The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. 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. And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes. Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls. Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested. 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. One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services. 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 main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general. 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. “A lot of people are doing it,” Mr. Ton-That shrugged. “Facebook knows.” Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments. Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the app’s legality. 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. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “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.”  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 “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,”

bill is designed to prevent dominant online platforms—like Apple and Facebook and, especially, Google and Amazon—from giving themselves an advantage over other businesses that must go through them to reach customers. As one of two antitrust bills voted out of committee by a strong bipartisan vote (the other would regulate app stores), it may be this Congress’ best, even only, shot to stop the biggest tech companies from abusing their gatekeeper status. according to the tech giants and their lobbyists and front groups, the bill, which was introduced by Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley, respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, would be a disaster for the American consumer. In an ongoing publicity push against it, they have claimed that it would ruin Google search results, bar Apple from offering useful features on iPhones, force Facebook to stop moderating content, and even outlaw Amazon Prime. It’s all pretty alarming. Is any of it true? The legislation’s central idea is that a company that controls a marketplace shouldn’t be able to set special rules for itself within that marketplace, because competitors who object don’t have any realistic place to go. No business can afford to be left out of Google’s search index, and few online retailers can make a living if they’re not listed on Amazon. So the Klobuchar-Grassley bill, broadly speaking, prohibits self-preferencing by platforms that hit certain size thresholds, like monthly active users or annual revenue. To take a simple example, it would mean Amazon can’t give its in-house branded products a leg up over other brands when someone is shopping on its site, and Google can’t choose to give YouTube links when someone does a video search unless those links are objectively the most relevant. The bill would impose other constraints on Amazon, like preventing it from using data gleaned from third-party sellers to improve the sales of its own brands. (Last month, the House Judiciary Committee asked the DOJ to investigate Amazon executives for allegedly lying to Congress about whether the company does this.) But Mitchell, who supports the bill, says it doesn’t go far enough. She thinks a breakup is needed “Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers,’ which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.” Keeping users on Google properties means more opportunities to show ads and more ways to take a cut of a transaction

Retinal cells grown from stem cells can reach out and connect with neighbors, according to a new study, completing a “handshake” that may show the cells are ready for trials in humans with degenerative eye disorders. once they are separated from adjacent cells in their organoid, they can reach out toward new neighbors with characteristic biological cords called axons. “The last piece of the puzzle was to see if these cords had the ability to plug into, or shake hands with, other retinal cell types in order to communicate,” says Gamm, whose new results on successful connections between the cells was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

public research suggests that encrypted material may eventually be unlocked by powerful computers.. Shor’s algorithm would make a quantum computer exponentially faster than a classical one at cracking an encryption system based on large prime numbers — called RSA after the initials of its inventors — as well as some other popular cryptography techniques, which currently protect online privacy and security. But implementing Shor’s technique would require a much larger quantum computer than the prototypes available. The size of a quantum computer is measured in quantum bits, or qubits; researchers say it might take a million or more qubits to crack RSA. The largest quantum machine available today — the Osprey chip announced in November by IBM — has 433 qubits. In the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, they claim that it could break strong RSA keys — numbers with more than 600 decimal digits — using just 372 qubits. In an email to Nature on behalf of all the authors, Guilu Long, a physicist at Tsinghua University in China, cautioned that having many qubits is not enough, and that current quantum machines are still too-error prone to do such a large computation successfully. “Simply increasing the qubit number without reducing the error rate does not help.” while Shor’s algorithm is guaranteed to break encryption efficiently when (and if) a large-enough quantum computer becomes available, the optimization-based technique could run on a much smaller machine, but it might never finish the task.

