A woman who recently traveled to Iran is New York's first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday night. The Wall Street Journal reports: The woman, who wasn't named, is in her late 30s and contracted the virus while traveling abroad in Iran. She has respiratory symptoms and is isolated in her home, according to the governor's office. She isn't in serious condition and has been in a controlled situation since arriving in New York, according to the governor's office. "There is no cause for surprise -- this was expected," the governor said in a statement. "I said from the beginning it was a matter of when, not if, there would be a positive case of novel coronavirus in New York." A state official said the woman is in Manhattan. The report says there's been a total of eight other cases in New York City, but all of those people had tested negative. "As of Sunday, 32 people in New York, including the one positive case, have been tested for coronavirus infection," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing New York state health officials. "All the other tests were negative." If the virus spreads, New York City health officials said there are roughly 1,200 hospital beds throughout the city that could be used.

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After years of development and hype, Google's long-rumored push into video games arrived last November, with the launch of Google Stadia. Google Stadia isn't a game console, nor is it a game platform, really -- it's a digital storefront run by Google where you can buy individual games. It's a hugely ambitious new platform, and it aimed to be the Netflix of gaming. What makes Stadia so ambitious? Rather than downloading games or playing them off a Blu-ray disc, Stadia streams games to you wherever you are, like Netflix streams movies and TV shows. However, four months after Stadia's launch, the service is still extremely light on games: Just 28 titles are available as of this week. From a report: We spoke with game developers and publishers who said there are two main reasons their games aren't on Stadia: Google didn't offer them enough money, and they don't trust the mercurial company to stick with gaming in the long term. "We were approached by the Stadia team," one prominent indie developer told me. "Usually with that kind of thing, they lead with some kind of offer that would give you an incentive to go with them." But the incentive "was kind of non-existent," they said. "That's the short of it." It's a statement we heard echoed by several prominent indie developers and two publishing executives we spoke with for this piece. "It's that there isn't enough money there," one of the publishing executives we spoke with said. The offer was apparently "so low that it wasn't even part of the conversation." The "incentive" isn't solely financial, but it's the main part of the equation. "When we're looking at these types of deals," another prominent indie developer said, "We're looking at 'Is this enough money where we have the resources to make what we want, or is this an exclusivity deal that gives us security?'" they said.

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Gordon Moore's 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moore's Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years. Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself. Moore's argument was an economic one. It was a beautiful bargain -- in theory, the more transistors you added to an integrated circuit, the cheaper each one got. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip. Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore's prediction. It has also fueled today's breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers. But what happens when Moore's Law inevitably ends? Or what if, as some suspect, it has already died, and we are already running on the fumes of the greatest technology engine of our time?

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Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and other large companies are being sued by a California environmental group for creating a plastic pollution "nuisance" and misleading consumers about the recyclability of plastic. From a report: The suit, filed in San Mateo county superior court last week, argues that companies that sell plastic bottles and bags that end up polluting the ocean should be held accountable for damaging the environment. Earth Island Institute, which filed the lawsuit, says a significant amount of the eight to 20m tons of plastic entering the Earth's oceans annually can be traced back to a handful of companies, which rely heavily on single-use plastic packaging. The suit seeks to require these companies to pay to remediate the harm that plastic pollution has caused to the Earth and oceans. It also demands these companies stop advertising products as "recyclable," when they are, in fact, largely not recycled. "These companies should bear the responsibility for choking our ecosystem with plastic," said David Phillips, executive director of Earth Island Institute. "They know very well that this stuff is not being recycled, even though they are telling people on the labels that it is recyclable and making people feel like it's being taken care of." Further reading: Coca-Cola, Nestle, and PepsiCo Are the Top 3 Plastic Polluters on the Planet .

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To make its iPhone messaging app run better -- especially on older phones -- Facebook rewrote it from the ground up. The new version is going live now. From a report: In August 2011, Facebook introduced Messenger, an iPhone and Android app that spun off the social network's chat feature into a stand-alone experience. [...] Messenger hit one billion monthly active users in 2016 and was the world's most-downloaded app in 2019, according to App Annie. Along the way, it supplemented its original text-based conversations with everything from voice and video calls to games to payments to bots to Snapchat-style stories. As its user base and ambitions grew, so did its size. What had been a wafer-thin 8.5MB download in 2012 expanded to take up 130MB of space on users' iPhones. That's about twice the size of WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging app that offers many similar features. But now Facebook has put the iOS version of Messenger on an extreme weight-reduction plan. By rewriting it from scratch, it's shrunk Messenger's footprint on your iPhone down to an eminently manageable 30MB, less than a quarter of its peak size. According to the company, the new version loads twice as fast as the one it's replacing. The update is so compact that Facebook was able to quietly build it into the existing version and test it by exposing it to a subset of users. As a giant piece of programming, the downsizing is even more dramatic. Messenger is going from 1.7 million lines of code to 360,000, for an 84% reduction.

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stikves writes: An organization called Vista Group recently uploaded dozens of VHS and cassette tapes from the 90s and early 2000s to the Internet Archive, and the content within is worth a retro-nostalgia trip back to a simpler, weirder, more wavy time. Vista Group uploaded nearly 200 in the last two months, most of which were uploaded on January 5 -- a rate noticeably higher than their usual 50-70 per month. They're being added to the VHS Vault, an Internet Archive collection of more than 17,500 VHS scans. Most of the videos are instructional or documentary films, like workout or yoga videos or tutorials on installing vinyl flooring or training a dog. There are also a few audio only cassettes in this most recent batch, like "Is It Worth Dying For?," based on Dr. Robert S. Eliot's breakthrough book on stress management.

