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At the March 8 event, Apple is also rumoured to announce a third-generation iPhone SE
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Facebook will temporarily allow its billions of users to praise the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi military unit previously banned from being freely discussed under the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, The Intercept has learned.
The policy shift, made this week, is pegged to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and preceding military escalations. The Azov Battalion, which functions as an armed wing of the broader Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement, began as a volunteer anti-Russia militia before formally joining the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014; the regiment is known for its hardcore right-wing ultranationalism and the neo-Nazi ideology pervasive among its members. Though it has in recent years downplayed its neo-Nazi sympathies, the group’s affinities are not subtle: Azov soldiers march and train wearing uniforms bearing icons of the Third Reich; its leadership has reportedly courted American alt-right and neo-Nazi elements; and in 2010, the battalion’s first commander and a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, Andriy Biletsky, stated that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].” With Russian forces reportedly moving rapidly against targets throughout Ukraine, Facebook’s blunt, list-based approach to moderation puts the company in a bind: What happens when a group you’ve deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault?
According to internal policy materials reviewed by The Intercept, Facebook will “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Internally published examples of speech that Facebook now deems acceptable include “Azov movement volunteers are real heroes, they are a much needed support to our national guard”; “We are under attack. Azov has been courageously defending our town for the last 6 hours”; and “I think Azov is playing a patriotic role during this crisis.”
The materials stipulate that Azov still can’t use Facebook platforms for recruiting purposes or for publishing its own statements and that the regiment’s uniforms and banners will remain as banned hate symbol imagery, even while Azov soldiers may fight wearing and displaying them. In a tacit acknowledgement of the group’s ideology, the memo provides two examples of posts that would not be allowed under the new policy: “Goebbels, the Fuhrer and Azov, all are great models for national sacrifices and heroism” and “Well done Azov for protecting Ukraine and it’s white nationalist heritage.”
In a statement to The Intercept, company spokesperson Erica Sackin confirmed the decision but declined to answer questions about the new policy.
Azov’s formal Facebook ban began in 2019, and the regiment, along with several associated individuals like Biletsky, were designated under the company’s prohibition against hate groups, subject to its harshest “Tier 1” restrictions that bar users from engaging in “praise, support, or representation” of blacklisted entities across the company’s platforms. Facebook’s previously secret roster of banned groups and persons, published by The Intercept last year, categorized the Azov Battalion alongside the likes of the Islamic State and the Ku Klux Klan, all Tier 1 groups because of their propensity for “serious offline harms” and “violence against civilians.” Indeed, a 2016 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found that Azov soldiers had raped and tortured civilians during Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
The exemption will no doubt create confusion for Facebook’s moderators, tasked with interpreting the company’s muddled and at time contradictory censorship rules under exhausting conditions. While Facebook users may now praise any future battlefield action by Azov soldiers against Russia, the new policy notes that “any praise of violence” committed by the group is still forbidden; it’s unclear what sort of nonviolent warfare the company anticipates.
Facebook’s new stance on Azov is “nonsensical” in the context of its prohibitions against offline violence, said Dia Kayyali, a researcher specializing in the real-world effects of content moderation at the nonprofit Mnemonic. “It’s typical Facebook,” Kayyali added, noting that while the exemption will permit ordinary Ukrainians to more freely discuss a catastrophe unfolding around them that might otherwise be censored, the fact that such policy tweaks are necessary reflects the dysfunctional state of Facebook’s secret blacklist-based Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. “Their assessments of what is a dangerous organization should always be contextual; there shouldn’t be some special carveout for a group that would otherwise fit the policy just because of a specific moment in time. They should have that level of analysis all the time.”
Though the change may come as welcome news to critics who say that the sprawling, largely secret Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy can stifle online free expression, it also offers further evidence that Facebook determines what speech is permissible based on the foreign policy judgments of the United States. Last summer, for instance, Motherboard reported that Facebook similarly carved out an exception to its censorship policies in Iran, temporarily allowing users to post “Death to Khamenei” for a two-week period. “I do think it is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy,” Kayyali said of the Azov exemption. “That has always been how the … list works.”
The post Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
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Web Desk:
Have you ever wished that there was an app that could help you blows out your birthday candles without having to get up and do it yourself? Well, you might be surprised to hear this, but it actually exists.
Blower is an iOS app available on app store that uses secret hardware features of your iOS device to let you blow air out of your speakers hard enough to blow out a candle.
Photo Courtesy: Screen Grab While it may sound like a gimmick, it actually works. And a You Tuber has made a video to explain how exactly the app turns your iOS device into a blower.
YouTube channel The Action Lab did a deep dive on the Blower app to show how it works. In a detailed video, the channel found that the app utilizes an iOS device’s speaker to create enough air movement to blow out a candle.
Contrary to the app’s claims, there isn’t any secret hardware on your iOS device that is designed to blow air. However, the app does take advantage of your device’s speaker in a pretty unique way.
The Action Lab channel explains how sound waves are essentially a manipulation of air that causes noise. The Blower app is able to create enough air movement using your device’s speaker. It has enough power to blow out the candle.
Photo Courtesy: Screen Grab Now, looking at the example in The Action Lab’s video, it’s pretty obvious that the app isn’t really super powerful. In fact, the air is blown by the speaker actually looks like it’s barely enough to blow out the candle in front of it.
Still, it’s a pretty interesting party trick, and something that most of us didn’t know was possible on our iOS devices.
This app is not available for free but it costs $1.99. Even so, it ranks eighth on the Apple Store in the category of entertainment apps. Apart from iPhone, it is also available for iPad and iPod. However, it only supports iOS / iPad OS 11.0 or later.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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As per The Verge, Google has switched to a true black that should really pop on OLED and AMOLED displays
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The Verge obtained a screenshot of a new ‘leave this conversation’ feature
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Web Desk:
According to The News on japan, East Japan Railway has unveiled the country’s first hydrogen-powered train. The train has a top speed of about 100 kilometers per hour.
The firm hopes to replace its diesel models with the new design, which emits no CO2. JR East developed the train with Toyota Motor and Hitachi.
Photo Courtesy: FuelCellsWorks/Internet When hydrogen in the rooftop tanks reacts with oxygen in the air, it produces electricity.
“Trains powered only by batteries have short ranges, so we looked at using hydrogen, which is already commercialized for automobiles,” said Shoichi Oizumi of the JR East group’s Research and Development Center.
Hydrogen-powered passenger cars and buses are already running in Japan, but the law doesn’t allow trains to use the fuel.
JR East had to apply for an exemption for its new prototype. The rail firm plans to conduct test-runs from next month and have the train running commercially in 2030.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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The industrial sector is responsible for about a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, but solutions for reducing its footprint have not received nearly as much funding or attention as efforts to clean up electricity or transportation. Now President Joe Biden wants to use the federal government’s $650 billion in purchasing power to build a market for cleaner manufacturing.
The Biden administration announced on Tuesday a multi-pronged strategy for cleaning up the production of steel, cement, aluminum, and other carbon-intensive materials. The plan includes the creation of a new Buy Clean Task Force that will develop recommendations for identifying low-carbon steel and concrete for federally funded construction projects and launch pilot programs to boost the purchase of clean construction materials. It will also engage with manufacturers to improve reporting of the lifecycle emissions of their products.
Experts are hopeful that the programs and plans laid out on Tuesday will provide much-needed clarification and guidance on what “low-carbon” materials or “buying clean” actually mean. Steel and cement are two of the most challenging industries to cut carbon from — unlike gasoline-powered cars, they have no cleaner alternatives, so reducing emissions means innovating new ways to make them. But it’s not yet clear whether “clean” means that manufacturers simply eliminate the lowest-hanging fruit emissions or go after steeper reductions.
Sasha Stashwick, an industrial decarbonization expert and senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that a number of states and companies are already experimenting with “buy clean” policies, which risks creating a patchwork of different requirements that manufacturers have to navigate.
“This is not actually an area where we want to see 1,000 flowers bloom,” she said. “This is a uniquely appropriate role for the federal government to step in to define, how are we going to collect this data? How are we going to make this data transparent? How are we going to build integrity into the system?”
Tuesday’s announcement doesn’t begin to answer those questions, but it does set in motion a plan that might. In addition to the new task force, the administration announced a new Embodied Carbon Working Group at the Department of Transportation that will measure the lifecycle emissions of materials used in agency projects and take steps to lower them. And the Environmental Protection Agency will incorporate standards for carbon intensity in certain Energy Star products.
Meanwhile, the General Services Administration, the agency that constructs and oversees the government’s buildings, will write new standards for low-carbon concrete and sustainable asphalt to be used in border station projects funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed last fall. The White House noted that this may include requiring the use of concrete with at least a 20 percent lower carbon footprint.
The infrastructure law contains more than a trillion dollars for investments in roads, bridges, tunnels, highways and transit. Stashwick said that even a 20 percent emissions reduction for the materials used across these projects will ultimately add up to much bigger carbon reductions across the economy. Once manufacturers change their products and processes to win public infrastructure bids, they’ll be ready to sell those new low-carbon materials to the wider market. “Those indirect benefits are multiples of the direct greenhouse gas savings that we expect to see from the federal government’s procurement,” she said.
The actions announced this week also include new details on programs created by the bipartisan infrastructure law to grow the domestic production and use of clean hydrogen fuel — a promising replacement for natural gas and coal in heavy industries like steelmaking. The Department of Energy issued a request for information on Tuesday to kick off an $8 billion program to develop four clean hydrogen “hubs” where hydrogen will be produced either using renewable electricity, natural gas with carbon capture, or nuclear energy. The agency will spend another $1 billion to support research and development for hydrogen produced from clean electricity.
Many environmental advocates have come out against carbon capture, arguing that it will entrench the use of fossil fuels and increase non-carbon pollution. The Biden administration, which sees carbon capture as an essential solution to tackle climate change, is trying to quell those concerns with new federal guidance for agencies to develop projects “responsibly.” A draft version of that guidance was published Tuesday, with an emphasis on meaningful community engagement, transparency, and pollution reduction measures.
