Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged coding

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

China's new morality guidelines describe how to eat right, lower carbon footprints - an... - 0 views

  • the new codes are “totally consistent with Beijing’s pivot toward nativism and political tightening over the past decade — a pivot which has steadily engulfed one field of human endeavor after another: law, media, culture and higher education. All of this raises deep questions of exactly how much further such trends might run.
  • that could have serious implications for a range of academic, economic and person-to-person ties binding China with the rest of the world.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Next Decade Will Be Just as Bad - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We will remember the 2010s as a grifter’s paradise. These were the years when our collective sense of objective reality totally fell apart and when politics, business, technology, culture and even ordinary life fell fully under the sway of a new breed of swindler, huckster, influencer, troll and hacker.
  • this was the big lesson of the 2010s: Almost nothing is as it seems. Doubt everything. Trust no one.
  • pervasive doubt could just as well bring on civilizational ruin.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Getting through modern life seems to require adopting a corrosive view of society that makes a hash of our fundamental ideas about the value of cooperation and trust among our fellow humans
  • We’re bringing on a death-spiral of distrust
  • Our information system has slipped its moorings, and as a result, lying and scheming and fraud has simply become too effective a life strategy. As I argued in March, when the celebrity college admissions scandal broke, we’re seeing the “uberization” of corruption — bending the rules is becoming routine and pervasive, a push-button cheat code for modern life.
  • The grift wasn’t limited to politics. The tech industry welcomed hucksters with open arms. Look at WeWork, Uber and Theranos — once high-flying start-ups that promised to change the world in big ways and small, each unmasked for peddling false prospects, unreal tech or hiding systemic corruption and abuse
  • Facebook and other social media services were not just a haven of state-sponsored disinformation; with dodgy, easily gamed stats, social media increasingly came to provide a false view of the world.
  • Why are we being overrun by scams? Society’s signals for judging reputation and trustworthiness haven’t caught up with the changing tech.
  • rather than the establishment foiling Trump, his slippery style and overwhelming blizzard of lies would so fully alter political and media culture that by the end of the decade, members of the G.O.P. would be embracing and echoing his conspiracy theories as a way to forestall his removal from office.
  • It’s not a big leap from “Trust no one” to “swindle everyone.”
Javier E

How We Are Ruining America - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The most important is residential zoning restrictions.
  • zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009
  • Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution.
  • With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.
  • We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.
  • American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
  • the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.
  • To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. 1019 Comments
  • In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
  • Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
  • Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids
  • Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
  • Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
  • Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else
Javier E

TikTok's owner is helping China's campaign of repression in Xinjiang, report finds - Th... - 0 views

  • In a detailed new report, experts at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre concluded that many Chinese tech companies “are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”
  • “Some of these companies lead the world in cutting-edge technology development, particularly in the AI and surveillance sectors,” Fergus Ryan, Danielle Cave and Vicky Xiuzhong Xu write in the report. “But this technology development is focused on servicing authoritarian needs, and as these companies go global (an expansion often funded by [Chinese] loans and aid) this technology is going global as well.”
  • Xinjiang Internet Police began working with Douyin, the local version of TikTok, last year and built a “new public security and Internet social governance model” in 2018. Then in April, the Ministry of Public Security’s Press and Publicity Bureau signed a strategic cooperation agreement with ByteDance to promote the “influence and credibility” of police departments nationwide, the ASPI experts said.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Over the same period, ByteDance has flourished. Its TikTok app has been downloaded a billion times, of which nearly 100 million came from the United States, and it has a jaw-dropping valuation of $75 billion.
  • ByteDance has also been working with Xinjiang authorities under a program called “Xinjiang Aid,” whereby Chinese companies open subsidiaries or factories in Xinjiang and employ locals who have been detained in the camps. Its operations are centered on Hotan, an area of Xinjiang considered backward by the Communist Party and where the repression has been among the most severe.
  • Leaked documents have previously shown how ByteDance censors content that the Chinese government disapproves of, including Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
  • ByteDance has been guiding and helping Xinjiang authorities and media outlets to use its news aggregation app and Douyin to “propagate and showcase Hotan’s new image,” according to the ASPI report.
  • In the case of Huawei, which is locked in an existential battle with the Trump administration, there is evidence of extensive and direct work with Chinese security organs in Xinjiang, including helping authorities there with the “digitization requirements” of public security projects.
  • “Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society,” a Xinjiang government website quoted one Huawei director as saying last year.
  • When the Xinjiang Public Security Department and Huawei signed the agreement to establish an “intelligent security industry” innovation lab in the regional capital of Urumqi last year, a local official said Huawei had been supplying “reliable technical support” for the department, according to the report
  • Huawei has also participated in a program called “Safe Xinjiang,” which the ASPI experts said was “code for a police surveillance system.”
  • “The Chinese tech companies in this report enjoy a highly favorable regulatory environment and are unencumbered by privacy and human rights concerns,” it concludes. Many are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”
Javier E

