Citing threats to free speech and civil rights, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts on Tuesday moved to prohibit local government from using facial recognition. Three other cities in the country have already instituted such bans over concerns that the technology is biased and violates basic human rights. Gizmodo reports: In December of last year, the Cambridge City Council passed the Surveillance…
Tag: Civil Rights
How the women of NASA made their mark on the space program
The Civil Rights Act had just passed and the slide rule was giving way to computers when Frances “Poppy” Northcutt arrived at NASA’s Houston campus in 1965, eager to join the space race. But her job title stunned her: “computress.” Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-07-women-nasa-space.html…
Bill Gates Shares His Memories of Steve Jobs
BGR reports:
Bill Gates would like you to know that the reason his late rival was able to resuscitate Apple and take the iPhone maker from near-death to being the most valuable company in the world is that Steve Jobs was so successful at making people believe in an idea. Or, as Gates puts it, that Jobs was so good at “casting…
NSA Improperly Collected US Phone Call Data After Saying Problem Was Fixed
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: The National Security Agency improperly collected phone call records of Americans last fall, months after a previous breach that compelled the agency to destroy millions of records from the contentious program, documents released Wednesday revealed. The redacted documents, obtained by the ACLU in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, do not indicate…
The Splinternet Is Growing
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” said Internet pioneer John Gilmore in a 1993 Time magazine article about a then-ungoverned place called “cyberspace.” How times have changed. From a report: In April, Sri Lankan authorities blocked its citizens’ access to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube following a major terrorist attack. Such censorship, once considered all…
Shareholder Efforts To Curb Amazon Facial Recognition Tech Fall Short
Two Amazon shareholder proposals about the company’s controversial facial recognition technology failed to pass Wednesday, following a concerted push by civil rights groups and activist investors. From a report: One proposal would have banned Amazon from selling its Rekognition technology to government agencies unless it first determines the software doesn’t infringe on civil liberties. The other proposal called for an independent…