Tech

NEW YORK (AP) - The New York Police Department has agreed to limit its use of sound cannons on crowds, ending a five-year legal battle over claims that the devices caused hearing damage, dizziness and migraines.

In a settlement agreement filed in federal court on Monday, the police department said ...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - The city of Jackson, Mississippi, has denied a TV station's public records request for email about problems with the city water treatment system.

WLBT-TV recently requested all city email related to the Environmental Protection Agency telling Jackson in March 2020 to bring its water treatment ...

DETROIT (AP) — Two federal agencies are sending teams to investigate the fatal crash of a Tesla near Houston in which local authorities say no one was behind the wheel.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday they will send investigators to Spring, ...

About Facebook: Facebook says it will start testing Live Audio Rooms in Groups and expects to roll out the feature to everyone on the Facebook app by the summer  —  Storytelling helps people build meaningful bonds: we all have stories to share with our friends, our communities, and the world at large.

Sara Fischer / Axios: Zuckerberg says Facebook is planning a short-form audio product called Soundbites, a podcast discovery tool, and more audio products for the next 3 to 6 months  —  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said Facebook was launching a suite of new tools and features designed to help users better connect …

Jay Peters / The Verge: Reddit shares a preview of Reddit Talk, a Clubhouse-like social audio feature for subreddits coming to iOS and Android; moderators can join a waitlist to try it  —  Sign up now to get on the waitlist  —  Reddit unveiled its take on a Clubhouse-like social audio product on Monday, called Reddit Talk.

I received a positive COVID-19 test result on December 9th. I was working from home and had avoided socializing for months, but the virus reached me through my daughter’s kindergarten. Staying isolated for a couple of weeks wasn’t going to be a problem. Still, the timing for getting sick was unfortunate. Everyone who has ever […]

The post How I Managed My Growing Company While Being COVID-19 Positive appeared first on ReadWrite.

In 2020, AI had rapid transformations and unexpected developments along with excellent innovations. We, as humans have entered into the most digitalized era of all times. Due to the pandemic of coronavirus, technology has become the central focus like never before. Internet and social media witnessed a tremendous boost as well. No doubt but the […]

The post Will AI dominate in 2021? A Big Question appeared first on ReadWrite.

It’s not news that technology has become an important factor in almost every aspect of our lives. More people are getting rid of traditional satellite TV and moving to streaming services, Alexa letting us know when to water our plants, and the average person spending almost 3 hours and 30 minutes of their day just […]

The post The Link Between Diversity, Inclusion and the Use of Technology appeared first on ReadWrite.

Senators have written to Facebook and Twitter to ask about vaccine misinformation superspreaders.

As the Covid-19 vaccine rollout continues across the US, some lawmakers are concerned that ongoing misinformation and disinformation campaigns are exacerbating vaccine hesitancy. Now, two senators are turning their attention to the vaccine misinformation superspreaders that push the bulk of conspiracy theories and lies on social media — and asking the social media giants to take more aggressive action.

“For too long, social media platforms have failed to adequately protect Americans by not taking sufficient action to prevent the spread of vaccine disinformation online,” wrote Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) in a Friday letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was viewed by Recode. “Despite your policies intended to prevent vaccine disinformation, many of these accounts continue to post content that reach millions of users, repeatedly violating your policies with impunity.”

In particular, the senators urged the companies to take action against 12 anti-vaccine influencers — 11 individuals and one couple — who spread anti-vaccine content on the internet. These accounts include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed distrust in vaccines, and Joseph Mercola, an online alternative medicine proponent who was recently flagged by the Food and Drug Administration for promoting fake Covid-19 cures, including through his still-active Twitter account.

These 12 entities were identified in a report published last month by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit focused on online hate and misinformation. To find these 12 influencers, researchers identified 10 private and 20 public anti-vaccine Facebook groups, whose sizes ranged between 2,500 and 235,000 members. The researchers then analyzed links posted in these groups and tracked the sources of their links.

They found that up to 73 percent of that content, including posts sharing it across Facebook, came from websites affiliated with these 12 superspreaders, who have built reputations in the anti-vaccine online world through multiple accounts on various social media services. More broadly, up to 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on both Facebook and Twitter identified by the researchers seemed to come from these entities. At the time of the report’s publication in March, nine of these superspreaders were active on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

In their Friday letter, the senators asked for more details on the platforms’ approach to content moderation, and for explanations of why the content shared by these 12 superspreaders does or does not violate Facebook’s and Twitter’s rules. The senators also sought more information on the companies’ investment in content moderation for communities of color, rural communities, and non-English speaking communities, pointing out that some of the content posted by the 12 superspreaders “targets Black and Latino communities with tailored anti-vaccine messages.”

