An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: Snowden is the first guest in the new 'Shelter in Place' series debuting on VICE TV on Thursday at 10 p.m. EST, which looks at the global response to COVID-19 and its lasting impact around the world. VICE co-founder Shane Smith will discuss these themes, as well as how to survive quarantine, with a host of thinkers from science, entertainment, economics, and journalism. In the premiere episode, Smith talks to Snowden, who blew the lid off of the National Security Agency's surveillance of the American people in 2012. In the interview conducted from Smith's home in Santa Monica over video chat, the two tackle topics including the lack of preparedness in the face of a global pandemic, how long this will be a threat to humanity, and whether the power we're handing to global leaders will come back and bite us in the ass. [...] It seems that [coronavirus] may be the greatest question of the modern era around civil liberties, around the right to privacy. Yet no one's asking this question. As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world. Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what' is being built is the architecture of oppression. Snowden said intelligence agencies knew a pandemic like this was coming "because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics." Asked about if we can trust the numbers coming from China, Snowden says "I don't think we can," adding that autocratic regimes like China aren't doing things better than democratic ones. "I mean, there are arguments being made that China can do things that the United States can't. That doesn't mean that what these autocratic countries are doing is actually more effective." You can watch Shane Smith's full interview with Snowden here.

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If the airlines thought they would lose all that money from a shutdown, instead of being bailed out, maybe they would have pressured the government to act more aggressively against the virus.

McConnell had polio as a child, it left him disabled for life. I grew up after there was a vaccine, but just barely. The vaccine came out in 1954, I was born in 1955. So there were polio victims in school when I was. There was a girl, Bridgett, who played with us in a wheel chair.

A rare hole has opened up in the ozone layer above the Arctic, in what scientists say is the result of unusually low temperatures in the atmosphere above the north pole. From a report: The hole, which has been tracked from space and the ground over the past few days, has reached record dimensions, but is not expected to pose any danger to humans unless it moves further south. If it extends further south over populated areas, such as southern Greenland, people would be at increased risk of sunburn. However, on current trends the hole is expected to disappear altogether in a few weeks. Low temperatures in the northern polar regions led to an unusual stable polar vortex, and the presence of ozone-destroying chemicals such as chlorine and bromine in the atmosphere -- from human activities -- caused the hole to form. "The hole is principally a geophysical curiosity," said Vincent-Henri Peuch, director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. "We monitored unusual dynamic conditions, which drive the process of chemical depletion of ozone. [Those dynamics] allowed for lower temperatures and a more stable vortex than usual over the Arctic, which then triggered the formation of polar stratospheric clouds and the catalytic destruction of ozone."

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Turkey will require foreign social media companies with high internet traffic to appoint a representative in the country to address concerns raised by authorities over content on their platforms, a draft law seen by Reuters showed. From the report: Companies that do not comply with the new measure could face having their bandwith halved after 30 days by court order, and then slashed by 95% if they hold out another 30 days, it said. The law will apply to social media networks accessed by more than 1 million people daily from Turkey, the draft law said. Ankara strictly polices social media content, especially during periods such as military operations and the current coronavirus pandemic. In the three weeks to April 6, more than 3,500 social media accounts were reviewed, 616 suspects were identified and 229 were detained for "provocative" social media posts, according to the Interior Ministry.

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The number of deaths linked to the coronavirus worldwide has passed 100,000 as known infections surged past 1.6 million, according to data collected by The New York Times. From a report: At least 177 countries have reported cases. The most recent was war-torn Yemen, which reported its first coronavirus case on Friday. The death toll in the United States has surpassed that of Spain, with almost 18,000 fatalities related to the virus reported by Friday afternoon. Only Italy has reported more deaths. Although some governments are considering easing restrictions, lockdowns are being extended across much of the world heading into the Easter weekend, and policing measures stepped up. Tokyo's governor parted ways with Japan's national government by requesting the closure of a range of businesses -- including nightclubs, karaoke bars, gyms and movie theaters -- during a state of emergency declared this week.

