Seattle Amazon Employee Tests + for Coronavirus; 14.1 Inch MacBook Pro Coming; Facebook-New Anti-Spam Tool; Google Cancels I/O

An Amazon employee in Seattle has tested positive for coronavirus. Geekwire.com reports that the person went home sick February 25th, and later tested positive for COVID-19. Amazon has notified other employees who came into close contact with the infected individual. The employee worked in Amazon’s Brazil building at 400 9th Ave N, near downtown.

Well reputed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says 6 new Apple products are coming this year with mini-LED displays, including a 14.1 inch MacBook Pro. In a story picked up by 9to5mac.com, Kuo also says they will release mini-LED screens in a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, a 27 inch iMac Pro, 16 inch MacBook Pro, a 10.2 inch iPad, and a 7.9 inch iPad. No release dates, but Kuo says the iMac Pro will drop 4th quarter. Why mini-LED screens? Apple is interested in adopting mini-LED screen panels for the rich wide color gamut, high contrast ratios, high dynamic range, and localized dimming. mini-LED is also believed to result in thinner panels that are more power-efficient, and they do not suffer from burn-in like OLED.

Trying to get rid of fake accounts is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole for social media like Facebook. Now, zdnet.com says Facebook engineers have cooked up a more efficient machine learning tool which has already helped the platform to kill 6.6 billion fake accounts in the past year. Facebook notes that there are additional millions of attempts to create fake accounts daily that they are able to block. They call the tech behind the takedown tool Deep Entity Classification. It looks for the “deep features” of each account, which are the behavioral patterns of profiles, rather than the direct characteristics of an account. In other words, instead of only registering details like the creation date of an account or the number of friend requests it has sent, DEP also looks at all of the properties of the profiles, groups or pages that a particular user has made contact with. It can reportedly catalog up to 20,000 unique features per account, and gives them a way to squash fake accounts that is super hard to reverse engineer. Of course, spammers will take this as a challenge!

Due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, Google won’t hold its I/O 2020. According to 9to5google.com, Google is looking at some sort of alternative format, like doing events and interactive learning sessions online. Since they already have been streaming all the keynotes and sessions on YouTube, it may be that they can announce an alternative I/O pretty quickly….stay tuned.