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The major tech companies are scrambling to craft digital options for this year's summer intern class, as businesses remain shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic. These companies said they're moving their programs online: Google said it will pay its interns the full rate. Twitter said its intern class may shrink this year. Microsoft said it will have its biggest ever intern class -- more than 4,000. Lyft, which will have the same number of interns as originally planned, limit them to just two start dates to provide students with more of a common experience. Salesforce, which also plans a similar size intern class as intended. These companies are still hoping have at least some interns on-site for at least part of the summer: Apple said it plans to hire more than 1,000 people for a mix of online and in-person internships and pledged in a statement to "extend to our interns the same precautions and care that we're extending to all our other personnel as a part of the ongoing COVID-19 response." Amazon said it expects its biggest-ever class of interns globally, though it said the vast majority of internships will be virtual. Intel, which does plan to have its interns work remotely but hopes to move them on-site should the situation and health authority guidelines make that possible. Uber, which has made plans for online on-boarding and will keep the program online if their offices remain closed, but will aim to have its interns work in the office if that is possible. Doordash said, for now, it "plans to stay the course" with its summer internship program, but is exploring options for conducting the program remotely and will "continue to re-evaluate as the situation progresses."

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No stopping or slowing down the release cadence of veteran browser

Mozilla has squeezed out version 75 of the Firefox browser, crediting "empathy" in its systems for an ability to continue emissions even as Microsoft and Google hit the pause button on their Chromium-based apps.…

Deep learning algorithms can diagnose, triage, and monitor coronavirus cases from lung images. Next, can they predict who will need a ventilator? From a report: AI-powered analysis of chest scans has the potential to alleviate the growing burden on radiologists, who must review and prioritize a rising number of patient chest scans each day, experts say. And in the future, the technology might help predict which patients are most likely to need a ventilator or medication, and which can be sent home. "That's the brass ring," says Matthew Lungren, a pediatric radiologist at Stanford University Medical Center and co-director of the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging. "That would be the killer app for this." Some companies are selling their tools, others have released free online versions, and various groups are organizing large crowdsourced repositories of medical images to generate new algorithms. "The system we designed can process huge amounts of CT scans per day," says Hayit Greenspan, a professor at Tel-Aviv University and chief scientist of RADLogics, a healthcare software company that recently announced one such AI-based system. "The capability for quickly covering a huge population is there."

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We'll have to wait until the US wakes up before we can answer that one

In an impressively frank postmortem, Microsoft has admitted that at least part of its organisation was asleep at the wheel in a very real sense while its European DevOps tooling tottered.…

Microsoft is planning to make all of its internal and external events digital-only until July 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The software maker had already revealed Build 2020, due to be held in Seattle in May, would transform into a digital event. This digital-only focus is now extending to far more events over the next year. "In light of the challenges presented by COVID-19, Microsoft has been closely monitoring the developing global situation and re-assessing the overall company-wide in-person event strategy," explains a recent email to Microsoft MVPs. "As a company, Microsoft has made the decision to transition all external and internal events to a digital-first experience through July 2021."

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We've got just a few Qs about automation, storage, AI

Reader survey Like other parts of your business, the IT team is beginning to suffer as key people fall sick or need to self-isolate. At the same time, they have the added pressure of supporting many more users working from home, which has dramatically changed some established internal service dynamics.…

In ordinary times, they moved among us largely unnoticed. Now we can't get enough of them. The Covid-19 pandemic has thrust once-anonymous IT support workers into a new role: corporate saviors. From a report: As millions of employees make the transition from well-maintained office equipment to jury-rigged kitchen table setups, information technology departments have been called upon to keep companies online and connected. Requests range in size and scale, from replacing employees' $5 mouses, to speeding up networks, to keeping multimillion-dollar data centers up and running. For many departments, the result has been virtually unprecedented workloads. On March 12, Qualcomm told all staff to prepare to start working remotely in three days. Vice president of IT infrastructure, Zeeshan Sabir, and his team then worked about 72 hours straight trying to prepare a lot of laptops for secure, remote access and get other corporate systems ready. "I just saw heroics," he said. "I didn't see a blip of complaint from anyone." [...] The way most IT departments are set up has meant many directors have been juggling major issues alongside relatively minor ones. At Bay Area transit agency SamTrans, IT manager Edward Kelly got help from AT&T to quickly increase the speed of connections to the agency's networks once its 200 employees made the switch to remote work. At the same time, Kelly's team of five was flooded by calls from employees who'd forgotten their computer password and guessed wrong too many times. He said he's also hoping people learn to use the "reply-all" button on group emails more sparingly. As many employees' home computers infuriate them, tensions can run high, said Jennifer Reed, a consultant at IT outsourcing firm Viqtor Davis North America.

