Author: Tech Support

    • One year after the passage of Russia's domestic internet law, a look at the uneven past and uncertain future of Moscow's attempts to regulate the internet (Justin Sherman/Wired)

    Justin Sherman / Wired: One year after the passage of Russia’s domestic internet law, a look at the uneven past and uncertain future of Moscow’s attempts to regulate the internet  —  The Kremlin’s path toward censorship, surveillance, and repression has many more layers than meets the eye. One year after the passage of Russia's domestic

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    Mass Mask-Making Masterclass

    Just as 3D printers around the world have been churning out face shields, the thread injectors of home sewists have been stitching up fabric masks. Over the past several weeks, [Becky Stern] has made them for friends, family, neighbors, and anyone in her community who happens upon the box of free masks she’s left at

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    • Profile of Canada-based Draganfly, which is piloting "pandemic drones" that use machine vision and AI to track social distancing and monitor health vitals (Emil Protalinski/VentureBeat)

    Emil Protalinski / VentureBeat: Profile of Canada-based Draganfly, which is piloting “pandemic drones” that use machine vision and AI to track social distancing and monitor health vitals  —  Like the rest of the world, Canadian drone maker Draganfly has been anxiously watching the spread of the novel coronavirus. Profile of Canada-based Draganfly, which is piloting

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    • An inside look at the dropshipping scene in Bali, where expats typically purchase items on AliExpress and have them shipped directly to buyers in the West (Sirin Kale/WIRED UK)

    Sirin Kale / WIRED UK: An inside look at the dropshipping scene in Bali, where expats typically purchase items on AliExpress and have them shipped directly to buyers in the West  —  In Bali, western immigrants are selling products they’ve never handled, from countries they’ve never visited, to consumers they’ve never met An inside look

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    • How researchers are working to build AI with common-sense reasoning, such as the COMET system, which combines symbolic reasoning and neural language modeling (John Pavlus/Quanta Magazine)

    John Pavlus / Quanta Magazine: How researchers are working to build AI with common-sense reasoning, such as the COMET system, which combines symbolic reasoning and neural language modeling  —  The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. How researchers are working to build AI with common-sense reasoning,

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    • Google's Messages app, which isn't part of Google's apps package often pre-installed on phones by 3rd-party Android OEMs, passes 1B+ installs on the Play Store (Hagop Kavafian/Android Police)

    Hagop Kavafian / Android Police: Google’s Messages app, which isn’t part of Google’s apps package often pre-installed on phones by 3rd-party Android OEMs, passes 1B+ installs on the Play Store  —  Google’s Messages app is packed with features, including a built-in markup tool, reminders, context-aware recommendations, a dark mode, RCS support, and a web interface.

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    • Bitfinex's parent firm has applied for subpoenas in three US states asking federal courts to aid in recovering $800M+ in user funds seized by legal authorities (George Chidi/CoinDesk)

    George Chidi / CoinDesk: Bitfinex’s parent firm has applied for subpoenas in three US states asking federal courts to aid in recovering $800M+ in user funds seized by legal authorities  —  The Bitfinex crypto exchange is making a new push to find and potentially recover more than $800 million in user funds seized … Bitfinex's

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    • India's government has mandated all private sector employees to download its COVID-19 contact tracing app, following its mandate for all the public sector staff (The Economic Times)

    The Economic Times: India’s government has mandated all private sector employees to download its COVID-19 contact tracing app, following its mandate for all the public sector staff  —  Privacy activists said a diverse group of organisations and individuals had endorsed a representation to the Prime Minister’s Office … India's government has mandated all private sector

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    • Apple has missed an opportunity by not introducing a product like Facebook Portal by combining different aspects of the Apple TV and HomePod with FaceTime (M.G. Siegler/500ish)

    M.G. Siegler / 500ish: Apple has missed an opportunity by not introducing a product like Facebook Portal by combining different aspects of the Apple TV and HomePod with FaceTime  —  Apple TV should own the living room with FaceTime.  And the Facebook Portal market with HomePod.  And yet… Apple has missed an opportunity by not

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    • Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud infrastructure spending grew 37% YoY to $29B in Q1, with Amazon at 32% market share followed by Microsoft at 18% (Synergy Research Group)

    Synergy Research Group: Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud infrastructure spending grew 37% YoY to $29B in Q1, with Amazon at 32% market share followed by Microsoft at 18%  —  New data from Synergy Research Group shows that Q1 spend on cloud infrastructure services reached $29 billion, up 37% from the first quarter of 2019. Despite

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    • Sources: Bangalore-based education app Byju's is in talks to raise up to $400M at $10B valuation, up from a valuation of $8B in February (Manish Singh/TechCrunch)

    Manish Singh / TechCrunch: Sources: Bangalore-based education app Byju’s is in talks to raise up to $400M at $10B valuation, up from a valuation of $8B in February  —  Byju’s, an education learning startup in India that has seen a surge in its popularity in recent weeks amid the coronavirus outbreak … Sources: Bangalore-based education

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