The administration also wants to develop a social science research agenda that can help “build the consensus necessary” to transform the economy at the speed and scale required to tackle climate change. Infrastructure projects can be held up for years by community opposition.
“I was so excited to see that,” said Rebecca Dell, director of the industry program for the ClimateWorks Foundation, a philanthropic organization. “The social, political, and economic barriers are at least as important as the technological ones, and get way less attention.”
When asked what was missing from Biden’s strategy, Dell said that she’d like to see the creation of a high-ranking government position tasked with overseeing the country’s industrial strategy. “It’s really hard to have vision and move toward that vision if you don’t even have stable leadership that has the prestige, the decision-making authority, the status within the government to actually make it happen,” she said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden administration could finally define what ‘clean’ manufacturing is on Feb 15, 2022.
This post was originally published on Grist.
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The poorest households are taking another hit to their finances. People could see broadband bills rise by 10% this year. It comes amid the ongoing Tory-enabled cost of living crisis and is yet another blow to households already struggling.
Cost of living: the crisis
The UK is facing its biggest cost of living crisis in recent years. As The Canary has already documented:
- 2.5 million families are struggling to pay rent and heat their homes.
- 15% of households live in food insecurity.
- 4% of households have used a foodbank.
In the coming months, things will get worse:
- The Department for Work and Pensions is making a real terms cut to people’s social security.
- Inflation is predicted to hit 7%.
- Energy companies are putting prices up by over £600 a year.
- The Tories are hiking national insurance by over 10%.
- Over two million people could be destitute – the most extreme form of poverty.
And now, another area of people’s lives is set to become even more unaffordable – potentially impacting many other areas.
Communications: spiralling prices
Ofcom is the communications regulator. It deals with television, radio, internet, and telecommunications. On Tuesday 15 February, it released a report into how affordable communications services are. Ofcom’s findings showed that the price of mobile phones and broadband was also impacting the overall cost of living crisis. As the Guardian reported, Ofcom warned that mobile, telephone, and broadband bills could go up by over 10% this year. Based on an average bill, this would see households facing a yearly rise of just under £40.
This higher than inflation increase comes against a backdrop of people already struggling to keep up with their bills. Ofcom found that:
- 1.1m households (5%) are struggling with the affordability of their broadband. This included people cancelling services, missing payments, or cutting back on food to pay for it.
- 1m (4%) households are struggling with the affordability of their smart phone.
Predictably, it was the poorest households and those reliant on social security who struggled the most. Ofcom said that 11% of them were struggling with the affordability of broadband with 3% of low-income households cancelling services because they couldn’t afford them. Moreover, over 1m households (5%) don’t even have home broadband. They rely on mobile data for internet access or other devices. And 7% of this group struggled with these costs.
Social tariffs
Ofcom says part of the solution to broadband being too expensive is social tariffs. As it noted:
Special discounted broadband packages… are available to an estimated 4.2 million households in receipt of Universal Credit.
But only 55,000 homes have taken advantage of these discounted rates so far – just 1.2 per cent of those eligible. That means that millions of benefits recipients are missing out on an average annual broadband saving of £144 each.
Currently there are eight social tariffs available. Some of them are also available to people claiming other types of social security. But the prices and speeds of connection vary:
Ofcom says that 84% of social security claimants don’t even know about social tariffs. This is despite 6.8m households potentially being entitled to them.
Wider implications
Moreover, if people struggle to pay phone and broadband bills and get cut off, this will directly impact on other areas. For example, take the “out-of-work” Universal Credit claimant who Ofcom says spends 8.3% of their disposable income on broadband. They have to manage their social security claim online, so no internet or mobile data would mean chaos.
Historically, if you didn’t have internet access you could visit a library. But with Tory-led austerity closing over 800 libraries as of 2019, this is becoming less of an option. For children, the effect on education has also been stark, highlighted further by the pandemic. As Ofcom wrote:
4% [of children] relied solely on mobile internet access during the pandemic – with 2% only able to get online using a smartphone. School-aged children from the most financially vulnerable homes (5%) were more likely than those in the least financially vulnerable households (2%) to have mobile-only access.
Additionally, around one in five children (17%) did not have consistent access to a suitable device for their online home-learning. This increased to 27% of children from households classed as most financially vulnerable.
And none of this addresses the 3.3 million people in 2020 who had still never even used the internet. This figure includes two million chronically ill and disabled people.
A perfect storm for the poorest people
Struggling to eat, heat, and fuel their homes, the poorest people were already facing social exclusion, financial devastation, and overall socioeconomic hardship. Now, with the added impact of potentially no internet access, the situation for some of the most deprived and marginalised people in the UK is looking even more desperate.
So, community support and cohesion is crucial. We all need to be active in our local areas – offering mutual aid where needed and ensuring as few people as possible fall through the ever increasing cracks in a system collapsing in on itself.
Featured image via Frantisek_Krejci – Pixabay
By Steve Topple
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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With the new feature, users can show appreciation for a Story without clogging up the other person’s DMs
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Another first for the series is that it can stream Netflix in HD
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Every year, companies debut their best ads during the Super Bowl, hoping to convince millions of Americans they know exactly what the country needs. Last night’s celebrity-studded commercials sent a clear message: It’s time to buy an electric vehicle — preferably a large one, like a truck or SUV.
General Motors, BMW, Chevrolet, and Kia peddled EVs using advertising’s crowd-pleasers, celebrities and cute animals. The implication was that electric cars aren’t just for environmentalists or rich Tesla drivers anymore. They’re going to become the new normal.
While EV sales have grown in the U.S. in recent years, fewer than 1 percent of vehicles on the road today are electric. Shifting from gas-powered cars to electric ones has become a priority in tackling climate change, as transportation is currently the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., with the majority of that coming from passenger cars and trucks. The country’s infrastructure doesn’t make owning an electric car easy, but President Biden has promised that 500,000 charging stations will be built all over the country (assuming Congress plays along).
“We still need to continue work on that idea of normalizing EVs and help Americans across the country actually see themselves in one,” Deborah Wahl, GM’s Chief Marketing Officer, said during a media briefing ahead of the Super Bowl.
GM’s Super Bowl commercial leaned into Austin Powers nostalgia, with Dr. Evil, renamed Dr. EV-il. His gang decided to take over GM to take on climate change (which has out-eviled them as the greatest threat to the world). The spot was part of the company’s marketing around its plans to roll out 30 new types of EVs by 2025.
On the other end of the spectrum, an ad from Chevy stood out simply by being so low-key and understated. It shows Jamie Lynn-Sigler of Sopranos fame driving a blue, all-electric Silverado truck on the highway around gritty New Jersey, flashing past the Statue of Liberty, playgrounds, and a butcher shop before stopping to fuel up at a charging station.
Such ads used to be relatively rare, with only three total Super Bowl commercials touting EVs from 2010 through 2019. But that began to change two years ago during the ads for Super Bowl LIV, when Lebron James promoted GM’s electric Hummer, Porsche’s electric Taycan sped through German streets, and Audi invoked both Frozen and Game of Thrones to draw attention to its e-Tron Sportback. During last year’s game, Will Ferrell, in an ad for GM, punched a globe because he was angry that Norway had a higher number of EVs per person than the U.S.
With electric cars showing up in at least a half-dozen ads during this year’s Super Bowl, it seems that carmakers no longer worry that EVs aren’t tough enough to market during the biggest game of football. In fact, only a couple of commercials specifically advertised a gas-powered vehicle this year. Even Nissan’s commercial for its gas-powered Z sports car, driven by Eugene Levy, featured a cameo of its all-electric Ariya, driven by Catherine O’Hara, his longtime comedy partner.
Celebrity appearances were a big theme this year, with one commercial starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a retired Zeus, former Greek god of the sky, who gets cheered up by an electric BMW iX crossover SUV.
Kia’s ad took a different approach, with an adorable robo-dog chasing the EV6 SUV.
A Super Bowl debut from the startup Polestar went the minimalist route, flashing plain white text over a black screen and pushing back at the tradition of flashy car commercials (“No epic voiceover”). It made some not-so-subtle digs at its competitors, including Volkswagen (“No dieselgate”) and Tesla’s Elon Musk (“No conquering Mars”).
Tesla, the biggest seller of electric vehicles in the U.S., was otherwise nowhere to be seen during the Super Bowl ad blitz. The luxury car company is sticking to its decade-long strategy of no advertising, relying on word of mouth instead.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The American dream is now a huge electric truck on Feb 14, 2022.
This post was originally published on Grist.
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Bosch, the German multinational most famous for its toasters, drills, and refrigerators, is also one of the world’s leading developers of surveillance cameras. Over the last three years, the company has poured tens of millions of euros into its own startup, Azena, which has the potential to completely transform the surveillance camera industry.
Via Azena, Bosch has led the development of a line of surveillance cameras that relies on edge computing — where each camera has its own processor, operating system, and internet connection — to provide “smart” surveillance of people, objects, and places. Like smartphones, these cameras connect to an app store, run by Azena, where customers can purchase apps from a selection of cutting-edge video analytics tools. These apps allow camera owners to analyze video feeds for different security and commercial purposes.
Here, the devil is in the details: In its documentation for developers, Azena states that it will only carry out basic auditing related to the security and functionality of the software available in its app store. According to the company, responsibility for the ethics and legality of the apps rests squarely on the shoulders of developers and users.
In the rapidly advancing field of video analytics, there is a growing market for software that can transform a video feed into a set of data points about individuals, objects, and locations. Apps currently available in the Azena store offer ethnicity detection, gender recognition, face recognition, emotion analysis, and suspicious behavior detection, among other things, despite well-documented concerns about the discriminatory and intrusive nature of such technologies.
Privacy and human rights researchers expressed concern that by decentralizing and facilitating the creation of powerful surveillance software able to analyze people’s traits and activities without their knowledge, Azena has exponentially raised the possibility for abuse. Should we be worried?
