In the face of the Covid-19 outbreak, several tech companies have stepped up in their attempt to make life a little bit easier, including Pluralsight.  Pluralsight are running a promo called Stay Home Skill Up #FreeApril, which makes all 7000+ of their courses available for free.  You do not need a credit card to sign up, simply an email address.  The free account is valid during the month of April, expiring May 1st.

Click here to sign up.  You can learn more about the promotion and Pluralsight in general in the video below.

GameDev News Tutorial

Right in time for the bank holiday weekend (depending where you are), Niantic is gearing up to drop an exciting new feature in Pokémon Go: online leaderboards. These tie into the Go Battle League feature, and provide you with a list of the top 500 players statistically. The leaderboard hasn’t gone live yet, but you’ll be able to see it at the official Pokémon Go live website as soon as the Go Battle League changes to Master League from Ultra.

The leaderboard will detail the top 500 players’ nicknames, teams, ranks, ratings, and the total number of battles played. This information is taken from the previous day’s statistics, and will update between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC each day. If you want to make it on the leaderboard, you’ll not only have to be a good enough battler, but you’ll also have to ensure that you don’t have an offensive nickname.

To celebrate the launch of the Go Battle League leaderboards, Niantic is hosting a Go Battle Day event on Sunday, which features the Pokémon Marill. The more battles you perform between 11:00 and 14:00 in your local time zone, the higher the chance you’ll have of encountering the fan-favourite Pokémon.

Marill will also appear as a guaranteed reward after your first and third wins, though those who own a premium battle pass will get Marill after every single win. All players will also receive twice the normal amount of stardust for catching Marill.

Niantic is also extending the number of battles you can perform for the entirety of Sunday (in your local time). Rather than the five sets of battles you can typically perform, Niantic is increasing this to 20. That’s a whopping 100 battles for those who want to participate.

If you’re interested, you can go ahead and grab Pokémon Go from the App Store or Google Play right now and get ready for the online leaderboards going live later today. The Go Battle Day event happens on Sunday.

Using smartphone contact tracing to track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 has been floated as a possible way out of the outbreak —but there are plenty of signs suggesting that its effectiveness is an open question.

Smartphone surveillance seems like a promising way to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are major hurdles that it may not be able to overcome. Credit: Giles Lambert.

The coronavirus has upended life for most Americans, and government and private entities are looking for a way out. On Friday, Apple and Google announced a joint initiative to develop systems for cross-platform contact tracing. But there’s much more to the conversation, and the probability of the system actually working, than you might see at first glance.

Past attempts at COVID-19 surveillance

A heatmap of smartphones held by Florida beachgoers in March, collected from mobile ad firm X-Mode. Credit: Tectonix

The U.S. government is already using smartphone location data to track the movements of Americans, per a March story from The Wall Street Journal.

According to the report, the lion’s share of that data is sourced from mobile advertising firms, either from location-tracking applications or from app developers who resell the data. Some of it has been provided by Google’s “Community Mobility Reports” project, which is collected on an opt-in basis from Google users.

But neither of those data types actually count as contact tracing. The data, stripped of personally identifiable information, is only really useful for keeping tabs on where people are congregating, and the general patterns of movement of large groups of people. It isn’t useful for tracking out how and when COVID-19 spreads from person-to-person.

More than that, privacy advocates have long cautioned that this type of location data can never be truly anonymized. In 2019, a research paper published by the University of Washington shows that it was relatively trivial to figure out a specific person’s location using location-based ad targeting. On the flip side, unmasking an “anonymous” user is also relatively easy for skilled attackers.

Apple has long been trying to fight against data collection from advertisers and third-party analytics firms. The iOS 13 update, for example, contained new features that Ad Age said “crippled” location-based advertising. Again, that’s the same data type provided to the government by marketing firms.

All of this has largely lead to short-range Bluetooth signals being forwarded as the most realistic means to implement contact tracing on a widespread basis. Hence Apple and Google’s Friday announcement. But while it does away with some of the pitfalls of mass geo-surveillance, it has its own hurdles to overcome.

