161843270
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while laden with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don't.
While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may one day offer, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.
“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”
161395018
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
In a first-of-its-kind move—and the latest sign that crypto-investing has gone mainstream—Fidelity Investments announced Tuesday that 401(k) plan participants will soon be able to invest in Bitcoin via their retirement plan.
The investing option should be available by mid-year, Fidelity, the nation’s largest 401(k) plan provider, said in a press release. Employers will need to opt into the change, which may limit which employees actually have access to Bitcoin in their workplace retirement accounts.
There are few details currently available about how exactly the account will work, but Fidelity says employees will be able to invest in Bitcoin via what the company is calling the Digital Assets Account, which will be part of the investor's 401(k). That account will also hold short-term money market investments to provide the liquidity for transactions.
Employers will be able to set their own limits on how much an employee can contribute to Bitcoin, though Fidelity's platform allows no more than 20% of a saver's contributions to be allocated to it, the company said. More digital assets may be added to the 401(k) offerings in the future.
161165910
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
Anomaly Six, a secretive government contractor, claims to monitor the movements of billions of phones around the world and unmask spies with the press of a button.
In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.
Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access.
159894735
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
After weeks of microscopic adjustments, NASA unveiled the first fully focused image from the James Webb Space Telescope Wednesday, a razor-sharp engineering photo of a nondescript star in a field of more distant galaxies that shows the observatory's optical system is working in near-flawless fashion.
The goal was to demonstrate Webb can now bring starlight to a near-perfect focus, proving the $10 billion telescope doesn't suffer from any subtle optical defects like the aberration that initially hobbled the Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxies in the image were a bonus, whetting astronomers' appetites for discoveries to come.
"This is one of the most magnificent days in my whole career at NASA, frankly, and for many of us astronomers, one of the most important days that we've had," said NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen. "Today we can announce that the optics will perform to specifications or even better. It's an amazing achievement."
157432135
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
It's a rock. A small rock.
China has discovered the explanation for the mysterious "hut" its Yutu 2 rover spotted on the moon late last year. As the lunar rover made a closer approach, a log of its activities revealed the object was actually just a rock on a crater rim.
The revelation came as the lunar rover drove closer to the formation that was once believed to be as tall as Paris' Arc de Triomphe, according to a post published Friday on "Our Space," a Chinese media channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration. Instead, it was much smaller and had a peculiar shape. Upon a closer view, the rock looked like a "jade rabbit" holding carrots, the post said.
"The Moon's surface is 38 million square kilometres of rocks, so it would have been astronomically exceptional for it to be anything else," Space News journalist Andrew Jones wrote on Twitter. "But while small, the jade rabbit/ rock will also be a monumental disappointment to some."
149083279
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
General Motors tells Chevy Bolt owners to park outside because batteries could catch fire
General Motors is telling owners of some older Chevrolet Bolts to park them outdoors and not to charge them overnight because two of the electric cars caught fire after recall repairs were made.
The company said Wednesday that the request covers 2017 through 2019 Bolts that were part of a group that was recalled earlier due to fires in the batteries.
The latest request comes after two Bolts that had gotten recall repairs caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey, GM spokesman Kevin Kelly said.
Owners should take the steps "out of an abundance of caution," he said. The steps should be continued until GM engineers investigate and develop a repair, he said.
The cars should be parked outdoors after charging is complete, GM said in a statement. "We are moving as quickly as we can to investigate this issue," the company said.
148176186
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
As ransomware attacks surge, the FBI is doubling down on its guidance to affected businesses: Don't pay the cybercriminals. But the U.S. government also offers a little-noticed incentive for those who do pay: If you pay a ransom, it may be tax deductible.
The Internal Revenue Sservice offers no formal guidance on ransomware payments, but multiple tax experts interviewed by the Associated Press said deductions of ransomeware payments as a cost of doing business are usually allowed under law and established guidance. Some called it a "silver lining" for ransomware victims.
Those looking to discourage payments are less sanguine. They fear the IRS deduction is a potentially problematic incentive that could entice businesses to pay ransoms against the advice of law enforcement. At a minimum, they say, the deductibility sends a discordant message to businesses under duress.
146153050
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.
"We might hire people that we know we're going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team," one manager told Insider.
The practice is informally called "hire to fire," in which managers hire people, internally or externally, they intend to fire within a year, just to help meet their annual turnover target, called unregretted attrition (URA). A manager's URA target is the percentage of employees the company wouldn't regret seeing leave, one way or the other.
138931728
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
China launched its most ambitious moon mission yet Monday: a robotic spacecraft expected to land on the lunar surface by the end of the week. The spacecraft is expected to collect about four pounds of rock and soil samples, and return them to Earth next month for laboratory analysis.
If successful, the Chang'e 5 mission will make China only the third nation, after the United States and the former Soviet Union, to bring moon rocks back to Earth. It will also be the first to attempt the feat since Russia's Luna 24 in 1976.
The 8,335-pound Chang'e 5 spacecraft, named after the mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, is made up of four major components: a lunar orbiter, a sample return craft, a lander carrying science instruments and sample collection equipment, and a small ascent vehicle mounted atop the lander to carry the collected surface samples back up to orbit.
The Chang'e 5 lander features multiple cameras, a spectrometer to assess the composition of the soil near the spacecraft and a ground-penetrating radar. A robot arm is equipped with a percussive drill and scoop to pick up excavated rock and soil.
Working by remote control from Earth, engineers will use the arm to move collected samples up to the ascent vehicle, which then will blast off, rendezvous with the Chang'e 5 orbiter and transfer the sample to the return craft for the trip back to Earth.
Landing in Inner Mongolia is expected around December 16. From there, the samples will be transferred to specially equipped laboratories for analysis.
128376080
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
Recently there has been a proliferation of modeling work which has been used to make the point that if we can stay inside, practice extreme social distancing, and generally lock-down nonessential parts of society for several months, then many deaths from COVID-19 can be prevented.
But what happens after the lockdown?
In the article studying the possible effects of heterogeneous measures, adademics presented examples of epidemic trajectories for COVID-19 assuming no mitigations at all, or assuming extreme mitigations which are gradually lifted at 6 months, to resume normal levels at 1 year.
Unfortunately, extreme mitigation efforts which end (even gradually) reduce the number of deaths only by 1% or so; as the mitigation efforts let up, we still see a full-scale epidemic, since almost none of the population has developed immunity to the virus.
There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all.
119464416
submission
BeerFartMoron writes:
This past year has been chock full of uncomfortable revelations about Ring, the surveillance social network and home security hardware company acquired by Amazon for a reported $800 million, including reports of potentially disastrous internal security practices, an apparent disregard for user privacy, and wave after wave of detail on secret partnerships with local police. Today, in a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, five Democratic senators are asking for an explanation, citing potential threats to U.S. national security.
Much of the letter focuses on allegations that Ring’s Ukrainian office, where it conducts much of its research and development operation, allowed employees across the company to access customer video data whether they had any real need to or not. In January, The Intercept reported that this loose security atmosphere at Ring meant “if [someone] knew a reporter or competitor’s email address, [they] could view all their cameras,” per one source, who also recalled Ring engineers casually spying on and “teasing each other about who they brought home” after dates. “If hackers or foreign agents were to gain access to this data,” the letter states, “it would not only threaten the privacy and safety of the impacted Americans; it could also threaten U.S. national security.”
