An anonymous reader shares a report: We've seen several smartphone brands cheat benchmarks over the years, ostensibly in a bid to earn some ill-deserved praise among enthusiasts. But a new report suggests chipset manufacturer MediaTek could be gaming these scores. AnandTech uncovered evidence of benchmark cheating by MediaTek when it received a Helio P95-powered Oppo Reno 3 Pro (European version) and a standard Dimensity 1000L-powered Oppo Reno 3 (Chinese model). The outlet's suspicions were raised when the Reno 3 Pro beat the Reno 3 in the PCMark benchmark utility. This was strange, because the Helio P95's Cortex-A75 CPU cores are two generations older than the Dimensity 1000L's Cortex-A77 CPU cores. Furthermore, the P95 only had two of these cores versus the newer chip's four heavyweight cores. A stealth version of the PCMark benchmark utility -- which manufacturers can't identify -- was installed on the Reno 3 Pro. This revealed a 30% drop in benchmark score compared to the previous questionable score, with Anandtech saying some tests in the benchmark dropped by 75%. The outlet also tested the Chinese version of the Reno 3 Pro, which swaps the Helio P95 for a Snapdragon 765G, and noted the phone ran the benchmark without resorting to cheating. AnandTech then dug into the offending device's firmware files and found references tying benchmark apps to a so-called "sports mode." It's believed that this mode ramps up things like the memory controller and scheduler in order to facilitate faster performance.

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Tail OS, an operating system optimized for privacy and anonymity, has released version 4.5 this week, the first version that supports a crucial security feature named UEFI Secure Boot. From a report: Secure Boot works by using cryptographic signatures to verify that firmware files loaded during a computer's boot-up process are authentic and have not been tampered. If any of the firmware checks fail, Secure Boot has the authority to stop the boot process, preventing the operating system from launching. The feature has been available as part of the UEFI specification for almost two decades but is rarely used. The reason is because not all firmware vendors cryptographically sign their files, leaving the door open to verification errors that -- when Secure Boot is enabled -- block many operation systems from launching.

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On Wednesday, Mozilla chair and longtime leader Mitchell Baker was named permanent CEO of the company that makes the Firefox web browser. From a report: Mitchell became interim CEO of Mozilla in December 2019, after former CEO Chris Beard resigned. The company conducted an external candidate search over the last eight months, and concluded the Mitchell is the right leader for Mozilla at this time, according to a company blog post published Wednesday. "Increasingly, numbers of people recognize that the internet needs attention," Baker said in another Mozilla blog post Wednesday. "Mozilla has a special, if not unique role to play here. It's time to tune our existing assets to meet the challenge. It's time to make use of Mozilla's ingenuity and unbelievable technical depth and understanding of the "web" platform to make new products and experiences. It's time to gather with others who want these things and work together to make them real."

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Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, clearing Joe Biden's path to the Democratic nomination and a showdown with President Donald Trump in November. From a report: Sanders first made the announcement in a call with his staff, his campaign said. "I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth, and that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible," Sanders said in a livestream after the call. "So while we are winning the ideological battle and while we are winning the support of so many young people and working people throughout the country, I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful. And so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign." Sanders' exit caps a stunning reversal of fortune following a strong performance in the first three states that voted in February. The nomination appeared his for the taking until, on the last day of February, Biden surged to a blowout victory in South Carolina that set off a consolidation of moderate voters around the former vice president. The contest ends now as the country continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, which halted in-person campaigning for both Sanders and Biden and has led many states to delay their primary elections."

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An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched Chrome 81 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 81 includes an Origin Trial of Web NFC for mobile, early Augmented Reality support, mixed images autoupgraded to HTTPS, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 deprecated, and more developer features. With over 1 billion users, Chrome is both a browser and a major platform that web developers must consider. In fact, with Chrome's regular additions and changes, developers have to stay on top of everything available -- as well as what has been deprecated or removed. Among other things, Chrome 81 removes the "discard" element and FTP support.

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Google's video game streaming platform, Stadia, is now free to anyone with a Gmail address, the company announced on Wednesday. To sweeten the deal, Google is also giving new users two months of Stadia Pro -- including access to nine games -- for free. From a report: Existing Stadia Pro subscribers won't be charged for the next two months of the service, Google said. Previously, access to Stadia required purchasing the $129 Google Stadia Premiere Edition, a bundle that includes a Chromecast Ultra, a wireless Stadia Controller, and three months of Stadia Pro, the service that offered free games and video streams up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with HDR lighting.

