Under his plan, “Justice and Safety for All,” Bernie Sanders wants to ban facial recognition software for policing. As a supporter of Sanders, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. Here’s why…
Last Sunday, presidential-hopeful Bernie Sanders released on his website what is arguably one of the most extensive plans for law enforcement oversight and criminal justice overhaul that the United States has ever seen. As a progressive, myself, and supporter of Sanders during his primary run, I fully endorse everything that’s been laid out in this plan— that is, except for one minor policy.
The plan, titled “Justice and Safety for All,” calls to “Ban the use of facial recognition software for policing.” It also calls for a “moratorium on the use of the algorithmic risk assessment tools in the criminal justice system until an audit is completed,” whereby the audit would “ensure these tools do not have any implicit biases that lead to unjust or excessive sentences.”
I’m perfectly fine with the policy on algorithmic risk assessment tools being used by our criminal justice system. It’s not a total ban; it simply serves as a temporary safety measure until it’s been proven that these algorithms won’t carry with them any unjust biases. But when it comes to Sanders’ policy on banning facial recognition software for policing, I simply cannot get behind it.
With the launch of its Quantum Science Satellite, nicknamed Mozi, China took the lead in implementing quantum-encoded communications. In the first article of a series about China’s ambitious space program, space policy expert Aoki Setsuko explains the significance of this development.
Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a comprehensive policy framework for the development and oversight of regenerative medicine products, including novel cellular therapies.
The framework — outlined in a suite of four guidance documents — builds upon the FDA’s existing risk-based regulatory approach to more clearly describe what products are regulated as drugs, devices, and/or biological products. Further, two of the guidance documents propose an efficient, science-based process for helping to ensure the safety and effectiveness of these therapies, while supporting development in this area. The suite of guidance documents also defines a risk-based framework for how the FDA intends to focus its enforcement actions against those products that raise potential significant safety concerns. This modern framework is intended to balance the agency’s commitment to safety with mechanisms to drive further advances in regenerative medicine so innovators can bring new, effective therapies to patients as quickly and safely as possible. The policy also delivers on important provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act.
We’re at the beginning of a paradigm change in medicine with the promise of being able to facilitate regeneration of parts of the human body, where cells and tissues can be engineered to grow healthy, functional organs to replace diseased ones; new genes can be introduced into the body to combat disease; and adult stem cells can generate replacements for cells that are lost to injury or disease. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction. This is the practical promise of modern applications of regenerative medicine.
It will take more than six weeks to travel about 238,600 miles (384,000km) to the moon. The four-tonne spacecraft has a lunar orbiter, a lander named Vikram after the founder of Isro, and a rover. The rover, named Pragyan, which means “wisdom” in Sanskrit, will spend two weeks traversing the moon’s surface. The six-wheeled vehicle, which will be deployed in early September, will collect crucial information about the mineral and chemical composition of the lunar surface, and search for water.
It was, he added, a “fully indigenous” project, using Indian technology.
Chandrayaan-2 aims to become the first mission to conduct a surface landing on the lunar south pole region, where it will collect crucial information about the moon’s composition. It would be India’s first surface landing on the moon – a feat previously achieved by only Russia, the US and China.
The $141m (£113m) mission is a “demonstration of the growing sophistication of India’s space power”, said Dr Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation thinktank in Delhi.
The procedures implement national-level and DOD policies to protect information from foreign intelligence collection. It requires that the application of TEMPEST countermeasures be proportional and appropriate to the threat and potential damage to national security. It explains the selection, training, utilization, and operational requirements for appointment of an Army certified TEMPEST Technical Authority (CTTA) and provides Army protected distribution policy.
Early this morning, I was asked this question at Quora. It’s a pretty basic request of network administrators, including parents, schools and anyone who administers a public, sensitive or legally exposed WiFi hot spot.
Is there a quick and easy way to view, log, or otherwise monitor the web sites visited by people on your home or office network?
Yes. It’s free and and it is pretty easy to do.
It gets a bit trickier, if the individual on your network is using a VPN service that they have configured on their device.[1] A VPN does not stop you from logging their browsing, but all of their activity will point to the VPN address instead of the site that they are actually visiting. In that case, there is another way to monitor their activity. See note #1, below.
Before getting into this, I should mention that I believe that using covert methods to monitor a family member’s online activity is a terrible method of parenting. In my opinion, there are better ways to deal with the issue—parenting techniques that don’t undermine trust as they deal with safety.