The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the last half-century. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend. “The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

An investigation by The Markup and STAT found 49 out of 50 telehealth websites sharing health data via Big Tech’s tracking tools Virtual care websites were leaking sensitive medical information they collect to the world’s largest advertising platforms. URLs users visited:49 sites Personal info (e.g. full name, email, phone):35 sites When user initiated checkout:19 sites User's answers to questionnaires:13 sites When user added to the cart:11 sites When user created an account:9 sites On 13 of the 50 websites, we documented at least one tracker—from Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest—that collected patients’ answers to medical intake questions. Health privacy experts and former regulators said sharing such sensitive medical information with the world’s largest advertising platforms threatens patient privacy and trust and could run afoul of unfair business practices laws. They also emphasized that privacy regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) were not built for telehealth. That leaves “ethical and moral gray areas” that allow for the legal sharing of health-related data Google:47 sites Facebook:44 sites Bing:27 sites TikTok:23 sites Snapchat:15 sites Pinterest:11 sites Linkedin:9 sites Twitter:7 site Rather than providing care themselves, telehealth companies often act as middlemen connecting patients to affiliated providers covered by HIPAA. As a result, information collected during a telehealth company’s intake may not be protected by HIPAA, while the same information given to the provider would be. Together, the companies in this analysis reflect an increasingly competitive—and lucrative—direct-to-consumer health care market. The promise of a streamlined, private prescription process has helped telehealth startups raise billions as they seek to capitalize on a pandemic-driven boom in virtual care. The industry’s rapid growth has been enhanced by its ability to use data from tools like pixels to target advertisements to increasingly specific patient populations and to put ads in front of users who have visited their site before. “It’s a pure monetization play,” said Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. “And yes, everybody else is doing it, it’s the way the internet works.… But I think that it’s out of step with medical ethics, clearly.” The increased attention reflects growing fears about how health data may be used once it enters the black boxes of corporate data warehouses—whether it originates from a hospital, a location tracker, or a telehealth website. “The health data market just continues to kind of spiral out of control, as you’re seeing here,” said Perakslis. But thanks to their business structures, many of the companies behind telehealth websites appear to be operating on the outskirts of health privacy regulations. The telehealth companies that responded to our detailed queries said their data-sharing practices adhered to their privacy policies. Those kinds of policies commonly include notice that some—but not all—health data shared with the site is subject to HIPAA. Many companies responded that they were careful to ensure that data shared via third-party tools was not considered protected health information. But the structure of those companies’ businesses—and the inscrutable language in their privacy policies and terms of use—make it difficult for consumers to know what data would qualify as protected, and when. Further complicating decisions for patients, at least 12 of the direct-to-consumer companies we examined promise on their websites that they are “HIPAA-compliant.” That could encourage users to think all the data they share is protected and lead them to divulge more, said Hartzog. Yet the regulations apply to the websites’ data use only in limited cases. Facebook’s transparency tool..did not provide details about the specific data Facebook ingested during those interactions. A TikTok pixel collected some of that same information from RexMD, but TikTok’s report on our “usage data from third-party apps and websites” had just one line: “You have no data in this section.” On some websites, users’ data was also being collected by “custom events,” meaning that a website owner deliberately created a custom tracking label that could have a phrase such as “checkout” in it but wouldn’t necessarily show up in the tech platforms’ transparency tools. Without updated laws and regulations, experts said patients are left to the whims of rapidly evolving telehealth companies and tech platforms, who may choose to change their privacy policies or alter their trackers at any time.

Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment. "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby. "It was pretty simultaneous, I think, to me, going through the metal detector, that I heard over an intercom or loudspeaker," she told NBC New York. "I heard them say woman with long dark hair and a grey scarf." they knew she was an attorney. They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. A sign says facial recognition is used as a security measure to ensure safety for guests and employees. Conlon says she posed no threat "This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG in their multi-billion dollar network,"

Hypocritcal to the max

The financial details emerged in a newly unredacted copy of a lawsuit that "Fortnite" video game maker Epic Games first filed against Google in 2020. It alleged anticompetitive practices related to the search giant's Android and Play Store businesses. *Epic [Games] last year mostly lost a similar case against Apple Inc (AAPL.O), the other leading app store provider. An appellate ruling in that case is expected next year.* The Google agreements with developers are part of an internal effort known as "Project Hug" and were described in earlier versions of the lawsuit without the exact terms. The remuneration includes payments for posting to YouTube and credits toward Google ads and cloud services. Google at the time forecast billions of dollars in lost app store sales if developers fled to alternative systems.

