Went grocery shopping today. Found it impossible not to put my fingers in my mouth when trying to open the plastic bags for fruit and produce. Touching all kinds of surfaces that probably are infected. The place had a Thanksgiving-like feel to it. Could just be a Friday thing in late winter. I've been stocking up on canned goods. I buy about twice as much as I need every week. Also noted there is plenty of toilet paper on the shelves. Apparently people here aren't so scared of running out. The only thing that was in short supply was Bread Alone bread, for some reason. I should've asked. It looks like they're not going to carry it in the future? That would be not good.

Ten years ago, David Wang pulled off a remarkable trick, installing Android on the first-generation iPhone. Now Wang and his colleagues at cybersecurity startup Corellium are doing it again with the ostentatiously titled Project Sandcastle. From a report: And Forbes got an exclusive hands-on look at their Android for iPhone product ahead of its public release scheduled for later this Wednesday. The timing is sure to have Apple fanboys rubbernecking: Corellium is in the middle of being sued by Apple. As previously reported by Forbes, in August last year, Corellium was taken to court over Apple claims the startup breached copyright laws by creating software versions of the iPhone for security and testing. The case took a surprise turn late last month when Apple subpoenaed Spanish banking giant Santander and the $50 billion U.S. military and intelligence contractor L3Harris. But Corellium has lofty ambitions for Project Sandcastle, saying that it'll actually show how Apple's walled garden, which it has fiercely protected since launching its flagship phone in 2007, can be deconstructed and taken over by others' software. "Project Sandcastle is about having fun building something new from the sand -- from the literal silicon of the hardware," said Corellium CEO Amanda Gorton, in a statement sent to Forbes. "Apple restricts iPhone users to operate inside a sandbox, but users own that hardware, and they should be able to use that hardware the way they want. So where sandboxes create limits and boundaries on the hardware that users own, sandcastles provide an opportunity to create something new and wonderful from the limitless bounds of your imagination."

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As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread in the US and other countries, demand for products like face masks and hand sanitizer has led to a spike in prices. To combat price gouging, online retailer eBay is banning some listings related to the coronavirus. From a report: In a notice to eBay sellers posted Thursday and spotted earlier by CNBC, eBay said it would block new listings and remove existing listings in the US for disinfecting wipes, hand sanitizer and face masks, including N95/N100 masks and surgical masks. The listings are being removed due to concerns that inflated prices for these products may violate US laws or regulations. eBay also said it will remove any listings, except for books, that mention COVID-19, coronavirus or 2019nCoV in the title or description. It's unclear how long the ban will last.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: For those who don't want to dive fully into torrents, Plex is a great alternative for streaming television shows and movies for free. Officially, Plex is a "neutral" media player, and it first became popular with people looking to stream content between devices at home, like from their desktop in the study to their laptop in their bedroom. But, with Plex Media Server, users can also share media with other users to stream, creating a virtual free-for-all, and a serious problem from a copyright perspective. CreativeFuture, a pro-copyright coalition boasting more than 560 members, has taken notice and is calling out the platform, along with rival service Kodi. "Thanks to a rapidly growing media application called Plex, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (for criminals who have no problem with profiting from content that doesn't belong to them, that is)," the coalition writes in a blog post. Those who pay $4.99 per month for Plex Pass are able to share their libraries with up to 100 users. As Creative Future points out, this isn't always done for the sake of altruism, or so family's can share their legally procured copies of Frozen. Some Plex users actually charge for access to their content -- a more nefarious (though, granted, enterprising) evolution from the totally free world of torrenting. For extra sass, the shared content can be pirated to begin with.

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Quibi, a streaming service that has already raised more than $1.6 billion, is finally almost here, and in an effort to entice people who are probably already spending too much on content every month, the short form video streaming service is giving people a 90-day free trial for a limited time. From a report: The company is also planning to pump an impressive amount of content into the app within that time. Quibi is set to launch on April 6th with 50 shows and movies, half of which consists of "daily essential" programming that's constantly being updated. More will be released throughout the first month and beyond. After the 90-day trial, Quibi will cost $4.99 with ads, and $7.99 without. That's more expensive than Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus, both of which run ad-free.

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Preview of next feature for LO2 -- sorting.

