More than 1 in 5 COVID survivors may develop long COVID, CDC study suggests

The study assessed the relative risks of 26 conditions linked to post-COVID.

A woman breathes into a tube while a health care worker looks on.

Enlarge / A long-COVID patient in Germany takes a pulmonary function test at Hufeland Clinic's Center for Pneumology. (credit: Getty | picture alliance)

More than one in five adults in the US who have recovered from COVID-19 may end up developing a long-term condition linked to the viral infection, according to a study published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The post-COVID conditions span heart, lung, kidney, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neurological, and mental health conditions. Overall, COVID survivors had nearly twice the risk of developing respiratory and lung conditions, including pulmonary embolisms, compared with uninfected controls. The most common post-COVID conditions were respiratory conditions and musculoskeletal pain.

Among COVID survivors, people ages 18 to 64 were more likely than older survivors to develop cardiac dysrhythmia and musculoskeletal pain. The risks for survivors 65 and up were greater for kidney failure, blood clots, cerebrovascular disease, muscle disorders, neurological conditions, and mental health conditions.

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More than 1 in 5 COVID survivors may develop long COVID, CDC study suggests

The study assessed the relative risks of 26 conditions linked to post-COVID.

A woman breathes into a tube while a health care worker looks on.

Enlarge / A long-COVID patient in Germany takes a pulmonary function test at Hufeland Clinic's Center for Pneumology. (credit: Getty | picture alliance)

More than one in five adults in the US who have recovered from COVID-19 may end up developing a long-term condition linked to the viral infection, according to a study published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The post-COVID conditions span heart, lung, kidney, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neurological, and mental health conditions. Overall, COVID survivors had nearly twice the risk of developing respiratory and lung conditions, including pulmonary embolisms, compared with uninfected controls. The most common post-COVID conditions were respiratory conditions and musculoskeletal pain.

Among COVID survivors, people ages 18 to 64 were more likely than older survivors to develop cardiac dysrhythmia and musculoskeletal pain. The risks for survivors 65 and up were greater for kidney failure, blood clots, cerebrovascular disease, muscle disorders, neurological conditions, and mental health conditions.

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Prominent ex-Tesla self-driving car exec leaves Apple for greener pastures

CJ Moore will join lidar company Luminar to lead software development.

A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company's Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple has reportedly been working on self-driving car technology since 2014, but it has faced a series of prominent employee departures over the past year. As reported Wednesday by Bloomberg, the latest is CJ Moore, who had only just joined the company last August.

Before joining Apple, Moore was Tesla's director of autopilot, where he worked on self-driving cars even as he contradicted Tesla CEO Elon Musk's bold timeline for the project when speaking with California regulators. It's unclear exactly what Moore's work has been at Apple since joining the company.

In any case, he's now moving to lidar company Luminar Technologies, which has been aggressively hiring prominent directors and executives from tech and automobile giants. At Luminar, Moore will lead the global software development for lidar-based features to ensure passengers' safety in autonomous vehicles.

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Microsoft Dev Box will virtualize your Windows development PC in a browser window

Windows 365-powered VMs support variable hardware and software configs.

A selection of apps from the Microsoft Store.

Enlarge / A selection of apps from the Microsoft Store. (credit: Microsoft)

Among the announcements made at Microsoft's Build developer conference yesterday was a new service for organizations that want to offer preconfigured, virtualized developer workstations on demand. Microsoft Dev Box is intended to simplify the process of getting new developer workstations up and running quickly, with all necessary tools and dependencies installed and working out-of-the-box (so to speak), along with access to up-to-date source code and fresh copies of any nightly builds.

Dev Box is built on Windows 365, a service that IT admins can use to provide preconfigured virtual PCs to users. Admins can build operating system images and offer hardware configurations with different amounts of CPU power, storage, and RAM based on what particular users (or workloads) need. Windows 365 virtual machines, including but not limited to Dev Box VMs, can be accessed from other Windows PCs, or devices running macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, or ChromeOS.

Virtualized development environments could offer many benefits to developers and testers beyond the ability to access a preconfigured dev box from anywhere. If you install software or make a change that breaks your development environment, you could easily roll back to a known-working version. Your administrator could offer different environments for different apps to prevent software conflicts or offer multiple environments for different versions of your app so you could easily maintain, test, and provide support for multiple versions at a time.

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Today’s best deals: PlayStation Days of Play sale, SanDisk storage, and more

Dealmaster also includes the MacBook Air, Jabra earbuds, and Xbox consoles.

