The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

Addicted to A.I.

Mr. Ton-That, 31, grew up a long way from Silicon Valley. In his native Australia, he was raised on tales of his royal ancestors in Vietnam. In 2007, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. The iPhone had just arrived, and his goal was to get in early on what he expected would be a vibrant market for social media apps. But his early ventures never gained real traction.In 2009, Mr. Ton-That created a site that let people share links to videos with all the contacts in their instant messengers. Mr. Ton-That shut it down after it was branded a “phishing scam.” In 2015, he spun up Trump Hair, which added Mr. Trump’s distinctive coif to people in a photo, and a photo-sharing program. Both fizzled.Dispirited, Mr. Ton-That moved to New York in 2016. Tall and slender, with long black hair, he considered a modeling career, he said, but after one shoot he returned to trying to figure out the next big thing in tech. He started reading academic papers on artificial intelligence, image recognition and machine learning.Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.Police departments have had access to facial recognition tools for almost 20 years, but they have historically been limited to searching government-provided images, such as mug shots and driver’s license photos. In recent years, facial recognition algorithms have improved in accuracy, and companies like Amazon offer products that can create a facial recognition program for any database of images.Mr. Ton-That wanted to go way beyond that. He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo. Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition. Read the full article

Facebook Repairs Bug That Prompted Brief iOS App Outages

Popular smartphone apps including Spotify and Pinterest suffered outages Friday for a few hours due to a bug in Facebook's systems.Facebook has resolved the problem, a spokesperson said."Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK," or software development kit, the spokesperson said."We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologise for any inconvenience."App users began reporting on Twitter early Friday that they were unable to open Spotify and other sites.Downdetector, which monitors for internet problems in real time, showed a rise in problems for a number of applications, including Spotify, Pinterest, Waze, and The New York Times.It reported a major spike in problems around 10:30am GMT (4pm IST), and a decline in user issues at around 1pm GMT (6:30pm IST).In 2020, will WhatsApp get the killer feature that every Indian is waiting for? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below. Read the full article

Betaal Netflix Series Review, Download, Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and More

Netflix and Shah Rukh Khan's Red Chillies are coming together for their second collaboration after Bard of Blood last year. Releasing this week is Betaal, which is arguably the first zombie horror series out of India. It follows a counter-insurgency force that's attacked by a cursed undead British officer and his officers as they try to excavate a blocked tunnel. Betaal comes from the makers of Ghoul in Patrick Graham, who's the showrunner, co-director, and co-writer, and the studio Blumhouse, known for low-budget horror films such as Get Out and Paranormal Activity. Nikhil Mahajan (Baji) and Suhani Kanwar (Lipstick Under My Burkha) serve as director and writer alongside Graham, who has previously worked with Kanwar on the Netflix dystopian series Leila. For Netflix, Betaal will be the fifth original series from India in 2020, after the Jharkhand-based phishing drama Jamtara in January, the romantic drama Taj Mahal 1989 in February, the Imtiaz Ali-created crime drama She in March, and the Vir Das-led dark comedy Hasmukh in April. With Betaal out this weekend, here's all you need to know about the Netflix series, from review to cast. From Paatal Lok to Snowpiercer, TV Shows to Watch in May

Betaal Netflix release date

Betaal is out — on the day of Eid — Sunday, May 24 at 12:30pm on Netflix in India. As always, you will have the option to download all episodes. Betaal has a total of four episodes, each with a runtime around 50 minutes.

Betaal meaning

Betaal — also written as “Betal” — is the anglicised form of the Marathi word “बेताळ”, which is a folk deity worshipped in the western Konkan region of India. But for the purposes of the show, Betaal is drawn from the Sanskrit word “वेताल” / “Vetala”, which refers to reanimated corpses — that's zombies — who reside in charnel grounds and predict fortunes.

Betaal Netflix trailer

Netflix released the first and only trailer for Betaal in the second week of May, which set up the zombie horror series' premise and introduced its primary characters.

