Month: April 2018

An image taken from alleged shooter Nasim Aghdam's personal website. (credit: Nasim Aghdam)

As news unfolded about Tuesday's YouTube shooting, a chilling motive emerged. Ahead of the incident, the alleged shooter had posted videos maligning the service—doing so as a former money-making user of the site.

"I'm being discriminated [against] and filtered on YouTube, and I'm not the only one," alleged shooter Nasim Aghdam said in a video that was shared after her identity as the shooting's current, sole casualty was revealed. "My workout video gets age-restricted. Vegan activists and other people who try to point out healthy, humane, and smart living, people like me, are not good for big business. That's why they are discriminating [against] and censoring us."

The shooting has put a massive spotlight on this topic, which, up until now, has been more likely to appear in angry YouTube videos than on major newspaper headlines. But well before this shooting, Aghdam was just one of many voices on the site to cry foul about YouTube's policies.

Enlarge / UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong is an expert on tech revolutions and long-term economic trends, as well as social democracy. (credit: Brad DeLong)

Right now, the US tech economy is booming, but what will be the long-term effects of automation and AI? Are robots about to steal our jobs? Will Facebook throw the next election? Is social democracy doomed to be a casualty of the tech revolution? To answer these questions and more, we’re turning to UC Berkeley economics professor Bradford DeLong.

Brad’s areas of expertise include technological and industrial revolutions; finance and corporate control; the long-term shape of economic history; and the rise and fall of social democracy. Aside from his work at UC Berkeley, Brad is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a blogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Join Ars Technica editor-at-large Annalee Newitz in conversation with Brad at the next Ars Technica Live on Wednesday, April 11 at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland, California. There will be plenty of time for audience questions, too.

Enlarge / Polar bear fur insulates even when wet. (credit: Mario Hoppmann)

Personal heating products have always scared me. The idea of getting into a bed with an electric blanket appeals about as much as a romantic bath with my toaster. So when researchers propose a shirt that you plug in to the mains, my response is: yeah, nah.

But the research is quite interesting, made even better by the inclusion of a gratuitous polar bear picture. Polar bears, according to Chris' compendium of tru facs (patent pending), are most famous for being the animal least-likely to express regret after accidentally chewing off your left foot. Equally famously, polar bears seem to be able to cope with some rather cold weather. It is this latter fact that has caught the attention of researchers who have replicated the insulating properties of polar bear fur in a weavable thread.

Polar bear fur faces some tough challenges. Being insulating is not enough: it also needs to maintain that insulation when the bear's coat is soaked through after swimming from one ice floe to another. For fair-weather animals, this swimming would be deadly, because their insulation mostly relies on the air trapped between hairs. Since air is a poor heat conductor, trapped air provides remarkably good insulation. Unfortunately, a prolonged swim will remove all the air, replacing it with water. Water is a much better heat conductor, so body heat is sucked away from a sodden animal at a deadly rate in cold conditions.

Enlarge / I see the resemblance. (credit: Getty | John Greim)

There are many reasons to avoid the plethora of direct-to-consumer DNA tests on the market these days. Recent data suggests that many may produce alarming false positives for disease risks, while others that claim to predict things like athletic abilities and wine preferences are simply dubious. Another, perhaps less-common concern is that an at-home genetic analysis may unveil completely unexpected, deeply disturbing information that you just can’t prepare for.

That was the case for Washington state’s Kelli Rowlette (née Fowler), who took a DNA test with the popular site Ancestry.com back in July 2017.

Rowlette was likely expecting to discover new details about her distant ancestors, but she instead learned that her DNA sample matched that of a doctor in Idaho. The Ancestry.com analysis predicted a “parent-child” relationship. Befuddled and in disbelief, Rowlette relayed the findings to her parents, Sally Ashby and Howard Fowler. According to a lawsuit the family filed in the US District Court of Idaho, she told her parents she was disappointed that the results were so unreliable.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In a new blog post published Wednesday morning, Facebook announced that even more people—beyond the initial 50 million—have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

At the end of a lengthy piece, authored by Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, the company said simply: "In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people—mostly in the US—may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica."

Last month, the British data analytics contractor which worked with Donald Trump's presidential campaign retained private data from 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it. The scandal has spawned numerous lawsuits, and it has put significant pressure on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | RiverNorthPhotography)

CenturyLink is trying to force customers into arbitration in order to avoid a class-action lawsuit from subscribers who say they've been charged for services they didn't order. To do so, CenturyLink has come up with a surprising argument—the company says it doesn't have any customers.

While the customers sued CenturyLink itself, the company says the customers weren't actually customers of CenturyLink. Instead, CenturyLink says they were customers of 10 subsidiaries spread through the country.

CenturyLink basically doesn't exist as a service provider—according to a brief CenturyLink filed Monday.

Enlarge / A General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper. (credit: USAF / Airman First Class Adarius Petty)

About a month ago, news surfaced that Google was working with the United States Department of Defense on drone software called "Project Maven." The project applied Google's image-recognition techniques to the millions of hours of drone footage collected by the military with the goal of identifying people and objects of interest. At the time, some Google employees were reportedly outraged at the news, and now The New York Times reports the situation has escalated to a formal letter being addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The letter, which The Times reports has "garnered more than 3,100 signatures" comes right out in the first paragraph and demands the project be cancelled:

Dear Sundar,
We believe that Google should not be in the business of war. Therefore we ask that Project Maven be cancelled and that Google draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.

The letter goes on to say that "building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance—and potentially lethal outcomes—is not acceptable" and that Maven will "irreparably damage Google's brand and its ability to compete for talent." The letter even invokes Google's "Don't Be Evil" motto.

Enlarge / YouTube's headquarters is seen during an active shooter situation in San Bruno, California on April 03, 2018. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images))

In a brief press conference Wednesday morning, San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini told reporters that the YouTube shooter had legally purchased her handgun and that she had trained on a local range prior to the incident.

Late Tuesday evening, the San Bruno Police Department, which serves YouTube’s hometown, identified the suspect in Tuesday’s shooting at the YouTube campus as Nasim Aghdam, a 39-year-old woman from San Diego. She ended the shooting when she took her own life.

While Barberini declined to name the gun range, there is one just three miles away from YouTube’s headquarters in the nearby city of South San Francisco.