In response to the pandemic and the vaccine rollout, Facebook and Twitter have altered their approach to content moderation and health misinformation. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, has banned anti-vaccine misinformation and misinformation about Covid-19 that could lead to “imminent physical harm,” and the company says it has removed more than 12 million pieces of content that violate this threshold. Facebook has also conducted research into vaccine-hesitant comments on its service.

“Working with leading health organizations, we’ve updated our policies to take action against accounts that break our Covid-19 and vaccine rules — including by reducing their distribution or removing them from our platform — and have already taken action against some of the groups in this report,” Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever told Recode. She added that the company had connected 2 billion people to resources from health authorities.

Twitter has taken a two-pronged approach of removing the most harmful vaccine misinformation and labeling other misleading tweets.

Generally, these approaches have focused on individual pieces of content, not the broader behavior of particular influencers across the internet. That means that vaccine misinformation superspreaders have more leeway to spread distrust without necessarily outright sharing false claims about vaccines. Instead, they can promote “health freedom” to encourage people to not get vaccinated, present vaccine news in a misleading light, use social media to link to misleading claims on their own websites, and simply raise questions in order to sow doubt.

Update, April 19, 2021, 2:10 pm ET: This piece was updated to include a comment from a Facebook spokesperson.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

Some powerful tech has landed on the red planet.

On Monday morning, a small helicopter named Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly on another planet. The autonomous bot flew for less than a minute on Mars before landing, according to NASA.

Ingenuity’s short but successful flight comes about two months after NASA’s Perseverance rover, which carried the tiny helicopter, first landed on the planet, completing a journey through space that began last July. Perseverance is the fifth rover to arrive on the red planet; this boxy, car-sized vehicle with an extendable arm is now charged with looking for signs of ancient life and gathering data about Mars’s geology and climate. It will even lay the groundwork for eventual human exploration of the planet.

You wouldn’t believe what I just saw. More images and video to come...#MarsHelicopterhttps://t.co/PLapgbHeZU pic.twitter.com/mbiOGx4tJZ

To make all that possible, the rover carries a stunning display of technology designed especially for Perseverance’s historic mission. Those tools will help the rover gather data about the planet and its atmosphere, which it can then send back to NASA. There’s also an excavation system that can collect high-quality samples of Martian soil to be stashed and later analyzed by a future mission to Mars.

In the years the new rover is expected to operate, these machines will battle challenges that terrestrial technology never has to deal with, including Mars’s super-thin atmosphere, limited resources, incredibly cold temperatures, and delayed communication with human overlords on Earth.

To give you an idea of how all this will happen, we’ve outlined some of the coolest features that will be on display now that Perseverance’s mission on Mars is fully underway.

Key to its mission’s success is the ability for Perseverance to self-drive. The vehicle has a computer devoted to its autonomous capabilities, and as Wired explains, it was designed and built specifically for this mission. The autonomous driving feature is essential because Mars is simply too far away for humans to give the vehicle constant, real-time instructions. So the rover needs to fend for itself.

“One of the fundamental constraints of any kind of space exploration — whether you’re going to Mars or Europa or the moon — is that you have limited bandwidth, which means a limit on the amount of information you can send back and forth,” David Wettergreen, research professor at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, told Recode. “During the periods of time when the robot can’t communicate, autonomy is important for it to enable it to keep doing tasks, to explore on its own, to make progress, rather than just sitting there waiting for the next time it hears from us.”

But building an autonomous vehicle for Mars is not necessarily as easy as building a self-driving car here on Earth (and that’s not easy, either). For one thing, the vehicle needs to be primarily concerned with safety, not with speed or the comfort of its passengers. After receiving basic instructions from humans about where it needs to go, Perseverance has to figure out the least-dangerous route on its own. If it crashes, the rover might render itself useless.