I can think of at least three methods for logging the websites that people on your network visit. In the explanation below, we will focus on #2. For more information, dig into the notes at the bottom of this answer.
You can either…
Configure your router to store logs of visited IP addresses [2]
Set your router to use the DNS server at opendns.com, instead of the default server offered by your internet service provider. This involves a simple setting available in all routers. (Replace default DNS server addresses with 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220)
You can set up a proxy which redirects web traffic to one of the computers in your house or a third-party service. This is how the monitoring software for parents and custodial services monitor or block web traffic.
In the remainder of this quick tutorial, we focus on method #2..
Once you configure your router to use the two DNS servers at OpenDNS.com, create a free account on their web site. Then, enable the logging feature. It not only shows you visited domains, it maps them into actual domain names and subdomains—making it easy to search, sort or analyze traffic.
You can download a spreadsheets and sort by number of visits or by the domains visited. Logs are maintained for only two weeks. So, if you wish to maintain a history, you will need to visit OpenDNS and download them regularly. (Check their user forum. Someone has created a safe, single-line DOS command that downloads these activity logs to your PC).
[1] VPN, Onion Routing and Encryption
If an individual in your home or office is using a Virtual Private Network [VPN], they are effectively covering their tracks with method #3, above. You can see their connection to the VPN service, but that service is either trusted to destroy logs of visited web sites, or anonymize traffic, by routing it through a chain of users that have no way to back-trace and identify the requester’s address.
Since their traffic originates on your network, there are other things you can do to monitor their activities. For example, if they are not using end-to-end encryption, you can use method #3 yourself, to route data in and out through your own PC or service.
[2] Logging the IP address or domain of visited web sites is not a feature of all routers. I have three recent model routers — and only one of them has a feature to log traffic in and out of the network.
[3] OpenDNS cannot discriminate the individual device in your home or office that has accessed websites that it logs. The logs include the traffic for all HTTP access that originates through your internet service subscription.
But some remarkable feature of OpenDNS (other than it being completely free):
a) It speeds up your overall internet experience noticeably! Like Google’s free DNS service, it is more robust and more redundant than the default DNS settings recommended by your internet service provider.
b) It maps every IP address into a domain name. So when you log in to check your logs and statistics, you don’t need to figure what the numbers mean. You view a list that makes sense. You can even search for certain words or web sites.
c) It permits you to block websites based on a very rich set of 100 criteria, including violence, adult content, hate speech, etc.
d) It offers graphs of your network access including overall volume. An example is shown here:
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation has been responsible for widespread, simultaneous crop failures in recent history, according to a new study from researchers at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and other partners. This finding runs counter to a central pillar of the global agriculture system, which assumes that crop failures in geographically distant breadbasket regions such as the United States, China and Argentina are unrelated. The results also underscore the potential opportunity to manage such climate risks, which can be predicted using seasonal climate forecasts.
The study, published in Science Advances, is the first to provide estimates of the degree to which different modes of climatevariability such as ENSO cause volatility in global and regional production of corn, wheat and soy. Such variability caused nearly 18 percent volatility in global corn production from 1980 to 2010, for example.
“Global agriculture counts on the strong likelihood that poor production in one part of the world will be made up for by good production elsewhere,” said Weston Anderson, a postdoctoral research scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and lead author on the study.
The public is encouraged to watch today’s first-ever virtual debate among Transhumanist primary candidates for President of the United States. We will have candidates Charles Holsopple, Rachel Haywire, and Johannon Ben Zion discussing the principles of transhumanism and Core Ideals of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, as well as a wide range of policy proposals that enables transhumanist candidates to stand apart from and above the conventional political fray.
The first virtual debate among U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party candidates for President of the United States will take place on Saturday, July 6, 2019, at 3 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time and will last approximately two hours.
The candidates will discuss how their platforms reflect the Core Ideals of the USTP and will also answer selected questions from the public. To pose a question, submit it here.
Learn about the USTP candidates here: https://transhumanist-party.org/candidate-profiles/
View individual candidate profiles:
Johannon Ben Zion — https://transhumanist-party.org/candidate-profiles/johannon-ben-zion/ Dan Good — https://transhumanist-party.org/candidate-profiles/dan-good/ Rachel Haywire — http://transhumanist-party.org/candidate-profiles/rachel-haywire/ Charles Holsopple — https://transhumanist-party.org/candidate-profiles/charles-holsopple/