When a DNA Test Says You're a Younger Man, Who Lives 5,000 Miles Away - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Three months after his bone marrow transplant, Chris Long of Reno, Nev., learned that the DNA in his blood had changed. It had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor, a German man he had exchanged just a handful of messages with.
  • it was not only Mr. Long’s blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained his DNA — but also that of his donor. Even more surprising to Mr. Long and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor.
  • Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor’s DNA shows up — beyond blood — has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
  • The average doctor does not need to know where a donor’s DNA will present itself within a patient. That’s because this type of chimerism is not likely to be harmful. Nor should it change a person. “Their brain and their personality should remain the same,”
  • for a forensic scientist, it’s a different story. The assumption among criminal investigators as they gather DNA evidence from a crime scene is that each victim and each perpetrator leaves behind a single identifying code — not two
  • In 2004, investigators in Alaska uploaded a DNA profile extracted from semen to a criminal DNA database. It matched a potential suspect. But there was a problem: The man had been in prison at the time of the assault. It turned out that he had received a bone marrow transplant. The donor, his brother, was eventually convicted.
  • she heard about another disconcerting scenario since then. It involved police investigators who were skeptical of a sexual assault victim’s account because she said there had been one attacker, though DNA analysis showed two. Eventually the police determined that the second profile had come from her bone marrow donor.
  • In 2008, he was trying to identify the victim of a traffic accident for the National Forensic Service in Seoul, South Korea. Blood showed that the individual was female. But the body appeared to be male, which was confirmed by DNA in a kidney, but not in the spleen or the lung, which contained male and female DNA. Eventually, he figured out that the victim had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.
  • Fraternal twins sometimes acquire each other’s DNA in the womb; in at least one case that led to unfounded fears of infidelity when a man’s child did not seem to be his. In another case, a mother nearly lost custody of her children after a DNA test.
Javier E

Opinion | Who Killed the Knapp Family? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him.
  • Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.
  • We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.
  • “The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.”
  • Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”
  • Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class
  • The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them
  • The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays.
  • If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.
  • we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.
  • “I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.
  • One consequence is that the bottom end of America’s labor force is not very productive, in ways that reduce our country’s competitiveness
  • we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school.
  • “We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place,”
  • We have to treat America’s cancer.
  • the situation is worsening, because families have imploded under the pressure of drug and alcohol abuse, and children are growing up in desperate circumstances
  • In the 1970s and ’80s it was common to hear derogatory suggestions that the forces ripping apart African-American communities were rooted in “black culture.” The idea was that “deadbeat dads,” self-destructive drug abuse and family breakdown were the fundamental causes, and that all people needed to do was show “personal responsibility.
  • A Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.
  • Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable.
  • Family structure collapsed.
  • The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years
  • The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies.
  • The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did.
  • Americans also bought into a misconceived “personal responsibility” narrative that blamed people for being poor.
  • It’s true, of course, that personal responsibility matters: People we spoke to often acknowledged engaging in self-destructive behaviors.
  • But when you can predict wretched outcomes based on the ZIP code where a child is born, the problem is not bad choices the infant is making.
  • If we’re going to obsess about personal responsibility, let’s also have a conversation about social responsibility.
  • Why did deaths of despair claim Farlan, Zealan, Nathan, Rogena and so many others?
  • First, well-paying jobs disappeared
  • Second, there was an explosion of drugs
  • Third, the war on drugs sent fathers and mothers to jail, shattering families.
  • Both political parties embraced mass incarceration and the war on drugs, which was particularly devastating for black Americans, and ignored an education system that often consigned the poor — especially children of color — to failing schools
  • Since 1988, American schools have become increasingly segregated by race, and kids in poor districts perform on average four grade levels behind those in rich districts.
  • Women in Recovery has a recidivism rate after three years of only 4 percent, and consequently has saved Oklahoma $70 million in prison spending,
  • ob training and retraining give people dignity as well as an economic lifeline. Such jobs programs are common in other countries.
  • For instance, autoworkers were laid off during the 2008-9 economic crisis both in Detroit and across the Canadian border in nearby Windsor, Ontario. As the scholar Victor Tan Chen has showed, the two countries responded differently
  • The United States focused on money, providing extended unemployment benefits. Canada emphasized job retraining, rapidly steering workers into new jobs in fields like health care, and Canadian workers also did not have to worry about losing health insurance.
  • The focus on job placement meant that Canadian workers were ushered more quickly back into workaday society and thus today seem less entangled in drugs and family breakdown.
  • Another successful strategy is investing not just in prisons but also in human capital to keep people out of prisons.
  • We attended a thrilling graduation in Tulsa, Okla., for 17 women completing an impressive local drug treatment program called Women in Recovery.
  • The graduates had an average of 15 years of addiction each, and all were on probation after committing crimes. Yet they had quit drugs and started jobs
  • Yet it’s not hopeless. America is polarized with ferocious arguments about social issues, but we should be able to agree on what doesn’t work: neglect and underinvestment in children. Here’s what does work.
  • Bravo for philanthropy, but the United States would never build interstate highways through volunteers and donations, and we can’t build a national preschool program or a national drug recovery program with private money.
  • For individuals trying to break an addiction, a first step is to face up to the problem — and that’s what America should do as well
Javier E

