Tips and tricks for all

Dara Kerr / CNET : Uber partners with telemedicine service Ro to give US workers free COVID assessments, as Lyft partners with One Medical for one month trial memberships   —  The ride-hailing company partners with the telemedicine service to help drivers figure out if they may have been infected with the coronavirus. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2xn5Vd9

ICANN : ICANN board has voted to reject the sale of the .org registry to private equity firm Ethos Capital   —  Today, the ICANN Board made the decision to reject the proposed change of control and entity conversion request that Public Interest Registry (PIR) submitted to ICANN. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3f9JDN2

Monica Chin / The Verge : Reddit has disabled its chat room feature, Start Chatting, a day after launch due to “several errors” in rollout and moderators' concerns over lack of control   —  The company says the rollout had several errors  —  Remember how Reddit announced just yesterday that it was introducing built-in subreddit chat rooms? from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2WcIBHG

Aimee Chanthadavong / ZDNet : IDC: Global smartphone shipments dropped 11.7% YoY to 276M during Q1 2020, the largest YoY decline ever   —  Shipment volumes suffered its largest year over year decline in the first quarter.  —  The latest data from International Data Corporation (IDC) has revealed that as the world grapples … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/35miL8a

Benjamin Romano / The Seattle Times : Amazon tells its Seattle and Bellevue employees already working from home since early March that they “are welcome to do so until at least October 2”   —  Amazon told its corporate employees working from home since early March that they “are welcome to do so until at least October 2 … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3bUN6x9

Joseph Cox / VICE : The UN's social distancing app, 1point5, is largely ineffective at monitoring distance between people, indiscriminately picking up any Bluetooth signals   —  This week a division of the United Nations announced its new social distancing app designed to help alert people when they get too close … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2YlUOfJ

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch : Walmart is piloting a 2-hour “Express” grocery delivery service for an extra $10 fee; plans to expand to 1K stores in May, using its 74K+ “personal shoppers”   —  Record usage of grocery delivery services amid the COVID-19 pandemic has led to delayed orders … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2VPbaMe

Bobbie Johnson / MIT Technology Review : Pandemic conspiracy theories are being spread using Wayback Machine links of content already discredited by fact-checkers and even deleted   —  Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote “zombie content” that evades moderators and fact-checkers. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2z1HClK

Sam Nussey / Reuters : SoftBank says it sees a loss of ~$6.6B in the year ending March on its WeWork investment held outside the Vision Fund, extending its expected net loss to $8.4B   —  TOKYO (Reuters) - SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T) said it sees a loss of around 700 billion yen ($6.6 billion) … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2SjxOdC

Taylor Lyles / The Verge : Facebook rolls out a tool that lets users in the US and Canada transfer their photos and videos to Google Photos as part of the Data Transfer Project   —  Facebook launched the tool in Ireland last year  —  Facebook is rolling out a new tool today allowing users in the US and Canada to transfer … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2KLzokj

In the first decade of the twentieth century two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented fertilizer — the nitrogen compound which ushered in modern agriculture and saved the world from potential starvation. Now, over a century later, a new group of scientists backed by government-owned international investment funds and some of the world’s wealthiest men and women is trying to save the world from their invention. In the hundred years since companies began manufacturing fertilizer at an industrial scale, the chemical has become one of the main sources of the pollution that’s choking the planet and putting millions of the lives its use has helped to feed at risk from severe droughts, fires, floods, and storms caused by climate change. That’s why investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures (the investment fund backed by Mukesh Ambani, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Masayoshi Son) and the Singapore-owned investment fund Temasek along with DCVC ; Prelude Ventures ;

Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside the home and the wider economic pressures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. And today,  Twitter reported quarterly earnings that bore this trend out. The ad-based social networking and media company said that in Q1 it made  $808 million in revenues, actually up 3% on a year ago, with  monetizable daily active users (Twitter’s own metric for measuring its audience) grew 24% to 166 million, an all-time high, adding 14 million average mDAUs since Q4 (152 million) and 32 million since Q1 of last year (134 million). However, o perating income for the quarter swung to a loss of $7 million, working out to a net margin of -1% and diluted EPS of -$0.01. Analysts had expected , on average, to see $775.96 million in revenues on earnings per share of $0.10, so Twitter beat on sales, and missed on earnings. (Note: Twitter’s analyst c

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : Twitter reports Q1 sales up 3% YoY to $808M as it swings to a net loss of $8M due to COVID-19, mDAUs hit record 166M, up 24% YoY   —  Despite traffic for many online properties being at an all-time high, advertising has fallen off a cliff because of the downturn in consumer activity outside … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3bPRopj

Google announced today it is providing $2.3 million in funding to 18 news organizations in the Asia Pacific region, the latest in its ongoing effort to support publishers globally. News organizations from 11 nations, including Australia, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan are receiving the grant as part of Thursday’s announcement, the company said, which began accepting applications for the new innovation challenge fund in the region late last year. The search giant said more than 250 organizations had applied for the funding. Those that are selected showed “variety and creativity of their ideas” to explore ways to increase reader engagement that would drive greater loyalty and willingness in readers to pay for content. The $2.3 million innovation challenge fund is not evenly distributed among the 18 hand-picked organizations, a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company additionally also offers mentoring and training sessions to these organizations, the spokesper

Tom Krazit / Protocol : Wall Street has been slow to shift to the cloud, using mainframes until recently, but issues like handling spikes in demand amid COVID-19 may change that   —  Financial services companies were skeptical of cloud computing's benefits and wouldn't hand over control of their data.  But the pressure is rising. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2VQWaxt

Tom Warren / The Verge : Zoom admits it doesn't have 300M DAUs, quietly correcting a misleading claim in its original blog post, which now says 300M “daily Zoom meeting participants”   —  Zoom quietly updated a blog post earlier this month  —  Zoom has admitted it doesn't have 300 million daily active users. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2WbkLvL

Since the onset of the pandemic, the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center, where I am the director, has been investigating how misinformation, scams, and conspiracies about covid-19 circulate online. If fraudsters are now using the virus to dupe unsuspecting individuals, we thought, then our research on misinformation should focus on understanding the new tactics of these media manipulators. What we found was a disconcerting explosion in “zombie content.” In April, Amelia Acker, assistant professor of Information Studies at UT Austin, brought our attention to a popular link containing conspiratorial propaganda suggesting China is hiding important information about covid-19.  The News NT website The original post was from a generic looking site called News NT , alleging that 21 million people had died from covid-19 in China. That story was quickly debunked and, according to data from Crowdtangle (a metric and engagement product o