TMO Link

Lockdown is hard for everyone, including creative people used to being out and about playing music or creating art. One photographer, Tim Dunk, found a way to keep taking portraits – using FaceTime. He explained how on Peta Pixel.

I then had an idea to sustain myself creatively and socially, and threw it out to a few contacts — maybe with the use of some common apps and bits of tech, I could continue to make work. Using FaceTime, a MacBook Pro, and my subject using an iPhone under instruction, I was able to make portraits of people in isolation, distanced from the world and the people that make it up. I’ve been lucky enough that my FaceTime portraits have really caught folk’s attention, and I’ve been fielding a lot of questions from other photographers.

Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey announced Tuesday that he has moved $1 billion worth of Square equity into an LLC to fund COVID-19 relief, NBC News reported. This equates to around 28 percent of his total net-worth.

Dorsey’s investment in coronavirus relief is the most significant financial pledge by a private individual to date. Several other current and former tech executives, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, have each pledged $100 million. Unlike other donors, Dorsey also promised to keep a consistently updated public record of all the donations. Once the pandemic is over, Dorsey said, the rest of the $1 billion will be dedicated to “girl’s health and education, and UBI,” which is short for Universal Basic Income, a program that calls for each person to receive a certain amount of money from the government every month.

Netflix was installed 59 million times in the first quarter of 2020. However, it was YouTube Kids that had the most usage, according to AppTopia and Blaze data reported on by Reuters.

Netflix Inc led rivals YouTube, Amazon Prime and Disney+ with over 59 million installs in the first quarter of 2020, but more time was spent on YouTube’s Kids service as usage boomed following the shutdown of thousands of schools in March. YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, collected $110 million in in-app spending during the same time period, the highest among major streaming apps globally, according to a report by analytics firms Apptopia and Braze. The report did not give actual hours of usage, but ranked YouTube Kids first, followed by Netflix. YouTube itself was in third place.

It’s census year in the U.S., but this time around it’s going to be different. Each enumerator tasked with getting the data is to be handed an iPhone 8 instead of a pen and paper. CNet looked into how it is all going to work, and the risks involved.

In an effort to make the door-to-door process, which is the most laborious and expensive part of the census, faster and more efficient, the bureau is arming 500,000 enumerators with the Apple iPhone 8. But as the census goes mobile, instantaneously beaming respondents’ answers to data centers and cloud servers, it opens itself up to those who may want to access or manipulate such valuable information. The stakes to pull off a census have always been high, but with this year’s adoption of new technological methods, the pressure to succeed is even higher.

A report today reveals that Saudi Arabia uses flaws in telecom networks to track its citizens as they move through the U.S.

The data shows requests for mobile phone location data that were routed through the decades-old SS7 global messaging system, which allows mobile operators to connect users around the world…The SS7 system also enables tracking of phones, which has been a cause for concern by security experts. When a US carrier – such as Verizon, T-Mobile or AT&T – receives what is known as a Provide Subscriber Information SS7 message (or PSI) from a foreign mobile phone operator, they are getting, in effect, a tracking request.

Also included in the report: Senator Ron Wyden says the FCC knew about these flaws and failed to act, blaming FCC chairman Ajit Pai.

512 Pixels collected every default Mac wallpaper since 10.0 Cheetah, and there are high quality 5K versions available.

Major props to the world-class designer who does all the art of Relay FM, the mysterious @forgottentowel, for upscaling some of these for modern screens.

I think this is great. It’s cool to see how the default wallpaper has changed over time.

Google announced Thursday that it will resume its Chrome and Chrome OS update program, ZDNet reported. It paused the updates to avoid disruptions web developers during the coronavirus pandemic.

The company said that starting next week, the current Chrome 80 release will start receiving security updates once againt. Chrome v81, initially scheduled to be released on March 17, was rescheduled for April 7, at which time, web developers and system administrators would have had the time to adapt to their new working conditions. The Chrome 82 release was canceled altogether, with features being reshuffled into Chrome 83 and other versions. Per the new adjusted schedule, Chrome 83 is now expected to be released somewhere in mid-May.

An international group of roughly 400 cybersecurity experts are fighting hacking related to the coronavirus.

One of four initial managers of the effort, Marc Rogers, said the top priority would be working to combat hacks against medical facilities and other frontline responders to the pandemic. It is already working on hacks of health organizations.

Also key is the defense of communication networks and services that have become essential as more people work from home, said Rogers, head of security at the long-running hacking conference Def Con and a vice president at security company Okta Inc.

At least there’s some good news.