The Apple and Google solution

Credit: Apple, Google

In a rare show of unity, Apple and Google on Friday announced new plans for a cross-platform, system-level feature that will allow public health officials to track and possibly reduce the spread of COVID-19.

By leveraging short-range Bluetooth signals, the system will help public health officials identify and follow up with smartphone users who have possibly come into contact with someone infected by COVID-19. They’ll even receive a notification on their phone that this event occurred.

Both companies are likely highly conscious of their respective privacy reputations, so they both claim that the system is being developed in a private and transparent manner. Out of the gate, they’ve published documentation illustrating how the system would work, including one document focused on the cryptographic standards used to protect privacy.

The initiative will apparently be deployed in two parts. In May, both companies will release a developer API for iOS and Android that app makers and public health teams can use in their own apps to enable contact tracing. Deeper system-level functionality, which will presumably negate the need for a third-party app entirely, will be released “in the coming months.”

But while Apple and Google are the most high-profile proponents of Bluetooth contact tracing, they are far from the first to float the idea. Earlier in April, researchers at MIT developed essentially the same system partly inspired by Apple’s offline Find My feature.

Contact tracing apps have also already been used in places like Singapore and South Korea, where they reached varying levels of success.

The problems with Bluetooth contact tracing

An illustration of Bluetooth contact tracing. Credit: MIT

Bluetooth-based contract tracing still has one major downfall. Both Apple and Google made it clear that both waves of contact tracing deployment will be offered on an opt-in basis. The first wave requires that users download an app using the API. The second wave explicitly says users need to “choose to opt in.”

Like social distancing, this type of contact tracing absolutely depends on adoption by a significant portion of the population. Otherwise, it won’t make much of a difference. The fact that this is being deployed on both iOS and Android certainly helps, but it’s not enough to ensure that most people will actually use it, particularly in the U.S.

Unless this type of system is government-mandated, we have serious doubts that enough people are going to volunteer for it to be effective. This is borne out by many states and local governments only starting to ensure compliance with social distancing requirements by force of law when citizens didn’t voluntarily adopt suggestions.

On the flip side, government-mandated contact tracing runs into the same privacy and ethical issues as widespread location surveillance, and will likely meet the same resistance that voluntary lock-in did.

And, there are still some signs casting doubt on whether it really will help curb the spread of COVID-19. Just take a look at Singapore, which implemented fastidious physical contact tracing and surveillance methods, along with an app that used a mix of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS and cell tower signals to track user locations.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that despite the “good contact tracing,” the government has been unable to figure out how people are catching COVID-19 for “nearly half” of cases. While initially a “master class” for COVID-19 mitigation success, the BBC reports that there has since been a surge in new cases on the tiny island-state despite control measures.

Singapore is a small country with a population smaller than New York City. Adopting widespread contact tracing in the U.S. may be near impossible, even with the computing and financial might of Apple and Google behind it. Even though its effectiveness in Singapore is questionable, it probably won’t do nearly as well in larger countries just because of scale.

And, of course, there are unanswered questions about what will happen to all of these systems and data once the shadow of COVID-19 no longer looms over daily life, as digital rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out. Unless the systems are completely dismantled and the data wiped, the possibility for dragnet surveillance is still there.

Possible ways forward

As we’ve thoroughly covered, for a contact tracing app to be effective, it needs to be used by at least a majority of citizens. For that, it either needs the trust of the people or it needs to be mandated.

In the U.S., neither of those options seems particularly promising, with trust in both the federal government and technology juggernauts at a relative low. Even pro-privacy Apple may have a hard time persuading people to willingly undergo surveillance.

Even if a simple majority of people sign up for contact tracing, the system likely won’t do much for most COVID-19 cases, as is evidenced by cases like Singapore and South Korea. If the government starts requiring the usage of the app or implements it was a prerequisite for testing, there will undoubtedly be a backlash.

Which begs the question of what will actually work, a question many officials in the U.S. are actively trying to answer. Without something of a return to normalcy, the economic impact may well be unimaginable. And if we return to normal too quickly, lives will be lost — and the economy will still see a major impact.

