The US House of Representatives approved the Moving Forward Act this week, a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill that puts $100 billion toward bringing high-speed broadband to underserved areas. The ambitious bill also allocates funds toward transportation and clean energy initiatives, like $500 billion for rebuilding highways, bridges and rail, and $70 billion for promoting renewable energy.

The main objective of the broadband portion of the bill is to bring high-speed internet to “unserved and underserved rural, suburban, and urban communities,” as well as adequate support for it, according to a Moving Forward Act fact sheet from the Department of Transportation. It prioritizes remote learning for children by providing digital equipment and outfitting school buses and school libraries with Wi-Fi. The bill also provides broadband payment support for low-income households and the recently unemployed.

The full version of the Moving Forward Act isn’t likely to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate. However, the broadband-related amendments may still have a chance, said Matt Wood, President of Policy and General Counsel at Free Press Action, a media advocacy group. “People in cities and rural areas alike need better broadband at better prices, no matter their party or politics,” Wood said.
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The bill is just one of many recent efforts by the government to close the “digital divide.” In February 2019, President Donald Trump unveiled the American Broadband Initiative aimed at bringing broadband to rural America. Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission committed $20.4 billion to the same end.

One of my favorite training assets is ScreenCastsOnline from Mac pioneer Don McAllister. Each week they produce a full tutorial and a shorter tip video on Mac software and services.

This week, the main tutorial was on a free online service called xkpasswd. This open-source service will produce incredibly secure passwords. There are five settings that you can customize, and based on these settings, the site will generate several passwords from which you may pick one that you like.

The five settings include:
         • Words: set the max number of letters and the number of words
         • Transformations: use the lower and upper case letters on words
         • Separator: a randomly chosen character to separate words
         • Padding Digits: any number of digits before and after the words
         • Padding Symbols: any number of symbols added to the front and back of the password.

After generating several passwords, the site will evaluate the level of safeness of the results. When the strength of the password is good or better, the numbers are shown in green. Less secure results display in red. This immediate assessment gives you the data you need to know that the password you select will be safe and extremely difficult to hack.

The site also has generated several configurations of the above five settings for specific uses. One configuration is designed for Apple ID passwords specifically. The values set are designed to respect the prerequisites that Apple places on Apple ID passwords. But, it also limits the symbols found on the iOS letter and number keyboards, so entering the password is easier.

One other configuration is called SECURITYQ and is designed to create answers to those pesky security questions such as the first name of the maid of honor at your wedding or your mother’s maiden name. Answering these questions with something other than the truth is really important since today’s hackers are getting very good at researching information about their prey. This configuration will help generate good answers to these questions without any relationship to reality.

The site is free, but they do note that the server that is running the application is not free, and they welcome donations.
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Remember that all of these passwords need to be kept secure with good password management software such as 1Password, LastPass, and Dashlane.

Zoom has reversed its controversial decision to restrict access to end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for some users and will now offer the feature to customers of both its free and premium services.

The video conferencing app said it had consulted with rights groups, child safety advocates, government representatives, encryption experts, and its security council to gather feedback.

“We are also pleased to share that we have identified a path forward that balances the legitimate right of all users to privacy and the safety of users on our platform,” the firm’s CEO Eric Yuan said in a recent blog post.
“This will enable us to offer E2EE as an advanced add-on feature for all of our users around the globe – free and paid – while maintaining the ability to prevent and fight abuse on our platform.”

Users of the free service will be required to authenticate in a one-off process with information such as their phone number, for the platform to “reduce the mass creation of abusive accounts,” Yuan added.

The news came as rights groups, tech firms, and internet users petitioned the firm to reverse its policy on E2EE.

They argued that E2EE is too essential to be a premium feature, especially in the context of global protests against racial injustice and government oppression. The technology protects activists, journalists, and other vulnerable parts of the population from government repression and surveillance, as well as from cyber-criminals, they said.

Mozilla welcomed the news. The tech non-profit, which wrote an open letter to Zoom earlier in the week signed by tens of thousands of internet users, argued that E2EE should always be the default setting, not a luxury.

“We’re heartened that Zoom listened to consumers, especially at a time when millions of people are relying on the platform to stay connected amid the pandemic and to organize in support of Black lives,” it said in a statement.
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“Zoom’s decision is part of an emerging trend: Consumers are demanding more of the technology products and services they use every day. And companies are changing their products to meet these demands.”

From predicting outbreaks to devising treatments, doctors are turning to AI to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why It Matters. While machine learning algorithms were already becoming a part of health care, COVID-19 is likely to accelerate their adoption. But lack of data and testing time could hinder their effectiveness – for this pandemic, at least.

