The Pentagon is teaming up with some of the biggest names in tech to combat hacks designed to mess with the automated systems we'll rely on in the near future. From a report: In February, DARPA issued a call for proposals for a new program. Like most DARPA projects, it had a fantastic acronym: Guaranteeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robustness against Deception (GARD). It's a multimillion-dollar, four-year initiative that's aiming to create defenses for sensor-based artificial intelligence -- think facial recognition programs, voice recognition tools, self-driving cars, weapon-detection software and more. Today, Protocol can report that DARPA has selected 17 organizations to work on the GARD project, including Johns Hopkins University, Intel, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International and IBM's Almaden Research Center. Intel will be leading one part of the project with Georgia Tech, focusing on defending against physical adversarial attacks. Sensors that use AI computer vision algorithms can be fooled by what researchers refer to as adversarial attacks. These are basically any hack to the physical world that tricks a system into seeing something other than what's there.

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Yesterday Jeff Bezos visited an Amazon warehouse and a Whole Foods supermarket.

Google today announced the launch of a virtual braille keyboard for Android that's designed to enable those with low vision or blindness to type on their phones without additional hardware. From a report: The tech giant says it collaborated with braille developers and users to create it, and to ensure it can be used anywhere a user would normally type -- including social media, text messaging, and email apps. According to the World Health Organization, at least 2.2 billion people globally have a vision impairment or blindness. To address their needs, Google previously developed and released BrailleBack, an accessibility service for Android that helps users make use of braille devices, but BrailleBack didn't offer on-screen typing.

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Foxconn's Wisconsin plant, the controversial recipient of billions of dollars in tax subsidies and the focus of several investigations, will produce ventilators with medical device firm Medtronic. From a report: The partnership was announced by Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak in an interview with CNBC, who said that Foxconn will be manufacturing ventilators based on its PB-560 design in the next four to six weeks. Foxconn's Wisconsin plant was first announced way back in 2017 as a $10 billion LCD factory. It was labeled the "eighth wonder of the world" by President Trump, but Foxconn's plans for the site appear to have changed repeatedly over the years. At various points, Foxconn has said that it would build a smaller LCD factory, no factory at all, or that it would produce other items like a robot coffee kiosk. Now, it appears the factory will, in part at least, produce ventilators, after its planned opening next month.

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More than 3.5 million iOS users have installed "fleeceware" apps on their devices, UK security firm Sophos warned in a report published earlier this week. From a report: The term fleeceware is a new addition to the cyber-security jargon and describes apps engaging in a new form of online fraud. Coined last year by Sophos researchers, the term refers to mobile apps that abuse legal loopholes in the app trial mechanism on Android -- and now iOS. Both the Google and Apple app stores allow app makers to create trial periods for commercial/paid/subscription apps. Users can install these apps and sign-up for a trial by giving the app permission to incur a charge on the user's Play Store or App Store account. Once the trial period ends, the user is charged automatically on their card and allowed to use the app.

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One unexpected effect of the coronavirus pandemic has to do with the colorful little pictograms we use on our phones and computers to express, well, pretty much everything: emoji. From a report: According to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit which takes care of the Unicode Standard -- a widely-used standard for character encoding on computers and phones -- the release of Unicode 14.0 has been postponed by six months. "Under the current circumstances we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date," Mark Davis, President of the Unicode Consortium, said in a statement. Unicode 14.0 was supposed to be released in March 2021, but that has been moved six months into the future, to September 2021. Since it takes a while for developers to incorporate new emoji into phones -- typically eight months or so, according to the Consortium -- this means we won't get any new emoji until well into 2022.

