Facebook Refuses To Remove Doctored Video of Nancy Pelosi

Facebook said Friday that a video doctored to depict House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slurring her words will remain on the social network because false information alone does not violate the site's rules. "We remove things from Facebook that violate our Community Standards, and we don't have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true," a company spokesperson said in a statement shared with Politico. The social network said it will, however, greatly reduce distribution of the video among Facebook users' News Feeds and add context from two third-party fact checkers who deemed it false after Facebook asked them to review it. One of the two fact checkers, Politifact, gave the video its "Pants on Fire" appellation, reserved for the most egregious falsehoods making "ridiculous claim[s]."

The incarnation of the video, posted to a Facebook page called Politics WatchDog, that caught the greatest media attention after first being spotted by the Washington Post Thursday didn't have any fact-checking information tagged to it as of Friday afternoon. At that point, it had been viewed roughly 2.5 million times. The video, which uses real footage of Pelosi (D-Calif.) slowed down by 25 percent, has circulated widely since Thursday. It comes amid a pitched battle between Pelosi and President Donald Trump, with each leader depicting the other as incompetent. And it is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate over how and whether companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should police their networks for problematic content.

Click here for the video.

Credits:
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/24/facebook-fake-pelosi-video-1472413

Your iPhone Sends Data Back While you Sleep

A disturbing new report reveals how your iPhone is snooping on you while you're sleeping. An investigation by the Washington Post found apps are passing personal data to thousands of trackers - third-party advertising and analytics companies who partner with apps in order to access their user data. A disturbing new report reveals how your iPhone is snooping on you while you're sleeping. An investigation by the Washington Post found apps are passing personal data to thousands of trackers - third-party advertising and analytics companies who partner with apps in order to access their user data.

As many people remain unaware of the trackers living in their phone and being fed their data, tracker-protection software isn't prevalently used. The Washington Post's investigation found privacy policies didn't equal privacy protection, with many apps using loopholes in their own policy to obtain data. Apps may also prohibit trackers from selling user data, but won't take responsibility for their practices. The investigation uncovered that certain apps will still share personally identifiable information even if it directly breaches their privacy policy. Many apps fail to disclose the names of the companies tracking its data, or how it works to protect user privacy; information that should, according to Apple, be readily accessible and available for users to see and permit.

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Australian Teen Hacks Apple ... To Try to Get a Job

If you were a teen hoping to land a job at a tech giant, how would you go about it? Plan your education and hope you eventually land an internship? An Australian had another, less conventional method. The teen hacked Apple and pleaded guilty while admitting that he hoped this would land him a job at the iPhone maker. He'd heard that Apple hired a European who'd done the same thing, and had assumed that a job was waiting for him the moment he was discovered. Clearly, law enforcement had other ideas. He was 13 when he started the hacks, and the magistrate in the case believed testimony that the teen had been using his technological powers for good since then. He hoped to study digital security and criminology at university, and wasn't relishing the thought of a hacking conviction staining his record.

According to the Australian court, the teen said he committed the hack because he heard of a person in Europe that also hacked Apple but ended up getting a job out of it. Given that the teen was only 13 when he first hacked Apple, the magistrate accepted the defense’s argument that he had “no idea about the seriousness of the offense.” The magistrate noted the teen has since been using his computer skills for good at school, as per his classmates and teachers. Further, Apple confirmed that no customer information was accessed by the teenager and it didn’t incur any losses during the hacking. For those reasons, the magistrate did not convict the boy, instead opting to he’s on a $500 AUD (roughly $465 CAD) good behavior bond for nine months.



Credits:
https://mobilesyrup.com/2019/05/27/teenager-hacked-apple-to-get-job/

Send Your Name to Mars

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission will send a brand new robotic explorer to the Red Planet’s surface as early as July next year. The NASA mission will precede any human exploration of Mars but will have a chance to indirectly land on the planet in spirit. Anyone who submits their name to NASA through the link below will have their name etched onto a microchip fixed to NASA’s Mars rover. Each name will be painstakingly “stencilled” onto a silicon chip with an electron beam, creating signatures no wider than one-thousandth the width of a human hair.

