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Old 08-29-2020, 02:23 PM   #21
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Post Neuralink: Elon Musk Unveils Pig With Chip in its Brain

[Video cannot be displayed. Click on the link below to view.]
Gertrude the pig had the chip implanted two months ago.


Elon Musk has unveiled a pig called Gertrude with a coin-sized computer chip in her brain
to demonstrate his ambitious plans to create a working brain-to-machine interface.



"It's kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires," the billionaire entrepreneur said on a webcast.

His start-up Neuralink applied to launch human trials last year.

The interface could allow people with neurological conditions to control phones or computers with their mind.

Mr Musk argues such chips could eventually be used to help cure conditions such as dementia, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries.

But the long-term ambition is to usher in an age of what Mr Musk calls "superhuman cognition", in part to combat artificial intelligence so powerful he says it could destroy the human race.

* Elon Musk reveals brain-hacking plans.

Gertrude was one of three pigs in pens that took part in Friday's webcast demo. She took a while to get going, but when she ate and sniffed straw, the activity showed up on a graph tracking her neural activity. She then mostly ignored all the attention around her.

The processor in her brain sends wireless signals, indicating neural activity in her snout when looking for food.

[Cannot Display Video: Meet Elon Musk, the man who inspired Robert Downey Jr's take on Iron Man.]

Mr Musk said the original Neuralink device, revealed just over a year ago, had been simplified and made smaller.

"It actually fits quite nicely in your skull. It could be under your hair and you wouldn't know."

Founded in 2017, Neuralink has worked hard to recruit scientists, something Mr Musk was still advertising for on Twitter last month and which he said was the purpose of Friday's demo.



Getting the human brain to communicate with machines is an ambitious goal.


The device the company is developing consists of a tiny probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible threads thinner than a human hair, which can monitor the activity of 1,000 brain neurons.

Ahead of the webcast, Ari Benjamin, at the University of Pennsylvania's Kording Lab, had told BBC News the real stumbling block for the technology could be the sheer complexity of the human brain.

"Once they have the recordings, Neuralink will need to decode them and will someday hit the barrier that is our lack of basic understanding of how the brain works, no matter how many neurons they record from.

"Decoding goals and movement plans is hard when you don't understand the neural code in which those things are communicated."

Mr Musk's companies SpaceX and Tesla have captured the public imagination with his attempts to drive progress in spaceflight and electric vehicles respectively.

But both also demonstrate the entrepreneur's habit of making bold declarations about projects that end up taking much longer to complete than planned.



Source: bbc.com
Website: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53956683
Date: August 29, 2020
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Old 08-31-2020, 09:32 AM   #22
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Post Japan's 'Flying Car'

Japan's 'flying car' gets off ground, with a person aboard (Video).


This photo taken at the beginning of August, 2020.


The decades-old dream of zipping around in the sky as simply as driving on highways may be becoming less illusory.



Japan's SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of "flying car" projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard.

In a video shown to reporters on Friday, a contraption that looked like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet (1-2 meters) off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes.

Tomohiro Fukuzawa, who heads the SkyDrive effort, said he hopes "the flying car" can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical.

"Of the world's more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board," he told The Associated Press.

"I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe."

The machine so far can fly for just five to 10 minutes but if that can become 30 minutes, it will have more potential, including exports to places like China, Fukuzawa said.

Unlike airplanes and helicopters, eVTOL, or "electric vertical takeoff and landing," vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle.




They could do away with the hassle of airports and traffic jams and the cost of hiring pilots, they could fly automatically.

Battery sizes, air traffic control and other infrastructure issues are among the many potential challenges to commercializing them.

"Many things have to happen," said Sanjiv Singh, professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who co-founded Near Earth Autonomy, near Pittsburgh, which is also working on an eVTOL aircraft.

"If they cost $10 million, no one is going to buy them. If they fly for 5 minutes, no one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no one is going to buy them," Singh said in a telephone interview.



This photo taken at the beginning of August, 2020.


The SkyDrive project began humbly as a volunteer project called Cartivator in 2012, with funding by top Japanese companies including automaker Toyota Motor Corp., electronics company Panasonic Corp. and video-game developer Bandai Namco.

A demonstration flight three years ago went poorly. But it has improved and the project recently received another round of funding, of 3.9 billion yen ($37 million), including from the Development Bank of Japan.

The Japanese government is bullish on "the Jetsons" vision, with a "road map" for business services by 2023, and expanded commercial use by the 2030s, stressing its potential for connecting remote areas and providing lifelines in disasters.



This photo taken at the beginning of August, 2020.


Experts compare the buzz over flying cars to the days when the aviation industry got started with the Wright Brothers and the auto industry with the Ford Model T.

Lilium of Germany, Joby Aviation in California and Wisk, a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Kitty Hawk Corp., are also working on eVTOL projects.




Sebastian Thrun, chief executive of Kitty Hawk, said it took time for airplanes, cell phones and self-driving cars to win acceptance.

"But the time between technology and social adoption might be more compressed for eVTOL vehicles," he said.



Source: techxplore.com
Website: https://techxplore.com/news/2020-08-...Rw4sNJI65ZPl8k
Date: August 28, 2020
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Old 08-31-2020, 11:06 AM   #23
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Post FAA Clears Amazon's Fleet of Prime Air Drones For Liftoff


"The FAA supports innovation that is beneficial to the public, especially during a health or weather-related crisis,"
an agency spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.



* The Federal Aviation Administration has issued Amazon permission to begin conducting delivery drone operations.

* Amazon's Prime Air drone project has been in the works since 2013.

* The online retail giant received permission to begin testing drone deliveries in June 2019.

* "Amazon Prime Air's concept uses autonomous UAS to safely and efficiently deliver packages to customers," a FAA spokesperson said in a statement sent to Business Insider.



The Federal Aviation Administration will allow Amazon's fleet of Prime Air delivery drones to take flight.

