I used to think April Fools Day was interesting. Companies and people brought out clever web jokes, many of them subtle and almost believable. Some were entertaining, some were cringeworthy, but few were offensive.

Now, the whole thing is just extraordinarily annoying. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old and crabby. It could be because of my friend Nev who has taken up residence in my brain. It’s possible that it makes me feel like my tech news feeds have been invaded by the same kind of endless nonsense that now invades all other news feeds.

Or maybe it’s just easier to skip a day on the web, let people do whatever they are going to do, and pick it up on again on April 2nd.

In the meantime, if you want to play the classic game of Snake, Google Maps has you covered today.

PewDiePie (real name Felix Kjellberg) has intensified his battle for YouTube dominance with Bollywood music company T-Series by releasing a video "congratulating" the rival channel.

PewDiePie and T-Series have been neck-and-neck for months in the battle to be the subscribed-to channel on YouTube. PewDiePie had previously held the number one spot since 2013.

Read more: PewDiePie's huge campaign to swat away T-Series and keep his YouTube crown is slowing down

T-Series has edged ahead a few times, and this weekend overtook PewDiePie once again. On March 31, PewDiePie released a music video entitled "Congratulations" mocking the Bollywood channel.

In the video, PewDiePie made reference to a Times of India article from December last year about T-Series chairman Bhushan Kumar being questioned over tax evasion. It also alluded to a sexual harassment accusation levelled against Kumar in October. Kumar denied the allegation.

The song also references an issue that has been at the heart of the competition: That PewDiePie as an independent vlogger represents the soul of YouTube, while T-Series is a corporate interloper.

"Yeah, you did it, very nice. And all it took was a massive corporate entity with every song in Bollywood," PewDiePie raps on the diss track. It's why he has garnered support from other YouTubers, like Logan Paul.

PewDiePie's campaign to guard his title against T-Series was also endorsed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who went on PewDiePie's show with "Rick and Morty" co-creator Justin Roiland in February in a bid to win more subscribers.

The campaign was also referred to by the suspected gunman of the New Zealand mosque attacks in March, who said "Subscribe to PewDiePie" during a Facebook live stream of the attack. PewDiePie said he was "sickened" by the reference.

In another video commenting on the battle for subs, PewDiePie joked: "Who cares about sub count anyway? It was just a troll, it was just a big troll."

Raghu Rai is CEO and founder of Jio Health

British tech unicorn Darktrace posted a 93% jump in revenue last year, striking a positive note as the company tries to distance itself from a $5 billion courtroom drama involving one of its major backers.

According to filings with the UK's Companies House, Darktrace saw an increase in its pre-tax losses, but the overall story through 2018 was one of growth. It has more than doubled its headcount, with the new employees mostly across sales and marketing, and research and development.

The firm said it had bookings worth $209 million in the year to the end of June 2018, although it's worth noting that this isn't the same as revenue.

Here are the key financial numbers for the year to 30 June 2018:

Darktrace did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its results.

Darktrace bills itself as a cybersecurity startup that uses artificial intelligence to detect viruses and other threats to an organisation's IT systems. It hit a valuation of $1.65 billion after raising $50 million last September from backers such as Vitruvian Partners.

Darktrace's origins are deeply connected to British investor and entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his investment fund Invoke Capital. Lynch was Darktrace's first backer through Invoke, which filings show currently holds 41% of the startup's shares.

Former Autonomy CEO and Darktrace investor Mike Lynch. HENRY NICHOLLS/Reuters

He made his money after founding UK enterprise software firm Autonomy, and selling it to HP for $11 billion in 2011. It remains one of the biggest acquisitions of a UK tech company to date.

The deal was a disaster and HP is now suing Lynch and another former executive for $5 billion in the UK's High Court, alleging that the pair committed fraud and made Autonomy appear more valuable than it really was. Lynch is also facing criminal charges in the US.

Darktrace has sought to distance itself from its backer's legal troubles, with Lynch resigning from the firm's board in November 2018 to avoid "distraction."

