The Chinese company on Monday announced a second-generation version of its Mate X folding phone, which up to now has been sold mostly in its home country. This time Huawei is bringing it to Europe, and said the product’s more durable than the first version and has a faster processor and 3D graphics.

When folded, the Mate Xs has a 6.6-inch display, which is just slightly larger than Apple Inc.’s iPhone 11 Pro Max. But when opened out, Huawei’s device becomes an 8-inch tablet computer. It has three rear-facing Leica Camera-branded lenses, which double as selfie cameras when flipping the phone around in its folded form.

It’ll cost 2,499 euros ($2,704) when it goes on sale worldwide in March.

The market for smartphones is slowing, and manufacturers are trying to find new ways to convince consumers they should upgrade their devices. Bendable products are an increasingly popular strategy being tried out by some of the world’s biggest device makers.

Samsung has been selling a foldable smartphone for as many months as Huawei, and at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Lenovo Group showed off an updated prototype of a folding ThinkPad computer. The Motorola Razr brand is also due to make a comeback later this year, and it too will bend.

Huawei also showed off a new line of tablet computers for Europe — the MatePad Pro 5G — aimed at the same buyers of products like Apple’s iPad Pro. It’s not without its physical similarities, either.

The MatePad Pro has a 10.8-inch display compared to the iPad’s 11 inches; it includes a stylus that, like the Apple Pencil, connects magnetically to the outer edge of the tablet for recharging, and is dubbed the Huawei M-Pencil. The bezel around the screen is slimmer than that of Apple’s, but uses the same rounded screen corners that differentiate the iPad Pro from its cheaper brethren.

At a briefing with reporters ahead of the launch on Monday, Huawei championed the MatePad Pro’s use of split-screen multitasking to run apps side-by-side and its optional magnetic keyboard case.

It does have innovations of its own, however. The tablet can mirror the display of certain Huawei smartphones if they’re nearby, letting you control the phone virtually — a bit like using a remote desktop app to use a PC from another computer. The tablet also has fifth-generation 5G wireless — something no iPhone or iPad offers yet — and it can be used to wirelessly charge other products, such as phones, headphones or computer mice.

Prices will start at 549 euros for a Wi-Fi-only version from April.

However, due to the U.S. government blacklisting Huawei — which it accuses of aiding Beijing in espionage — last year, the company’s new Mate Xs and MatePad run on versions of Android that’s free and open-source, meaning they don’t have apps such as Google Maps, YouTube or the Google Play Store. Samsung’s Android-powered tablets do not suffer such restrictions.

Huawei’s been battling global scrutiny over its telecom equipment, but often overlooked is the company’s rapid growth as a smartphone manufacturer. In 2018, it surpassed Apple to become the world’s second-largest maker of smartphones, according to data from market research firm IDC.

Hackers are increasingly conducting more cyberattacks, especially DDoS, which causes server crashes. This type of cyberattack has caused enormous damage and made businesses lose opportunities.

Assistant vice president of the Datcom Division Theerachai Udomkitpanya explained that DDoS attacks are used by hackers to obstruct service.

“The easiest way to carry out a DDoS attack is to make a massive amount of requests to access servers or websites at the same time until the servers fail to provide services for customers, resulting in lost business or transactions which are unable to proceed smoothly. This has also caused businesses to lose opportunities and customer credibility,” he said.

Ten years ago, a DDoS attack was performed by several hackers attacking one website at the same time, Theerachai said.

“Now, this cyberattack has developed into something more complex, such as embedding malware into Internet of Things [IoT] devices or tricking users to download files to embed malware that has been set to attack at a later stage. That is why organisations find it difficult to identify which method hackers have used,” he said.

According to 2019 statistics by Imperva, the leader of the Web Application Firewall (WAF), the size of a DDoS attack can be measured in two ways – the ratio at mega packet per second (Mpps) and the amount of attack bandwidth at gigabit per second (Gbps)

Hackers once sent a packet of 580 Mpps to a network, with bandwidth of 680 Gbps. Last year, 36 per cent of hackers targeted game companies.

For Thailand, most hackers have targeted financial institutions, while customers who used online services also fell victim to the attacks.

Theerachai said the best possible solution is to prevent risks of a DDoS attack from the very beginning, this was so especially for large agencies or organisations, which are the main target.

