Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: government

“Facial recognition is a uniquely dangerous form of surveillance. This is not just some Orwellian technology of the future — it’s being used by law enforcement agencies across the country right now, and doing harm to communities right now,” Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer said in a statement shared with VentureBeat and posted online.

Members of the United States Congress introduced a bill today, The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act of 2020, that would prohibit the use of U.S. federal funds to acquire facial recognition systems or “any biometric surveillance system” use by federal government officials. It would also withhold federal funding through the Byrne grant program for state and local governments that use the technology.

The bill is sponsored by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) as well as Representatives Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Pressley previously introduced a bill prohibiting use of facial recognition in public housing, while Merkley introduced a facial recognition moratorium bill in February with Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ).

The news comes a day after the Boston City Council in Pressley’s congressional district unanimously passed a facial recognition ban, one of the largest cities in the United States to do so. News also emerged this week about Robert Williams, who’s thought to be the first person falsely accused of a crime and arrested due to misidentification by facial recognition.

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TOKYO (AFP) — Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer, built with government backing and used in the fight against coronavirus, is now ranked as the world’s fastest, its developers announced Monday (June 22).

It snatched the top spot on the Top500, a site that has tracked the evolution of computer processing power for more than two decades, said the Riken scientific research centre.

The list is produced twice a year and rates supercomputers based on speed in a benchmark test set by experts from Germany and the US.

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“The local government units and the public are strongly reminded that entry into the 4-km radius permanent danger zone must be strictly prohibited due to the further possibilities of sudden and hazardous steam-driven or phreatic eruptions,” the institute warned.

The Phivolcs said that it has recorded 136 volcano-tectonic earthquakes—earthquakes caused by the movement of magma beneath the surface of the Earth—on the western flanks during the 24-hour observation period.

It added that four of these earthquakes recorded between 1 a.m. to 2.06 a.m. on Monday were felt in La Carlota City and Bago City in Negros Occidental province and Canlaon City in Negros Oriental province.

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The Spot Explorer is likely not coming to a workplace near you. The high price point makes it impractical to all but a few institutions, like high-end construction firms, energy companies, and government agencies. But just seeing out in the world, doing more than dancing to “Uptown Funk,” is surely a sign of progress.

These viral robots have ranked up big YouTube numbers for years. Now, they’re about to start their day jobs.

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In the last few years, most of the data such as books, videos, pictures, medical and even the genetic information of humans are moving toward digital formats. Laptops, tablets, smartphones and wearable devices are the major source of this digital data transformation and are becoming the core part of our daily life. As a result of this transformation, we are becoming the soft target of various types of cybercrimes. Digital forensic investigation provides the way to recover lost or purposefully deleted or hidden files from a suspect’s device. However, current man power and government resources are not enough to investigate the cybercrimes. Unfortunately, existing digital investigation procedures and practices require huge interaction with humans; as a result it slows down the process with the pace digital crimes are committed. Machine learning (ML) is the branch of science that has governs from the field of AI. This advance technology uses the explicit programming to depict the human-like behaviour. Machine learning combined with automation in digital investigation process at different stages of investigation has significant potential to aid digital investigators. This chapter aims at providing the research in machine learning-based digital forensic investigation, identifies the gaps, addresses the challenges and open issues in this field.

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Researchers in England say they have the first evidence that a drug can improve COVID-19 survival: A cheap, widely available steroid reduced deaths by up to one third in severely ill hospitalized patients.

The results were announced Tuesday and the British government immediately authorized the drug’s use across the United Kingdom for coronavirus patients like those who did well in the study. Researchers said they would publish results soon, and several independent experts said it’s important to see details to know how much of a difference the drug, dexamethasone, might make and for whom.

But “bottom line is, good news,” said the United States’ top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. “This is a significant improvement in the available therapeutic options that we have.”

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“We have a researcher who was removed by the RCMP from the highest security laboratory that Canada has for reasons that government is unwilling to disclose. The intelligence remains secret. But what we know is that before she was removed, she sent one of the deadliest viruses on Earth, and multiple varieties of it to maximize the genetic diversity and maximize what experimenters in China could do with it, to a laboratory in China that does dangerous gain of function experiments. And that has links to the Chinese military.”

Gain of function experiments are when a natural pathogen is taken into the lab, made to mutate, and then assessed to see if it has become more deadly or infectious.

Most countries, including Canada, don’t do these kinds of experiments — because they’re considered too dangerous, Attaran said.

Newly-released access to information documents reveal details about a shipment of deadly pathogens last year from Canada’s National Microbiology Lab to China — confirming for the first time who sent them, what exactly was shipped, and where it went.

The virus shipments are not related to the outbreak of COVID-19 or research into the pandemic, Canadian officials said.

CBC News had already reported about the shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses but there’s now confirmation one of the scientists escorted from the lab in Winnipeg amid an RCMP investigation last July was responsible for exporting the pathogens to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier.

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Despite pigheaded intransigence at the highest levels of its national government, the renewable energy revolution is coming to Australia in a big way. And why not? Enough sunlight hits what Bill Bryson calls “a sunburned country” every day to meet all of humanity’s energy needs for a year. All it has to do is figure out how to harvest and distribute all that energy. (It could begin by replacing its national leaders with people who possess actual functioning brains, but the same can be said for many nations around the world.)

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A mysterious cloud containing radioactive ruthenium-106, which moved across Europe in autumn 2017, is still bothering Europe’s radiation protection entities. Although the activity concentrations were innocuous, they reached up to 100 times the levels of what had been detected over Europe in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident. Since no government had assumed responsibility, a military background could not be ruled out.

Researchers at the Leibniz University Hannover and the University of Münster (both Germany) were able to confirm that the cloud did not originate from military sources—but rather from civilian nuclear activities. Hence, the release of ruthenium from a reprocessing plant for nuclear fuels is the most conclusive scenario for explaining the incident in autumn 2017. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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