Betaal Netflix cast

Viineet Kumar (Mukkabaaz) leads the Betaal cast as Vikram Sirohi, the second-in-command of the Baaz squad of the CIPD (Counter Insurgency Police Department). In a mailed statement, Kumar said: “We had to undergo physical training, as one cannot carry this uniform without training and knowing how to give and receive commands. There were different knives and guns training as well, how to take position, formations etc. Many times, people would have bruises on their elbows and knees after the training.” Aahana Kumra (Lipstick Under My Burkha) stars alongside on Betaal as DC “Ahu” Ahluwalia (Aahana Kumra). She's the one with that huge scar on the right side of her face. Kumra said: “I was both terrified and excited by the idea of wearing a prosthetic piece since I've never done it before. The scar is so central to Ahlu's character. It speaks volumes about her, it makes you realise that there is a lot more to Ahlu's story than meets the eye. She has had a difficult past and has not yet lost hope.” Also part of the Betaal cast are Suchitra Pillai (Karkash) as Commandant Tyagi, the leader of the CIPD; Jitendra Joshi (Sacred Games) as Ajay Mudhalvan, a political fixer of sorts; Manjiri Pupala (Party) as Puniya, a tribal woman; and Syna Anand (Mere Pyare Prime Minister) as Ajay's daughter, Saanvi Mudhalvan. There are supporting roles for Jatin Goswami (Babumoshai Bandookbaaz) as Assad Akbar, Siddharth Menon (Chhappad Phaad Ke) as Nadir Haq, Yashwant Wasnik (Bajirao Mastani) as Sarpanch, and Savita Bajaj (Uski Roti) as Mausi. Puniya is among those village folk caught between the zombies and the CIPD. On her role, she said: “Shooting for a horror-thriller like Betaal has been a really great experience. I am essaying the role of a tribal woman who is consumed by anger and hatred for the CIPD which eventually leads to an interesting turn of events. It's a very compelling character and without giving away much all I can say is watch out for Betaal and the monster within us.” Mrs. Serial Killer, The Imitation Game, Room, and More on Netflix in May Betaal synopsis “While on a mission to displace the natives of Campa forest in order to build a highway, Sirohi and his squad unwittingly unleash the curse of Betaal mountain. A remote village quickly becomes the arena of a breathless battle when a two-century-old East India Company Colonel, infected with Betaal's curse, and his battalion of blood-thirsty zombie redcoats are released from their tomb, attacking anything with a pulse. The CIPD forces are pitted against the undead army that wreaks havoc on the people and threatens to end civilisation as we know it.”

Betaal Netflix review

Netflix isn't providing critics early access to Betaal, which means reviews will not be available before release. Betaal Netflix poster Here you go:

The official poster for Betaal Photo Credit: Netflix Can Netflix force Bollywood to reinvent itself? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS. You can also download the episode or just hit the play button below. Read the full article

Zoom Suspends New Free User Registrations in China

Video conferencing provider Zoom Video Communications said on Tuesday it was limiting new user registrations in mainland China to enterprise customers only. Free users in mainland China can continue to join meetings hosted by registered customers, whereas new user registrations are available only for enterprise customers who sign up through authorised sales representatives, according to a statement from the company. The coronavirus-fuelled lockdowns of millions of people globally have driven huge growth in use of platforms such as Zoom, as families and organisations use its software to connect.   Nikkei first reported of the development saying the restriction on Chinese individual accounts on the Zoom app was due to "regulatory requirements" in the country, and the company has come under scrutiny from both the US and China as trade tensions intensified. Although Zoom has seen a surge in demand for its services it faced a backlash from cyber security experts and users alike over a number of privacy and security issues that caused it to pause new feature development for 90 days to address the concerns. Zoom said last week it plans to open two new R&D locations in Phoenix and Pittsburgh over the next two years, expanding its engineering workforce by about 60 percent. © Thomson Reuters 2020 For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on Twitter, Facebook, and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Betaal Netflix Series Review, Download, Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and More Jio Discontinues Rs. 98 Prepaid Recharge Plan

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Facebook, Telcos Plan Subsea Cable to Connect Africa, Middle East and Europe

Facebook and a team of African and global telecom majors have struck a deal to build one of the world's largest subsea cable networks, boosting internet availability across three continents, they said in a joint statement on Thursday.South Africa's MTN GlobalConnect and Mauritius-based infrastructure provider WIOCC are partners in the project, along with China Mobile International, French telecoms major Orange SA, Saudi Arabia's stc, Telecom Egypt, and Vodafone.The project, called 2Africa, aims to build 37,000 kilometres of subsea cable infrastructure which will directly connect countries around the African coast to Europe and the Middle East, according to its website.The network will have a design capacity of up to 150 terabytes per second (Tbps) on key parts of the system, the site said. The 11 new cables rolled out between 2009 and 2016 in sub-Saharan Africa provided around 70Tbps of design capacity.Subsea infrastructure provider Alcatel Submarine Networks will build the project, which is expected to be operational by 2023/24, the statement said. The companies did not reveal how much money they were investing."2Africa... will interconnect Europe, the Middle East, and 21 landings in 16 countries in Africa," the partners said in the statement.Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet, carrying 99 percent of the world's data traffic.Africa's big economies have a large and fast growing population of internet users, with growth in internet use fuelled by rapidly expanding mobile broadband networks and ever more affordable phones.However, with a population of 1.3 billion, Africa is still a laggard in internet connectivity, with average internet penetration at around 39 percent against a world average of 59 percent.On completion the subsea network will deliver more than the total combined capacity of all subsea cables serving Africa today, the firms said in the statement."Improving connectivity for Africa is a significant step which lays the groundwork for increased digitalisation across the continent," said Vodacom International Business Chief Officer Diego Gutierrez.Vodacom, which is majority owned by Britain's Vodafone, is South Africa's second biggest telecom player.© Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