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Apple is working on a new way to offer specific parts of third-party apps across the system without needing to have them installed, 9to5Mac has learned based on an early build of iOS 14. From a report: The feature would allow users to experience parts of an app's functionality by scanning a QR Code. If you open a link or scan a QR code today from an app that you haven't installed on your iPhone or iPad, it will open that link in Safari. Apps can provide universal links, which open the app instead of Safari when the app is installed. But that could change in the near future with a new API internally referred to as "Clips" found on iOS 14 code. As 9to5Mac has analyzed this new API, we can say that it allows developers to offer interactive and dynamic content from their apps even if you haven't installed them. The Clips API is directly related to the QR Code reader in the build we have access to, so the user can scan a code linked to an app and then interact with it directly from a card that will appear on the screen.

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Internet web infrastructure company Cloudflare announced plans to drop support for Google's reCAPTCHA service and move to a new bot detection provider named hCaptcha. From a report: Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said the move was motivated by Google's future plans to charge for the use of the reCAPTCHA service, which would have "added millions of dollars in annual costs" for his company, costs that Cloudflare would have undoubtedly had to unload on its customers. "That is entirely within their right," Prince said yesterday. "Cloudflare, given our volume, no doubt imposed significant costs on the reCAPTCHA service, even for Google." "If the value of the image classification training did not exceed those costs, it makes perfect sense for Google to ask for payment for the service they provide," he added.

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Linux malware is real and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups have been infiltrating critical servers with these tools for at least eight years, according to a new report from BlackBerry. From a report: In "Decade of the RATs: Cross-Platform APT Espionage Attacks Targeting Linux, Windows and Android," security researchers found that these groups have attacked companies around the world and across all industries with goals ranging from simple cybercrime to full-blown economic espionage. The RATs report describes how five APT groups are working with the Chinese government and the remote access trojans (RATs) the cybercriminals are using to get and maintain access to Linux servers. According to the report, the groups appeared to be using WINNTI-style tooling to take aim at Linux servers and remain relatively undetected for almost a decade. These groups are targeting Red Hat Enterprise, CentOS, and Ubuntu Linux environments for espionage and intellectual property theft. The APT groups examined include the original WINNTI GROUP, PASSCV, BRONZE UNION, CASPER (LEAD), and a newly identified group BlackBerry researchers are tracking as WLNXSPLINTER. The BlackBerry researchers think all five groups are working together, given the distinct similarities in their preferred tools, tactics, and procedures.

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Five Easter-egg sized decorated ostrich eggs in the British Museum are the subject of a new study.

Traditional fanfare is abandoned as a team head for the International Space Station.

Microsoft is setting internal expectations that it won't deliver any Windows 10X devices in calendar 2020, ZDNet reports. From a report: This isn't really surprising, given what's going on externally with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. But for enthusiasts who were looking forward to dual-screen Surface Neo devices this holiday season, the reality is taking root. My contacts say that Chief Product Officer Panos Panay informed some of his team internally today, April 8, that Microsoft wouldn't be delivering its own Surface Neo dual-screen 10X devices this calendar year. In addition, Microsoft also won't be enabling third-party dual-screen Windows devices to ship with 10X in calendar 2020, I hear.

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The Fake Friends of Facebook are getting so freaking obvious and numerous. Every day I get ten friend requests. Here's a screen shot of some of them. I'm amazed their algorithm can't filter these.

Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic. While the nation's biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn't expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years. From a report: Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother's Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year. Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times. In contrast, internet traffic is up around 20 percent to 25 percent from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said. The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline. Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom. Wireless calls replaced much of that calling activity, but the volume of minutes spent on phone calls hasn't changed much over the past decade as people turned to texting and to apps like FaceTime and WhatsApp, according to wireless carriers and analysts.

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Tom Watson: "The push to re-open is a push for death."

Here's what I said in response.

It's something to campaign on. Concrete. Biden can make a simple president-like statement. It's not time to even think about surrendering to the virus.

You know what else he can do? He can assemble a panel of scientists and medical doctors to keep the public informed. An hour a day, press conference style. What the CDC would be doing if Trump weren't president. I'm sure Fauci would welcome it.