ICANN chief executive Goran Marby has a message for its hundreds of registrars. Though ICANN can't involve itself in content issues, "That does not mean we are unconcerned or unaware of how certain domain names are being misused in fraudulent activities during this global pandemic." It is this concern that prompted me to contact the registries and registrars thanking them for their efforts and actions aimed at helping to mitigate and minimize the abusive domain names being used to maliciously take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic. For example, the Registrar Stakeholder Group has posted a useful guide, entitled "Registrar approaches to the COVID-19 Crisis" that provides a number of steps and resources the registrar community can use in their efforts. Many of our contracted parties already support a Framework to Address Abuse, which deals with DNS abuse and website content abuse. I continue to commend them for making this commitment to protect the DNS from those who would maliciously exploit domain names. In my correspondence to the registries and registrars, I expressed ICANN org's appreciation for their work during the pandemic. Additionally, I'm pleased to tell you that ICANN org has joined registries, registrars, security experts, law enforcement, Internet engineers, and others, in the COVID-19 Cyber Threat Coalition (CTC). The CTC's mission is to, "operate the largest professional-quality threat lab in the history of cybersecurity out of donated cloud infrastructure and with rapidly assembled teams of diverse, cross-geography, cross-industry threat researchers." I am proud that so many in the Internet ecosystem are joining together during this crisis to stop those who prey on the desperate. AFP reports that just in March at least 100,000 websites were registered with names including terms like "COVID," "corona," and "virus," according to recent report prepared for ICANN. "COVID-19 is unique in that it is truly global; and the cyber bad guys haven't drifted toward it, they have rushed toward it like a barrel off Niagra Falls," ICANN security chief John Crain told AFP. "This is a new low, preying on people at a time like this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The post office is fine. Repubs like to say government does everything wrong but it isn't true.

Ever try to get help from an airline? Or an ISP?

I live in the country and we depend on the post office. A lot of systems would break without it.

Trump can't be serious.

Silicon Valley hasn't changed in all these years.