“We recommend using DDoS protection services from professional IT departments because some server attacks might not be considered DDoS attacks, such as campaigns which provide online services or sale promotions which draw people to websites and can also cause system crashes,” he added.

Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Seibt denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/562421d5-d1f3-4335-ac87-f9b7eae62545

“She’s a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago that has the ear of the Trump administration.

In December, Heartland headlined Seibt at its forum at the U.N. climate conference in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month, Heartland hired Seibt as the young face of its campaign to question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming.

“Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” asked Heartland in a digital video. This week, Seibt is set to make her American debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a high-profile annual gathering just outside Washington of right-leaning activists.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Heartland’s tactics amount to an acknowledgment that Greta has touched a nerve, especially among teens and young adults. Since launching her protest two years ago outside the Swedish parliament at age 15, Greta has sparked youth protests across the globe and in 2019 was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the youngest to ever win the honor.

The teenager has called on the nations of the world to cut their total carbon output by at least half over the next decade, suggesting that if they don’t, “then there will be horrible consequences.”

“I want you to panic,” she told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. “I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

Seibt argues that these predictions of dire consequences are exaggerated. In a video posted on Heartland’s website, she gazes into the camera and says, “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to think.”

Seibt says her political activism was sparked a few years ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal immigration policies. She says the backlash from teachers and other students hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking. More recently, she said that watching young people joining weekly “Fridays For Future” protests inspired by Greta helped spur her opposition to climate change activism.

“I get chills when I see those young people, especially at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”

Seibt said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have overstated their impact.

“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are man-made CO2 emissions having that much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”

Seibt argues that other factors, such as solar energy, play a role – though the amount of solar energy reaching Earth has declined since the 1970s, according to federal measurements. A slew of peer-reviewed reports, from scientific bodies in the U.S. and elsewhere, have concluded that greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20th century, producing a range of devastating effects from massive marine die-offs in South America to severe wildfires in Australia and sinking ground in the Arctic.

In addition to climate change, Seibt echoes far-right skepticism about feminism and immigration. The German media have described her as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Seibt says she is not a member of AfD – she describes herself as libertarian – but acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.

Her path to Heartland began in November with a speech at EIKE, a Munich think tank whose vice president is a prominent AfD politician. By then, Seibt was already active on YouTube, producing videos on topics ranging from migration to feminism to climate change. In the audience was Heartland’s Taylor. He said he immediately recognized her potential and approached her about working with Heartland.

Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors, Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its staff and researchers have ready access to the Trump administration, and one of the institute’s senior fellows, William Happer, served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council between September 2018 and 2019.

An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions should be viewed as beneficial to society – not a pollutant that drives global warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,” according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Why would an American think tank want to get involved in German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent investigation aired on German television.

For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions this year by 40% compared with 1990 – and by up to 95% by mid-century.

In December, during the Madrid climate conference, two undercover staffers from the nonprofit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV approached Taylor and claimed to work for a wealthy donor from the auto industry who wanted to give Heartland a half-million euros. Taylor took the bait and followed up with a three-page proposal outlining a campaign to push back against German efforts to regulate emissions.

“These restrictive environmental programs are largely unnecessary,” says the document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post. “Worse, other nations – including the United States and European Union nations – are increasingly being influenced by unwise German policy.”

The proposal described Seibt as “the star” of a “Climate Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over 100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Seibt was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.

“Funding for our Germany Environmental Issues project will enable Heartland to provide Naomi with the equipment and the sources she needs to present a series of effective videos calling attention to the negative impacts of overreaching environmental regulations,” the proposal says.

CORRECTIV aired its report on Heartland earlier this month on German TV. Taylor dismissed the report, saying, “Heck, I would have spoken with them if they told us who they were, and the answers would have been pretty much the same.”

The report included secretly filmed footage of Seibt, who struck back with her own video response. Invoking Greta, she said, “To the media, I have a few last words: How dare you?”

Despite echoes of Greta’s style, Seibt has objected to the comparison.

“The reason I don’t like the term anti-Greta is that it suggests I myself am an indoctrinated puppet, I guess, for the other side,” she says in one video. Asked whether she meant that as a criticism of Greta, Seibt says: “That sounds kind of mean, actually.” She added: “I don’t want to shame her in any way.”

