Trump: “Take the Guns First, Go Through Due Process Second”
February 28th, 2018Via: USA Today:
President Trump said Wednesday he favors taking guns away from people who might commit violence before going through legal due process in the courts, one of many startling comments he made in a rambling White House meeting designed to hash out school safety legislation with a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
“I like taking guns away early,” Trump said. “Take the guns first, go through due process second.”
The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin’s Doomed Meteorologist
February 28th, 2018Via: Atlas Obscura:
AN ARCTIC FOX, A HEN, wild berries, a reindeer, a single candle glowing in the darkness, glaciers floating at sea, and an aurora borealis. These are some of the subjects of delicate, precise illustrations created by a man imprisoned in a Soviet gulag during the 1930s. The man’s drawings and letters, teeming with melancholy, survive today thanks to his daughter who conserved and published them. His story, as told in Olivier Rolin’s new biography, Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death, is one of tragedy, but also of resilience—the kind that allows a sensitivity and love for the wonders and mysteries of nature to survive the most oppressive, cruel circumstances.
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 that purports to predict which people are likely drivers or victims of violence.
The partnership has been extended three times, with the third extension scheduled to expire on February 21st, 2018. The city of New Orleans and Palantir have not responded to questions about the program’s current status.
Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process.
In fact, key city council members and attorneys contacted by The Verge had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract.
Even James Carville, the political operative instrumental in bringing about Palantir’s collaboration with NOPD, said that the program was not public knowledge. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” Carville said.
Trump Announces Re-Election Campaign and Campaign Manager
February 27th, 2018It’s a bit like the Christmas shit appearing in stores in October.
Hmm.
I wonder if They’ll fit Hillary with a powered exoskeleton suit this time?
Via: CBS:
President Donald Trump announced that he’s running for re-election in 2020, and Brad Parscale, who served as the Trump campaign’s 2016 digital guru, has been named campaign manager.
In an announcement posted on the president’s campaign website, his son, Eric Trump, called Parscale “an amazing talent” who was “pivotal to our success in 2016.” Top Trump adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner said that Parscale “was essential in bringing a disciplined technology and data-driven approach to how the 2016 campaign was run.”
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 from happening.
Via: TechCrunch:
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles established new rules announced Monday that will allow tech companies and others working on driverless vehicle systems to begin trialling their cars without a safety driver at the wheel. The new rules go into effect starting April 2.
Until now, the DMV has allowed companies approved for autonomous vehicle testing to run their cars on the roads, with autonomous driving systems engaged, provided that there’s a trained safety driver behind the wheel ready and able to take over manual control. Now, the regulators are updating their rules to allow for fully driverless test, which is a key step along the route towards actually deploying self-driving vehicles in a commercial capacity.
This doesn’t mean test vehicles will be out there on the roads without any kind of human intervention backup – the DMV will require that those testing autonomous cars without a driver present have a dedicated communications channel that ties the car to a remote operator, who can take over if needed. The cars will also need to be hardened against cyber attacks and be able to provide their owner and operator info to any other parties in the event of an accident.
Norway Will Spend $13 Million to Upgrade Its Doomsday Seed Vault
February 26th, 2018Via: The Verge:
Norway will spend 100 million Norwegian Crowns ($12.7 million) to upgrade the doomsday seed vault it built 10 years ago. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was constructed in an abandoned Arctic coal mine to store and safeguard the world’s crops and plants from global natural or man-made disaster. If nuclear war or global warming kills certain crops, governments will be able to request seeds from the vault to restart their agricultural industries.
The Norwegian government says the upgrades will include the construction of a new concrete access tunnel and a service building that will house “emergency power and refrigerating units and other electrical equipment that emits heat through the tunnel.” Norway’s minister of agriculture and food, Jon Georg Dale, said the building work will begin soon. “It is a great and important task to safeguard all the genetic material that is crucial to global food security,” Dale said in a statement.
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 from developing sufficiently to enable them to hold a pencil correctly, they say.
“Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago,” said Sally Payne, the head paediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust. “Children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not be able to hold it because they don’t have the fundamental movement skills.
“To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers,. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills.”
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 cloud infrastructure business.
CDC Epidemic Intelligence Officer Left Work Feeling Ill, Hasn’t Been Seen Since
February 25th, 2018Update: Body of CDC Worker Who Mysteriously Disappeared in February Found in a River
Via: Business Insider:
The mystery surrounding the February disappearance of a 35-year-old Centres for Disease Control and Prevention worker ended tragically this week, with the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department finding the CDC commander’s body in a river late Tuesday evening.
The Atlanta Police Department confirmed to Business Insider that Timothy Cunningham’s body was recovered in the Chattahoochee River in northwest Atlanta. Cunningham was wearing his favourite jogging shoes when he was found by a group of fishermen, police said.
Cunningham left work at the CDC feeling sick on February 12, then tried to call his mum on his drive home, but hadn’t been heard from since.
Maj. Michael O’Connor of the Atlanta Police Department said in February that Cunningham had recently been turned down for a promotion at work, and left feeling ill shortly after his supervisor explained why he’d been passed over.
Cunningham drove off that day and was never seen alive again, even as his car, credit and debit cards, dog, keys, and mobile phone were all recovered at his home, the police said.
“We found that to be an unusual circumstance in a missing persons case,” Major O’Connor told reporters at a press conference on Thursday afternoon. The only thing police said they found in Cunningham’s pockets when his body was recovered were three crystals.
Police said they “knew he was a collector of crystals.”
The muddy river spot where the officer was found wasn’t too far from his house, but there weren’t any roads or running trails nearby, so it’s not clear exactly how Cunningham got in there. Police say they’d conducted a “very thorough” search of the riverbanks in that area on February 23, but didn’t find any signs of the missing commander.
“We may never be able to tell you how he got into the river,” O’Connor said. Doctors who’ve examined his body say there’s no evidence of trauma or foul play, and they believe the cause of death is drowning.
—
Via: NBC:
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employee was last seen 11 days ago, when he left work early after complaining that he felt unwell, Atlanta police said Friday.
Timothy Cunningham, 35, works as a commander in the U.S. Public Health Service and has responded to the Ebola virus and the Zika virus outbreaks, the CDC said. He holds two degrees from Harvard.
Police are now conducting a search for Cunningham and have enlisted the help of his family, friends and the alumni network of his alma mater Morehouse College.
China Sets Stage for Xi to Stay in Office Indefinitely
February 25th, 2018Via: Reuters:
China’s ruling Communist Party on Sunday set the stage for President Xi Jinping to stay in office indefinitely, with a proposal to remove a constitutional clause limiting presidential service to just two terms in office.
