Month: January 2017

Enlarge / A Chicago Police car, as seen in 2003. (credit: Tim Boyle / Getty Images)

A local attorney has sued the the City of Chicago and numerous police officials in a proposed federal class-action lawsuit, claiming that he and countless others were unconstitutionally searched when the police used a cell-site simulator without a warrant.

In the suit, Jerry Boyle, who describes himself as an “attorney and longtime volunteer legal observer with the National Lawyers’ Guild,” alleged that while attending the “Reclaim MLK Day” event in Chicago nearly two years ago, his phone was targeted by the Chicago Police Department’s device, better known as a stingray. Boyle argued that his Fourth Amendment and First Amendment rights were violated as a result.

Stingrays are used by law enforcement to determine a mobile phone's location by spoofing a cell tower. In some cases, stingrays can intercept calls and text messages. Once deployed, the devices intercept data from a target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity. At times, police have falsely claimed the use of a confidential informant when they have actually deployed these particularly sweeping and intrusive surveillance tools. Often, they are used to locate criminal suspects.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Aaron P. Bernstein )

As Republican lawmakers set the legal groundwork for a swift dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, a new NPR/Ipsos poll (PDF) found that most Americans still don’t have a firm grasp of the law—and what’s at stake.

The law’s biggest success was that the number of uninsured dropped to the lowest rate in the nation’s history—just 9 percent. Yet, when Americans were asked how the ACA affected the number of uninsured, 51 percent got it wrong, responding either that the number of uninsured increased, stayed the same, or that they didn’t know.

Bill Pierce, a senior director at APCO Worldwide, which advises health care companies on strategic communications, told NPR that the law’s shaky start with healthcare.gov may have planted a bad seed in people’s minds. And the years-long rollout of the law helped create a disconnect. “By the time the insurance rate started to fall, a lot of minds were already set,” he said.

Enlarge / Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is one of two sponsors on an H-1B reform bill. He's pictured here House Republican Conference meeting in 2015. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty)

President-Elect Donald Trump is just a week away from taking office. From the start of his campaign, he has promised big changes to the US immigration system. For both Trump's advisers and members of Congress, the H-1B visa program, which allows many foreign workers to fill technology jobs, is a particular focus.

One major change to that system is already under discussion: making it harder for companies to use H-1B workers to replace Americans by simply giving the foreign workers a raise. The "Protect and Grow American Jobs Act," introduced last week by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. and Scott Peters, D-Calif., would significantly raise the wages of workers who get H-1B visas. If the bill becomes law, the minimum wage paid to H-1B workers would rise to at least $100,000 annually, and be adjusted it for inflation. Right now, the minimum is $60,000.

The sponsors say that would go a long way towards fixing some of the abuses of the H-1B program, which critics say is currently used to simply replace American workers with cheaper, foreign replacements. In 2013, the top nine companies acquiring H-1B visas were technology outsourcing firms, according to an analysis by a critic of the H-1B program. (The 10th is Microsoft.) The thinking goes that if minimum H-1B salaries are brought closer to what high-skilled tech employment really pays, the economic incentive to use it as a worker-replacement program will drop off.

Enlarge / Even as the rare tech company without one of these on the market, Facebook could be pioneering everyday AI for users. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Facebook will one day have a conversational agent with human-like intelligence. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all currently attempt to do this, but go off script and they fail. That's just one reason why Mark Zuckerberg famously built his own AI for home use in 2016; the existing landscape didn't quite meet his needs.

Of course, his company has started to build its AI platform, too—it's called Project M. M will not have human-like intelligence, but it will have intelligence in narrow domains and will learn by observing humans. And M is just one of many research projects and production AI systems being engineered to make AI the next big Facebook platform.

On the road to this human-like intelligence, Facebook will use machine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), to understand all the content users feed into the company’s infrastructure. Facebook wants to use AI to teach its platform to understand the meaning of posts, stories, comments, images, and videos. Then with ML, Facebook stores that information as metadata to improve ad targeting and increase the relevance of user newsfeed content. The metadata also acts as raw material for creating an advanced conversational agent.