One of the possible alternatives, per several proposals seen by Vox, is to implement mass coronavirus testing in lieu of surveillance. Like with mass location tracking or contact tracing, that’s a herculean effort.

The most realistic way forward is a balanced approach mixing these strategies. But that, of course, is easier said than done. The Apple and Google systems will help because they’re privacy-respecting and cross-platform, reducing friction and centralizing data. But it’s just piece of a larger puzzle, and past contract tracing attempts suggest it may not be a significant piece.

Until a vaccine is implemented — something that’s at least a full year away according to experts and the companies developing them — solutions like these are only going to be able to do so much.

Fedora Workstation uses GNOME Shell by default and this one was mainly written in JavaScript. JavaScript is famous as a language of front-end development but this time we’ll show its usage for back-end.

We’ll implement a new API using the following technologies: JavaScript, Express and Fedora Workstation. A web browser is being used to call the service (eg. Firefox from the default Fedora WS distro).

Installing of necessary packages

Check: What’s already installed?

$ npm -v

$ node -v

You may already have both the necessary packages installed and can skip the next step. If not, install nodejs:

$ sudo dnf install nodejs

A new simple service (low-code style)

Let‘s navigate to our working directory (work) and create a new directory for our new sample back-end app.

$ cd work

$ mkdir newApp

$ cd newApp

$ npx express-generator

The above command generates an application skeleton for us.

$ npm i

The above command installs dependencies. Please mind the security warnings – never use this one for production.

Crack open the routes/users.js

Modify line #6 to:

res.send(data);

Insert this code block below var router:

let data = { '1':'Ann', '2': 'Bruno', '3': 'Celine' }

Save
the modified file.

We modified a route and added a new variable data. This one could be declared as a const as we didn‘t modify it anywhere. The result:

Running the service on your local Fedora workstation machine

$ npm start

Note: The application entry point is bin/www. You may want to change the port number there.

Calling our new service

Let‘s launch our Firefox browser and type-in:

http://localhost:3000/users

It‘s also possible to leverage the Developer tools. Hit F12 and in the Network tab, select the related GET request and look at the side bar response tab to check the data.

Conclusion

Now we have got a service and and an unnecessary index accessible through localhost:3000. To get quickly rid of this:

1. Remove the views directory
2. Remove the public directory
3. Remove the routes/index.js file
4. Inside the app.js file, modify the line 37 to:
   
   
   res.status(err.status || 500).end();
5. Remove the next line res.render(‘error’)

Then restart the service:

$ npm start

Hamster has added another Arcade Archives game to the Switch eShop. This time around, it’s Konami’s 1987 shoot ’em up, MX5000 (otherwise known as FLAK ATTACK). Like previous releases, this one will set you back $7.99 / £6.29 and supports up to two players.

You’ll take control of “the latest fighter aircraft” of the Roufanis territory as you fight with the Desalis empire, which seeks world domination. Some features include a “military style worldview”, simple controls and exciting BGM. Below are some screens:

The Arcade Archives series has faithfully reproduced many classic arcade masterpieces – allowing players to change various settings such as game difficulty and compete against high scores set by other players from around the world.

Will you be adding this Arcade Archives release to your Switch HOME Menu? Tell us below.

As I write this, millions of people around the world are adjusting to full-time remote work and learning. Working remotely full-time can challenge us as humans because we are hardwired for connection. Here at Microsoft, we did a study a couple years back that asked 14,000 people in seven countries to name the form of communication that makes them happiest. No surprise, in-person meetings ranked number one over email, chat, or texting across all generations. In a moment where meeting face-to-face is impossible, how do we continue to connect to one another?

Over the past weeks, we’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are connecting during meetings in Microsoft Teams. We’ve seen bosses show up to meetings as virtual potato heads and team stand-ups turn delightfully silly. From teams of workers sharing shift updates to students and teachers connecting in virtual classrooms and CEOs conducting town hall Q&As with thousands of employees, we’re all finding new ways to come together when we have to work and learn apart.

This idea is reflected in the sheer number of meetings happening in Microsoft Teams each day. We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day,¹ a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. And as students and teachers turn to Teams for distance learning, there are 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education.²

To explore changing trends in remote work and learning further, today we’re releasing the first report from our new Work Trend Index. Through ongoing research, we will explore how work is changing via surveys and interviews, and by looking at trends in the way people interact with our productivity tools.