Taylor said the tendency to associate Seibt with Greta is “kind of natural” – and benefits Heartland’s message.

“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.

Still, Seibt has a long climb to reach the level of global attention lavished on Greta. While Greta measures her social media following in the millions, Seibt counts slightly under 50,000 YouTube subscribers.

Through her representatives, Greta declined to comment.

“Joanna, Can you mail out a check to to a Vendor today? Barbara,” the email said.

The email had some hallmarks of a scam that is becoming increasingly common. But it also had a few unique attributes that intrigued cybersecurity experts at the company’s email security provider, Agari Data Inc. Using a fake email account posing as the company accountant, Agari sent back a reply.

“Hi Barbara, Yes, of course. Please send me the details for the payment and I will take care of it ASAP. Joanna,” the reply said.

Over the next several months, Agari said it was able to unravel what’s known as a business email compromise operation. Agari dubbed the group sending the emails Exaggerated Lion, and said its members were based in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. Between April and August 2019, Exaggerated Lion targeted more than 3,000 people at nearly 2,100 companies, all of them in the U.S., according to an Agari report published Thursday.

Similar email attacks are growing problem in the U.S., according to the latest Federal Bureau of Investigation report, but one that doesn’t get the headlines of state-sponsored hacks or ransomware attacks. Global losses from business email compromises increased 100% from May 2018 to July 2019, according to the FBI, which recorded 166,349 incidents from June 2016 to July 2019 and $26.2 billion in losses during that period.

In one of its simplest forms, a business email compromise operator will send an email posing as the chief executive officer to an accounts payable department with an urgent request to transfer funds or fulfill a fake invoice. In another example, payroll representatives will receive an email appearing to be from an employee requesting to update their direct deposit information – often to a prepaid card account. Companies often realize something is amiss only when it’s too late to recover the transferred funds.

“We think of business email compromise as any attack which claims to be someone you know and trust and is attempting some kind of theft,” said Patrick Peterson, Agari’s founder and chief executive officer, in an online video. “This has been far too successful.”

Leveraging its position as an email security provider, Agari can sometimes see email scams that target its customers as they happen. In some cases, the company intervenes to communicate with the fraudster, posing as a clueless employee in order to draw out more details. That’s what happened with Exaggerated Lion, when the operation sent the email to the company, which Agari declined to name, last April.

In the months that followed, Agari said it engaged with Exaggerated Lion more than 200 times, and discovered the identity of 28 “mules” used to ferry payments between victims and the group itself. Mules are primarily recruited by Exaggerated Lion under the pretense of romance and likely unaware they are participating in a criminal enterprise, the company said. “These romance-victims-turned-money-mules are told they are helping their romantic partner recover a large inheritance that is tied up with lawyers and is being distributed slowly over time,” according to Agari.

In one exchange with a mule included in Agari’s report, a member of Exaggerated Lion wrote, “Okay honey please put the cash in big envelope and seal it before taking to FedEx.”

The unnamed mule responded, “Honey, that’s a lot of money to send cash that’s a heck of a liability it could be lost anywhere.”

Exaggerated Lion’s representative then wrote, “It can’t honey. As long as you insure it. And I’ve received more than that through cash mailing when my dad was still alive.”

Agari declined to say how it obtained the digital conversations.

As the fake relationship progresses, mules are asked to launder increasingly larger sums of money, according to Agari. Once an unsuspecting business parts with its cash, through a paper check or wire transfer, Exaggerated Lion’s mules have a variety of ways to get the money back to them. Once a physical check is cashed, the money can be delivered to Exaggerated Lion via traditional money transfer, Bitcoin, or gift cards, according to Agari.

Agari said it turned its information on the mules over to financial partners and law enforcement.

Exaggerated Lion began operating in 2014 by running check scams on Craigslist and has since become more sophisticated, according to the report. One scam the group allegedly operated for years involved recruiting people to wrap their car with marketing decals for a beverage company in exchange for a fixed amount of money every week.

Participants, who responded to an online ad or email, would be sent a fake check, which included the first month’s pay and money for a specialist to place advertisements on the car. Respondents were then instructed to keep the first month’s pay and wire the money to the “specialist,” who was really a money mule or a member of Exaggerated Lion, according to Agari.