Amazon's Livestreaming Platform Twitch Announces Safety Advisory Council

Amazon's video game live-streaming platform Twitch is forming an advisory council of experienced users, online safety experts and anti-bullying advocates to help improve safety on the site, Twitch said in a blog post on Thursday.The council's eight members will advise on product and policy changes, focusing on areas such as harassment and protection of marginalised groups.Twitch, which was used last October to stream footage from shooting attacks in Germany, said it had doubled the size of its safety operations team this year and added new tools to help its volunteer channel moderators.The company said it also uses a combination of human moderators and automation to handle the moderation reports it receives.Twitch, which says it has 15 million daily users, is primarily a site where video gamers can livestream their games and chat to other users, though it also has channels focused on sports, music, and politics. Last year, US President Donald Trump joined the platform.The council includes Dr. Sameer Hinduja, the co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, sociologist TL Taylor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) whose research focuses on online gaming, Alex Holmes, the deputy CEO at UK-based youth charity The Diana Award, and Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Free Expression Project.Also on the council are experienced Twitch streamers CohhCarnage, Cupahnoodle, Zizaran, and FerociouslySteph."When developing this council, we felt it was essential to include both experts who can provide an external perspective, as well as Twitch streamers who deeply understand creators' unique challenges and viewpoints," Twitch said in the blog post.The move adds Twitch to the list of social platforms that have created councils to advise on site decisions, such as Twitter, which formed its Trust and Safety Council in 2016.In March, Chinese social video app TikTok, which faces U.S. scrutiny over data-sharing and censorship concerns, named members of a U.S.-focused content moderation committee to give "unvarnished views" on its policies.Last week, social media giant Facebook announced the first members of its Oversight Board, a high-profile effort to respond to criticism over content moderation decisions.But unlike the Facebook's oversight board, which can overrule the company's verdicts on certain content, a Twitch spokeswoman told Reuters that its council would not make moderation decisions.The spokeswoman said the council would meet regularly. Asked about transparency on the group's advice, she said that Twitch hopes to share periodic updates into its work.© Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

Aarogya Setu App Data Only Shared With Government Officials Working on COVID-19: NITI Aayog CEO

The Central government's Aarogya Setu mobile application is based on "privacy-first by design" principle keeping in mind the safety and privacy of users' data, said Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog. He added that the user data from the app would only be provided to those government officials who were directly in charge of containing the spread of the Coronavirus in India.In an exclusive interaction with ANI, Kant informed that Aarogya Setu mobile application has been built to ensure privacy and security of personal information that was collected from people. It is based on "privacy-first by design" principle."Aarogya Setu has a clearly defined protocol for access to data. National Informatics Centre (NIC) is the fiduciary of the data, and data is only shared with government officials directly involved in COVID-19 related medical and administrative interventions on a strictly need-to-know basis and limited in scope only to their direct work," said Kant.Concerns over the Aarogya Setu App were raised when a French ethical hacker claimed to have access of the users' data and had highlighted security bugs within the app which could be privacy ramifications.Clarifying apprehensions that some users may have related to data security, Kant said: "When an individual provides his/her mobile number for registration, the Aarogya Setu server assigns an anonymous, randomized unique device identity number (DiD) and associates it with their mobile device. This pair - the mobile number, DiD and other personal information is securely stored in a highly encrypted server."After registration, the app asks for your name and mobile number (any name that you want to be called by, not your legal name). In addition, it asks for your age and gender (both have a direct co-relation to COVID-19 impact), profession (to ensure people who are in essential services are proactively assisted), countries visited in last 30 days and willingness to volunteer in times of need."All contact tracing and location information that might have been uploaded to the Aarogya Setu server is permanently deleted 45 days from the date of upload if you have not tested positive for COVID-19 within that period of time. If you are infected, all contact tracing and location information pertaining to you are permanently deleted from the server 60 days after you are declared cured of COVID-19," added Kant.While the app requests users to share location, the app does not use location data for contact tracing. "The app has clearly defined and delimited how location information is used - only on an anonymous or aggregate basis and for the specific purpose of identifying hotspots so that proactive increased testing and sanitisation of these locations can be done," he said, adding that the app does not continuously monitor any user's location.According to Government data till date, Aarogya Setu app has registered about 9.6 crore users since its launch on Apri 2l. However, contact tracing data has been fetched of only 12,000 users who had tested positive for COVID-19 constituting less than 0.1 percent of all users. "Unless a person turn COVID-19 positive, this information is never accessed or pushed to the server and is permanently deleted from the phone 30 days after it is collected," he said."The central feature of the app is location history and Bluetooth-based contact tracing in the fight against the coronavirus. The Bluetooth interaction between two phones on which the app is installed is performed anonymously, using a randomised and secure Device Identification Number (DID) that has been assigned to the devices at the time of registration," added Kant.Along with the user's location history which is sampled sparingly (once every 30 minutes), this information is securely encrypted using the native key chain of the phone's operating system and is stored on the phone itself."The Aarogya Setu engine is designed to respect the privacy of COVID-19 positive patients. The back-end of the App is integrated with ICMR database through an API, and information about patients who have tested COVID-19 positive is received in real-time. It is this ICMR database which is the source from which the app receives information about all COVID-19 positive cases," added Kant."It is only in the event there is a requirement for individual medical intervention that the anonymised personal information is re-identified. The team is exploring moving from a one-time DID to dynamically generated DIDs for every user, to further enhance privacy," added Kant in an interview to ANI.Explaining significant predications made by the Aarogya Setu, Kant said, "In the last 6 weeks, Aarogya Setu App has emerged as a key technology solution aimed in combating COVID-19. Through this app, several potential emerging and hidden hotspots were identified. The engine predicted 130 hotspots across India at the sub-post office-level between April 13th to April 20th. Every forecasted hotspot has since been declared a real hotspot and acted upon by the health ministry." Read the full article