This first report explores how people are learning to connect as a team when they need to work apart. Our goal in sharing these insights is twofold. First, while safeguarding personal and organizational data, we want to help our customers learn from the bright spots and plan for the future. Second, we aim to use these insights to guide innovation in our products so that we can continue to build the best possible experiences.

Key findings

As the world works in Microsoft 365, searches in Bing, and connects on LinkedIn, it creates trillions of signals—like emails, meetings, searches, and posts—that form the Microsoft Graph, one of the largest graphs of human interactions at work in the world. Trends in this data provide a unique view into the world’s productivity patterns.

Microsoft takes privacy seriously. We remove all personal data and organization-identifying data, such as company name, from the data before using it to produce reports. We never use customer content such as information within an email, chat, document or meeting to produce reports. Our goal is to discover and share broad workplace trends from aggregated data from the Microsoft Graph.

People are finding a human connection through video

Researchers like Dr. Fiona Kerr have found that eye contact and physical connection with another human increases dopamine and decreases the stress hormone cortisol. Her research shows that you can even physically calm someone down simply by looking them in the eye. So as the world works remotely, it is no surprise people are turning on video in Teams meetings two times more³than before many of us began working from home full-time. We’ve also seen total video calls in Teams grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March.⁴

As we looked at countries with the most active Teams users, we saw people in Norway and the Netherlands turn on video most, with about 60 percent of calls including video. People in Australia use video in meetings 57 percent of the time, Italy 53 percent, Chile 52 percent, Switzerland 51 percent, and Spain 49 percent. Meanwhile people in the U.K., Canada, and Sweden use video 47 percent of the time and people in Mexico and the U.S. use it 41 percent and 38 percent respectively.

Who doesn’t use video as much and why? People in India use video in 22 percent of meetings, Singapore 26 percent, South Africa 36 percent, France 37 percent, and Japan 39 percent. This may be attributed in part to less access to devices and stable internet in some regions such as India and South Africa.

We’ve been inspired by the ways our customers are using video to connect during this time. For example, The 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, the largest hospital in Wenzhou, China, deployed Microsoft Teams to enable healthcare staff inside the quarantined section of the hospital to communicate with non-quarantined staff, allowing for secure coordination of patient care while ensuring the health and safety of their workforce.

While there is no true replacement for in-person collaboration, we’re working harder than ever to quickly innovate to decrease pain points, increase human connection, and make work a bit more fun.

• Custom backgrounds, which allow you to replace your background in Teams meetings with a fresh and bright home office, for example, is now generally available in Teams. This feature builds upon background blur, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to blur the environment behind you. In the future, we will also include the ability to upload your own custom images.
• To make video calls more inclusive, the raise hand feature we announced last month is rolling out globally this month. It lets meeting participants indicate they have something to say during a meeting by clicking on a hand-raise icon in the meeting control bar.
• Today, we are releasing the ability for meeting organizers to end a meeting for all participants with the click of a button. Meeting organizers can now find an option to “end meeting” in the meeting control bar options.
• Meeting organizers, especially teachers, often need to know who joined their Teams meetings. This month, you will be able to download a participant report, found in the participant list, that includes join and leave times for participants.
• Later this year, we will bring real-time noise suppression, which uses AI to reduce distracting background noise such as loud typing or a barking dog in Teams meetings.

People are using video to connect in new ways

As companies adapt to full-time remote work, we’re seeing more leaders use virtual town halls to connect employees on a large-scale basis. Large conferences and events are also moving online. We’re also seeing more people take advantage of the ability to record Teams meetings—such as a teacher recording a lesson for students or a worker recording a meeting for an invited colleague to view later.

Microsoft Stream is the service that powers live events and meeting recordings in Teams. As a result of customers moving events online, the number of Stream videos in Teams per week has increased over five times in the last month with hundreds of hours of video uploaded per minute.⁵

Nuance, which uses AI to solve some of the world’s toughest problems in healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, government, and retail, turned their global R&D conference—planned to take place in Montreal—virtual in a matter of days. Organizers connected hundreds of attendees with a Teams channel and PDF agenda that linked to each Teams event session. Last year Nuance spent approximately $700,000 on the conference and this year the cost was close to zero, with no carbon impact from global travel.