Conspiracy theorists have committed more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism against U.K. wireless towers and other telecom gear, reports the New York Times, citing police reports and a telecom trade group. But what's stirring them up? For starters, over two million people watched a 5G conspiracy video on YouTube last month, the Times notes, adding that the misinformation is also spreading widely through other social media sites: An analysis by The New York Times found 487 Facebook communities, 84 Instagram accounts, 52 Twitter accounts, and dozens of other posts and videos pushing the conspiracy. The Facebook communities added nearly half a million new followers over the past two weeks. On Instagram, a network of 40 accounts nearly doubled its audience this month to 58,800 followers. On YouTube, the 10 most popular 5G coronavirus conspiracy videos posted in March were viewed over 5.8 million times. Today, the conspiracy can be found on Facebook in over 30 countries, including Switzerland, Uruguay and Japan... "This is nonsense of the absolute highest order," said Julian Knight, a member of Parliament who leads a committee investigating coronavirus-related online misinformation. He said Facebook and YouTube needed to "get a grip" on the situation or risk undermining the crisis response. Mr. Knight added that the spread of 5G conspiracies raised alarms about how information about a future coronavirus vaccine would be disseminated. "If we were to get a vaccine for Covid-19, can we trust the social media companies to ensure that the right public health messages are put out about that vaccine?" he asked... Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was "starting to remove false claims that 5G technology causes the symptoms of or contraction of Covid-19." YouTube said it would reduce recommendations of videos linking the coronavirus to 5G, while Twitter said it had taken action against misleading and harmful content about the illness. Telecommunications companies, which have added more security and are working with law enforcement, said the attacks against their workers and equipment had been widespread, threatening communication networks during the crisis. A YouTube spokesman told the BBC this week that YouTube has toughened its stance against conspiracy theories. "Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the World Health Organization and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies. This includes conspiracy theories which claim that the symptoms are caused by 5G." But "Everything about this is senseless," says the head of BT, who points out that most of the attacked phone masks don't even carry the 5G signal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix reports on a new concern about Qt, the free and open-source widget toolkit for creating GUIs and cross-platform applications: Wednesday a KDE developer who serves on the board of the KDE Free Qt Foundation commented that The Qt Company is evaluating restricting new releases to paying customers for 12 months. That was said to be under consideration due to COVID19 / coronavirus impacting their finances and needing to boost short-term revenues... [Slashdot editor's note: the comment also claims the Qt Company "says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas."] This comes months after The Qt Company already shifted to make Qt long-term support releases customer-only, among other steps to boost their commercial business at the beginning of the year. Following all the speculation and concerns from the statement by KDE's Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer, The Qt Company released this very brief statement: There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company. The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model. But in the event of a one-year freeze on free releases, Phoronix now reports, "several individuals and projects are already expressing interest in a Qt fork should it come to it." The hope is first and foremost that The Qt Company and KDE / KDE Free Qt Foundation can reach a mutual agreement without this embargo on future releases, which would effectively close up its development... Among those backing the concept of forking Qt as a last resort if necessary has been developers from consulting firm KDAB, the Qute browser developer, and the QGIS project as one of the leading geographic information system software packages, among many KDE developers themselves. The mailing list thread is quite active in talking about the possible fork if necessary, including aspects like web-hosting down to what such a fork should be called ("Kt" seems to be a popular choice so far with several different members in the community).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet's 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, "with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice." "Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design," explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google in 2005 to name him its "Chief Internet Evangelist," a title he still holds... Cerf, along with fellow computer scientist Robert E. Kahn, was a driving force in developing key Internet protocols in the 1970s for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which provided early research funding but ultimately relinquished control of the network it spawned. Cerf also was among a gang of self-described "Netheads" who led an insurgency against the dominant forces in telecommunications at the time, dubbed the "Bellheads" for their loyalty to the Bell Telephone Company and its legacy technologies. Bell, which dominated U.S. telephone service until it was broken up in the 1980s, and similar monopolies in other countries wanted to connect computers through a system much like their lucrative telephone systems, with fixed networks of connections run by central entities that could make all of the major technological decisions, control access and charge whatever the market -- or government regulators -- would allow. The vision of the Netheads was comparatively anarchic, relying on technological insights and a lot of faith in collaboration. The result was a network -- or really, a network of networks -- with no chief executive, no police, no taxman and no laws. In their place were technical protocols, arrived at through a process for developing expert consensus, that offered anyone access to the digital world from any properly configured device. Their numbers, once measured in the dozens, now rank in the tens of billions, including phones, televisions, cars, dams, drones, satellites, thermometers, garbage cans, refrigerators, watches and so much more... Such a system carries a notable cost in terms of security and privacy, a fact the world rediscovers every time there's a major data breach, ransomware attack or controversy over the amount of information governments and private companies collect about anyone who's online -- a category that includes more than half of the world's almost 8 billion people. But the lack of a central authority is key to why the Internet works as well as it does, especially at times of unforeseen demands. Some of the early Internet architects -- Cerf among them, from his position at the Pentagon -- were determined to design a system that could continue operating through almost anything, including a nuclear attack from the Soviets... Several [Netheads] acknowledged they celebrated just a bit when the telephone companies gradually abandoned old-fashioned circuit-switching for what was called "Voice Over IP" or VoIP. It was essentially transmitting voice calls over the Internet -- using the same technical protocols that Cerf and others had developed decades earlier. "They're deservedly taking a bit of a moment for a high five right now," added one Comcast vice president (who "has briefed some members of the Internet's founding generation about how the company has been handling increased demands.") And last week Vint Cerf reported good news about his own recent COVID-19 infection -- that he is no longer contagious -- and briefly summed up the experience for the Washington Post. "I don't recommend it... It's very debilitating."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yahoo News shares an encouraging report from former Newsweek correspondent Andrew Romano: Until very recently, nationwide data about how many COVID-19 patients are currently receiving treatment in hospitals was hard to come by. It's still incomplete and inconsistent. But on April 7, researchers at the University of Minnesota launched the U.S. COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project, which is just what it sounds like: the first effort to capture, track, visualize and compare daily data on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the 37 state departments of health that are reporting this information (so far). The reason this information is so valuable is simple. Because hospitalization typically occurs a week or so after infection, it's less of a lagging indicator than the death count (which trails by two to two and a half weeks) and more directly tied to the trajectory of the epidemic than the testing-dependent case count. It's also a measure of the most pressing public health concern of all: how close we are to exceeding the capacity of our hospital system, which can make COVID-19 much deadlier than it would otherwise be. Which brings us to New York and California. Chart each state's hospitalization data over the last seven days or so, and two different narratives emerge. Both are encouraging... On Wednesday, New York's daily death count hit an all-time high: 799. But that reflects infections from weeks ago, before the state's lockdown started. The number of people testing positive stayed relatively flat. Meanwhile, there were fewer new hospitalizations — just 200 — than on any day since March 18. It wasn't a blip. The amount of new daily hospitalizations has been declining since last Thursday: from 1,427 on April 2 to 1,095 on April 3 to 656 on April 6 to 200 on April 8. (There are some questions about inconsistencies between the data from New York state and New York City, but the trend line is the same.) Previously, the total current number of coronavirus patients in New York hospitals had been increasing by at least 20 percent a day for weeks. Now the overall number of hospitalizations is barely increasing at all... The good news in New York is that the state might be peaking now. The good news in California is that the state might not peak for a long time — but its path to that peak will be so incremental, its curve so flat, that coronavirus patients will never come close to overwhelming the hospital system. The numbers do look encouraging. (Click on the "Currently Hospitalized" rectangle and then select each state's two-letter abbreviation from the dropdown menu.) In fact, the San Francisco Bay Area recorded its fourth day of declining ICU patients on Saturday. "Home-sheltering efforts may well be paying off, at least according to the number of hospitalizations and patients in ICU," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup. And SFGate noted Friday that the statewide hospitalization figures "have also been relatively flat in recent days, with Governor Gavin Newsom expressing guarded optimism after the number of individuals in intensive care units decreased Thursday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I posted this earlier.