A FAA spokesperson told Business Insider that the administration issued Amazon Prime Air its certificate on August 29. The Part 135 air carrier certificate allows Amazon to use "unmanned aircraft systems," or UAS, in a commercial operation.

"Amazon Prime Air's concept uses autonomous UAS to safely and efficiently deliver packages to customers," the spokesperson said in a statement sent to Business Insider. "The FAA's role is to ensure that any UAS operation is performed safely. The FAA supports innovation that is beneficial to the public, especially during a health or weather-related crisis."

Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

"This certification is an important step forward for Prime Air and indicates the FAA's confidence in Amazon's operating and safety procedures for an autonomous drone delivery service that will one day deliver packages to our customers around the world," Amazon Vice President and Prime Air Chief David Carbon told Bloomberg.

The certificate will allow Amazon to dive into operating a commercial drone delivery service, which has been in the works since 2013. The FAA gave Amazon permission to test its drones in the US in June 2019. FAA regulations hold that "Part 135 certification is the only path for small drones to carry the property of another for compensation beyond visual line of sight."

But Amazon is not the only player in the delivery drones game. In July, regional grocery chain Rouses Markets teamed up with last-mile delivery drone startup Deuce Drone for test flights in Alabama. The FAA has also issued Part 135 air carrier certificates to Alphabet's Wing Aviation and UPS' Flight Forward.



Source: businessinsider.com
Website: https://www.businessinsider.com/amaz...-ruling-2020-8
Date: August 31, 20202
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Old 09-01-2020, 07:43 AM   #24
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Default Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Donate Millions to Promote Safe Voting

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are donating $300 million to promote safe voting in the 2020 election


Mark Zuckerberg (right) and Priscilla Chan.


* Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are donating $300 million towards infrastructure to carry out the 2020 presidential election.

* $250 million will go towards nonprofit The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to fund staffing, training, and equipment in local jurisdictions.

* $50 million is going to nonprofit The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) to help secure voting.




Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan on Tuesday revealed they are donating $300 million to try to help people vote in the 2020 presidential election.

The news was unveiled by the groups benefiting from the donation, The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR).

The CTCL will receive the majority of the money ($250 million), which it says it will redistribute to local election jurisdictions to: "help ensure that they have the staffing, training, and equipment necessary so that this November every eligible voter can participate in a safe and timely way and that their vote is counted."

The CEIR will receive the remaining $50 million, which will be spent on helping local jurisdictions secure their voting data.

"Due to the unprecedented challenges COVID-19 will have on voting across the country, election officials are working around the clock to make sure that every voter has the ability to participate safely and have their vote counted," Zuckerberg and Chan said in a joint statement.

"Many counties and states are strapped financially and working to determine how to staff and fund operations that will allow for ballots to be cast and counted in a timely way. These donations will help to provide local and state officials across the country with the resources, training and infrastructure necessary to ensure that every voter who intends to cast a ballot is able to, and ultimately, to preserve the integrity of our elections," the couple added.

This donation is the latest display by Zuckerberg to indicate he cares about election integrity. Facebook launched a tool in August aimed at promoting accurate voting information, and according to an August 24 New York Times report Zuckerberg has met with Facebook deputies to discuss the possibility of implementing a "kill switch" to shut down political advertising after November 3 to head off any potential misinformation.

The company faced fierce criticism in May after Trump posted misinformation claiming mail-in votes would be fraudulent on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter added fact-checks to the post, whereas Facebook chose to leave it untouched. In July the company started adding labels to all posts about voting from officials and political candidates, including the president.

Harming election integrity has a sore point for Facebook ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations of Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election.



Source: businessinsider.com
Website: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark...lection-2020-9
Date: September 1, 2020
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Old 09-01-2020, 09:22 AM   #25
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Default Facebook Threatens to Block Australians From Sharing News in Battle Over Landmark Media Law

Digital giant says it will stop users of Facebook and Instagram sharing local
and international news if new law proposed by competition watchdog is approved


img source nypost.com

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The social media platform has said it would stop users
sharing news on Facebook and Instagram if Australia’s new digital platform rules become law.



Facebook will block Australians from sharing news if a landmark plan to make digital platforms pay for news content becomes law, the digital giant has warned.

The sharing of personal content between family and friends will not be affected and neither will the sharing of news by Facebook users outside of Australia, the social network said.

The mandatory news code has been backed by all the major media companies including News Corp Australia, Nine Entertainment and Guardian Australia, as a way to offset the damage caused by the loss of advertising revenue to Facebook and Google.

“Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram,” the managing director of Facebook Australia & New Zealand Will Easton said in a blog post on Tuesday.

“This is not our first choice – it is our last. But it is the only way to protect against an outcome that defies logic and will hurt, not help, the long-term vibrancy of Australia’s news and media sector.”

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the government would continue with the legislation and did not respond to “coercion or heavy-handed threats”.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims said Facebook’s threat was ill-timed and misconceived.

“The draft media bargaining code aims to ensure Australian news businesses, including independent, community and regional media, can get a seat at the table for fair negotiations with Facebook and Google,” Sims said.

“Facebook already pays some media for news content. The code simply aims to bring fairness and transparency to Facebook and Google’s relationships with Australian news media businesses.

“We note that according to the University of Canberra’s 2020 Digital News Report, 39% of Australians use Facebook for general news, and 49% use Facebook for news about COVID-19.

“As the ACCC and the Government work to finalise the draft legislation, we hope all parties will engage in constructive discussions.”

Tuesday’s statement marked the company’s first comment since Google also took an aggressive approach to the looming legislation, although the search giant has stopped short of saying it would block search functions in Australia.

The director of the the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology, Peter Lewis, said Facebook is prepared to remove trusted journalism from its site but will allow disinformation and conspiracy theories to flourish.

“As a big advertising company, Facebook would do well to realise its success is only as strong as its network of users,” Lewis said.

“Bullying their elected representatives seems a strange way to build long-term trust.

