Two lead economists for the World Bank called for an updated online version of a legendary government program from America's Great Depression during the 1930s -- public works programs -- as a companion to widespread calls for quarantining: What is missing in such mandatory "stick" approaches is the more active use of "carrot" incentives that could both encourage self-isolation and help prepare a workforce to bounce back in the recovery phase.... [W]e propose that governments subsidize a set of activities that could be done from home. This would further induce self-isolation, reduce the need for quarantine enforcement, and encourage some to learn new skills that could be useful after the pandemic is over. It could also provide effective, self-targeted social assistance to young people who have lost their jobs due to quarantines and lockdowns. Several categories of activities satisfy these criteria: data labeling, document digitization, and virtual services. Long-time Slashdot reader sixoh1 quips it could be a kind of "Mechanical Turk for all," but adds, "One idea that struck me was converting documents to display online." The two World Bank economists also suggest that governments subsidize online courses -- and maybe even streaming services. In these times of social distancing, "There is actually a public-good component in these privately-provided services..."

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I had a pretty terrible Dropbox outage here since Friday, but with help from Daniel Bradley, I was able to get most of my servers connected to Dropbox again.

I just noticed that the server for LO2 got completely trashed in the process. I have no idea how, but I had a backup from yesterday, which I am now restoring. It may take about an hour or so. Any work done between the outage and the restoration will be lost. Sorry.

I'm going to have to stop depending on Dropbox. Obviously the Linux version is not a priority for them, it's breaking a lot these days. I've been a Dropbox user since the beginning. But it's been obvious for a few years that this is no longer a good match.

Update: Well that was pretty good outage-wise. Less than 15 minutes. But data was lost. It seems fortunate this happened after I added the backup command. No excuse for not having copies of your files.

Some Windows users are reporting serious problems after downloading Microsoft's latest update for Windows 10, according to Forbes: The problems those users are reporting to the Microsoft support forums and on social media have included the installation failing and looping back to restart again, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) following a "successful" update and computers that simply refuse to boot again afterward. Among the more common issues, in terms of complaints after a Windows 10 update, were Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity related ones. But there were have also been users complaining that after a restart, all files from the C drive had been deleted. Microsoft has stated that it has "not seen these issues reflected in telemetry, support data, or customer feedback channels," but is aware of social media reports that mention Bluetooth, a stop error with a blue screen, and other related issues. "We continuously investigate all customer feedback and are closely monitoring this situation," Microsoft said in the known issues section of the update notes. "On social platforms like Twitter and Reddit, PC users are reporting photos, documents and apps are disappearing without a trace..." reports Komando.com. "Some things never change... Microsoft can't deliver a stable update to save its life!"

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"The coronavirus crisis is giving Quebec's nationalist government an excuse to attempt what may be impossible," reports Bloomberg. "The Canadian province is embarking on an uphill battle to chip away at Amazon's position." Reckoning that weeks of confinement will permanently accelerate the growth of online shopping, Premier Francois Legault wants to boost Quebec retailers' digital sales, and is urging the population of 8.5 million to buy from local firms. His government took a first step by building an online directory of retailers called Le Panier Bleu -- or Blue Basket, a reference to the color of the French-speaking province's flag... "People will be able to see what's available in their region," Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said in an interview. "There's a solidarity developing, I want to capitalize on that...." To run it, the government recruited a board including the former president of Loweâ(TM)s Cos. Inc. in Canada and Alexandre Taillefer, a private equity partner who years ago floated the idea of a Quebec response to Amazonâ(TM)s dominance... About 13,000 businesses were referenced as of April 24.... "Our goal is to shift some of the searches Quebeckers do on Amazon or Google to a search engine presenting essentially 100% Quebec content," he said during a webcast of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal. If just 1% get diverted, "it will have been worth it." Economy Minister Fitzgibbon describes it as a way to "enable our small retailers to do well against companies that have huge marketing resources."

