Technology

This pilot fishis an engineer setting up control systems for power plants, and one day he has a disagreement with an IT manager at one of his clients.Topic: complex passwords. Therea push on throughout the IT world to make passwords more complex.

But fishpoint is that that advice isn&t valid when you have an air gap betweenthe control systems and any other network.In fact, fish tells the manager, when it comes to internal hacking, complex passwords are more risky than no password at all because people never remember complex passwords and have to write then down on sticky notes.The manager says that would never happen at his plant — people know better.

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American equities closed down today, with the major domestic indices all losing ground after a wild trading cycle. After starting the day up sharply higher after strong Monday gains, those gains were erased as the day closed. It was a day of confusing movement; the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, to pick an example, had a range on the day of more than 3%, despite closing off just a tenth of that figure.

Divining the correct reason for movement in the stock market is a foolerrand most days. Today, however, it isn&t hard to point to at least part of the reason for the reversed gains: a possibly record-setting one-day domestic death toll from COVID-19. Per collected data, deaths for the day as of the time of writing came to 1,690, with several high-infection states yet to report.

Here are the dayresults:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA): -26.13, -0.12%
• S-P 500: -4.27, -0.116%
• Nasdaq Composite: -25.98, -0.33%

Shares of SaaS and cloud companies dropped more sharply, with the Bessemer cloud index falling 1.88% on the day. Oil also fell, with WTI crude dropping more than 7% as of the time of writing.

Are you a bit sandblasted by all the volatility? Letupdate you on how the major indices have performed since their recent highs:

• DJIA change from 52 week highs: -23.4%
• S-P 500 change from 52 week highs: -21.63%
• Nasdaq Composite change from 52 week highs: -19.83%

And for good measure, the Bessemer cloud index is off 24.09% from recent highs. So everything is in bear market territory at the moment — even after Mondayhuge gains — except for the Nasdaq Composite, which remains merely in deep correction. Not great news for anyone with a 401k balance, but the numberswere worse on Friday.

Today the market tried to go up again and failed. Letsee what tomorrowCOVID-19 data shows us. It just may drive the markets yet again.

When any technology sees its popularity increase quickly, the number of bad actors taking advantage of new and untrained users also grows. The world is seeing this now with videoconferencing services and applications, as reports about the popular Zoom app being hijacked — known as &Zoom-bombing& — have surfaced.

With multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language, the FBIBoston office recently issued a warning for users of videoconferencing platforms about the incidents. Security expert and investigative journalist Brian Krebs provided details on Zoompassword problems and how hackers were able to use &war dialing& methods to discover meeting IDs and passwords for Zoom meetings.

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A number of startups over the years have promised to re-invent email only to have fallen short. Even Googleradical re-imagining, the Inbox app, finally closed up shop last year. Today, another company is announcing its plans to build a better inbox. Edison Software is preparing to launch OnMail, a new email service that lets you control who enters your inbox. This is handled through a new blocking feature called Permission Control. The service is also introducing a number of other enhancements, like automatic read receipt and tracker blocking, large attachment support, fast delivery, and more.

Edison is already home to the popular third-party email app, Edison Mail.

Edison Mail is designed to work with your existing email, like your Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, or iCloud email, for example, among others. OnMail, however, is a new email service where users will be assigned their own email account at @onmail.com when the product debuts later this summer.

At launch, the web version of OnMail will work in a number of browsers. It will also work in the existing Edison Mail apps for Mac, iOS, and Android.

The biggest idea behind OnMail is to create a better spam and blocking system.

Though Gmail, Outlook.com, and others today do a fairly decent job at automatically filtering out obvious spam and phishing attempts, our inboxes still remain clogged with invasive messages — newsletters, promotions, shopping catalogs, and so on. We may have even signed up for these at some point. We may have even tried to unsubscribe, but can&t get the messages to stop.

In other cases, there are people with our email address who we&d rather cut off.

The last time Gmail took on this &clogged inbox& problem was in 2013 when it unveiled a redesigned inbox that separated promotions, updates, and emails from your social media sites into separate tabs. OnMailpremise is that we should be able to just ban these emails entirely from our inbox, not just relocate them.

OnMail&Permission Control& feature allows users to accept or decline a specific email address from being able to place mail in your inbox. This is a stronger feature than Edison Mail&Block Sender& or &Unsubscribe& as a declined senderfuture emails will never hit your inbox — well, at least not in a way thatvisible to you.

In technical terms, declined senders are being routed to a folder called &Blocked.& But this folder isn&t displayed anywhere in the user interface. The blocked emails won&t get pulled up in Search, either. It really feels like the unwanted mail is gone. This is all done without any notification to the sender — whether thata human or an automated mailing list.

If you ever want to receive emails from the blocked senders again, the only way to do so will be by reviewing a list of those senders you&ve banned from within your Contacts section and make the change. You can&t just dig into a spam folder to resurface them.