The announcement blindsided Australian media following a long silence from Facebook in Australia. Facebook chose to brief American journalists ahead of the release of the news about the ban, while ignoring Australian media.

Sources said the targeting of the US media indicated Facebook’s main concern was that the mandatory code set an “international precedent”.

Nine Entertainment, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, said Facebook’s “strange” response had demonstrated its use of its monopoly power “while failing to recognise the importance of reliable news content to balance the fake news that proliferates on their platform”.

“We are ready to engage and hope to come to a constructive outcome with Facebook which will work for both of us and importantly the Australian community,” a Nine spokeswoman said.

Facebook said the competition regulator “misunderstands the dynamics of the internet” and will damage the media companies it is trying to protect with the bargaining code which would see Google and Facebook sharing some of the revenue they get from advertising using news content.

“When crafting this new legislation, the commission overseeing the process ignored important facts, most critically the relationship between the news media and social media and which one benefits most from the other.”

Easton denied the ACCC’s claim that the digital giants make money from news, saying “the reverse is true” in the case of Facebook.

He said in the first five months of 2020 Facebook sent two billion clicks from Facebook’s News Feed back to Australian news websites “at no charge”, traffic that was worth an estimated $200m to Australian publishers.

In the incendiary post Facebook branded the scheme devised by the ACCC as one which allowed publishers to “charge us for as much content as they want at a price with no clear limits”. The statement had some support, including from billionaire tech mogul Mike Cannon-Brookes who said media would be the loser not Facebook.

In a separate post, the vice president of global news partnerships for Facebook, Campbell Brown, said the company’s commitment to journalism had not changed and listed the projects Facebook had launched globally.

“And we hope to once again count Australian news publishers among our partners in the future,” Brown said.

Brown said the company was “disappointed” by the outcome in Australia which did not produce regulation which helped the relationships between technology companies and news organisations but one which hindered it.

Facebook told users it was updating its terms of reference next month, apparently to include the ban on Australians sharing news. The new line in the terms is: “We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook”.

The minister for communications Paul Fletcher said Facebook’s statement was a reminder that the tech giants had a history of making heavy-handed threats and the government remained committed to the mandatory code.

The commercial TV lobby group accused Facebook of bullying.

“What we’re seeing today is a global monopoly that will say and do anything to avoid making a fair payment for news content, Free TV Australia chief executive Bridget Fair said: “Australian Facebook users are being held to ransom as a tactic to intimidate the Australian Government into backing down on this issue.”



Source: theguardian.com
Website: https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...ULnf_fBwTERfmI
Date: September 1, 2020
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Old 09-02-2020, 09:30 AM   #26
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Default

[QUOTE=PlatinumPearl;1274088][CENTER][B]Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are donating $300 million to promote safe voting in the 2020 election

Be nice if they donated 2-3 Billion....they can afford it and it would indicate their sincerity and commitment.

Zuckerberg donating 300 Million at his level of income is equivalent to me donating $100 at mine.
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Old 09-05-2020, 06:55 PM   #27
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Post Netflix

Netflix offering free catalogue of original content to non-subscribers worldwide.

The content includes Oscar-nominated 'The Two Popes' and 'BirdBox'.



img arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Netflix



Netflix is currently offering a free catalogue of its original content to non-subscribers worldwide in the hopes of attracting new users.

The content includes Stranger Things, Murder Mystery, Elite, Boss Baby: Back in Business, Birdbox, When They See Us, Love is Blind, The Two Popes, Our Planet and Grace and Frankie.

There is a catch, the streaming service is only offering the first episodes of the TV shows for free, after which you’ll be asked to sign-up for the service. You can watch the full-length of the movies, but there’s a 30-second skippable ad that will pop-up before it plays.

Further, the free previews are only accessible through web browsers and the Netflix Android app, and not the iOS app, unfortunately. It’s unknown why this is the case.

“Netflix is the premiere destination for all your entertainment needs. But don’t take our word for it–check out some of our favourite movies and TV shows, absolutely free,” the streaming giant notes on the catalogue page.

Netflix hasn’t stated how long this free catalogue will be available to non-subscribers, but notes that the selection may change from time to time.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Netflix has offered some of its original content for free, since it made To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before free for non-subscribers in Canada and U.S. ahead of the release of the sequel earlier this year.

However, this is the first time that Netflix has released an entire catalogue for users around the world to access without signing up. You can access it here.



Source: mobilesyrup.com
Website: https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/08/31/n...n-subscribers/
Date: August 31, 2020
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Old 09-29-2020, 12:47 PM   #28
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Post Amazon Pitches New Palm Scanning Tech

Amazon Pitches New Palm Scanning Tech For Stadiums, Offices As Consumer Privacy Concerns Linger.




TOPLINE New technology announced Tuesday by Amazon that allows the palm of a user’s hand to double as a credit card or company ID could find its way into use in office buildings and sports stadiums, according to the e-commerce giant, which said it chose the palm technology because it's "more private" than other biometric markers as consumers continue to have concerns over data privacy and big tech.

KEY FACTS
* The technology, called Amazon One, uses custom-built algorithms and hardware to create a person’s unique “palm signature,” allowing for everything from making credit card or loyalty card purchases to entering a location like a stadium, or badging into work securely, the company said in a blog post.

* Amazon, which is increasingly looking to evolve from e-commerce to bricks and mortar, will begin using the new technology in two of its Amazon Go stores in Seattle, where Amazon One will be added to the store’s entry gate.

* Now, consumers who shop at Amazon Go open a dedicated app and hold their phones near a gate that contains a scanner.

* To collect payment, those locations use what Amazon calls “just walk out” shopping which automatically charges items to a customer’s Amazon account.

* Amazon clearly is hoping to license the palm-reading technology to other users and said in the blog post that it is “in active discussions with several potential customers.”

CRUCIAL QUOTE
“We believe Amazon One has broad applicability beyond our retail stores, so we also plan to offer the service to third parties like retailers, stadiums, and office buildings so that more people can benefit from this ease and convenience in more places,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of physical retail and technology at Amazon.

KEY BACKGROUND
Retailers and financial transaction services have long eyed using biometric technology to speed contactless payment but have yet to get past consumer concerns about data privacy and a general unease with having facial images out in cyberspace waiting for a hack attack. In April 2019, Alibaba’s financial services arm, Ant Financial said it would spend $448 million to promote its point-of-sale payment device “Dragonfly” that would allow Alipay users to pay using only their faces, according to Technode. Update reported last week that facial recognition payments have not yet become popular in China due to problems with cumbersome enrollment and concerns about the security and privacy of the data and images involved. A 2019 survey by Wharton found that nearly half of Americans are concerned about the privacy risks associated with biometric authentication, according to ID Agent, which tracks cybersecurity issues. Amazon said its new technology is protected by multiple security controls. Palm images are not stored on the Amazon One device but are encrypted and sent to a “highly secure area we custom-built in the cloud where we create your palm signature.” The company said it chose palm recognition in part because it is considered more private than some biometric alternatives because you can’t determine a person’s identity by looking at an image of their palm.

FURTHER READING
Introducing Amazon One—a new innovation to make everyday activities effortless.



Source: forbes.com
Website: https://www.forbes.com/sites/karenro...r#71290dd222a7
Date: September 29, 2020
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Old 10-04-2020, 06:47 PM   #29
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Post Amazon Says 19,816 Workers Got Covid-19 This Year


Workers protest against the failure from their employers to provide adequate protections in the workplace
of the Amazon delivery hub on National May Day Walkout/Sickout by workers at Amazon, Whole Foods,
Innstacart and Shipt amid the Covid-19 pandemic on May 1, 2020, in Hawthorne, California.



TOPLINE After previously refusing to release coronavirus data on its workforce, Amazon for the first time Thursday disclosed how many employees have been infected with the virus: 19,816, or 1.44% of its workforce.

KEY FACTS
* The number comes from an analysis of 1.37 million Amazon and Whole Foods frontline workers in the U.S. employed at any time from March 1 to September 19, Amazon said.

* Amazon released state-by-state data, which shows employees in Florida and New Mexico had the highest number of cases per 1000 people.

* Based on the infection rate for the general U.S. population, Amazon said it expected 33,952 cases among warehouse workers and Whole Foods employees, which is 42% less than the actual number of cases.

* Amazon has been under pressure to release workforce infection rates for months, with workers resorting to tracking the number of positive cases themselves with crowdsourced databases.

* Amazon hopes to conduct 50,000 coronavirus tests per day across 650 sites starting in November, something it can do because it hired its own lab team with the goal of testing most frontline employees every two weeks.

KEY BACKGROUND
Early in the pandemic, Amazon became a target of labor groups, Democratic lawmakers and internal protests over its coronavirus procedures. Warehouse workers complained about lax enforcement of social distancing guidelines, not enough paid sick leave and called on Amazon to shut down and clean facilities with known infections. Amazon said at the time it is providing masks and temperature checks to employees, as well as staggered shifts and cleanings every 90 minutes. “All in, we've introduced or changed over 150 processes to ensure the health and safety of our teams,” Amazon said.

WHAT’S NEXT
Amazon noted it would be “more powerful if there were similar data from other major employers to compare it to,” urging other companies to follow by releasing their own infection rates.



Website: forbes.com
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachels...r#14423a092e84
Date: October 1, 2020
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Old 10-06-2020, 01:09 PM   #30
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Post Finally!!

This AI Startup Raised $15 Million To Help Patients Transcribe Doctor Appointments


Abridge cofounders CTO Sandeep Konam (L) and CEO Shiv Rao (R).



Imagine your doctor diagnosed you with pyelonephritis. Sounds scary and you might tune out some of the explanation where you’re told it’s a kidney infection. Wouldn’t it be great to have an automatic transcript of the conversation, so you could go back and read it later? Enter Pittsburgh-based startup Abridge. The company has combined a consumer app with artificial intelligence to securely transcribe any medical conversation that a patient chooses to record. Abridge, which announced its official launch and $15 million in funding on Tuesday, already has 50,000 users, mainly garnered through word-of-mouth.

“Technology has this potential to help so many more people than I could ever see in my weekly clinic,” says Abridge cofounder and CEO Dr. Shiv Rao, 41, a cardiologist who still occasionally sees patients.

The problem the company aims to solve is this: nearly two-thirds of patients surveyed by Abridge forgot more than 40 percent of the conversations they’ve had with their doctors, including key details, like what to do next to stay healthy. The app highlights key information from those conversations to help them. “It's helping them understand the details of their health from the high-level care plan down to the details of diagnoses, procedures, or medications that are discussed,” says Rao. Patients can also share the transcripts with caregivers or family members or other clinicians.

It’s the focus on the consumer—and using technology to bridge the gap between patients and clinicians—that attracted lead investor Union Square Ventures. “Most healthcare entrepreneurs attempt to solve things from the healthcare side,” says Andy Weissman, managing partner at Union Square Ventures. But Rao and his cofounder and CTO Sandeep Konam, 25, took the opposite approach. They focused on building what Weissman calls a “buttery user experience” for the consumer, which was key to other technology investments made by the firm, including Twitter, SoundCloud and Kickstarter. “It was rare for us to see people talking about that in healthcare,” says Weissman. Bessemer Venture Partners and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center also participated in the $10 million Series A round. The company previously raised $5 million in a seed round, which included Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer under President Obama, and investor Esther Dyson.



Screenshots of Abridge app.


In the era of “Dr. Google,” where patients often turn to the internet to get answers to pressing medical questions, Abridge has defined over 400,000 medical terms in easy to understand language, pulling from resources like the Mayo Clinic and the National Library of Medicine. Konam and his team spent two years developing algorithms that could understand medical jargon, surface key terms and detect next steps. The technology skips over discussions of topics like the weather and only focuses on the medically relevant parts of the conversation. “Our thesis has always been that we should focus on the conversation between a patient and the doctor,” says Konam. “Because that conversation is upstream of all the diagnostics, therapeutics, labs and other services.”