National Technology Day: PM Modi Hails Those at the Forefront of Research to Defeat COVID-19

On the National Technology Day on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed all those at the forefront of research and innovation to defeat coronavirus and remembered the "exceptional achievement" of the country''s scientists in carrying out the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests. The National Technology Day marks the anniversary of the underground nuclear tests conducted in Rajasthan's Pokhran.On this day in 1998, India successfully conducted first of its five nuclear tests under the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee."On National Technology Day, our nation salutes all those who are leveraging technology to bring a positive difference in the lives of others. We remember the exceptional achievement of our scientists on this day in 1998. It was a landmark moment in India''s history," Modi said in a series of tweets. On National Technology Day, our nation salutes all those who are leveraging technology to bring a positive difference in the lives of others. We remember the exceptional achievement of our scientists on this day in 1998. It was a landmark moment in India's history.— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 11, 2020 "Today, technology is helping many in the efforts to make the world free from COVID-19. I salute all those at the forefront of research and innovation on ways to defeat Coronavirus. May we keep harnessing technology in order to create a healthier and better planet," he also tweeted. Today, technology is helping many in the efforts to make the world free from COVID-19. I salute all those at the forefront of research and innovation on ways to defeat Coronavirus. May we keep harnessing technology in order to create a healthier and better planet.— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 11, 2020 The tests in Pokhran in 1998 also showed the difference a strong political leadership can make, he said.The Prime Minister said, "Today, technology is helping many in the efforts to make the world free from COVID-19. I salute all those at the forefront of research and innovation on ways to defeat coronavirus."PM Modi said he hoped that the humankind will keep harnessing technology to create a healthier and better planet.Separately, President Ram Nath Kovind said that science and technology are "key instruments for inclusive progress" and scientists and technologists are on the frontlines of the global battle against COVID-19. "Greetings to the fellow citizens on the National Technology Day, marking the anniversary of the nuclear tests of 1998. On this occasion, we celebrate the incomparable contribution of the scientific community in making the nation self-reliant," tweeted President Kovind. Greetings to the fellow citizens on the National Technology Day, marking the anniversary of the nuclear tests of 1998. On this occasion, we celebrate the incomparable contribution of the scientific community in making the nation self-reliant.— President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) May 11, 2020 "We recognise science and technology as the key instruments for inclusive progress. Our scientists and technologists are also on the frontlines of the global battle against COVID-19, making the nation proud," he said in his subsequent tweet. We recognise science and technology as the key instruments for inclusive progress. Our scientists and technologists are also on the frontlines of the global battle against COVID-19, making the nation proud.— President of India (@rashtrapatibhvn) May 11, 2020  Read the full article

Uber Offers Discounted Trips to 2.5 Million UK Health and Care Workers

Uber is offering discounted journeys to health and care workers in Britain from Wednesday, as it extends the scope of a service set up in Madrid last month to cover more than 4 million frontline workers fighting COVID-19 in over 20 countries.The ride-hailing service said it had worked with governments and healthcare institutions around the world to set up Uber Medics to provide workers with free and discounted rides to and from hospitals, health centres and care homes.Uber said 1.2 million National Health Service (NHS) staff and 1.3 million social care workers in Britain would receive a 25 percent discount on trips, funded by Uber, after linking their NHS email address to an account, or by their care home registering.Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber was proud to play a small part in the incredible efforts of healthcare staff to protect and treat those affected by COVID-19."We stand ready to work with governments and healthcare providers around the world to support their efforts to tackle the pandemic," he said on Monday.Uber Medics was developed last month in Madrid in response to a request made by the Madrid Health Department to support healthcare workers as an essential service, Uber said.It has since been rolled out to more than 20 countries, including France, Italy, Germany, and India.Uber said earlier this month it would provide 10 million rides and food deliveries, free of charge, to healthcare workers, seniors, and people in need globally.In Britain, it is providing 200,000 free rides and 100,000 free meals for NHS staff.Uber drivers will be able to opt into Uber Medic trips, the company said, offering them an opportunity to earn additional money during the lockdown. They will retain all of the fare.Raazma, a London-based Uber driver, said he had already signed up to the NHS Volunteer Responders."It's the least I can do in these challenging times, as we all need to pull together to help one another," he added.© Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

