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 product should exist at all.
The pitch for the Google Clips is it’s a camera that sits off to the side in a room and automatically captures the kinds of candid shots that one never really plans for — the most common examples cited being some random happening involving one’s kids or pets. Instead of mere serendipity, however, the camera uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to try and guess when to best take a shot.
Reviews, perhaps unsurprisingly, haven’t been great. The technology to take pictures in a smart way with satisfying results simply doesn’t exist yet, largely because determining what makes a good shot is still a profoundly human, subjective thing. But perhaps a product with such obvious flaws is cause for concern for reasons more significant than the release of yet another disappointing gadget. Instead, it appears that in rarely questioning whether a piece of tech should have been released at all, we are unwittingly become guinea pigs for tech, and inadvertent cheerleaders for things that, in the aggregate, end up making things worse.
Los Angeles: How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function?
March 1st, 2018How Can a Place with 58,000 Homeless People Continue to Function?
Answer: With favelas and airmobile paramilitary forces.
Most Americans couldn’t identify Brazil on a map, but the sprawling U.S. ghettos will increasingly look like Rio.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Homelessness affects the lives of all Angelenos, not just those forced to live on the streets. And it does so almost daily, in ways large and small.
Consider the pairs of thick gloves that George Abou-Daoud has stashed inside the nine restaurants he owns on the east side of Hollywood. When a homeless person accosts his customers, Abou-Daoud says, he can no longer count on the police for help; unless there’s an imminent threat to safety, he contends, they don’t respond quickly and can’t just haul the person away. So he’s had to take matters into his own hands, literally, by physically ejecting problematic homeless people himself. That’s why he has the gloves — to keep his hands clean.
Abou-Daoud’s gloves are a particularly bleak symbol of the relationship between the homeless and the non-homeless. But everyone’s got a story of one sort or another. Day in and day out, Metro riders step into trains with homeless people on them — often visibly disturbed or threatening, prompting nervous passengers to edge away or change cars. In downtown L.A., shop owners worry that customers will opt for suburban malls to avoid the panhandlers and glassy-eyed wanderers. In Venice, besieged businesses have banded together to share the cost of security guards and cleanup crews to clear garbage, bedding or worse from the sidewalks.
Across the city, drivers exiting freeways routinely encounter homeless people on the off-ramps shuffling from window to window requesting money. Libraries, train stations and public parks have become refuges for homeless people. In many residential neighborhoods and commercial districts, encampments have become a seemingly immutable fact of life.
South Africa to Seize Land from White Farmers Without Compensation
March 1st, 2018“But he stressed it must be conducted in a manner which preserved food production and security.”
Oh sure.
Keep those in mind when you see the kids in the streets waving hammer and sickle signs.
Via: Independent:
South Africa‘s parliament has passed a motion to seize land from white farmers without paying them compensation.
Passed by an overwhelming majority of 241 votes to 83 votes against, the proposal to amend Section 25 of the constitution would allow expropriation of land without any financial recompense.
It was put forward by the radical left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, whose leader Julius Malema told the country’s parliament: “We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.”
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) amended but supported the motion. The party has promised reforms to address the racial disparities in land ownership which persist more than two decades after the end of apartheid.
South Africa’s new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, said he would speed up the transfer of land from white to black owners after his inauguration two weeks ago.
But he stressed it must be conducted in a manner which preserved food production and security.
Related: Expropriating Land Without Compensation Is Impossible—Take It From Zimbabwe
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 Security Conference.
“Everyone immediately then wants to talk about all the movie-inspired death scenarios, and I can confidently predict to you that they are one to two decades away. So let’s worry about them, but let’s worry about them in a while,“ Schmidt said.
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.
