On CNNState of the Union Sunday, the leading U.S. authority on the COVID-19 pandemic made some grim predictions about the course of the novel coronavirus as it rages through communities within the United States.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and emerging face of American leadership in the fight against the virus, estimated that the U.S. may see between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths from COVID-19, the deadly disease caused by the novel coronavirus. A deeply-respected authority on viral diseases, Fauci assisted in guiding the federal response to SARS, MERS, Ebola and now the novel coronavirus.

Fauci cautioned that these estimates are based on models and a model is only as accurate as the assumptions that go into building it. An extreme worst-case situation in which the coronavirus causes millions of American deaths remains &not impossible but very, very unlikely.&

&Whenever the models come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario,& Fauci told CNNJake Tapper. &Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I&ve never seen a model of the diseases that I&ve dealt with where the worst case actually came out. They always overshoot.&

Fauci believes that the U.S. is likely going to have &millions of cases& but broadly cautioned against relying on modeling estimates while still stressing the extreme risk the virus poses.

Watch Mark Zuckerberg talk live with epidemic expert Dr. Anthony Fauci

&I just don&t think that we really need to make a projection when itsuch a moving target that we could so easily be wrong and mislead people,& Fauci said. He added that outbreaks in New York, New Orleans and other areas with &serious problems& remain worrisome, indicating that the data at hand is plenty of cause for concern.

As of Sunday morning, 2,197 people in the U.S. have lost their lives fighting the virus, with 125,313 confirmed cases in the country to date according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The number of actual cases of the virus on the ground is likely substantially higher, as testing challenges continue to trouble some parts of the country and many mild or asymptomatic cases go untested.

Fauci: US can expect more than 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, millions of cases

Write comment (91 Comments)
Espresso yourself and save AU$90 on the Nespresso Vertuo Plus with milk frotherEspresso yourself and save AU$90 on the Nespresso Vertuo Plus with milk frother

Looking to buy a pod machine because your favourite cafe has closed? Introducing the Nespresso Vertuo Plus – a convenient, easy-to-use pod machine that creates a range of great-tasting coffees that are sure to give you that much-needed buzz in the morning. 

The Nespresso’s Vertuo is one smart machine – its recyclable pods come with a barcode which t

Write comment (91 Comments)

Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren may have ended her 2020 presidential run, but the tech used to drive her campaign will live on.

Members of her staff announced they would make public the top apps and digital tools developed in Warrenbid to become the Democratic nominee for president.

&In our work, we leaned heavily on open source technology — and want to contribute back to that community…[by] open-sourcing some of the most important projects of the Elizabeth Warren campaign for anyone to use,& the Warren for President Tech Team said.

In a Medium post, members of the team — including chief technology strategist Mike Conlow and chief technology officer Nikki Sutton — previewed what would be available and why.

&Our hope is that other Democratic candidates and progressive causes will use the ideas and code we developed to run stronger campaigns and help Democrats win,& the post said.

Warrentech team listed several of the tools they&ve turned over to the open source universe via GitHub.

One of those tools, Spoke, is a peer to peer texting app, originally developed by MoveOn, which offered the Warren Campaign high volume messaging at a fraction of the costs of other vendor options. The team used it to send four million SMS messages on Super Tuesday alone.

Pollaris is a location lookup tool with an API developed to interface directly with Warrenofficial campaign website and quickly direct supporters to their correct polling stations.

Elizabeth Warren for President open-sources its 2020 campaign tech

One of Elizabeth Warrenpresidential campaign app, Caucus, designed for calculating delegates. (Image: supplied)

Warrentech team will also open-source Switchboard (FE and BE) — which recruited and connected volunteers in primary states — and Caucus App, a delegate calculating and reporting tool.

The campaignRedhook tool took in web hook data in real time and experienced zero downtime.

&Our intention in open sourcing it is to demonstrate that some problems campaigns face do not require vendor tools and are solved…efficiently with a tiny bit of code,& said the Tech Team.

Elizabeth Warren ended her 2020 presidential bid on March 4 after failing to win a primary. Among her many policy proposals, the Massachusetts senator had proposed breaking up big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Her campaign will continue to share the tech tools they used on open source channels.

&We&ll have more to say in the coming weeks on all that we did with technology on our campaign,& the team said.

Elizabeth Warren, big techsworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

Write comment (94 Comments)
This is probably the best value Windows 10 PC on the planet right nowThis is probably the best value Windows 10 PC on the planet right now

With Windows 10 now well established as the world's most popular desktop operating system, getting your own PC up to speed has never been easier and one of the best deals we've seen on a low-cost PC is one called the AP34 Pro from Beelink, one that we sadly, have never reviewed.

If you're looking for a low-cost way to enjoy all the top Microsoft

Write comment (95 Comments)

