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New submitter jsicolo shares a report: Nvidia Chief Scientist Bill Dally has released an open-source ventilator hardware design he developed in order to address the shortage resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic. The mechanical ventilator design developed by Dally can be assembled quickly, using off-the-shelf parts with a total cost of around $400 -- making it an accessible and affordable alternative to traditional, dedicated ventilators, which can cost $20,000 or more. The design created by Dally strives for simplicity, and basically includes just two central components -- a solenoid valve and a microcontroller. The design is called the OP-Vent, and in this video you can see how bare-bones it is in terms of hardware compared to existing alternatives, including some of the other more complex emergency-use ventilator designs developed in response to COVID-19.

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Puts to rest claims staff should've been paid for time spent in security lines

Amazon yesterday settled for $11m with staff at its California warehouses who'd sued it over uncompensated wait times for security checks as they began and ended shifts.…

Bill Gates, whose foundation is focusing its efforts to fight the coronavirus, doesn't think life will return to normal until there's a viable vaccine that can stop its spread. The good news is that it may take less time than many have been predicting. From a report: "Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he thinks it'll take around eighteen months to develop a coronavirus vaccine," Gates wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "I agree with him, though it could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years." Even if it takes 18 months, that would still be the fastest that scientists have created a new vaccine, Gates said, adding that he's thinks eight to ten of the 115 current COVID-19 vaccine candidates look promising. "I'm particularly excited by two new approaches that some of the candidates are taking: RNA and DNA vaccines," he wrote. "It might be a bit hard to see right now, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel."

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Coronavirus + entity lists + people not keen to upgrade = 13% dive

Early forecasts of the Q1 smartphone sector made for grim reading, with appetite expected to be severely suppressed thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent analysis from Canalys shows those forecasts were bang-on, with worldwide shipments into the channel falling by 13 per cent year-on-year, to just over 272 million units.…

Three female employees at Oracle scored a major victory in court, gaining the right to represent thousands of others in a gender-discrimination lawsuit over pay, a legal milestone that has eluded women at other tech titans. From a report: A California state judge certified the class action Thursday, allowing the lawsuit to advance on behalf of more than 4,000 women who claim the database giant pays men more for doing the same job. "Whether the jobs at issue in this case are substantially equal or similar is a question of fact for a jury," California Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope in Redwood City said in the 25-page ruling, rejecting Oracle's claim that each is an individual case because people in the same job code don't perform substantially similar work. The ruling gives the women critical leverage in pursuing the case under the state's Equal Pay Act.

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Its servers merely record more HTTPS requests to Mail Online and Amazon than anywhere else

Civil servants at the UK's Ministry of Defence are spending a large part of their surfing time gazing at online shopping and news websites, the red-faced government department has admitted.…

Just as suddenly as it first formed, a record-breaking ozone hole has healed. The largest ozone hole to ever open up over the Arctic is now closed, after first opening up earlier this spring. From a report: Scientists monitoring the "unprecedented" hole at the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) announced the closure last week. Despite coronavirus lockdowns leading to a significant reduction in air pollution, researchers said the pandemic likely was not the reason for the ozone hole closing. "Actually, COVID19 and the associated lockdowns probably had nothing to do with this," CAMS tweeted Sunday. "It's been driven by an unusually strong and long-lived polar vortex, and isn't related to air quality changes." Now that the intense polar vortex has ended, the ozone hole has closed. CAMS said Monday that it does not expect the same conditions to occur next year.

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An anonymous reader writes: Browser maker Mozilla is working on a new service called Private Relay that generates unique aliases to hide a user's email address from advertisers and spam operators when filling in online forms. The service entered testing last month and is currently in a closed beta, with a public beta currently scheduled for later this year, ZDNet has learned. Private Relay will be available as a Firefox add-on that lets users generate a unique email address -- an email alias -- with one click. The user can then enter this email address in web forms to send contact requests, subscribe to newsletters, and register new accounts. "We will forward emails from the alias to your real inbox," Mozilla says on the Firefox Private Relay website. "If any alias starts to receive emails you don't want, you can disable it or delete it completely," the browser maker said.