What Abridge has built is more complicated than the technology that underpins voice-controlled systems like Alexa or Siri, since those devices have corrections through voice commands. The company’s algorithms had to be able to recognize complicated names of prescriptions, such as atorvastatin for cholesterol or lisinopril for hypertension, on the first try. Abridge has also partnered with the drug pricing company GoodRx (which went public in September) to include information about available coupons next to the name of prescriptions. Privacy and security of protected health information was paramount to the platform design, says Konam. Another big challenge was being able to interpret varying degrees of microphone quality and people talking over each other.

Abridge was founded in 2018, but the cofounders met a couple years earlier, when Konam was pursuing a master's in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where Rao was a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The company’s ties to both institutions still run deep. The algorithms were developed using a de-identified and consented research dataset from UPMC, which is also an investor, and Abridge continues to work with machine learning professors at Carnegie Mellon. The company has 15 full-time employees and plans to use the funding to expand on the engineering and product side to continue developing new features.

“The most important part of the health journey often happens between visits,” says Rao. That is the next step for Abridge, using nudges to get patients to take the next steps—fill their prescriptions, schedule a follow-up visit, get their imaging done. While the main users are patients, the main customers Abridge hopes to attract are health systems and health insurers, who are willing to pay for the use of a platform that could help improve the long-term outcomes for their patients. “Our ambition here isn't to automate humans away,” says Rao. “That's not where we're coming from. We're coming up with an angle of using cutting edge technology, like machine learning to augment humans and the relationships between them.”



Source: forbes.com
Website: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katieje...r#5c1aa1d53d90
Date: October 6, 2020
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Old 10-19-2020, 03:18 AM   #31
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Default

Billionaire wealth increased to $10.2 trillion through the end of July, setting a new record amid the coronavirus pandemic even as millions of unemployed people fall into poverty.

The number of billionaires also rose from 2,158 in 2017 to 2,189 this summer, according to the report.

While the UBS analysis looked at billionaires around the world, a separate analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness found that billionaire wealth in the United States has grown by $792 billion, or 27%, since the beginning of coronavirus lockdowns in March. The combined wealth of American billionaires now tops $3.7 trillion.

The study pointed to President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which helped billionaires keep more of their earnings. The UBS study noted that Trump's desired capital gains tax cut, billed as a pandemic-related stimulus, would overwhelmingly favor the richest Americans.

"For billionaires, this is a heads-we win, tails-you-lose economy, boosted by Trump policies to funnel wealth to the top," Chuck Collins, the head of the Institute for Policy Studies' Program on Inequality, said in a news release.

The study pointed to President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which helped billionaires keep more of their earnings. The UBS study noted that Trump's desired capital gains tax cut, billed as a pandemic-related stimulus, would overwhelmingly favor the richest Americans.

"For billionaires, this is a heads-we win, tails-you-lose economy, boosted by Trump policies to funnel wealth to the top," Chuck Collins, the head of the Institute for Policy Studies' Program on Inequality, said in a news release.
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/billionaires-rich/
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Old 11-05-2020, 10:28 PM   #32
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Post Tesla’s Tequila

Tesla’s Tequila Exists, Pricily



The product once known as Teslaquila.



Elon Musk has branched out from rockets and cars into booze — as Tesla has launched Tesla Tequila on its website today. If you have $250 burning a hole in your pocket, you can pick up your very own lightning-shaped bottle.



A screenshot of Tesla’s website.


The original branding was Teslaquila, but that must have been jettisoned somewhere along the way. (Well, the idea did start as an April Fools’ Day joke.) Orders are limited to two bottles, and only people in some states can receive them because of “industry regulations.”


[Twitter Img. Cannot Display.]
Click here for Twitter post.


According to the marketing copy, the booze is “an exclusive, small-batch premium 100% de agave tequila añejo.” An añejo is typically aged from one to three years in oak; this one was aged for 15 months.

Tequila, like Champagne, is subject to strict denomination-of-origin rules; tequila must be manufactured in one of five Mexican states. It must also be made from blue agave, among other rules. (Mezcal, a similar drink, can be made from several varieties of agave.) According to the website, the product was produced by Nosotros Tequila, a California-based brand. On Nosotros Tequila’s website, it says its agave is sourced in Jalisco, one of the permitted states.

In 2018, Musk ran into some trouble with the Tequila Regulatory Council in Mexico (CRT), after he’d tweeted a “visual approximation” of a bottle. The problem had to do with a patent application that didn’t fit with the tequila denomination-of-origin rules. At the time, Reuters reported the CRT said that if Tesla wanted to produce a tequila, “it would have to associate itself with an authorized tequila producer, comply with certain standards and request authorization from Mexico’s Industrial Property Institute.”


[Twitter Img. Cannot Display.]
Click here for Twitter post.


Merch is normal for car companies — though it could be argued that alcohol is in poor taste. But Tesla won’t be liable if consumers drink and drive; besides, alcohol companies are probably more excited than anybody about self-driving cars. Tesla isn’t yet at full automation, though it did recently release a feature called “Full Self-Driving” in beta, catching regulators’ attention.



Source: theverge.com
Website: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1...exists-website
Date: November 5, 2020
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Old 11-12-2020, 09:56 AM   #33
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Default Amazon Palm Payment

Amazon expands palm-scanning payment technology to 3 more Seattle-area stores


With the Amazon One technology, customers have the option to enter the store by waving their
hand over a palm scanner, after linking their handprint to a credit card. (Courtesy of Amazon)


In its latest push to collect data on consumer purchases, Amazon is expanding a new palm recognition payment technology into three more Seattle-area stores, the company announced Tuesday.

Civil-liberties advocates, though, are concerned the company is storing immutable biometric information on its customers, which they say poses risks to consumer privacy.