Today’s best deals: PlayStation Days of Play sale, SanDisk storage, and more

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

The time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web is led by various deals on PlayStation games and gear. That's because Sony kicked off its annual late-spring "Days of Play" sale, which the company says will run through June 8.

In general, the number of noteworthy deals here isn't quite as vast as what we highlighted from Epic's PC-focused Mega Sale over the weekend: Unlike years past, there are no discounts on PlayStation Plus subscriptions—likely due to Sony's ongoing revamp of that online service—some well-regarded PS5 exclusives like Returnal and Demon's Souls aren't on sale, and a few of the included PS4 games are at prices we've seen fairly frequently. Many of them will be included with PS Plus' new upgrade tiers, if you plan on paying for that.

Still, there are some deals worth your attention. If you need a spare DualSense controller for the PS5, for instance, all colors of that gamepad are down to $59, which is a $10 or $15 discount depending on which model you choose and only a couple of dollars from the lowest price we've tracked. The colorful action game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is down to a new low of $40, while Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, another PS5 exclusive that remasters the action flick-style shooters Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, is discounted to $30, another new low. Other hits like MLB The Show 22 (Nintendo Switch version included), the PS5 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake, and The Last of Us Part II have received substantial discounts, too; you can see our full list of worthwhile deals from Sony's sale below.

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Google urged to stop collecting phone location data before Roe v. Wade reversal

Lawmakers pressure Google on Android privacy after leak of Supreme Court ruling.

A pro-choice demonstrator holds a sign with a coat hanger and the words

Enlarge / A pro-choice demonstrator in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on May 11, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Stefani Reynolds)

More than 40 Democratic members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data that prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions.

"[W]e are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google's current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care. That's because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies," Democrats wrote Tuesday in a letter led by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). The letter was sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Specifically, Google should stop collecting "unnecessary customer location data" or "any non-aggregate location data about individual customers, whether in identifiable or anonymized form. Google cannot allow its online advertising-focused digital infrastructure to be weaponized against women," lawmakers wrote. They also told Google that people who use iPhones "have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices."

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The (fossil) eyes have it: Evidence that an ancient owl hunted in daylight

The structure of bones around the eye indicate a small pupil that let in less light.

The (fossil) eyes have it: Evidence that an ancient owl hunted in daylight

Enlarge (credit: IVPP)

An extraordinarily well-preserved fossil owl was described in PNAS this past March. Owls are not new to the fossil record; evidence of their existence has been found in scattered limbs and fragments from the Pleistocene to the Paleocene (approximately 11,700 years to 65 million years ago). What makes this fossil unique is not only the rare preservation of its near-complete articulated skeleton but that it provides the first evidence of diurnal behavior millions of years earlier than previously thought. 

In other words, this ancient owl didn’t stalk its prey under the cloak of darkness. Instead, the bird was active under the rays of the Miocene sun.

Seeing the light

Its eye socket was key to making this determination. Dr. Zhiheng Li is lead author on the paper and a vertebrate paleontologist who focuses on fossil birds at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in China. He explained in an email that the large bones around the eyes of birds (but not mammals) known as the scleral ossicles offer information about the size of the pupil they surround. In this case, the pupils of this fossil owl were small. And if the pupil is small, he wrote, it “means they can obtain good vision with a smaller eye opening.”

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Blizzard: No Piracy Filters? That’s Evidence of Intentional Infringement

A recent DMCA notice sent by Blizzard to Github demands the takedown of an avatar depicting the gaming company’s character ‘Chef Nomi’. While legally sound up to this point, Blizzard’s notice goes on to inform the coding platform that its failure to deploy piracy filtering technologies is “evidence of intentional facilitation of copyright infringement.” In Github’s case? Not even close.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

epic failThis week marked the 10th anniversary of Google’s important decision to begin publishing DMCA takedown notices sent to the company.

Over the last decade, online platforms including Twitter, Wikipedia, Medium and Github joined this transparency movement by submitting their notices to the Lumen Database. This archive not only allows rightsholders to monitor trends relevant to them, but also shines light on how copyright can be abused to impede the free flow of information.

A DMCA notice we’re highlighting today is available thanks to Github’s transparency. The notice, sent by anti-piracy company Irdeto on behalf of Blizzard Entertainment, is verifiably legitimate and addresses a genuine case of copyright infringement.

Github user ‘Chef Nomi’ (who was central to the SushiSwap crypto controversy) had not only taken the name of one of Blizzard’s characters but was also using Blizzard’s artwork in his avatar. As expected, the notice received full cooperation from Github under the DMCA and the offending content was removed as the law requires.

So that’s that then? Well not exactly.

