Technology

Mozilla has started to turn on DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, as part of its overall strategy of stressing user privacy.

"We know that unencrypted DNS is not only vulnerable to spying but is being exploited," wrote Selena Deckelmann, Mozilla's new vice president of desktop Firefox, in a Feb. 25 post to a company blog. "We are helpingto make the shift to more secure alternatives [and] do this by performing DNS lookups in an encrypted HTTPS connection. This helps hide your browsing history from attackers on the network, helps prevent data collection by third parties on the network that ties your computer to websites you visit."

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There are important accounts to secure, and then there are important accounts to secure. Your Google account falls into that second category, maybe even with a couple of asterisks and some neon orange highlighting added in for good measure.

I mean, really: When you stop and think about how much stuff is associated with that single sign-in — your email, your documents, your photos, your files, your search history, maybe even your contacts, text messages, and location history, if you use Android — saying it's a "sensitive account" seems like an understatement. Whether you're using Google for business, personal purposes, or some combination of the two, you want to do everything you possibly can to keep all of that information locked down and completely under your control.

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The real stinker this month, KB 4524244, rolled out the automatic update chute for four full days until Microsoft yanked it & leaving a trail of wounded PCs, primarily HP machines, in its wake. The other big-time bug in this monthpatches, a race condition in the KB 4532693 Win10 version 1903 and 1909 cumulative update installer, hasn&t been officially acknowledged by Microsoft outside of a blog post. But at least itwell known and understood.

Folks running SQL Server and Exchange Server networks need to get patched right away.

Win10 UEFI update KB 4524244 blockages

Patch Tuesday brought KB 4524244 for Windows 10 owners, a bizarre single-purpose patch apparently directed at one specific UEFI bootloader. Italked about it last week.

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In an early-evening press conference, President Donald Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread through Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The new coronavirus strain, which has infected about 81,000 people around the world and killed 3,000, has already wrought havoc on the global economy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned yesterday that the U.S. will likely not be able to escape the spread of the virus.

&Itnot a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,& said Dr. Nancy Messonier,director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a press conference given by the Centers for Disease Control on Tuesday. &Disruption to everyday life might be severe.&

Earlier this evening, California reported its first case of community transmission, which was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control, according to The New York Times. Thata case where an infected person was not exposed to anyone known to be infected with the virus and had not traveled to countries where the virus had spread.

Speaking alongside Pence; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci; and principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control Dr. Anne Schuchat, the President stressed that the U.S. government was &very, very ready& to respond to the disease.

Vice President Pence said that the White House would continue to work closely with state and local officials, add additional personnel and work with Congress to ensure that the necessary resources are available. &The threat to the American public remains low,& Pence said.

The White House is asking Congress for $2.5 billion to support efforts to stop the spread of the virus in the U.S. while Senate Democrats led by Chuck Schumer have put an $8.5 billion price tag on the coronavirus fight.

Secretary Azar outlined five areas where the government would look to spend money including: monitor the spread of the virus, cooperate with local governments, develop therapeutics, develop vaccines, and manufacture and purchase personal protective equipment.

Diagnosing the illness has been a particular problem for the U.S. According to multiple reports, the CDC isn&t prepared to test for a potentially rapidly expanding number of cases in the U.S.

Only 12 of the 100 public health labs in the U.S. are able to diagnose the coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, according to a Politico report.

Better diagnostics tools are going to be one of the critical areas where startups could play a role in combating the spread of the virus.

&Where startups are going to make contributions is in detection, monitoring, epidemiological predictions, sequencing, supply chain [and] distribution logistics,& wrote James Birch, an entrepreneur and former researcher with the American College of Surgeons.

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief and an investor with New Enterprise Associates, has advocated for the expansion of Emergency Use Authorizations from the organization he used to lead as a way to respond to the need for more, better diagnostic tests.

The lack of effective tests available to public health facilities calls into question exactly how prepared the government is for the potential health crisis. In fact, the White House got rid of the pandemic response group in the Administration in a cost-cutting measure in 2018.

Californiarecently diagnosed new case also casts doubt on the governmentability to effectively respond to the emerging illness. As the University of California Davis Medical Center wrote in an internal document:

&Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19. We requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, since neither Sacramento County nor (the California Department of Public Health) is doing testing for coronavirus at this time. Since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered…&

On Sunday, the CDC ordered COVID-19 testing of the patient and the patient was put on airborne precautions and strict contact precautions. The positive test results were announced on Wednesday.

Also troubling to some healthcare observers is Penceown track record when it comes to healthcare crises.

As governor of Indiana, Penceinaction led to an outbreak of HIV in one of the statemore rural counties, according to a report in HuffPost. As drug use soared in the state during the opioid crisis, addicts in the county were also becoming infected with the virus because they were sharing needles. Pence opposed a needle-sharing program, which could have limited the spread of the virus.

Fears about how the new coronavirus would impact the economy rattled stock markets earlier this week as news of the diseasespread to Europe were confirmed. The marketslide and the political response in Washington played a role in the presidentdecision to hold a press conference today, judging by the presidentown Twitter account.

This holding company owns a handful of subsidiaries that all run independently — which keeps things interesting for an IT pilot fish who works there.

&In IT, we are often told to just make it work when one company buys its own software,& fish says. &Websites are one thing that we have managed to unify, except for one company that insists on using its own provider and managing themselves.&

Email for all the companies is also on fishservers, and that works without a hitch — at least until the day fish gets a frantic call from the subsidiary with its own website. The problem: No outside emails are arriving.

After fish sits through the standard chewing-out about how the business can&t function without email, he starts testing. Sure enough, no outside email is reaching the subsidiary. It isn&t even reaching the mail servers.

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TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms but the CEO of Reddit had some harsh words for the popular app, calling it &fundamentally parasitic& at an event Wednesday.

The comments from Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman were some of the more controversial offered up during a panel discussion with former public policy exec Elliot Schrage and former Facebook VP of Product Sam Lessin. During a brief conversation about the feature innovations of TikTok, Huffman pushed back hard on the notion that Silicon Valley startups had something to learn from the app.

&Maybe I&m going to regret this, but I can&t even get to that level of thinking with them,& Huffman said. &Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that italways listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone.&

&I actively tell people, ‘Don&t install that spyware on your phone,'& he later added.

The comments were made in front of a large group of Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs gathered for a one-day conference called &Social 2030& put on by Lightspeed Venture Partners and LessinVC firm Slow Ventures. The event aimed to highlight and identify trends in social apps that would be shaping the next decade of the space.

Huffmancomments critiqued how TikTok tracks the actions of its users. The social media app was a hot topic of discussion throughout the event, and while Lessin asserted that the app had made a number of notable innovations, Huffman was one of the few at the event to offer deep criticisms of the app.

TechCrunch has reached out to TikTok owner ByteDance for comment.