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IR blasters and headphone jacks, likely south of £350? Oh my

Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi's onslaught into the UK market continues with two more phones: the MediaTek Helio G85-powered Redmi Note 9, and the more upmarket Redmi Note 9 Pro, which uses the Qualcomm 720G platform.…

On May 1st, workers from Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, FedEx, Target, and Walmart joined together in a series of work stoppages to protest conditions and equipment in the face of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. From a report: The actions have been organized by a range of groups within the various companies, but are timed to coincide with International Workers' Day. The groups are encouraging customers to boycott the stores and services for the duration of the day. Organizers at Amazon said thousands of employees are participating in the actions nationwide. The groups are calling for better practices and equipment to protect frontline workers from contracting the disease at work. Specifics of those protections vary between companies and jobs: Instacart workers are calling for better distribution of personal protective equipment (or PPE), while Whole Foods workers are calling for locations with positive cases to be shut down for 14 days.

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It's not just Skype and Zoom cashing in on remote-working boom

Britain's courts are moving to their own video-conferencing platform – for criminal trials rather than business meetings.…

The Education Department has asked the University of Texas System to provide documentation of its dealings with the Chinese laboratory that U.S. officials are investigating as a potential source of the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The request for records of gifts or contracts from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its researcher Shi Zhengli, known for her work on bats, is part of a broader department investigation into possible faulty financial disclosures of foreign money by the Texas group of universities. The Education Department's letter, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, also asks the UT System to share documents regarding potential ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party and some two dozen Chinese universities and companies, including Huawei Technologies Co. and a unit of China National Petroleum Corp. The department is also seeking documents related to any university system contracts or gifts from Eric Yuan, a U.S. citizen who is the chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications.

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NASA selects three contenders for flag-in-Moon prize

With a scant few years remaining until the agency's 2024 boots-on-the-Moon goal, NASA has named the three US companies that will be dealing with the tricky human landing bit of the mission.…

Digital gold rush spurred by global pandemic: Big 4 bag 62% of market

Cloud infrastructure providers are making bank following the mass migration of millions of workers from their offices to their homes, with spending on services leaping by 34.5 per cent in Q1 to $31bn.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Post: The World Health Organization lauded Sweden as a "model" for battling the coronavirus as countries lift lockdowns -- after the nation controversially refused restrictions. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, said Wednesday there are "lessons to be learned" from the Scandinavian nation, which has largely relied on citizens to self-regulate. "I think there's a perception out that Sweden has not put in control measures and just has allowed the disease to spread," Ryan told reporters. "Nothing can be further from the truth." Ryan noted that instead of lockdowns, the country has "put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting people in long-term care facilities." "What it has done differently is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate," Ryan said. "In that sense, they have implemented public policy through that partnership with the population." He said the country also ramped up testing and had adequate capacity in hospitals to handle any outbreaks. "I think if we are to reach a new normal, Sweden represents a model if we wish to get back to a society in which we don't have lockdowns," Ryan said. Last month, more than 2,300 Swedish researchers penned a letter demanding the government enact stricter regulations. "Until we get a better idea of the situation, I think it is a good idea to close schools, restaurants and entertainment venues," said Olle Kampe, an immunology researcher at the Karolinska Institute, in March. "[Sweden], which has a population of 10.3 million, has seen more than 20,300 cases and 2,462 deaths as of Thursday afternoon -- far higher than its Nordic neighbors, which implemented stricter containment measures," the report adds.

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Now 'Visual Studio Codespaces': Prices sliced, but won't somebody think of the branded swag?

Barely six months on from its grand unveiling, Microsoft is renaming its browser-based code botherer, Visual Studio Online and, more importantly, is trimming its prices.…

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of your partner

The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. This one has been intensely anticipated by myself and thousands of others for eight long years. We had abandoned all hope, but now it's here and it's not even finished yet. So without further ado...…

Cupertino hamstrung by Chinese factory closures, Samsung tabs up but wider market shrinks: IDC

Under the shadow of a pandemic that forced the shutdown of Apple's production lines in parts of China, global sales of iPads are tumbling rapidly.…

You thought that yoghurt in the back of fridge was time-expired? Behold X-ray boffinry YEARS past its design-life

Space Extenders Sure – that telescope can be serviced by Space Shuttle astronauts. But how do you keep one running for years past expiration without a prodding by spacewalkers? Behold ESA's XMM-Newton.…

Researchers analysing samples submitted to VirusTotal find new strain

Researchers have analysed a new strain of Android malware that does not yet exist in the wild.…