Gertrude Himmelfarb, the Historian of Moral Change - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Intellectuals played a different role then. They were more of a secular priesthood than today. The intellectual vocation, Irving Howe wrote, meant standing up for values that have no currency in commercial culture. It meant wrestling with the big questions, upholding the high ideals, and using the power of ideas to shape the mental life of the nation.
  • her passing marks the dusk of what was arguably the high-water mark of American intellectual life.
  • Himmelfarb was a great historian, and reported fairly on all sides, but it was always clear which side her heart was on. She grew up working-class and preferred the prosaic bourgeois values that fueled her family’s rise: work, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, cleanliness, moderation, respect for tradition.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • To understand a nation, you have to understand its literary and moral imagination—the way artists and writers reflect the times, the way the greatest minds of the day express their ideals and spread beliefs.
  • Britain in the 19th century, like America in the 20th century, was losing its religious faith and searching for a moral code to replace it.
  • Trilling believed that the manners, mores, and morals of a nation touch people everywhere, while politics touches people only in some places, and so morals are more important than day-to-day politics.
  • In its original definition, a neoconservative was a leftist who broke with the left when, in the 1960s, its leaders rejected bourgeois values for the counterculture. By this definition, she was a neoconservative.
  • Himmelfarb shared the Victorian awareness of sin. She detested the snobbery of cultural elites and narcissism in all its forms.
  • she came to admire the optimistic British Enlightenment, especially Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. We are endowed with a moral sense. We want not only to be loved, but to be lovely. We may have differences along race, class, and gender lines, but deep down we are much alike, longing to lead a life that transcends the individual sel
  • Himmelfarb didn’t fear immorality so much as demoralization, the sense that our age has lost a moral vocabulary and with it the ability to think subtly about moral matters. A great deal, she wrote, is lost when a society stops aiming for civic virtue and is content to aim merely for civility.
brookegoodman

5-Marx's Comm M. - Google Drive - 0 views

  • A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
  • Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
  • It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
  • village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.
  • the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.
  • The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
  • The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
  • the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
  • The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
  • The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
  • Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
  • The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
  • The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
  • Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*
  • In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
  • He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
  • Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
  • Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
  • Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
  • And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
  • Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.
  • But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
  • Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers.
  • Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
  • At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
  • the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.
  • But every class struggle is a political struggle.
  • a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
  • The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for
  • The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.
  • The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
  • It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
  • Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
delgadool

Anna Wiener Interview: 'Uncanny Valley' - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The problem that needs to be solved there is one of transparency and autonomy. Learning how to code is one way to approach it. But it’s also about education and leveling out that power dynamic.
  • I’m hoping that other people in tech read it and they relate to it in some way, and that it articulates an experience that I believe to be common and not just my own. I hope it opens up space for more writing like this, by which I mean writing about tech from the perspective of someone who’s just an average employee and not an executive.
brookegoodman

