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The city council of Mill Valley, a small town located just a few miles north of San Francisco, voted unanimously late last week to effectively block deployments of small-cell 5G wireless towers in the city’s residential areas.

Through an urgency ordinance, which allows the city council to immediately enact regulations that affect the health and safety of the community, the restrictions and prohibitions will be put into force immediately for all future applications to site 5G telecommunications equipment in the city. Applications for commercial districts are permitted under the passed ordinance.

Next time you pass someone on the street who appears to be talking to themselves, they may literally have voices inside their head…and be a highly trained soldier on a dangerous mission. The Pentagon has inked a roughly $10 million contract with a California company to provide secure communication gear that’s essentially invisible.

“The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy who manages the facility is addressing a security issue at this time,” Lifson said. “We have decided to vacate the facility at this time as precautionary measure. It was our decision to evacuate the facility.”

She said she cannot comment on the specifics of the security issue.

…

Otero County Sheriff Benny House said the Otero County Sheriff’s Office was asked to standby.

“The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on,” House said. “We’ve got people up there (at Sunspot) that requested us to standby while they evacuate it. Nobody would really elaborate on any of the circumstances as to why. The FBI were up there. What their purpose was nobody will say.”

He said he has a lot of unanswered question about what occurred at Sunspot.

“But for the FBI to get involved that quick and be so secretive about it, there was a lot of stuff going on up there,” House said. “There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers but nobody would tell us anything.”

The Daily News contacted the Albuquerque FBI spokesman seeking comment for this story, but telephone calls and messages were never returned.

House said he pulled his deputies from the facility after there was no identifiable threat.

But even as the kiosks have provided important services to connect New Yorkers, they may also represent a troubling expansion of the city’s surveillance network, potentially connecting every borough to a new level of invasive monitoring. Each kiosk has three cameras, 30 sensors, and heightened sight lines for viewing above crowds.

Since plans for LinkNYC were first unveiled, journalists, residents, and civil liberties experts have raised concerns that the internet kiosks might be storing sensitive data about its users and possibly tracking their movements. For the last two years, the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a small but vocal group of activists — including ReThink LinkNYC, a grassroots anti-surveillance group, and the anonymous Stop LinkNYC coalition — have highlighted the kiosk’s potential to track locations, collect personal information, and fuel mass surveillance.

Through the AI Next initiative, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aims to bring about so-called “third wave” AI, tools capable of human-like communication and contextual reasoning that far surpass the abilities of today’s most advanced machine-learning and AI technology.

The massive investment comes as global powers like China pour significant resources into their own artificial intelligence R&D programs.

“I’m proud to tell you DARPA plans to continue and increase its support for AI research, with a significant focus on the technologies that underpin a third wave of AI,” said DARPA Director Steven Walker in the announcement at the agency’s 60th anniversary conference. “Let’s … double down and commit to ensuring our country continues to create technological surprise for many more years and continues to use that surprise for a better and more secure world.”

DARPA currently runs more than 20 programs to advance artificial intelligence and more than 60 others that explore ways the technology can bolster cybersecurity, share the electromagnetic spectrum and enable other breakthroughs. Under AI Next, the agency will spend the next year significantly expanding that portfolio.

Some drone systems, like the Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications drone from CyPhy Works, deliver power through a tether to keep a small drone aloft for an entire week. The Army, however, is developing a system to supply power through a laser, according to reporting from the New Scientist.

The company told trade officials in a letter on Friday that the proposed tariffs would affect prices for a “wide range” of Apple products, including its Watch, but it did not mention the iPhone.

Trump, speaking on Friday aboard Air Force One, said the administration had tariffs planned for an additional $267 billion worth of Chinese goods.

Trump tweeted that “Apple prices may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China – but there is an easy solution where there would be ZERO tax, and indeed a tax incentive. Make your products in the United States instead of China. Start building new plants now.”

On a screen, a manager pops up in a recorded video and asks a question like: “Why do you want a career in this field?”

You have 10 seconds to think, and just a minute and a half to record your response on webcam.

Everything you say, how you say it — even where your eyes wander — is being analyzed. And not by a human, but by an algorithm. It evaluates whether you have the necessary skills and rates you on how well you fit the job.

Cold and calculated, yes — but potentially fairer than how humans hire now.

Companies have thousands of applicants knocking on their door, says Jahanzaib Ansari, CEO of Knockri, a Toronto startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help companies like IBM shortlist new talent.

“It’s just not humanly possible for them to go through each and every one, [so] a lot of organizations resort to a lottery process. A process that actually misses out great talent.”

The video analytics software captured stills of individuals caught on closed-circuit TV footage and automatically labeled the images with physical tags, such as clothing color, allowing police to quickly search through hours of video for images of individuals matching a description of interest. At the time, the software was also starting to generate alerts for unattended packages, cars speeding up a street in the wrong direction, or people entering restricted areas.

Over the years, the NYPD has shared only occasional, small updates on the program’s progress. In a 2011 interview with Scientific American, for example, Inspector Salvatore DiPace, then commanding officer of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, said the police department was testing whether the software could box out images of people’s faces as they passed by subway cameras and subsequently cull through the images for various unspecified “facial features.”

While facial recognition technology, which measures individual faces at over 16,000 points for fine-grained comparisons with other facial images, has attracted significant legal scrutiny and media attention, this object identification software has largely evaded attention. How exactly this technology came to be developed and which particular features the software was built to catalog have never been revealed publicly by the NYPD.