After the closure, the testing and also tracing. & Trace, examination as well as reward is the mantra & hellip; no lockdowns, no obstacles and no restriction on motion & in South Korea. & To suppress and also regulate the epidemic, nations need to isolate, test, reward and also trace, & state THAT. But what does & tracing & look like specifically? In Singapore, they use a & TraceTogether & app, which utilizes Bluetooth to track neighboring phones (without area tracking), keeps neighborhood logs of those calls, and also just submits them to the Ministry of Health when the user chooses/consents, presumably after a medical diagnosis, so those contacts can be signaled. Singapore plans to open-source the application. In South Korea, the federal government texts people to allow them understand if they were in the vicinity of a detected individual. The info conveyed can include the person & s age, gender, and thorough place history. Ultimately, much more details may be offered: The level of detail provided by @Seoul_gov for every and also every COVID-19 instance in the city is astonishing: Surname (which I have actually covered) SexBirth yearDistrict of residenceProfessionTravel historyContact with known casesHospital where they're being dealt with pic.twitter.com/GsI0QQPcVH —-- Victoria Kim (@vicjkim) March 24, 2020 In China, as you could anticipate, the security is even more prevalent as well as draconian. Below, the pervasive apps Alipay as well as WeChat now include health and wellness codes & environment-friendly, yellow, or red & set by the Chinese government, making use of nontransparent standards. This wellness status is after that used in hundreds of cities (and also soon across the country) to figure out whether people are permitted to e.g. ride the metro, take a train, get in a building, and even exit a freeway. What about us, in the abundant autonomous globe? Are we OK with the Chinese model? Of training course not. The South Oriental design? & hellip; Probably not. The Singaporean version? & hellip; Perhaps. (I presume it would fly in my homeland of Canada, for example.) However the demand to install a different application, with TraceTogether or the directionally comparable MIT task Safe Paths, is a trouble. It operates in a city-state like Singapore but will certainly be far more troublesome in a massive, politically separated country like America. This will certainly cause substandard data blinded by both noncompliance and option prejudice. A lot more normally, at what factor does the immediate requirement for much better information ram the need to shield specific privacy as well as avoid allowing the tools for an aspiring, or existing, authorities state? And also let & s not youngster ourselves; the pandemic rises, instead of decreases, the tyrannical threat. Maybe, like the UK & s NHS, designers of new pandemic information infrastructures will promise & Once the public health emergency situation has actually finished, information will certainly either be ruined or returned & —-- but not all companies infuse the called for level of trust in their population. This tension has provoked heated conversation around whether we ought to produce new surveillance systems to aid minimize as well as regulate the pandemic. This shocks me substantially. Wherever you might get on that spectrum, there is no feeling whatsoever in creating a new surveillance system —-- seeing as how multiple options already exist. We put on & t like to assume concerning it, much, yet the nitty-gritty is that two teams of entities currently collectively have basically unconfined accessibility to all our proximity (and place) information, as and when they choose to do so. I refer of course to the major cell carriers, as well as to Apple - Google. This was strongly highlighted by information company Tectonix in a viral visualization of the spread of Springtime Break partygoers: Intend to see real possible impact of ignoring social distancing? Via a collaboration with @xmodesocial, we analyzed second locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a solitary Ft. Lauderdale coastline throughout springtime break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin —-- Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020 Unnecessary to state, Apple and Google, purveyors of the OSes on all those phones, have basically the same capacity as and when they select to exercise it. An open letter from & technologists, epidemiologists - medical professionals & get in touch with & Apple, Google, as well as various other mobile os vendors & (the concept that any kind of other vendors are from another location relevant is cute) & to provide an opt-in, personal privacy preserving OS feature to sustain get in touch with tracing. &. They & re right. Android and also iOS could, as well as should, add and also turn out privacy-preserving, interoperable, TraceTogether-like functionality at the OS degree (or Google Play Services level, to split fine technical hairs.) Provided, this means depending on corporate security, which makes all of us worry. However at the very least it doesn & t imply creating a whole brand-new security framework. Furthermore, Apple and Google, specifically contrasted to cellular service providers, have a strong institutional history and emphasis on protecting personal privacy and also restricting the remit of their monitoring. ( Don & t think me? Apple & s commitment to privacy has long been a competitive benefit. Google supplies a thorough collection of devices to let you regulate your information as well as personal privacy settings. I ask you: where is your cell company & s equal? Ah. Do you expect it to ever before produce one? I see. Would you likewise be interested in this fine, very gently utilized Brooklyn Bridge I have on sale?). Apple and also Google are likewise a lot far better fit to the job of preserving privacy by & anonymizing & information sets (I understand, I know, however see listed below), or, better yet, protecting personal privacy through some type( s) of differential personal privacy and/or homomorphic file encryption —-- or perhaps some type of zero-knowledge cryptography, he handwaved hugely. As well as, on a practical degree, they & re more able than a third-party app developer to ensure a history service like that remains energetic. Undoubtedly this ought to all be well and strongly controlled. However at the same time, we should stay cognizant of the fact that not every country counts on such policy. Building privacy deep right into a contact-tracing system, to the maximum level consonant with its efficiency, is especially essential when we consider its possible usage in tyrannical countries who may demand the raw data. & Anonymized & place datasets undoubtedly often tend to be something of an oxymoron, but authoritarians might still be practically prevented by the problem of deanonymization; and also if individual privacy can be protected even more safely than that through some elegant security system, a lot the better. Contrasted to the other options —-- government monitoring; the phone firms; or some brand-new app, with all the concomitant rubbing as well as barriers to usage —-- Apple as well as Google are by some range the least objectionable choice. What & s much more, despite this international pandemic they can present their component of the test-and-trace solution to three billion individuals fairly promptly. If we require a pervasive pandemic surveillance system, then allow & s make use of one which (though we wear & t like to talk concerning it) currently exists, in the least unsafe, most privacy-preserving way.

Write comment (95 Comments)
Optus is doubling the data on some of its best 5G plansOptus is doubling the data on some of its best 5G plans

As Optus continues to roll out its 5G network across the country, the telco is hoping to tempt new customers to its 5G-ready phones by doubling your data on selected plans.

Android users, you’re in luck – this offer is currently available across Samsung's 5G range of smartphones, and the deal is for the two bigger plans (Large and Extra Large), so t

Write comment (100 Comments)
Next