A bipartisan pair of US senators on Thursday introduced long-rumored legislation known as the EARN IT Act. The bill is meant to combat child sexual exploitation online, but if passed, it could hurt encryption as we know it. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, writes: Because the Department of Justice has largely failed in its mission to convince the public that tech firms should stop using end-to-end encryption, it's decided to try a different tack. Instead of demanding that tech firms provide access to messages only in serious criminal circumstances and with a warrant, the DoJ and backers in Congress have decided to leverage concern around the distribution of child pornography, also known as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. [...] End-to-end encryption systems make CSAM scanning more challenging: this is because photo scanning systems are essentially a form of mass surveillance -- one that's deployed for a good cause -- and end-to-end encryption is explicitly designed to prevent mass surveillance. So photo scanning while also allowing encryption is a fundamentally hard problem, one that providers don't yet know how to solve. All of this brings us to EARN IT. The new bill, out of Lindsey Graham's Judiciary committee, is designed to force providers to either solve the encryption-while-scanning problem, or stop using encryption entirely. And given that we don't yet know how to solve the problem -- and the techniques to do it are basically at the research stage of R&D -- it's likely that "stop using encryption" is really the preferred goal. EARN IT works by revoking a type of liability called Section 230 that makes it possible for providers to operate on the Internet, by preventing the provider for being held responsible for what their customers do on a platform like Facebook. The new bill would make it financially impossible for providers like WhatsApp and Apple to operate services unless they conduct "best practices" for scanning their systems for CSAM. Since there are no "best practices" in existence, and the techniques for doing this while preserving privacy are completely unknown, the bill creates a government-appointed committee that will tell technology providers what technology they have to use. The specific nature of the committee is byzantine and described within the bill itself. Needless to say, the makeup of the committee, which can include as few as zero data security experts, ensures that end-to-end encryption will almost certainly not be considered a best practice.

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NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the prob, which has crossed into interstellar space. From a report: Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now 13 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations. But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades. On any given day, NASA communicates with an armada of spacecraft in deep space. These long distance calls require the most powerful radio antennas in the world. Luckily NASA has its own switchboard, the Deep Space Network or DSN.

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Investors and clients of the facial recognition start-up freely used the app on dates and at parties -- and to spy on the public. From a report: One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn't recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo. Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter's date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.. Ms. Catsimatidis said she and her date had no idea how her father had identified him so quickly. Clearview was unknown to the general public until this January, when The New York Times reported that the secretive start-up had developed a breakthrough facial recognition system that was in use by hundreds of law enforcement agencies. The company quickly faced a backlash on multiple fronts. Facebook, Google and other tech giants sent cease-and-desist letters. Lawsuits were filed in Illinois and Virginia, and the attorney general of New Jersey issued a moratorium against the app in that state. [...] The Times, however, has identified multiple individuals with active access to Clearview's technology who are not law enforcement officials. And for more than a year before the company became the subject of public scrutiny, the app had been freely used in the wild by the company's investors, clients and friends.

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We will look back at March 2020 as the good old days when the virus was more or less contained. Will we ever get back to this level again of containment? What will the survivors witness? What will be left if our economy? Will anyone ever say again we don’t need government?

There's a new version of nodeStorage that supports the enhanced File/Open dialog in LO2.

Asked on Twitter: I have a Mac and an iPhone. What's the best way to get a text file from my Mac onto my iPhone. Best == least work. Lots of answers. The thing I like about email the best is that the same approach works from a browser-based app like LO2. I can add email capabilities there so I can make a list in the outliner and email it to my phone. That will be beautiful.

Tens of millions of merchants and users in India are struggling to make online transactions and use several popular services after the nation's central bank seized control of Yes Bank, the fourth largest lender in the country. From a report: The emergency takeover of the private sector bank has taken off several financial startups that rely on it for facilitating services such as processing QR codes, point-of-sale terminals as well as transactions of UPI-based payments. Leading payments app PhonePe, owned by e-commerce giant Walmart, has been inaccessible to tens of millions of its users since Thursday evening (local time). The startup said in a statement that it was working to restore its services, and has solved some of the issues for its merchant partners. [...] New Delhi took over Yes Bank midnight on Thursday, after the Reserve Bank of India said it had no alternative but to implement measures to replace the private sector firm's board and temporarily restrict withdrawals and suspend all other transactions for 30 days. Yes Bank has struggled for months to raise capital to improve its financials. According to NPCI, Yes Bank is the technology banking partner for ticketing platforms Cleartrip, MakeMyTrip, and RedBus, telecom operator Airtel, food-delivery startup Swiggy, movie ticketing business BookMyShow and PVR, Microsoft's chat service Kaizala, as well as several other Flipkart properties including the marquee service, fashion platforms Jabong, and Myntra.

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I was CEO of a small Silicon Valley company in the 1980s. Even back then, lawyers were advising companies to settle with employees who made claims, even when the company had done nothing wrong.

Here's why. Lawyers are expensive, as are trials, and some employees make a business of suing their employers, knowing that they will settle instead of contesting the claim because it's far less expensive.

We only had one such claim, for age discrimination. I forget how much we paid, but it was a lot for a company our size. And it came with a mutual NDA. It wasn't to keep the employee from talking, it was to keep the company silent, because we were the ones who were harmed. After the suit was over and settled, I realized then why none of his references were willing to talk about him. He was going through the Valley, to companies who were hungry for skilled programmers, and willing to take a chance, with or without references. No doubt we weren't the last company to pay him off and accept an NDA.

Also, even if there is no NDA, the laws in California and New York heavily favor the employee. So the company isn't likely to say much about a former employee it had differences with, because it could very easily turn into an expensive lawsuit.

Just want to say NDAs are not nearly as simple as candidate Elizabeth Warren made them sound in the debates. I know from experience and I am not a lawyer, she is, and I'm sure she knows all about it.

One thing I want from the eventual Democratic nominee. A promise not to pardon Trump or any of his co-conspirators.