What makes Exaggerated Lion unique in the world of business email compromise is its preference for physical checks, a payment method the group had “experience and comfort with,” according to Agari. Paper checks may be helpful in evading systems designed to detect fraudulent wire transfers. Exaggerated Lion requests these checks to be sent as fast as possible, through an overnight mail service, according to exchanges contained in the Agari report. But when a victim is hesitant about sending a check, Exaggerated Lion is quick to suggest a bank account to wire money to, according to the report.

Exaggerated Lion also used fake invoices, created using a free invoice generator, and W-9s, publicly available on the Internal Revenue Service website, “to inject a sense of authenticity in their attacks,” according to Agari. The group also used Google’s enterprise email service to send more emails, the security company said. “Google doesn’t start charging for G Suite until after the first month,” Agari said in its report. “This means Exaggerated Lion can create a new G Suite account, add compromised credit card information as a payment method, and effectively have at least a 30-day free trial on each domain they set up.”

If the credit card doesn’t work, the group “can simply move on to another account,” Agari wrote. With a Google Enterprise account, Exaggerated Lion can send 2,000 emails a day, four times more than a regular gmail account. Google declined to comment.

Among the mules identified by Agari was 63-year-old Reuben Alvarez Sr., of Beaumont, Texas, who was arrested in October 2019 and accused of laundering more than $100,000, nearly $70,000 of which came from the United Methodist Church, according to a probable cause affidavit from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The rest came from small-to-medium-sized businesses, such as an insurance company in Ohio and golf courses in Alabama, who were all victims of a business email compromise scam, according to the affidavit. Agari said its researchers discovered 14 messages where Exaggerated Lion directed its targets to send money to Alvarez’s bank accounts.

Alvarez’s case is pending and he hasn’t yet entered a plea, according to the district attorney’s office. Neither Alvarez nor his attorney could be located for comment.

In an interview with a detective, Alvarez said the money he received came from a woman he believed to be named “Peggy Smith,” who lived in Washington state. Alvarez said he knew Smith from chatting online for three or four years but had never met her in person. Alvarez told the detective that he assumed the money came as part of Smith’s inheritance payments after her parents died. But Alvarez said he knew his activities constituted a crime, according to the affidavit. When the detective drove Alvarez home, he handed over a package he had received the day before: it contained a $25,647 check from a Tennessee health care company.

The Gumi facility, 202 kilometers south of Seoul, consists of two production lines for network equipment and premium smartphones, including the latest Galaxy S20 series and the foldable Galaxy Z Flip.

A female employee in her 20s who worked on the smartphone line was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Saturday morning. According to reports, she visited Daegu on Feb. 16.

The tech giant sent a message to all employees across the country, notifying them that the Gumi plant would be shut down until Monday morning for disinfection and other preventive measures.

Since the Gumi plant is the only facility that produces smartphones mostly for the domestic market, the temporary shutdown raises concerns about supplies of the new phones.

The first batch of preordered Galaxy S20 devices is scheduled to be shipped out Thursday. The phones’ official launch date is March 6.

The Galaxy Z Flip, the foldable device that launched to much fanfare Feb. 14, is also manufactured in Gumi. While Samsung churns out over 90 percent of its smartphones for overseas markets in Vietnam, some of the smartphones produced at the Gumi plant are exported to other countries.

“Delays in delivery of unlocked phones that were ordered last week seem inevitable,” said a sales manager at a Samsung retail shop.

But the company said it would ensure smooth supplies of the devices by keeping the lines operating longer than usual in the coming week.

“The shutdown was limited to the weekend, which had limited impact on productivity,” said a Samsung official. “There won’t be any problem in supplying (phones).”

Industry insiders say the COVID-19 outbreak could have a greater impact than expected on sales.

All three mobile carriers in South Korea have canceled offline events to promote the new Samsung smartphones. Some were replaced with online events.

Samsung has also scaled back hands-on events to promote its latest devices.

During a press conference held Feb. 11 after the Samsung Unpacked event in San Francisco, the company’s mobile business head, Roh Tae-moon, pledged to minimize the impact of the disease on supplies of the Galaxy S20 and Z Flip.

