Tech’s biggest companies just wrapped up a huge year. From a report: The seven most valuable U.S. technology companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Tesla and Nvidia — picked up a combined $3.4 trillion in market cap in 2020, powering through a global pandemic and broader economic crisis. Between continued optimism over iPhone sales, Microsoft’s growing Teams collaboration product, Amazon’s…
Tag: global pandemic
Spam Calls Grew 18% This Year Despite the Global Pandemic
Despite several efforts from carriers, telecom regulators, mobile operating system developers, smartphone makers, and a global pandemic, spam calls continued to pester and scam people around the globe this year — and they only got worse. From a report: Users worldwide received 31.3 billion spam calls between January and October this year, up from 26 billion during the same period last…
YouTube Cancels Rewind Video Amid Pandemic
YouTube says it will not produce its annual end-of-year “Rewind” video this year, due to the global pandemic. The BBC reports: The video-sharing platform has produced an annual retrospective since 2010, featuring well-known YouTube stars referencing big viral moments. But, in a statement it said: “2020 has been different. And it doesn’t feel right to carry on as if it weren’t.”…
How Ransomware Puts Your Hospital At Risk
nickwinlund77 quotes a New York Times opinion piece: In March, several cybercrime groups rushed to reassure people that they wouldn’t target hospitals and other health care facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic. The operators of several prominent strains of ransomware all announced they would not target hospitals, and some of them even promised to decrypt the data of health care organizations for…
Coursera’s Enterprise Learning Platform Now Available in AWS Marketplace
By Leah Belsky, Chief Enterprise Officer, Coursera Coursera’s enterprise learning platform is now available for purchase in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. Starting today, technical teams using Amazon Web Services (AWS) can easily search and deploy online learning for their organizations using Coursera. Coursera’s robust enterprise offering includes access to courses from the world’s leading […]
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China’s Qingdao To Test 9 Million in Five Days
The Chinese city of Qingdao is testing its entire population of nine million people for Covid-19 over a period of five days. From a report: The mass testing comes after the discovery of a dozen cases linked to a hospital treating coronavirus patients arriving from abroad. In May, China tested the entire city of Wuhan — home to 11 million people…
1 in 4 Americans aren’t washing their hands regularly
In a global pandemic, hand-washing is even more important than it usually is. Source: https://www.livescience.com/hand-washing-covid-19-pandemic.html
After ‘No Time To Die’ Postponement, Hundreds of US and UK Movie Theatres Postpone Reopening
An anonymous reader quotes the Hollywood Reporter: Following the delay of more Hollywood tentpoles — including James Bond film No Time to Die — mega-movie theater chain Cineworld is planning to keep all of its locations in the U.K. and the U.S. closed for the time being, The Sunday Times reported on Saturday. The British-based company is the largest circuit in…
Could Open Source Licensing Stop Big Pharma Profiteering On Taxpayer-Funded Covid-19 Vaccines?
Two professors at the University of Massachusetts have co-authored a new essay explaining how open source licensing “could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research” in the international, multi-billion-dollar race for a Covid-19 vaccine: The invention of the “General Public License,” sometimes referred to as a viral or reciprocal license, meant that should an improvement be made, the…
Storelift Launches Autonomous Convenience Stores Using AI and Computer Vision
schwit1 shares a report from VentureBeat: As physical retail struggles amid the global pandemic, storeowners are rapidly trying to adapt to new realities that also include growing competition from Amazon. But a French startup called Storelift believes it can create a new convenience store concept that leans on many of the same AI and computer vision tools used in Amazon Go…