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If seasonal influenza roars back this fall while the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging, the combined weight of the diseases could cause US healthcare systems to collapse, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday.

The grim warning comes as COVID-19 is spreading out of control in many areas of the country, which is now seeing upwards of 60,000 new cases a day.

“I am worried,” CDC director Robert Redfield said in a live interview with Howard Bauchner, editor-in-chief of the medical journal JAMA. “I do think the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the most difficult times we’ve experienced in American public health.”

Enlarge / Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden arrives to speak at a "Build Back Better" Clean Energy event on July 14, 2020 at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware. (credit: Olivier Douliery | AFP | Getty Images)

Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden today unveiled a $2 trillion policy platform that seeks to address both the climate crisis and the worsening pandemic-driven economic crisis by drastically expanding investments in infrastructure improvements and clean energy.

The proposals in the Biden plan are in line with a policy package released earlier this month by the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. The House Democrats' plan (a 550-page PDF), at a very high level, calls first for bringing the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050, then for using the back half of the century to get to negative emissions. That ambitious goal would be reached by adopting new regulations and incentives in energy, transportation, housing, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, telecommunications, and infrastructure, among other sectors.

Biden's plans, as outlined on his campaign website, go much less in-depth than the Congressional proposal package but are perhaps even more aggressive.

Enlarge / A data center stock photo. I spy with my little eye some de-badged EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 or DMX-4 disk bays at right and some de-badged EMC CX disk bays at left. Disk arrays like these are a mainstay of traditional enterprise data center SANs. (credit: Bryce Duffy / Getty Images)

Microsoft is urgently advising Windows server customers to patch a vulnerability that allows attackers to take control of entire networks with no user interaction and, from there, rapidly spread from computer to computer.

The vulnerability, dubbed SigRed by the researchers who discovered it, resides in Windows DNS, a component that automatically responds to requests to translate a domain into the IP address computers need to locate it on the Internet. By sending maliciously formed queries, attackers can execute code that gains domain administrator rights and, from there, take control of an entire network. The vulnerability, which doesn’t apply to client versions of Windows, is present in server versions from 2003 to 2019. SigRed is formally tracked as CVE-2020-1350. Microsoft issued a fix as part of this month's Update Tuesday.

Both Microsoft and the researchers from Check Point, the security firm that discovered the vulnerability, said that it’s wormable, meaning it can spread from computer to computer in a way that’s akin to falling dominoes. With no user interaction required, computer worms have the potential to propagate rapidly just by virtue of being connected and without requiring end users to do anything at all.

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  Explode! [credit: Microsoft ]

The bulk of the speed increase, as Microsoft has said before, comes from the system's use of NVMe SSD memory, rather than the much slower-spinning hard drives of past consoles. That gives the system "2.4 GB/s of raw I/O throughput," Microsoft says, though we've noted previously it will also likely make expanding that memory past the built-in 1TB default more expensive.

To extend that speed even further, Microsoft says it's expanding on the "industry standard LZ decompressor" with "a brand new, proprietary algorithm specifically designed for texture data named BCPack." This hardware-accelerated texture-unpacking algorithm can be run in parallel with the standard LZ decompressor, Microsoft says, increasing the functional throughput of the I/O bus without using up precious CPU core cycles. In fact, without hardware acceleration, Microsoft says similar software-exclusive decompression methods "would require more than four Zen 2 CPU cores" to achieve the same results.

Microsoft also went into a bit more detail on its previously announced DirectStorage API. That new expansion of the DirectX pipeline offers developers "fine grain control of their I/O operations" on the Series X, "empowering them to establish multiple I/O queues, prioritization and minimizing I/O latency," Microsoft says. That should help with situations where developers need specific data to show up from memory right when they need it, ahead of other data that used to be loaded at the same time.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Motortion)

The Trump administration has rescinded a controversial policy that could have forced the deportation of foreign students who attend colleges that aren't offering in-person classes during the coronavirus pandemic.

As we reported last week, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the Trump administration to block the policy issued by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under the policy change announced July 6, foreign students with nonimmigrant (F-1 and M-1) visas would have had to leave the United States or transfer to different schools that offer in-person classes.

But US officials agreed to rescind the new policy in a settlement with Harvard and MIT, as revealed today at a hearing on the case at US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. "At a short hearing Tuesday afternoon, US District Judge Allison Burroughs confirmed that a settlement had been reached," The Wall Street Journal reported. "She said the government would rescind the policy, withdraw an FAQ detailing the rule and return to the status quo of guidance issued in the spring."

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  The Kano PC offers similar specs to this year's Chromebooks, at a similar price—but it runs Windows, not ChromeOS. [credit: Kano ]

Last June, educational software and hardware vendor Kano announced an ambitious new project: a build-your-own computer kit based on x86 hardware and Windows 10. This replaces similar products Kano has offered for years, based on the Raspberry Pi. The finished product, designed in partnership with Microsoft, launched launched today.

The Kano PC, retailing for $299, is an 11.6" touchscreen two-in-one design, usable as either tablet or laptop—although it's a Windows system, it most strongly resembles an extremely chunky Android tablet in a folding case with a built-in keyboard. The case includes a built-in stand to prop the screen up at a landscape viewing angle, as well as the integrated keyboard and touchpad.

The Kano PC ships with Windows 10 Home in S Mode and is powered by an Intel Celeron N4000 CPU, 4GB of DDR3L RAM, and 64GB eMMC storage. It's also got a Micro SD card slot for adding storage later. Wi-Fi connectivity is included, but it's not stellar—the specs describe it as dual-band b/g/n, with Bluetooth 5.0. Resolution on the touchscreen is 1366x768, and video can be pushed to an external display via an HDMI port. The system also offers two USB 3.0 ports, one USB-C port, and three audio jacks (two out, one in).