GAO report highlights shortcomings in the Pentagon's ongoing cybersecurity efforts, with DOD's initiatives rarely completing goals and lacking status updates — Five years ago, the Department of Defense set dozens of security hygiene goals. A new report finds that it has abandoned or lost track of most of them.
Current and recently fired Amazon warehouse workers say they faced retaliation as they advocated for better working conditions; Amazon denies charges — Employees say they were targeted for organizing; tech giant defends firings, safety measures at facilities
Folding@Home, a ~20 year-old distributed computing project aiding scientific research, has seen a surge in users, breaking an exaFLOP of compute amid COVID-19 — Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche. Then came COVID-19. — Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department …
Online consignment company The RealReal is the latest tech company to lay off and furlough employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the company’s quarterly earnings report today, The RealReal announced layoffs affecting 10% of its workforce and furloughs impacting 15% of employees.
By doing so, The RealReal says it will be able to reduce its operating expenses by about $70 million. In a press release, The RealReal said these changes are designed to “support its employees through the pandemic and ensure the team is well positioned for a strong restart on the other side of this health crisis.”
Those furloughed include employees in The RealReal’s e-commerce centers, retail stores, luxury consignment offices, sales organization and headquarters. The RealReal has also instituted a hiring freeze and reduced the salaries of executives.
The RealReal, which has been a public company for a little less than one year, joins the growing number of tech companies that have made personnel changes in the wake of the coronavirus.
“Given the unknown duration of the pandemic, we’ve focused on reducing operating expenses and preserving liquidity to weather the near-term challenges and ensure we are well positioned to capitalize on the significant opportunity in front of us,” The RealReal CEO Julie Wainwright said in a statement. “I am confident the strength of our balance sheet, customer satisfaction, healthy traffic trends, and buyer and consignor repeat rates, along with continuing progress in technology initiatives that support efficiently scaling our operations, will position us to bounce back quickly once the economy stabilizes.”
It’s hard enough in the first place having to drive an astronomically expensive rover around a planet millions of miles away. Doing it from home seems like a pretty big ask — but it turns out NASA’s Curiosity team is up to it.
The space agency posted today about how the team has adapted to the unprecedented situation of having to manage an important, ongoing mission involving hundreds of people, without any of those people meeting in person.
“We’re usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,” said team lead Alicia Allbaugh. Now they’re not only in separate rooms, but on different schedules and computing setups. “I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times. You’re juggling more than you normally would.”
Naturally there are video calls, too — sometimes several at once. Processes previously accomplished on high-performance workstations are now being done on laptops and web services. But while the added complexity makes the planning process less efficient, the results are still rolling in.
In mid-March, the Jet Propulsion Lab offices in Pasadena, Calif., had already been totally emptied of staff and work was suspended elsewhere. But Curiosity was still trucking. It drove up to a rock, drilled a sample and sent confirmation back to the team — just as it would if they were all working as normal. And the work continues.
“Mars isn’t standing still for us; we’re still exploring,” said Allbaugh.
Enlarge / Face masks may be a regular feature in our near-term future. (credit: Rob Kim/Getty Images)
Most of the optimistic ideas about what to do about SARS-CoV-2 involve engineering the virus' extinction. We could ramp up testing and isolate anyone who's been in contact with an infected individual. We could carefully manage infections to build up herd immunity without exceeding our hospital capacity. Or, in an ideal world, we could develop herd immunity using an effective vaccine.
Unfortunately, there are reasons to be worried that none of these will work. Tracing the contacts of infected individuals may be impossible with a virus that spreads as easily as SARS-CoV-2. And some of the virus' closest relatives don't build up the long-lasting immune response that's needed for persistent herd immunity. All of which raises a disturbing question: what happens then?
A group of Harvard epidemiologists attempted to answer the question by trying out models that tested the impacts of different assumptions about the virus' behavior and the immune system's response to it. The researchers find that there's a risk that it could become a seasonal menace, and we might have to be socially isolating every winter.
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Enlarge / A man looks at the home screen for the "new" Windows 7 platform when it was launched in October 2009. Microsoft has ended support, but the OS lives on. (credit: Katie Collins - PA Images / Getty Images)
Microsoft has patched four actively exploited vulnerabilities that allow attackers to execute malicious code or elevate system privileges on devices that run Windows.