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An anonymous reader quote Hot Hardware: If you're looking for the best gaming CPU or the best CPU for desktop applications, there are only two choices to pick from: AMD and Intel. That fact has spawned an almost religious following for both camps, and the resulting flamewars, that make it tricky to get unbiased advice about the best choice for your next processor. But in many cases, the answer is actually very clear. In fact, for most users, it's a blowout win in AMD's favor. That's an amazing reversal of fortunes for the chipmaker after it teetered on the edge of bankruptcy a mere three years ago, making its turnaround all the more impressive as it continues to upset the entrenched Intel that enjoyed a decade of dominance... Pricing is the most important consideration for almost everyone, and AMD is hard to beat in the value department. The company offers a plethora of advantages, like bundled coolers and full overclockability on all models, not to mention complimentary software that includes the innovative Precision Boost Overdrive auto-overclocking feature. You also benefit from the broad compatibility of Socket AM4 motherboards that support both forward and backward compatibility, ensuring that not only do you get the most bang for your processor buck, but also your motherboard investment. AMD also allows overclocking on all but its A-Series motherboards (see our article on how to overclock AMD Ryzen), which is another boon for users. And, in this battle of AMD vs Intel CPUs, we haven't even discussed the actual silicon yet. AMD's modern processors tend to offer either more cores or threads and faster PCIe 4.0 connectivity at every single price point. "We're not covering laptop or server chips," the article notes, adding "There's a clear winner overall, but which brand of CPU you should buy depends most on what kind of features, price and performance are important to you." Still, it's noteworthy that AMD beats Intel in 7 out of 10 comparisons. The three in which Intel won were gaming performance ("only because we measure strictly by the absolute top performance possible"), drivers and software ("the company has an army of software developers [and] a decade of dominance also finds most software developers optimizing almost exclusively for Intel architectures"), and overclocking, where Intel "has far more headroom and much higher attainable frequencies. "Just be prepared to pay for the privilege."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well that was pretty good outage-wise. Less than 15 minutes. But data was lost. It seems fortunate this happened after I added the backup command. No excuse for not having copies of your files.

"SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites will soon sport an accessory to tamp down their surprising brightness," reports Live Science: That brightness worries many astronomers, who say that the huge Starlink constellation could seriously disrupt a variety of scientific observations. And Starlink will indeed be huge, if all goes according to SpaceX's plan: The company has approval to launch 12,000 craft to low Earth orbit (LEO) and has applied for permission to loft 30,000 more. (For perspective, humanity has launched just 9,400 objects to orbit since the dawn of the space age in 1957). SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that the company will find a way to make Starlink craft fade from scientists' sight, predicting that the constellation will end up having no impact whatsoever on astronomical discoveries. SpaceX has been working with the astronomical community to help make this happen, researchers say, and the company has already tried out some mitigation measures. For example, one of the 60 Starlink satellites that launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket this past January sported an experimental coating to make it less reflective. Observations show that this "DarkSat" is considerably dimmer than its brighter Starlink cohorts, but probably not dim enough to quell most astronomers' concerns about the megaconstellation. But SpaceX is taking additional measures as well, which brings us to the new accessory. Musk tweeted the following on Wednesday (April 22), in response to a Twitter follower who wished SpaceX luck on a 60-satellite Starlink launch that day: "Thanks! We are taking some key steps to reduce satellite brightness btw. Should be much less noticeable during orbit raise by changing solar panel angle & all sats get sunshades starting with launch 9."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I had a pretty terrible Dropbox outage here since Friday, but with help from Daniel Bradley, I was able to get most of my servers connected to Dropbox again. I just noticed that the server for LO2 got completely trashed in the process. I have no idea how, but I had a backup from yesterday, which I am now restoring. It may take about an hour or so. Any work done between the outage and the restoration will be lost. Sorry. I'm going to have to stop depending on Dropbox. Obviously the Linux version is not a priority for them, it's breaking a lot these days. I've been a Dropbox user since the beginning. But it's been obvious for a few years that this is no longer a good match.

U.K. vacuum cleaner company Dyson "said the British government no longer needed the ventilator it had developed from scratch," reports Reuters: Company founder James Dyson said the company had welcomed Prime Minister Boris Johnson's challenge to build ventilators. "Mercifully they are not required, but we don't regret our contribution to the national effort for one moment," he said in a statement. Dyson said his company had spent around 20 million pounds ($25 million) on the project to date, and would not accept any public money. "I have some hope that our ventilator may yet help the response in other countries, but that requires further time and investigation," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A picture rescued from Facebook. Tompkins Square Park in NYC.
From left to right, my uncle, Ken Kiesler, his friend Sparky, my grandfather Rudy Kiesler, and me. I'm guessing this is 1989 or 1990.

