HPE announced on Tuesday it's working with Intel and the Linux Foundation on a new open source software project to help automate the roll out of 5G across multiple sites. From a report: The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE's move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM's Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology. HPE will also introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator.

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Popular video-conferencing Zoom is leaking personal information of at least thousands of users, including their email address and photo, and giving strangers the ability to attempt to start a video call with them through Zoom. From a report: The issue lies in Zoom's "Company Directory" setting, which automatically adds other people to a user's lists of contacts if they signed up with an email address that shares the same domain. This can make it easier to find a specific colleague to call when the domain belongs to an individual company. But multiple Zoom users say they signed up with personal email addresses, and Zoom pooled them together with thousands of other people as if they all worked for the same company, exposing their personal information to one another.

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Widespread use of nonmedical masks could reduce community transmission. But recommending their broad use could also cause a run on the kind of masks that health care workers desperately need. From a report: Should healthy people be wearing masks when they're outside to protect themselves and others? Both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have repeatedly said that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing. And as health care workers around the world face shortages of N95 masks and protective gear, public health officials have warned people not to hoard masks. But those official guidelines may be shifting. On Monday during the coronavirus task force briefing, President Trump was asked whether Americans should wear nonmedical masks. "That's certainly something we could discuss," he said. "It could be something like that for a limited period of time." Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., confirmed in an interview with National Public Radio on Monday that the agency was reviewing its guidelines on who should wear masks. Citing new data that shows high rates of transmission from people who are infected but show no symptoms, he said the guidance on mask wearing was "being critically re-reviewed, to see if there's potential additional value for individuals that are infected or individuals that may be asymptomatically infected." The coronavirus is probably three times as infectious as the flu, Dr. Redfield said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, we learn some new details about the upcoming Linux Mint 20. While most of the newly revealed information is positive, there is one thing that is sure to upset many Linux Mint users. First things first, Linux Mint 20 will be based on the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04. This shouldn't come as a surprise, as Mint only uses Long Term Support versions of Ubuntu, and 20.04 will be an LTS. We also now know the name of Linux Mint 20. The Mint team always uses female names, and this time they chose "Ulyana." This is apparently a Russian name meaning "youthful." So far, all of the news is positive, so what exactly will upset some users? The Linux Mint developers are finally dropping 32-bit support and will only produce 64-bit ISOs.

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Ground monitoring stations in major British cities detect clear reductions in two major pollutants.

Apple acquired popular mobile weather service Dark Sky to help bolster the Weather applications on its devices. From a report: The service, which has existed on the web and on iPhone and Android platforms, stood out from the competition by offering more specific data and notifications such as when it is about to rain. Dark Sky announced the deal on its website, saying "we're thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone." The companies didn't specify the price of the deal. Apple has included a Weather app on its devices since the first iPhone and currently gets its data from The Weather Channel. It could use this purchase to revamp its Weather app.

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It was my friend JY's idea to put a smile on my mask. I'm not any kind of artist, but I actually love the idea.

They did a movie about Trump, one of the best movies of all time.

Satellite radio giant SiriusXM announced today it's made its 300-plus channel streaming service available for free in North America starting today through May 15.

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My NYC correspondent. "I was already cautiously optimistic that the virus is milder than we realize, because of the testing bias towards very ill patients. Now there's evidence that may be true, from a Dutch study that would not only explain why it spreads so well, but is an argument for why 100% of the population should wear masks in public, and why we should exhaustively test healthy people as well. The more people who have already been infected with sub-clinical or no symptoms, the lower and sooner the peak will be, at least here in NYC where it's already likely to sweep the population."

