Free Republic

NEW YORK (AP) — Are the female voices behind Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa amplifying gender bias around the world? The United Nations thinks so. A report released Wednesday by the UN's culture and science organization raises concerns about what it describes as the "hardwired subservience" built into default female-voiced assistants operated by Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The report is called "I'd Blush If I Could." It's a reference to an answer Apple's Siri gives after hearing sexist insults from users. It says it's a problem that millions of people are getting accustomed to commanding female-voiced assistants that are...

4' Broadcasters and Analysts during the Collegiate Esports Championship. PHOTO BY PHIL ELLSWORTH / ESPN IMAGES Wrapping Up the ESPN Collegiate Esports Championships at Comicpalooza CARLOS BRANDON | MAY 13, 2019 | 5:30AM Comicpalooza and ESPN brought the inaugural Collegiate Esports Championships to Houston with a spectacular live studio arena and a Twitch stream viewed by thousands. The event was the first of its kind and the first major esports tournament hosted by ESPN's recently developed esports division. Over three days of match play, collegiate champions were crowned in five titles: Overwatch, Hearthstone, Star Craft II, Heroes of the Storm,...

NEW YORK/SEOUL – Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it has received “a few” reports of damage to the displays of samples of its upcoming foldable smartphone, raising the prospect of a less-then-smooth entry for the splashy $1,980 handset. The Galaxy Fold, on sale from April 26 in the United States, resembles a conventional smartphone but opens like a book to reveal a second display the size of a small tablet at 7.3 inches (18.5 cm). The design, matched by Huawei Technologies Co Ltd’s Mate X, was hailed as the future in a field that has seen few surprises since Apple...

AMAZON is listening to customers through Alexa devices - with employees recording thousands of clips including a woman singing in the shower and a sex assault, it emerged last night. Full-time workers and contractors at the online retail giant reportedly sift through as many as 1,000 recordings per shift - and even share "amusing" clips between themselves.

Tespa’s Overwatch Collegiate Championship has been well underway for several months now. Back in January, a crowded field of over 500 participating teams with over 4,500 players began to thin down to the final 16 teams that we had at the start of this past week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, that field thinned down to the final eight teams, set to play one another at a LAN event in Houston, TX. The exact date for the quarterfinals is listed as May 10 on the Tespa website, although no official announcement has been made to confirm this. Each of these Round...

February 20, 2019 America’s STEM Crisis Threatens Our National Security By Arthur Herman On October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed “Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it stayed for three weeks before its batteries died. Then it continued silently in a decaying orbit for another two months before burning up in the atmosphere. Its radio signal pulses were easily...

"Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked. Suppose I could program my computer to create a space in which everything could be linked to everything." – Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web In 1989 the world’s largest physics laboratory, CERN, was a hive of ideas and information stored on multiple incompatible computers. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a unifying structure for linking information across different computers, and wrote a proposal in March 1989 called “Information Management: A Proposal”. By 1991 this vision of universal connectivity had become the World Wide Web.

Co-founder of environmental organization Greenpeace Patrick Moore said Tuesday that the climate change crisis driving much of liberal politics today “is not only fake news. It’s fake science.” Moore also wondered during his appearance on “Fox & Friends” why people would be worried about global warming: “A little bit of warming would not be a bad thing, for myself being Canadian.” Moore bounced back into the climate change debate last week in an online feud with New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after he blasted her Green New Deal for being not ambitious but ridiculous. “Well, it’s a silly plan;...

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook Inc. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps...

Combined companies will offer endpoint security with built-in cloud backup. The data backup and storage company Carbonite has announced that it has acquired endpoint security provider Webroot for $618m. The deal will allow Carbonite to combine the strengths of both companies to provide customers with automated cloud security software that has emergency backup already built in.

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default setting on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail. The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy. A number of pro-Trump websites, including Breitbart News, are...

A fire Sunday morning in Northwest Washington, D.C., damaged studios for Fox News, C-SPAN and MSNBC, and forced "Fox News Sunday" to relocate its broadcast to a local affiliate's studio. D.C. Fire and EMS tweeted that an electrical fire broke out in the 8th floor television studio but nobody was injured. Steve Scully, the political editor for C-SPAN, tweeted shortly after 7 a.m. that the Fox News and C-SPAN studios sustained "extensive damage," and MSNBC's studio took on "extensive smoke and water damage."

LAS VEGAS — CES 2019 kicks off this week, which of course means that close to 200,000 tech heads are swarming into Sin City to ogle the latest crop of gadgets — and we’re not necessarily talking about stripper robots. Talking appliances... from basic items like speakers and alarm clocks, to quirkier fare like fridges and toilets.

In May 2018, the Russian military revealed it had combat-tested its Uran-9 robot tank in Syria. The diminutive remote-control tank is noted for its formidable gun and missile armament. However, just a month later Defense Blog reported that Senior Research Officer Andrei Anisimov told a conference at the Kuznetsov Naval Academy in St. Petersburg that the Uran-9’s performance in Syria revealed that “modern Russian combat Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are not able to perform the assigned tasks in the classical types of combat operations.” He concluded it would be ten to fifteen more years before UGVs were ready for such...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A user of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company. The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported. “This unfortunate case was the result of a human error and an isolated single case,” an Amazon spokesman said on Thursday. The first customer had initially got no reply...

(This is 96 pages long so I am just posting the Executive Summary here) On September 7, 2017, Equifax announced a cybersecurity incident affecting 143 million consumers. This number eventually grew to 148 million—nearly half the U.S. population and 56 percent of American adults. This staff report explains the circumstances of the cyberattack against Equifax, one of the largest consumer reporting agencies (CRA) in the world. Equifax is one of several large CRAs in the United States. CRAs gather consumer data, analyze it to create credit scores and detailed reports, and then sell the reports to third parties. Consumers do...

Elon Musk unveiled the workings of the prototype tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday night, by giving rides to VIPs and a few reporters. The mile-long tube runs 30 feet below the surface from Space X headquarters into a residential neighborhood and has car elevators on either end. A vehicle is lowered into the single-lane tunnel, where it pulls onto raised, rail-like platforms. Horizontal guide wheels mounted near the front tires hold the car between the walls, similar to some roller coaster designs, as, ideally, an autonomous driving system propels it up to 150 mph. Musk envisions a network of...

Google works with establishment conservative think tanks that argue against regulating the tech giant, one of which had its pro-Google opinions published in National Review, according to a new report. Audio recordings obtained by Wired reveal that Google cooperates with and funds a range of establishment conservatives in D.C. that help it fend off scrutiny and oversight from politicians. The organizations named in Wired’s report are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Cato Institute. ... In case anyone still takes bought-and-paid-for establishment arguments about free markets and competition seriously, that’s a special privilege Silicon...

... Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her. An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was...

On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, marking the beginning of the United States’ war against Japan. @USSArizona marked the occasion with a series of “as it happened” tweets... However, earlier in the day during the live “as it happened” tweets, there was a problem that’s being looked into.