Month: March 2016

It's "precrime" meets "thoughtcrime." China is using its substantial surveillance apparatus as the basis for a "unified information environment" that will allow authorities to profile individual citizens based upon their online behaviors, financial transactions, where they go, and who they see. The authorities are watching for deviations from the norm that might indicate someone is involved in suspicious activity. And they're doing it with a hand from technology pioneered in the US.

As Defense One's Patrick Tucker reports, the Chinese government is leveraging "predictive policing" capabilities that have been used by US law enforcement, and it has funded research into machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to identify human faces in surveillance video. The Chinese government has also used this technology to create a "Situation-Aware Public Security Evaluation (SAPE) platform" that predicts "security events" based on surveillance data, which includes anything from actual terrorist attacks to large gatherings of people.

The Chinese government has plenty of data to feed into such systems. China invested heavily in building its surveillance capabilities in major cities over the past five years, with spending on "domestic security and stability" surpassing China's defense budget—and turning the country into the biggest market for security technology. And in December, China's government gained a new tool in surveillance: anti-terrorism laws giving the government even more surveillance powers, and requiring any technology companies doing business in China to provide assistance in that surveillance.

iPad Pro support, yes. Full-fledged iOS 9 support, not so much. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Google updated its Docs and Sheets productivity apps on Tuesday to support the iPad Pro's larger screen resolution. As you might recall from our iPad Pro review, iOS apps that don't properly support Apple's guidelines for resolution-independent apps will look stretched out and slightly blurry on an iPad Pro, much like an iPhone 5 app would look larger and blurry on an iPhone 6.

The problem, as pointed out by MacStories and elsewhere, is that the apps still don't support the Split View multitasking features Apple introduced in iOS 9 when it was announced in June and released in September. This is especially noticeable because productivity apps are the best fit for Split View multitasking—it just makes it easier to grab text and other data from one place and paste it down in another place when your apps are side-by-side. And it's not just Docs and Sheets that still haven't gone all-in on iOS 9. Few of Google's apps support Split View, and the YouTube app doesn't support the Picture-in-Picture multitasking mode either.

Google Chrome picked up iPad multitasking support back in October, so it's not as though Google doesn't recognize the benefits of the feature (the company is also taking advantage of new iOS 9 features to make the browser faster and more stable). It's just that Drive, YouTube, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Inbox, and others, despite being actively maintained and updated with some frequency, still aren't supporting features that Microsoft and other big companies have already gotten behind. And as nice as it is to be able to use first-party Google apps with Google's services on the iPad, this sort of thing is frustrating for people who want to use their iPad or iPad Pro as their primary computing device.

The smallest, oldest coal plants have been the first to go. (credit: US EIA)

In the US, electricity demand is growing very slowly, which means that capacity additions don't have to exceed retirements by much in order to keep the grid functioning. Tracking the comings and goings from the electric grid can help provide a picture of the country's changing energy mix.

We recently discussed the planned generating additions for 2016, which were dominated by renewables and natural gas; no new coal plants were expected. It appears that 2015's retirements were the mirror image.

The Energy Information Administration, which provides data on the US' electric grid, says 18GW of capacity were retired this past year, more than 80 percent of it coal-fired. More than 27GW of utility-scale projects will replace that this year. Note that much of the new generating hardware is wind and solar, which typically have a capacity factor in the area of 30 percent, while the plants they are replacing could have a capacity factor that's much higher, so it's not easy to have a direct comparison between the two.

On Tuesday, The Guardian reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has changed its rules regarding how it redacts Americans’ information when it takes international communications from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) database. The paper confirmed the classified rule change with unnamed US officials, but details on the new rules remain murky.

The new rules, which were approved by the secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), deal with how the FBI handles information it gleans from the National Security Agency (NSA). Although the NSA is technically tasked with surveillance of communications involving foreigners, information on US citizens is inevitably sucked up, too. The FBI is then allowed to search through that data without any “minimization” from the NSA—a term that refers to redacting Americans’ identifiable information unless there is a warrant to justify surveillance on that person.

The FBI enjoys privileged access to this information trove that includes e-mails, texts, and phone call metadata that are sent or received internationally. Recently, the Obama administration said it was working on new rules to allow other US government agencies similar access to the NSA’s database.