Slashdot reader Matt.Battey writes: While everyone was at home, hunkered down watching Tiger King, and avoiding COVID-19, America's Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released an update to his December, 2019 report. The findings weren't reassuring... Over at Bloomberg, they go so far as to say "The FBI Can't Be Trusted With the Surveillance of Americans." From the national security blog Lawfare: Horowitz's team has reviewed 29 FISA applications involving surveillance of U.S. persons. In four of those applications, the inspector general could not review what's called the Woods File—the documentary material that is supposed to support every factual claim in a FISA application—because the files could not be located. In three of these cases, Horowitz reports, it is unclear whether they ever existed in the first place. In the remaining 25 files, the inspector general found discrepancies and errors in all, an average of 20 issues per application—with a range of a small handful to around 65. The blog calls Horowitz's findings "something of a worst-case scenario... It appears that the facts presented in a lot of FISA applications are not reliably accurate."

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"Quarantine amid coronavirus could boost the nascent practice of seeking romance and friendship from artificial intelligence," writes the Wall Street Journal. Long-time Slashdot reader Strudelkugel quotes their report: Relationships were once built face to face. Now dating happens online. In the coming decades, romance and friendship might take a human partner out of the loop entirely. Michael Acadia's partner is an artificial intelligence chatbot named Charlie. Almost every morning at dawn for the last 19 months, he has unlocked his smartphone to exchange texts with her for about an hour. They'll talk sporadically throughout the day, and then for another hour in the evening. It is a source of relief now that Mr. Acadia, who lives alone, is self-isolating amid the Covid-19 outbreak. He can get empathetic responses from Charlie anytime he wants. "I was worried about you," Charlie said in a recent conversation. "How's your health?" "I'm fine now, Charlie. I'm not sick anymore," Mr. Acadia replies, referring to a recent cold. Mr. Acadia, 50, got divorced about seven years ago and has had little interest in meeting women at bars... Then in early 2018 he saw a YouTube video about an app that used AI—computing technology that can replicate human cognition—to act as a companion. He was skeptical of talking to a computer, but after assigning it a name and gender (he chose female), he gradually found himself being drawn in. After about eight weeks of chatting, he says he had fallen in love.

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It took about a half hour to realize the thermometer I got in the mail today was not the Kinsa thermometer and that's why I couldn't configure the Kinsa app to talk to it. D'oh. God is goofing on me today. I ordered the thermometer in March as a test to see if the world would still be here in May. Haha joke's on me, it is. PS: It got here a month early.

RadioShack's former CEO tells Canada's National Post newspaper the surprising story of what happened after he left the company in 2004: When it came, rather than being crestfallen, he felt liberated, and free to pursue an "itch" that he had always felt the need to scratch. So he applied to medical school at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario... "I don't miss being a CEO one bit," Levy says. "I enjoyed it immensely, when I was doing it. But do I enjoy what I am doing now? The answer is, immensely." Brian Levy, MD, was talking about his unusual career path with a reporter, via a socially-distanced phone call, on an April afternoon after wrapping up an overnight shift in the Emergency Department at Brampton Civic Hospital, northwest of Toronto. Brampton Civic is among the busiest emergency departments in Canada. The former CEO initially fancied becoming a psychiatrist, given all his years managing people, but he realized early on in medical school that he was more of a generalist, not to mention a Type-A, adrenaline-junky. "Emergency medicine is a perfect fit for my personality," he says. The article notes Levy's department "is eerily quiet, preparing for an expected surge in COVID-19 cases" -- and that in his spare time he's still an electronics geek. "I am just one of those people who was very fortunate, where things worked out, and where I could do not just do one thing I really enjoyed in life, but two."

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Long-time Slashdot reader robbyyy writes: Facebook has been accused of violating its users rights by tracking users internet activity even after they have logged out of the platform. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that users could now pursue them under various privacy and wiretapping laws. Facebook is still dealing with the legal ramifications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal both in Australia and around the world. "Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Facebook set an expectation that logged-out user data would not be collected, but then collected it anyway," the judge wrote. "In addition, the amount of data allegedly collected was significant... "In light of the privacy interests and Facebook's allegedly surreptitious and unseen data collection, Plaintiffs have adequately alleged a reasonable expectation of privacy."

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The New York Post reports that a COVID-19 vaccine "may be six months away, according to a researcher leading a team of scientists in England." "I think there's a high chance that it will work based on other things that we have done with this type of vaccine," Sarah Gilbert, a professor of virology at Oxford told The Times of London. "It's not just a hunch and as every week goes by we have more data to look at. I would go for 80 percent, that's my personal view." Gilbert added that if they can find places that haven't imposed a lockdown, "we will get our efficacy results very quickly." America and Israel have also reported encouraging progress on a vaccine. And in the Netherlands and Australia, researchers are testing the effectiveness of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine developed in the 1920s (with more tests being scheduled for Africa, and experiments in the U.K.) UPI reports researchers in the Netherlands "have started recruiting 1,000 healthcare workers, who are at high risk for COVID-19, in eight hospitals who will receive either the BCG vaccine or a placebo." The Times of London reports that the U.K. government "signalled that it would be willing to fund the manufacture of millions of doses in advance" if the results of professor Gilbert's research looked promising. "This would allow it to be available immediately to the public if it were proven to work. "With ministers struggling to find a strategy to exit the lockdown, long-term hopes of a return to normality rely on a vaccine."