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The major tech companies are scrambling to craft digital options for this year's summer intern class, as businesses remain shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. These companies said they're moving their programs online: Google said it will pay its interns the full rate. Twitter said its intern class may shrink this year. Microsoft said it will have its biggest ever intern class -- more than 4,000. Lyft, which will have the same number of interns as originally planned, limit them to just two start dates to provide students with more of a common experience. Salesforce, which also plans a similar size intern class as intended. These companies are still hoping have at least some interns on-site for at least part of the summer: Apple said it plans to hire more than 1,000 people for a mix of online and in-person internships and pledged in a statement to "extend to our interns the same precautions and care that we're extending to all our other personnel as a part of the ongoing COVID-19 response." Amazon said it expects its biggest-ever class of interns globally, though it said the vast majority of internships will be virtual. Intel, which does plan to have its interns work remotely but hopes to move them on-site should the situation and health authority guidelines make that possible. Uber, which has made plans for online on-boarding and will keep the program online if their offices remain closed, but will aim to have its interns work in the office if that is possible. Doordash said, for now, it "plans to stay the course" with its summer internship program, but is exploring options for conducting the program remotely and will "continue to re-evaluate as the situation progresses."

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According to this emergency room doctor in NYC, Covid-19 is a new disease. Not ARDS. The disease is like being dropped at the summit of Mt Everest without acclimation. He says the standard treatment hurts the patients. Here's the writeup in Stat.

Deep learning algorithms can diagnose, triage, and monitor coronavirus cases from lung images. Next, can they predict who will need a ventilator? From a report: AI-powered analysis of chest scans has the potential to alleviate the growing burden on radiologists, who must review and prioritize a rising number of patient chest scans each day, experts say. And in the future, the technology might help predict which patients are most likely to need a ventilator or medication, and which can be sent home. "That's the brass ring," says Matthew Lungren, a pediatric radiologist at Stanford University Medical Center and co-director of the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. "That would be the killer app for this." Some companies are selling their tools, others have released free online versions, and various groups are organizing large crowdsourced repositories of medical images to generate new algorithms. "The system we designed can process huge amounts of CT scans per day," says Hayit Greenspan, a professor at Tel-Aviv University and chief scientist of RADLogics, a healthcare software company that recently announced one such AI-based system. "The capability for quickly covering a huge population is there."

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Microsoft is planning to make all of its internal and external events digital-only until July 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The software maker had already revealed Build 2020, due to be held in Seattle in May, would transform into a digital event. This digital-only focus is now extending to far more events over the next year. "In light of the challenges presented by COVID-19, Microsoft has been closely monitoring the developing global situation and re-assessing the overall company-wide in-person event strategy," explains a recent email to Microsoft MVPs. "As a company, Microsoft has made the decision to transition all external and internal events to a digital-first experience through July 2021."

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Humans have grown crops in areas of the Amazon since the end of the last ice age, a study says.

In ordinary times, they moved among us largely unnoticed. Now we can't get enough of them. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust once-anonymous IT support workers into a new role: corporate saviors. From a report: As millions of employees make the transition from well-maintained office equipment to jury-rigged kitchen table setups, information technology departments have been called upon to keep companies online and connected. Requests range in size and scale, from replacing employees' $5 mouses, to speeding up networks, to keeping multimillion-dollar data centers up and running. For many departments, the result has been virtually unprecedented workloads. On March 12, Qualcomm told all staff to prepare to start working remotely in three days. Vice president of IT infrastructure, Zeeshan Sabir, and his team then worked about 72 hours straight trying to prepare a lot of laptops for secure, remote access and get other corporate systems ready. "I just saw heroics," he said. "I didn't see a blip of complaint from anyone." [...] The way most IT departments are set up has meant many directors have been juggling major issues alongside relatively minor ones. At Bay Area transit agency SamTrans, IT manager Edward Kelly got help from AT&T to quickly increase the speed of connections to the agency's networks once its 200 employees made the switch to remote work. At the same time, Kelly's team of five was flooded by calls from employees who'd forgotten their computer password and guessed wrong too many times. He said he's also hoping people learn to use the "reply-all" button on group emails more sparingly. As many employees' home computers infuriate them, tensions can run high, said Jennifer Reed, a consultant at IT outsourcing firm Viqtor Davis North America.

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Researchers at two leading universities take different approaches to creating cough-analysing tools.

A New York Times analysis of internet usage in the United States from SimilarWeb and Apptopia, two online data providers, reveals that our behaviors shifted, sometimes starkly, as the virus spread and pushed us to our devices for work, play and connecting. From the report: With nearly all public gatherings called off, Americans are seeking out entertainment on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, and looking to connect with one another on social media outlets like Facebook. In the past few years, users of these services were increasingly moving to their smartphones, creating an industrywide focus on mobile. Now that we are spending our days at home, with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates. While traditional social media sites have been growing, it seems that we want to do more than just connect through messaging and text -- we want to see one another. This has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google's video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty, which allows groups of friends to join a single video chat and play games together.

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When I sit down at a lovely dinner, with interesting, humor-filled friends in a beautiful spot, I am as rich as I can possibly be. A billionaire couldn't have more. I first realized this at a sushi restaurant in Sausalito, where the chef had prepared the most amazing looking and tasting bouquet of fresh fish and rice. Literally this is as rich as you can get.