What's Happening. With millions of cases and outbreaks in every corner of the world, speed is of the essence when it comes to diagnosing and treating COVID-19. So it's no surprise doctors were quick to employ AI tools to get ahead of what could be the worst pandemic in a century.

• HealthMap, a web service run by Boston Children's Hospital that uses AI to scan social media and other reports for signals of disease outbreaks, spotted some of the first signs of what would become the COVID-19 outbreak. This was days before the WHO formally alerted the rest of the world.
• Early in the epidemic, the Chinese tech company Alibaba released an AI algorithm that uses CT scans of possible coronavirus patients and can diagnose cases automatically in a matter of seconds.
• In New York, Mount Sinai Health System and NYU Langone Health have developed AI algorithms that can predict whether a COVID-19 patient is likely to suffer adverse events soon and determine when patients will be ready to be discharged. Such systems can help overburdened hospitals better manage the flow of supplies and personnel during a medical crisis. 

The Big Picture. Even before COVID-19, AI was already becoming a more significant part of modern health care. Nearly $2 billion was invested in companies involved in health care AI in 2019, and in the first quarter of 2020, investments hit $635 million – more than four times the amount seen in the same period of 2019, according to digital health technology funder Rock Health.

• The advance of AI is partially a result of the rapid increase in data, the lifeblood of any machine learning system. The amount of medical data in the world is estimated to double every two months.
• Engineer and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis told Wired an estimated 200 million physicians, scientists, technologists, and engineers are now working on COVID-19, generating and sharing data "with transparency and at speeds we've never seen before."
• "We understand who is at risk and how they're at risk, and then we can get the right treatment to them," says Zeeshan Syed, the CEO of Health[at]Scale, an AI health care startup.

In Trials. AI has demonstrated in recent trials a decent record of success, especially when it comes to rapidly diagnosing COVID-19 by interpreting medical scans.

• A study published in Nature Medicine in May found an AI system was more accurate than a radiologist in diagnosing COVID-19 patients using CT scans – X-ray images of lungs – combined with clinical symptoms. 
• A systematic review of preprint and published studies of AI diagnostic systems for COVID-19 published in the British Medical Journal in April noted the models reported "good to excellent predictive performance." However, they cautioned the data was still limited for real-world applications and at high risk for bias.

The Catch. That's the perennial challenge for AI systems in any field. Experts worry models that perform well in an experiment may not be able to replicate that success in a hospital under stress.

• "There is a lot of promise in using algorithms, but the data in the biomedical space can be really difficult to deal with," says Gabe Musso, the chief science officer at BioSymetrics. This biomedical AI company uses machine learning for simulation-based drug discovery. Genetic data, imaging data, and data from electronic health records are often unstructured and rarely share a common format, complicating efforts to feed the information into an algorithm.
• Many of the AI diagnostic systems being rushed into the fight against COVID-19 were developed before the pandemic and thus were trained on other respiratory diseases like tuberculosis. That reduces their accuracy – especially if their training datasets don't match the gender or age of typical COVID-19 patients.
• As a result, pioneering computer scientist Kai-fu Lee wrote recently, "I would give [AI] a B-minus at best" for its performance during the pandemic.

The Bottom Line. As both the size and quality of medical data on COVID-19 improves, so should the AI systems that draw from it. But that will take time.

The very first contact tracing app powered by Google and Apple's exposure notification APIs has gone live in Switzerland.

As announced on Twitter by EPFL yesterday, 'SwissCovid' is now undertaking a large scale pilot, with hopes that it will pave the way for public availability by mid-June.

As of today, employees at @EPFL, @ETH_en, @vbs_ddps, and some hospitals and cantonal administrations can download the digital proximity tracing application #SwissCovid. This large-scale pilot paves the way for public availability by mid-June. https://t.co/E9hl43g8Ca #COVID19 #DP3T

In an announcement the institute stated:

Several thousand people in Switzerland can now download "SwissCovid," the official application for tracing contacts at risk of transmission of COVID-19 if they wish. "This is the first time that the operating system updates from Google and Apple enable its deployment and testing on such a large scale," says Professor Edouard Bugnion, Vice-President for Information Systems at EPFL. He was at the heart of discussions with Google and Apple to have them adopt the "DP3T" protocol led by the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology. Alfredo Sanchez, project manager, notes that "this gives great responsibility to the Swiss testers, as many other countries intend to adopt the same protocol later on."

