One of every five New York City residents tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus, according to preliminary test results described by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Thursday, suggesting the virus had spread far more widely than known. The New York Times reports: The results also provided the tantalizing prospect that many New Yorkers who never knew they had been infected -- possibly as many as 2.7 million, the governor said -- had already encountered the virus, and survived. Mr. Cuomo also suggested the death rate was far lower than believed. The reliability of some early antibody tests to hit the market has been widely questioned, with some -- made in China without Food and Drug Administration approval -- found by health officials to be deeply flawed. Researchers across New York have worked in recent weeks to develop and validate their own, with federal approval. In New York City, about 21 percent, or one of every five residents, tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was 16.7 percent in Long Island, 11.7 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties, and 3.6 percent in the rest of the state. Almost 14 percent of those tested in New York were positive, according to preliminary results from the state survey, which sampled approximately 3,000 people over two days at grocery and big-box stores. The governor suggested on Thursday that, based on the survey, the death rate in New York from Covid-19 would likely be far lower than previously believed, possibly 0.5 percent of those infected. On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo did not talk about any potential for immunity among those previously infected.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has shut down a feature in its Bing search engine that shows popular articles from major websites after Ars Technica reported that the feature was showing wildly inappropriate results from the stock photo site Shutterstock. How inappropriate? Well, here are a couple of screenshots I took on Wednesday morning after a reader tipped me off to the problem. "These search results were unacceptable, and we appreciate Ars Technica making us aware of them," Microsoft said in an emailed statement on Wednesday evening. "We've disabled the preview feature responsible for these results while we examine how they occurred and how we can prevent them in the future." As the name suggests, this "trending articles" carousel is supposed to highlight articles on a website (Shutterstock in this case) that are most popular at the moment. Microsoft didn't just shut it down for Shutterstock. It has disabled the feature for all websites. Microsoft says that its software attempts to filter out pornographic and racy content from results like this. But the company admitted that its filters failed in this case, and it vowed to improve them before re-enabling the feature.

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The biggest assessment of global insect abundances to date shows a worrying drop of almost 25% in the last 30 years, with accelerating declines in Europe that shocked scientists. From a news report: The analysis combined 166 long-term surveys from almost 1,700 sites and found that some species were bucking the overall downward trend. In particular, freshwater insects have been increasing by 11% each decade following action to clean up polluted rivers and lakes. However, this group represent only about 10% of insect species and do not pollinate crops. Researchers said insects remained critically understudied in many regions, with little or no data from South America, south Asia and Africa. Rapid destruction of wild habitats in these places for farming and urbanization is likely to be significantly reducing insect populations, they said. Insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times, and are essential to the ecosystems humanity depends upon. They pollinate plants, are food for other creatures and recycle nature's waste.

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Many security-conscious people probably think they'd never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Brian Krebs: Here's how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken for more than $10,000 in an elaborate, weeks-long ruse. Today's lesson in how not to get scammed comes from "Mitch," the pseudonym I picked for a reader in California who shared his harrowing tale on condition of anonymity. Mitch is a veteran of the tech industry -- having worked in security for several years at a fairly major cloud-based service -- so he's understandably embarrassed that he got taken in by this confidence scheme. On Friday, April 17, Mitch received a call from what he thought was his financial institution, warning him that fraud had been detected on his account. Mitch said the caller ID for that incoming call displayed the same phone number that was printed on the back of his debit card. But Mitch knew enough of scams to understand that fraudsters can and often do spoof phone numbers. So while still on the phone with the caller, he quickly logged into his account and saw that there were indeed multiple unauthorized transactions going back several weeks. Most were relatively small charges -- under $100 apiece -- but there were also two very recent $800 ATM withdrawals from cash machines in Florida. If the caller had been a fraudster, he reasoned at the time, they would have asked for personal information. But the nice lady on the phone didn't ask Mitch for any personal details. Instead, she calmly assured him the bank would reverse the fraudulent charges and said they'd be sending him a new debit card via express mail. After making sure the representative knew which transactions were not his, Mitch thanked the woman for notifying him, and hung up. The following day, Mitch received another call about suspected fraud on his bank account. Something about that conversation didn't seem right, and so Mitch decided to use another phone to place a call to his bank's customer service department -- while keeping the first caller on hold. "When the representative finally answered my call, I asked them to confirm that I was on the phone with them on the other line in the call they initiated toward me, and so the rep somehow checked and saw that there was another active call with Mitch," he said. "But as it turned out, that other call was the attackers also talking to my bank pretending to be me."

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The health of insect populations globally is far more varied than previous research suggested.

Regulators voted to let fast Wi-Fi devices use a broad swath of airwaves, delivering a win for tech companies such as Google and Facebook and a setback to utilities that use the frequencies to control pipelines and electric grids. From a report: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission decided to let the airwaves band known as 6 gigahertz be used by phones, tablets, wearables and other consumer electronics as well as industrial sensors for manufacturing. The agency said it anticipates new, high-speed uses will emerge that will help secure U.S. leadership in advanced 5G services. The agency approved the change in a 5-0 vote during its monthly meeting, which was held online. "This will be a huge benefit to consumers and innovators," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. The agency under his leadership has pushed to rearrange airwaves uses, finding places on the spectrum where assignments made years ago can be modified to accommodate the booming demand for mobile signals. Wi-Fi, which routes signals to wired networks, already carries the bulk of mobile-phone traffic. The newly available airwaves will expand frequencies available to Wi-Fi six-fold, and uses will expand substantially, said Edgar Figueroa, president of the Wi-Fi Alliance, with members including chipmakers Intel Corp. and Qualcomm.