In the era of big data, memes and disinformation, the Democrats are trying to regain their digital edge as the president and his loyalists dictate the terms of debate. From a report: The deceptively edited video that purported to show Joseph R. Biden Jr. endorsing President Trump's re-election bounced relentlessly around the internet, falsely painting the former vice president as too confused to know what office he was running for or whom he was vying to run against. The doctored video didn't originate with one of the extremist sites that trade in left-bashing disinformation. It was posted on Twitter by Mr. Trump's own social media director. [...] The video, based on a speech Mr. Biden gave earlier this month, registered five million views in a day before his campaign responded -- with statements to the press and cable interviews that largely focused on persuading Facebook to follow the example of Twitter, which had labeled the content "manipulated media." A direct social media counterattack, aides said later, would have risked spreading the damage. [...] As Mr. Biden closes in on his party's nomination, that digital mismatch underscores one of the Democrats' biggest general-election challenges: They are up against a political figure who has marshaled all the forces of the modern web to refract reality and savage his opponents. Yet they are starting from a deficit, struggling to regain their once-formidable online edge. Now closing this technological divide has taken on deepening urgency, with public life shut down against the threat of the coronavirus. Already, Mr. Biden's allies have expressed anxiety about his ability to break into the national conversation around the pandemic as it reverberates from the president's daily briefings to social media feeds. If modern politics is increasingly digital politics, today even more so. In the three years since Hillary Clinton's humiliating 2016 defeat, the Democrats have been urgently scrambling to reorder the digital equation, an all-hands-on-deck effort that has drawn a range of new donors, progressive activists and operatives together with veterans of the tech-forward Obama campaigns and the old-line contributors and party regulars of the Bill Clinton era. So far, the Democrats and their allies have produced new apps to organize volunteers and register voters, new media outlets to pump out anti-Trump content and a major new data initiative to drive what the party hopes will be the biggest voter-mobilization effort in its history.

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The FBI has issued an alert on Monday about state-sponsored hackers using the Kwampirs malware to attack supply chain companies and other industry sectors as part of a global hacking campaign. From a report: This marks the third alert about this particular group sent this year, in as many months, after the FBI sent alerts on January 6 and February 5. This time around, the FBI highlighted that some of the group's targets are organizations in the healthcare industry, currently grappling with the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. Besides sending out a PIN (Private Industry Notification), the FBI has also published two Flash alerts, one containing YARA rules to identify the group's Kwampirs malware on infected networks, and the second containing a technical report, complete with IOCs (indicators of compromise).

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Nate Silver is running an interesting poll.

Usually I get groceries once a week, and there's nothing surprising about it, certainly nothing that's blogworthy. Today it's different. It was time to go, and I dreaded it. But I had a mask, and they have sanitizing wipes at the front door, and I had read all about how to do it safely, so I went. A few notes.

• The store wasn't empty, but it wasn't very full either. People were cheerful, as they often are in the country. I didn't think I'd be able to smile through the mask, but I figured it out. I say hello and tell the other person that I'm wearing a mask (obviously) and smiling under it. Which of course makes my eyes smile.
• I got everything I wanted, almost, and more. It's still an American supermarket. Filled to the brim with goodies and the essentials. I got meat, milk, eggs, veggies, bags of onions, potatos and oranges. A 24-pack of water and my two favorite kinds of diet soda.
• And to my surprise they had wipes! I got the last two packages. And they have a limit of two per customer. See the photo below. This made the whole trip worthwhile. I desperately have wanted to have some of the basic sanitizing supplies at home. Now I do. And I love that they have the daily limit of two per customer. I heard about people hoarding, coming back to the store three times a day to swipe up all the paper goods and cleaners.
• We're now a few weeks into this crisis, and we're doing better than the worst I had anticipated. America is still America, somewhat. :
• The checkout station was revamped. There's a red line that keeps you from getting to close to the checkout person. There's a plastic shield separating the customer and the clerk. They don't pack your cloth bags, but they're happy to use their paper bags, which they're now giving out for free after a few months of getting us to switch over.

Two-per customer limit for sanitizing wipes at Woodstock supermarket. Good thing.

MSNBC would be doing a great public service if they re-aired Cuomo's briefing in the time slot they've been giving to Trump. He's setting the example for the rest of the country. They would be saving American lives if they help him lead.