated to buying the Nintendo Switch, with resellers grabbing as many as they can to sell for a profit during the crisis. Now, that idea of getting a technical one-up over others has expanded to buying essential items such as food.

Long-term reader schwit1 shares a report: Missouri became on Tuesday the first U.S. state to sue the Chinese government over its handling of the coronavirus, saying that China's response to the outbreak that originated in the city of Wuhan brought devastating economic losses to the state. In Beijing, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry dismissed the accusation on Wednesday as "nothing short of absurdity" and lacking any factual or legal basis. The civil lawsuit, filed in federal court by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, alleges negligence, among other claims. It says Missouri and its residents suffered possibly tens of billions of dollars in economic damages, and seeks cash compensation. "The Chinese government lied to the world about the danger and contagious nature of COVID-19, silenced whistleblowers, and did little to stop the spread of the disease," Schmitt, a Republican, said in a statement. "They must be held accountable for their actions."

Health officials have prioritised two clinical trials that will be supplied with blood from recovered Covid-19 patients in the hope that transfusions can help save the lives of people hospitalised with the infection. From a report: NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) has started to collect blood from recovered patients with a view to using the antibody-rich serum to boost the immune systems of patients struggling to overcome the virus. The limited supply of convalescent plasma will be given to patients enrolled on sub-studies in the Recovery trial led by Peter Horby at the University of Oxford, and the Remap-Cap trial led by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) in London. The Recovery trial will assess whether the plasma helps patients to recover before they are admitted to intensive care, while the Remap-Cap trial will investigate whether similar transfusions help to save patients who are already in high-dependency or intensive care units. At least one trial that was designed to assess whether the plasma could protect healthy people who are in close contact with Covid-19 patients, such as NHS staff and family members, was rejected by NHSBT amid a shortage of the donated serum.

Vivaldi, the browser launched by former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has long positioned itself as a highly customizable alternative to Chrome and Firefox for power users. Today, the team is launching version 3.0 of its desktop browser, with built-in tracker and ad blockers, and it's bringing its Android browser out of beta. From a report: I've long been a fan of Vivaldi, but the company was relatively late to the tracking protection game. Now it's doubling down by integrating a blocklist powered by DuckDuckGo's Tracker Radar. Like competing browsers, Vivaldi offers three blocking levels that users can easily toggle on and off for individual websites. Those blocking levels are relatively blunt, though, with the options to either block trackers, block trackers and ads, or disable blocking. Competitors like Edge offer slightly more nuanced options for blocking trackers, though I would expect Vivaldi to adopt a similar scheme over time.

In the summer of 2016, researchers at a digital rights organization and a cybersecurity firm announced they had caught one of the rarest fish in the cybersecurity ocean -- an in the wild attack against an iPhone, using unknown vulnerabilities inside Apple's vaunted operating system. Since then, only a handful of similar attacks have been caught and publicly disclosed. Now, a small startup said it has caught another one. From a report: ZecOps, a company based in San Francisco, announced on Wednesday that a few of its customers were targeted with two zero-day exploits for iOS last year. Apple will patch the vulnerability underlying these attacks on an upcoming release of iOS 13. "We concluded with high confidence that it was exploited in the wild," Zuk Avraham, the founder of ZecOps, told Motherboard. "One of [the vulnerabilities] we clearly showed that it can be triggered remotely, the other one requires an additional vulnerability to trigger it remotely."

"These vulnerabilities," ZecOps researchers wrote in a report they published Wednesday, "are widely exploited in the wild in targeted attacks by an advanced threat operator(s) to target VIPs, executive management across multiple industries, individuals from Fortune 2000 companies, as well as smaller organizations such as MSSPs." One of the two vulnerabilities, according to Avraham, is what's known as a remote zero-click. This kind of attack is dangerous because it can be used by an attacker against anyone on the internet, and the target gets infected without any interaction -- hence the zero-click definition. Vulnerabilities or exploits called zero-days are bugs in software or hardware that are unknown to their manufacturers and can be used to hack targets. They can be particularly effective attacks because they use flaws that are not patched yet, meaning there's no code deployed to specifically defend against them.

General Motors is shutting down Maven, the car-sharing service it launched in 2016. From a report: It joins a small but growing list of car-sharing services from automakers and other companies that have struggled or otherwise fully shut down in North America. "After critically looking at our business, the industry, and what's going on with COVID-19, we have made the tough but necessary decision to wind down our business," the company explained in an email to Maven customers sent on Tuesday. Originally designed to be a competitor to the Zipcars and Car2Gos of the world, GM expanded Maven in 2018 to allow car owners to share their vehicles on the service as well, similar to services like Turo or Getaround. At its peak, Maven was available in 17 cities across the US. But Maven's first CEO left her post early last year, and by mid-2019, GM decided to pull the service from about half of its cities, including major markets like Boston, Chicago, and New York City. Maven continued to operate in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Toronto until last month when service was suspended amid the pandemic.