Two of the security flaws—tracked as CVE-2020-1020 and CVE-2020-0938—reside in the Adobe Type Manager Library, a Windows DLL file that a wide variety of apps use to manage and render fonts available from Adobe Systems. On supported operating systems other than Windows 10, attackers who successfully exploit the vulnerabilities can remotely execute code. On Windows 10, attackers can run code inside an AppContainer sandbox. The measure limits the system privileges malicious code has, but even then, attackers can use it to create accounts with full user rights, install programs, and view, change, or delete data.
Attackers can exploit the flaws by convincing a target to open a booby-trapped document or viewing it in the Windows preview pane. Tuesday’s advisories said that Microsoft is “aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to leverage” both vulnerabilities. Microsoft revealed last month that one of the bugs was being exploited in limited attacks against Windows 7 machines.
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Enlarge / Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), speaks during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, April 8, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)
As Americans anxiously await news of when they can emerge from their 4-meter-wide personal-space bubbles and go back to something resembling normal life, public health experts are working furiously to determine essential steps to get us there safely. And a consensus is emerging that key among those steps is recruiting a massive number of people to perform contact tracing.
"It is going to be critical," director Robert Redfield of the US Centers for Disease Control told NPR in an interview late last week. Scaled-up contact tracing, along with increased testing, is needed to "make sure that when we open up, we open up for good."
"We can't afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission," he said, "so it is going to be very aggressive, what I call 'block and tackle,' 'block and tackle.'"
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Binance adds Bitcoin options trading to its mobile app, six months after adding futures trading, as it looks to widen its lead in the Bitcoin derivatives market — Binance launched Bitcoin futures trading half a year ago, and it's now the biggest derivatives market in the industry.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has forced billions of people to stay home, has led to a surge in new downloads of several consumer and enterprise focused apps in the west. But in India, the biggest open market globally, things have taken a slightly different turn.
Daily downloads for several popular apps including TikTok, WhatsApp, Truecaller, Helo, Vmate, Facebook, Google Pay, and Paytm have either remained unchanged in the last three months or taken a dip, according to a TechCrunch analysis of figures provided by research firm Apptopia.
Additionally, several popular apps that offer in-app purchases have seen their revenue dramatically drop in the last four weeks as most companies in India recommended employees to work from home and New Delhi imposed a 21-day nationwide lockdown — now extended to May 3.
TikTok was downloaded 20.2 million times in India in a 31-day period ending April 12, down from 21.6 million times it was downloaded in the month of January, for instance. During the same period, WhatsApp’s download plummeted to 12 million from 17 million; Hotstar fell from 9.8 million to 3 million; and ByteDance’s Helo dropped from 10.5 million to 7.5 million.
For most of February, TikTok saw more than 700,000 downloads a day in India, peaking at 891,000. In the last one week, volume of daily downloads of the app has fallen below 450,000. WhatsApp’s figure has dropped from about 650,000 to below 250,000, according to Apptopia.
Aarogya Setu, an app launched by the Indian government to help people know if they have been in the vicinity of someone who has tested positive for coronavirus, is currently topping the chart in India with more than 780,000 downloads a day.
Tinder clocked $319,102 in in-app revenue on the App Store and Google Play Store in India between March 13 to April 12, down from $547,103 in January. Netflix’s in-app revenue fell from $285,562 to $192,154 during the same period. LinkedIn and YouTube also observed a decline.
One app that has seen its in-app revenue improve noticeably is Hotstar, which went from $173,253 to $329,675. Disney launched Disney+ atop Hotstar in India earlier this month.
Grocery delivery apps BigBasket, which raised $60 million last week, and Grofers have surged considerably, while Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal that have halted taking non-essential orders in recent weeks have seen a decline in volume of daily downloads and active users on Android in India, according to marketing research firm SimilarWeb.
Zoom, a popular video chat app, has seen its daily downloads surge to over 500,000 in recent weeks, up from about 9,000 in early February. Ludo King, a popular game in Asian markets, has seen its daily download figure jump from about 150,000 in early February to over 450,000 in India in recent days.
As people stay at home, desktop usage has also increased in India, a mobile-first nation with nearly half a billion smartphone users.
“India has consistently seen mobile web browsing account for the heavy majority compared to the desktop, however from February to March, desktop usage increased its share of total visits to the top 100 sites by 1.6%. While this may seem small, it is 1.6% of 31.32 billion visits, so it is still rather significant,” a SimilarWeb representative told TechCrunch.
Counterpoint Research : Apple led global Q1 smartphone shipments for the first time with a 21% market share in Q1 2026; overall smartphone...