“So far, we can’t say we have no difficulty in terms of supply chain management,” Roh said. “We will keep monitoring closely and do our best to minimize the impact on the new products.”

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)

But the academic calendar marches on.

So on Monday, Duke Kunshan will resume classes as an online university until further notice. Out, for now, are face-to-face seminars. In are virtual classrooms, laboratories and forums that hundreds of students will access through computers wherever they happen to be.

It is one of many improvised educational responses to a public health emergency that has disrupted daily routines for millions since the novel coronavirus epidemic surged last month in China and began spreading to other countries. The virus can cause respiratory illness and in some cases death.

This wasn’t what Duke University imagined when it launched Duke Kunshan in 2013, just west of Shanghai, in partnership with Wuhan University of China. But Matthew Rascoff, Duke’s associate vice provost for digital education and innovation, said the Kunshan venture has no other options.

“When the alternative is no learning at all,” he said, “and the institution grinds to a halt, then online is looking a lot better.” Rascoff said Duke is sparing no expense to aid what is, effectively, “a university in exile.”

An online school also wasn’t what Alberto Najarro envisioned when he turned down offers from prestigious universities in the United States in 2018 to join Duke Kunshan’s first undergraduate class. Leaving classmates with a hasty goodbye in late January, Najarro flew home to El Salvador and has kept in touch with friends through text messages and video calls. He is eager to return to studies in Chinese, microeconomics and environmental science.

“I look forward to seeing how online classes will work for us,” the 20-year-old sophomore wrote in an email. He expects the digital setup will follow the university’s emphasis on active learning with a liberal-arts approach. “I have my concerns, of course. But I’m rest[ing] assured that we will make it through.”

Kiera Zhou, 19, also a sophomore, from Yangzhou, China, said she worries the online courses might not be as lively as those taught in person. “I really like in-class discussions, when we communicate and argue with others,” she wrote in an email. “That is a unique experience.”

The viral outbreak, which struck heavily in Wuhan and the Hubei province, scrambled education timetables throughout China. The usual school break for the Lunar New Year was extended as authorities sought to slow the spread of the virus.

For universities, especially those with students far from campus, online education can provide a temporary fix in the urgent quest to restore academic order. The prominent Tsinghua University in Beijing started its spring semester online Feb. 3. “Delaying a return to school doesn’t mean no classes – we can continue our education,” university President Qiu Yong told students who listened via laptops and smartphones.

New York University launched an online program Feb. 17 for its Shanghai campus. The program offers 293 courses for 820 undergraduates and 136 graduate students. They are “signing in from all over the world,” Jeffrey Lehman, NYU Shanghai’s vice chancellor, wrote in an email, “and we have experienced very few glitches so far.” Hundreds of other NYU students ordinarily based in Shanghai are studying abroad this semester in New York and other NYU locations.

Lehman is co-teaching a class called “Creativity Considered,” using online communication tools Zoom and Slack. “It was a tremendous relief to discover that we could maintain authentic discussion and engagement,” he wrote. NYU awarded its first bachelor’s degrees in Shanghai in 2017 and is expanding its campus there.

For Duke Kunshan, the crisis hit at a delicate moment: The university is in the midst of recruiting its third undergraduate class.

The school has about 325 freshmen and 250 sophomores, as well as 125 graduate students. Two-thirds of the undergraduates are from China, with the rest from the United States and elsewhere. Tuition for international undergrads is about $55,000 for the current school year, not counting room and board. For Chinese students, it is about $25,000.

About 50 undergrads have remained in Kunshan with a small group of staff. The campus has had no reported cases of coronavirus infections, officials said.

Duke Kunshan’s executive vice chancellor, Denis Simon, said the university cannot skimp on academic quality, no matter the medium of instruction, because its brand is at stake. The first undergrads are planning to study for a semester at Duke next school year and then return to China. They expect to earn two bachelor’s degrees in 2022 – one from Duke and one from Duke Kunshan.

“We really have to deliver a first-class education, through and through,” Simon said in a telephone interview Feb. 19 as he was traveling to the Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina.

There, several Duke Kunshan professors have been huddling in recent days with Duke experts to map an online curriculum for the final four weeks of a seven-week term. The school year is supposed to conclude with one more seven-week term in the spring. If needed, that will be online, too.

