How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online
December 13th, 2019Via: Wall Street Journal:
Jacob Gottlieb was considering raising money for a hedge fund. One problem: His last one had collapsed in a scandal.
…
So last year Mr. Gottlieb hired Status Labs, an Austin, Texas-based company specializing in so-called reputation management. Its tactic: a favorable news blitz to eclipse the negative stories.
Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured some of the articles on Google News.
His online makeover shows the steps some executives and public figures are taking to influence what comes up on the world’s top search engine. It also illustrates that despite Google’s promises to police misinformation, sites can still masquerade as news outlets and avoid Google’s detection.
Queensland School Runs Out of Water as Commercial Bottlers Harvest Local Supplies
December 13th, 2019Via: Guardian:
The Tamborine Mountain state school has run out of water, even as water miners in the Gold Coast hinterland are sending millions of litres to commercial bottling operations.
Trucks sent by the Queensland government carrying emergency supplies to the school, including Mount Tamborine bottled water, have been passing trucks heading in the opposite direction taking local water to bottling plants for beverage giants such as Coca-Cola.
The World’s First 3D-Printed Neighborhood Now Has Its First Houses
December 13th, 2019Via: FastCompany:
A giant 3D printer is currently squeezing out new homes in rural Mexico. Each one takes 24 hours and lets local families upgrade from a shack to a two-bedroom house. Could this be part of the global housing solution?
Fed Will Flood Market With Gargantuan $500 Billion In Liquidity To Avoid Year-End Repo Crisis
December 13th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge:
In other words, instead of QE4 the Fed will flood the repo market with a firehose of liquidity.
Britain: Worst Labour Result Since 1935
December 13th, 2019I wasn’t expecting the Brexit win in 2016, and I didn’t expect this. However, maybe Brexit is like fusion power: Something that’s perpetually going to happen in the future.
Look at the Brexit timeline. It reminds me of a bunch of corporate consultants who are trying to keep a crisis going for as long as possible.
Via: Daily Mail:
Boris Johnson hailed the political ‘earthquake’ that has given him a ‘mandate to get Brexit done’ today as he marched his new blue-collar Tory army towards a staggering election landslide.
Huckabee: Trump Is Eligible to Serve Third Term [???]
December 13th, 2019Via: Independent:
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee says he has been “named to head up” what would be an unconstitutional 2024 re-election campaign for Donald Trump.
Mr Huckabee, father of former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, made the explosive claim in a pair of tweets on Thursday afternoon in which he also said the US president was “eligible” for a third term due to congressional investigations into him.
“Greatly honored to be asked to chair @realDonaldTrump re-election campaign for @POTUS in 2024. Gives me lots of time to plan!” Mr Huckabee said without providing evidence.
He added: “I’ll be on @seanhannity 2nite @FoxNews at 9pm ET and will explain how @realDonaldTrump will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media, et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.”
It was unclear if Mr Huckabee was serious, but there is no indication there exists any official 2024 re-election campaign for Mr Trump, who faces a battle just to win a second term in November 2020.
The US constitution expressly forbids presidents from serving more than two terms in the White House.
A Self-Driving Freight Truck Just Drove Across the Country to Deliver Butter
December 12th, 2019Autonomous freight transportation? Yes, now/soon/regulatory barriers.
Autonomous robotaxis? Don’t hold your breath.
Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars:
My guess is that, if it happens, it will happen in the freight market first. Freight is a walk in the park compared to the robotaxi concept that Musk is talking about.
With freight, you can train the machine on a specific route and annotate, by hand, the areas that it’s not able to navigate properly. The machine wouldn’t be able to self drive without this training and annotation process.
That is far less sexy than what Musk is claiming is right around the corner, but I could see route specific AI systems being good enough to begin firing some truck drivers in the not too distant future.
With regard to this story, here’s an absolutely critical point, which I doubted would be included in the article, “zero disengagements”:
The trip took about 41 hours to complete, according to data from Google Maps, and spans over 2,800 miles. It took the Plus.ai truck three days to complete the journey, during which it made a few stops, but never because it couldn’t handle the driving. In fact, there was a safety driver aboard the vehicle, but they never had to take over and intervene for the truck other than during fuel stops and federally mandated breaks. The company said there were zero “disengagements,” where the truck lost control.
Via: Popular Mechanics:
If you happen to live in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, some 50 miles outside of Philadelphia, your next stick of creamy butter just may have been delivered via self-driving freight truck. It’s believed to be the first time an autonomous freight vehicle has made a cross-country trip, let alone a commercial delivery.
Google Hands Feds 1,500 Phone Locations In Unprecedented ‘Geofence’ Search
December 12th, 2019If the mobile radio is on, always assume that the device is phoning home your location, and a deluge of other privacy compromising information. If airplane mode is on, assume it will transmit your movements as soon as as you turn off airplane mode and it connects to the Internet.
If the mobile radio is on, the mobile network always has your position if you are within range.
You can trust that a mobile phone isn’t spying on you if you remove the battery. Hint: Most mobile devices “feature” a unibody design, meaning that the back of the phone is glued on, preventing easy battery removal.
Via: Forbes:
Two dead dogs and more than $50,000 in damaged property were just some of the casualties of arsons carried out across Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throughout 2018 and 2019.
To find the perpetrators, officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) demanded Google supply records of user devices in the respective locations at the times the arsons took place, Forbes has learned. Though federal agents had used the technique before, they’d never received such a data haul back from Google.
The requests, outlined in two search warrants obtained by Forbes, demanded to know which specific Google customers were located in areas covering 29,387 square meters (or 3 hectares) during a total of nine hours for the four separate incidents. Unbeknownst to many Google users, if they have “location history” turned on, their whereabouts are stored by the tech giant in a database called SensorVault.
In this case, Google found 1,494 device identifiers in SensorVault, sending them to the ATF to comb through. In terms of numbers, that’s unprecedented for this form of search. It illustrates how Google can pinpoint a large number of mobile phones in a brief period of time and hand over that information to the government.
Armies of Low Paid Contractors Transcribing Recordings from Tech Company Surveillance Platforms to Improve AI Apps
December 12th, 2019Ah yes, the AI secret sauce in your “smart” speaker…
Via: Bloomberg:
How the world’s biggest companies got millions of people to let temps analyze some very sensitive recordings.
The Origins of Cyberpunk
December 12th, 2019Via: Indigo Gaming:
