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Tuesday, 14 January 2020

Puerto Rico is reeling from devastating earthquakes: How you can help - CNET

Thousands are homeless and without power and water as aftershocks continue to shake the island.

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Rumors mount that a major bug could be disclosed on the day Microsoft ends support for Windows 7

Security researcher Brian Krebs is warning that a particularly nasty bug may be patched on Tuesday, January 14—the day that support for Windows 7 is expected to expire.

If that’s true, then potentially millions of Windows users could be exposed to the malware, which Krebs is reporting could involve crypt32.dll, which controls “certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in the CryptoAPI.” Here’s what’s scary, Krebs reports: A flaw in the crypt32.dll could be used to spoof the digital signature of a piece of software, creating the possibility that your PC could allow in a piece of malware posing as a perfectly legitimate application.

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Apple might be developing a 'Pro Mode' to speed up Macbooks


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Oscar Health now has 400,000 members and expects to bring in $2 billion by the end of 2020

Oscar Health, the upstart healthcare insurance company and technology developer, expects to have roughly 400,000 members insured under its healthcare plans, who collectively will bring in roughly $2 billion in revenue for the company by the end of 2020, according to slides of a presentation from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference seen by TechCrunch.

Those figures, based on the open-enrollment period that just closed, would represent 50% growth both in membership and revenue for the healthcare provider co-founded by Mario Schlosser and Joshua Kushner, founder of VC firm Thrive Capital and the brother of senior Trump advisor Jared Kushner.

Earlier today, Oscar announced that it was partnering with Cigna to provide services to small business owners. Commercial health insurance is a small but growing proportion of Oscar’s total membership, and it’s one area where the company hopes to expand. Essentially, Oscar can bring its technology-enabled healthcare services to small businesses in concert with the large healthcare networks with which businesses are used to working.

To date, Oscar counts around 375,000 individual members on its insurance plans, with another 20,000 coming through small-group insurance and the balance derived from Medicare Advantage customers, according to a person familiar with the company’s business.

Only three years ago, Oscar was a much smaller business, with only 70,000 members after retrenching its coverage and pulling out of markets in Dallas-Fort Worth and New Jersey. From a footprint that encompassed New York, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Francisco, Oscar now expects to operate in 29 markets by the end of 2020.

Fueling that expansion is prodigious capital infusions the company has received over the past few years. In 2018 alone, Oscar raised $540 million from investors including Alphabet, Founders Fund, Capital G (Alphabet’s later-stage investment firm) and Verily, Alphabet’s investment firm focused on life sciences. In all, Oscar Health has raised $1.3 billion to fulfill its vision of providing better healthcare services through technologies like a mobile app for telemedicine, physician consultations, booking appointments, prescription refills and a more concierge-like healthcare experience for its members.

Initially, the company took advantage of the Affordable Care Act’s creation of new marketplaces for individuals to buy health insurance when it launched in 2012, but is now looking to buoy its growth by adding more deals with insurance providers like Cigna for small businesses.

Ultimately, the company envisions a healthcare industry where employer-defined plans will disappear as more consumers turn to Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements. In that environment, Oscar’s bespoke services — like the recent partnership with the startup Capsule Pharmacy to provide same-day prescription delivery for Oscar’s members in New York — or the company’s tight relationship with providers like the Cleveland Clinic, become competitive advantages.



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The PC market, once left for dead, actually grew during 2019

After years of consistent declines, PC sales appear to have finally turned a corner. Market researchers Gartner and IDC reported today that PC sales grew during the fourth quarter of 2019, boosting the entire year into the black.

Gartner reported that PC sales grew 2.3 percent for the fourth quarter, to 70.6 million units, and 261 million units for the year. Rival analyst firm IDC largely agreed, estimating that PC unit sales grew 4.8 percent, to 7.18 million units. IDC said that worldwide PC sales grew 2.7 percent for 2019 as a whole, ending eight successive down years since the PC market grew 1.7 percent in 2011.

Gartner reported that two opposing factors affected PC sales: On one hand, the end of support for Windows 7 prompted businesses to invest in new hardware, giving new PC sales a shot in the arm. However, the ongoing Intel CPU shortage constrained sales, Gartner wrote, and actual sales could have been much higher. 

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How to watch LSU and Clemson in the college football national championship - CNET

It's the undefeated Tigers vs. the undefeated Tigers in the final game of the College Football Playoff.

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Amazon to share more information on counterfeit goods with police - CNET

The e-commerce giant is more aggressively cracking down on fakes on its platform.

