Homeland Security’s Massive New Database Will Include Face Recognition, DNA, and Peoples’ “Non-Obvious Relationships”
June 10th, 2018Via: EFF:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it.
The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.
“Those People Who Dug the Big Hole Under Switzerland Looking for the Higgs Boson Particle” Bought New Zealand Dairy Farm
June 9th, 2018Everyone knows about the billionaires buying up rural land in New Zealand.
They’re not the only ones.
CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) is getting in on the act too.
Obviously, I expect to receive many nothing-to-see-here emails, but CERN is very strange.
Also, I wish Bruce Cathie was still alive.
Via: Stuff:
The shareholders in the latest farm purchase of Craigmore Dairy 11 LP include the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (58.8 per cent), Aurum Agrar GmbH of Germany (23.5 per cent), Stefan Jentzsch, UK (7.6 per cent), Golien, Hong Kong (4.2 per cent), Forbes Herbert Elworthy, New Zealand (2.7 per cent), with the balance held by smaller investors.
Related: Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa
Research Credit: Pookie
Inside Tesla’s Model 3 Factory
June 9th, 2018There are some interesting photos of the Model 3 assembly line in this piece.
Via: Bloomberg:
On the Model 3 body line on a Tuesday afternoon in early June, everything is still. Tesla Inc. is just coming off a week of downtime during which workers added a new production line, improved ventilation after a fire in the paint shop, and overhauled machines across the factory. But even after the changes, there are kinks to work out.
Suddenly, dozens of robots snap into frenzied action, picking up door panels, welding window pillars, taking measurements, and on and on. This robotic dance is a visceral representation of what Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has dubbed “Alien Dreadnought,” a code name for the factory that evokes an early 20th century warship, but with extraterrestrials.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for Tesla, which is sprinting to produce the Model 3 in quantities great enough to turn a profit. But so far, the plant’s choreography has been choppy. The flow at the factory in Fremont, California, is constantly interrupted while robots and humans are trained, retrained, or swapped out. If Tesla can’t make this dance work, it will be remembered as a lesson in the dangers of irrational exuberance for automation. Success, on the other hand, could transform the car industry.
Netherlands: 3D Printed Houses
June 9th, 2018Five.
It would be much more interesting if the number was 5,000 or 50,000.
Well, it’s early days.
This reminds me…
I recently read an interesting sci-fi/cyberpunk/dystopia novel called Voidstar by Zachary Mason.
In the near future, the sprawling favelas that exist between San Francisco and Los Angeles have been 3D printed by autonomous machines.
“The favelas were always rising, like hard clouds of grey stone billowing up…”
Check out the picture at the link.
Via: Quartz:
What do you do when there are too few skilled bricklayers to meet national housing demands? Figure out a workaround—like 3D-printed houses.
That’s the solution the Dutch construction company Van Wijnen and researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands came up with. The city of Eindhoven soon hopes to boast the world’s first commercially-developed 3D-printed homes, an endeavor known as Project Milestone.
Construction on the first home begins this year and five houses will be on the rental market by 2019, project organizers say.
A Mall in China Put in a Traffic Lane Just for People Staring at Their Phones
June 9th, 2018Reader DF sent in this video a few days ago.
Via: FastCompany:
According to the New York Times, the new lane of traffic was intended to address the needs of the so-called “heads down tribe,” people who find the world around them so dull that they can’t bear to look up from their phones, even when crossing the street. Their distracted walking is part of a growing number of traffic-related deaths with the World Health Organization estimating that around 68,000 pedestrians are killed every year in China. While there are undoubtedly large-scale solutions to the problem (education campaigns, fines, etc.) the easiest solution might be the one used at the mall: Pedestrian lanes specifically for cellphone users.
Hockey Stick: U.S. Residential Energy Storage Deployments Q1 2018
June 7th, 2018Via: GTM:
Ever since GTM Research began tracking storage deployments in 2013, residential batteries appeared as the faintest of slivers on the industrywide bar graph, nonzero but totally insubstantial.
Now, for the first time, the smattering of a few kilowatts here and there has nearly overtaken the giants of grid-scale mega-projects. That’s a result both of the mega-projects not showing up this quarter and the micro-projects swarming into action.
Dialing into the numbers, it’s clear that California and Hawaii drove this newfound strength with state-level growth that merits no less than the technical designation: “bonkers.”
California’s resi sector rose 3,833 percent year-over-year in terms of megawatts, 4,324 percent in terms of megawatt-hours. The fact that energy capacity grew more reflects that these systems are sizing up to hold more duration.
Grave Robbers Steal Bones from Miami’s Historic Cemeteries
June 6th, 2018Via: Miami Herald:
Kennedy, who lives in the small office at the center of the 10-acre Lincoln property in Brownsville, nightly chases away drug addicts, homeless people, prostitutes, vandals, bone burglars and Santeria worshippers who deposit offerings of slain chickens, fruit, candy, cigars and coins.
“I got shot once. Guy pulled a gun on me when I told him to get out,” said Kennedy, rolling up his shorts to show a scar on his thigh. “I might pick up 18 chickens in one day. I’ve picked up a boar’s head, a dead monkey, dead rabbits, apples, a birthday cake. We got some serious voodoo and hocus pocus out here.”
Microsoft Sinks Data Centre Off Orkney
June 6th, 2018I don’t really buy the explanations given in the article. This is way too much hassle for cooling efficiencies.
EMP-proof data repositories? The water would fully attenuate the effects of an EMP attack.
Hmm…
Also, don’t forget: Bill Gates and the “Doomsday Seed Vault”.
It’s all very Ernst Blofeld.
Via: BBC:
Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea off Orkney to investigate whether it can boost energy efficiency.
The data centre, a white cylinder containing computers, could sit on the sea floor for up to five years.
An undersea cable brings the data centre power and takes its data to the shore and the wider internet – but if the computers onboard break, they cannot be repaired.
Orkney was chosen because it is a major centre for renewable energy research.
The theory is that the cost of cooling the computers will be cut by placing them underwater.
“We think we actually get much better cooling underwater than on land,” says Ben Cutler, who is in charge of what Microsoft has dubbed Project Natick.
“Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres.”
Deep in the Pentagon, a Secret AI Program to Anticipate the Launch of Nuclear Missiles
June 5th, 2018First, we take some W.O.P.R.
Next, we stir in a pinch of SkyNet
And then…
Via: Reuters:
The U.S. military is increasing spending on a secret research effort to use artificial intelligence to help anticipate the launch of a nuclear-capable missile, as well as track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and elsewhere.
The effort has gone largely unreported, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of near impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. But U.S. officials familiar with the research told Reuters there are multiple classified programs now under way to explore how to develop AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike.
If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch, according to more than half a dozen sources. The sources included U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research is classified.
Forewarned, the U.S. government would be able to pursue diplomatic options or, in the case of an imminent attack, the military would have more time to try to destroy the missiles before they were launched, or try to intercept them.
Homeland Security to Compile Database of Journalists, Bloggers
June 5th, 2018Via: Bloomberg Government:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”
It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.
The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.
