schweini shares a report: Every year the world celebrates the anniversaries of masterworks and maestros. In 2020, a host of events and publications commemorated the lives of Ludwig van Beethoven, Raphael, Charles Dickens, Anne Bronte and William Wordsworth. Such milestones usually come in neat multiples of 50. The 42nd anniversary of anything is rarely observed. Yet on March 8th fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ("HHGTTG") paid tribute to the comedy science-fiction series, which had its radio premiere on that day in 1978 and was subsequently adapted into novels, TV series, video games and a film. To mark the occasion, Pan Macmillan reprinted the scripts and novels in colourful new editions ("HHGTTG" was the first book published under their "Pan Original" imprint to sell more than 1m copies). The British Library will host a day of "celebrations, conversation and performance." BBC Radio 4 has aired the original episodes; Radio 4 Extra will put on a "five-hour Hitchhiker's spectacular" including archival material and specially commissioned programmes. Such is the enduring interest in Douglas Adams's story that it is due to be adapted into a new television series by Hulu, a streaming service.

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Telecom operators in India have started to warn users of Covid-19 spread after more than three dozen cases have been detected in the nation. From a report: Subscribers of Reliance Jio, Airtel, and state-run BSNL were greeted with a warning in Hindi and English when they attempted to make a phone call on Sunday. The message, locally known as "caller tune," plays instead of regular phone ring. "Always protect your face with a handkerchief or tissue while coughing or sneezing. Regularly clean hands with soap. Avoid touching your face, eyes, or nose. If someone has cough, fever, or breathlessness maintain one metre distance. If needed, visit your nearest health centre immediately," the pre-recorded message said. Vodafone, the top telecom operator in India, has started to implement the warning message, too, while Airtel is looking to broaden the reach of its alert, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Australia's privacy watchdog is suing Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data breach -- which, back in 2018, became a global scandal that wiped billions off the tech giant's share price yet only led to Facebook picking up a $5B FTC fine. Should Australia prevail in its suit against the tech giant the monetary penalty could be exponentially larger. Australia's Privacy Act sets out a provision for a civil penalty of up to $1,700,000 to be levied per contravention -- and the national watchdog believes there were 311,074 local Facebook users in the cache of ~86M profiles lifted by Cambridge Analytica . So the potential fine here is circa $529B. (A very far cry from the 500k pound Facebook paid in the UK over the same data misuse scandal.)

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Back in the world of the mundane, recall that I've had a problem with UPS deliveries for a while, so I was amazed today when a UPS truck showed up. Alas, it was just a temp driver, subbing for the permanent one. One day we will get this worked out.

Highly recommend this week's Open Source podcast, esp the first segment, an interview with Yale professor Frank Snowden, for a historic perspective of Covid19.

Stanford University canceled in-person classes for the final two weeks of the quarter, switching to online instruction amid rising concern about the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: As the coronavirus first reported in China spreads in the United States, several schools have taken this step as a precaution, hoping to avoid further infections on campus. The University of Washington, which has more than 55,000 students on three campuses, announced Friday that it would switch to virtual classes, and some smaller schools in and near the hard-hit Seattle area, such as Pacific Lutheran University, announced similar plans. On Sunday, Rice University in Houston canceled in-person classes for the week of March 9 and canceled gatherings of 100 or more people through the end of April. An employee tested positive for covid-19 last week after international travel, university officials said in issuing the alert. [...] In New York, where multiple cases have been identified, Columbia University announced Sunday that classes are canceled Monday and Tuesday and that the university strongly discourages nonessential gatherings of more than 25 people. There are no confirmed cases among Columbia students, faculty or staff, but the Ivy League school's president wrote that someone had been quarantined and that the suspension of classes will allow the school to prepare for a shift to remote classes for the remainder of the week.

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Italy has placed up to 16 million people under quarantine as it battles to contain the spread of coronavirus. From a report: Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April. Italy has seen the largest number of coronavirus infections in Europe, with the number of confirmed cases jumping by more than 1,200 to 5,883 on Saturday. Among the latest people to test positive is the army's chief of staff. Salvatore Farina said he felt well and was self-isolating.