The technology, called Amazon One, was piloted in two cashierless Amazon Go stores in South Lake Union earlier this fall. Customers who have linked their handprint to a credit card pay by waving their hand over a sleek palm scanner. Customers can also link their handprint to their Amazon account, though that’s not required.

The company will roll out Amazon One devices at the Amazon Go Grocery in Redmond on Wednesday, followed by the Amazon Books in University Village and the Amazon 4-Star store in Southcenter in coming weeks, said Dilip Kumar, Amazon’s vice president of physical retail and technology, in an interview.

Amazon dominates the e-commerce marketplace, in part because it collects massive amounts of data on customers’ online shopping habits, enabling it to predict with uncanny accuracy which goods might appeal to specific customers.

Lately, the company has started to collect similar data on customers’ purchases in physical stores — and plans to expand those efforts beyond the Amazon ecosystem.

Amazon is marketing the Amazon One service to “retailers, stadiums, and office buildings,” Kumar wrote in a blog post announcing the product launch. (As to whether the company will expand Amazon One into the chain of Whole Foods grocery stores, which it purchased in 2017, customers should “stay tuned about that,” Kumar said.) Once a customer registers, they can use the same handprint signature at every Amazon One terminal, no matter where the device is located.

The impetus behind the science-fiction-esque palm scanner is to “remove friction in the shopping process,” Kumar said in the interview, by reducing how long it takes to pay.

That builds on the premise behind the company’s 26 Amazon Go convenience stores, where cash registers have been replaced by sophisticated cameras tracking which items customers remove from shelves to bill their Amazon accounts later.

To civil-liberties advocates, though, it’s not clear whether the purported convenience of using biometric technologies to pay for groceries outweighs the potential risks to consumers’ privacy.

“The way the surveillance infrastructure is being built around us at increasing speed, it’s very disturbing,” said Jennifer Lee, who works on the intersection of technology and privacy for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

The scanners use two sets of cameras to capture images of both the exterior and interior of a customer’s palm, according to a patent application Amazon filed last year. The process, called vein matching, isn’t new — it’s been around since the 1980s, and has been used by Japanese banks to secure ATM transactions since the early 2000s. Amazon One, though, represents the first significant commercial rollout of the technology in the U.S.

The gradual encroachment of Amazon’s data collection into ever-more-personal spheres, Lee said, may generate a sense of complacency among consumers. “First it’s your online shopping patterns, then it’s your palm prints, then it’s facial recognition, then you’ve ceded all privacy,” she said. “It’s very concerning.”

Amazon has previously come under scrutiny for its ties to law enforcement, raising concerns over whether police or federal agencies might be able to access the handprint data, Lee said. The company’s home security division, Ring, supplies home surveillance footage to 1,300 law enforcement agencies around the country. The company has previously marketed its facial recognition software to police agencies; it placed a one-year moratorium on police use of the technology this summer amid protests over police violence.

There are also concerns about data breaches.

“This vein mapping data will be stored on servers that are hackable,” said Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School who studies data collection.

Amazon rebuffed those concerns. The palm-print data is anonymized and stored securely in the cloud, Kumar said, and the proprietary way Amazon scans customers’ hands means the data is of virtually no use to any other organization.

The only people who have access to the palm data are a “small group of trained Amazon researchers” working “to improve the technology and service,” said Amazon spokesperson Kerri Catallozzi in an email. Customers can ask Amazon to delete their handprint from its cloud storage.

Most worrisome, West said, is that the camera devices and cloud technologies powering Amazon Go and Amazon One record consumers’ immutable physical characteristics.

“Some may argue that we essentially have this kind of personal identifying information in our phones or our wallets,” West said. But if credit card or cellphone data is exposed, “I can throw away those phones and wallets. I can’t throw away my hand.”


Source: seattletimes.com
Website: https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...box=1605153124
Date: November 11, 2020
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Old 11-18-2020, 09:59 AM   #34
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Post Facebook, Twitter CEOs Testify on Censoring Hunter Biden Story, Handling of Election

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify before the Senate on blocking
distribution of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden and the handling of the 2020 election.


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Old 11-23-2020, 12:14 PM   #35
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Post Facebook Launches ‘Drives’ - US ONLY

Facebook launches ‘Drives,’ a U.S.-only feature for collecting food, clothing and other necessities for people in need.


img: FB



Facebook today is introducing a new feature that will allow users in the U.S. to collect food, clothing, and other necessities for people in need. The feature, called “Drives,” is being made available through Facebook’s existing Community Help hub, which is the place where Facebook centralizes requests and offers for help within a local community.

The Community Help hub was first launched in 2017 as a way for Facebook users to centralize their resources in the wake of a crisis, like a man-made, accidental or natural disaster, ranging from weather events to terrorist attacks, and more. In 2020, however, the feature has been put to broader use as a part of Facebook’s COVID-19 efforts, which even saw a version of Community Help feature scaled globally to help those impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.

Now, with the economic crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., millions are out of work and 12 million may lose their unemployment benefits in December when CARES Act provisions lapse. Food insecurity and an inability to pay bills, including rent and mortgage payments, as well as manage other household expenses, are impacting millions as well.

With Drives, Facebook will allow users to create and share their own efforts in collecting items for those in need, like a Canned Food Drive that’s looking to gather items for local shelters, a Clothing Drive, or any other event where someone is working to collect items to help others.



img: FB


To create a Drive, type “Community Help” into Facebook Search to find the shortcut that takes you to the Community Help hub. From there, click the “Request or Offer Help” button, and on the bottom sheet that appears, click “Create Drive.” You can then fill out the form, setting a goal for the number of items you want to collect. When you post the Drive, others will be able to see what’s still needed with this goal tracker. Once created, the Drive will appear in your News Feed and Timeline like a regular post, in addition to appearing in Community Help.