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Valve told ZDNet today that it's safe to play games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 even after their source code leaked online this week on 4chan and torrent sites. From a report: The leak has caused panic in the two games' online communities. For most of the day, gamers have been warning each other that hackers may develop exploits based on the leaked source code that may be used to hack computers connecting to CS:GO and TF2 servers. Warnings have been circulating all day on Twitter and on the official /r/counterstrike and /r/tf2 subreddits.

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Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post pledging to combat misinformation about COVID-19 circulating on Facebook. "We've taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading," Zuckerberg wrote. But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in "pseudoscience." From the report: According to Facebook's ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people. This week, The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience, and the ad was approved by Facebook. Using the same tool, The Markup boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram, the Facebook-owned platform that is incredibly popular with Americans under 30. The ad was approved in minutes.

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Telecoms engineers have told Radio 1 Newsbeat they're being threatened and harassed by people who believe they're working on 5G, which has been wrongly linked to coronavirus. From a report: Claims about any link have been branded complete rubbish by scientists. But the union and trade body representing thousands of workers across the UK say they've had around 120 cases of abuse reported to them. The reports have included threats of extreme violence. "We've actually had cases where people have been threatened with being stabbed, threatened with physical violence and in some cases actually threatened with murder," says Andy Kerr, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU). CWU represents nearly 40,000 telecoms engineers. Andy says most aren't even working on 5G -- they're maintaining the network and playing "a crucial role." "People are stuck at home -- whether they want to watch their box set of Peaky Blinders or somebody's isolated and they want to keep in touch with family. "The only way to do that is the telecom network. More importantly these are engineers maintaining the network so it's there for all the health and emergency services."

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Apple is planning to start selling Mac computers with its own main processors by next year, relying on designs that helped popularize the iPhone and iPad, Bloomberg reported Thursday. From the report: The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on three of its own Mac processors, known as systems-on-a-chip, based on the A14 processor in the next iPhone. The first of these will be much faster than the processors in the iPhone and iPad, the people said. Apple is preparing to release at least one Mac with its own chip next year, according to the people. But the initiative to develop multiple chips, codenamed Kalamata, suggests the company will transition more of its Mac lineup away from current supplier Intel Corp. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Apple's partner for iPhone and iPad processors, will build the new Mac chips, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private product plans. The components will be based on a 5-nanometer production technique, the same size Apple will use in the next iPhones and iPad Pros, one of the people said.

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Working my way through the last season of Better Call Saul. It's great, but the most striking thing are the ads. When the first show aired, on February 23, there was no awareness of the virus in advertising. As the season progressed, at times I forgot I was watching something from nine weeks ago. An ad for a bank that has turned itself into a coffee shop. Whoa that's optimistic, I thought to myself, and then realized this was the old reality. The full series makes a very interesting window into the transition our culture is making. I'm reminded of when my mom died, we didn't do a video walkthrough of the house we grew up in. Didn't think of it, because it seemed normal to be there, not realizing soon this would all be gone, and in the future it would be anything but normal. Now we're repeating it on a much much larger scale. When this show turns up on Netflix it won't have the ads, and we'll miss the transition, which is in every way as interesting as the show, which as I said is fantastic.

Zoom Video has been lambasted for its security flaws, but the backlash hasn't slowed growth. The company reported a 50% surge in use of the online meeting application in the past three weeks. From a report: On April 21, more than 300 million people used Zoom's flagship videoconferencing app, up from about 200 million on April 1, Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan said Wednesday during a webinar focused on security. While some companies and school districts have dropped the app, Zoom's response has reassured investors and sent shares climbing. "Clearly the Zoom platform is providing an incredibly valuable service to our beloved users during this challenging time," Yuan said. "We are thrilled and honored to continue to earn the trust of so many enterprises, hospitals, teachers and customers throughout the world."

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Republican will be one of the most reviled names in human history.

Amazon.com employees have used data about independent sellers on the company's platform to develop competing products, a practice at odds with the company's stated policies. From a report: The online retailing giant has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn't use information it collects from the site's individual third-party sellers -- data those sellers view as proprietary. Yet interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon's private-label business and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reveal that employees did just that. Such information can help Amazon decide how to price an item, which features to copy or whether to enter a product segment based on its earning potential, according to people familiar with the practice, including a current employee and some former employees who participated in it. In one instance, Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. The information included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Amazon's private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers. "Like other retailers, we look at sales and store data to provide our customers with the best possible experience," Amazon said in a written statement. "However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using nonpublic, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch." Amazon said employees using such data to inform private-label decisions in the way the Journal described would violate its policies, and that the company has launched an internal investigation.

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