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Huawei launched its Mate X foldable phone at MWC 2019, following up with the Mate XS in February this year. The latter foldable has enjoyed a wider launch of sorts, but the firm has revealed that it's still making a hefty loss on the device. From a report: Huawei consumer group CEO Richard Yu told media in China that even though the Mate XS retails for an eye-watering 16,999 yuan (~$2,408), the firm has lost between $60 million and $70 million. This is despite earlier claims that the phone is seeing high demand, suggesting that the company is willing to swallow losses to encourage foldable adoption.

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I have a question about Apple podcasts. The new Cuomo podcast shows up in my iPhone podcasts app. Screen shot. It also shows as having updated. But when I look at the page for the podcast it only shows episodes through Tuesday. Today is Friday. Is there something wrong with my feed? I want to get this working properly. I also noted that Sunday and Monday are missing too. They are most definitely in the RSS feed.

A Nintendo Switch video game has been pulled off China's grey market e-commerce platforms, Reuters' checks show, after Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong used the game to protest against Beijing's rule of the Chinese territory. From a report: The game, "Animal Crossing: New Horizons," is a colorful social simulator in which players can decorate their own island and invite others to visit. It became an instant hit after its launch last month and has been used by many players to interact and simulate real-life scenarios while they are stuck at home because of measures to curb the coronavirus outbreak. Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong democracy activist, took his protests to the game last week and on Twitter posted a screenshot of his island decorated with a banner saying: "Free Hong Kong, revolution now." China has stringent rules on content from everything from video games to movies and music, censoring anything it believes violates core socialist values. Gaming companies must also seek licences for the games they want to publish.

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Engineering teams at Apple and Google have banded together to create a decentralized contact tracing tool that will help individuals determine whether they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19. From a report: Contact tracing is a useful tool that helps public health authorities track the spread of the disease and inform the potentially exposed so that they can get tested. It does this by identifying and 'following up with' people who have come into contact with a COVID-19 affected person. The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. The next phase is a system level contact tracing system that will work across iOS and Android devices on an opt-in basis. The system uses on-board radios on your device to transmit an anonymous ID over short ranges -- using Bluetooth beaconing. Servers relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices which search for a match. A match is determined based on a threshold of time spent and distance maintained between two devices.

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It's pretty obvious that Cuomo should be the Democratic nominee. What's happening now is a much more rigorous vetting than the primary debates (a reality show).

I chose this route for rolling out rendering for outlines very deliberately because it didn't include blogging features. It's focused on writing. There are already countless ways to blog. But there's a common feature set between the this.how docs and Old School blogs, so any skills you pick up here can work for blogs too, if there's ever a need to go that far. I have found this format useful even though I have a blog. So when you think -- I should write some guidelines for this, or a FAQ or directions for cooking a type of bread, writing that isn't of-the-moment, then you can use LO2 to write and revise it, and send people the URL of the my.this.how rendering of it.

It's pretty obvious that Cuomo should be the Democratic nominee. What's happening now is a much more rigorous vetting than the primary debates (a reality show).

Here's a new service for LO2 users. Use this kind of outline for documents you want to add to or refine over time. FAQs, guidelines, instructions, screeds. Definitely not for blog posts, since there's no time element in it. There's lots of depth to this kind of outline, and it's easy for me to add new features. So that's an extra bonus. If a small community of writers develops here, I will have incentive to show you how to use the other features, and perhaps add new ones.

An anonymous reader shares a story: Ahead of last November's launch of the Apple TV+ video streaming service, Apple seemed to be doing nearly everything it could to widen the base of early viewers -- it gave away a free year of service with any newly purchased iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod, or Apple TV, then added free access to student Apple Music subscriptions, collectively guaranteeing itself millions of (unpaid) users. But that apparently wasn't enough: Starting today, the company will offer free access to seven complete TV+ series to almost any person with an Apple ID. Apple's video strategy has continued to stand in stark contrast to Disney's, though both companies launched paid streaming services last year. Disney+ offers a mere seven-day free trial before charging $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year for access to a large catalog of new original and historic Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic content, plus The Simpsons. This week, Disney+ surpassed 50 million subscribers across only a dozen countries, and it has recently rewarded quarantined fans by providing early access to its latest animated films, including Frozen II and Onward.

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