No Proactive Piracy Filters? That’s Evidence of Intentional Infringement

In addition to the takedown request, the notice also contains an unsolicited lecture on Github’s supposed liabilities under copyright law. It includes a strong suggestion that Github’s failure to deploy proactive piracy filtering technologies to prevent any future violations of Blizzard’s rights is “evidence of intentional facilitation” of its users’ copyright infringements.

If applicable, this would be an extraordinarily big deal for Github but absolutely terrifying for a small yet honest tech platform responding in good faith to a DMCA notice. But, as astronomer Carl Sagan once said, an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. And here’s another applicable wisdom: context is everything.

blizzard grokster claims

In this case, there is no proof that the additional statements in the notice are relevant to the conduct of Github, or its liability under copyright law. Indeed, the very lawsuit the notice’s claims are culled from was the subject of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court copyright ruling that adds significant nuance.

Among other things, it broadly establishes that a responsible platform like Github, that takes its legal responsibilities seriously, can not be held liable for its users’ infringements simply due to the absence of proactive filtering. And here’s why.

Context is Everything

When major movie studios, record labels, and other copyright holders sued peer-to-peer file-sharing companies Grokster and Streamcast, little did they know their case would end in a landmark 2005 ruling by the Supreme Court.

In a nutshell, the plaintiffs in MGM v. Grokster argued that users of the defendants’ file-sharing software (Grokster and Morpheus) were sharing millions of music tracks and videos with each other, in breach of copyright law. Crucially, the copyright holders insisted that since Grokster and Streamcast were complicit in those violations, they could be held liable for third-party infringement.

In response, the peer-to-peer companies pointed to a Supreme Court precedent set in the so-called ‘Betamax case‘, noting that a maker of technology used to infringe copyright can not be held liable for infringement (even if it knew that the technology was being used for infringement) as long as the technology is “capable of substantial non-infringing uses.”

That defense served the companies well in the lower courts but in the Supreme Court, all hope of relying on the Betamax case evaporated when the thorny issue of intent was factored into the equation.

In brief, the peer-to-peer companies specifically targeted their software at former users of Napster in the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of files available on Napster (before it was shut down) were infringing and that many of its users were infringers.

Internal documentation also revealed that the aim of the defendants was to have as many copyrighted files on their networks as possible. Grokster even sent out a newsletter stating that popular copyrighted content could be downloaded from its client.

“Grokster and StreamCast’s efforts to supply services to former Napster users, deprived of a mechanism to copy and distribute what were overwhelmingly infringing files, indicate a principal, if not exclusive, intent on the part of each to bring about infringement,” the Supreme Court wrote.

“The unlawful objective is unmistakable,” it added.

So What About Filtering?

Rather than dealing directly with the decision in the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ultimately settled on intent as the key factor in Grokster. Since the owners of the file-sharing clients advertised them as tools for infringing purposes, other aspects of their behavior could also be considered as contributing factors in the case against them.

Specifically, MGM showed that Grokster and Streamcast made no attempt to develop tools that could have diminished the volume of copyright infringements being carried out by users of their software. MGM said that the companies could’ve used filtering software to prevent piracy, but did not.

The Supreme Court agreed this was indeed a contributing factor. In light of the companies’ established unlawful objective, “..this evidence underscores Grokster’s and StreamCast’s intentional facilitation of their users’ infringement.

And there it is in black and white. It’s almost exactly the same text sent in the Github notice informing the company that a “failure to use available filtering technologies to diminish infringement is evidence of intentional facilitation of infringement.”

By now it should be crystal clear why this statement demands context and why it doesn’t apply to Github – it does not have an established unlawful objective. But just in case more clarity is needed on filtering and similar mechanisms, here’s the Supreme Court’s assessment:

“Of course, in the absence of other evidence of intent, a court would be unable to find contributory infringement liability merely based on a failure to take affirmative steps to prevent infringement, if the device otherwise was capable of substantial noninfringing uses. Such a holding would tread too close to the Sony safe harbor.”

The DMCA notice sent to Github can be found here

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

AYN Loki will be a low-cost handheld Windows gaming PC (from the makers of the AYN Odin Android handheld)

The company behind the Android-powered AYN Odin handheld game console have announced they’re working on a new model with a nearly identical design, but one key difference: the AYN Loki is a handheld gaming PC that runs Windows. According to a br…

The company behind the Android-powered AYN Odin handheld game console have announced they’re working on a new model with a nearly identical design, but one key difference: the AYN Loki is a handheld gaming PC that runs Windows. According to a brief teaser video, the Loki will be “the most affordable Windows handheld ever created,” […]

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