An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: City authorities in Moscow are rolling out new digital "social monitoring" tools targeting the public, after what officials say were constant violations of the city's quarantine imposed this week to fight the spread of the new coronavirus. Under restrictions in place since Monday, most of the city's 12 million residents must remain indoors, barring a few exceptions -- like trips to the supermarket or pharmacy, taking out the trash or briefly walking the dog. But starting Thursday, Muscovites will have their movements tracked through a mandatory app required on their smartphones. Don't have one? The city says it will lend out devices. In addition, Moscow residents will be obligated to register for a government-issued QR code -- a small square matrix bar code containing personal data. What information the codes will hold isn't yet clear. But Russians must present it on their smartphones or carry a printout of their QR profiles to present to police, when requested. (City officials say they're also preparing to educate the public -- and elder Russians, in particular -- on what a QR code actually is.) The new tools will merge with existing street cameras and face recognition software to quickly identify residents who stray from their homes and/or quarantines, say authorities. President Putin also signed a bill into law on Wednesday that introduces criminal penalties for skipping quarantine and infecting others. They include fines and up to seven years in prison.

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The internet is rife with online communities where users can go and share Zoom conference codes and request that pranksters connect and hurl insults, play pornographic material, or make death threats against other participants -- in a practice called Zoom-bombing or a Zoom raid. From a report: ZDNet began tracking the tactic since mid-March when the term was first coined following a TechCrunch article. Ever since then, Zoom-bombing incidents have increased, as articles in major news outlets like the New York Times and the BBC have made the practice a favorite pastime for all the teenagers stuck in their homes during the current coronavirus (COVID-19) quarantines. From a niche prank that started on a derelict Discord channel, Zoom-bombing has now spread to enormous proportions -- being so rampant these days that the FBI sent a nationwide alert last week, urging companies, schools, and universities to take steps to secure their Zoom channels. But as Zoom-bombing became more popular, more pranksters wanted to join on the fun, and more users wanted their friends' Zoom meetings disrupted. And as the old saying goes; where there's a demand, there's always a supply. Over the course of the past week, the number of places on the public internet where you can request a zoom raid from a gang of bored teenagers has exploded.

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President Trump moved to use the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era national security mobilization law, to secure supplies companies need to make ventilators. From a report: "My order to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Homeland Security will help domestic manufacturers like General Electric, Hill-Rom, Medtronic, ResMed, Royal Philips, and Vyaire Medical secure the supplies they need to build ventilators needed to defeat the virus," Mr. Trump said in statement that accompanied his order. He praised the companies and other domestic manufacturers for ramping up production of the machines and said the order "will save lives by removing obstacles in the supply chain that threaten the rapid production of ventilators."

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Today's Daily podcast interview with Anthony Fauci may be the most consequential podcast ever. In the last ten minutes they finally get to the important stuff, i.e. what's coming. Now I understand the next phase of the virus much better. I'm also glad to hear they're considering the functioning of society in their plans. At some point we're going to have to provide health care to the people who can't afford it, if we ever want to come out of this. Imho the sooner the better, but Fauci has to take as a given that the president is who he is. I've never said anything was more of a must-listen than this podcast. I think they should play the last ten minutes on Maddow tonight. Everyone with a mind needs to hear this.

EU justice chief Vera Jourova on Thursday criticised U.S. tech giants such as Google and Facebook for making money off coronavirus-related fake news instead of putting in more efforts to stop the deluge. From a report: With millions of people confined to their homes due to lockdowns to counter the spread of the virus, social media and online platforms have seen the volume of news on their sites and user traffic soared. That has in turn sparked alarm and criticism because of the flood of disinformation. Jourova, who last week held a conference call with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, said their efforts to date were inadequate. The companies last week told Jourova that they had removed large quantities of false and harmful content, the bulk of which related to health, and taken measures to remove ads related to protective equipment, such as masks, although there were still gaps. They also pledged to step up measures to increase users' access to authoritative sources of information.

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Everything is so dark, but the internet -- for all its bad and broken parts -- is helping to keep us together in a way that has never happened before, writes Joshua Topolsky in an essay on Input Mag. Two excerpts from the essay: What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be. At a time when politicians and many corporations have exhibited the worst instincts, we're seeing some of the best of what humanity has to offer -- and we're seeing it because the internet exists. I was 12 the first time I logged onto whatever was called the internet then. There were no websites to speak of, not really. No ecommerce, no banner ads, no data tracking, no spyware. iPhones hadn't been invented yet; we called apps "programs"; and I had an EGA monitor on my PC (a whole 16 colors of range). But the first time I telnetted into a chatroom about raves, made new friends in Australia, or downloaded files to load into a music tracker, I felt the same elation that I feel now. This force, propelled by people, connected by copper and light, letting us make new connections. Connections we need now more than ever. We're here together, for how long we don't know. But we're not alone. Not anymore.

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My poor uncle, my father's brother, was murdered. I think how sad that the last person he saw was someone who had just killed him. I feel the same way about watching The Trump Show on MSNBC every evening at 6PM. He's murdering us. Why would we want to listen to him?

Two million years ago, Africa was home to three human-like species, new discoveries reveal.

Think before you RT. I am once again unfollowing people who RT Trump, and I am now also unfollowing people who RT Kellyanne Conway. They make us stupid. Waste our capacity to think. Reduce everything to emotion. Trump and Conway are intellectual pneumonia. They fill your mind with emotional nonsense, crowding out your ability to think. The cure is simple. Distance yourself from them, and people who are infected with them. Even people you like.