Azena says no.
Developers and users “must be compliant with the law,” said Hartmut Schaper, Azena’s CEO. “If we find out that this is not adhered to, we first of all ask for fixes, and then — depending on how severe the violation of the contract is — we can take apps out of the app store or revoke the user’s license.”
Unlike its parent company, Azena doesn’t produce cameras or develop video analytics tools. Instead, it provides a platform for companies and individual developers to distribute their own applications and takes a cut of the sales — much like the Apple and Google app stores, but for surveillance software. According to Schaper, Google’s app store is the direct inspiration for Azena: Within just a few years of releasing the Android operating system, Schaper noted, Google had revolutionized how smartphones were used and achieved domination over the market. With their new surveillance app store, Azena and Bosch hope to do the same.
And like Google’s integration of Android with other smartphone manufacturers around the world, Bosch and Azena are working with a number of companies that produce surveillance cameras running their operating system. Schaper thinks this will lead to drastic changes in the surveillance economy: “In the end, there will be just two or three operating systems for cameras that dominate the market,” he said, “just as is the case in the smartphone market.”
So far, the strategy has resulted in swift growth: The Azena store currently contains over 100 apps, and Schaper has boasted of how the business model made it possible to provide “the first face mask detection app within two weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic beginning.” Other apps directed at shops and public spaces promise crowd and line counting alongside more intrusive offers of individual identification, face recognition, and biometric detection.
The company has also actively courted new types of software: Azena’s “App Challenge 2021,” which was judged by representatives from a host of major security companies, resulted in apps claiming to detect violence or aggression and offering the ability to track individual movements across multiple cameras.
Applications for video analytics can broadly be divided into two categories, explained Gemma Galdon Clavell, a technologist and director of the Eticas Foundation. The more basic applications involve identifying people, objects, barriers like doors or fences, and locations, then sending an alarm when certain conditions apply: someone passing an object to another person, leaving a bag on a train platform, or entering a restricted area.
Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters/Alamy
It’s the second category — applications that allegedly detect emotions, potential aggression, suspicious behavior, or criminality — that Galdon Clavell said can be impossible to do accurately and is often based on junk science. “Identifying a person in a space where they shouldn’t be — that works. But that’s very low-tech.” With the more advanced applications, she said, developers often promise more than they deliver: “From what I’ve seen, it basically doesn’t work.”
“When you move from protecting closed-off areas to actually doing movement detection and wanting to derive behavior or suspicion from how you move or what you do,” Galdon Clavell said, “then you enter a really problematic area. Because what constitutes normal behavior?”
Behind the Scenes
For Bosch and Azena, however, these are early days. “I think we’re just at the beginning of our development of what we can use video cameras for,” Schaper said. Azena aims to go “way beyond the traditional applications that we have today,” he added, and interconnect cameras with a host of other sensors and devices.
Brent Jacot, a senior business development manager at Azena, gave an example of how this might work during a 2020 webinar. Imagine you have a camera app that is good at measuring demographics such as age or gender, Jacot said, and you connect it to another app that controls a gate. “You want to, say, open a gate only if they’re above the age of 18. Then you can take the data from this one app and feed it into the next and create this logical chain to make a whole new use case.”
In this example, the people involved might at least know what was happening. But often, the people subjected to video analytics don’t know that the cameras they are so accustomed to seeing are connected to sophisticated software systems, said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“People have an antiquated vision of what surveillance cameras do,” Maass said. “They’re used to seeing them everywhere, but they just assume the video footage is going to some hard drive or VHS tape and no one is looking at it unless a crime occurs.”
People “don’t see when AI is monitoring it, documenting it, adding metadata to it, and also being trained on it.”
If people knew that the footage was being parsed for signs of emotion, anger, or more obscure traits like suspicion or criminality, they might feel differently about it. “They don’t see when AI is monitoring it, documenting it, adding metadata to it, and also being trained on it,” Maass said. “There’s a disconnect between what people are seeing in their day-to-day lives and what’s happening behind the scenes.” Azena also foresees using publicly sourced surveillance footage to train future video analytics algorithms: An informational graphic in the company’s online portal for developers states that camera users “may contribute to enhancements via crowd-generated data.”
Cameras that connect to the Azena app store run an operating system that is a modified version of Android. By using Google’s open-source smartphone operating system as the base for their cameras, Azena’s platform is open to some 6 million software developers around the world. While other surveillance cameras are limited by proprietary operating systems that can only be worked on by niche developers, Azena’s approach aims to put innovation “on steroids,” according to Felicitas Geiss, the company’s vice president of strategy and venture architecture.
Azena recognizes that security cameras are often targeted by hackers and claims to have hardened its operating system against forced entry. Security experts say that, if done correctly, using Android could mean improved security over proprietary software, given the platform’s open code and frequent updates. But in the case of the cameras connecting to Azena, this might not be the case.
Internet of Things devices often run old software that users don’t think to update, explained Christoph Hebeisen, head of security intelligence research at the mobile security firm Lookout. “That’s why routers get hacked, that’s why security cameras get hacked, and often in very large numbers.”
There are also cases where human error is at fault: Last March, after locating a username and password that were publicly accessible on the internet, a hacking group said it gained access to tens of thousands of cameras produced by the California-based security startup Verkada, some of which were hooked up to video analytics software.
The hackers were able to view footage from prisons, hospitals, factories, police departments, and schools, among other places. A member of the group that claimed responsibility told Bloomberg that the breach exposed “just how broadly we’re being surveilled, and how little care is put into at least securing the platforms used to do so.”
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On many platforms, including Android, when developers patch a potential vulnerability, they publish a notice in the form of a Common Vulnerability and Exposures list. Azena, Hebeisen said, appears to be years behind on patching CVEs: Its current operating system only addresses Android CVEs as late as 2019, judging from the webpage where it summarizes system updates.
“That is really a problem,” Hebeisen said. A determined hacker, he explained, could look at the years’ worth of vulnerabilities and work their way backward to develop an exploit.
“Now, these vulnerabilities might be accessible to an attacker externally, so they could attack those devices and possibly take them over,” Hebeisen added. “And they have the resources and time to do this.”
Azena’s CEO disputed the suggestion that the company is behind on patching Android CVEs. Schaper stated that because cameras running Azena’s operating system lack some hardware functionality that modern smartphones have, like Bluetooth, many Android CVEs don’t apply. Schaper said Azena’s security team evaluates all security patches from Google for their relevance to the camera operating system.
Hebeisen remains skeptical. The company’s response “is hard to verify independently,” he said, pointing to specific vulnerabilities in Android core components that, based on its own documentation, Azena appears to have left unpatched.
“The security of this app store and those apps stands and falls with how well they are being vetted.”
“This process is not transparent to the public,” Hebeisen said, adding that he’d like to see the company “publish regular security advisories that list the vulnerabilities that affect their OS along with the corresponding patches.”
More importantly, Hebeisen said, is that the apps on the Azena store are too high stakes to carry so little auditing. “The security of this app store and those apps stands and falls with how well they are being vetted,” he said. “Even with Google Play, sometimes malicious apps slip through — I don’t think this company is nearly as well resourced or would be nearly as careful.”
According to Azena’s documentation for developers, the company checks potential applications “on data consistency” and performs “a virus check” before publishing to its app store. “However,” reads the documentation, “we do not perform a quality check or benchmark your app.”
In comparison to Azena’s inspiration, Google, this appears to be a light-touch process. While Google Play Store developers are also ultimately responsible for the legality of the apps they upload, they are obliged to comply with a barrage of policies covering everything from gambling and “unapproved substances” to intellectual property and privacy.
Google warns developers that “powerful machine learning” is deployed alongside human review to detect transgressions, although widespread SMS scams and the recurrent appearance of stalkerware in the Play Store suggests that this process is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Bosch and Azena maintain that their auditing procedures are enough to weed out problematic use of their cameras. In response to emailed questions, spokespeople from both companies explained that developers working on their platform commit to abiding by ethical business standards laid out by the United Nations, and that the companies believe this contractual obligation is enough to rein in any malicious use.
At the same time, the Azena spokesperson acknowledged that the company doesn’t have the ability to check how their cameras are used and doesn’t verify whether applications sold on their store are legal or in compliance with developer and user agreements.
The spokesperson also said that users are able to develop or purchase applications from outside Azena’s store and sideload them onto cameras running their operating system, allowing users to run powerful video analytics software without any auditing or oversight.
“Further review beyond the contractual obligations of platform users is not possible, because the apps are not Azena’s own products,” the Azena spokesperson wrote. “The application rights remain entirely with the respective developer who offers it in their own name on the Azena platform.”
A Chilling Effect
In Europe, legislators have recognized a need to regulate and control new technologies that make use of machine learning and advanced algorithms, such as those offered on Azena’s platform. The European Union’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act calls for balancing the benefits and risks of AI, underpinned by the aim of stimulating economic growth. Still, it’s unclear if European regulators will be able to keep up with technological advancements. Where exactly that balance should lie is currently the subject of political negotiations.
As the proposed legislation stands, Azena would likely be classed as a distributor of AI technologies, said Sarah Chander, senior policy adviser at European Digital Rights. In the case of “high-risk” apps, this would mean the company would have to ensure that providers complied with the act’s requirements for transparency, risk management, quality checks, and data accuracy; if Azena suspected noncompliance, it would have to inform the provider or withdraw the app from sale and ensure “corrective actions” were taken. “Low-risk” apps, meanwhile, would be governed by voluntary codes of conduct drawn up by government authorities.
“It’s surveillance capitalism on steroids.”
“I doubt the act will help provide accountability for distributors,” Chander wrote in an email. Even if it did, the proposed rules “don’t capture the root of why this platform is problematic. The reason why we should be concerned with a platform like this is because it is accelerating and promoting the uptake of harmful AI systems, accelerating the sale and use of pseudo-scientific, discriminatory surveillance systems, and finding ways to get these systems to market in more and more efficient ways.”
