Month: June 2023

In many ways, modern advancements stole the show in the COVID-19 pandemic. With unprecedented speed, researchers decoded and shared the genetic blueprints of SARS-CoV-2. They developed highly effective, safe vaccines and treatments. Near real-time epidemiological data were at people's fingertips, and global genetic surveillance for viral variants reached unrivaled heights.

But while the marvels of modern medicine and biotechnology wowed, the US struggled with the basics. Health departments were chronically underfunded and understaffed. Behind slick COVID-19 dashboards, health workers shared data in basic spreadsheets via email—and even fax machines. Long-standing weaknesses in primary care deepened health inequities. And useful pandemic prevention tools, like masks, became maligned in the disconnect between communities and local health departments.

At our Ars Frontiers conference this year, I virtually sat down with two leading experts in pandemic preparedness, who talked through these takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic. I spoke with: Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center and a Professor of Epidemiology at Brown University’s School of Public Health, and Dr. Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and founding associate director of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Enlarge (credit: Photo Illustration by Miguel Candela/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

No wonder Google is having trouble keeping up with policing its app store. Since Monday, researchers have reported that hundreds of Android apps and Chrome extensions with millions of installs from the company’s official marketplaces have included functions for snooping on user files, manipulating the contents of clipboards, and injecting deliberately unknown code into webpages.

Google has removed many but not all of the malicious entries, the researchers said, but only after they were reported, and by then, they were on millions of devices—and possibly hundreds of millions. The researchers aren’t pleased.

A very sad place

“I’m not a fan of Google’s approach,” extension developer and researcher Wladimir Palant wrote in an email. In the days before Chrome, when Firefox had a bigger piece of the browser share, real people reviewed extensions before making them available in the Mozilla marketplace. Google took a different approach by using an automated review process, which Firefox then copied.

Enlarge / The Pixel Watch. It's a round little pebble. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Here's one of the improvements Google might want to look into for the Pixel Watch 2: better glue. Android Police spotted a few reports of the back panels of some Pixel Watches just falling off. A few posts on the PixelWatch subreddit have photos of this phenomenon; several commenters say it happened to them, too.

This certainly seems like something Google should cover under warranty, and with the device being less than a year old, everyone should be under warranty. You also have a strong argument if you contact Google support about a device that has fallen apart. The scary thing is this will also compromise the device's water resistance, and we doubt Google is covering every instance of water damage. Most reports indicate Google is taking care of the problem, but a few users were initially threatened with a $300 repair fee, which was later waived.

Thanks to my excessive sweating (I believe) the glue on the back of my pixel watch dissolved and the back has popped off. pic.twitter.com/ltUQauXC4I

— SuperSanusi (@supersanusi) May 30, 2023

When iFixit tore down the Pixel Watch, it noted the back adhesive was a novel "liquid gasket" the site had never seen before. The report said, "The rear glass appears to be held in place by a kind of liquid gasket that seals tightly, but comes open clean. It also peels off the glass with virtually no residue." It sounds like Google's fancy glue peels off a little too easily. Poorly adhered back panels were also a recent problem with Fossil watches, and in the "Gen 6" versions, Fossil acknowledged the problem and said it was fixed.