Amazon is no longer offering N95 masks to the general public, as it prioritizes the delivery of essential supplies to hospitals, government agencies and other groups amid the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: Earlier this week, the company rolled out a new section of its website dedicated to COVID-19 related supplies. There, any U.S.-accredited hospital or state or federal agency can fill out a form to access necessary items like N95 masks, surgical masks, facial shields, surgical gowns, surgical gloves and large-volume sanitizers. The site states it is not accepting requests from the general public, noting: "We are not accepting requests from individuals or non-qualified organizations at this time." Amazon also noted it will not make a profit from the orders.

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This is a technical description of a new server bridge between two apps, PagePark and Little Outliner. It's now possible to view user-editable files through PagePark as long as they've been made public. This is how the pieces fit together.

• PagePark is a Node-based HTTP server that has special understanding of two kinds of files -- Markdown and OPML.
• For Markdown files, it renders them in a template. So you don't have to repeat the envelope for each bit of text, and it's easy to modify, for all pages. So it's a bit of a CMS for Markdown files. It also can connect directly to GitHub repos, so it can serve from them, which is nice because Markdown is a default format on GitHub.
• PagePark also has a special ability to render OPML files. I use this feature for my this.how site which I've been using to accumulate documents that I want to revise over time. Unlike blog posts, they are not ephemeral. Examples include my Trolling howto and the Google and HTTP doc.
• So to sum up, what's special about PagePark, for this situation, is that it's really good at rendering OPML documents.
• Little Outliner is an outline editor that runs in a web browser. Its native format is OPML.
• Every file you edit with LO2 is either public or private.
• I have a copy of PagePark running on the same machine as the server that runs Little Outliner. I created a bridge between the two apps, on the server, that allows PagePark to serve from each users' public folder. When you access the page, you'll see a beautifully rendered version, like my this.how documents. Here's an example.
• This might sound complicated, because you've probably never thought of the software that runs these apps. But conceptually it's simple. There's a new bridge between LO2 and PagePark. That bridge is a PagePark plug-in.
• I've been talking about the new plug-in ability for PagePark. I needed that to create this connection. I've designed a lot of plug-in architectures over many years, and this is a good one. All web servers running in JavaScript should consider doing it this way. The plug-in I use for this bridge, is a bit of logic that translates a URL from the outside, to a file in the user's public folder. I've published the source. As you can see, there's not much there.
• To really nail it, it turns this source file into this rendering. That's it. The next step, soon, will be to present a document that explains how to edit and view these files through the new bridge. If you have questions, post a comment here.

Posted on Facebook by Daniel Schmachtenberger. "Hong Kong and Italy got exposed to the same virus. The pandemic is not caused by a virus, it's caused by the failure of effective governance. In other words, the huge and preventable numbers of people dying currently...are dying from the effects of dysfunctional governance."

A community effort to improve the internet's routing security has won the backing of some of the web's biggest names. From a report: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Akamai, and Netflix, among others, have signed up to the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) group, in their roles as content delivery networks (CDNs) and cloud providers (CPs). MANRS's goal is to shore up the internet's lax security when it comes to routing people's connections around Earth. It is, essentially, depending on the circumstances, too easy for miscreants to hijack and redirect internet traffic from legit servers to malicious machines so that web browsing and other online activities can be snooped on or meddled with. This widespread issue is something that has become increasingly important in the past few years as the number and size of connectivity breakdowns and attacks on the global system have grown. Criminals and possibly government spies have realized the potential that exists in snatching people's internet traffic for surveillance, disruption, and theft. The MANRS group pushes four main approaches, two technical and two cultural: filtering, anti-spoofing, and then coordination and validation.

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Just like Intel said at CES, it's crossed the 5GHz barrier with its new H-series 10th generation notebook CPUs. And you won't need to shell out for the top-of-the-line Core i9 to do it: The new six and eight-core i7 processors reach up to 5.1Ghz (boost speed) on a single core. From a report: But if you want to go all out, the octa-core i9-10980HK hits 5.3GHz -- and it's fully unlocked for overclocking, to boot. As usual, these H-series chips are meant for gaming and workhorse machines, not laptops where battery efficiency is key. You can expect around 44 percent better performance in Assassin's Creed Odyssey in 1080p with high settings, compared to the three-year-old Core i7-7700HQ. And the new top-of-the-line Core i9 is 54 percent faster in Red Dead Redemption 2, compared to the i7-7820HK (there weren't any mobile Core i9 chips three years ago). Reaching beyond 5GHz is a notable achievement, and it's a nice deflect away from Intel's reliance on its 14nm "Comet Lake" architecture, just like its last batch of powerful ultraportable CPUs. Intel is competing directly with AMD's new 4000 series Ryzen mobile processors, which also offer up to eight cores, but with a lower 4.4GHz maximum clock speed. AMD is using a refined 7nm architecture, which makes them more efficient power-wise. And AMD's new chips also include up to 8 cores of Radeon Vega graphics, which can easily trounce Intel's aging UHD graphics. But really, all of these processors are best suited for notebooks with dedicated GPUs, so it makes sense for Intel to skimp on that for now.

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I ordered dish towels from Amazon, just got them! I'm a happy home maker.