Facebook has enjoyed unparalleled reach in India for more than a decade. But as China's fast-growing ByteDance emerges as a formidable competitor in what has become the world's second largest internet market, the American social media giant has found the horse it wants to bet on in the new decade. From a report: The world's largest social media company announced today it has invested $5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake in India's Reliance Jio Platforms, a three-and-a-half-year-old subsidiary of the nation's most valued firm, Reliance Industries, and the biggest telecom operator in the country with more than 380 million subscribers. The deal, which valued Jio at a pre-money valuation of $65.95 billion, makes Facebook the largest minority shareholder in the Indian telecom network. The social giant said the investment marks its "commitment to India," where it will focus on collaborating with Jio to create "new ways for people and businesses to operate more effectively in the growing digital economy." This is the largest investment for a minority stake by a technology company anywhere in the world and the largest foreign direct investment in the technology space in India.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Facebook has released a map showing the proportion of people who say they have experienced coronavirus symptoms in each state in the US. The data was gathered from more than one million Facebook users who filled in a survey created by Carnegie Mellon University about whether they were experiencing symptoms like a cough or a fever. The map, which goes down to county level, will be updated every day. Facebook says it will create similar maps for other countries in the coming days and weeks, also based on survey responses.

Knowing who is experiencing symptoms and where could help health officials and governments to prepare for surges of hospital cases and decide where to allocate resources like ventilators, face masks, and personal protective equipment. Given the shortage of tests, and long delays for results, this map could be useful in helping to predict where COVID-19 hot spots are forming across the U.S. Obviously, the map is only as good as the data that's used to create it, and as you can see for yourself, vast swaths of the map don't have enough participants to yield reliable data. The map is part of Facebook's work with CMU and the CDC to predict the coronavirus's spread.

Michael Lynch, blogger and former software engineer at Microsoft and Google, discovered that the payment processing platform Stripe and its official JavaScript library records all browsing activity on its customers' websites and reports it back to the company. Lynch says this data includes the following:

1. Every URL the user visits on my site, including pages that never display Stripe payment forms
2. Telemetry about how the user moves their mouse cursor while browsing my site
3. Unique identifiers that allow Stripe to correlate visitors to my site against other sites that accept payment via Stripe

In his blog post, Lynch shares what he found, who else it affects, and how you can limit Stripe's data collection in your web applications. Here's how he says he made the discovery: I discovered this by accident while adding paid plans to my portfolio rebalancer. As part of development, I was using an HTTP proxy that allows me to inspect HTTP traffic from my browser. After successfully implementing my app's payment flow with Stripe, I noticed that every page navigation generated a new HTTP POST request to a Stripe URL. This was strange because none of the pages I visited contained any calls to Stripe's library. In fact, my app doesn't collect payment information from users until they create an account, but Stripe was making HTTP requests when I landed on my app's homepage as a brand new user with no cookies or stored credentials. "I looked around for an official disclosure from Stripe about this behavior, but I couldn't find anything," adds Lynch. "The closest I found is this vague paragraph on their npm package description, which the Stripe support rep quoted to me: 'To best leverage Stripe's advanced fraud functionality, ensure that Stripe.js is loaded on every page, not just your checkout page. This allows Stripe to detect anomalous behavior that may be indicative of fraud as customers browse your website.'"

"The privacy policy is a bit more specific about the data they collect, but it implies that they're collecting this data on stripe.com rather than on customer sites," writes Lynch. "Worryingly, the privacy policy also includes loose wording that allows Stripe to sell this data to advertisers: 'When you visit our Sites or online services, both we and certain third parties collect information about your online activities over time and across different sites to provide you with advertising about products and services tailored to your individual interests.'"

The sandbox video game Minecraft has teamed with the United Nations for a PSA campaign that aims to spread helpful information and health tips amid the coronavirus pandemic. From the Hollywood Reporter: In an official blog post on Tuesday, a spokesperson from the game's Swedish developer wrote, "At Mojang, we find that distributing factual information is incredibly important, as that information will help people make informed decisions, which in turn may save lives. One thing we're doing to help is teaming up with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and their partner, Heart17. Together, we'll spread the word under the banner of #TomorrowTogether."

The blog post noted that over the next week or so, Minecraft's social media channels will be devoted to sharing crucial health advice derived from the World Health Organization's safety recommendations. There will be three videos in the campaign that replay guidelines about practices such as handwashing and social distancing. "So if you suddenly come across a Creeper asking you to wash your hands, don't worry: their agenda has not permanently changed," the blog post continued. "In the game, they still want nothing more than to get cozy with you and proceed to blow up. But in our social channels, and for the time being, they also want to help put an end to the pandemic."