“It’s surveillance capitalism on steroids,” she added.
Echoing this concern, Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the technology is not yet able to live up to its claims. Emotion detection technology is like selling “snake oil.” But the implications are still concerning. “Things like emotion detection are an easy sell for many people,” Stanley said. “You have all these cameras around your building and [developers] think, for example, who wouldn’t want to get a notification if there was an extremely angry person in the area?”
But Stanley is just as worried about the rapid expansion of simple applications of video analytics. “There’s a real concern here that even on the most effective end of the spectrum, where a video analytics system is trying to detect just the raw physical motion or attributes or objects,” he said, “every time you hand a backpack to a friend or something like that, an alarm gets set off and you get approached.”
“That’s going to have a real chilling effect. We’re going to come to feel like we’re being watched 24/7, and every time we engage in anything that is at all out of the ordinary, we’re going to wonder whether it’ll trip some alarm,” Stanley said.
“That’s no way to live. And yet, it’s right around the corner.”
The post The Company That Makes Your Kitchen Appliances Wants to Revolutionize Video Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
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Several Airtel users on Twitter complained that both their mobile data and broadband connection stopped working
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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Lahore,
Justice Shams Mehmood Mirza dismisses the petition for an immediate ban of online game PUBG, in Lahore High Court-LHC. The dismisses of petition due to petitioner’s lawyer did not appear before the court even on last scheduled hearing on Monday, news channel reported.
Honorable Judge rejected the petition filled by Citizen Tanveer Sarwar, in which the Federal government, Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) were made respondents in the petition.
The plea stated that a 14-year-old boy killed his mother and siblings, while addicted a PUBG online game in Lahore. Playing a PUBG poses a serious threat to the mental health and lives of young people, the petition said.
The petition further said that there is no law in Pakistan to regulate online games. Regular laws have been enacted in India to regulate online games, the petition stated.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
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Investigators with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service frequently work to thwart a variety of environmental offenses, from illegal deforestation to hunting without a license. While these are real crimes, they’re not typically associated with invasive phone hacking tools. But Fish and Wildlife agents are among the increasingly broad set of government employees who can now break into encrypted phones and siphon off mounds of data with technology purchased from the surveillance company Cellebrite.
Across the federal government, agencies that don’t use Cellebrite technology are increasingly the exception, not the rule. Federal purchasing records and Cellebrite securities documents reviewed by The Intercept show that all but one of the 15 U.S. Cabinet departments, along with several other federal agencies, have acquired Cellebrite products in recent years. The list includes many that would seem far removed from intelligence collection or law enforcement, like the departments of Agriculture, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development; the Social Security Administration; the U.S. Agency for International Development; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Cellebrite itself boasted about its penetration of the executive branch ahead of becoming a publicly traded company in August. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that it had over 2,800 government customers in North America. To secure that reach, The Intercept has found, the company has partnered with U.S. law enforcement associations and hired police officers, prosecutors, and Secret Service agents to train people in its technology. Cellebrite has also marketed its technology to law firms and multinational corporations for investigating employees. In the SEC filing, it claimed that its clients included six out of the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies and six of the 10 largest oil refiners.
Civil liberties advocates said the spread of Cellebrite’s technology represents a threat to privacy and due process and called for greater oversight. “There are few guidelines on how departments can use our data once they get it,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “We can’t allow every federal department to turn into its own spy agency.”
But Cellebrite’s extensive work with U.S. authorities may be providing it with something even more important to the company than money: political cover. Like NSO Group, whose formidable phone malware recently made headlines, Cellebrite is based in Israel. While NSO’s Pegasus malware is far more powerful than Cellebrite’s technology, providing near-effortless remote infection of devices, both companies have stirred controversy with their sales to authoritarian governments around the world. Cellebrite’s technology is cheaper and has been used in China to surveil people at the Tibetan border, in Bahrain to persecute a tortured political dissident, and in Myanmar to pry into the cellphones of two Reuters journalists. (Under pressure, the company has pledged to stop selling in China and Myanmar, though enforcement is spotty.)
But unlike NSO and the lesser-known Israeli spyware company Candiru, which were added to a Commerce Department trade blacklist in November, Cellebrite has yet to face calls for sanctions. There are signs that people at the company are worried: The day before the NSO listing, D.C. lobbying firm Alpine Group registered with the U.S. Senate to lobby on behalf of Cellebrite. The contract was Cellebrite’s first engagement with outside lobbyists since 2019.
Cellebrite and Alpine Group declined to comment on the lobbying contract. But according to Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for AccessNow, “Cellebrite tries hard to distinguish themselves from NSO by claiming that they are not a spyware company that gets involved in foreign espionage.” While she did not know for certain the reason behind Cellebrite hiring Alpine Group, she said, “They are investing a lot of resources into aggressively defending their reputation, especially in the West.”
“Cellebrite is now trying to put the flashlight more on how much they are connected to the American government,” said Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, who has repeatedly exposed abuses perpetrated with Cellebrite technology. “But I believe that they are very worried. They are working in many countries that the Americans have problems with. Because of the story of NSO Group, they are afraid that things could become difficult for them.”
So far, however, Cellebrite’s growth seems to be continuing unimpeded, pushing deeper and deeper into police, corporate, and bureaucratic surveillance.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, along with most of the U.S. departments and agencies contacted by The Intercept, did not comment for this article. A spokesperson with the strategic communications firm Reevemark, which represents Cellebrite, pointed The Intercept to the “Ethics and Integrity” page on Cellebrite’s website but otherwise declined to comment.
Photo: Lynn DeBruin/AP
The Rise of Cellebrite
Cellebrite’s journey into the citadels of global power began in the 1990s, when it was started as a relatively benign consumer technology outfit. Its first product was a tool to migrate contacts from one cellphone to another. It eventually moved into coercive forms of data transfers, allowing customers to bypass phone passwords and vacuum data out of devices.
As smartphones came to contain more and more information about people’s daily lives, business boomed among police and militaries around the world. Cellebrite cashed out in 2007, selling to the Japanese conglomerate Sun Corp., although many of the researchers who collect cellphone vulnerabilities remain based at its campus in Petah Tikva, Israel.
In 2016, the company got a boost from speculation that the FBI had used a Cellebrite product to unlock the phone of one of the perpetrators of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. The rumors turned out to be false, but Cellebrite’s government work in the United States continued to grow. It gained clients within the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Air Force, as well as among local police departments, which have used its technology on people accused of minor crimes like graffiti, shoplifting, and being drunk in public.
“We talk about the sanctity of the home, but there’s so much more on your phone … than probably anything in your house.”
The company has a 4,000-square-foot showroom that it calls an “envisioning center” in Tysons Corner, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital. Today its chief marketing officer, Mark Gambill, is based in the area, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Cellebrite’s flagship offering is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device, or UFED, a phone-hacking kit, but it also offers software that can perform similar feats through a desktop computer as well as products to access data stored in the cloud.
This type of work has been lucrative. According to Cellebrite’s recent SEC filing, the company’s average government customer spends $415,000 on data collection devices and services, with additional millions if they add on analytics software.
The cost of that business, Cellebrite’s critics say, is borne by citizens, and not just in the form of tax dollars. “We talk about the sanctity of the home, but there’s so much more on your phone that gives a deeper and more intimate view than probably anything in your house,” said Jerome Greco, a public defender for the Legal Aid Society. Greco remembers police turning to a Cellebrite UFED-type device following a bar fight between strangers. “What could be on the person’s phone, when they didn’t know each other?” he said.
The proliferation of Cellebrite’s technology within the federal government is “deeply alarming,” said Cahn. While a 2014 Supreme Court ruling set new legal hurdles for searches of cellphones, citing the intimate information the devices now contain, this has “meant very little on the ground.”
“Very, very few people understand the power of the tools that Cellebrite offers.”
“Not only is there no justification for agencies like U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use this sort of invasive technology, it’s deeply alarming to see agencies use these devices in more and more low-level cases,” he added. Federal wildlife investigators aren’t the only ones using Cellebrite tools in the great outdoors: Wildlife officers in Missouri and Michigan, for example, use such devices, and Cellebrite has heavily marketed its hardware and software for combating animal trafficking. Upturn, a nonprofit focused on justice and equity, last year published a report documenting the purchase of mobile device forensic tools, including Cellebrite technology, by over 2,000 smaller agencies. “Very, very few people understand the power of the tools that Cellebrite offers,” said Upturn’s Logan Koepke.
“Cellebrite should only be used by competent law enforcement agencies with proper oversight and screening, and only for more serious crimes,” said Krapiva. “It should be up for public discussion as to whether we as a society accept that such invasive tools are being used by educational institutions, private firms, and government agencies.” Other experts interviewed by The Intercept said they believed that cellphone crackers should never be used, even when investigating serious crimes.
Cellebrite’s federal customers provide little transparency as to how they’re using the powerful technology. Of the agencies that did respond to The Intercept’s requests for comments, few offered any concrete information about their use of the tools or answered questions about the implications of that usage. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, would not comment on specific technologies, according to a spokesperson, who said only that the department uses a “wide variety of tools” to “leverage technology” to advance its mission.
The Department of Education at least allowed through a spokesperson that it uses Cellebrite tools for “investigative work” by its inspector general and “to determine if a government-issued iPhone has been compromised and to what extent.” The Department of Energy, whose responsibilities touch on nuclear weapons and federal research labs like Los Alamos, said that it uses Cellebrite products in investigations by its Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and inspector general and to examine government-owned handsets “that have exhibited or been reported to exhibit strange or malicious behavior; or devices that were taken on foreign travel where there is an opportunity for compromise or tampering by a foreign adversary.”
A Social Security Administration spokesperson told The Intercept that Cellebrite tech is used in its office solely to investigate allegations of fraud, including stolen Social Security numbers, insurance fraud, and scams related to pandemic-related relief such as Paycheck Protection Program loans and unemployment benefits. The spokesperson declined to discuss specific instances.
