Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police
April 13th, 2019Via: New York Times: The warrants, which draw on an enormous Google database employees call Sensorvault, turn the business of tracking cellphone users’ locations into a digital dragnet for law enforcement. In an era of ubiquitous data gathering by tech companies, it is just the latest example of how personal information — where you go, […]
Amazon Workers Listening to the Inane Ramblings of Alexa Users to Train AI
April 10th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a […]
Walmart Is Rolling Out the Robots
April 10th, 2019Via: Wall Street Journal: Walmart Inc. is expanding its use of robots in stores to help monitor inventory, clean floors and unload trucks, part of the retail giant’s efforts to control labor costs as it spends more to raise wages and offer new services like online grocery delivery.
Prison Labor: Inmates in Finland Are Training AI
March 29th, 2019Via: The Verge: “Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other […]
Boston Dynamics: Handle Robot
March 29th, 2019Via: Boston Dynamics: Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets. The on-board vision system on Handle tracks the marked pallets for navigation and finds individual boxes for grasping and placing. When Handle places a boxes onto a […]
How Android Phones Keep Tabs On Our Every Move
March 29th, 2019I wouldn’t encourage the use of Apple’s mobile devices as an alternative, but Android is essentially malware. Via: El País: As a consumer, you buy a new Android cellphone. It could be any brand, but it is likely to be an Android as they account for more than 80% of today’s cellphone market. You open […]
U.S. Government Will Be Scanning Faces at 20 Top Airports
March 13th, 2019Via: BuzzFeed: For Hasbrouck, the big takeaway is that the broad surveillance of people in airports amounts to a kind of “individualized control of citizenry” — not unlike what’s already happening with the social credit scoring system in China. “There are already people who aren’t allowed on, say, a high-speed train because their social credit […]
China’s “Democracy” Includes Mandatory Apps, Mass Chat Surveillance
March 7th, 2019Change the proper nouns and it would read like the situation in Europe or the U.S. Via: ArsTechnica: As the National People’s Congress gathers in Beijing for the beginning of China’s “Two Sessions” political season, state media is making an international propaganda push on social media—including on platforms blocked by China’s “Great Firewall”—to promote China’s […]
Trump Cancels U.S. Report on Civilian Deaths in Drone Strikes
March 7th, 2019Via: Fortune: President Donald Trump revoked a requirement that U.S. intelligence officials publicly report the number of civilians killed in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones. Trump formally ended the requirement with an executive order on Wednesday, months after signaling such a move. The administration last year ignored a […]
FedEx Package-Delivering Robot Can Climb Stairs, Carry Hot Food, and Replace Human Workers
March 7th, 2019Via: Business Insider: FedEx revealed a cutting-edge robot on Wednesday that can deliver packages and hot food from stores and restaurants to customers’ homes. The FedEx Same-Day Bot will be hitting the streets this summer in select markets, including Memphis, Tennessee, the company said. FedEx said it collaborated with retailers including Walmart, Target, Lowe’s, Pizza […]