Germany Approves First Trial of COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate

Germany has authorised its first clinical test of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the country's regulatory body said Wednesday, green-lighting trials on human volunteers for an RNA vaccine developed by German firm Biontech and US giant Pfizer."The Paul-Ehrlich-Institut... has authorised the first clinical trial of a vaccine against COVID-19 in Germany," the regulatory body PEI said in a statement.The trial, which was only the fourth to have been authorised worldwide, was a "significant step" in making a vaccine "available as soon as possible", the institute added.It said that approval was the "result of a careful assessment of the potential risk/benefit profile of the vaccine candidate."The trials will see "200 healthy volunteers aged between 18 and 55 years" vaccinated with variants of the RNA vaccine, while the second phase could see the inclusion of volunteers who belonged to high-risk groups.Neither PEI nor the developers specified when the trial will begin, though Biontech claimed in a statement that it would be "soon" and "ahead of our expectations".The PEI also claimed that "further clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccine candidates will start in Germany in the next few months". Read the full article

Facebook-Powered Virus 'Heat Map' Unveiled

Researchers on Monday unveiled a coronavirus "heat map" powered by Facebook data which is aimed at helping track the spread of the disease and plan for reopening society.The Carnegie Mellon University project offers "real-time indications of COVID-19 activity not previously available from any other source," according to a university statement.The map was developed with millions of responses to surveys of Facebook and Google users as part of an effort to monitor the spread of the virus.Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the heat map, currently available for the United States, was being expanded globally with help from University of Maryland research teams."As the world fights COVID-19 and countries develop plans to reopen their societies, it's critical to have a clear understanding of how the disease is spreading," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page and in the Washington Post."With a community of billions of people globally, Facebook can uniquely help researchers and health authorities get the information they need to respond to the outbreak and start planning for the recovery."Carnegie Mellon researchers said they are receiving about one million responses per week from Facebook users, and have also gotten some 600,000 from Google users."Using these and other unique data sources, the CMU researchers will monitor changes over time, enabling them to forecast COVID-19 activity several weeks into the future," the research team said.The research uses responses to Facebook surveys about symptoms people are experiences, with data controlled by university team and not shared with the social network.The scientists also rely on anonymized data from Google and other partners on symptoms and search queries."The survey asked people if they have symptoms such as fevers, coughing, shortness of breath or loss of smell that are associated with COVID-19," Zuckerberg said."Since experiencing symptoms is a precursor to becoming more seriously ill, this survey can help forecast how many cases hospitals will see in the days ahead and provide an early indicator of where the outbreak is growing and where the curve is being successfully flattened." Read the full article

Apple-Google Alliance Welcomed by European Coronavirus App Platform

An Apple collaboration with Google will make it quicker to get systems for tracing coronavirus infections up and running, the prime mover behind a European effort to support the smartphone technology says. Technologists are racing to use Bluetooth short-range communications between devices as a proxy for measuring the risk that a person infected with the coronavirus can pass it on. Apple and Alphabet's Google said last week that they would launch tools to support such applications in May, with full integration of Bluetooth contact tracing functions into their operating systems to follow. Chris Boos, who is championing the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) technology platform, says this can help shorten the path to deployment. "We need to worry less about operating system stability and device calibration," Boos, the founder of German business process automation startup Arago, said in written answers to Reuters. PEPP-PT plans a progress update on Friday. Chain of infection The coronavirus can be spread by people who show no symptoms, increasing the urgency of efforts once an individual tests positive to break the chain of infection. Digital technology can help give people targeted warnings to see their doctors or self-isolate, its backers say, reducing the need for lockdowns that have caused huge economic disruption. Bluetooth advocates say it would be a more accurate and less intrusive way of logging the closeness and duration of personal contacts than location tracking based on networks or satellites. But a divide has opened up between supporters of decentralized systems - including Apple and Google - and advocates of a centralised approach in which sensitive data is held on a server. The latter includes some governments, raising concerns that they could put citizens under surveillance. PEPP-PT, being developed in partnership with Germany's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute and technologists from other European countries, would support both models. "A centralised model offers such much better pandemic management potential without infringing privacy," Boos said. "But it should be a country's choice. You can gather the same data on top of a decentralized model - it just means more people have to move data on infected people." PEPP-PT is undergoing certification by Germany's cyber-security watchdog and has drawn support from some leaders in Chancellor Angela Merkel's government. No decision has yet been made, however, to endorse an official contact-tracing app to run on PEPP-PT that experts say would need to be downloaded by at least 60 percent of the population to help achieve so-called digital herd immunity. © Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article

PUBG Mobile Season 13 Reportedly Called Toy Playground, Royale Pass Details Leaked

