Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

On Friday afternoon, Uber held a press conference to say that it would not be applying for a permit with the California DMV to test its so-called self-driving cars, despite an order from the DMV to apply for a permit or halt its operations. Uber added that it is still pick up riders with self-driving Uber cars, despite the DMV’s demands.

“We respectfully disagree with the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ legal interpretations of existing regulations,” Anthony Levandowski, Uber’s Vice President of Advanced Technologies Group, said on the conference call. Levandowski added that Uber’s current technology was more akin to the Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) technology that’s found on Teslas in the form of autopilot software. Tesla's autopilot is not subject to the same scrutiny that more advanced autonomous vehicle software is.

The dispute between Uber and the DMV began on Wednesday, when Uber announced that it had added a handful of self-driving cars to its fleet. As a redundancy, each self-driving car is sent out with an engineer in the driver’s seat, ready to take over if the vehicle struggles to drive on its own. Riders get a notification if they’re selected for a ride in one of Uber’s test cars, which they can accept or decline. But the California DMV stated that Uber hadn’t submitted the proper permitting to put self-driving cars on the road. By Wednesday night, the department told the ride-hailing company to stop (PDF) driving its self-driving cars on state roads until it got proper permission.

In an apparent first for any American news outlet, the Washington Post released a Chrome plug-in on Friday designed to fact-check posts from a single Twitter account. Can you guess which one?

The new "RealDonaldContext" plug-in for the Google Chrome browser, released by WaPo reporter Philip Bump, adds fact-check summaries to selected posts by President-elect Donald Trump. Users will need to click a post in The Donald's Twitter feed to see any fact-check information from the Washington Post, which appears as a gray text box beneath the tweet.

Enlarge / Cover detail from Infomocracy, by Malka Older. (credit: Will Staehle)

Whether or not you think American democracy is broken, you can probably come up with some ways to improve it. The country gets less than 50-percent voter turnout; the Electoral College has disagreed with the popular vote twice in the past five election cycles; there are referenda with explanations that take 10 minutes to read and still don’t make any sense; and don’t forget all the special interests and pork-barrels and legislative gridlock. Surely we can do better.

With all the technology we’ve developed in the centuries since the Founding Fathers set up our system, we have the capacity to make voting much more convenient. Plus, we can manage an almost unlimited number of voter concerns simultaneously. With all this technological capacity, what are the possible next steps for democracy?

One idea is microdemocracy. As the name suggests, this is about getting democracy to a more granular, local scale, although there are different suggestions for how to do so. In the 1990s, the term arose in academic literature exploring whether democratic practices at the civil society level could support democratic transitions in authoritarian regimes such as Zimbabwe.

(credit: Gionnico)

As you read these words, malicious ads on legitimate websites are targeting visitors with malware. But that malware doesn't infect their computers, researchers said. Instead, it causes unsecured routers to connect to fraudulent domains.

Using a technique known as steganography, the ads hide malicious code in image data. The hidden code then redirects targets to webpages hosting DNSChanger, an exploit kit that infects routers running unpatched firmware or are secured with weak administrative passwords. Once a router is compromised, DNSChanger configures it to use an attacker-controlled domain name system server. This causes most computers on the network to visit fraudulent servers, rather than the servers corresponding to their official domain.

Patrick Wheeler, director of threat intelligence for security firm Proofpoint, told Ars:

Enlarge / Food basket delivery provided by WOFAK (Women Fighting Aids in Kenya), Nairobi, Kenya. (credit: Getty | Godong)

Each year, the planet has to feed more hungry, hungry humans. Right now, projections suggest that we might just be able to meet the challenge of feeding our growing population in 2050, but only if we make better use of the land that we use for agriculture.

For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), though, the question gets a little more complicated. Even if there’s enough food globally to go around by 2050, will SSA be able to produce enough to be self-sufficient? A paper in this week’s PNAS suggests that the region might be stuck relying on imports unless it massively expands its croplands. This would be bad news for the environment, and it wouldn’t be easy.

Every region on Earth relies on food imports to some extent, but importing large amounts of food is only really feasible in countries that are economically developed. For developing countries, affording large quantities of food imports can stifle economic development. Right now, SSA produces around 80 percent of the staple grains that it needs. By contrast, North and South America, Europe, and Australia all produce well above 100 percent of their own needs. And the population of SSA is projected to increase more than that of other regions.

After users made a stink about Evernote's new privacy policy, CEO Chris O'Neill did a lot of backtracking and apologizing. He says the company "communicated poorly" about how it would implement new machine learning features and that it was all just a misinterpretation.

In an interview with Fast Company, O'Neill said that "what was interpreted as a policy that would give Evernote employees the opportunity to read users' notes, was actually a reference to using user data, with their permission, to help improve new features." He added that "you could grant access to that specific note to a support employee to help you troubleshoot the issue."

The privacy policy, related to the company's new machine learning efforts, has now been indefinitely delayed, Evernote announced in a release. Confusingly, O'Neill also stated in a release:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

For the second time this year, someone has apparently used Twitter to attack journalist Kurt Eichenwald by exploiting his epilepsy. In October, he revealed in Newsweek that a Trump supporter had attempted to induce a seizure via Twitter with an epileptogenic cartoon. Fortunately for Eichenwald, he was able to drop his iPad face-down in time.

Yesterday, someone evidently tried again. According to a series of tweets from Eichenwald's account, they succeeded this time.

Last night, for the second time, a deplorable aware I have epilepsy tweeted a strobe at me with the message "you deserve a seizure' on it...

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 16, 2016

...it worked. This is not going to happen again. My wife is terrified. I am...disgusted. All I will be tweeting for the next few days are...

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) December 16, 2016

Eichenwald says he's determined to have the attacker—who used the handle @jew_goldstein and the pseudonym (((Ari Goldstein)))—identified via subpoena and mentions both criminal and civil law as ways of bringing them to justice.

Enlarge (credit: CNN)

The term “anti-science” gets thrown around too loosely. Even though people are generally not opposed to the institution of science, most of us will stick to the positions of our cultural team when politics rub up against science. While science may be an effort to objectively evaluate the workings of the cosmos, human behavior is not.

Some arguments, however, come pretty close to a general antipathy toward science. On Wednesday, Trump transition team advisor Anthony Scaramucci made one of those arguments in a CNN appearance.

Scaramucci runs an investment firm, hosts Fox Business News’ “Wall Street Week” program, and has written books like The Little Book of Hedge Funds: What You Need to Know About Hedge Funds but the Managers Won’t Tell You. He is part of the Executive Committee for President-elect Trump’s transition—a group that includes Peter Thiel and Trump’s children, among others.