Photo: Issei Kato/Reuters/Alamy
After Hours, Lining the Pockets of Law Enforcement
Further complicating the ethics of government Cellebrite use is the fact that, according to LinkedIn, Cellebrite has employed more than two dozen U.S. government employees from across the country as contract instructors or forensic examiners. The contract employees have apparently included police detectives, a Secret Service officer, and people who claim to work for the Defense Department and defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
Other contractors say they work for the Florida attorney general’s office and the United States Postal Service Office of the Inspector General.
“Cops teaching cops is not anything new,” said Greco, the public defender. “But I would be concerned that there is a financial incentive to choose Cellebrite’s tools over others.”
“Cops teaching cops is not anything new. But I would be concerned that there is a financial incentive to choose Cellebrite’s tools over others.”
“Even if it’s an appearance of impropriety, it’s concerning,” said Krapiva.
Cellebrite’s apparent payments to police officers and prosecutors may also violate some police departments’ policies on moonlighting. The Florida attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about its policy on taking on side work. A Postal Service spokesperson approached with the same questions said that The Intercept would need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the Office of the Inspector General. The policy, which was eventually provided following a request, requires agents with the office to seek formal approval of outside employment in writing so that the position can be reviewed for potential conflicts of interest. It is not clear whether that happened in this case.
In another instance of government collaboration, Cellebrite has also brokered a partnership with an influential attorneys general’s association, with the goal of “creating legal policy and procedures” that allow for the use of a Cellebrite cloud tool.
Cellebrite may need all the U.S. government work it can get. Its stock prices have taken a dip. Recent exits from authoritarian countries have made its U.S. contracts even more critical to staying afloat. In December, facing recruitment difficulties in Israel following negative press coverage, the company launched a public relations campaign comparing its employees to superheroes.
Mack, the human rights lawyer, said the campaign had an air of desperation to it. “They have already been marked because they are working in some very bad places,” he said. “And things are going to keep being exposed.”
The post Why Have 14 of 15 U.S. Cabinet Departments Bought Phone Unlocking Technology? Few Will Say. appeared first on The Intercept.
This post was originally published on The Intercept.
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In the International Forum on Globalization, I worked with forty writers, journalists, academics and social and environmental leaders from around the world to inform the public about the ways in which “free-trade” treaties, the principal drivers of globalization, have eroded democracy, destroyed livelihoods, and accelerated resource extraction. In countries as disparate as Sweden and India, I have seen how globalization intensifies competition for jobs and resources, leading to dramatic social breakdown – including not only ethnic and religious conflict, but also depression, alcoholism and suicide.
The post Putting Technology (And Billionaires) In Its Place appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For all its faults — and there are many — the electrical grid in the United States is a miracle worker: If you flip a switch the lights come on, almost without fail. But as renewables like solar and wind replace fossil fuels, that miracle work gets a bit tougher because sunlight and wind aren’t always available. Navigating this intermittency, as it’s known among energy geeks, demands a fundamental rethink of how consumers use and even help store energy. One day electric vehicle drivers might, for instance, use their cars as a vast network of batteries that grid operators can tap into when renewables wane.
Another option might be to use information as batteries — of a sort. A pair of researchers has proposed that companies precompute certain data when the grid is humming with solar or wind power, and then stash it away for later use. Although the team dubbed the concept “information batteries,” don’t take “battery” to mean a physical device. This is digital, more of a timing strategy than a real battery, aimed at getting data-hungry companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix to use clean power when it’s plentiful so utilities can avoid burning fossil fuels when it’s not.
This kind of power use is somewhat flexible, says University of California San Diego computer scientist Jennifer Switzer. “You can’t charge your car unless the battery has discharged at least a little bit, and you can’t wash your clothes until your clothes are dirty,” says Switzer, one of the researchers who proposed the idea in a paper published earlier this month. “But with computing, if you have some way of predicting, with even a small amount of accuracy, what you’re going to need in the future, then you can compute results before you actually need them and store those results. Instead of storing energy to use later, you’re storing data.”
This is a new idea, so it hasn’t been deployed in the real world, but it has plenty of potential use cases. Tech companies have to crunch all kinds of data: Google builds its search results, and YouTube converts videos into different qualities for you to choose from. Facebook has to recommend friends, and Amazon has to recommend products. Much of this processing work is done on demand. But these researchers think some of it could be done asynchronously, when green energy is flowing into the grid.
Think of the information battery concept as being a bit like the Post Office: The agency knows roughly how many letters to expect to deliver on a given day, but not which specific letter a carrier will need to get to your house. So the Post Office has to use energy to do some maintenance tasks in advance (like powering up sorting centers) to enable the less predictable ones (like delivering a letter to a particular address). Similarly, if tech companies can crunch through routine data tasks when renewables are available, the intermittency of those energy sources won’t be as much of an issue when it comes to on-demand calculations later. “The core concept here is that information has an embodied energy to it,” says University of Southern California computer scientist Barath Raghavan, who coauthored the paper with Switzer. “Information batteries are going to work well where things are highly predictable. You get that in the case of video encoding, movie rendering, graphics work.”
For example, the moment you type a search into Google, the system has to process the request. Some of that work can’t be done in advance because your exact request is unpredictable. (Google can’t read your mind — at least, not yet.) But the foundation of the search tool also relies on a lot of rote computation, unsexy work done in great big data centers that use lots of energy. Chunks of that sort of computation are done well before you hit “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Or consider the computational power needed to supply streaming videos. When processing video files, says Switzer, “if you know that there’s going to be a lot of Netflix traffic at a certain time of day, you could do that ahead of time and have that ready for some popular shows and movies, even if not all those are actually requested.”
The most likely candidates for testing out this concept are companies that operate enormous data centers, because the demand for energy-intensive computing power — known as compute — is soaring. “The planetary scale for compute is going up dramatically, and I think that you’re going to see major providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook sourcing most or even all of their energy from renewables,” says George Porter, who is codirector of the Center for Networked Systems at the University of California San Diego and collaborates with Raghavan and Switzer, but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “And so in that particular case, I think managing this intermittency issue is going to be kind of a challenge.”
But Raghavan thinks this technique might also work for less-intensive energy consumers, like researchers who do climate modeling. “You can predict some fraction of the subtasks within that macro computational task,” he says. “And if you can get decent accuracy on those subtasks, you can precompute them and then later you can go and retrieve the results.” (It wouldn’t work as well for weather models, since that’s more immediate and less predictable.)
People have been doing this kind of batch processing for a long time, in other contexts. At night, for instance, there’s less competition for computing power in data centers because most people aren’t working then. So people who have to run a complex program might schedule it to run overnight, says Kurtis Heimerl, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who wasn’t involved in the proposal. “The really interesting thing in this paper is really moving that into an energy-conservation space, rather than usually just conserving computing resources in general,” he says.
“I think it’s really innovative,” says Porter. “It’s actually shifting work from the future to now. It’s just like at a restaurant, where they know how many pies they sell a day. So they’ll make a whole bunch in the morning, rather than on demand, and it’s more efficient and convenient that way.”
But like a restaurant staff, information battery users can’t predict the future — just parts of the future. A baker might know roughly how many pies they’ll sell, but not the age, height, weight, and socioeconomic status of the customers who will buy them. That’s asking too much. And so is asking a tech company to pre-crunch and then store all the data it’ll need tomorrow. The trick — and this is where Switzer and Raghavan are taking their research — is developing tools that isolate patches of data that are a good fit for precomputation. That would require knowing the unique needs of a given company or scientific modeling team.
Still, information batteries won’t be for everyone. “Where the information battery starts to not work as well is going to be in cases where the tasks are too small, where it’s not worth it from an energy perspective to precompute and store it,” says Raghavan. “It’s not going to always work — it’s not going to always give you high efficiency. But sometimes it will give you good efficiency.”
Starting with global tech giants, which would have the biggest influence on grid load, has another advantage: These companies can also shift computational tasks across the world. When it’s daylight in Europe, data centers there could take up more work. When the sun goes down, they could turn over that work to a data center in the western US, where the day is just beginning. Google’s already doing this, shifting tasks between data centers whenever carbon-free energy is locally available.
Getting the tech giants to match their demand to times when green power supply peaks is likely a cheaper solution than the leading alternative, which is spending obscene amounts of money on huge battery arrays to store solar and wind power. It’s no doubt simpler than convincing millions of individuals to time their home energy usage. It could happen long before there’s a fleet of electric vehicles big enough to serve as a distributed backup power supply. And it could mean sweet relief for an ailing grid.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Maybe green energy needs ‘information batteries’ too on Feb 7, 2022.
This post was originally published on Grist.
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The main Chrome logo won’t look the same across all systems either
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
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The cost of plant-based meat is projected to reach parity with conventional animal meat by 2023, according to new information from nonprofit organization Good Food Institute (GFI). Achieving price parity is vital for mainstream adoption because consumers are more likely to try a new plant-based option that is not much more expensive than its animal-based counterpart.
In a recent study conducted by GFI with consumer research firm Mindlab that investigated price as a driver of purchase intent, consumers ranked price as the second-most important factor (behind taste) in purchasing a plant-based product. Though retail sales for plant-based meat grew by 45 percent in 2020, on average, Neilson data demonstrates that plant-based meat on a per-pound basis is currently twice as expensive as conventional beef, three times as expensive as pork, and four times as expensive as chicken. For most consumers, closing the price gap would likely increase the purchase intent of plant-based products.
To get to price parity, plant-based foods have a few looming obstacles. The animal agriculture industry has been able to keep costs down because it has been slaughtering animals for food for decades at a large scale with the help of government subsidies. However, the plant-based sector is newer and has yet to achieve the same economies of scale.
“Reaching price parity comes down to scale,” Emma Ignaszewski, Corporate Engagement Project Manager at GFI, told VegNews. “Making the plant-based meat supply chain more efficient and more resilient to risks can result in lower costs for the manufacturer—and ultimately, more affordability for the consumer.”