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Quiet legal word leads to blanket month-long delay

Exclusive A UK tribunal halted 60 cases against the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) because the data watchdog's staff can't print documents or electronically organise them into hearing bundles, The Register has learned.…

A New York Times analysis of internet usage in the United States from SimilarWeb and Apptopia, two online data providers, reveals that our behaviors shifted, sometimes starkly, as the virus spread and pushed us to our devices for work, play and connecting. From the report: With nearly all public gatherings called off, Americans are seeking out entertainment on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, and looking to connect with one another on social media outlets like Facebook. In the past few years, users of these services were increasingly moving to their smartphones, creating an industrywide focus on mobile. Now that we are spending our days at home, with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates. While traditional social media sites have been growing, it seems that we want to do more than just connect through messaging and text -- we want to see one another. This has given a big boost to apps that used to linger in relative obscurity, like Google's video chatting application, Duo, and Houseparty, which allows groups of friends to join a single video chat and play games together.

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Such a move could standardise deployment of new versions, rather than it being at the whim of OEMs

Despite Google's better efforts, operating system updates on Android have long been a fragmented, disconnected mess. The launch of Android 11 will go some way to resolving that, with Google likely to force manufacturers to use the Virtual A/B partitioned updates system.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The new normal telecommuting may be a bit more permanent than realized, as 74% of CFOs say they expect to move previously on-site employees remote post-COVID-19, according to a Gartner survey. The survey, which had 317 CFO respondents on March 30, highlighted how remote work may become more of the norm as companies look to cut commercial real estate costs. Gartner found that almost a quarter of respondents said they will move at least 20% of their on-site employees to remote work permanently. The research firm is taking the pulse of the COVID-19 CXO shifts in a series of surveys. Among the key shifts from CFOs and enterprises as they manage cash via COVID-19 shutdowns: - 81% of CFOs plan to exceed their contractual obligations to hourly workers and to fund that they are using remote work to offer flexible schedules and maintain operations. - 90% of CFOs said their accounting close operations will be able to run effectively without disruptions off-site. - 20% of CFOs said they are cutting their on-premise technology spending with 12% planning the same move. - 13% of CFOs have already cut real estate expenses with another 9% planning cuts in the months to come.

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Another reason to hate auto-play videos: they drain your power

Brave has updated its Android web browser and claims a 5 per cent battery saving versus the previous release.…

But outgoing Carphone Warehouse staff can't use government support scheme to defer redundancies

Exclusive - updated Dixons Carphone CEO Alex Baldock and his fellow execs have agreed to a temporary pay cut as they prepare to furlough swathes of the workforce weeks after the UK government forced the closure of stores.…

Focus to be 'evolving the technology to a Kubernetes-based platform'

Cloud Foundry, home of open-source projects that simplify development and deployment of cloud-native applications, has named former CTO Chip Childers as exec director and VMware's Paul Fazzone as board chair.…

Asking price to banish ghost of Active Directory admin past was $1.7m: Redmond paid 'undisclosed amount'

Victims of early versions of Microsoft's Active Directory can breathe a sigh of relief: the software giant has snapped up the infamous corp.com domain.…

Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt would like his $260,000 invoice paid, please

The architect of a retro games console has sued Atari for allegedly failing to pay his invoices, amounting to $261,720.…

According to a study published Monday by the CDC, people in the United States under the age of 18 are far less likely to fall ill with COVID-19 or require intensive care, compared with older Americans. NPR reports: The study looked at about 149,000 infections for which age was known that were reported in the U.S. through April 2. Of those, 2,572 were among people under the age of 18. That's less than 2% of total cases, even though that age group makes up 22% of the U.S. population. The CDC cautions that most reports of coronavirus cases among children are incomplete, which adds uncertainty to the report's specific numbers. Relatively few children with COVID-19 ended up in the hospital, and fewer still required intensive care. But hospitalization status was known in only 29% of cases involving children. Based on the partial data analyzed in this study, between 5.7% and 20% of sick children end up in the hospital, and 2% or fewer end up in intensive care, the paper says. For adults ages 18-64, the proportion hospitalized was between 10% and 33%, and 1.4% to 4.5% required intensive care. Hospital admission was most common with children under the age of 1 or young people with underlying health conditions, the CDC report says. The study observed three deaths among the population it covered. The authors conclude: "Because persons with asymptomatic and mild disease, including children, are likely playing a role in transmission and spread of COVID-19 in the community, social distancing and everyday preventive behaviors are recommended for persons of all ages to slow the spread of the virus, protect the health care system from being overloaded, and protect older adults and persons of any age with serious underlying medical conditions."

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Kinsing malware infections surge – so please check your configurations

Some Docker installations are getting hammered by malware skiddies hoping to mine digital cash using other people's CPU time.…

Changes may help, but big user requests are still missing

Microsoft is rolling out improvements to its Teams collaboration software, while no doubt eyeing the success of Zoom in capturing millions of new video-conferencing users as much of the world endures lockdown.…

Only half the nation prefers digital radio to analogue, though

Britain's airwaves are opening up to DAB versions of local radio stations, Ofcom has declared as it tries to shift more Brits away from AM and FM radio.…