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Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment

The timing and scale of the attacks suggest the Russians may be looking for the same kind of damaging information on Joe Biden that President Trump wanted from Ukraine, security experts say.

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Kids with lazy eye can be treated just by letting them watch TV on this special screen

Amblyopia, commonly called lazy eye, is a medical condition that adversely affects the eyesight of millions, but if caught early can be cured altogether — unfortunately this usually means months of wearing an eyepatch. NovaSight claims successful treatment with nothing more than an hour a day in front of its special display.

The condition amounts to when the two eyes aren’t synced up in their movements. Normally both eyes will focus the detail-oriented fovea part of the retina on whatever object the person is attending to; In those with amblyopia, one eye won’t target the fovea correctly and as a result the eyes don’t converge properly and vision suffers, and if not treated can lead to serious vision loss.

It can be detected early on in children, and treatment can be as simple as covering the good eye with a patch for most of the day, which forces the other eye to adjust and align itself properly. The problem is of course that this is uncomfortable and embarrassing for the kid, and of course only using one eye isn’t ideal for playing schoolyard games and other everyday things.

And you look cool doing it!

NovaSight’s innovation with CureSight is to let this alignment process happen without the eyepatch, instead selectively blurring content the child watches so that the affected eye has to do the work while the other takes a rest.

It accomplishes this with the same technology that, ironically, gave many of us double vision back in the early days of 3D: glasses with blue and red lenses.

Blue-red stereoscopy presents two slightly different versions of the same image, one tinted red and one tinted blue. Normally it would be used with slightly different parallax to produce a binocular 3D image — that’s what many of us saw in theaters or amusement park rides.

In this case, however, one of the two tinted images just has a blurry circle right where the kid is looking. The screen uses a built-in Tobii eye-tracking sensor so it knows where the circle should be; I got to test it out briefly and the circle quickly caught up with my gaze. This makes it so the other eye, affected by the condition but the only one with access to the details of the image, has to be relied on to point where the kid needs it to.

The best part is that there isn’t some treatment schema or tests — kids can literally just watch YouTube or a movie using the special setup, and they’re getting better, NovaSight claims. And it can be done at home on the kid’s schedule — always a plus.

Graphs from NovaSight website.

The company has already done some limited clinical trials that showed “significant improvement” over a 12-week period. Whether it can be relied on to completely cure the condition or if it should be paired with other established treatments will come out in further trials the company has planned.

In the meantime, however, it’s nice to see a technology like 3D displays applied to improving vision rather than promoting bad films. NovaSight has been developing and promoting its tech over the last year; It also has a product that helps diagnose vision problems using a similar application of 3D display tech. You can learn more or request additional info at its website.



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Sony is skipping E3 again in 2020 ahead of the PS5 launch


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ESPN's 4K National Championship broadcast airs on Comcast, DirecTV and Altice


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NASA narrows down Mars 2020 rover names: Hello, FIDO? - CNET

Anaxagoras, Asteria Morpheus and MARV are all in the running.

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Sony skips E3 2020 despite upcoming PS5 launch - CNET

It's the gaming giant's second consecutive year of no showing E3.

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This Brother monochrome multifunction printer costs just $100 - CNET

You get a 250-sheet tray, duplex printing and even a 50-sheet ADF.

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Instacart workers call for boycott to restore 10 percent tip - CNET

They're asking customers to tweet #DeleteInstacart and email the grocery delivery company's CEO about proposed pay changes.

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LG's portable 4K UHD CineBeam home theater projector is $400 off - CNET

This ingeniously designed projector can display images as small as 40 inches or as large as 150 inches.

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Star Trek: Picard -- trailer, cast, plot, release date and more - CNET

Patrick Stewart beams back into the world of Star Trek as Jean-Luc Picard. Here's all the latest news on the cast, plot, release date, prequels and dog.

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Nissan taking a serious look at a split from Renault alliance, report says - Roadshow

The expedited planning reportedly comes after the latest Carlos Ghosn drama.

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Los Angeles Rethinks Taxis as Uber and Lyft Dominate the Streets

The cab business is down 75 percent in less than a decade. The plan is to make taxis a lot more like their app-hailed rivals.

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Ring hit with class action lawsuit for 'failure to take basic security precautions'


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Sage to sell Brazilian operations

The subsidiary is considered to be outside the firm's strategic focus; the sale is expected to complete by September 2020

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Rob Bearden takes over as Cloudera CEO

Cloudera is turning to a familiar face for its next leader.

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PC shipments grew in 2019, ending 7-year slump

Demand for Windows 10 upgrades ended the longtime decline in PC shipments, Gartner and IDC noted, with the growth expected to continue.

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