2032: The end of animal meat?
A 2021 report by investment firm Blue Horizon and business consultant BCG also points out that the key to consumer acceptance is price parity. The report notes that alternative proteins must taste and feel as good as the conventional foods they replace and cost either the same or less. According to their research, price parity will happen in three key stages.
First, plant-based products such as burgers, dairy, and egg substitutes made from soy, peas, and other plant-based proteins will achieve price parity in 2023. By 2025, alternative proteins made from microorganisms like fungi, yeasts, and single-celled algae will reach parity. And lastly, proteins grown directly from animal cells (often called “cell-based meat” or “cultured meat”) will reach price parity by 2032.
GFI’s own research suggests that cultured meat could become cost competitive with some conventional animal meats as early as 2030, when cultivated meat is projected to reach a production cost of $2.92 per pound.
“None of this can happen unless consumers are happy with the taste of plant-based meat products. It doesn’t help to scale up something consumers won’t purchase,” Ignaszewski said. “So above all, companies have to make plant-based products that come ever closer to tasting the same as or better than conventional meat. Scaling a plant-based product that tastes just like conventional meat—or better—to the point that it also reaches price parity is a golden formula.”
Why the cost of animal meat is rising
According to GFI, the progress on price parity for plant-based meat is not only affected by production costs but also by market effects that raise the cost of traditional animal meat products. Recent developments in animal agriculture such as higher input costs, meatpacker labor issues, and supply chain interruptions have all affected the price of animal meat. In fall 2021, conventional meat categories such as beef, chicken, and pork saw double-digit price increases compared to the same week in 2020. Plant-based meat prices compared to the prior year decreased or stayed the same.
Additional supply chain interruptions occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants around the country were forced to close because of COVID-19 outbreaks among workers, creating delays in the meat supply chain.
Shoulder-to-shoulder working conditions in slaughterhouses means workers are at higher risk of becoming infected.
“Interruptions like this and the resultant price hikes of conventional categories go hand-in-hand with the production inefficiencies of the conventional meat supply chain,” GFI said in its report.
Plant-based meat moving closer to parity
In recent years, major brands and private labels have already attempted to underprice animal meat to further drive demand for plant-based products. In 2020, Trader Joe’s launched its plant-based burger patties made with pea protein and priced them at $4.49 for two quarter-pound patties. Also in 2020, Kroger launched its plant-based chicken ground priced at $6.99 for a one-pound package.
Last year, plant-based brand Impossible Foods announced its second price reduction within a year for its plant-based ground meat, decreasing the suggested retail price to $9.32 per pound, a 20 percent drop. And competitor Beyond Meat has also said that it aims to underprice animal protein in at least one category by the end of 2024.
For more on vegan meat, read:
Why the Best New Meat Products Will Come From Korea
Will Vegan Meat Replace Animal Meat? Here’s What Beyond Meat’s CEO Says.
The USDA Just Invested $10 Million in Lab-Grown MeatThis post was originally published on VegNews.com.
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ANALYSIS: By Andrew Dodd, The University of Melbourne; Alexandra Wake, RMIT University, and Matthew Ricketson, Deakin University
News Corp Australia and Google have announced the creation of the Digital News Academy in partnership with the Melbourne Business School at the University of Melbourne. It will provide digital skills training for News Corp journalists and other media outlets.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
The academy won’t provide full degrees, just certificates and a chance to upgrade digital skills in a fast-changing media environment.
- READ MORE: More than protection, Australian journalism needs better standards
- The news media bargaining code could backfire if small media outlets aren’t protected: an economist explains
Many companies in various industries have partnered with universities to deliver what used to be in-house training programmes. Strengthening the links between industry and the academy has been welcomed in many sectors and certainly encouraged by governments for many years.
Why then are we as journalism academics concerned?
There are several reasons. The first and most obvious is the incursion of a high-profile and controversial media company into the higher education sector and the extent to which that is funded by a large disruptive digital search company.
Antagonism towards academia
It is telling that the Digital News Academy will be housed in the University of Melbourne’s private arm, the Melbourne Business School, rather than its Centre for Advancing Journalism within the Arts faculty.Australia’s largest commercial media company has long criticised university journalism education, and journalism academics, including each of the authors of this article and many of our colleagues.
The company even once sent an incognito reporter into a University of Sydney lecture to uncover criticism of News Corp in the classroom. That reporter, Sharri Markson, is now investigations editor at The Australian and a member of “the panel of experts” that will oversee the Digital News Academy.
Source: Digital News Academy
So it comes as no surprise that News Corp has avoided journalism programmes.
News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has said part of the academy’s role will be building a stronger Australia by keeping society informed through “strong and fearless news reporting and advocacy”.
Yet partnering with a journalism programme would have facilitated that. It might also have helped assuage News Corp critics, some of whom have been active online during the week with reminders about News Corp’s unethical conduct during the hacking scandal and its disregard for scientific evidence in its reporting on climate change.
University journalism courses teach ethics and critical thinking alongside practical skills such as new digital ways of fact checking, gathering information and telling stories.
Google Australia already offers free tutorials to journalism programmes about smart ways to use its search engine to find and check investigative stories.
University journalism programmes also distinguish between training and education; the former is predominantly about skills, the latter places those skills in context and teaches students how to think critically about the industry and environment in which they work.
By placing this course in a business school and not a liberal arts or humanities faculty, the venture gets the kudos of the University of Melbourne’s backing without the challenging academic culture News Corp dislikes.
News Corp and Google are corporate clients, paying the university for these courses, so the capacity for independent criticism of Australia’s most dominant newspaper company is eroded even further.
The Digital News Academy will be housed within the Melbourne Business School, rather than the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism. Image: The Conversation/Shutterstock What will the Digital News Academy do?
All we know so far about the academic credibility of the Digital News Academy comes from its promotional announcement, in press releases reported in the Media section of The Australian (published by News Corp).The publicity says the nine-month course will take 750 enrolments from journalists at News Corp Australia, Australian Community Media (the stable of 160 regional publications formerly owned by Fairfax) and smaller media partners.
A “governance committee” will select candidates (who nominate themselves or are put forward by their employers). These students will be expected to use the Google suite of tools as they collaborate online at the Melbourne Business School, to generate, build and sell stories to the course’s “Virtual Academy Newsroom”.
Each year there will be what is being billed as a major journalism conference and a US study tour for a select group of trainees.
There are no public details yet of the academic credentials of the certificate programme but the academy has drawn on a “panel of experts”, almost all of whom come from inside News Corp and Google.
Google gains influence
It’s easy to see why Google was motivated to fund a News Corp training academy above and beyond what it is required to do as part of its bid to stop further intervention in its workings by the Australian government under the terms of the News Media Bargaining Code.But there are some deeper questions about why a company that has such a stranglehold on the new digital economy is involved. By funding the academy Google may be undercutting full university degrees specialising in journalism.
Relying on Google to make up the shortfall in news organisations’ training budgets is a problem. It allows Google to shape curriculum while appearing to be a champion of the same journalism industry it has been accused of undermining.
As journalism academics we respect the need for specialised training and skills development. But journalism programmes should never be captured or constrained from being critical of the industry for which they prepare students.
They should continue to embed ethics in their courses. The aim, after all, is to improve journalism, for everybody’s benefit.
As it is often said, news is not just another business. While studying journalism often involves the study of business, business imperatives should not drive the study of journalism itself.
Dr Andrew Dodd is director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne; Dr Alexandra Wake is programme manager, journalism, at RMIT University, and Dr Matthew Ricketson is professor of communication at Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
Dr Dodd has worked as a journalist at The Australian newspaper and has provided in-house legal and news writing training for News Corp. Dr Wake has provided in-house training for the ABC and for Australian Provincial Newspapers. She is the elected president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA). Professor Ricketson has worked on staff at The Australian, among other news outlets. He was a member of the Finkelstein inquiry into the media and media regulation which was sharply criticised in News Corp Australia publications. His appointment as the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s representative on the Press Council was also criticised by News Corp Australia. Full disclosures at The Conversation.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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The feature gives users a quick and easy way to respond to a message without having to type out a lengthier text-based reply
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Web Desk:
The sudden hit Wordle, in which once a day players get six chances to guess a five-letter word, has been acquired by The New York Times Company. The smash online word game will integrate the daily word puzzle into The New York Times Games suite of word games.
Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price in the low seven figures, The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.
Photo courtesy: Getty Images Wordle first appeared on a no-frills, ad-free website in October, and had 90 users on Nov. 1, that number grew to 300,000 by the middle of this month, and now millions play the game daily, according to the Times announcement. The game is played online and allows you to share your daily performance with colorful square emojis.
Photo courtesy: techspot.com The game was originally created by Wardle as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah, after the two of them got hooked on word games (like the Times’ Spelling Bee and crosswords) during the pandemic. It was publicly released in late 2020, but has since exploded in popularity, thanks in part to the viral, emoji-based messages that allow players to share how they did on the daily puzzle without spoiling it for others.
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Web Desk:
“Can you take this down? It is a security risk.”
Elon Musk opened a conversation with a teenager over Twitter DM last fall. He was referencing a Twitter account, called @ElonJet, which tracks the movements of his private jet around the world.
Jack Sweeney, a 19-year-old from Florida, rejected a $5,000 offer from Elon Musk to delete his Twitter account that tracks the billionaire’s private jet.
Photo Courtesy: Internet @ElonJet has over 150,000 followers, and uses a bot that Sweeney developed to monitor Musk’s flights. The feed then tweets out when and where the plane takes off or lands and the duration of each trip.
The college freshman has developed about a dozen other flight bot accounts that track the travels of high-profile tech titans, including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
The initial direct message from Musk came November 30, Protocol first reported.
“Can you take this down?” Musk asked Sweeney. “It’s a security risk.”
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO eventually offered the teenager $5,000 to help prevent crazy people from tracking his flights. Sweeney countered asking for $50,000, saying he could use the money for college and maybe a Tesla (TSLA) Model 3.