But Darktrace and Invoke Capital are both inextricably linked to Autonomy, a connection that is being highlighted in the ongoing High Court trial which kicked off last week.

Darktrace co-CEO Poppy Gustafsson and its board member Andrew Kanter are acting as witnesses for Lynch, his lawyers told the court last week. Gustafsson was formerly Autonomy's corporate controller, while Kanter, now an Invoke Capital partner, was its COO.

Darktrace's other CEO, Nicole Eagan, was also a former Autonomy executive, and a second board member, Vanessa Colomar, was Autonomy's SVP of communications.

I woke up this morning with my eyes glued shut. That was pretty disorienting. I wasn’t a character in a Dean Koontz novel, but I was relieved when I realized that I had conjunctivitis, as I’m not sure what I would have done if my eyes were sewn shut with fishing line.

After I sorted myself out, I remembered that I was supposed to be running the Knoxville Marathon today. I would have been just finishing up when I woke up, so I had a wave a sadness come over me. I took a long shower, letting the hot water run down my face, with a fantasy that it would wash away all the goo (both current and future) in my eyes.

It’s late in the afternoon in Boulder and I’ve taken two naps today. Neither were pretty – they were both sweaty, emotional, dream-filled messes with plenty of eye goo involved. I’m loaded up on Tylenol, but the pounding in my sinuses is unrelenting. I’m not able to take decongestants/antihistamines anymore, as they wreak unpleasant havoc on a part of me completely unrelated to what they are supposed to help with.

This cold came on hard on Tuesday. I haven’t been sick all winter and have felt good since November after a summer of physical misery that ended with a 60-day course of Cipro, ensuring that an enormous amount of bacteria in me – both the good kind and the bad kind – was very dead.

I know that I’m a whiny sick person. I also know that being sick tilts me toward depression. I’m lucky that Amy knows this also and takes amazing care of me when I’m sick.

I’ve felt a crash coming since Friday. I’ve been grinding through the work that I have, some of which has deadlines before I go on vacation in a week. I know I can tell the deadline enforcers that I’m sick and things will have to wait a few weeks, but then I’ll just have a bigger pile of backed up stuff to do, which just feels like an awful additional burden. And yes, I realize I’m procrastinating by writing this blog post, but I am also waiting for the full function version of Adobe Acrobat to download since I need to use it to edit the Adobe files I’m sending back to Wiley soon.

I know that every human being gets sick on a periodic basis. I also know that this particular cold (which I call Nev – Nasty Evil Virus), which has morphed into a cold + bacterial infection, is minor compared to what most people encounter on their time on this planet. I also know that my resources make it even easier for me to deal with something like this.

When I reflect on this, I still feel shitty, but I have context for how I feel. We all have periodic crashes of different levels of severity (and one that has ultimate finality), but that doesn’t make it any easier to work through the moment.

And yes, I’m looking very forward to my vacation.

A $1 billion Israeli intelligence startup accused of helping Saudi Arabia track its adversaries could be the key to new assertions from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' security consultant Gavin de Becker.

In an op-ed published in The Daily Beast on Saturday, de Becker said his team concluded that Saudi Arabia "had access to Bezos' phone and gained private information," following its investigation into how Bezos' texts with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez ended up in the hands of The National Enquirer.

A foreign government surveilling a powerful American CEO using advanced technologies? It sounds like the stuff of a spy novel.

But as it turns out, tracking people's cell phones is a well-established practice, and the technology behind it — known as "lawful intercept spyware" — is a $12 billion industry.

Software can track texts, emails and apps

While De Becker stopped short of asserting how Saudi Arabia accessed Bezos' phone, his op-ed linked out to a New York Times article on "internet mercenaries" including NSO Group, DarkMatter, and Black Cube — companies which use technological prowess to put advanced spying techniques in the hands of governments around the globe.

The most established is NSO Group, $1 billion Israeli startup that's open about its mission to help "government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.'

NSO Group was founded in 2008 by Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie to help cell phone providers gain access to their customer's phones to perform maintenance.

Since then, the company has helped Saudi Arabia "track its adversaries," helped Mexico "hunt drug kingpins," and made millions of dollars doing similar work for dozens of different governments, according to an investigation by the Times.