“Mars is not a fixed, flat, nice, paved road. Mars is really challenging terrain. There is dirt, rocks, sand, slopes, cliffs — all these things that the rover is going to have to avoid,” explained Philip Twu, robotics system engineer at NASA. “In addition to cameras, the rover is also going to need computers, algorithms, and software to be able to process all that imagery data into essentially a 3D picture that it’s then going to go ahead and use to plan.”

Fortunately for Perseverance, Mars is not a place where a self-driving rover needs to worry about crashing into another car or hitting a pedestrian.

“On Mars, there’s nothing moving around,” said Wettergreen. “They’re moving slowly, so they can take the time to build a detailed model, do a lot of analysis on that model, and then decide what to do next.”

Also aboard the rover is Ingenuity, which is now both the first helicopter to fly on Mars and the “first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet,” according to NASA. That makes Ingenuity an experiment on its own, one that has undergone extensive testing on Earth. Its mission is to demonstrate that flight on Mars, where it will conduct up to five test flights, is possible, and that flights can be conducted autonomously on the planet.

While the device is essentially a drone, it’s specially crafted for Mars, which has less gravity than Earth. This makes ascent easier, but due to the planet’s comparatively thin atmosphere, flight itself is more challenging. The blades of the helicopter can make more than 2,000 revolutions a minute, several times the speed of helicopter blades whipping around in Earth’s atmosphere. Ingenuity is incredibly light, weighing in at around 4 pounds.

But the tiny vehicle’s autonomy is not just designed to help with navigation; it’s also built to keep Ingenuity alive.

“Mars is very, very cold. It gets to about negative 130 degrees Fahrenheit at night. That’s pretty cold,” explained Twu. “So the autonomy onboard the helicopter is also involved with finding a way to keep the helicopter warm enough to survive all the Martian nights.”

One purpose of the helicopter is to help NASA make decisions about where flight could lend assistance during future missions to the planet. Similar drones could serve as scouts that survey the terrain of Mars — especially places that rovers can’t easily get to — or, as NASA says, become “full standalone science craft carrying instrument payloads.”

Will we be seeing any of this tech on Earth one day? It’s hard to say right now, but Twu notes that NASA is famous for its spinoffs.

“Time and time again, we’ve seen that technology developed for NASA missions — a lot of them for space missions — end up having terrestrial applications here on Earth,” he said. “All technology development can cross-pollinate and advances in one area inevitably result in advances in other areas.”

The rover is armed with a 7-foot-long arm equipped with a drill that’s designed to collect rock and soil samples from beneath Mars’s surface. Those samples will then be stored in as many as 43 containers that the rover carries around on the planet. Once those samples are collected, they’ll be left in tubes that will sit on Mars’s surface for a future mission to pick up.

The arm alone isn’t all that impressive as a piece of space technology. Instead, its virtue is all the stuff that it comes, well, armed with.

“It’s like a Swiss Army knife of scientific instruments,” said Wettergreen. “What’s so amazing about it is all of these different functionalities and capabilities that they’ve been able to pack into such a small package.”

For instance, on the arm is a robotic claw equipped with a laser and other tools, including a camera called Watson that NASA compares to “a geologist’s hand-lens, magnifying and recording textures of rock and soil targets,” which is part of a tool — fittingly named Sherloc — that comes with special spectrometers and a laser. There’s also a tool called PIXL that can analyze incredibly tiny chemical elements and, in NASA’s words, take “super close-up pictures of rock and soil textures” to help scientists figure out whether Mars could have been home to microbial life in the past.

Integrated into the rover are a slew of extremely high-quality cameras — 23 in total — that will help the vehicle survey the planet. The cameras won’t just help Perseverance get around Mars, but they’ll also take images of samples collected on the planet and record the vehicle’s arrival on the surface in full color. Meanwhile, NASA says that so-called “engineering” cameras will take on tasks like helping the vehicle avoid potentially treacherous areas, like sand dunes and trenches, while others will help the system navigate without human intervention.

At the same time, the rover will pick up sound data through its two microphones. Those devices will listen to the rover as it arrives and travels on the planet. There’s a special microphone that works in conjunction with a laser to study the chemistry of the planet’s geology by zapping it and recording the sound of the zapping. As NASA explains, the microphone hears the intensity of the “pop” made by the laser turning the rock into plasma, which “reveals the relative hardness of the rocks, which can tell us more about their geological context.”

