Anti-Echo

"Don't Buy Anyone an Echo":

I’m not here to be Tin Foil Hat Man and convince you that companies like Amazon are spying on your every move and compiling data sets based on your activity so that they can more effectively serve you ads or sell you products. I am here to say that smart speakers like the Echo do contain microphones that are always on, and every time you say something to the speaker, it sends data back to the server farm... For now, the companies that sell smart speakers say that those microphones only send recordings to the servers when you use the wake word. The same companies are less explicit about what they’re doing with all that data. They’re also vague about whether they might share voice recordings with developers in the future. Amazon, at least, seems open to the idea.

We do know that Amazon will hand over your Echo data if the gadget becomes involved in a homicide investigation. That very thing happened earlier this year, and while Amazon had previously refused to hand over customer data, the company didn’t argue with a subpoena in a murder case. It remains unclear how government agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA are treating smart speakers, too. The FBI, for one, would neither confirm nor deny wiretapping Amazon Echo devices when Gizmodo asked the agency about it last year.

Sinister ambitions of governments and multinational corporations aside, you should also worry about the threat of bugs and hackers going after smart speakers.

Facebook AI Suicide Prevention

"Facebook is using AI to try to prevent suicide".

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider ways in which this could go wrong.

iPhone X Review

"iPhone X: A New Frontier"

Algorithms And War

"Future wars may depend as much on algorithms as on ammunition, report says."

Dino Eggs

"Scientists find over 300 ‘incredibly well-preserved’ dinosaur eggs". (Via H.R.)

Uterus Transplant Success

"First baby from a uterus transplant in the U.S. born in Dallas"

Pizza In Space

"Astronauts show how to make pizza in space"

Lightning Photography

"Transient": Spectacular lightning photography. (Via H.R.)

Smart Condoms

"This ‘smart condom’ will give insights into your sex life you probably didn’t want" :

The adjustable band measures number and velocity of thrusts, total duration of “sessions”, traditional fitness tracker information like calories burned, and is beta testing its tracking of positions used. And as if that wasn’t enough, all of the data is shareable.

Not sure this counts as "progress".

Voyager Engines

"Voyager 1 just fired its trajectory thrusters for the first time since 1980". (Via H.R.)

Hidden Landscapes

"What’s under the trees? LIDAR exposes the hidden landscapes of forested areas." (Via H.R.)

Super-Spiders

"Spider drinks graphene, spins web that can hold the weight of a human"

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

"The Surgeon Who Wants to Connect You to the Internet with a Brain Implant"

Marking Cards With Radioactive Iodine

"German cops nab card cheat with radioactive cards"

Maps In Space

"Google Maps in space: Spinnable maps of our solar system’s planets & moons". (Via H.R.)

4th Amendment And Technology

"Supreme Court Hears Argument In Case Involving Fourth Amendment Rights And Technology"

Drive-By Cryptomining

"Websites use your CPU to mine cryptocurrency even when you close your browser"

Light Posting

Admin note: Posting may be lighter than usual the rest of the week due to external obligations.

Detecting Phone Snoops

"Google can tell if someone is looking at your phone over your shoulder":

Google researchers Hee Jung Ryu and Florian Schroff will present a project they’re calling an electronic screen protector, where a Google Pixel phone uses its front-facing camera and eye-detecting artificial intelligence to detect whether more than one person is looking at the screen. An unlisted, but public video by Ryu shows the software interrupting a Google messaging app to display a camera view, with the peeking perpetrator identified and given a Snapchat-esque vomit rainbow.

The Last of the Iron Lungs

3 people in the United States still rely on "iron lungs" to breathe.

But for everyone else, polio is basically a thing of the past. Thanks to good science.

AI Detection Of Art Forgeries

AI's can now detect art forgeries with surprising reliabilty.

Hsieh Forbes Column: "Will Computers Be Reading Your Chest X-Ray?"

My latest Forbes column is now out: "Will Computers Be Reading Your Chest X-Ray?"

A team of researchers from Stanford University department of Computer Science and Stanford Medical School have now created an AI system capable of diagnosing pneumonia on chest x-rays more accurately than skilled human radiologists.

The future is coming quickly.

[Image below from the original article: "Our model, CheXNet, is a 121-layer convolutional neural network that inputs a chest X-ray image and outputs the probability of pneumonia along with a heatmap localizing the areas of the image most indicative of pneumonia."] 

After You Buy Expensive Art

"So You Just Bought a $450 Million Leonardo da Vinci Painting. Now What?"

Blockchain Scalability?

"Blockchains don't scale. Not today, at least. But there's hope."