NSO Group's main technology Pegasus came out in 2011. Pegasus lets its users collect remote data from smartphone apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype, as well as texts, emails, calls and location data, from "the air without leaving a trace," according to the Times.

While helping Mexico catch drug criminals is within NSO Group's stated mission, the company is at the center of a lawsuit which alleges its technology was used by Saudi Arabia to spy on journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

NSO Group has also worked with the United Arab Emirates, which was caught installing NSO's software on the cell phone of human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor, according to the Times.

NSO faces steep competition

Disney's "Dumbo" is having a bumpy takeoff.

It's uncommon for a Disney IP to not hit its industry box office projections or surpass it, but that's what's happened to the latest live-action remake of the Disney classic animated movie.

Tim Burton's look at lovable Jumbo Jr. (budgeted at $170 million, not counting marketing) took in an estimated $45 million over the weekend, that's below the $50 million most of the industry predicted it to make this weekend.

Playing on over 4,200 screens, Disney gave the movie the ability to be another one of its many hits, despite having a feeling audiences weren't going to run to see a movie about an elephant with big floppy ears who is split up from his mother. When reviews for "Dumbo" officially went online, Disney released its "Avenge the Fallen" character posters for its upcoming "Avengers: Endgame" Marvel movie, which went viral and numbed some of the negative "Dumbo" reviews (the movie is only sporting a 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

Read more: Jai Courtney says he will be back playing Captain Boomerang in the James Gunn "Suicide Squad" movie

The "Dumbo" opening is a far cry from Burton's last live-action remake for Disney. 2010's "Alice in Wonderland" had a $116 million opening, strengthened by the 3D craze of the time. The movie went on to earn $1 billion. The opening for "Dumbo" didn't do as strongly as Disney live-action movies like 2014's "Maleficent" ($69.4 million) and 2015's "Cinderella" ($67.8 million), but did better than the studios' previous live-action remake, "Christopher Robin" ($24.6 million).

Coming in second place for the weekend was Universal's "Us," bringing in $33.6 million. The Jordan Peele movie has earned over $100 million domestically (it was made for $20 million). Peele is now the first African-American writer-director with multiple movies to gross $100 million (the other being "Get Out").

Neon's ambitious release of Harmony Korine movie "The Beach Bum" didn't turn out so well. The movie played on over 1,000 screens but only brought in $1.8 million. That's the lowest wide-release opening ever for a Matthew McConaughey movie (performing worse than the $4.4 million opening for his movie "Serenity" earlier this year).

Jeff Bezos' security chief Gavin de Becker said in a column published Saturday that the Saudi government had access to the Amazon chief's phone and gained private information from it.

De Becker wrote in The Daily Beast that he could confirm the connection after an extensive investigation into the publication, which was sparked by reports targeting Bezos in tabloids owned by American Media Inc.

"Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos' phone, and gained private information," de Becker wrote. "As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details."

In February, Bezos alleged in a widely-read Medium post that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him by threatening to publish intimate text messages and photos. He also revealed that he had launched an investigation after a January exposé on his relationship with Sanchez to find out how the paper obtained the private information in the piece.

Read more: These are the main players in the explosive saga of Jeff Bezos' love life and his war with the National Enquirer

Bezos drew a connection in the letter between the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and American Media Inc., specifically accusing owner David Pecker of trying to blackmail him unless he publicly declared that the tabloid's reporting on him had no political motivation.

Days after Bezos' post, AMI attorney Elkhan Ambramowitz doubled down on the paper's commitment to their explanation that Sanchez's brother had been the only source, flatly denying any connection to the Trump administration and the media company's ties to Saudi Arabia.

De Becker points to an appearance by Abramowitz on ABC as perhaps the most concerted effort to throw blame on Sanchez's brother for the revealing materials in the January story, when he insisted that the source was "not Saudi Arabia" but a "person that was known to both Bezos and Ms. Sanchez."