Twitter employees say the company is eliminating workers without enough notice in violation of federal and California law, the report said.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/16/worker-sinks-miracle-hole-in-one-golf-shot-to-get-colleagues-day-off/

pandemic WW3 work

frequently, users configure their about:config for privacy or minimalism settings such as disabling dom storage can cause websites to stop working. what are some common or uncommon about:config settings that can be toggled to fix a website if it is acting dysfunctional?

assembly of teepee from tarp and fire

axe/hammer, and saw

Three years ago, the company walked away from a Defense Department project after employees objected to it. Now the company is working on a new proposal for the Pentagon Three years after an employee revolt forced Google to abandon work on a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence, the company is aggressively pursuing a major contract to provide its technology to the military. The company’s plan to land the potentially lucrative contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, could raise a furor among its outspoken work force and test the resolve of management to resist employee demands. In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a military program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and could be used to refine the targeting of drone strikes. Google management caved and agreed to not renew the contract once it expired. The outcry led Google to create guidelines for the ethical use of artificial intelligence, which prohibit the use of its technology for weapons or surveillance, and hastened a shake-up of its cloud computing business. Now, as Google positions cloud computing as a key part of its future, the bid for the new Pentagon contract could test the boundaries of those A.I. principles, which have set it apart from other tech giants that routinely seek military and intelligence work. The military’s initiative, which aims to modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield, is a replacement for a contract with Microsoft that was canceled this summer amid a lengthy legal battle with Amazon. Google did not compete against Microsoft for that contract after the uproar over Project Maven. The Pentagon’s restart of its cloud computing project has given Google a chance to jump back into the bidding, and the company has raced to prepare a proposal to present to Defense officials, according to four people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. In September, Google’s cloud unit made it a priority, declaring an emergency “Code Yellow,” an internal designation of importance that allowed the company to pull engineers off other assignments and focus them on the military project, two of those people said. On Tuesday, the Google cloud unit’s chief executive, Thomas Kurian, met with Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the chief of staff of the Air Force, and other top Pentagon officials to make the case for his company, two people said. Google, in a written statement, said it is “firmly committed to serving our public sector customers” including the Defense Department, and that it “will evaluate any future bid opportunities accordingly.” The contract replaces the now-scrapped Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, the Pentagon cloud computing contract that was estimated to be worth $10 billion over 10 years. The exact size of the new contract is unknown, although it is half the duration and will be awarded to more than one company, not to a single provider like JEDI. It is unclear whether the work, which would provide the Defense Department access to Google’s cloud products, would violate Google’s A.I. principles, although the Defense Department has said the technology is expected to support the military in combat. But Pentagon rules about outside access to sensitive or classified data could prevent Google from seeing exactly how its technology is being used. The Defense Department said it would seek proposals from a limited set of companies that could meet its requirements. “As this is an active acquisition, we cannot provide any additional information related to this effort,” said Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the department. After a late start in selling its cloud computing technology to other organizations, Google has struggled to close the gap with Amazon and Microsoft, which have the two biggest cloud computing businesses. To bring in more big customers, Google hired Mr. Kurian, a longtime executive at the software company Oracle, to take over the business in 2018. He has beefed up the size of Google’s sales staff and pushed the company to compete aggressively for new contracts, including military deals. But Google employees have continued to resist some work pursued by the cloud unit. In 2019, they protested the use of artificial intelligence tools for the oil and gas industry. A year later, the company said it would not build custom A.I. software for the extraction of fossil fuels. Google started working on Project Maven in 2017 and prepared to bid for JEDI. Many Google employees believed Project Maven represented a potentially lethal use of artificial