The highly ranked U.S. university has years of experience with online education in business, nursing and other fields. Duke also has posted dozens of classes on the Web platform Coursera in subjects including dog psychology and machine learning. The proliferation of online courses in recent years has spurred teaching innovations throughout higher education. It is common for lectures to be posted and searchable online, for digital discussion groups to be woven into face-to-face classes and for students to take a mix of courses online and in person.

But converting an entire liberal-arts school to a remote digital format within a few weeks poses an unusual test.

James Miller, a professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan, is part of a team teaching 160 freshmen a core class called “China in the World.” Ordinarily, class meets four times a week for lectures and small-group discussions.

Miller expects something like that schedule will continue online even though his students are tuning in from multiple continents and time zones. Those unable to participate in real time will be able to watch or listen afterward to catch up. “We’re cognizant that not every student in China, or wherever in the world, may have the bandwidth or Internet connectivity to participate 100% in a video conference meeting,” Miller said in a telephone interview from Durham.

In his career, Miller has always taught face-to-face. “For me, this has definitely been a new challenge,” he said. “And also an opportunity. In effect, being forced to use all the new technology has forced us to innovate in our teaching. Now, I’m thinking some of the technologies we’ve been learning, maybe we will keep.”

Benjamin Bacon, an associate professor of media and arts at Duke Kunshan, said he expects to hold plenty of video sessions for his classes in design perspectives and audio documentary. He said he has kept in touch with his students. “Everybody is healthy,” he said from Durham. “Nobody even has a sore throat.”

Students seem to be taking the upheaval in stride.

Nancy Zhu, 19, a freshman, wrote in an email from her home in Luoyang, China, that she is not worried. With video conferencing, Zhu wrote, she can easily talk with friends about schoolwork. “I think there is no difference in what we learn, it is just learning in a different way,” she said. “So, I feel quite connected.”

Spencer Reeves, 20, a sophomore, said going online is the only practical solution. “It also will help us to prepare for a working world where many meetings are conducted over the Internet,” he wrote in an email from his home in Connecticut. “These situations just make us better people overall.”

Wanying He, 18, a sophomore, from Hunan province in China, chose to stay on campus with a small group of others. She’s plowing ahead in logic and computer science courses, and plays guitar at night with friends to pass the time.

“Most people are still keeping up with their work and study as best as they can,” He wrote in an email. “We encourage each other, and none of us actually think the situation is that bad. . . . Seriously, nothing to complain about. Gorgeous campus, great facilities, and . . . a library open 24/7!”

A sensor system to monitor the development of patients in critical condition using big data is 10 to 100 times faster than a traditional system in indexing and searching for data. The system is used in screening patients in critical condition as well as suspected cases.

Data from the nation’s three telecommunication providers and the Baidu map application provides the number of people who migrated from the virus epicenter of Hubei province and where they traveled, to help guide control measures in different regions.

Full 5G coverage in the two makeshift hospitals of Huoshenshan and Leishenshan has ensured smooth and reliable communications and will also play a critical role in intelligent medical treatment.

Under the 5G network in the ward, robots and cloud medical consultation systems can help avoid unnecessary contact between medics and patients to reduce cross infection.

In public disease control, a no-contact infrared sensor system to identify passersby with a fever or without masks has been widely used in airports, subways and highways. Remote medical consultation can help other patients who are not advised to go to the hospital. AI doctors have been introduced in hospitals and residential communities to help screen suspected cases and diagnose symptoms.

People don’t have to fill in personal information over and over if they present a green health QR code when commuting in public. People in more than 100 cities will get their own codes that they had previously applied for online after scanning the verification codes through Alipay.

While it’s probably too late for the fledgling technology to play a major role in the current epidemic, there’s hope for the next outbreaks. AI is good at combing through mounds of data to find connections that make it easier to determine what kinds of treatments could work or which experiments to pursue next.

The question is what Big Data will come up with when it only gets meager scraps of information on a newly emerged illness like Covid-19, which first emerged late last year in China and has sickened more than 75,000 people in about two months.

The fact that researchers managed to produce the gene sequencing of the new virus within weeks of the first reported cases is promising, since it shows there’s far more immediate data available now when outbreaks happen.