The feature is rolling out starting today, but Facebook’s blog post originally said the feature may not be widely available to all for “weeks.” That would be unfortunate, given that many people likely want to run holiday-related Drives within the hub to help get food for holiday meals or toys for families in need, for example. (After publication of our article, Facebook updated the blog post to say “coming days” and emailed TechCrunch to say it will expedite the feature to ensure it arrives in time for the holidays.)

Facebook notes that all posts in Community Help, including Drives, are reviewed to ensure they don’t violate Facebook’s Community Standards or its Community Help Product Policies. These policies prohibit insensitive and promotional content, spam, inauthentic posts, and posts from users under 18, among other things. If posts are found to be in violation, they’re taken down, the company says.

Drives is one of several efforts around holiday giving that Facebook announced today. The company also says it will match up to $7 million in eligible donations to U.S. nonprofits on GivingTuesday (Dec. 1), and is running its own fundraiser, “Peace Through Music: A Global Event For Social Justice” exclusively on Facebook Live. The event, on Dec. 1 at 12 PM ET, will feature Aloe Blacc, Billie Eilish, Becky G, Carlos Santana & Cindy Blackman Santana, Killer Mike, Ringo Starr, Skip Markey, and others. The event will support the Playing for Change Foundation, the United Nations Population Fund, Sankofa, Silkroad and The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation.

Meanwhile, Instagram will soon gain new fundraising tools. Today, Instagram users can fundraise with stickers on Stories and on Instagram Live. A new feature will allow Instagram users to post fundraisers to their Instagram Feed, too, but Facebook didn’t offer a timeframe as to when that feature would launch.



Source: techcrunch.com
Website: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/23/fa...eople-in-need/
Date: November 23, 2020
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Old 11-23-2020, 04:43 PM   #36
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Post Qantas Airlines

Vaccination will be ‘a necessity’ for international flights, says Qantas chief.

Airline plans to insist that passengers have had a jab against Covid-19



Most of Qantas’s international routes are suspended because Australia’s borders remain shut to non-residents © Via Reuters



Qantas plans to insist that passengers on international flights have been vaccinated against Covid-19 before boarding its planes once any jab is rolled out.

Alan Joyce, the Australian airline’s chief executive, said he thought a vaccine would become “a necessity” for international travel.

“We are looking at changing our terms and conditions to say for international travellers, we will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft,” Mr Joyce told Channel 9 in Australia.

“I think that’s going to be a common thing talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe,” he added.

Qantas is the first big airline to publicly raise the possibility of refusing travel to passengers who have not been vaccinated.

The pandemic prompted Australia to close its borders to non-residents, and Qantas has suspended all international flights except for a skeleton schedule to New Zealand. The company does not expect to reopen most of them until the middle of next year.

Vaccine breakthroughs in the past two weeks have raised hopes that international travel could start to recover in 2021 but they have also provoked questions about how the health status of would-be passengers will be verified.

On Monday Oxford university and AstraZeneca became the third team of vaccine developers to announce their jab had been shown to be effective in late-stage trials.

David Powell, medical adviser to airline industry body Iata, said it was “a really strong possibility” that countries would start to demand proof of health status from travellers, particularly in areas with low prevalence of the virus such as Australia.

“Being able to have verifiable information about the health status of passengers, I think that is going to be critical,” he told reporters on Monday.

Tony Douglas, Etihad chief executive, told the Financial Times in September that health visas certifying that passengers were safe to fly could help the airline industry recover from the crisis.

Several digital health passes have since been developed, including the World Economic Forum-backed CommonPass, which uses a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone and has held test runs to and from major hubs including New York, London and Singapore.

Iata on Monday announced it was developing a health pass with British Airways owner IAG.

But given the airline industry is not expecting a vaccine to be readily available until the middle of next year, executives see airport testing as a first step to restarting travel before any jab is rolled out to a critical mass of the population.

Airlines for Europe, a lobby group, said that while it was “very likely” that international standards would be needed on certifying vaccinations, the industry “can’t afford to wait that long”.

“At this stage, our main priority is the adoption of a common testing protocol and the recognition of test standards and measures for travel both in Europe and across the globe,” it said.

EasyJet said it had no plans to ask passengers to prove they had been vaccinated before travel. IAG and Virgin Atlantic declined to comment, while Ryanair declined to comment.



Source: Financial Times
Website: https://www.ft.com/content/8a59043d-...0-2780f06c5d1e
Date: November 23, 2020
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Old 11-23-2020, 04:53 PM   #37
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Post Apple Alleged Bribery

Apple Exec Indicted For Allegedly Trying To Bribe Santa Clara Sheriff’s Officers With iPads.


TOPLINE Apple’s head of global security was indicted by a grand jury Monday for attempting to bribe law enforcement officers with iPads for concealed firearm permits, the highest-profile tech executive so far roped into the widening Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office scandal.



Apple Park's spaceship campus is seen from this drone view in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Monday, Oct. 21, 2019. Getty Images.



KEY FACTS
* A grand jury alleges that Thomas Moyer promised to donate 200 iPads worth $70,000 to the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office in exchange for four concealed firearm licenses for Apple employees.

* Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen alleges the scheme was orchestrated by Undersheriff Rick Sung and Captain James Jensen, who were also indicted.

* The donation never came to fruition, though, because the district attorney’s office began to investigate in August 2019.

* Moyer’s lawyer Ed Swanson said in a statement to Forbes his client is innocent of the charges filed against him and collateral damage in a dispute between the Santa Clara County sheriff and the district attorney.

* Moyer’s indictment is part of a larger scandal involving alleged bribes that went to Sheriff Laurie Smith’s reelection campaign in 2018, which has seen four other people, though not Smith, indicted this year.


CRUCIAL QUOTE
“In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” a press release from the Santa Clara District Attorney reads.


FURTHER READING
Read the full indictment here.


This is a developing story.