One important footnote is that while the pilot is ongoing, the Swiss parliament will deliberate revisions to the law on epidemics. MPs must debate and approve the scheme before it is offered to the public, however recent research has suggested that as many as 70% of Swiss residents support the program.

This is the first large-scale testing of an app that uses Apple and Google's exposure notification technology. As per the two companies' stipulations, the operation is also decentralized:
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SwissCovid operates in a "decentralized" way, which means that the operations that are essential from a privacy point of view are not carried out on a centralized server, but on each phone. The app uses Bluetooth to exchange and record the ephemeral proximity identifiers of other phones in the vicinity. These identifiers are kept on the phone unless a person is tested positive for COVID-19. In that case, their doctor will give them a single-use code that allows them to voluntarily share the ephemeral keys on their own phone that correspond to the days when the person was contagious. These keys are sent to a server managed by the Swiss administration.

The potential jurors popped onto the screen one by one. They confirmed their names and told the judge how they were connecting to the court: on laptops, tablets, and iPhones.

There were some wireless issues and camera problems. Still, eventually, 26 Texans in separate boxes raised their hands for the judge and together swore the juror’s oath, beginning the experiment of conducting a civil jury trial entirely over Zoom.

The coronavirus pandemic has crippled courts nationwide, putting many cases on indefinite hold and leaving judges trying to manage some hearings via videoconferencing. The delays have kept some defendants in jail longer, exposing them to possible outbreaks. And the virus even upended how the Supreme Court operates, with the justices hearing oral arguments by phone for the first time in the court’s history.

The test jury-trial-by-video that was held in suburban Dallas recently could reveal a possible path forward in which jurors are kept safely distanced. At the same time, cases are allowed to proceed until the coronavirus threat has receded enough to resume some semblance of normal life.

It also raises complex questions about security, a person’s right to a fair trial, and whether virtual deliberation might prevent 12 people from forming the bonds needed to hash out justice.

“No one is saying tomorrow we’re going to start trying serious felonies over Zoom,” said District Judge Emily Miskel, who coordinated the technology for the trial. “But I think there are many civil trials where parties might agree that this is a good way to resolve it given the uncertainty of when you’re ever going to get an in-person civil jury trial.”

The Collin County court held the so-called summary trial – a one-day civil proceeding with a non-binding verdict – on Monday as an experiment in restarting parts of the justice system that ground to a halt because of the coronavirus. It was over a disputed insurance claim that was originally set to be heard in-person in March. According to the National Center for State Courts, which has tracked court functions during the pandemic, it’s the first remote jury trial ever in the United States.

Those involved seemed pleased with the process.

Jury selection was streamed live on YouTube, but most of the rest was private because summary trials are confidential civil proceedings meant to give the parties the option of settling before an actual trial.

During jury selection, lawyers for both sides asked people on the call to raise their hands in response to questions about potential bias. When a hand popped onto the screen, the lawyers would ask follow-ups or note the juror’s number.

Matthew Pearson, a San Antonio lawyer for the plaintiff, said the comfort of their homes seemed to make the jurors more responsive to questions. They were attentive as he presented evidence by sharing his computer screen over Zoom, Pearson said, and his firm saved money because it didn’t have to fly in an expert witness from Minneapolis.

“Overall, it was a better experience than I was expecting,” he said.

Deliberation proved a little more tricky.

The jurors were broken into two groups of six and put in separate virtual rooms where they could talk privately and look at the evidence in Dropbox folders. They ultimately returned two verdicts meant to give the parties more information to assess whether to go to trial.

At one point, things were delayed a few minutes when a juror who’d stepped away to make a phone call during a break couldn’t hear the judge calling him back to his computer. The same type of thing happens in the courthouse, Keith Dean, the retired judge who presided over the trial, told the others.

Miskel, the other judge, joined the deliberation “rooms” a few times to help jurors access evidence, which she said would normally cause attorneys to “freak out.” Typically, jurors send notes asking the judge for help, and a member of the staff goes into the jury room with pieces of evidence.

But lawyers worry that virtual deliberation cuts out the casual interaction among jurors that some see as essential to building group trust. And defense attorneys are especially skeptical of e-court for criminal cases, where they already struggle to speak privately with their clients during routine hearings held remotely.

“It would just be too difficult, too many constitutional hurdles to clear for a defendant to be brought to a virtual trial,” said Randy Gioia of Massachusetts’ public defender agency. “There is no substitute for an in-person, face-to-face three dimensional hearing with a judge.”

Security is a concern too. As tens of millions of people have turned to video conferencing to stay connected during the pandemic, hackers have derailed many calls with threats, bigoted comments, and pornographic images.