People are embracing a more flexible work schedule

Productivity is different for everyone. The so-called larks of the world are more productive in the morning, while night owls are more creative and focused in the evening. Our data shows that a more flexible workday created by remote work is allowing people to work when it’s best for them.

From March 1–31, the average time between a person’s first use of Teams and last use of Teams each day increased by over one hour. This data doesn’t necessarily mean people are working more hours per day, rather that they are breaking up the day in a way that works for their personal productivity or makes space for obligations outside of work.

Countries and industries most impacted are turning to mobile to connect with their team

As organizations aim to continue operations, we’ve seen a considerable increase in Teams usage on mobile devices such as a phone or tablet. The number of weekly Teams mobile users grew more than 300 percent from early February to March 31. Some of our largest usage increases have been from customers in industries most impacted by the outbreak. With 183,000 tenants in 175 countries using Teams for Education, we’ve seen large increases in usage of Teams on mobile devices from customers in Higher Education and Primary and Secondary Education (K-12). We’ve also seen a notable increase from customers in Government-related industries.

When you consider this from a capacity perspective, it’s not just about the number of new users, but the amount they are using it each week—what we refer to as engagement. Engagement in Teams on mobile devices has increased exponentially in several regions most impacted by the crisis including Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France.

One example of a school transitioning to remote learning is Durham University in North East England. Classes had to move online and staff needed to work remotely so that the university could continue to serve its students, academics, and professional services during the outbreak. To respond effectively to the developing crisis, Durham University scaled up its use of Microsoft Teams to add to its online learning toolset, maintain community, and make it possible to collaborate and communicate remotely and securely on the device that works best for their students and staff.

This moment will change the way we work and connect with each other forever

Trends in the data and conversations with our customers show us the world is realizing we can effectively connect across distances in a way some never thought possible before. For example, despite some employees returning to work, there are still more than two times the number new Teams users each day in China compared to end of January.⁶ The number of daily active Teams users in China also continues to grow week over week. We can also learn from customers who are showing it’s possible to continue their mission while forced to work apart.

For instance, Mercy Housing, a non-profit committed to creating affordable housing options, implemented technology, including Microsoft Teams, to maintain continuity in the face of COVID-19. “The capability to conduct virtual meetings and collaborate on documents in a single place has been instrumental as many of our 1,600 employees shifted to remote work practically overnight. In some cases, our resident services staff is exploring the use of Teams video meetings to maintain a human connection with our residents, which is so important to supporting mental and emotional well-being in a time like this. This remote teamwork has allowed us to help our 45,000 vulnerable residents stay in their homes,” accounted Gunnar Tande, CIO and Senior Vice President, Technology & Strategy, Mercy Housing.

Even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Salvation Army is continuing efforts to address the needs of those they serve, including housing the homeless and feeding the hungry. Tim Schaal, Information Technology Director for The Salvation Army United States Western Territory, noted that despite the swift transition to remote work for thousands of employees, “Microsoft Teams allowed us to continue providing critical assistance in cities and towns, big and small, throughout the thirteen western states.”

We are so glad to see that our technology is helping these organizations continue their important work. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every individual and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And at a moment like this, when we are all adjusting to a new normal, it’s never felt more important to help connect more people and keep more organizations up and running with secure tools. Although the way we work has changed, our customers show us every day that our drive to connect to one another is so often stronger than the circumstances that keep us apart.

¹2.7 billion meeting minutes experienced in Teams on March 31, 2020.
²Tenants often represent school districts with dozens or hundreds of schools.
³Proportion of weekly calls and meetings with video grew from 21 percent to 43 percent, March 2–March 31.
⁴Data reflects increase in total weekly video calls in Teams from March 2–March 31.
⁵Data reflects weekly hours of videos being sent from March 1–March 28.
⁶Data reflects increase from last week in January to third week in March.