Nancy Pelosi references 'Irishman' over Trump impeachment - 0 views

  • House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday likened President Trump’s request for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor” to coded mob lingo by invoking the new Martin Scorsese flick “The Irishman.”
  • she signed two articles of impeachment against the president.
  • Then, taking even further liberty with the White House-released transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky, Pelosi said, “Do you paint houses too? What is this? Do me a favor?”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the July 2019 phone call, Trump asked Zelesnky, “But do us a favor” by investigating former US vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, over their dealings in the Eastern European nation.
  • The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted last month to bring two articles of impeachment against Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to the Ukraine imbroglio.
brookegoodman

Trump legal team calls impeachment 'brazen' attempt to overturn 2016 election | US news... - 0 views

  • In a joint statement, the seven managers led by the Democratic intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said their case was “simple, the facts are indisputable, and the evidence is overwhelming: President Trump abused the power of his office to solicit foreign interference in our elections for his own personal political gain, thereby jeopardising our national security, the integrity of our elections, and our democracy”.
  • The case hinges on a 25 July phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in which Trump asked his counterpart to do him a “favour” and investigate both a conspiracy theory concerning election interference and ties between former vice-president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, and the eastern European country.
  • Many observers suggest the slow nature of the trial will prove a turnoff to the American public, boosting Trump’s hopes of surviving unscathed. Others report that the president wants to add fire and TV knowhow to the team mounting his defence.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The documents also raised more questions about the security of Marie Yovanovitch, a former ambassador to Ukraine who testified in House impeachment proceedings. An unidentified individual with a Belgian country code appeared to describe Yovanovitch’s movements.
  • Trump seems certain to survive the Senate trial, as a two-thirds majority will be needed to convict and remove him and Republicans remain in line behind him.
  • In their statement on Saturday, the House impeachment managers said senators “must accept and fulfil the responsibility placed on them by the framers of our constitution and the oaths they have just taken to do impartial justice. They must conduct a fair trial – fair to the president and fair to the American people”.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
  • “This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away,” the lawyers said on Saturday, also claiming the charges against the president were invalid as they did not concern a crime.
Javier E

The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
  • without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year
  • The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
  • “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
  • While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
  • The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it.
  • In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
  • “I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
  • “In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”
  • He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo
  • Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition
  • Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are
  • Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”
  • When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.
  • Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”
  • The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners
  • Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.
  • They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,”
  • The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company
  • Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool
  • The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.
  • Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers,
  • Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.
  • “With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”
  • Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.
  • Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party
  • One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.
  • Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.
  • Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them.
  • Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see.
  • After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”
  • “It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”
  • But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin
  • Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.
  • We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”
  • “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”
  • Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.
  • Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name
  • Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.
anniina03

Yellow or Blue? In Hong Kong, Businesses Choose Political Sides - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The tapioca pearls at Fred Liu’s bubble teahouse are springy and fresh, just like the fish balls at Elaine Lau’s noodle shop. But that is not the only reason customers flock to these eateries in Hong Kong’s bustling Causeway Bay shopping district.Both are members of the so-called yellow economy, shops that openly support the democracy movement remaking Hong Kong as it strives to protect the freedoms differentiating the territory from the rest of China.
  • After seven months of street protests against Beijing’s assault on these liberties, Hong Kong is color-coded — and bitterly divided. The yellow economy refers to the hue of umbrellas once used to defend demonstrators against pepper spray and streams of tear gas. That is in contrast to blue businesses, which support the police.
  • A middle ground between the blue and yellow factions barely exists.“I’m yellow, but my parents are blue,” said Ms. Lau, the fish ball noodle seller. “A lot of families are like that.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “We want to show the Chinese Communist Party that Hong Kong people can be economically self-sufficient through the yellow economic circle,” Mr. Liu said. “We want to put pressure on blue shops to close.”
  • months of unrest, along with the trade war between the United States and China, have battered Hong Kong’s economy, which entered recession last year.
  • As tempers have flared, businesses on both sides of the color divide have been attacked.
  • The battle has gone online, too. Ken Leung helped create WhatsGap, a popular app in Hong Kong that maps businesses that are considered yellow, helping them draw customers.
mimiterranova