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The Brave browser is working on a feature that will randomize its "fingerprint" every time a user visits a website in an attempt to preserve the user's privacy. From a report: Brave's decision comes as online advertisers and analytics firms are moving away from tracking users via cookies to using fingerprints. [...] "The unfortunate truth about all these approaches is that, despite being well-intentioned, none of them are very effective in preventing fingerprinting," the Brave team said of other browser makers' approaches. "The enormous diversity of fingerprinting surface in modern browsers makes these 'block', 'lie' or 'permission' approaches somewhere between insufficient and useless, unfortunately," they added. "Brave's new approach aims to make every browser look completely unique, both between websites and between browsing sessions," Brave developers said.

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According to code seen by 9to5Mac, Apple is set to roll out rich system-wide support for mouse cursors with iOS 14. From a report: Apple added rudimentary compatibility with external mice in iOS 13 Accessibility settings, but iOS 14 (iPadOS 14) will make it mainstream. The iOS 14 build also referenced two new Smart Keyboard models in development. The changes coming to the software will bring most of the cursor features you recognize from a Mac desktop experience to iOS. One difference may be that the pointer disappears automatically after a few seconds of not touching the connected mouse or trackpad, a concession to the touch-first experience of the iPad. It would reappear when the user attempts to move the cursor again. This includes support for multiple pointers depending on what is being hovered over, like switching from a standard arrow pointer to a pointing hand when hovering over links. It is possible these APIs could then automatically translate over to Mac apps using Catalyst, which currently lacks an API for changing mouse cursor type. Apple is also developing support for Mac-like gesture, like tap with two fingers to right-click.

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Jake Voytko, who previously worked at Google, writing in a blog post: [...] Let's move away from Google's competitive advantages. How does DuckDuckGo perform for most of my search traffic? DuckDuckGo does a good job. I haven't found a reason to switch back to Google. I combed through my browser's history of DuckDuckGo searches. I compared it to my Google search history. When I fell back to Google, I often didn't find what I wanted on Google either. Most of my searches relate to my job, which means that most of my searches are technical queries. DuckDuckGo serves good results for my searches. I'll admit that I'm a paranoid searcher: I reformat error strings, remove identifiers that are unique to my code, and remove quotes before searching. I'm not sure how well DuckDuckGo would handle copy/pasted error strings with lots of quotes and unique identifiers. This means that I don't know if DuckDuckGo handles all technical searches well. But it does a good job for me. There are many domains where Google outperforms DuckDuckGo. Product search and local search are some examples. I recently made a window plug. It was much easier to find which big-box hardware stores had the materials I need with Google. I also recently bought a pair of ANC headphones. I got much better comparison information starting at Google. Google also shines with sparse results like rare programming error messages. If you're a programmer, you know what I'm talking about: imagine a Google search page with three results. One is a page in Chinese that has the English error string, one is a forum post that gives you the first hint that you need to solve the problem, and one is the error string in the original source code in Github. DuckDuckGo often returns nothing for these kinds of searches. Even though Google is better for some specific domains, I am confident that DuckDuckGo can find what I need. When it doesn't, Google often doesn't help either.

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BTW, if you want to catch up, here's a direct link to the archive page for Sunday. And the linkblog page.

When last night's email went out, it sent Saturday's posts, not Sunday's. This is pretty hard to debug, I'd have to recreate the conditions of various databases at midnight last night. At first I thought the problem must be related to the Daylight Savings Time switch on Saturday night, but on second thought, how could it? It doesn't really seem likely. And the relevant machines auto-updated their clocks. So for now, I'm going to wait to see what happens tonight. If the right stuff goes out, then I'll just call it an edge case or cosmic rays (programmerese for Act of God) and move on.

Finnish satellite operator Iceye makes movies of activity on the ground through cloud and at night.

Scientists have new evidence to explain why sea turtles eat and become entangled in plastic so often.

John Oliver slammed Disney-owned Hotstar on Sunday for censoring his show, "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver," in India saying the local streaming service had edited at least three of his episodes in recent months. From a report: A recent episode of "Last Week Tonight," in which Oliver criticised the Indian government's recent policies and its leader, Narendra Modi, never aired on Hotstar, which is the exclusive syndicating partner for most of HBO's content in India. [The same episode is available unedited on YouTube.] Oliver also referenced an episode of the show from late last year where he had mocked Disney, a segment he said was cleverly edited before streaming in India. And then, another instance in a segment focused on China's one-child policy in which he joked about Donald Duck's penis. That was also edited before going up for streaming in India, Oliver said. "They cut out a joke about Mickey Mouse being a cocaine addict. Why would they do that? It's hard to say. But it might be because Hotstar is owned by Disney and they seem extra sensitive to Disney references," said Oliver.

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