Day: February 28, 2020

Amazon said on Thursday that it blocked more than a million items from sale on its marketplace in recent weeks that made false claims about defending against the novel coronavirus, as schemers across the globe looked to make a quick buck amid a global health threat. But what’s left when searching “coronavirus” or “Covid-19” on the e-commerce site is a grab bag of rushed-to-publish pandemic books and protection gear, a mix of products that could be disorienting to the average shopper.

As the global count of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 approaches 3,000, small-time authors and all kinds of …

When it comes to self-driving cars, the future was supposed to be now.

In 2020, you’ll be a “permanent backseat driver,” the Guardian predicted in 2015. “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020,” blared a Business Insider headline from 2016. Those declarations were accompanied by announcements from General Motors, Google’s Waymo, Toyota, and that they’d be making self-driving cars by 2020. Elon Musk forecast that Tesla would do it by 2018 — and then, when that failed, by 2020.

But the year is here — and the self-driving cars aren’t.

Despite …

US health officials expect more cases of the coronavirus disease, Covid-19, in the coming days and weeks, even though the risk to the general public remains low.

So how will we know where those cases are and how fast the virus is spreading through the population?

The answer is simple: We need diagnostic test kits. A lot of them. And with cases of the disease confirmed in nearly 50 countries, we also need testing that focuses far beyond people with links to China, where the outbreak originated.

The problem is that testing in the US has been limited …

We all know how the Democratic nomination contest works, right? Well, we think we do.

People go and vote in primaries or caucuses in their states. The votes are counted and we see who wins. And then, those votes get translated … somehow … into how many delegates each candidate gets.

Even many hardened political obsessives tend to fast-forward through that last bit: the delegate math. It’s complicated and confusing, so why bother?

But the delegate math is incredibly important: It determines who wins. A candidate needs a majority of delegates to get the nomination at the Democratic …

The Covid-19 coronavirus is prompting major tech conferences around the world to cancel their events — so far, at least three major ones have been called off entirely, including Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference. It’s an unprecedented disruption to the usual packed lineup of annual tech events every spring.

The cancellations of some of the biggest tech events of the year seem to be a sign of what’s to come in other sectors as fears mount that the coronavirus will become a pandemic. The US tech industry shares close ties to China, where the outbreak started, and some in …

Clearview AI, the controversial and secretive facial recognition company, recently experienced its first major data breach — a scary prospect considering the sheer amount and scope of personal information in its database, as well as the fact that access to it is supposed to be restricted to law enforcement agencies. BuzzFeed News says it gained access to the leaked documents, and indeed, it looks like Clearview was working with everyone from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the NBA.

The new BuzzFeed report paints a chilling picture of Clearview’s scope and ambition to market its all-powerful facial …