“I don’t love the idea of being shot by a nutcase,” Musk said.
The last message exchange was Wednesday, Jan. 19, when Musk said it didn’t feel right to pay to shut this down. CNN Business has viewed the messages.
“Options other than remuneration like an internship would make taking it down a lot easier,” Sweeney replied. Musk has not yet responded.
Sweeney said he’s been a fan of SpaceX since the first Falcon Heavy launch in 2018.
“5,000 is not enough for how much I get out of it,” Sweeney said. “It doesn’t replace anything, like the enjoyment factor.”
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News outlets entrusted with promoting transparency and privacy are also lobbying behind closed doors against proposals to regulate the mass collection of Americans’ data.
In a filing last week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group, reported it was lobbying against a push at the Federal Trade Commission to restrict the collection and sale of personal data for the purpose of delivering advertisements. The IAB represents both data brokers and online media outlets that depend on digital advertising, such as CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, Time, U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post, Vox, the Orlando Sentinel, Fox News, and dozens of other media companies.
Under President Joe Biden and FTC Chair Lina Khan, the advertising technology industry is facing its first real challenge of federal regulation. There are several bills in Congress that attempt to define and restrict the types of data collected on users and how that data is monetized. Last July, Biden called for the FTC to promulgate rules over the “surveillance of users” in his landmark executive order on competition, which identified unfair data collection as a challenge to both competition and privacy.
In December, the advocacy group Accountable Tech petitioned the FTC calling for regulation of what it calls “surveillance advertising”: the process of collecting mass data on users of popular apps and websites and creating profiles of those users based on location, age, sex, race, religion, browsing history, and interests in order to serve targeted ads. The industry has grown in leaps and bounds, now generating billions in revenue, but has so far faced limited regulation in the U.S.
Major media corporations increasingly rely on a vast ecosystem of privacy violations, even as the public relies on them to report on it.
In a letter, IAB called for the FTC to oppose a ban on data-driven advertising networks, claiming the modern media cannot exist without mass data collection. “Data-driven advertising has actually help preserve, and grow, news outlets since its inception over twenty years ago,” the letter said. “The thousands of media companies and news outlets that rely on data-driven advertising would be irreparably harmed by the Petition’s suggested rules.”
The privacy push has largely been framed as a showdown between technology companies and the administration. The lobbying reveals a tension that is rarely a center of the discourse around online privacy: Major media corporations increasingly rely on a vast ecosystem of privacy violations, even as the public relies on them to report on it. Major news outlets have remained mostly silent on the FTC’s current push and a parallel effort to ban surveillance advertising by the House and Senate by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
“They certainly report on aspects of this problem, but they’re not reporting on how they’re complicit in the surveillance advertising story,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which supports the FTC petition for regulation.
Illustration: Soohee Cho for The InterceptChester noted that major media outlets will cover episodic scandals, such as the use of Facebook data by the firm Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential election or algorithmic targeting of ads in politics, but don’t provide context of how the outlets themselves use and benefit from the same collection of data for routine advertising purposes. (On its website, The Intercept uses Google Analytics but does not host more invasive trackers. Its podcasts use a separate third-party system, which users can opt out of.)
“The large media companies have their own programmatic advertising operations, or what you might call surveillance advertising, using content on their own websites,” said Chester. “Not only are they not reporting on this issue and what’s at stake, but they don’t report on what they do. It’s not just a privacy issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s a consumer protection issue.”
The tension was highlighted in a 2019 New York Times guest opinion column provocatively titled, “This Article Is Spying on You.” The article noted that a reader visiting a Times news article on, for instance, abortion might encounter tracking technology used by nearly 50 different companies, including BlueKai, a firm owned by the massive company Oracle that sells user data for markets to target those with “health conditions” and “medical terms.”
The column was based on a review of 4,000 U.S.-based news websites and 4,000 non-news sites conducted by Timothy Libert, formerly with Carnegie Mellon University, and Reuben Binns, with the University of Oxford. It found that news sites are generally more reliant on third-party tracking technology than non-news sites and had a lower degree of user privacy.
“While users may turn to the news to learn of the ways in which corporations compromise their privacy, it is news sites where we find the greatest risks to privacy,” noted the authors.
Since then, news sites’ user tracking has only gotten more extreme. In 2020, a study published by Ghostery, a company that provides tools to block third-party data collection, found that news websites contained the most trackers globally — more than business, banking, entertainment, or adult websites. The trackers tend to collect a variety of data, including browsing history, location, and phone identifying information.
And it’s been highly profitable. The New York Times, for instance, has moved away from traditional print advertising and paper delivery and is increasingly reliant on digital advertising and subscriptions. In its latest quarterly disclosure, the Times revealed that its digital ad revenues increased by $19.2 million over the same period in the previous year. The increase was driven in part by greater programmatic advertising revenue, a term for the automated ads served by third-party ad brokers. The Times, notably, is a member of IAB, the lobby group that defends the digital advertising industry from regulation.
Last month, as part of the regulatory push on data privacy, the FTC issued a $2 million fine against the advertising tech firm OpenX for illegally collecting and monetizing location data from children on a mass scale. Advertising platforms such as OpenX serve as an exchange, with data from thousands of web publishers and tens of thousands of apps feeding profiles of users into a system that advertising agencies use to place targeted ads that appear across multiple news websites as users browse the web.
Many gaming, weather, and dating apps, as well as a variety of websites, quietly collect behavioral, demographic, health, and location data on users that is sold to advertising tech brokers. Advertising agencies go to data brokers to better target potential consumers. As individuals browse the web, they are greeted by custom advertisements based on profiles of what data brokers believe to be their shopping habits, interests, or concerns.
OpenX, which processes nearly 100 billion ad requests per day, is one of the largest third-party platforms that serve as a key mechanism of this data exchange. The FTC alleged that OpenX vacuumed up location information on child-focused apps without parental consent and used the data to attract advertisers.
There were a few blogs and industry trade outlet stories that covered the settlement, but no pieces in major media outlets that have otherwise intensely covered Silicon Valley and the sprawling privacy issues presented by consumer-facing tech companies.
If major media outlets had covered the story, they would have had to acknowledge an awkward reality. OpenX is one of the largest third-party advertising platforms serving the news media, alongside AppNexus, Google, and Facebook. The company is used or has been used in recent months for the placement of targeted ads by outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, Gizmodo, HuffPost, Fox News, and Der Spiegel. Several outlets said they were in the process of reviewing the advertising partnership with OpenX but could not comment further.
The Gizmodo website, for example, uses trackers that store or sell user location data, including trackers from RhythmOne, Simpli.fi, Smart Adserver, Lotame, and OpenX, according to data compiled by Ghostery and privacy policy disclosures under the California Online Privacy Protection Act. Simpli.fi, according to disclosures, collects precise location data and partners with third-party data brokers such as Cuebiq.
“We work with OpenX as a marketplace through which advertisers may bid to place ads on our website. We do not provide OpenX with either data relating to children or precise location data,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the New York Times. The Times’s response, however, belies the nature of the third-party ad broker business; the Times does collect user location data, and its third-party behavioral ad partners, such as OpenX, use an array of sources to monetize location data for the placement of ads on sites such as the Times’s website. Other publications did not respond or declined to comment on their ties to OpenX.
“Almost all sites are trapped in a system of surveillance capitalism, in which they either steal data or rely on technology that steals data.”
The growth of digital advertising has forced nearly every major for-profit news website to utilize the most intrusive forms of mass surveillance, including browsing history and location data — a dynamic highlighted by the OpenX fine.
“It’s really a puzzling and tricky situation because almost all sites are trapped in a system of surveillance capitalism, in which they either steal data or rely on technology that steals data,” said Krzysztof Modras, director of engineering and product at Ghostery. “I don’t think OpenX is abnormal at all.”
Illustration: Soohee Cho for The Intercept
Though advertising is the focus of the data collection industry, the applications of user data are boundless. Law enforcement agencies have tapped the oceans of user data, including for the targeting of protesters and activist groups. Powerful political interests have hired data brokers to better influence voters. The data broker Acxiom, another tech firm that partners with many news websites, has provided data to the FBI and discussed programs to sell user data to the Pentagon.
The Pillar, a conservative Catholic publication, claimed to have obtained location data from the gay hookup app Grinder from third-party data brokers to out a prominent Catholic priest as gay.
In the case of the FTC fine issued in December, OpenX had sourced precise geolocation data from children under the age of 13, including child-directed apps “for toddlers,” “for kids,” and “preschool learning,” in the data the company offered to advertisers, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, rule.
“OpenX secretly collected location data and opened the door to privacy violations on a massive scale, including against children,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “Digital advertising gatekeepers may operate behind the scenes, but they are not above the law.”
Following the settlement, OpenX agreed to a periodic review of the apps the company uses to source its data. Max Nelson, a spokesperson for the company, pointed to a statement issued by the firm that noted the use of children’s location data was an “unintentional error” that has since been fixed.
Critics argue that the FTC needs to go beyond enforcing COPPA by cracking down on the sources of data that feed into the larger ecosystem. Many children’s websites and apps contain code that enable the sharing of user data with brokers. The tracking technology, known as an SDK, or software development kit, is intentionally embedded by web developers in order to monetize user data.
Angela Campbell, professor of law at Georgetown University, has argued for more enforcement and an update to the current law to make it easier for regulators to create clear rules to protect children from targeted data collection and advertising. Campbell noted that OpenX’s many partners also could have been targeted by regulators.
“I have a children’s app, if it’s a child-directed app and I’m the app developer, and I use an SDK from OpenX, I’m responsible,” noted Campbell. “This whole bidding process and advertising process is not transparent so the public doesn’t know about it. The FTC has not enforced this COPPA law very much at all.”
News outlets are also implicated. Although major media publications say they are not intentionally selling children’s data to OpenX and other brokers, these statements are largely expressions of plausible deniability rather than affirmative knowledge.