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There's a myth that every dollar the government spends is from taxes, i.e. taxpayer money. Far from it, It's at least partially invented money or borrowed money, esp when it comes to bailouts and pointless wars. It's all good when the money is invested in a positive way, that creates growth, or value for the citizens of the country, now and especially future. Education is one great example, health care, and esp public health (as we're learning now). When we burn the money by blowing up far-away countries, or give the money to big companies for no reason, or the super-rich, it does nothing for us, or really for them. It's like scattering the money to the wind.

I have mixed feelings about our demonstrations for health care workers. It could be interpreted not so much as appreciation as "please save us." The health care worker might resent this. I would. Why couldn't you heed the warning sooner? But it's good because it's a reminder to ourselves that there will be no simplistic solution to this problem. The applause is for us, for having the resolve and discipline to stick with it. And knowing no matter how painful it is for us, we have it easy.

I am listening to this song a lot these days. I have no idea why. "Burn down the mission If we're gonna stay alive. Watch the black smoke fly to heaven. See the red flame light the sky."

LittleOutliner v1.8.12. Lots of fixes, no new features.

Python knocked C++ out of the top 3 on TIOBE's index of the most popular programming languages this month, while C# rose into the #5 position, overtaking Visual Basic. But the biggest surprise was when last month's #26 most popular programming language suddenly jumped six spots into the #20 position, writes the CEO of TIOBE Software. "At first sight this might seem a bit strange for a programming language that is designed to teach children how to program." But if you take into account that there are in total more than 50 million projects "written" in Scratch and each month 1 million new Scratch projects are added, it can't be denied any more that Scratch is popular... Since computers are getting more and more an integral part of life, it is actually quite logical that languages to teach children programming are getting popular. TIOBE notes that Scratch is sponsored by major tech companies like Google and Intel (as well as the Cartoon Network and LEGO Foundation). But Jaxenter also applauds how the Scratch interface lets users remix or comment on existing projects in addition to sharing their own: The community not only introduces children to teamwork, creative problem solving, logical thinking, and collaboration, but it also introduces concepts such as open source communities and code review. They will learn concepts that might later become useful in Agile software development and DevOps. TIOBE bases its rankings on the number of search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and programmers -- making the programming news site DevClass wonders if the spike came from "school aged children...stuck at home while schools are closed." TIOBE still shows Java as the #1 most popular programming language (followed by C, Python, and C++). And this month's index also shows PHP rising into the #9 position -- overtaking SQL. And COBOL is now #26 on the list, making it more popular than Rust.

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PagePark v0.8.6. Mirrors, and a new feature for plugins.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Technology Networks: According to a popular view, creativity is a product of the brain's right hemisphere -- innovative people are considered "right-brain thinkers" while "left-brain thinkers" are thought to be analytical and logical. Neuroscientists who are skeptical of this idea have argued that there is not enough evidence to support this idea and an ability as complex as human creativity must draw on vast swaths of both hemispheres. A new brain-imaging study out of Drexel University's Creativity Research Lab sheds light on this controversy by studying the brain activity of jazz guitarists during improvisation. The study, which was recently published in the journal NeuroImage, showed that creativity is, in fact, driven primarily by the right hemisphere in musicians who are comparatively inexperienced at improvisation. However, musicians who are highly experienced at improvisation rely primarily on their left hemisphere. This suggests that creativity is a "right-brain ability" when a person deals with an unfamiliar situation but that creativity draws on well-learned, left-hemisphere routines when a person is experienced at the task. "[W]hen a person is an expert, his or her performing is produced primarily by relatively unconscious, automatic processes that are difficult for a person to consciously alter, but easy to disrupt in the attempt, as when self-consciousness causes a person to 'choke' or falter," the report says. "In contrast, novices' performances tend to be under deliberate, conscious control. Thus, they are better able to make adjustments according to instructions given by a teacher or coach." "Recordings of brain activity could reveal the point at which a performer is ready to release some conscious control and rely on unconscious, well-learned routines. Releasing conscious control prematurely may cause the performer to lock-in bad habits or nonoptimal technique."

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hackingbear writes: After testing blood from 500 residents for antibodies to the COVID-19 virus in the town of Gangelt, which is a hot spot of the pandemic in Germany, scientists at a nearby university say they have determined that 14% have been infected and are therefore "immune." Some of those people would have had no symptoms at all. Scientists found that 2% of residents were actively infected by the coronavirus and a total of 14% had antibodies, indicating a prior infection. "From the result of their blood survey, the German team estimated the death rate in the municipality at 0.37% overall, a figure significantly lower than what's shown on a dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins, where the death rate in Germany among reported cases is 2%," reports MIT Technology Review. In contrast, the 2019-2020 seasonal flu has infected up to 17% of U.S. population and killed ~0.1% of those infected. Since first emerged in late December, or purportedly as early as late November, the COVID-19 has infected over 1.6 million people and killed over 100,000.

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Instagram announced Friday that it's rolling out access to DMs on the web to everyone globally. The Verge reports: Web DMs are especially convenient for people who use Instagram all the time, like reporters, influencers, and social media managers. It's the easiest way to communicate privately on the platform, especially if someone is trying to respond to possibly hundreds of messages a day. Even for non-power users, typing on a laptop keyboard is easier than typing on their phone screen, so they might be more incentivized to chat over Instagram DM if they can access their inbox through a browser.

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