Google announced this week new rules for the Chrome Web Store in an attempt to cut down the number of shady Chrome extensions submitted and listed on the site. From a report: Starting August 27, Google says it intends to enforce a new set of rules, which will result in a large number of extensions being delisted. These rules are meant to crack down on a series of practices extension developers have been recently employing to flood the Web Store with shady extensions or boost install counts for low-quality content. They include: 1. Developers cannot submit duplicate extensions anymore. (e.g. Wallpaper extensions that have different names but provide the user with the same wallpapers when installed.) 2. Extensions are not allowed to use "keyword spam" techniques to flood metadata fields with multiple terms and have the extension listed across multiple categories to improve the extension's visibility in search results. 3. Developers are not allowed to use misleading, improperly formatted, non-descriptive, irrelevant, excessive, or inappropriate metadata. Extension metadata needs to be accurate, and Google intends to be strict about it. 4. Developers are now forbidden from inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or paid downloads, reviews, and ratings.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: HTC's Exodus blockchain smartphones will soon receive their own mining app, letting them mine Monero cryptocurrency when plugged in and idle, The Block reported earlier this month. The DeMiner app, which is being developed by Midas Labs, is scheduled to launch in Q2 2020. According to Midas Labs' Jri Lee, one of HTC's Exodus 1S smartphones should be able to mine $0.0038 of Monero a day, which doesn't exactly turn the phone into a moneymaking machine. In fact, Decrypt ran the numbers and found that, at that rate, you'd be in line to make just over a dollar a year ($1.387). That means you'd pay off $237 Exodus 1S in around 170 years -- excluding electricity costs, that is.

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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, said in March that promoting bleach as a cure for the coronavirus was "misinformation that has imminent risk of danger" and that such messages would immediately be removed from the social network. President Trump has now put Mr. Zuckerberg's comments to the test. From a report: At a White House briefing last week, Mr. Trump suggested that disinfectants and ultraviolet light were possible treatments for the virus. His remarks immediately found their way onto Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites, and people rushed to defend the president's statements as well as mock them. But Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have declined to remove Mr. Trump's statements posted online in video clips and transcriptions of the briefing, saying he did not specifically direct people to pursue the unproven treatments. That has led to a mushrooming of other posts, videos and comments about false virus cures with UV lights and disinfectants that the companies have largely left up. A New York Times analysis found 780 Facebook groups, 290 Facebook pages, nine Instagram accounts and thousands of tweets pushing UV light therapies that were posted after Mr. Trump's comments and that remained on the sites as of Thursday. More than 5,000 other posts, videos and comments promoting disinfectants as a virus cure were also on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube this week. Only a few of the posts have been taken down. The social media companies have always trod delicately when it comes to President Trump. Yet their inaction on posts echoing his remarks on UV lights and disinfectants stands out because the companies have said for weeks that they would not permit false information about the coronavirus to proliferate.

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Microsoft now has 10 million subscribers to its Xbox Game Pass service, the company said during an investor call yesterday. It's the first time Microsoft has publicly disclosed Xbox Game Pass numbers, and it's a sign that the company's ambitious bet on subscription gaming is starting to pay off. From a report: Microsoft has been trying to build a "Netflix for video games" for years, and it looks like it's taking an early lead before a significant expansion to game streaming later this year. 10 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers is a significant milestone. EA's competing subscription services, EA Access and Origin Access, hit more than 5 million subscribers last year, and Sony's PlayStation Now subscriber base reached 1 million in October, five years after its debut. Apple and Google haven't disclosed numbers for Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass, and Nvidia's GeForce Now service reached 1 million users shortly after its launch. Microsoft is also sharing some additional Xbox Game Pass statistics today. "Since March, Xbox Game Pass members have added over 23 million friends on Xbox Live, which is a 70 percent growth in friendship rate," explains Xbox chief Phil Spencer. "Game Pass members are also playing twice as much and engaging in more multiplayer gaming, which has increased by 130 percent."

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The space agency announces the companies that will develop landers to return astronauts to the Moon.

Amazon has confirmed it will cut the price of its Kindle ebooks from Friday, after the government announced it would bring forward plans to stop charging VAT on online publications because of the pandemic. From a report: The decision to remove the 20% VAT charged on online news subscriptions and books will bring them in line with their physical equivalents, which have always been zero-rated. Amazon said customers would very shortly start to notice the change, which will see the cost a $12.6 ebook reduced to $10.5. "For titles where Amazon sets the price, we will reduce the prices of books not already on promotion," said a spokesperson. "After receiving today's notification, we are working as fast as possible to lower prices for customers."