Update, April 19, 2021, 12:50 pm ET: This piece was updated to include details of Ingenuity’s first successful flight.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

America has officially blamed the Russian government for the hack of multiple federal agencies.

The Biden administration has officially blamed and sanctioned Russia for its role in the massive SolarWinds hack that compromised computer systems in multiple government agencies as well as private companies.

In an executive order issued April 15, President Biden levied a variety of economic sanctions against several Russian financial institutions, technology companies, and individuals designated as having participated in “harmful foreign activities,” including but not limited to the hack.

In a short speech addressing today’s actions, Biden said his administration concluded that the Russian government “interfered in our elections” and was behind the “totally inappropriate” SolarWinds hack.

Biden said he spoke with Russian president Putin on Wednesday to tell him about the measures, but also hoped that the countries would have a stable and productive relationship moving forward, possibly with the two leaders meeting in person for a summit in the summer.

“I was clear with President Putin that we could have gone further, but I chose not to do so,” Biden said. “Now is the time to de-escalate.”

First reported last December, the series of attacks, linked to software made by the Texas-based software company SolarWinds, infiltrated at least nine federal agencies, including the Commerce, Energy, and Justice Departments, as well as more than 100 private companies, the Biden administration said in February. Officials were initially hesitant to assign blame for the hack — or even acknowledge its existence — under the Trump administration, but they would eventually say the attack was “likely Russian in origin.” Trump said very little and even suggested that China, not Russia, might have been behind it. Russia has always denied any involvement.

The hacks are believed to have begun in March 2020 through network monitoring software called Orion Platform, which is made by SolarWinds. The hackers were able to insert malware into Orion Platform software updates which, once installed, gave hackers access to those systems. This is called a supply chain attack. At one point, there were fears that the attack affected thousands of SolarWinds’ government and private clients. The hack was only discovered when a cybersecurity company that makes hacking tools found that its own systems had been breached.

In contrast to his predecessor, Biden — then as a president-elect — said his administration would do everything possible to improve its own cybersecurity defenses, which the hack made clear were very much lacking, and that the breach would be a “top priority.” Biden also promised “substantial costs” for the perpetrators.

Four months later, the Biden administration is formally naming the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) — which it says includes the groups known as Cozy Bear, APT29, and The Dukes — as being behind the hack. That group has also been blamed for previous hacks on government systems, the Democratic National Committee, and even institutions doing research on Covid-19 and vaccine development. It’s long been linked to Russian intelligence, which Russia has long denied.

The National Security Agency (NSA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also released on April 15 a cybersecurity advisory about the vulnerabilities Russian hackers have exploited — and continue to exploit, as the advisory notably pointed out — in software from companies including Fortinet, Synacor, Pulse Secure, Citrix, and VMware. (Pulse Secure told Recode that the issue identified in its software has since been patched.)

Biden’s executive order doesn't just address the hack or Russia’s other cyber malfeasances. It also says the Russian government has tried to undermine free and fair elections in the United States and its allies, targeted dissidents and journalists, and violated international law by refusing to respect other nation-states’ territorial integrity. The sanctions will also apply to individuals associated with the occupation of Crimea; reports that the Russian government paid bounties to Taliban militants to kill American soldiers will be “handled through diplomatic, military and intelligence channels”; and 10 Russians who work at the country’s diplomatic mission in Washington have been expelled.

Russia’s response to the executive order, for now, is to promise that there will be a response.

“Such aggressive behavior will certainly receive a decisive rebuff, and the response to sanctions will be inevitable,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a Russian news agency.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

רגע היסטורי על אדמת מאדים: הרחפן Ingenuity המריא הבוקר (שני) מעל אדמת מאדים. מדובר ברחפן שיצא מחללית "התמדה" וטס במשך כדקה. בנאס"א חוגגים היום את הטיסה הראשונה של רחפן הנשלט מכוכב אחר

אנחנו יכולים להגיד לכם מה הדבר הראשון שתעשו כשתתחברו לאינטרנט מבוסס סיבים אופטיים! לא משנה מה זה, אנחנו נגלה - נסו אותנו

גם אתם קיבלת הודעה שאדידס חוגגת יום הולדת והיא מחלקת בגדים? אז זהו, שמדובר בהונאה ואדידס לא חוגגת יום הולדת, וגם לא מחלקת דבר. אלו הדברים שאתם צריכים לבצע כשאתם מקבלים הודעה כזאת