• I need to zip up a set of files in Node. Why isn't there a drop-dead simple API for doing this. Here's the pseudo code for how I'd like to do it. If you have a suggestion you can comment on the gist.

Since then I solved the problem, creating an NPM package, davezip (not released yet), that has the API I want, built on the archiver package.

Will post the details after my next session.

Wired investigated the vast spread of 5G/coronavirus conspiracy theories -- and reports that "Amongst the conspiracy sludge, one voice stands out." "For more than a year, propaganda broadcaster RT has been attacking the roll-out of 5G." While RT has never outright linked 5G to coronavirus, it has played a role in adding legitimacy to conspiracy theories surrounding the technology. As The New York Times reports, RT's disinformation campaign against 5G — seemingly created to hinder the global roll-out of the technology so Russia can catch up — has since spread to a network of blogs and social media accounts, where it has been decoupled from Moscow's propaganda firehose. And it doesn't stop at 5G. On January 29, RT's Greenstein opened an afternoon news show with a five-minute monologue asking viewers to question the role of Bill Gates in the coronavirus pandemic. "Maybe this is something to consider when you're reading headlines about how the Gates Foundation is pledging money to fight the coronavirus," she says... While Greenstein stops short of accusing Gates of somehow planning the coronavirus outbreak, RT's winks and nods have added fuel to another conspiracy theory that has also gone viral... None of these conspiracy theories have a shred of truth in them, while some are outright dangerous. The theory was spread further by a former U.K. sportsballer who livestreamed a two and a half hour interview Monday linking 5G and the coronavirus pandemic. The BBC reports that YouTube has since deleted the video -- watched by 65,000 viewers -- in which a former football player turned conspiracy theorist "claimed that a coronavirus vaccine, when one is developed, would include 'nanotechnology microchips' that would allow humans to be controlled. He added that Bill Gates — who is helping fund Covid-19 vaccine research — should be jailed." Ironically, efforts to launch 5G networks are well underway in Russia itself, VentureBeat noted last spring, "and the New York Times reports that Russians have embraced even more extreme views on the high-frequency wireless signals: It's believed that they can be used to heal wounds, fight hair loss, rejuvenate skin, and treat cancer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stop everything and watch this presentation by Prime Minister Johnson of the UK. Incredibly powerful, credible, a perfect call for the British people. Now maybe he can knock some sense into the Repub leadership in the US.