If more courts turn to video trials, ensuring people with poor or no wireless could serve as jurors would also be a challenge. Rare cases that require juries to be sequestered might have to take place in-person.

Even when cases do return to the courthouse, the virus may have changed things. Cross examinations will be different if attorneys and witnesses are wearing masks. And Miskel suggested courts might blend in-person and online – doing trials over video but bringing jurors to court to deliberate.

Dean reminded jurors at the start of the proceedings that the online setting made their duties no less important.
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“The courthouse came to you,” he said.

This week, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) unveiled the Endless Frontier Act (EFA).

This newsletter doesn’t usually cover new legislation, much less proposed bills. But EFA is an exception since it seeks to turbocharge American “discovery, creation, and commercialization of critical tech.” By that, the lawmakers mean every technology you read about in this newsletter. 

EFA’s core proposals. There are three principal parts to the proposed bill:

• Restructure the National Science Foundation into the National Science and Technology Foundation (NSTF)
• In the NSTF, stand up a Technology Directorate that receives $100 billion over five years and operates like DARPA
• Hand the Commerce Department $10 billion to invest across 10-15 regional tech hubs over five years

This is great news for U.S. universities and businesses because EFA would pad R&D budgets, establish new scholarships, and create cutting-edge labs and fabrication plants. 

What’s driving the frontier mindset? The private sector overtook Washington in R&D investment four decades ago. EFA’s sponsors want to expand the pool of capital so that all of Washington’s tech priorities are advanced in the U.S.

The other reason for EFA, which its sponsors explicitly call out: China. While Beijing’s bid for tech supremacy is better described as a “slow burn” rather than a “Sputnik moment,” the country’s tech industrial base is now a genuine contender with the U.S. There’s more to come: 

• China plans to invest $1.4 trillion in emerging tech over the next six years. 
• Chinese chipmaker SMIC recently announced a $2 billion investment from state-backed funds. 
• Tencent will spend $70 billion on tech infrastructure over the next five years. 
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“The U.S. needs to pursue with all-of-the-above strategy and intensify efforts,” a person familiar with the legislation said in a recent interview.

As Bill of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” could tell you, EFA may never see the light of day. But adding $$$ to tech R&D and accelerating the U.S.-China tech decoupling are bipartisan priorities.

Smartphone manufacturers have been launching “folding” devices with great fanfare, though, with high price tags and low demand, these units have not become market hits.

As an alternative, a smart start-up, castAway, has now announced a new device to add a second screen to your existing smartphone!

The castAway case enables you to open multiple apps at once, copy/paste, and access files and photos from either screen with ease.

The team responsible for creating the castAway screen smartphone case have added new perks for people to enjoy via Indiegogo, enabling backers to now order customizable mods that will be interchangeable with their castAway case, including a Qi wireless charging battery, a wallet w/ Qi wireless charging battery, and a Universal Case that will allow people to use all of castAways mods with ANY phone case they choose.

A quote from the company said, “We heard you loud and clear. After listening to your feedback, we’re excited to announce that we have expanded castAway into a full platform. We’re still delivering a second-screen experience — but now you can customize your case with a variety of accessories as well to meet the demands of your daily life. “

“A second monitor used to be a luxury, and now it’s a necessity. Juggling between apps and screens is how things go today. Adding a second screen to a PC is easy, but what about a second one for your smartphone? It’s not like you leave the need for multitasking behind when you are away from your desktop, out in the world doing things.”

The castAway case adds a second, ultra-slim screen to your existing iPhone or Android smartphone. The second screen is a powerful Chromium-based tablet that lets you multitask while on the go.”

Features of castAway include:

• castAway case connects with any iOS or Android phone and continues to work even when detached from your smartphone.  
• Features a dual boot option that lets you quickly turn it into a larger keyboard, trackpad, or game controller for your phone.  
• It is fully-equipped with a hi-res capacitive touch screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, front and back-facing cameras, & audio jack.  
• Integrated SD slot allows you to expand storage and offload photos from your phone  
• The built-in battery can do double duty and be used to boost your smartphone.

When the tablet is detached from your smartphone, your phone will look and feel like it would in any other high-end protective case. The hinge design also simplifies the task of supporting the myriad of smartphones. The smartphone side of the case is a custom fit for each major model type. That said, there are many unique (lower volume) phones for which we are developing a universal case back that works with the hinge. The castAway case will be available in 3 model sizes. Currently, the castAway is priced at $249, with delivery promised in October 2020.

