An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cloud-connected, "smart" automated pet-feeder system Petnet has had a rough spring. The service not only went offline in February, but all its customer service vanished, too, leaving users in the dark until the company apologized and pushed a patch more than a week later. The service briefly returned for some users but fell off again in March. Now, after weeks of silence, the company is blaming COVID-19 for driving it offline for good -- even though its problems started weeks or months before the novel coronavirus became a significant concern. Several Petnet customers began reaching out to Ars during the second and third weeks of April to report that, once again, not only were their feeders not working, but also they couldn't reach anyone at Petnet about it. Everyone's feeders didn't go offline at the same time but seemed to fail in slow sequence over the period between March 26 and April 13. The company emailed its customers on March 26, blaming the novel coronavirus for outages and delays. The message to customers listed the same email (support@petnet.io) and Twitter (@petnetiosupport) handles the company has always used, but every reader who wrote to Ars said they were unable to receive support through either.

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Chris Burns, writing for SlashGear: This morning the official Disney+ Twitter account suggested that Star Wars fans could celebrate the next big holiday with the biggest brand in the galaxy. "Celebrate the Saga," they said, "Reply with your favorite #StarWars memory and you may see it somewhere special on #MayThe4th." The follow up to this message with a bit of lawyer language. "By sharing your message with us using #MayThe4th," said the account, "you agree to our use of the message and your account name in all media and our terms of use here: disneytermsofuse.com."

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For the most part, you can no longer use Twitter as it was originally built to be used: over text message. From a report: Last week, Twitter turned off the ability to receive SMS messages containing the text of new tweets. The feature was disabled in all but "a few countries" that rely on the feature. This won't be a huge deal for the vasty majority of Twitter users who access the service via the app or website. But there are already complaints from some people who still used SMS to read tweets. The change largely marks the end of an era for Twitter: when the service launched, it was built around SMS. Its original 140-character limit was tailored to text message sizes, and you were meant to send and receive new tweets entirely over SMS.

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schwit1 writes: Georgia lost a close U.S. Supreme Court case over the state's ability to copyright its annotated legal code, in a ruling that dissenting justices said would shock states with similar arrangements. Copyright protection doesn't extend to the annotations in the state's official annotated code, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a 5-4 majority on Monday that crossed ideological lines. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joined Roberts. The state's lawyer warned at the oral argument that a ruling against it would "blow up" not only Georgia's copyright regime but similar ones in about a third of the states with similar setups. Indeed, the ruling "will likely come as a shock to the 25 other jurisdictions -- 22 States, 2 Territories, and the District of Columbia -- that rely on arrangements similar to Georgia's to produce annotated codes," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Samuel Alito and partially by Justice Stephen Breyer. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote her own dissent, joined by Breyer. Further reading: Supreme Court Says Georgia's 'Official Code' Is Public Domain -- Including Annotations.

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In the worldwide race for a vaccine to stop the coronavirus, the laboratory sprinting fastest is at Oxford University. From a report: Most other teams have had to start with small clinical trials of a few hundred participants to demonstrate safety. But scientists at the university's Jenner Institute had a running start on a vaccine, having proved in previous trials that similar inoculations -- including one last year against an earlier coronavirus -- were harmless to humans. That has enabled them to leap ahead and schedule tests of their new coronavirus vaccine involving more than 6,000 people by the end of next month, hoping to show not only that it is safe, but also that it works. The Oxford scientists now say that with an emergency approval from regulators, the first few million doses of their vaccine could be available by September -- at least several months ahead of any of the other announced efforts -- if it proves to be effective. Now, they have received promising news suggesting that it might. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Montana last month inoculated six rhesus macaque monkeys with single doses of the Oxford vaccine. The animals were then exposed to heavy quantities of the virus that is causing the pandemic -- exposure that had consistently sickened other monkeys in the lab. But more than 28 days later all six were healthy, said Vincent Munster, the researcher who conducted the test. "The rhesus macaque is pretty much the closest thing we have to humans," Dr. Munster said, noting that scientists were still analyzing the result. He said he expected to share it with other scientists next week and then submit it to a peer-reviewed journal.

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The UK's coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance. From a report: The NHS says it has a way to make the software work "sufficiently well" on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen. That limitation has posed problems for similar apps in other countries. Experts from GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre have aided the effort. NCSC indicated that its involvement has been limited to an advisory role. "Engineers have met several core challenges for the app to meet public health needs and support detection of contact events sufficiently well, including when the app is in the background, without excessively affecting battery life," said a spokeswoman for NHSX, the health service's digital innovation unit.

