White House creates ‘Team Telecom’ to probe whether foreign telcos should be allowed near US networks [Tom Claburn/The Register]
New Jersey seeks COBOL programmers to fix unemployment system: “… many of the state’s systems use older mainframes, and those systems are now seeing record demand for services as the coronavirus outbreak disrupts the economy.” [Kif Leswing/CNBC]
Cato Networks raises $77 million for cloud security platform that protects remote workforces
Cato Networks, which provides SD-WAN and other Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) connectivity, raises $77M additional funding, on top of $55M last year for a total of more than $200M. [Chris O’Brien/VentureBeat]
Cato securely connects remote workers and branch offices, which is of course kind of a big deal right now.
I’ve been doing a little work for Cato this year.
Cambridge Analytica and other abusers killed the open, collaborative, API-driven Web 2.0. “It’s amazing, in hindsight, just how naively open everything was back then.”
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A delightful video that takes a surprisingly philosophical and optimistic turn.
Photos of a computer shop that’s been locked since 2001, when the store owner, who also owned the strip mall it sits in, went bankrupt. [Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic]
Gateway 2000 PCs, LCD displays, and big beige CPUs with big fans!
LA crime drops 23% during the pandemic, including an 11% drop in family violence crime, even though family tensions often rise during crises. [Madeline Holcombe/CNN]
This proves once again that in an emergency your neighbors will help you; it’s the elites you have to watch out for, notes Cory Doctorow.
The stimulus bill seems big – $2 trillion – but it’s just one week of median income for small businesses and families.
Cory Doctorow: “The crisis is already four times longer than that, depending on which city you live in. The end is not in sight.”
Umair Haque: “Coronavirus is an extinction level event for modern economies.” We are living through the complete collapse of the US economy. This is happening now, will play out over the summer and will take generations to recover.
The solution for Congress is to just spend money to keep the economy going – or, more precisely, put the economy in suspended animation. Whatever it takes. Fund businesses to pay employee salaries and meet other essential expenses while the employees stay home, so when the crisis passes the businesses can just reopen their doors, call the employees back in and get back to work.
Only essential employees should be working now, and the government should spend whatever it takes to pay them and be sure they have the best protection we can provide.
Whatever it takes. $2 trillion is inadequate. A thousand trillion is a quadrillion. A thousand times that is a quintillion. If that’s what it takes, so be it.
After a church pastor in California announced he would defy shelter in place orders and hold services, his landlord, the Bethel Open Bible Church, changed the locks. [Lisa Fernandez/KTUTV] Via Cory Doctorow
Reminds me that I’ve been looking for years for a word other than “Christian” to describe the folks like those idiot pastors who are keeping their churches open. I have Christian friends; they are lovely, SANE people.
I’ve come up with “Fox News Christians” but I don’t really care for that either.
New video technique lets you replace the background on videos without any greenscreen required.
Via Cory Doctorow who says it “really puts Zoom’s background switching in the shade."
My MacBook Pro processor is too weak to use Zoom’s background switching, so I was forced to clean out my office instead. Or at least clean out the part of my office visible from the webcam!
Why is Trump touting hydroxychloroquine? Follow the money
Trump and his cronies are investors in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine. Trump has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a possible coronavirus cure, despite lack of scientific evidence, and also despite significant risks to people who take it, and despite its being needed for legitimate, proven medical uses, such as treating lupus.
Peter Baker, Katie Rogers, David Enrich and Maggie Haberman report at The New York Times: Trump’s Aggressive Advocacy of Malaria Drug for Treating Coronavirus Divides Medical Community
Sanofi’s largest shareholders include Fisher Asset Management, the investment company run by Ken Fisher, a major donor to Republicans including Trump.
Another investor in both Sanofi and Mylan, another pharmaceutical firm, is Invesco, the fund previously run by Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. Mr. Ross said in a statement Monday that he “was not aware that Invesco has any investments in companies producing” the drug, “nor do I have any involvement in the decision to explore this as a treatment.”
As of last year, Mr. Trump reported that his three family trusts each had investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, whose largest holding was in Sanofi….
Several generic drugmakers are gearing up to produce hydroxychloroquine pills, including Amneal Pharmaceuticals, whose co-founder Chirag Patel is a member of Trump National Golf Course Bedminster in New Jersey and has golfed with Mr. Trump at least twice since he became president, according to a person who saw them.
Andrew Cuomo is also touting the drug.
Dr. Daniel H. Sterman, the critical care director at NYU Langone Health, said doctors there are using hydroxychloroquine, but data about its effectiveness remained “weak and unsubstantiated” pending the study. “We do not know whether our patients are benefiting from hydroxychloroquine treatment at the present time,” he said.
On the other hand, many healthcare providers are advising use of the drug based on good preliminary results.
Dr. Roy M. Gulick, the chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, said hydroxychloroquine was given on a case-by-case basis. “We explain the pros and cons and explain that we don’t know if it works or not,” he said.
Doctors at Northwell Health and Mount Sinai Health System are using it as well. At the Mount Sinai South Nassau County branch on Long Island, doctors have employed a regimen of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin “pretty much since day one” with mixed results, said Dr. Adhi Sharma, its chief medical officer.
“We’ve been throwing the kitchen sink at these patients,” he said. “I can’t tell whether someone got better on their own or because of the medication.”