Using this incredibly fine technique, NASA can fit more than one million names on a chip the size of a coin, which will ride on the Mars rover under a glass cover. On top of the incredible privilege, you will receive a “souvenir boarding pass”, which you can show off to your friends and family. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said: “As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration.

Click here to sent your name to Mars.

Click here for the video.

Credits:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1130422/NASA-news-Mars-2020-submit-name-boarding-pass-Mars-rover-launch

GoCycle G3

The Gocycle G3 is a top-of-the-line folding pedal-assist electric bicycle. It's compact, light and really zips along, but is it up to the task of urban riding? Well, the answer depends on your definition of urban riding. It features magnesium construction, its own built-in headlight, fancy quick-release wheels, a self-shifting system, hydraulic brakes and more, but it's the folding feature that Gocycle focuses on, as well it being relatively lightweight. This bike is mainly pitched as one you can carry with you up a flight of stairs or toss in the back of your car for that last-mile trek into work. My time spent with the G3 saw none of that. There was no folding. No tossing in the trunk of a car. It was all riding. At speed and over longer distances.

So, out of its element, how did the G3 perform? It's fast. Almost too fast. It stops on a dime, though the rider may not be able to stop as quickly as the bike. It grips well, accelerates very quickly and has a reasonably smooth ride thanks to its unique rear suspension setup. However, the bike is not really designed for this high-speed type of usage. It's more at home at the marina where you'd ride it from your car to the boat or in big cities where it would be a perfect last-mile commuter. In those situations, where speed is not essential, the G3 undoubtedly shines. Additionally, it's an excellent traveler as it folds relatively quickly and packs into small spaces.



Credits:
https://insideevs.com/reviews/349284/gocycle-g3-electric-bicycle-test-review/ https://youtu.be/_tC7vw2NkE4

San Francisco Bans Police from using Facial Recognition Software

San Francisco supervisors voted Tuesday to ban the use of facial recognition software by police and other city departments, becoming the first U.S. city to outlaw a rapidly developing technology that has alarmed privacy and civil liberties advocates. The ban is part of broader legislation that requires city departments to establish use policies and obtain board approval for surveillance technology they want to purchase or are using at present. Several other local governments require departments to disclose and seek approval for surveillance technology.

The ban applies to San Francisco police and other municipal departments. It does not affect use of the technology by the federal government at airports and ports, nor does it limit personal or business use. Those who support the ban say the technology is flawed and a serious threat to civil liberties, especially in a city that cherishes public protest and privacy. They worry people will one day not be able to go to a mall, the park or a school without being identified and tracked. But critics say police need all the help they can get, especially in a city with high-profile events and high rates of property crime. That people expect privacy in public space is unreasonable given the proliferation of cellphones and surveillance cameras.



Credits:
http://time.com/5589403/san-francisco-bans-police-face-recognition/

Spyware Added to Cell Phone Simply by Calling Via WhatsApp

On Monday, WhatsApp has revealed a vulnerability in its system that could have allowed hackers access to its users' phones, with a London-based human rights lawyer possibly among the targets. The encrypted messaging service, owned by Facebook, said that it had discovered and fixed the vulnerability the attackers had sought to exploit. The hackers could implant malicious code on a victim's phone by placing a voice call to the victim on WhatsApp — victims may not even have needed to answer the call for their phone to be infected, an expert told CNN Business.

a source familiar with the investigation into the attack said that company is NSO Group, an Israeli cyber company that has developed a powerful piece of malware designed to spy on its victims. Among those believed to have been targeted via WhatsApp is a London-based human rights lawyer, who is advising on a case against NSO. NSO has denied targeting the lawyer. On Sunday, the lawyer received two calls that John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab believes were part of the attack. Citizen Lab is an academic security research group that investigates digital threats to civil society groups and online freedom of expression.

Click here to watch the video.

Credits:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/14/tech/whatsapp-attack/index.html

NASA Gets Budget Adjustment to Send Humans Back to the Moon

NASA's push to put humans on the moon in 2024 may get a financial boost next year. A new budget amendment gives NASA an additional $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2020, on top of the $21 billion already allocated to the space agency, President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday. "Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to space in a BIG WAY!" Trump said via Twitter this afternoon.