Andrew Hopkins, chief executive officer of Oxford, England-based startup Exscientia Ltd. is among those working to help train artificial intelligence for drug discovery. He figures new treatments could go from conception to clinical testing in as little as 18 to 24 months within the next decade, thanks to AI.

Exscientia designed a new compound for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder that’s ready to be tested in the lab after less than a year in the initial research phase. That’s about five times faster than average, according to the company.

Cambridge-based Healx has a similar approach, but it uses machine learning to find new uses for existing drugs. Both companies feed their algorithms with information — gleaned from sources such as journals, biomedical databases and clinical trials — to help suggest new treatments for diseases.

The two companies each use a team of human researchers to work alongside the AI to help guide the process. In Exscientia’s approach, dubbed the Centaur Chemist, drug designers help teach the algorithms strategies for searching for compounds. Healx puts the AI’s predictions to researchers who analyze the results and decide what to pursue.

Neil Thompson, Healx’s chief science officer, said the technique could be deployed against an outbreak like the coronavirus as long as it had enough data on the new disease. Healx isn’t working on tackling the coronavirus or tweaking its technology for outbreaks, but it wouldn’t be a stretch.

“We’re quite close,” Thompson said in an interview. “We wouldn’t need to change much about the AI algorithms we use. We look at matching drug properties to disease features.”

Artificial intelligence algorithms are already starting to churn out drugs for the diseases we know about. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said on Thursday that they’d used the method to identify a powerful new antibiotic compound that could kill an array of troublesome bacteria, even some that are currently resistant to other treatments.

One catch for all these technologies is clinical testing. Even drugs already safe for use to cure one ailment should be tested again before they’re prescribed for another. The process of showing they are safe and effective on a large number of people can take years before going to regulators for review.

To be effective, AI-based drug developers would have to plan ahead of time, picking out a virus genome likely to cause problems in the future and targeting it when there are few incentives to do so.

Another obstacle is finding qualified staff.

“It’s hard to find people who can operate at the intersection of AI and biology, and it’s difficult for big companies to make quick decisions on technology like this,” said Irina Haivas, a partner at venture capital firm Atomico and former surgeon who sits on the board of Healx. “It’s not enough to be an AI engineer, you have to understand and get into the applications of biology.”

Putting “C” students into AP felt on those campuses like a cultural gaffe, the equivalent of holding the senior prom in March.

The situation has improved somewhat. About 12 percent of high schools have at least half of their 11th- and 12th-graders taking a least one AP or IB course. Still, the majority of average students are told to stick with easy stuff. I figured that must be because school leaders weren’t taking into account the needs of students to be ready for college or a job.

Craig Kesselheim is changing my mind about this. He is a senior associate at the Great Schools Partnership, a nonprofit school-support organization based in Portland, Maine. He said the tendency to sort rather than teach is rooted in a specific high school administrative routine – producing the Program of Study, otherwise known as the course catalogue. It describes every subject at every level available at the school.

“Logistically, Program of Study documents are most often published midyear or early spring to assist school counselors with the course placement of entering ninth-graders,” Kesselheim said. “A frequent result of this deadline pressure is a hastily cobbled-together collection of paragraphs, submitted by teachers and department heads, comprised largely of last year’s text, and edited by no one.”

Middle school teachers are pressed into recommending which students going into high school should take honors courses and which should not. In many schools, “there is no science to these acts of judgment and no uniformity across teachers or across content areas,” Kesselheim said. “Placement recommendations are highly subject to departmental whims, teachers’ beliefs about ability and implicit bias.”

Kesselheim was once a middle school science teacher and administrator. For the past 16 years, he has been helping schools and districts ease themselves out of traditional course hierarchies that don’t make sense. “Highly engaged parents use the system to ensure their students rise to the top. America’s DNA for public education seems to be a zero sum game: In order to have winners, we must have losers,” he said.

I asked why so many schools, usually run by intelligent people who want the best for their students, let this go on. He blamed professional isolation, something I have seen often in the schools but never thought about much. Teachers must make their own decisions on a variety of matters, including grading. The same isolation is imposed on department heads, counselors and administrators.

Schools might have mission statements promising common goals, but hardly anyone pays attention. “One department, maybe social studies, provides an open door to any student wishing to embrace the challenge embedded in an honors-level class,” Kesselheim said. “The department down the hall or in another wing, perhaps English, requires an application essay.”