Attackers can steal data from Thunderbolt-equipped PCs or Linux computers, even if the computer is locked and the data encrypted, according to security researcher Björn Ruytenberg (via Wired). Using a relatively simple technique called “Thunderspy,” someone with physical access to your machine could nab your data in just a few minutes with a screwdriver and “easily portable hardware,” he wrote.

Thunderbolt offers breakneck transfer speeds by giving devices direct access to your PC’s memory, which also creates several vulnerabilities. Researchers previously thought those weaknesses (dubbed Thunderclap), could be mitigated by disallowing access to untrusted devices or disabling Thunderbolt altogether but allowing DisplayPort and USB-C access.

However, Ruytenberg’s attack method could get around even those settings by changing the firmware that controls the Thunderbolt port, allowing any device to access it. What’s more, the hack leaves no trace, so the user would never know their PC was altered.

If you intend to use Thunderbolt connectivity, it is strongly recommended that you Connect only your Thunderbolt peripherals; never lend them to anybody; avoid leaving your system unattended while powered on, even when screen-locked; avoid leaving your Thunderbolt peripherals unattended; ensure appropriate physical security when storing your system and any Thunderbolt devices, including Thunderbolt-powered displays; consider using hibernation (Suspend-to-Disk) or powering off the system completely. Specifically, avoid using sleep mode (Suspend-to-RAM).

He developed something called an “evil maid attack,” referring to an attacker who gets physical access to a PC in a hotel room, for instance. “All the evil maid needs to do is unscrew the backplate, attach a device momentarily, reprogram the firmware, reattach the backplate, and the evil maid gets full access to the laptop,” Ruytenberg told Wired. “All of this can be done in under five minutes.”

The attack only requires about $400 worth of gear, including an SPI programmer and $200 Thunderbolt peripheral. The whole thing could be built into a single small device. “Three-letter agencies would have no problem miniaturizing this,” Ruytenberg said.

Intel recently created a Thunderbolt security system called Kernel Direct Memory Access (DMA) Protection that would stop Ruytenberg’s Thunderspy attack. However, that protection is only available on computers made in 2019 and later, so it’s lacking in any models manufactured before that. Also, many PCs manufactured in 2019 and later from Dell, HP, and Lenovo aren’t protected, either. This vulnerability might explain why Microsoft didn’t include Thunderbolt in its Surface laptops.

Intel just released a blog post giving its perspective on the issue.

Apple computers running macOS are unaffected by the vulnerability unless you’re running Boot Camp, according to Ruytenberg.
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The researchers disclosed the vulnerabilities to Intel on February 10th, 2020, and Apple on April 17th. To find out if you’re vulnerable, there is a verification tool called Spycheck. To protect yourself, you should “avoid leaving your system unattended while powered on, even if screen-locked,” Ruytenberg wrote, avoid using sleep mode and ensure the physical security of your Thunderbolt peripherals.

In a triumph for the nascent industry of “satellite servicing,” an aging communications satellite has returned to service in geostationary orbit.

Northrop Grumman announced recently that its Mission Extension Vehicle-1, or MEV-1, has restored the Intelsat 901 satellite and relocated it into a position to resume operations.

“We see increased demand for our connectivity services around the world, and preserving our customers’ experience using innovative technology such as MEV-1 is helping us meet that need,” Intelsat Chief Services Officer Mike DeMarco said in a news release.

After launching on a Proton rocket last October, Northrop Grumman’s servicing vehicle used its mechanical docking system to latch onto Intelsat 901, at an altitude of 36,000km above Earth. Before this, no two commercial spacecraft had ever docked in orbit before.

Since it docked, the MEV-1 servicer has assumed navigation of the combined spacecraft stack, reducing the satellite’s inclination by 1.6 degrees and relocating it to a new orbital location, at 332.5° east. Intelsat then transitioned about 30 of its commercial and government customers to the satellite two weeks ago. The transition of service took approximately six hours and was successful.

Based on the agreement between Northrop and Intelsat, MEV-1 will provide five years of life extension services to the satellite before moving it into a graveyard orbit. MEV-1 will then be available to provide additional mission extension services, Northrop said, including orbit raising, inclination corrections, and inspections. Northrop is already building a second MEV to service another Intelsat satellite, 1002, later this year.

This satellite servicing milestone comes as both low-Earth orbit as well as geostationary space – where large, expensive communications satellites are often placed high above the planet to hold their position over the ground – are becoming more crowded. The availability of a service such as that offered by MEV-1 offers satellite providers both the ability to extend the lifetime of aging assets, but also to potentially remove those they have lost control of from the ground.
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These kinds of services are generally seen in the space community as vital to keeping orbital space as decluttered as possible in the coming decades, so it is good that this demonstration case worked out well.