Photos: The Non-Pandemic World Events That Helped Shape 2020 : NPR - 0 views

  • A massive computer breach allowed hackers to spend months exploring numerous U.S. government networks and private companies' systems around the world. Industry experts say a country mounted the complex hack — and government officials say Russia is responsible.
  • Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, is believed to have carried out the hack, according to cybersecurity experts who cite the extremely sophisticated nature of the attack. Russia has denied involvement.
  • President Trump has been silent about the hack and his administration has not attributed blame.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The victims include government, consulting, technology, telecom and other entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, according to the security firm FireEye, which helped raise the alarm about the breach.
  • After studying the malware, FireEye said it believes the breaches were carefully targeted: "These compromises are not self-propagating; each of the attacks require meticulous planning and manual interaction."
  • Hackers exploited the way software companies distribute updates, adding malware to the legitimate package. Security analysts said the malicious code gave hackers a "backdoor" — a foothold in their targets' computer networks — which they then used to gain elevated credentials. SolarWinds traced the "supply chain" attack to updates for its Orion network products between March and June.
  • FireEye is calling the "Trojanized" SolarWinds software Sunburst. It named another piece of malware – which it said had never been seen before — TEARDROP.
  • olarWinds said it is cooperating with the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and other investigating agencies to learn more about the malware and its effects. The company and security firms also said any affected agencies or customers should update to the latest software to lessen their exposure to the vulnerability. Microsoft has now taken control of the domain name that hackers used to communicate with systems that were compromised by the Orion update, according to security expert Brian Krebs. That access can help reveal the scope of the hack, he said.
  • For the U.S. government, Mandia says, there are bigger questions to be addressed — including a doctrine on what the U.S. expects nations' rules of engagement to be, and what the response will be to those who violate that doctrine.
aidenborst

Opinion | Supreme Leader of Voter Suppression - The New York Times - 0 views

  • we have trudged through these last months of President Trump trying, at every turn, to overthrow the will of the people by overturning the election he lost in November. Even if his ultimate loss is inevitably secured, it seems as though he is burning down the village as he retreats.
  • Trump has essentially claimed that fraud occurred during the election in large swing-state cities within counties that have large African-American populations — cities like Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia.
  • The New York Times pointed out in November: “All three cities voted pretty much the same way they did in 2016. Turnout barely budged, relative to other areas in these states. Joseph R. Biden Jr. saw no remarkable surge in support — certainly nothing that would bolster claims of ballot stuffing or tampered vote tallies. Mr. Trump even picked up marginally more votes this year in all three cities than he did four years ago.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But that thought is antithetical to the war Trump wants to wage in America between the suburbs and what he deems problematic “inner cities” and “Democrat-run cities” — code for where concentrations of Black people and other people of color live.
  • It threatens to strengthen efforts to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color who disproportionately vote for Democrats in the future.
  • “ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.” As Jay Willis pointed out in The Washington Post, “Even after Trump’s presidency ends, that message will pave the way for G.O.P. politicians and judges to further one of their party’s and the conservative movement’s most important ongoing projects: restricting voting rights.” He continued: “Trump lost this election, but he can still help Republicans win in the future.”
  • Trump not only attempted to erase Black votes after they were cast, he attempted to suppress them before they were cast. This is nothing new among conservatives, but Trump has dragged the practice out of the back rooms and into the light of day once again, giving it a telegenic, digitally contagious persona.
  • As Eric Levitz pointed out in New York Magazine: “The G.O.P. is now a party that has no compunction about nullifying the voting rights of its opposition to retain power. And once a party has liberated itself from the shackles of respecting its detractors’ rights, much else becomes permissible.”
  • But we don’t talk enough about how for Black people and other racial minorities, this isn’t only about faith. For them, it’s about being able to participate in elections at all.
  • Republicans plan to challenge the counting of state Electoral College votes. This effort, too, is expected to fail. But it will provide yet another spectacle on a grand stage for the lie that Trump and his sycophantic courtiers have sown: that the political machine in liberal cities full of Blacks, hipsters, gays and gangs stole elections from the real Americans in the hinterlands.
  • What we are seeing unfold before our eyes is not about building trust in elections, it is anti-patriotic. It is not about ensuring that every legal vote is counted. It’s about attempting to legally limit whose ballots can be counted.
  • Trump is attempting to drag Jim Crow into the Twitter era.
martinelligi

