Month: March 2020

Enlarge / The everything is watching, and Clearview's collecting the images. (credit: KENGKAT | Getty Images)

Clearview AI's bread and butter is a tool providing facial recognition on a massive scale to law enforcement, federal agencies, private companies, and—apparently—nosy billionaires. The company has achieved this reportedly by scraping more or less the entire public Internet to assemble a database of more than 3 billion images. Now that there are spotlights on the secretive firm, however, Clearview is facing a barrage of lawsuits trying to stop it in its tracks.

The latest comes from Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan, who filed suit against Clearview this week claiming violations of multiple state laws.

The complaint (PDF) alleges that Clearview, which is registered as a data broker under Vermont's Data Broker Law, "unlawfully acquires data from consumers and business concerns" in Vermont.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of what the iron rain might look like. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

The first exoplanets discovered tended to be gas giants orbiting close to their stars. That's because these are easy to find. Their large size and proximity to the star increase the signal caused by either their gravitational influence on the star or through the amount of starlight obscured by the planet. Over time, however, our ability to image exoplanets has given us a more complete picture of the full catalog of planets outside our Solar System.

As interest in exoplanets has shifted to their atmospheres, however, attention has shifted back to hot gas giants for similar reasons: their atmospheres are large, and therefore the signals they produce are correspondingly large. Now, researchers are reporting details of the atmosphere of a very hot exoplanet with a feature that sounds like something out of science fiction: a rain of liquid iron falling through the night atmosphere.

Imaging an atmosphere

How do you figure out what's going on in an atmosphere of a planet that's light years from Earth? It requires a planet that orbits in a way that it passes between Earth and its host star. During these transits, most of the light from the star still comes directly to Earth. But a tiny fraction passes through the planet's atmosphere on its way, interacting with the atoms and molecules that reside there. These can leave a signature on the light, with different atoms and molecules absorbing at specific wavelengths.

Enlarge / Geneva: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced on March 11, 2020 that the new coronavirus outbreak can now be characterized as a pandemic. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI)

COVID-19 is a pandemic, the World Health Organization declared in a press briefing Wednesday.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited not just the leaping numbers of cases, deaths, and countries affected in making the determination but also the slow responses of many countries and governments.

“We are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction," WHO Director-General, who goes by Dr. Tedros, said.

Enlarge / Verizon's pitch for Yahoo Mobile. (credit: Verizon)

Remember Yahoo? It's back... in phone-plan form. The Verizon-owned company is trying to get customers excited with a new "Yahoo Mobile" service that combines Verizon's 4G LTE network with Yahoo mail, for some reason.

Why even put the word "Yahoo" on a re-branded Verizon data plan? Because the service comes with Yahoo Mail Pro, the ad-free version of Yahoo Mail that normally costs $3.49 a month. Yahoo Mobile also includes "24/7 Yahoo account customer service." Verizon says Yahoo Mobile has "no hidden fees" or "clingy contracts."

"We're the only plan that gives you Yahoo Mail Pro for ad-free email across ALL your devices," the Yahoo Mobile website says. (Fact check: True.)