This statement was marred by reports from the Wall Street Journal and Page Six that said the Enquirer came to Sanchez after it knew about the relationship, de Becker said, which suggests there were other sources.

Numerous outlets suggested that Saudi Arabia's alleged role in AMI's pursuit of Bezos was motivated by Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post, which created diplomatic issues for the country through its dogged reporting on the killing of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, last October.

Bezos acknowledged in his February post that his ownership of the Post was a "complexifier," and De Becker wrote in the Beast that the Saudi government had been threatening Bezos since October.

The kingdom reportedly denies any connection, as well as any responsibility for Khashoggi's death.

De Becker also points to owner Pecker as a central figure in the paper's Saudi connections, ushering in glowing coverage for Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, including an advanced copy of a magazine that the prince and his aides had a chance to edit.

De Becker's investigation reportedly relied on interviews with "current and former AMI executives and sources," "top Middle East experts in the intelligence community," "leading cybersecurity experts who have tracked Saudi spyware," "discussions with current and former advisers to President Trump," "Saudi whistleblowers," and "people who personally know the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman."

De Becker also wrote that he has turned over his investigation's findings to US federal officials and will be releasing no further details.

Morgan Stanley is trying to tamper investor excitement for General Motor's Cruise robo-taxi unit.

In a note to clients this week, the Wall Street bank told clients that the self-driving department may not ever turn revenue if it can't remove backup safety drivers from the cars.

"While we think GM Cruise has important technological value, we urge investors to lower expectations on revenue generation and profitability of the unit," analyst Adam Jonas told clients in a research note.

"Taking nothing away from GM cruise, it is our understanding that the technology required to remove human drivers at an acceptable level of consumer safety is likely many years away," he continued. "And the legal and regulatory construct to support, even proven technology, may present even greater hurdles largely outside of GM Cruise's control."

Jonas is far from the first to downplay the hype around self-driving cars.

Take Google's Waymo, for instance, which is running the only consumer-facing, revenue-driving self-driving fleet. Even Waymo still has backup drivers in cars, making the service a de-facto Uber ride, for all practical purposes.

GM's hope is that Cruise can soon operate without a driver — and eventually in a car that doesn't even have a steering whee l. Federal regulators have opened up that possibility to the public in a 60-day comment period on GM's 15-month old proposal.

High-profile incidents, like the killing of a pedestrian in Arizona by an Uber self-driving car in 2018, have added to some skepticism of the technology. Still, given the massive number of road deaths each year in the US, advocates point to more safety with robots at the wheel than humans.

"We are constructive on the development of autonomous cars, but see room for the market to elongate the adoption curve scenarios," Jonas said. "Given the technological challenge as well as the legal and regulatory framework."

Average demand expressions: 25,549,346

Description: "DOOM PATROL reimagines one of DC's most beloved groups of Super Heroes: Robotman aka Cliff Steele (BRENDAN FRASER), Negative Man aka Larry Trainor (MATT BOMER), Elasti-Woman aka Rita Farr (APRIL BOWLBY) and Crazy Jane (DIANE GUERRERO), led by modern-day mad scientist Niles Caulder aka The Chief (TIMOTHY DALTON). Each member of the Doom Patrol suffered a horrible accident that gave them superhuman abilities, but also left them scarred and disfigured. Traumatized and downtrodden, the team found their purpose through The Chief, coming together to investigate the weirdest phenomena in existence. Following the mysterious disappearance of The Chief these reluctant heroes will find themselves in a place they never expected to be, called to action by none other than Cyborg (JOIVAN WADE), who comes to them with a mission hard to refuse. Part support group, part Super Hero team, the Doom Patrol is a band of superpowered freaks who fight for a world that wants nothing to do with them."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score (Season 1): 94%

What critics said: "This adaptation from executive producers Geoff Johns and Greg Berlanti is just as wonderful and weird as the comic." — Mark A. Perigard, Boston Herald

Season 2 premiered on DC Universe February 15.

The 2,100-person town of Longyearbyen endures four months of perpetual darkness in the winter, followed by four months of sunlight in the summer. The area boasts more polar bears than people and a bustling adventure-tourism economy. It's also home to the most important agricultural safeguard in the world.

