Archive for the 'Technology' Category
FBI Used Geek Squad Technicians as Informants
March 8th, 2018Via: EFF: After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants. EFF filed a Freedom of […]
Google’s AI Is Being Used by U.S. Military Drone Program
March 8th, 2018“For non-offensive uses only.” *snort* Via: Guardian: Google’s artificial intelligence technologies are being used by the US military for one of its drone projects, causing controversy both inside and outside the company. Google’s TensorFlow AI systems are being used by the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Project Maven, which was established in July last year […]
Self Driving Uber Trucks Start Shuttling Goods Across Arizona
March 6th, 2018Via: USA Today: Uber has been sending self-driving trucks on delivery runs across Arizona since November, the first step in what promises to be a freight transportation revolution that could radically reshape the jobs of long-haul truckers. After testing its technology earlier in 2017, Uber began contracting with trucking companies to use its own autonomous […]
Is Google Going Underground With Hypersonic Tech?
March 6th, 2018Via: IEEE: Google is carrying out research on hypersonics, probably for new technologies to slash the cost of geothermal energy and tunneling. It could also be acquiring a Washington-based startup called HyperSciences that has already built prototype devices. … The technology being developed by HyperSciences should make it cheaper to reach much higher temperatures even […]
YOUTUBE DELETES ENTIRE HEALTH RANGER VIDEO CHANNEL
March 4th, 2018The Health Ranger YouTube channel is currently returning: “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” Well, I went through being added to Google’s shit list over a decade ago. So… I have no idea why people who deal with alternative information continue to rely on Google’s platforms, given the company’s long history […]
40Hz Audio and Visual Stimuli and Alzheimer’s
March 2nd, 2018Via: Nature: In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering strobe. The mice — which had been engineered to produce plaques of the peptide amyloid-? in the brain, a […]
Tor Is a Foreign Policy Weapon of the U.S. Government
March 2nd, 2018Via: Yasha Levine: For years, the Tor Project — along with other U.S. government crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First […]
The Disturbing Acceptance of Google’s New ‘Smart’ Camera
March 1st, 2018Via: The Week: In the reviews that rolled out recently for Google’s new Clips smart camera, there were the rote things that you’d expect in all tech reviews: what was good, what was bad, and, inevitably, whether or not you should buy it. There was, however, a key idea conspicuously absent: whether or not the […]
Former Google Exec: Don’t Worry About Terminator Robots for Another Decade or Two
March 1st, 2018Via: Defense News: Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and military robotics have some concerned that the development of Terminator-like killer robots will be humankind’s downfall. But that doesn’t seem to worry Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, who addressed the impact of technology on democracy at the Feb. 16-18 Munich […]
Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology
February 28th, 2018Via: The Verge: The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago […]