The amendment is a proposal for now, however; NASA won't get the money until Congress, which has the power of the purse, officially signs off. The extra $1.6 billion is designed to help NASA put astronauts down near the lunar south pole in 2024, an ambitious goal that Vice President Mike Pence laid out in March. (Prior to Pence's announcement, the agency had been working toward a late-2020s crewed lunar landing.) This pioneering mission will help lead to a long-term, sustainable human presence on the moon, NASA officials have said. The additional funds would make a big difference, but more cash infusions are still necessary in the future, agency chief Jim Bridenstine said.



Credits:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-highlights-moon-2024-mission-with-fy-2020-budget-amendment

Amazon Web Service Owns 40% of the Internet

Amazon’s network of servers for hire is so big and so invisible that it can be hard to take it in. Luckily, there is a surprising number of tools to help you along. One of the best tools comes from Amazon itself, which offers an interactive color-coded map of all the Amazon Web Services locations around the world. There are lots of them, and none of the locations are any more specific than “near San Francisco,” but it’s still fascinating. If you look at the map long enough, you start to see the strategy behind it, with an AWS presence near population centers on each continent and just enough backups to reroute if any single region goes haywire. A lot of the more specific information we have about AWS’s physical footprint comes from WikiLeaks, which published the so-called “Amazon Atlas” last October. The release didn’t get much attention at the time — in large part because of WikiLeaks’ ongoing political decline — but it’s a really interesting look into Amazon’s network of data centers, which has grown into a kind of globe-spanning parallel internet. Mostly, it includes specific locations for many of the data centers in the US and overseas.

The location of those data centers isn’t quite as secretive as WikiLeaks likes to suggest (some of them are even labeled on Google Maps), but there’s still a lot to learn from the atlas. When people think of an AWS hub, they tend to think of an enormous suburban warehouse entirely controlled by Amazon, the digital equivalent of its notoriously demanding fulfillment centers. Those warehouses really do exist — particularly in Virginia, Oregon, and Washington state — but most of the AWS footprint consists of overseas hubs in colocation centers run by companies like Equinix or Securus. Amazon has the same level of control over its servers and network in those hubs, but it’s easier to let someone else take care of the actual building, especially since location makes it easier to interconnect when fiber is scarce. This level of infrastructure has never seen the kind of bloodthirsty competition we see over the rest of the tech stack. In part, that’s because of the structure of the internet itself. It’s easy to connect to the internet (that’s the whole point), which means it’s hard to build the kind of competitive advantage over hosting that you could have over social networks or e-commerce. Still, as the internet centralizes and closes off, there’s always a chance that data centers and fiber connections will be one of the places where corporate conflicts play out. If that happens, the sheer scale of AWS will be a huge advantage for Amazon. If you’ve ever wondered why Amazon’s streaming service has never had the same interconnection problems as Netflix, the sheer inescapability of AWS is why.



Credits:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/10/18563485/amazon-web-services-internet-location-map-data-center

Fitbit For kids.

In 2019, it's more common to see kids glued to their smartphones and tablets than it is to see them playing outside. The Fitbit Ace, the company's first fitness tracker for kids ages eight and up, is attempting to change this by making it fun and easy for kids to stay active, rewarding them with badges and trophies for their accomplishments. Using a connected app, parents can access their kids' activity and help give them a motivational boost through personal messages and emojis. The Ace tracks basic metrics, including steps, active minutes, and hours of sleep, and sports a sleek design kids will actually want to wear.

Kids can see all of their tracked activity on the Fitbit mobile app through a special Kid View. Similarly, parents/guardians can use the Parent View on their phone and manage child accounts, see how much activity their kid(s) is getting, and approve friend requests. If you want to pick one up for your kid, the Fitbit Ace 2 is available for purchase now in Night Sky and Watermelon for $70.



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One and Done Robo Calls

The Federal Communications Commission has issued an alert to consumers about a new wave of "One Ring" robocalls after "widespread overnight calling" in the states of New York and Arizona. These recent "One Ring" calls attempt to bait consumers into calling the number back, which can result in you being billed toll charges as if you called a 900 number. The calls are also known as "Wangiri" – the term means "one ring and done" in Japanese, so labelled after the scam originated there years ago.