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Donie O'Sullivan, reporting for CNN Business: Maatje Benassi, a US Army reservist and mother of two, has become the target of conspiracy theorists who falsely place her at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, saying she brought the disease to China. The false claims are spreading across YouTube every day, so far racking up hundreds of thousands of apparent views, and have been embraced by Chinese Communist Party media. Despite never having tested positive for the coronavirus or experienced symptoms, Benassi and her husband are now subjects of discussion on Chinese social media about the outbreak, including among accounts that are known drivers of large-scale coordinated activities by their followers. The claims have turned their lives upside down. The couple say their home address has been posted online and that, before they shut down their accounts, their social media inboxes were overrun with messages from believers of the conspiracy. "It's like waking up from a bad dream going into a nightmare day after day," Maatje Benassi told CNN Business in an exclusive interview, the first time she has spoken publicly since being smeared online.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Just when you think you've seen everything: an eight-year-old has discovered a way to watch YouTube past Apple's Screen Time limits by using the iMessage App Store. Redditor Jsmith4523 noticed that his sister was still watching YouTube, despite having used her allotted daily time on the app. It turns out she'd developed a pretty simple trick to keep browsing videos: just access YouTube through the iMessage App Store.

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Cecily Strong for VP.

WhatsApp's bid to cutting virality of messages circulating on its platform by introducing an additional limit earlier this month has already started to pay off. From a report: The Facebook -owned service said on Monday that spread of "highly forwarded" messages sent on WhatsApp had dropped by 70% globally in weeks after introducing a new restriction earlier this month. In one of the biggest changes to its core feature, WhatsApp said earlier this month that users on its platform can now send along frequently forwarded messages they receive to only one person or a group at a time, down from five. The restriction was rolled out globally to WhatsApp's 2 billion users on April 7.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now devoting all of its attention to addressing the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview published Sunday. From a report: Gates told The Financial Times that his foundation, which has an endowment of more than $40 billion, was prepared to put all of its resources toward fighting the virus, even if it meant efforts to combat other deadly diseases would suffer as a result. "We've taken an organization that was focused on HIV and malaria and polio eradication, and almost entirely shifted it to work on this," Gates, a leading philanthropist, said. "This has the foundation's total attention. Even our non-health related work, like higher education and K-12 [schools], is completely switched around to look at how you facilitate online learning." The Gates' foundation has already committed $250 million toward coronavirus relief efforts around the world. The group's most recent $150 million pledge is set to go toward international efforts to develop diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, as well as efforts to provide resources to African and South Asian countries.

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BTW, the trouble with Dropbox turned out to be their Linux install requires components that aren't there on a headless Ubuntu installation. When the software tried to update itself it failed, and that was the end. I'm guessing not many people use Dropbox on headless Linux?

Cyber-security firm Sophos has published an emergency security update to patch a zero-day vulnerability in its XG enterprise firewall product that was being abused in the wild by hackers. From a report: Sophos said it first learned of the zero-day on late Wednesday, April 22, after it received a report from one of its customers. The customer reported seeing "a suspicious field value visible in the management interface." After investigating the report, Sophos determined this was an active attack and not an error in its product. "The attack used a previously unknown SQL injection vulnerability to gain access to exposed XG devices," Sophos said in a security advisory today. Hackers targeted Sophos XG Firewall devices that had their administration (HTTPS service) or the User Portal control panel exposed on the internet. Sophos said the hackers used the SQL injection vulnerability to download a payload on the device. This payload then stole files from the XG Firewall.

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I got a Kinsa thermometer on April 14, almost two weeks ago. I've gotten in the habit of taking my temperature at the beginning and end of every day. I feel like I'm doing my part to support an early warning system. I just noticed they have a way to export your data. I was hoping it would be a nice XML or JSON format, but it's a log file format. Not sorted by anything I can see. I don't have any code that can process this format. But it was there, and that's worth something. I'd give it a B-, but most apps don't give you a way to export your own data, and for that, A+. Also, they should change their store from saying it's pre-order -- there's nothing pre about it. You can buy it. It takes a few weeks to get there because the product is so popular.

If Trump will sideline Fauci, Biden should start a nightly briefing with Fauci as the moderator. How about a little competition -- raise the bar on the information the people get. Give the press an option not to cover Trump's misinfo.