Archive for the 'Technology' Category
SpaceX’s Unnerving Silence on an Explosive Incident
April 30th, 2019Via: The Atlantic: The smoke was visible for miles. The day, April 20, was sunny on the Florida coast, with few clouds. The plumes, thick and glowing orange, rose over the horizon and crawled across the sky. Beachgoers stopped to stare. A photographer for Florida Today, on assignment to cover a surf festival, turned the […]
Censorship – The First Action of a Criminal Government
April 29th, 2019Via: The Crow House: Research Credit: LoneWolf
Poway Synagogue Shooting: Minecraft References in John T. Earnest’s Manifesto
April 28th, 2019Update: It’s a Joke Used on 8chan SK writes: The “It’s easy to do {{felony}} . . . In Minecraft” is an 8chan idiom to suggest the author had plausible deniability in making the statement. I don’t think it’s taken as a true legal defense as much as a running joke. Given the content of […]
Retailers Are Tracking Where You Shop – and Where You Sleep
April 27th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Retailers are following the trail of electronic bread crumbs left by millions of customers. And it’s helping them at a time when the industry is suffering. They’re buying mobile-phone data that can track where and for how long people shop, eat, see movies — and where they go before and after. It allows […]
Walmart Experiments with AI to Monitor Stores in Real Time
April 25th, 2019Enable face recognition so the system can tempt Bubba with three cents off his next bag of Doritos with alerts on his phone as he’s standing in front of the chips. Via: AP: Inside one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market grocery stores, high resolution cameras suspended from the ceiling point to a table of bananas. […]
Amazon Automatically Tracks and Fires Warehouse Workers for ‘Productivity’
April 25th, 2019Via: The Verge: The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)
Ford Motor to Put $500 Million Into Electric Vehicle Startup Rivian
April 24th, 2019Panic: With Ford, who wants to increasingly focus on milking truck profits, it could get ugly over there in a couple of years when Rivian and Tesla enter the pickup truck market. Ford only has a hybrid F-150 planned for 2020. Via: Reuters: Ford Motor Co said on Wednesday it will invest $500 million in […]
Amazon’s Alexa Reviewers Can Access Customers’ Home Addresses
April 24th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program. The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The […]
The Pentagon Is Investing in Space Robots to Repair Satellites
April 24th, 2019Via: Nextgov: The Pentagon’s research office wants to send robots into space to inspect and repair the nation’s satellites. Today the U.S. has more than 400 military, government and commercial satellites circling the globe in geosynchronous Earth orbit, or GEO, a celestial path about 22,000 miles above the ground. These high-altitude satellites are ideal for […]
DHS Plan for Face Scanning at Airports Sparks Alarm
April 24th, 2019Via: The Hill: Lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt plans to begin using facial recognition technology on nearly all departing air passengers within the next four years. The agency’s plan has reignited the fight over the sensitive technology. Critics say facial recognition technology is not […]