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Microsoft will retire MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications on June 30, 2020, according to a new post by Alex Payne, GM, Global Technical Learning at Microsoft Worldwide Learning, on the Microsoft Learning Blog. twocows shares a report: Microsoft shifted its focus to role-based training and certifications in September 2018 and has added 34 different certifications since then to its portfolio "across Azure, Modern Workplace, and Business Applications". Since Microsoft is now focusing on role-based training and certifications, it will retire all remaining Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certifications on June 30, 2020.

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AT&T has launched its newest video service brand, called AT&T TV, and it could be the beginning of the end for AT&T's DirecTV offering. From a report: That's because AT&T TV is like DirectTV in many ways: It allows you to watch more than 100 live TV channels, but whereas DirecTV requires you to have a satellite dish, AT&T TV only requires that you have an internet connection. AT&T TV also goes further than DirectTV. Not only can you watch hundreds of live TV channels, the service, which is housed in a set-top box much like the Roku or Apple TV, allows you to also access third-party streaming services such as Netflix and Disney Plus. AT&T TV's remote also comes with Google Assistant built in, Chromecast support, and can even allow you to control smart home devices. But with the introduction of AT&T TV on a nationwide scale (the service has been in testing for months), AT&T's offerings get even more confusing. The Wall Street Journal has a rundown of all the video brands the company offers now, including U-verse, DirectTV, AT&T TV Now, AT&T WatchTV, the new AT&T TV, HBO Go, HBO Now, and the upcoming HBO Max streaming service.

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Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle litigation accusing it of quietly slowing down older iPhones as it launched new models, to induce owners to buy replacement phones or batteries. From a report: The preliminary proposed class-action settlement was disclosed on Friday night and requires approval by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California. It calls for Apple to pay consumers $25 per iPhone, which may be adjusted up or down depending on how many iPhones are eligible, with a minimum total payout of $310 million. Apple denied wrongdoing and settled the nationwide case to avoid the burdens and costs of litigation, court papers show. Friday's settlement covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7Plus or SE that ran the iOS 10.2.1 or later operating system. It also covers U.S. owners of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus that ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017.

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Researchers have discovered an unusual ultra-massive snowman-shaped star with an atmospheric composition never seen before.

The email addresses and travel details of about 10,000 people who used free wi-fi at UK railway stations have been exposed online. From a report: Network Rail and the service provider C3UK confirmed the incident three days after being contacted by BBC News about the matter. The database, found online by a security researcher, contained 146 million records, including personal contact details and dates of birth. It was not password protected. Named railway stations in screenshots seen by BBC News include Harlow Mill, Chelmsford, Colchester, Waltham Cross, Burnham, Norwich and London Bridge. C3UK said it had secured the exposed database - a back-up copy that included about 10,000 email addresses -- as soon as it had been drawn to their attention by researcher Jeremiah Fowler, from Security Discovery. "To the best of our knowledge, this database was only accessed by ourselves and the security firm and no information was made publicly available," it said. "Given the database did not contain any passwords or other critical data such as financial information, this was identified as a low-risk potential vulnerability."

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Voter suppression is a philosophical crime. In the US we have a rule -- one person, one vote. So from a voting standpoint, state govt officials have as much say as any other voter. One vote. That's it. But they're trying to make their vote more powerful by preventing yours.

Malware developers are always trying to outdo each other with creations that are stealthier and more advanced than their competitors'. At the RSA Security conference last week, a former hacker for the National Security Agency demonstrated an approach that's often more effective: stealing and then repurposing a rival's code. From a report: Patrick Wardle, who is now a security researcher at the macOS and iOS enterprise management firm Jamf, showed how reusing old Mac malware can be a smarter and less resource-intensive approach for deploying ransomware, remote access spy tools, and other types of malicious code. Where the approach really pays dividends, he said, is with the repurposing of advanced code written by government-sponsored hackers. "There are incredibly well-funded, well-resourced, very motivated hacker groups in three-letter agencies that are creating amazing malware that's fully featured and also fully tested," Wardle said during a talk titled "Repurposed Malware: A Dark Side of Recycling." "The idea is: why not let these groups in these agencies create malware and if you're a hacker just repurpose it for your own mission?" he said. To prove the point, Wardle described how he altered four pieces of Mac malware that have been used in in-the-wild attacks over the past several years. The repurposing caused the malware to report to command servers belonging to Wardle rather than the servers designated by the developers. From there, Wardle had full control over the recycled malware. The feat allowed him to use well-developed and fully featured applications to install his own malicious payloads, obtain screenshots and other sensitive data from compromised Macs, and carry out other nefarious actions written into the malware.

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A few years ago I wrote Health care is socialist, about health insurance. But I didn't consider this. If there's a lethal virus going around, and we want to slow it down, we need to know where it is. That's the first thing. We have to test lots of people as they are in South Korea. I suppose we could require that people pay for their own tests, but that's just a tax. We might as well simplify the accounting and pay for the testing with tax dollars. It's the same thing. So when Repubs say it would be bad to make health care socialist, they're tricking you. It already is socialist. They just want to siphon off a fat chunk of the health care money for themselves, for doing nothing.

Two things to watch out for re the virus. 1. There will be anti-vaxer types will say the test gives you the disease, so a fair number of people will refuse to be tested. 2. The government will realize that they need to control the press to control the flow of info about the virus. The result could be they shut down the press. That could happen in the next few weeks. Best to think about it in case it happens. People who read this blog might be the people who figure out how to distribute good info even if the government is trying to stop it. Probably will be easier to do before the press is controlled.