Unguided grading practices pave the way for mindless sorting. “School systems do a far better job of codifying dress codes, class-rank procedures and disciplinary ladders than they do in guiding and unifying teachers’ grading practices,” he said. Grades influence how students think about themselves and their futures, yet teachers often give grades as they like without much thought about the effect. There is little evidence that bad grades inspire improvement, while instruction that is challenging has been shown to work.

It usually takes an order from above to change practices at high schools that keep average students out of AP and IB classes. The Fairfax County School Board’s decision to open AP and IB classes to all students in 1998 brought much change and spread through the rest of Northern Virginia. Sadly, few other states and districts have made that move.

Kesselheim said he thinks schools can fix this on their own. They can launch course reviews, seek community engagement and get isolated teachers and counselors to talk to one another.

Average students often have much potential, but how can they show it if they are always assigned to the slowest and dullest courses?

The technology giant is discussing whether to let users choose third-party web browser and mail applications as their default options on Apple’s mobile devices, replacing the company’s Safari browser and Mail app, according to people familiar with the matter. Since launching the App Store in 2008, Apple hasn’t allowed users to replace pre-installed apps such as these with third-party services. That has made it difficult for some developers to compete, and has raised concerns from lawmakers probing potential antitrust violations in the technology industry.

The web browser and mail are two of the most-used apps on the iPhone and iPad. To date, rival browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox and mail apps like Gmail and Microsoft Outlook have lacked the status of Apple’s products. For instance, if a user clicks a web link sent to them on an iPhone, it will automatically open in Safari. Similarly, if a user taps an email address — say, from a text message or a website — they’ll be sent to the Apple Mail app with no option to switch to another email program.

The Cupertino, California-based company also is considering loosening restrictions on third-party music apps, including its top streaming rival Spotify Technology SA, on HomePods, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal company deliberations.

Apple’s closed system to prohibit users from setting third-party apps as defaults was questioned last year during a hearing of a U.S. House of Representatives antitrust panel. Lawmakers pressed the issue of whether iPhone users can make non-Apple apps their defaults in categories including web browsers, maps, email and music.

Being a default app on the world’s best-selling smartphone is valuable because consumers are subtly coaxed and prodded into using this more-established software rather than alternatives. Keeping users tethered to Apple’s services is important to the company as the growth of smartphone demand slows and sales of music, video, cloud storage and other subscriptions make up a greater share of the iPhone maker’s total revenue.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

The company currently pre-installs 38 default apps on iPhones and iPads, Bloomberg News has reported, including the Safari web browser, Maps, Messages and Mail.

Last year, Stockholm-based Spotify submitted an antitrust complaint to the European Union, saying Apple squeezes rival services by imposing a 30% cut for subscriptions made via the App Store. Apple responded that Spotify wants the benefits of the App Store without paying for them. As part of its complaint, Spotify singled out the inability to run on the HomePod and become the default music player in Siri, Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant.

Now, Apple is working to allow third-party music services to run directly on the HomePod, said the people. Spotify and other third-party music apps can stream from an iPhone or iPad to the HomePod via Apple’s AirPlay technology. That’s a much more cumbersome experience than streaming directly from the speaker.

Opening the HomePod to additional music service may be a boon for the product. The speaker has lagged behind rivals like the Amazon Echo in functionality since being introduced in 2018 and owns less than 5% of the smart-speaker market, according to an estimate last week from Strategy Analytics.

Also under discussion at Apple is whether to let users set competing music services as the default with Siri on iPhones and iPads, the people said. Currently, Apple Music is the default music app. If the company changes the arrangement, a user would be able to play music from Spotify or Pandora automatically when asking Siri for a song.

The potential changes to third-party apps on Apple’s devices and the HomePod are still under discussion or early development, and final decisions haven’t been made, the people said. If Apple chooses to go forward with the moves, they could appear as soon as later this year via the upcoming iOS 14 software update and a corresponding HomePod software update, the people said.

Apple typically announces major new iPhone and iPad software versions in June, and releases them in September around the launch of new iPhone models. For this year’s update, Apple is also planning to focus on performance and quality because the current version, iOS 13, has been riddled with bugs that upset some users.