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About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It')s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It's also dropping the price of the service by more than 50% and giving developers the option to run it on relatively low-performance virtual machines that will start at $0.08 per hour. In today's announcement, Microsoft's Scott Hanselman points out that the company learned that most developers who used Visual Studio Online thought of it as being much more than simply an editor in the browser.

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US space agency satellites follow the melting trends in Antarctica and Greenland over 16 years.

As our lives have become a seemingly endless series of work meetings on Zoom and FaceTime or WhatsApp catch-ups with friends, we're all getting a bit sick of seeing people's faces enclosed in a cold, almost lifeless, digital frame. A tech worker from New York had a different idea for his tech conference, which he announced, in all seriousness, on April Fools' Day. The free conference is called Deserted Island DevOps and is happening on Thursday, entirely inside Animal Crossing, the Nintendo Switch hit game released in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. From a report: Speakers are doing their talks on an island in Animal Crossing specifically built for the conference, and attendees can follow along in the game, on Twitch, or Zoom, as a fallback option. Other than the unusual, and incredibly colorful and fun setting, the conference is very much like any other conference. The speakersâ(TM) avatars are standing behind a podium, their slides are being displayed next to them, and attendees sit in the audience. Crucially, the conference isn't about Animal Crossing, it's kind of a standard software development type conference. It just happens to be happening inside a video game.

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McConnell's one-finger salute to local government.

Crashing waves emitting a flash of neon blue have lit up darkened stretches of Southern California's coastline this month, most recently making an appearance in the South Bay. From a report: The sporadic phenomenon -- sometimes called sea sparkle -- is something scientists have been studying for 120 years. It's associated with a red tide, or an algae bloom, made up of organisms called dinoflagellates. These tiny single-celled organisms are common members of the coastal plankton community that float on or near the ocean's surface and can emit bioluminescence, most commonly when they're grabbed by a predator. The light acts to startle their attacker, according to Michael Latz, a marine biologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Occasionally, the organisms are found in high concentrations, resulting in red tides and known for giving the ocean water a deep red, brown or orange hue during the day. At night, they can put on a truly spectacular show when jostled by a crashing wave or the wake of a boat. Red tides are difficult to predict, and not all of them produce bioluminescence. Scientists still aren't sure about all the factors that lead to them, Latz said.

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The Raspberry Pi can be used for all sorts of maker projects, and the foundation has offered camera modules for it since 2013, adding vision-related functionality. The first module was a modest 5-megapixel affair that was eventually replaced by an 8-megapixel Sony sensor four years ago. Today, sees the arrival of a new much higher 12.3 megapixel quality camera, and a range of interchangeable lenses. From a report: The new camera is compatible with all Raspberry Pi models -- from Pi 1 Model B onwards -- with the exception of early Pi Zero boards. The camera is available to buy from today for $50.

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Nintendo is telling partner developers it's not going to hold one of its Nintendo Direct video events in June. From a report: The publisher has had a June Direct to correspond with E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) every year since 2013. And before that, it held annual stage presentations. But complications brought about from Japan's work-from-home order as part of its attempts to mitigate COVID-19 are forcing Nintendo to push back its schedule. Nintendo was putting together a June event. The company was lining up partners and was planning to unveil its first-party schedule for the rest of 2020. That included highlighting the Mario franchise's 35th anniversary, which it's going to celebrate with the release of some classic 3D Mario games on Switch, according to various reports. But now, the company is far less certain. If it holds another Direct, it may not come until the very end of summer.

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On Twitter it was suggested that I change the titles of the items in the Cuomo Briefing podcast feed so each item has a unique title, that it might start working properly in Apple's podcasts app on my iPhone. Note the items in the feed have proper guid elements, so there should be no need to use the title as a guid, but it seems that Apple's podcast app does, because when I changed the titles of the five most recent episode, voila -- they show up in the Apple podcasts app. This was suggested on Twitter by OG podcaster Madge Weinstein. Bottom-line: there appears to be an easy-to-fix bug in Apple's podcasts app on iOS.

Zoom has admitted it doesn't have 300 million daily active users. From a report: The admission came after The Verge noticed the company had quietly edited a blog post making the claim earlier this month. Zoom originally stated it had "more than 300 million daily users" and that "more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time." Zoom later deleted these references from the original blog post, and now claims "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants." The difference between a daily active user (DAU) and "meeting participant" is significant. Daily meeting participants can be counted multiple times: if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you're counted five times. A DAU is counted once per day, and is commonly used by companies to measure service usage. Only counting meeting participants is an easy, somewhat misleading, way to make your platform usage seem larger than it is.

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