Singapore Says COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Data Can Be Requested By Police : Coronavirus U... - 0 views

  • Privacy concerns have been raised after ministers in Singapore's government acknowledged that data collected by its widely used COVID-19 contact-tracing program may be turned over to police for criminal investigations.
  • The TraceTogether smartphone app and token are used by 78% of the people in Singapore, a country of 5.7 million. Balakrishnan called it "perhaps the most successful contact-tracing program in the world."
  • The TraceTogether program was developed by the Singapore government's technology agency and includes a smartphone app or a token that documents proximity to other users. The program was adopted more widely after it became required to enter places such as grocery stores or workplaces, the BBC reported.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Balakrishnan noted that the Criminal Procedure Code already applies to other types of sensitive information protected by privacy laws, including banking records. He said police have accessed such records in the past "with proper safeguards, and with the good outcomes that Singaporeans have come to expect from our police investigations."
  • He said contact-tracing data have been used once so far, in a murder case, according to The Straits Times.
  • Eugene Tan, a law professor at Singapore Management University and a former nominated member of Parliament, told The Straits Times that the government's backtracking on privacy assurances undermines trust and credibility. "This damage could undermine its future efforts, given its reiteration that Singapore has only managed to keep COVID-19 under control due to the people's trust in the government's measures," he told the paper.
aidenborst

If you want to travel next year, you may need a vaccine passport - CNN - 0 views

  • Now that coronavirus vaccines are starting to roll out in the US and abroad, many people may be dreaming of the day when they can travel, shop and go to the movies again. But in order to do those activities, you may eventually need something in addition to the vaccine: a vaccine passport application.
  • Several companies and technology groups have begun developing smartphone apps or systems for individuals to upload details of their Covid-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that could be shown in order to enter concert venues, stadiums, movie theaters, offices, or even countries.
  • The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as a Covid-19 test result or, eventually, a proof of vaccination by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or pass in the form of a QR code that can be shown to authorities without revealing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists health pass requirements at the points of departure and arrival based on your itinerary.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "You can be tested every time you cross a border. You cannot be vaccinated every time you cross a border," Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business.
  • Large tech firms are also getting in on the act. IBM (IBM) developed its own app, called Digital Health Pass, which allows companies and venues to customize indicators they would require for entry including coronavirus tests, temperature checks and vaccination records.
  • Early on in the pandemic, Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) set aside their smartphone rivalry to jointly develop a Bluetooth-based system to notify users if they'd been exposed to someone with Covid-19.
  • "I think where exposure notification ran into some challenges was more of the piecemeal implementation choices, lack of federal leadership ... where each state had to go it alone and so each state had to figure it out independently," said Jenny Wanger, who leads the exposure notification initiatives for Linux Foundation Public Health, a tech-focused organization helping public health authorities around the world combat Covid-19.
  • "Trust and transparency remain paramount when developing a platform like a digital health passport, or any solution that handles sensitive personal information," the company said in a blog post. "Putting privacy first is an important priority for managing and analyzing data in response to these complex times."
  • A few companies within the Covid-19 Credentials Initiative are also developing a smart card that strikes a middle ground between the traditional paper vaccine certificates and an online version that's easier to store and reproduce.
  • CommonPass, IBM and the Linux Foundation have all stressed privacy as central to their initiatives. IBM says it allows users to control and consent to the use of their health data and allows them to choose the level of detail they want to provide to authorities.
  • "If we're successful, you should be able to say: I've got a vaccine certificate on my phone that I got when I was vaccinated in one country, with a whole set of its own kind of health management practices... that I use to get on a plane to an entirely different country and then I presented in that new country a vaccination credential so I could go to that concert that was happening indoors for which attendance was limited to those who have demonstrated that they've had the vaccine," said Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Linux Foundation.
  • "A point of entry — whether that's a border, whether that's a venue — is going to want to know, did you get the Pfizer vaccine, did you get the Russian vaccine, did you get the Chinese vaccine, so they can make a decision accordingly,"
  • The variance can be wide: the vaccine developed by Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical giant Sinopharm, for example, has an efficacy of 86% against Covid-19, while the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna each have an efficacy of around 95%.
  • It's also unclear how effective the vaccines are in stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show that you've received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you safely attend an event or get on a flight.
  • Still, Behlendorf anticipates that the rollout and adoption of vaccine passports will happen rather quickly once everything falls into place and expects a variety of apps that can work with each other to be "widely available" within the first half of 2021.
aidenborst