PUBG Mobile is one of the biggest mobile games with a huge player base. It sees regular updates in the form of seasons with different themes. Season 12, which started early in March, is currently underway and now, a leak sharing details of Season 13 has surfaced online. The upcoming season is expected to be called ‘Toy Playground' and, as the name suggests, has a toy theme. There are Lego-themed colourful guns and character skins that look very similar to the live-action superhero television series Power Rangers.According to a YouTuber called ‘Mr.Ghost Gaming', Season 13 will be called ‘Toy Playground'. The skins for the items and weapons make them look like toys. The Vector gun and a pistol can be seen in a video shared by ‘Mr.Ghost Gaming' with colourful Lego/Power Ranger theme. The character skins can also be seen in the video with what looks like a Power Rangers theme. With PUBG Mobile Season 13 Royale Pass, players may also get a new AUG skin and a level 3 helmet skin. If the players purchase the Royale Pass, they will also get a choice of costume rewards which include Lava Superman and Flash Superman.The video also shows a special Tribal Set with a male sheep's skull mask and a similarly themed outfit. However, it is unclear how this can be obtained. Further, there seems to be a new character as well named Andy who is showcased with the tagline, “I can make this gun talk.” Several new voice chat options can be seen in the video as well.As of now PUBG Mobile has not confirmed any of the details for Season 13.With Season 12, PUBG Mobile brought the 2nd Year Anniversary theme with version 0.17.0. It added an Amusement Park Mode in Classic Erangel, an Arctic Mode, a new weapon, Hardcore Mode, Death Replay, and Colorblind Mode. Read the full article

Will Coronavirus Freeze the Search for Dark Matter?

Elena Aprile was in a race against time.Her Xenon experiment, one of the world’s largest and most expensive investigations into the nature of dark matter, was coming together beneath Gran Sasso, a mountain in Italy. But Dr. Aprile, a Columbia University physics professor, was stuck in her apartment in Brooklyn as New York entered an indeterminate period of lockdown to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, and she was “living on Cheerios and milk,” she said.In Italy, about a month into its own lockdown, a skeleton crew was trying to finish assembling her experiment’s expensive and delicate detector and safely seal it in place deep below the mountain’s rocks, before the virus brought down the hammer on even this much group activity.What followed was an illustration of how some science is managing to get done during a plague. At stake was perhaps nothing less than the secret of the universe.Astronomers have reluctantly concluded over the last half-century that most of the matter in the universe is invisible. They suspect that this invisible stuff consists of giant cosmic clouds of subatomic particles called “wimps,” for weakly interacting massive particles, left over from the Big Bang.Mostly impervious to normal forces like electromagnetism, these particles drift through the world, and through us, like ghosts through a wall.In the quest to spot them, physicists have built a succession of bigger and bigger detectors. But as they’ve gained greater and greater clarity, they have seen no wimps, which has created a crisis in physics.In the 1970s and 1980s, fashionable but speculative concepts in particle physics were devised to explain some of the deeper mysteries of fundamental physics. One, supersymmetry, suggested that the universe might be littered with undiscovered particles that could act like dark matter. But over the years, the most promising models of what these particles might have been were slowly crossed out. This leaves many of the mysteries of the universe — like why stars are so big and atoms are so small — with no plausible explanation.The wimp experiments keep improving. But eventually they could reach a limit called the “neutrino floor,” becoming so sensitive that they are overwhelmed by neutrinos, ghostly super-elusive particles that flood the universe from the sun, the stars and the Big Bang. Any wimps passing through will be impossible to discern in this sea, and there the wimp search will end.“So we have a few more years where this guy can hide, but it’s not there yet,” she said.Dr. Aprile and her team — a globe-spanning confederation — planned to record the pit-pat of dark matter particles raining into a tank of liquid xenon lined with 500 photomultipliers and other sensors, and placed far underground to shield it from cosmic rays. The hope was that her team’s device would spot the rare collision of a wimp with a xenon nucleus, an event she estimated might happen about once a year per ton of xenon.Dr. Aprile was reluctant to put a price on the project. An earlier version of the experiment with 3.3 tons of xenon cost $30 million. But that didn’t include the people, she said. A big part of the cost is xenon itself, which costs around $2 million per ton, she added. Her new detector will have 8.5 tons.A rival experiment called the LZ Dark Matter Experiment, also using eight tons of xenon, was being assembled in an old gold mine that is now the Sanford Underground Research Facility, in Lead, S.D. And there is a whole alphabet soup of other experiments stashed in old mines and tunnels around the world, with names like PandaX, DarkSide and SuperCDMS.But now coronavirus was infecting even the cosmos. Richard Gaitskell of Brown University, one of the principal scientists of the LZ experiment, said in an email that their project had temporarily been mothballed “out of an abundance of caution and to allow personnel to respect shelter in place.”Dr. Aprile said, “All of us will have delays due to this damn thing. If one of my people gets sick, I will feel so bad.”