There's a new landspeed record for driving from New York City to Los Angeles -- but "unlike most speed records and races, there's no sanctioning body or official rules," notes Road and Track. "That's because setting a 'Cannonball' record invariably involves breaking multiple traffic laws." But now Cannonball purists "are criticizing the run as grossly irresponsible while the nation deals with an emergency of unseen magnitude." schwit1 shares their report from Thursday: Only a few months have passed since we reported that the New York-to-Los Angeles Cannonball record was broken. It's allegedly been broken again. The 26 hour, 38 minute time — which beats the record set in November by more than 45 minutes — appears to be legitimate, according to Ed Bolian, a Cannonball insider and driver who set his own 28 hour, 50 minute record in 2013.... All we know about this new set of scofflaws is that there were three, maybe four of them, and that they were driving a white 2019 Audi A8 sedan with a pair of red plastic marine fuel tanks ratchet-strapped into its trunk. They started at the Red Ball Garage in New York City at 11:15 pm on April 4, and ended less than 27 hours later at the Portofino Hotel & Marina in Redondo Beach, California, the traditional start and end points of a Cannonball attempt... [A]n exuberant friend posted a picture of the Audi on Facebook this week — situated among a number of other high-dollar cars, with its trunk open to show the auxiliary fuel tanks — along with the team's alleged time. Within a day, hundreds of people had shared the post, and social media chat groups were abuzz with Cannonball aficionados offering up opinions on the matter... [R]esponses ran the gamut from "Nice job!" to "Who the hell do those guys think they are?" to "Who the hell are we to judge them?" There was talk of not recognizing the new 26:38 time set by the white Audi team as a record, due to the extraordinary circumstances. But as John Ficarra, the creator and organizer of The 2904, pointed out, there is no sanctioning body for illegal cross-country races and time trials. Slashdot covered previous records in 2007 (31 hours, 4 minutes) and in 2013 (28 hours, 50 minutes). The average speed of this run was over 103 miles per hour -- for more than 26 hours.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I need to zip up a set of files in Node. Why isn't there a drop-dead simple API for doing this. Here's the pseudo code for how I'd like to do it. If you have a suggestion you can comment on the gist.

sciencehabit writes: Recycling isn't as guilt-free as it seems. Only about 30% of the plastic that goes into soda bottles gets turned into new plastic, and it often ends up as a lower strength version. Now, researchers report they've engineered an enzyme that can convert 90% of that same plastic back to its pristine starting materials. Work is underway to scale up the technology and open a demonstration plant next year. The researchers generated hundreds of mutant enzymes changing amino acids as they went. They then mass produced the mutants in bacteria and screened them to find efficient breakers of plastic bonds. After repeating this process for several rounds, they isolated a mutant enzyme that's 10,000 times more efficient at breaking down an important bond that allows plastic to be recycled. The team is currently building a demonstration plant that is expected to recycle hundreds of tons of plastic per year. The enzyme can't recycle other major types of plastics, such as polyethylene and polystyrene, which have bonds between building blocks that are harder to break. But if successful, it could make it help society deal with one of the most challenging plastic problems we face. John McGeehan, who directs the center for enzyme innovation at the University of Portsmouth, also tells Science that now recycling companies typically melt plastics together to make carpets or other low-grade plastic fibers that will eventually end up in a landfill or get incinerated. "It's not really recycling at all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Worth mentioning. All six key swing states—FL, NC, AZ, MI, PA, and WI—already allow their residents to vote by mail, for any reason. So Trump doesn't have to try to destroy the US Postal Service.

I'm getting the Kinsa thermometer tomorrow, but I already have my pulse oximeter, it came via Fedex on Friday. It's that thing they put over your finger that says how fast your heart is beating and how much oxygen is in your blood. My numbers are good.