Archive for the 'Technology' Category
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 […]
California to Allow Testing of Self-Driving Cars Without a Driver Present
February 27th, 2018Thinking about the security side of this sends a chill down my spine. We’ve all heard of botnets. We’re probably not more than a couple of years away from the first botnet consisting of thousands of autonomous vehicles. I have roughly zero confidence that the security around autonomous vehicles will be sufficient to prevent this […]
Kids Use Tech So Much They Can’t Hold A Pencil Anymore, Doctors Say
February 26th, 2018Swipetarded parents. Swipetarded children. This should be a boon for the public school to private prison gravy train. Via: Guardian: Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior paediatric doctors have warned. An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children’s finger muscles […]
Apple Confirms It Uses Google’s Cloud for iCloud
February 26th, 2018Via: CNBC: A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it’s relying on Google’s public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services. The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google’s cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the […]
Apple Moves to Store iCloud Keys in China, Raising Human Rights Fears
February 24th, 2018Via: Reuters: When Apple Inc begins hosting Chinese users’ iCloud accounts in a new Chinese data center at the end of this month to comply with new laws there, Chinese authorities will have far easier access to text messages, email and other data stored in the cloud. That’s because of a change to how the […]
Daimler’s Truck Boss Thinks Tesla Semi Specs Defy Laws of Physics, Musk Thinks Production Tesla Semi Will Exceed Specs for Same Price
February 24th, 2018Via: Electrek: As we reported last week and discussed on the Electrek podcast yesterday, many people still have a difficult time wrapping their head around the Tesla Semi specs that the company announced last year. But now CEO Elon Musk says that he is ‘optimistic’ they can beat those specs with the production version of […]