Research on the run

Dr. Aprile was born in Milan. To say that she lives a peripatetic life would be an understatement. She teaches at Columbia but commutes regularly to L’Aquila, a town in central Italy near the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, which lies off a tunnel through the mountain of the same name, beneath nearly 4,600 feet of rock.Until March she had been living the typical jet-setting life of particle physicist. In November she attended a physics conference in South Korea. In February, after a brief stop in New York, she was in Italy at Gran Sasso for three days. From there she went to a conference in South Africa, and on to the University of California, San Diego, where she was a visiting professor.Then the universities shut down. Worried about her two daughters, who live in New York, Dr. Aprile returned home. She had planned to return to Gran Sasso in early May after her professorship was done, when they would start testing and running their detector. But the virus had other plans.Stefano Ragazzi, director of the Gran Sasso lab, said that the experiments there are designed to be conducted remotely. As a result, there were only about half a dozen scientists on site in March when the coronavirus hit Italy.It is safer and easier to keep experiments running, rather than shut them off and later switch them back on, he explained, so the lab’s experiments have continued to operate as they would during the winter holidays.Dr. Ragazzi announced that, to ensure the safety of the people and the equipment, work in Gran Sasso would be limited only to what was necessary.“Xenon was amid critical ongoing operations,” Dr. Ragazzi said in an email. “We asked them to come to a safe stopping point and to pause operations.”That stopping point would come once the detector had been sealed in its cryostat — a big thermos bottle that could keep the xenon inside at minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit — and all the air had been pumped out, Dr. Aprile said: “The point is to enclose it in a cryostat, seal it, make it leak-tight.” She spoke over the phone after a long day of teleconferencing with Italy.“We close this detector for the first time inside this big water tank,” she said. “Then we spend a few months, if everything goes well, commissioning it to understand how the hell it works. Hopefully it works as you designed. You start to see if there’s a signal. And that’s when you declare OK, and then you start to work.”All did not go well.An important step occurred on March 5, when a team led by Luca Grandi of the University of Chicago installed the detector underground. It had arrived in pieces at Gran Sasso from all over the world, “like the pieces of a puzzle,” Dr. Aprile said, and had to be assembled in a “clean room” in a part of the Gran Sasso lab that was aboveground.The finished detector, known as a time projection chamber, is about five feet long and five feet wide, and weighs half a ton without the xenon in it. The team had to rent a special truck and get a police escort to move it to the underground part of the lab, which is accessible through a highway tunnel under the mountain.“We didn’t realize it would be so hard to handle,” Dr. Aprile said.There the detector was installed under the dome of the cryostat. But the cryostat was not ready to be closed. “We were almost done, but now we needed special permissions,” Dr. Aprile said.Failure to finish installing the detector would leave the tank open to the air, which would increase the chance of contamination by radon, a radioactive gas found in underground spaces and the main source of contamination in experiments like this one.A minimum of three or four people were needed to handle these final steps. Dr. Aprile had a half-dozen scientists and technicians at the site, so the margin was getting thin. But Dr. Grandi had to leave to teach in Chicago.Dr. Aprile promoted Petr Chaguine, a scientist from Rice University who had been living in Gran Sasso, to direct the team. He reported back to his friends and family in Houston that his Italian colleagues were “kindly translating news and new government regulations” as they appeared, which was often.For a while, the team members approved by Dr. Ragazzi could car-pool from their homes to the lab. Then the rules changed and they had to drive separately.Another rule required a Glimos — Group Leader in Matter of Safety — to visit every day to make sure everything was in order. Roberto Corrieri was doing the job, then announced that he would follow governmental instructions and stay home in Assergi; then he changed his mind and stayed. The only other person who could have done the safety inspection had left to join his family in Naples.“I did not want to push the boundary if he felt he wanted to stay home,” Dr. Aprile said of her conversations with Mr. Corrieri. “Luckily he is a good guy and realized that doing it was important for many people, so he agreed to do it.”She added, “I fear, what happens if the team gets infected or gets hurt. The lab gets the blame."That left enough people in the lab to continue working. “I had to do a lot of encouraging,” Dr. Aprile said. It helped that they knew each other, and that there were no strangers on the team: “So they were comfortable being close enough to work.”On March 20, Dr. Aprile received a photo by email of a pair of her scientists, Masatoshi Kobayashi and Danilo Tatananni. They were garbed much like E.R. doctors, in “bunny suits” and masks, which are standard apparel for the clean rooms where sensitive scientific gadgets are assembled. The men were standing in front of her detector, which they had just closed up.“We did it,” the email said.The physicists will now spend two weeks pumping air from the vat, down to a vacuum, at which point it can be monitored remotely. The task of filling the vat with liquid xenon must wait.“We cannot test drive our new car,” Dr. Aprile said. She was happy and relieved to no longer have to reluctantly urge her colleagues to enter a field of danger.“They feel like heroes,” she said. “Was it worth it? I’m wondering myself.” Read the full article