intelligence, and more than 4,000 workers signed a letter demanding that Google withdraw from the project. Soon after, Google announced a set of ethical principles that would govern its use of artificial intelligence. Google would not allow its A.I. to be used for weapons or surveillance, said Sundar Pichai, its chief executive, but would continue to accept military contracts for cybersecurity and search-and-rescue. Several months later, Google said it would not bid on the JEDI contract, although it was unlikely that the company had a shot at landing the deal: The Maven experience had soured the relationship between Google and the military, and Google lacked some of the security certifications needed to handle classified data. Google’s cloud business recently has done other work with the military. Since last year, Google has signed contracts with the U.S. Air Force for using cloud computing for aircraft maintenance and pilot training, as well as a U.S. Navy contract for using artificial intelligence to detect and predict the maintenance needs of facilities and vessels. Some Google workers believed the new contract would not violate the principles, a person familiar with the decision said, because the contract would enable generic uses of its cloud technology and artificial intelligence. The principles specifically state Google will not pursue A.I. that can be applied in “weapons or those that direct injury.” Lucy Suchman, a professor of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University whose research focuses on the use of technology in war, said that with so much money at stake, it is no surprise Google might waver on its commitment. “It demonstrates the fragility of Google’s commitment to staying outside the major merger that’s happening between the D.O.D. and Silicon Valley,” Ms. Suchman said. Google’s efforts come as its employees are already pushing the company to cancel a cloud computing contract with the Israeli military, called Project Nimbus, that provides Google’s services to government entities throughout Israel. In an open letter published last month by The Guardian, Google employees called on their employer to cancel the contract. The Defense Department’s effort to transition to cloud technology has been mired in legal battles. The military operates on outdated computer systems and has spent billions of dollars on modernization. It turned to U.S. internet giants in the hope that the companies could quickly and securely move the Defense Department to the cloud. In 2019, the Defense Department awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft. Amazon sued to block the contract, claiming that Microsoft did not have the technical capabilities to fulfill the military’s needs and that former President Donald J. Trump had improperly influenced the decision because of animosity toward Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman and the owner of The Washington Post. In July, the Defense Department announced that it could no longer wait for the legal fight with Amazon to resolve. It scrapped the JEDI contract and said it would be replaced with the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. The Pentagon also noted that Amazon and Microsoft were the only companies that likely had the technology to meet its needs, but said it would conduct market research before ruling out other competitors. The Defense Department said it planned to reach out to Google, Oracle and IBM. But Google executives believe they have the capability to compete for the new contract, and the company expects the Defense Department to tell it whether it will qualify to make a bid in the coming weeks, two people familiar with the matter said. The Defense Department has previously said it hopes to award a contract by April.

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From June 2020 to August 2021, 7-Eleven conducted surveys that required customers to fill out information on tablets with built-in cameras. These tablets, which were installed in 700 stores, captured customers' facial images at two points during the survey-taking process -- when the individual first engaged with the tablet, and after they completed the survey. The facial images were uploaded to the server as algorithmic representations, or "faceprints", that were then compared with other faceprints to exclude responses that 7-Eleven believed may not be genuine. 7-Eleven also used the personal information to understand the demographic profile of customers who completed the survey Falk said 7-Eleven did not provide any information about how customers' facial images would be used or stored, which meant 7-Eleven did not receive any form of consent when it collected the images. "While I accept that implementing systems to understand and improve customers' experience is a legitimate function for 7-Eleven's business, any benefits to the business in collecting this biometric information were not proportional to the impact on privacy." As part of the determination, Falk has ordered for 7-Eleven to cease collecting facial images and faceprints as part of the customer feedback mechanism. 7-Eleven has also been ordered to destroy all the faceprints it collected.

prioritize disk performance for commands that involve files.