Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Security and privacy protip: Don't do your videoconference in the middle of an airport. (credit: hapabapa | Getty Images)

Zoom's meteoric rise to prominence as the go-to teleconference tool of the COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on every single design flaw, privacy issue, or vulnerability the platform has. Now, the company is scrambling to react to problems while investigations and lawsuits mount.

The company is already facing lawsuits from consumers, but now investors have joined the fray. A shareholder filed a class-action suit (PDF) yesterday in federal court in California, alleging that Zoom violated securities law by covering up known problems with its product.

Publicly traded businesses are required by federal law to disclose issues or events that could materially affect their stock price so that investors can make informed decisions. Basically any time you hear of some catastrophe at a company—for example, Equifax's disastrous 2017 data breach—there's a shareholder suit right after from investors who are angry that they received no warning their shares were about to plummet in value.

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  This terminal is your entry point to helping biomedical research through gaming.

Players can help biomedical research by playing a new color-matching mini-game introduced in Borderlands 3 this week. "Borderlands Science" basically tricks human players into solving complex genetic alignment problems that can be intuitive for humans but difficult for computer algorithms.

The mini-game is a joint effort between Borderlands maker Gearbox and scientists at McGill University, UC San Diego's Microsetta Initiative, and the Massively Multiplayer Online Science group. "The first time I met with [Gearbox founder] Randy Pitchford and [Producer] Aaron Thibault to discuss this crazy idea was 5 years ago at GDC," MMOS founder Attila Szantner said in a blog post. "Since then we have been working together with the Gearbox team to realize this project."

How does it work?

The process starts with DNA sequences from some of the trillions of microbes in the human gut. Researchers want to arrange those sequences to figure out which of these microbes are genetically similar to each other. That can help indicate which genetic lines of microbes are associated with certain diseases.

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  Here is a shot of our hero, Fyodor Ivanovich Sukhov. He is a Red Army soldier fighting in Central Asia during the Russian Civil War. [credit: Mosfilm/YouTube ]

Sometime Wednesday, perhaps around the time this article is published, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and his two Russian crew mates—Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner—will repair to their quarantine crew quarters for movie night in the Cosmonaut Hotel.

This Soviet-era building in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, is where astronauts spend their final days before launching into space on board the Russian Soyuz vehicle. Cassidy's crew is due to launch on Thursday afternoon, at 1:05pm local time. (This is 4:05am ET Thursday, and 8:05am UTC.) They will spend about six hours catching up to and docking with the International Space Station.

The Russians have the oldest space program in the world and by far the most traditions and superstitions related to launch, including peeing on the wheel of the bus that takes the crew to the launch pad—a tradition that dates back to Yuri Gagarin's first human spaceflight in 1961.

Enlarge / The 2020 Kia Telluride, 2020 World Car of the Year winner. (credit: BradleyWarren Photography)

If 2020 had been a normal year, this week would have been packed with news from the New York International Auto Show. Instead, the Javits Center in Manhattan is being converted into a mass intensive care unit to handle up to 3,000 COVID-19 patients. That has crimped the plans of every OEM hoping to make a splash with a new reveal at NYIAS this year, but one small slice of normality remains—the World Car Awards. Instead of holding a press conference in New York, the steering committee decided to use the power of YouTube to make the announcements from the safety of their homes. And as yours truly is one of the jurors, I figured it was worth climbing my way out of a pit of existential despair to bring you the winners.

Each juror is only allowed to vote for a car they've actually driven. For the first round of voting, we are asked to rank the cars in each category. Once that's done, the second round asks jurors to rank the finalists from 1 to 10 in a range of attributes, including design, safety, performance, technology, the environment, value for money, and so on, with the final three being announced a few weeks ahead of time.

World Urban Car

Of the top three finalists, I've driven two of them—the Kia Soul EV, which made my top 10 cars of 2019, and the Volkswagen T-Cross, which decidedly didn't. The third contender is the Mini Electric—my press loan is not scheduled until mid-May, so in the meantime you could always check out Jonny Smith's recent video review. The other cars that didn't make it were the Peugeot 208, Renault Clio, Hyundai Venue (which I thought was rather good), Opel/Vauxhall Corsa, and the Renault Zoe R135.