Source: Forbes
Website: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachels...h=791616072400
Date: November 23, 2020
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Old 11-29-2020, 11:09 PM   #38
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Post CFAA Case

The Supreme Court will hear its first big CFAA case




The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in a case that could lead to sweeping changes to America’s controversial computer hacking laws — and affecting how millions use their computers and access online services.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was signed into federal law in 1986 and predates the modern internet as we know it, but governs to this day what constitutes hacking — or “unauthorized” access to a computer or network. The controversial law was designed to prosecute hackers, but has been dubbed as the “worst law” in the technology law books by critics who say it’s outdated and vague language fails to protect good-faith hackers from finding and disclosing security vulnerabilities.

At the center of the case is Nathan Van Buren, a former police sergeant in Georgia. Van Buren used his access to a police license plate database to search for an acquaintance in exchange for cash. Van Buren was caught, and prosecuted on two counts: accepting a kickback for accessing the police database, and violating the CFAA. The first conviction was overturned, but the CFAA conviction was upheld.

Van Buren may have been allowed to access the database by way of his police work, but whether he exceeded his access remains the key legal question.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said Van Buren vs. United States was an “ideal case” for the Supreme Court to take up. “The question couldn’t be presented more cleanly,” he argued in a blog post in April.

The Supreme Court will try to clarify the decades-old law by deciding what the law means by “unauthorized” access. But that’s not a simple answer in itself.

“The Supreme Court’s opinion in this case could decide whether millions of ordinary Americans are committing a federal crime whenever they engage in computer activities that, while common, don’t comport with an online service or employer’s terms of use,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at Stanford University’s law school. (Pfefferkorn’s colleague Jeff Fisher is representing Van Buren at the Supreme Court.)

How the Supreme Court will determine what “unauthorized” means is anybody’s guess. The court could define unauthorized access anywhere from violating a site’s terms of service to logging into a system that a person has no user account for.

Pfefferkorn said a broad reading of the CFAA could criminalize anything from lying on a dating profile, sharing the password to a streaming service, or using a work computer for personal use in violation of an employer’s policies.

But the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling could also have broad ramifications on good-faith hackers and security researchers, who purposefully break systems in order to make them more secure. Hackers and security researchers have for decades operated in a legal grey area because the law as written exposes their work to prosecution, even if the goal is to improve cybersecurity.

Tech companies have for years encouraged hackers to privately reach out with security bugs. In return, the companies fix their systems and pay the hackers for their work. Mozilla, Dropbox, and Tesla are among the few companies that have gone a step further by promising not to sue good-faith hackers under the CFAA. Not all companies welcome the scrutiny and bucked the trend by threatening to sue researchers over their findings, and in some cases actively launching legal action to prevent unflattering headlines.

Security researchers are no stranger to legal threats, but a decision by the Supreme Court that rules against Van Buren could have a chilling effect on their work, and drive vulnerability disclosure underground.

“If there are potential criminal (and civil) consequences for violating a computerized system’s usage policy, that would empower the owners of such systems to prohibit bona fide security research and to silence researchers from disclosing any vulnerabilities they find in those systems,” said Pfefferkorn. “Even inadvertently coloring outside the lines of a set of bug bounty rules could expose a researcher to liability.”

“The Court now has the chance to resolve the ambiguity over the law’s scope and make it safer for security researchers to do their badly-needed work by narrowly construing the CFAA,” said Pfefferkorn. “We can ill afford to scare off people who want to improve cybersecurity.”

The Supreme Court will likely rule on the case later this year, or early next.



Source: techcrunch.com
Website: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/29/su...buren-hacking/
Date: November 29, 2020
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Old 12-06-2020, 07:32 PM   #39
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Default How did retailers miss this?!

UPS Shipping Limits Set from 5 Major Retailers May Delay Christmas Gifts..

Amazon Sellers Report Increases In Shipping Delays....

Shipping delays are expected to surge. As many as 1 in 5 packages won’t arrive on time this holiday season, according to a forecast by LateShipment.com.

Sidebar: Consumers have been shopping more and more online since this pandemic hit! Did businesses just assume this would slack off as the holidays grew near? And why didn't FedEX, United Parcel Service, USPS, etc have the foresight to see this continuing trend and hire more help?

We placed an order on Cyber Monday with See's and have yet to get a email verifying the order has shipped with a tracking number!

Hopefully it wasn't based on what that idiot in the White House was saying about the pandemic just magically disappearing!
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Old 12-06-2020, 08:03 PM   #40
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Post Time to Shop Local and Support Your Small Businesses!!

Amazon workers working 55-hour weeks and so exhausted by targets they 'fall asleep standing up'.

Ambulance crews called after workers collapse at work.


Pictures taken by an undercover reporter captured workers asleep standing up
as they reportedly had to process a parcel every 30 seconds (Sunday People).



Amazon workers are so exhausted by long hours and relentless targets they are falling asleep on their feet, according to a new investigation.

Employees reportedly had timed toilet breaks, a claim denied by the company. Some were made to do compulsory overtime, meaning they were working a 55-hour week ahead of the Christmas period.

Pictures taken by an undercover reporter captured workers asleep standing up as they reportedly had to process a parcel every 30 seconds.

Sunday Mirror reporter Alan Selby spent five weeks working at the online shop's warehouse in Essex and finished his last shift on Black Friday.


A number of workers who could not cope with the relentless targets were attended to by ambulance crews after they collapsed on the job, the investigation found.

The reporter was told to pack 120 items an hour, although that target is set to rise to 200 items. Workers are paid £8.20 an hour.

One colleague told him: “Everybody suffers here. I pulled my hamstring but I just had to carry on. My friend spent two days off after she damaged her knee ligaments.”

Amazon said in a statement: “Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace with competitive pay and benefits from day one. We are proud to have created thousands of permanent roles in our UK fulfilment centres in recent years.

“We offer great jobs and a positive environment with opportunities for growth. As with most companies, we expect a certain level of performance.

“Targets are based on previous performance achieved by our workers. Associates are evaluated over a long period of time as we know a variety of things could impact the ability to meet expectations in any given day or hour.”



Source: independent.co.uk
Website: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-a8079111.html
Date: November 27, 2020
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