Robocallers typically call specific area codes repeatedly, often late at night. The latest wave of calls, the FCC says, are using the “222” country code of the West African nation of Mauritania. "This is a concerning trend and consumers should not call back if they receive such calls,” deputy press secretary Will Wiquist said. Other public officials have taken to Twitter to warn consumers. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich tweeted this week about the robocalls, saying, "DO NOT call back. Scammers hope you'll call back so they can pocket the cost of the expensive phone call."

Credits:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/05/03/one-ring-robocalls-fcc-warns-users-not-call-them-back/3661967002/

Google Develops Speech Recognition for the disabled

For those with speech impairments, artificial intelligence-powered voice recognition technology simply doesn’t work for them. Google is trying to fix that. Today at Google I/O, Google unveiled Project Euphonia, to explore how artificial intelligence can better recognize those with speech impairments and other types of speech patterns. “We also want to help those with speech disorders or people whose speech has been affected by a stroke or ALS,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at I/O. “Researchers from Google AR are exploring the idea of personalized communication models that can better understand different types of speech, as well as how AI can help even those who cannot speak to communicate.”

Voice recognition technology doesn’t work today for people with speech impairments because no one has collected large enough data sets, Pichai said. That’s where Euphonia comes in. In partnership with nonprofits like ALS Therapy Development Institute and ALS Residence Initiative, Google is recording voices of people who have the neurodegenerative condition ALS. But in order to get there, Google will need more training data. Pichai ended with a call to action asking people with slurred or otherwise impaired speech to submit voice samples here.



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Robotic Cowboy in Australia

SwagBot is the world's first robot cowboy, built to roam the rugged Australian terrain. While it will be doing some cowboy work, make no mistake: SwagBot is less like John Wayne and maybe a little more like a hyper-competent herding dog. It can corral cows and pull trailers, doing the type of work needed to be done on a ranch or in a pasture. It can go through swamps, up hills, and over rocks. It's not the first robot to hit the farms of the Australian outback, which are vast, remote and often difficult to access.

Other farmbots, however, take on less active roles than SwagBot does. And SwagBot should only get more sophisticated with time. Upcoming updates could let it identify sick or wounded animals, with thermal and motion imaging sensors detecting changes in body temperature and gait. Livestock is currently only monitored one or twice a year in the Australian outback, meaning a permanent SwagBot presence could mean a great deal in the lives of animals. While currently only in trial mode, researchers leading the trial have told New Scientist that the tests were so successful they're planning on moving towards animal health recognition fairly soon.



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College Students Engineer a Wearable Epi Pen

People susceptible to acute allergic reactions, particularly children, can find it difficult to keep an epinephrine injector (think EpiPen) on hand. Adrenaline, the common name of epinephrine, has to be delivered quickly before anaphylactic shock sets in, so a team at Rice University have developed a wearable injector that can be used at any time. “The idea came from me, because I suffer peanut allergies,” in a Rice release said Justin Tang, who worked on the device at the Brown School of Engineering’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen with adviser and Rice lecturer Deirdre Hunter. “I’m very self-aware and worried about my life, but it was always difficult for me to bring something as bulky and obtrusive as this when going to dinner with friends or just going out at night.”

The EpiWear device uses a spring to activate an injector that pushes epinephrine into the body. The trick, of course, is to avoid any large vessels so that too much adrenaline doesn’t get to the heart too quickly. So far the working prototype is a upscaled version of the device, and it will need some miniaturization to be a true wearable. Nevertheless, the team knows that a working dose of epinephrine ( 0.3 milliliters) will fit into a small wearable, along with the necessary mechanics. We envision this technology being coupled to a smartwatch through which parents can make contact with nearby bystanders of their stricken children and activate the injector when an anaphylactic shock is confirmed. Perhaps there could even be wearable technology that can detect anaphylaxis and activate the device accordingly.



Credits:
https://www.medgadget.com/2019/04/wearable-epinephrine-injector-to-stop-allergic-reactions.html