Money Heist Season 4 Is Now Streaming on Netflix in India

Netflix's most popular non-English-language original is back. The fourth season of Money Heist — known as *La casa de papel* in Spanish, which means “the house of paper” — is now streaming on Netflix in India and across the world. Technically, Money Heist season 4 is the second half of the second season, which is why Netflix refers to it officially as Money Heist: Part 4. Hence, it picks up right where the third season left off, with the Professor (Álvaro Morte) falling in the trap he set and kickstarting a war in the process, while the police officer Raquel “Lisbon” Murillo (Itziar Ituño) herself in handcuffs.From Money Heist to Modern Family, TV Shows to Watch in AprilIn addition to Morte and Ituño, returning stars on Money Heist season 4 include Úrsula Corberó as Silene “Tokyo” Oliveira, Pedro Alonso as Andrés “Berlin” de Fonollosa, Alba Flores as Ágata “Nairobi” Jiménez, Miguel Herrán as Aníbal “Rio” Cortés, Jaime Lorente as Ricardo “Denver” Ramos, Esther Acebo as Mónica “Stockholm” Gaztambide, Darko Perić as Yashin “Helsinki” Dasáyev, Hovik Keuchkerian as Bogotá, Enrique Arce as Arturo Román, Rodrigo de la Serna as Martín / Palermo / The Engineer, and Najwa Nimri as Alicia Sierra. There's no word yet on new cast members.Created by Álex Pina (Locked Up), Money Heist came to life on Spanish cable TV in 2017 as a 15-episode limited series. Netflix picked up global streaming rights later that year and re-edited the show into 22 episodes, which were released on its service in two parts in December 2017 and April 2018. Netflix would go on to pick up the show for 16 more episodes split across two parts. An eight-episode season 3 aired in July last year, with the remaining ones part of Money Heist season 4. This is also the shortest gap between the two seasons — or parts — of the show.Money Heist, Extraction, The Departed, and More on Netflix in AprilHere's the official synopsis for Money Heist season 4, via Netflix:“La casa de papel: Part 4 begins in chaos: the Professor (Morte) thinks that Lisbon (Ituño) has been executed, Rio (Cortés) and Tokyo (Oliveira) have blown up an army tank, and Nairobi (Jiménez) is struggling between life and death. The gang is going through one of its toughest moments and the rise of an enemy among its ranks will put the heist in serious danger.”All eight episodes of Money Heist season 4 are available on Netflix. You can also download them for offline viewing. New seasons of Netflix shows are released at 12am PT, which translates to 12:30pm IST from mid-March to early November. Read the full article

Money Heist Season 4 Is Now Streaming on Netflix in India

Netflix's most popular non-English-language original is back. The fourth season of Money Heist — known as *La casa de papel* in Spanish, which means “the house of paper” — is now streaming on Netflix in India and across the world. Technically, Money Heist season 4 is the second half of the second season, which is why Netflix refers to it officially as Money Heist: Part 4. Hence, it picks up right where the third season left off, with the Professor (Álvaro Morte) falling in the trap he set and kickstarting a war in the process, while the police officer Raquel “Lisbon” Murillo (Itziar Ituño) herself in handcuffs.From Money Heist to Modern Family, TV Shows to Watch in AprilIn addition to Morte and Ituño, returning stars on Money Heist season 4 include Úrsula Corberó as Silene “Tokyo” Oliveira, Pedro Alonso as Andrés “Berlin” de Fonollosa, Alba Flores as Ágata “Nairobi” Jiménez, Miguel Herrán as Aníbal “Rio” Cortés, Jaime Lorente as Ricardo “Denver” Ramos, Esther Acebo as Mónica “Stockholm” Gaztambide, Darko Perić as Yashin “Helsinki” Dasáyev, Hovik Keuchkerian as Bogotá, Enrique Arce as Arturo Román, Rodrigo de la Serna as Martín / Palermo / The Engineer, and Najwa Nimri as Alicia Sierra. There's no word yet on new cast members.Created by Álex Pina (Locked Up), Money Heist came to life on Spanish cable TV in 2017 as a 15-episode limited series. Netflix picked up global streaming rights later that year and re-edited the show into 22 episodes, which were released on its service in two parts in December 2017 and April 2018. Netflix would go on to pick up the show for 16 more episodes split across two parts. An eight-episode season 3 aired in July last year, with the remaining ones part of Money Heist season 4. This is also the shortest gap between the two seasons — or parts — of the show.Money Heist, Extraction, The Departed, and More on Netflix in AprilHere's the official synopsis for Money Heist season 4, via Netflix:“La casa de papel: Part 4 begins in chaos: the Professor (Morte) thinks that Lisbon (Ituño) has been executed, Rio (Cortés) and Tokyo (Oliveira) have blown up an army tank, and Nairobi (Jiménez) is struggling between life and death. The gang is going through one of its toughest moments and the rise of an enemy among its ranks will put the heist in serious danger.”All eight episodes of Money Heist season 4 are available on Netflix. You can also download them for offline viewing. New seasons of Netflix shows are released at 12am PT, which translates to 12:30pm IST from mid-March to early November. Read the full article