Buried inside a mountain in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, the Global Seed Vault — often referred to as the doomsday seed vault — stores back-up seeds for every one of humanity's food crops. The vault's location and design protect its contents from the effects of sunlight, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, warfare, and political strife.

The idea is that in the event of a global disaster, people from anywhere in the world should be able to withdraw seeds for crops that they'd need to re-grow.

But Longyearbyen is no longer as invulnerable as scientists initially thought when it opened in 2008. A new report from the Norwegian Centre for Climate Services warns that increasing Arctic temperatures are putting the seed vault and the surrounding area at risk.

An 'insurance policy for the world's food supply'

Currently, the Global Seed Vault holds more than 983,500 seed samples — seeds from almost every country in the world — according to the Crop Trust, which oversees the vault in partnership with the Norwegian government. The group calls the vault the "ultimate insurance policy for the world's food supply."

The seeds are sealed in three-ply foil packages that are stored in boxes shelved inside the vault. Scientists can only access the vault via a 400-foot-long tunnel. To deposit seeds, they must pass through five doors with coded locks.

The only way into the vault is a 400-foot-long tunnel. AP Photo/John McConnico

The air in the Global Seed Vault is kept at a constant temperature just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 18 degrees Celsius). The vault was designed so that even if its power goes out, the seed contents would to stay frozen for 200 years. That's because the space is set more than 300 feet deep into the side of a mountain and buried in permafrost — a layer of soil that remains frozen all year long.

Read More: Staggering photos show what life is like in the world's northernmost town, where it's dark 4 months of the year and you're likely to run into a polar bear

But that built-in refrigeration mechanism is showing signs of fallibility.

The doomsday seed vault's natural refrigeration may melt away

In 2017, record temperatures and heavy rainfall caused melt-water to breach the vault's tunnel. Fortunately, the water didn't reach the seeds.

"A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in," vault owner Hege Njaa Aschim told the Guardian at the time. "The question is whether this is just happening now, or will it escalate?"

Since then, Arctic temperatures have continued to go up due to climate change, and that's causing the permafrost to thaw. A new report from the Norwegian Centre for Climate Service warns that the future of the Global Seed Vault is even more up in the air than it was in 2017.

Longyearbyen endures four months of perpetual darkness during the winter.Mari Tefre/Svalbard Globale frøhvelv/Flickr

The report's authors project that surrounding air temperatures will increase by 18 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to increase at current rates. They also warn that instances of heavy rainfall in the Svalbard area will get more frequent, with 45% to 65% more annual precipitation than we see today. More water, of course, means more melting, floods, and avalanches.

What's more, the scientists reported that Svalbard has the warmest permafrost this far north in the Arctic. If emissions continue, permafrost near the surface (anything less than 32 feet deep or so) in western Svalbard is projected to thaw and perhaps completely disappear by the next century.

Even if emissions are reduced according to the Paris climate agreement goals, the Arctic permafrost is still expected to shrink by 45%, according to a report from the United Nations. That could create a feedback loop that would release trapped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to additional warming.

As Aschim recently told CNN, "we can't trust the permafrost anymore."

Coastal ice melts in the city of Longyearbyen, in Norway's Svalbard Islands, on February 27, 2008. John McConnico/AP

Inger Hanssen-Bauer, the editor of the new report, told CNN that the climate in Longyearbyen is probably warming faster than in any other town on Earth. The town's annual average temperature about 120 years ago was 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Since then, the average has gone up by almost 7 degrees Fahrenheit — nearly triple the worldwide average increase of about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius).

In anticipation of these challenges, the seed vault is getting expensive upgrades. The vault originally cost about $9 million to build, but subsequent upgrades will likely add up to more than 1.5 times that much — upwards of $12 million.

These upgrades include the construction of a new concrete access tunnel, as well as a service building to house emergency power and refrigeration units.

"It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security," Norway's Minister of Agriculture and Food Jon Georg Dale said last year.

However, Norwegian government officials haven't yet given a timeline for the completion of the new projects.