Opinion: After the pandemic recovery, we must tackle the national debt - CNN - 0 views

  • Few of our political leaders are eager to deal with the national debt. It's an issue that entails very challenging policy solutions, and thus tends to be used more as a cudgel to stop expensive policies from moving forward, than as an issue in its own right.
  • So even with a $21 trillion debt serving as a flashing warning sign, and with no plan to get the borrowing under control once the economy is strong again, there is very little political interest in doing something about it.
  • Now President-elect Biden will be inheriting the second-highest debt of any American president, second to President Truman who came into office at the end of World War II, and the very worst situation if you look at where the debt is headed long term, with about $5 billion in borrowing per day.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • This needs to be addressed or else future generations of Americans will still be paying the price in decades to come.
  • Debt isn't always bad, however. There are times when it is useful, and now is one of those times. We need money to fight the pandemic, help the millions of people whose lives have been damaged, support businesses and prop up the economy until things get back to normal. We aren't out of the woods yet, even with the recent positive vaccine news, and we need to borrow more.
  • Here then is what the Biden administration should do. First, focus on getting the pandemic under control, helping those in need and supporting the economy.
  • These could include sensible cost control measures, such as increasing the retirement age and encouraging those who want to continue to work part time into retirement to do so.
  • Even at today's rock-bottom interest rates, we could quadruple federal education spending or send every family an annual check of $2,200 with the money we are spending on interest.
  • Once the economy is strong enough, as indicated by growth and employment (rather than political whims), the administration and Congress should gradually implement sensible measures to get control of the debt. This could include repealing some or all of the irresponsible tax cuts of the past years, reducing health care costs throughout the economy, cutting some of the near $1.4 trillion of tax breaks in the code and restoring sensible spending caps.
  • We also need to address our major trust fund programs that are facing insolvency in the upcoming years, including Social Security and Medicare.
  • Just because more debt is necessary right now doesn't mean it is harmless. We entered the last recession with debt as a share of GDP at 35%. This one is at 80% and we will leave it at well over 100%. US debt is growing faster than the economy and will break the all-time record set just after World War II as soon as 2023.
  • To Biden's credit, his campaign plan included trillions of dollars in revenue raisers and spending reforms, creating opportunities for lawmakers to fund new public investments in a fiscally responsible manner. It is a start, but there will be much more to do. Debt naysayers will want the new administration to opt for the free lunch approach -- borrowing rather than paying for new priorities -- but that is a dangerous economic plan in the long run that invites serious risk and leaves us vulnerable at a time we should be pursing an agenda of economic strength.
xaviermcelderry

Live Trump vs. Biden Election Updates: Texas Court Denies G.O.P. Push to Throw Out Vote... - 0 views

  • The Texas Supreme Court denied an effort by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had already been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, leaving Republicans’ only remaining option at the federal level.
  • The effort to get rid of the votes from largely Democratic Harris County now hinges on a nearly identical effort at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday.
  • More than 127,000 voters have cast ballots at the sites and the number could grow to more than 135,000 through Election Day on Tuesday, said Susan Hays, a lawyer for Harris County. She said county officials planned to vigorously challenge the suit, which she described as an act of “voter suppression.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In a statement on Twitter on Saturday, Mr. Hollins said drive-through voting “is a safe, secure and convenient way to vote. Texas Election Code allows it, the Secretary of State approved it, and 127,000 voters from all walks of life have used it.”
  • “My message is simple: Pennsylvania is critical in this election,” Mr. Biden said at a “Souls to the Polls” event at Sharon Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon.
  • “Every single vote matters,” he added, noting that President Trump had only won the state in 2016 by roughly 44,000 votes. “The power to change this country is literally in your hands.”
  • “We need to get every soul in Philadelphia to the polls,” he said, urging voters to get their absentee ballots to a drop box “as soon as you can” if they still had one or to vote in person on Election Day. Mr. Biden will also hold a drive-in rally in Philadelphia on Sunday evening.
« First ‹ Previous 301 - 320 of 409 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page