In another update that puts the needs of the receiver above those of the sender, OnMail will remove all information sent from any invisible tracking pixels.

Today, most savvy email users know to disable images in their Gmail or other mail apps that allow it, so their email opens are not tracked. But OnMail promises to remove this tracking without the need to disable the images.

&We view pixel tracking as this horrific invasion of privacy and this is why we block all read receipts,& noted Edison Co-Founder and CEO, Mikael Berner. &The sender will never know that you opened their email,& he says.

Other promised features include an improved Search experience with easy filtering tools, support for large attachments, enhanced speed of delivery, and more.

Edison says itbeen working to develop OnMail for over two years, after realizing how broken email remains.

Today, U.S. adults still spend over 5 hours per day in our inboxes and feel like they&ve lost control. Tracking pixels and targeted ads are now common to the email experience. And searching for anything specific requires complicated syntax. (Google only recently addressed this too, by adding filters to Gmail search — but just for G Suite users for now.)

It may be hard for people who have set up shop for 10 or 20 years in the same inbox to make a switch. But therealways a new generation of email users to target — just like Gmail once did.

And now that Gmail has won the market with over 1.5 billion active users, its innovations have slowed. Every now and then Gmail throws a bone — as with 2018debut of Smart Compose, for example — but it largely considered the email problem solved. A little fresh competition is just the thing it needs.

&We&ve invested years as a company working to bring back happiness to the inbox,& said Berner, in a statement. &OnMail is built from the ground up to change mail. Nobody should fear giving out their address or have to create multiple accounts to escape an overcrowded mailbox,& he said.

OnMailpremise sounds interesting. However, its software is not yet live so none of its claims can be tested at this time. But based on Edisonhistory with its Edison Mail app, it has a good handle on design and understanding what features email users need.

Currently, OnMail is open only tosign-ups for those who want to claim their spot on its platform first. Like Gmail once did, OnMail will send out invites when the service becomes available.

Jack Dorsey announced in a series of tweets today that he is shifting $1 billion in his Square equity to create a fund dedicated to COVID-19 relief. The Twitter and Square CEO is calling the fund Start Small and posting a tally of disbursements and recipients in a public spreadsheet.

Dorsey said in his announcement that the new initiative will shift the focus to other causes at some point.

The first Start Small contribution listedis $100,000 to AmericaFood Fund — an effort led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurene Powell Jobs dedicated to providing meals to vulnerable populations disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other top backers of AmericaFood Fund include Oprah Winfrey ($1 million) and Apple ($5 million), according to the organizationGoFundMe page.

Thatwhat we know so far from a tweet posted Tuesday afternoon by the American tech entrepreneur who co-founded and leads not one, but two publicly listed companies.

Therestill a lot to learn about Dorseynew initiative, including how it will be managed, whether it will make investments (along with donations) and how to apply for funding. TechCrunch has asked Square for additional details and will update this post when we hear back.

Sony has revealed the design of the PlayStation 5‘s controller — a follow-on to its popular DualShock line that takes on a new name for a new generation: DualSense.

The DualSense controller is kitted out in black and white, and in some ways looks like a futuristic, plastic armor-plated robot companion more than a gamepad. Itstill recognizably a product of the DualShock legacy, however, and has the same familiar button layout as previous PlayStation controllers. The DualSense incorporates haptic feedback, however, for what Sony says will be a heightened sense of immersion in gaming.

Haptic feedback should be an improvement over the relatively general and non-specific rumble vibration of current generation controllers, and Sony has also added more tactile response thanks to new L2 and R2 &adaptive triggers& that provide different kinds of tension response when performing in-game actions, like &drawing a bow to shoot an arrow,& the company says.

The resulting physical design is a bit chunkier than the DualShock 4, with more room needed inside the case for that adaptive trigger tech. Still, Sony said that it has redesigned the component angles to produce a controller that feels a lot lighter in the hand than it looks.

This controller also does away with the dedicated &Share& button, but replaces it with a &Create& button that sounds like it should offer similar features and much more, though Sony isn&t yet ready to tip its hand as to exactly what that entails, and promises more details to follow.

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Meanwhile, therea new built-in mic array for voice chat without any headset required — though it sounds like this is intended primarily as a &you have it in case you need it& feature than a dedicated input, since Sony is still advocating use of a headset for longer play sessions.

From a pure looks perspective, Sony clearly decided it wanted to go a bit more bold than its standard all-black look for the first version of a new controller it ships with a console. The two-tone, Stormtrooper palette is complemented by a new light bar that lines both sides of the central touchpad.

Personally, I love this look — and the USB-C port that you can spy at the top of the controller for charging. I don&t even know if I&m all that interested in a new generation of console, but the controller alone might convince me to upgrade.