Mike Bouma is Slashdot reader #85,252. (And judging by his Slashdot profile, he was also a participant in the short-lived Amiga webring.) He writes: KK of the demo scene group Altair is making a Doom clone for the Amiga 500. The system requirements are a mere 7 Mhz Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM! Have a look: Dread Ep 01 — making "Doom" clone for Amiga 500 Dread Ep 02 — "Doom" clone for Amiga 500 — Laying out the map... You can find KK/Altair at the English Amiga Board.

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Doctors in PPE's are a new class of hero.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Rust has been voted the "most-loved" programming language by developers on Stack Overflow for four years in a row. But the Rust project now admits it has an adoption problem among developers and organizations. Rust's adoption issue surfaced in January's Stack Overflow's 2019 survey, which revealed that despite developers' positive feelings toward Rust, 97% of them hadn't actually used it. Rust maintainers have now explored the adoption challenges in their latest annual survey of nearly 4,000 developers across the world... Asked why developers have stopped using Rust, the most common response is that the respondent's company doesn't use it, suggesting an adoption issue. Other common reasons are the learning curve, a lack of necessary libraries, and a lack of integrated development environment (IDE) support. The top issues that respondents say the Rust project could do to improve adoption of the language are better training and documentation, followed by better libraries, IDE integration, and improved compile times... "Most indicated that Rust maturity — such as more libraries and complete learning resources and more mature production capabilities — would make Rust more appealing," the project noted.... "The results show the overriding problem hindering use of Rust is adoption. The learning curve continues to be a challenge — we appear to most need to improve our follow-through for intermediate users — but so are libraries and tooling." The article also notes that Rust is popular with some developers at Microsoft, "who are experimenting with Rust to reduce memory-related bugs in Windows components written in C and C++."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We're updating our bug bounty policy and payouts to make it more appealing to researchers and reflect the more hardened security stance we adopted after moving to a multi-process, sandboxed architecture," reports the Mozilla security blog: Besides rewarding duplicate submissions, we're clarifying our payout criteria and raising the payouts for higher impact bugs. Now, sandbox escapes and related bugs will be eligible for a baseline $8,000, with a high quality report up to $10,000. Additionally, proxy bypass bugs are eligible for a baseline of $3,000, with a high quality report up to $5,000... Additionally, we'll be publishing more posts about how to get started testing Firefox — which is something we began by talking about the HTML Sanitization we rely on to prevent UXSS. By following the instructions there you can immediately start trying to bypass our sanitizer using your existing Firefox installation in less than a minute... Lastly, we would like to let you know that we have cross-posted this to our new Attack & Defense blog. This new blog is a vehicle for tailored content specifically for engineers, security researchers, and Firefox bug bounty participants. They point out that Firefox has one of the world's oldest bug bounty programs, dating back to 2004 -- and it's still going strong. "From 2017-2019, we paid out $965,750 to researchers across 348 bugs, making the average payout $2,775 — but as you can see in the graph below, our most common payout was actually $4,000!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes I write posts to solicit info from my brain trust, the people who read my blog. Yesterday I wrote about the non-inevitablity of a Covid-19 vaccine, and got two interesting responses.

From correspondent #1.

• HIV has a very high mutation rate, it's a constantly changing target, very hard to vaccinate. Fortunately this corona virus is highly conserved (stable), there are many stable proteins you can target. We don't see a reason why that stability would change as it's already spread around the world, but it's possible, but not likely.

From correspondent #2.

• I wanted to offer a few reasons for limited, cautious optimism, and one reason for a little bit of pessimism.
• Nobody ever "gets better" from HIV on their own. Our immune systems can't beat it. So it's hard to make a vaccine that teaches our immune systems how to beat it.
• We do get better from the flu on our own. But the problem is that the flu is a "modular" virus that can be recombined, so there's always a new version. So flu vaccines work, but there's a new vaccine every year.
• Our bodies can beat the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. People usually get better in a few weeks, if they don't die.
• Many people who caught the original SARS-CoV virus in 2003 still had antibodies ~10 years later.
• The SARS viruses are unusually complex, and in order to replicate correctly, they have pretty good proofreading. So they mutate much more slowly than HIV or the flu.
• But there's also one reason to worry:
• There are four other coronaviruses that cause about 15% of cases of the common cold. We build immunity to these viruses but it usually doesn't last forever.
• So as I understand it, the biggest question with SARS-CoV-2 isn't whether we can teach our bodies to beat it. It's how long our immune system will remember. And whether we can find a low-risk vaccine that doesn't cause other problems.

As always, Scripting News readers are the smartest and best.