Unlike products and services which are specifically targeted at children, which are required under federal COPPA guidelines to collect age information, media sites are not required to verify the age of users as their products are primarily directed at adult audiences. This means that by default, news media sites assume all readers are adults and treat the data of all visitors the same, so children’s data is almost certainly provided to brokers — it just isn’t labeled as such.
Even news media sites with student sections, such as CNN Student News, which describes itself as “ten-minute, commercial-free, daily news program designed for middle and high school classes” do not consistently collect age information, thereby following the media industry standard assumption that readers are adults.
Due to this lack of verification, CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia has a privacy policy that simply states “on most Sites, we do not knowingly collect information from children,” while still sending data to ad brokers without verification.
The near-unavoidable nature of online surveillance has presented similarly thorny issues for other privacy-centric organizations. Last year, Ashkan Soltani, a prominent privacy advocate, noted that the American Civil Liberties Union used many of the very data trackers the group has long critiqued. The ACLU shared personally identifiable information with third parties such as Facebook, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and ZIP codes.
The decision to use the tracking technology was made by the ACLU’s fundraising and advocacy team, not its legal department, which often does not work in tandem, noted Catherine Crump, a former ACLU attorney who now leads the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law.
This is all the more reason, advocates say, to focus on broad reform rather than simply highlighting cases of individual bad actors.
“There’s a tendency to focus on individual narratives even in the face of systemic problems,” said Alan Butler, the president of Electronic Privacy Information Center, who favors universal opt-out solutions for users and strict rules on so-called secondary collection of data.
“It’s not a solution to just bring a fine or enforcement when there is surveillance advertising happening up and down the stack and throughout the ecosystem,” added Butler.
The bigger question for the media might be, how do we create a free press that isn’t reliant on mass data collection?
“Does the free internet mean an internet dominated by surveillance and manipulation?” asked Chester, of Center for Digital Democracy. “What does it mean that the only way to have an independent news media is to have this kind of surveillance system? Those issues [have] not been covered by the press.”
The post How CNN, the New York Times, and Other Major Media Outlets Monetize Your Data and Lobby Against Regulation appeared first on The Intercept.
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Web Desk:
Hypersonic is a term that usually associated with military-related projects, but commercial aviation is also trying to revive the concept of ultra-fast flight.
A Beijing-based company “Space Transportation” plans on winged rocket that can soar from Beijing to New York in just one hour.
Chinese aerospace firm is developing a “rocket with wings” designed for space tourism as well as point to point travel.
“We are developing a winged rocket for high-speed, point-to-point transportation, which is lower in cost than rockets that carry satellites and faster than traditional aircraft,” the company said in a recent interview with Yicheng Times.
According to a report from Space.com, the space plane would aim to provide rapid transport between two locations on Earth through suborbital travel and be fully reusable.
The company revealed that ground tests are planned by 2023 with a first flight in 2024 and a crewed flight in 2025. Even more ambitiously, a test flight of a global, or orbital, crewed space vehicle is planned by 2030, the company says.
Photo Courtesy: Space Transportation According to the company’s website, space plane will travel at speed of approximately 2,600 mph (4,184 km/h), meaning that it could fly from New York to London in about an hour.
Photo Courtesy: Space Transportation The company’s website release a video that shows passengers board a plane attached to a large triangular paragliders-like wing featuring two large rocket boosters. After takeoff, the plane detaches from the wing and flies through suborbital space. The wing lands back safely on Earth while the space plane carried on to its destination.
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Spotify has been embroiled in protests, kicked off by Neil Young, over the spread of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation
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Tang Mingfang is willing to risk reprisals to clear his name over Foxconn revelations – and to get backing from Jeff Bezos
A whistleblower who exposed illegal working conditions in a factory making Amazon’s Alexa devices says he was tortured before being jailed by Chinese authorities.
Tang Mingfang, 43, was jailed after he revealed how the Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese city of Hengyang used schoolchildren working illegally long hours to manufacture Amazon’s popular Echo, Echo Dot and Kindle devices.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In December 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring the 600,000-vehicle federal fleet to shift to zero-emissions by 2035 as part of an effort to leverage government buying power to “catalyze America’s clean energy economy.” The massive federal purchase is meant to help manufacturers move away from internal combustion engines and toward electric vehicle production.
If Biden has his way, half of the 17 million cars and trucks sold in the United States in 2030 will be electric. And even if his order is overturned by a later administration, the International Energy Agency predicts that market-driven demand will lead to similar numbers of new electric vehicles on the road, substantially decreasing tailpipe emissions, urban pollution and overall greenhouse gas emissions — as long as fossil fuels don’t dominate the grids charging the cars.
But it will also substantially increase the demand for the so-called energy transition minerals that go into electric vehicles, their batteries and the charging infrastructure — lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and rare earth elements. Currently, these minerals are largely mined outside of the U.S., in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia and so on. But with the expected electric vehicle-manufacturing surge on its way, officials from both the auto and mining industries are calling on the federal government to streamline mine permitting in order to bring the supply chain closer to home. The projected demand and the rise in metal prices are breathing new life into Western copper mines and spurring dozens of proposals for new mines from Wyoming to Oregon and Nevada to Arizona.
Illustrations by Emily Poole/High Country News These minerals, which are also used in wind turbines and solar panels, are sometimes called “green rocks.” But more often than not, their extraction is anything but green. Copper ore is gouged from vast open pits, visible from space as intricate scars on the landscape. All metal mining tends to facilitate a chemical reaction that causes acid mine drainage, which can sully rivers and harm fish and other aquatic life. Cobalt mining can release radioactive and carcinogenic particles, while lithium extraction sucks billions of gallons of water from the ground and the wastewater disposal can contaminate drinking water aquifers.
Efforts are underway to minimize the environmental impacts. At California’s Salton Sea, companies are hoping to tap wastewater from geothermal power production for lithium. Global mining giant Rio Tinto is extracting lithium from waste at its gaping boron mine in California’s Mojave Desert; if the pilot project proves feasible, it could produce lithium without the need for new mining. Innovators are working on non-lithium batteries, and in Nevada one of Tesla’s founders has devoted millions of dollars to develop ways to recycle electric vehicle batteries.
Antimony
Idaho: Perpetua Resources plans to construct an open-pit gold and antimony mine in the defunct Stibnite mining district east of McCall. Historic mining in the area ravaged the landscape and degraded water quality, harming the salmon on which the Nez Perce people depend. Tribal members fear the new mine will bring its own problems. Perpetua says it plans to restore the river and improve water quality.
Cobalt
Salmon-Challis National Forest, Idaho: Australia-based Jervois Global has begun work on the nation’s only active underground cobalt mine just outside the Frank Church Wilderness. The Idaho Conservation League dropped its opposition years ago, after the developers agreed to treat the water in perpetuity and store waste securely in order to protect down-stream water quality.
Shooting Star (Dodecatheon conjugens) wildflowers blooming in Elk Meadows, Salmon-Challis National Forest, Idaho. Alan Majchrowicz / Getty Images Lithium
Thacker Pass, Nevada: Proposed by Canada-based Lithium Americas, this open-pit mine would target one of the nation’s largest lithium deposits. The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and Northern Paiute group Atsa koodakuh wyh Nuwu (People of Red Mountain) oppose the project, which is on tribal homelands and was the site of two massacres of Indigenous people in the 1800s. The project would use about 1.7 billion gallons of water per year.
Salton Sea, California: Australia-based Controlled Thermal Resources — with backing from General Motors — is drilling deep under the Salton Sea to produce geothermal energy from superheated water. The company plans to tap the wastewater for lithium.
Boron, California: Mining giant Rio Tinto is extracting lithium from waste rock at its huge boron mine in the California desert. It hopes to achieve commercial production levels this year.
Nickel
Oregon: Although there are no active proposals to mine nickel in the West, deposits are scattered across the region. In the 1980s, southern Oregon’s Nickel Mountain Mine was the nation’s only combined nickel mine and smelter, but it shut down due to falling prices.
Copper
Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona: Canada-based Hudbay hopes to capitalize on the projected rise in copper demand with its proposed Rosemont open-pit mine south of Tucson. Hudbay’s website says that “the copper mined at Rosemont will support a cleaner and more interconnected economy.” The proposal has hit regulatory and legal obstacles in recent months, and its fate remains uncertain.
Rare Earth Elements
Mountain Pass, California: The nation’s only operating rare earths mine is in the Clark Mountains near the Nevada border. During the 1980s and ’90s, the mine was plagued by pipeline ruptures, hazardous waste spills and other environmental problems.
Bokan Mountain, Alaska: UCore Rare Metals Alaska is slowly working toward developing a rare earth mine in southeast Alaska on Prince of Wales Island.
Bear Lodge Mountain, Wyoming: After commencing exploratory drilling for rare earth metals at this northeast Wyoming site near Sundance, Rare Element Resources suspended its permit application with the U.S. Forest Service in 2016, citing low metal prices and lack of funding.
White Mesa Mill, Utah: The only operating uranium mill in the U.S., located in southeast Utah, has been retooled to also process rare earth elements.
Recycling
Carson City, Nevada: A study last year found that recycled retired batteries could supply more than half of the global demand for cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel by 2040, thereby reducing the need for new mines. Nevada-based Redwood Materials, led by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, says it can recover more than 95% of the critical minerals from recycled batteries. The company recently announced that it will produce recycled copper foils for Panasonic, for use in battery anodes manufactured at the Tesla Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada.
Sources: U.S. Geological Survey, Ucore Rare Metals Inc., Idaho Mountain Express, Jervois Global, Perpetua Resources, Los Angeles Times, Energy Fuels, S&P Global, Bureau of Land Management, Earthworks, International Energy Agency, Atlantic Council Global Energy Center, Hudbay, Environmental Science & Technology, Pew Research Center.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Electric vehicles drive up demand for ‘green metals’ on Jan 28, 2022.
This post was originally published on Grist.
