Minimum-Wage Offensive Could Speed Arrival of Robot-Powered Restaurants
August 17th, 2015“Enjoy any higher minimum wages while you can because the Rise of the Machines grinds steadily onward, and the goal is to eliminate as many human workers from corporate payrolls as possible.”
—Seattle Hikes Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
Via: Washington Post:
The avalanche of rising costs is why franchisers are aggressively looking for technology that can allow them to produce more food faster with higher quality and lower waste. Dave Brewer is chief operating officer with Middleby Corp., which owns dozens of kitchen equipment brands, and is constantly developing new ways to optimize performance and minimize cost.
“The miracle is, the wage increase is driving the interest,” Brewer said. “But the innovation and the automation, they’re going after it even before the wages go up. Why wait?”
Fab11: Making Robots
August 16th, 2015Via: YouTube:
NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’
August 15th, 2015NSAT&T: Since 1985.
Via: ProPublica:
The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.
While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”
AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.
The NSA’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.
One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting: “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”
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Fairview is one of its oldest programs. It began in 1985, the year after antitrust regulators broke up the Ma Bell telephone monopoly and its long-distance division became AT&T Communications. An analysis of the Fairview documents by The Times and ProPublica reveals a constellation of evidence that points to AT&T as that program’s partner. Several former intelligence officials confirmed that finding.
Flashback 2007: AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
NSA Preparing Quantum Resistant Encryption Algorithms
August 15th, 2015Via: National Security Agency:
IAD recognizes that there will be a move, in the not distant future, to a quantum resistant algorithm suite. Based on experience in deploying Suite B, we have determined to start planning and communicating early about the upcoming transition to quantum resistant algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to provide cost effective security against a potential quantum computer. We are working with partners across the USG, vendors, and standards bodies to ensure there is a clear plan for getting a new suite of algorithms that are developed in an open and transparent manner that will form the foundation of our next Suite of cryptographic algorithms.
Until this new suite is developed and products are available implementing the quantum resistant suite, we will rely on current algorithms. For those partners and vendors that have not yet made the transition to Suite B algorithms, we recommend not making a significant expenditure to do so at this point but instead to prepare for the upcoming quantum resistant algorithm transition.
For those vendors and partners that have already transitioned to Suite B, we recognize that this took a great deal of effort on your part, and we thank you for your efforts. We look forward to your continued support as we work together to improve information security for National Security customers against the threat of a quantum computer being developed. Unfortunately, the growth of elliptic curve use has bumped up against the fact of continued progress in the research on quantum computing, necessitating a re-evaluation of our cryptographic strategy.
Related: Microsoft: Securing Today’s Data Against Tomorrow’s Quantum Computers
Apple Is Building a Self-Driving Car in Silicon Valley
August 14th, 2015Via: Guardian:
Apple is building a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is scouting for secure locations in the San Francisco Bay area to test it, the Guardian has learned. Documents show the oft-rumoured Apple car project appears to be further along than many suspected.
In May, engineers from Apple’s secretive Special Project group met with officials from GoMentum Station, a 2,100-acre former naval base near San Francisco that is being turned into a high-security testing ground for autonomous vehicles.
In correspondence obtained by the Guardian under a public records act request, Apple engineer Frank Fearon wrote: “We would … like to get an understanding of timing and availability for the space, and how we would need to coordinate around other parties who would be using [it].”
Apple declined to comment.
GoMentum Station is on the old Concord naval weapons station, a disused second world war-era facility with 20 miles of paved highways and city streets. The base is closed to the public and guarded by the military, making it, officials claim, “the largest secure test facility in the world” for the “testing validation and commercialization of connected vehicle (CV) applications and autonomous vehicles (AV) technologies to define the next generation of transportation network infrastructure.” Mercedes-Benz and Honda have already carried out experiments with self-driving cars behind its barbed-wire fences.
This security is bound to appeal to Apple, which has hundreds of engineers quietly working on automotive technologies in an anonymous office building in Sunnyvale, four miles from its main campus in Cupertino. Details of the project are still unknown but it seems that Apple has a self-driving car almost ready for the road. In late May, Jack Hall, program manager for autonomous vehicles at GoMentum Station, wrote to Fearon to postpone a tour of the facility but noted: “We would still like to meet in order to keep everything moving and to meet your testing schedule.”
Tianjin Explosions
August 13th, 2015Via: Guardian:
Armed troops and elite military units trained to handle nuclear, biological and chemical disasters are being dispatched to the scene of a deadly explosion in northern China as Beijing vowed to deploy “every resource available” to help survivors.
At least 50 deaths have been confirmed and 701 people admitted to hospital with injuries – 71 of those said to be “severe” – after a fire at warehouse containing “dangerous chemicals” sparked a series of blasts on Wednesday night.
By Thursday afternoon at least 1,000 firefighters were attempting to bring the flames under control around the main disaster zone, a portside industrial estate in Tianjin.
Around 10,000 medical staff were working at 10 different hospitals to treat survivors, Zhang Yong, a local Communist party official, told a press conference. “We will bring things back on track as soon as possible,” he said.
New Competition for Tesla: Fisker to Open Factory in Riverside County
August 13th, 2015Update: Audi to Build a Tesla Competitor
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Via: Los Angeles Times:
Southern California is in the car business again.
Fisker Automotive has signed a deal to lease a large factory in Moreno Valley, where it will begin building plug-in electric hybrid vehicles that could be offered for sale as early as the middle of next year.
The region, the nation’s biggest car market, has not been home to an automobile manufacturing plant since General Motors closed a Van Nuys facility in 1992.
The admired but beleaguered luxury carmaker, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013 and was purchased by Chinese auto parts giant Wanxiang Group a year later, has signed an 11-year lease worth an estimated $30 million in the Riverside County city — signaling a long-term commitment by the company.
The assembly plant, part of a growing network of alternative-fuel technology companies putting down roots in California, will be the state’s second electric car manufacturing factory, joining entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors plant in the Bay Area city of Fremont.
Facial Recognition Software Moves From Overseas Wars to Local Police
August 12th, 2015The countries that run ECHELON, the largest civilian communications surveillance program in the world, have developed unified standards for biometric identification.
See how this might look in the future by looking at Iraq. That’s the beta testing phase for what’s in store for the rest of us.
Via: New York Times:
Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of police departments around the country to pursue drug dealers, prostitutes and other conventional criminal suspects. But because it is being used with few guidelines and with little oversight or public disclosure, it is raising questions of privacy and concerns about potential misuse.
Chinese Military Trains Students to Control Machines with Their Minds
August 12th, 2015The source article is in Chinese.
So, Daily Mail warning.
Via: Daily Mail:
Forget joysticks and exoskeletons, the future of warfare could see robot armies controlled using just a commander’s mind.
China has been training students at a military academy to use headsets that detect and interpret the brain activity of the wearer, allowing them to control the machines.
At a demonstration at the People’s Liberation Army Information Engineering University in Zhengzhou, students used the device to send robots trundling in different directions.
They were also able to turn the robot’s heads and get them to pick up objects.
The technology uses a brain computer interface known as a electroencephalograph, which uses electrodes embedded in a cap to detect tiny changes in the electrical activity of the brain.
By training a computer to recognise particular patterns that accompany commands, such as turn left or turn right, this can be then transmitted to control the robot.
The technology is being developed at the military academy’s laboratory for brain-machine coordination.
The Coddling of the American Mind
August 12th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.
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The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.
