The story of how the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, has produced a nasty propaganda battle between the United States and China. From a report: The two sides have traded some of the sharpest charges made between two nations since the Soviet Union in 1985 falsely accused the CIA of manufacturing AIDS. U.S. intelligence officials don't think the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is "natural" transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don't rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study. "Good science, bad safety" is how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) put this theory in a Feb. 16 tweet. He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of an "engineered bioweapon" or a "deliberate release." Cotton's earlier loose talk about bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January and called the outbreak "worse than Chernobyl."

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Thousands of personal Zoom videos have been left viewable on the open Web, highlighting the privacy risks to millions of Americans as they shift many of their personal interactions to video calls in an age of social distancing. From a report: Many of the videos appear to have been recorded through Zoom's software and saved onto separate online storage space without a password. But because Zoom names every video recording in an identical way, a simple online search can reveal a long stream of videos that anyone can download and watch. Zoom videos are not recorded by default, though call hosts can choose to save them to Zoom servers or their own computers. There's no indication that live-streamed videos or videos saved onto Zoom's servers are publicly visible. But many participants in Zoom calls may be surprised to find their faces, voices and personal information exposed because a call host can record a large group call without participants' consent.

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What games have you been playing on your Xbox, or PlayStation, or Nintendo Switch? Any game on your PC?

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SoftBank is walking away from a sizeable chunk of its WeWork rescue package, which included a near billion dollar windfall for ousted founder Adam Neumann. From a report: The Japanese tech company has backed out of a plan to buy $3 billion worth of shares in the coworking startup from existing shareholders and investors, according to statements from SoftBank and a special committee of WeWork's board. SoftBank's chief legal officer, Rob Townsend, said in a statement on Thursday that the share purchase was subject to certain conditions agreed to in October. "Several of those conditions were not met, leaving SoftBank no choice but to terminate the tender offer," he said.

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An anonymous reader shares a column: Remember that story about the Polish dentist who pulled out all of her ex-boyfriend's teeth in an act of revenge? It was complete and utter bullshit. 100% fabricated. No one knows who wrote it. Nevertheless, it was picked up by Fox News, the Los Angeles Times and many other publishers. That was eight years ago, yet when I search now for "dentist pulled ex boyfriends teeth," I get a featured snippet that quotes ABC News' original, uncorrected story. Who invented the fidget spinner? Ask Google Assistant and it will tell you that Catherine Hettinger did: a conclusion based on poorly-reported stories from The Guardian, The New York Times and other major news outlets. Bloomberg's Joshua Brustein clearly demonstrated that Ms. Hettinger did not invent the low friction toy. Nevertheless, ask Google Assistant "who really invented the fidget spinner?" and you'll get the same answer: Catherine Hettinger. In 1998, the velocity of information was slow and the cost of publishing it was high (even on the web). Google leveraged those realities to make the best information retrieval system in the world. Today, information is free, plentiful and fast moving; somewhat by design, Google has become a card catalog that is constantly being reordered by an angry, misinformed mob. The web was supposed to forcefully challenge our opinions and push back, like a personal trainer who doesn't care how tired you say you are. Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need. But, it's not our bodies that are turning into mush: It's our minds.

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A senior Amazon executive called a fired Staten Island warehouse worker "not smart or articulate" in internal discussions about how the company should respond to employee criticism of its handling of the pandemic, Bloomberg reported Friday. From a report: Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky said fired worker Chris Smalls should be the focus of Amazon's public-relations campaign countering activist employees, said the person who saw an internal memo. Amazon workers around the country have been walking off the job or holding demonstrations to highlight what they describe as inadequate safety precautions. Smalls said the memo reveals that Amazon is more interested in managing its public image than protecting workers, and he called on employees to keep pressuring the company to implement stronger safeguards. "Amazon wants to make this about me, but whether Jeff Bezos likes it or not, this is about Amazon workers -- and their families -- everywhere," he said, referring to the company's chief executive officer. "There are thousands of scared workers waiting for a real plan from Amazon so that its facilities do not become epicenters of the crisis. More and more positive cases are turning up every day."

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I think what Bill Gates is doing is terrific, but it's ironic that the thing that helped the Mac take over from Windows were viruses, and Microsoft's refusal at first to do anything about them.

Meetings on Zoom, the increasingly popular video conferencing service, are encrypted using an algorithm with serious, well-known weaknesses, and sometimes using keys issued by servers in China, even when meeting participants are all in North America, according to researchers at the University of Toronto. From a report: The researchers also found that Zoom protects video and audio content using a home-grown encryption scheme, that there is a vulnerability in Zoom's "waiting room" feature, and that Zoom appears to have at least 700 employees in China spread across three subsidiaries. They conclude, in a report for the university's Citizen Lab -- widely followed in information security circles -- that Zoom's service is "not suited for secrets" and that it may be legally obligated to disclose encryption keys to Chinese authorities and "responsive to pressure" from them.

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For the past two weeks, a hacker has been breaking into Elasticsearch servers that have been left open on the internet without a password and attempting to wipe their content, while also leaving the name of a cyber-security firm behind, trying to divert blame. From a report: According to security researcher John Wethington, one of the people who saw this campaign unfolding and who aided ZDNet in this report, the first intrusions began around March 24. The attacks appear to be carried with the help of an automated script that scans the internet for ElasticSearch systems left unprotected, connects to the databases, attempts to wipe their content, and then creates a new empty index called nightlionsecurity.com. The attacking script doesn't appear to work in all instances, though, as the nightlionsecurity.com index is also present in databases where the content has been left intact.

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It sucks that there isn't a wiki-type food ordering app that takes no percentage of sales. I want the money to go to the deliverers and the restaurants. The restaurant would pay a flat monthly fee. At this late date there is no justification for the money the middlemen make.

Facebook representatives approached controversial surveillance vendor NSO Group to try and buy a tool that could help Facebook better monitor a subset of its users, according to an extraordinary court filing from NSO in an ongoing lawsuit. From a report: Facebook is currently suing NSO for how the hacking firm leveraged a vulnerability in WhatsApp to help governments hack users. NSO sells a product called Pegasus, which allows operators to remotely infect cell phones and lift data from them. According to a declaration from NSO CEO Shalev Hulio, two Facebook representatives approached NSO in October 2017 and asked to purchase the right to use certain capabilities of Pegasus. At the time, Facebook was in the early stages of deploying a VPN product called Onavo Protect, which, unbeknownst to some users, analyzed the web traffic of users who downloaded it to see what other apps they were using. According to the court documents, it seems the Facebook representatives were not interested in buying parts of Pegasus as a hacking tool to remotely break into phones, but more as a way to more effectively monitor phones of users who had already installed Onavo.

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Another thing that will happen, is already happening. More art will flow through the net. It's now the main form of human expression. I predicted this, going back to the beginning. People thought I was nuts. We were building a platform for human expression. Communication with a Big C.

I predict that this week we will finally realize, the vast majority of Americans, that Trump is a distraction, an impediment, a sideshow. Finally the focus will be where it should have been since January, the virus.

As time goes by more of us will realize the danger we're in. Soon it will be universal. Everyone will feel it. This will have a benefit. Being right doesn't matter as much as you thought. We can be more accepting of ourselves and each other.

And don't forget, we have a podcast feed for the Cuomo daily briefings. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client.