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In 2019, you don’t have to be just afraid of hackers who may leak your closely guarded private photos. A newly developed artificial neural network only needs to be fed a normal picture to replace your clothes with what's under them. An anonymous ‘technology enthusiast’ has created an app which is able to undress a fully clothed person within a couple of clicks, triggering concerns over the ethics of such technology and non-consensual photo sharing. The app in question is called DeepNude – a play on the new term deepfake – an AI-assisted technology that superimposes faces onto other bodies...

I sat at a banquet a week ago with a guy who started up, worked, then sold his wholesale machinist biz, in our Sacramento CA suburb, Rancho Cordova. That’s where the money is, in the long run, but for young people starting out, a starting wage of $20, up to $26, is not chopped liver. The happy-stance is that the computer control programming, like specialty AutoCAD, for 3D printing, at local education specialty clubs and for hobbyists, strongly resembles the professional computer application software for machinist vocational training, that now goes by the jargon CNC, for Computer Numerical Control. Our...

The U.S. military’s Defense Innovation Board warned Congress that China’s fifth generation telecommunications rollout is designed to interfere with U.S. weapons systems. The Congressional Research Service issued a report titled ‘National Security Implications of Fifth Generation (5G) Mobile Technologies’ that highlights China’s incorporating “Low to Mid-Band” electromagnetic spectrum into its 5G wireless networks and technology will directly interfere with the U.S. military systems and secure government communications. Mobile data upgrades are implemented about every 10 years. AT&T and Verizon began rapid deployment of fourth generation long-term evolution (4G LTE) mobile data technology in 2010 that was about 10 times faster...

Here’s A Proposal To Hurt Big Tech When It Censors Conservative Users https://dailycaller.com/2019/06/17/sears-big-tech/

Still don't think deepfakes will be a problem? The tech is getting so good it's scary. Can you tell the difference in these videos between the fake and the real thing? A horrible version of Trump went viral in Belgium and caused mass outrage. So what happens when the tech is spot on? https://youtu.be/NWhyTk7cZdI

Now, a story in the Sunday Telegraph is just the latest to pose serious questions. The newspaper reports that China has been "rigging" 5G equipment testing to discredit Huawei's rivals, including Nokia and Ericsson. According to government and industry sources, "Beijing is feeding secret details of security vulnerabilities" to the testers to tip the balance in Huawei's favor. The testing encompasses "hacking techniques used to check for weak spots... vulnerabilities discovered by China’s secret state hackers have been passed to the 5G testers to ensure Nokia and Ericsson’s equipment is found to be insecure." Huawei's security issues have always been...

As things stand, America is likely to lose the tech war with China. The stock market should be sending a message to President Trump. U.S. semiconductor stocks are down 20% in the past month, and the broad market has been in freefall for a week. This is a war we can win, by mobilizing American ingenuity to produce technology that will crush the competition. No-one ever won a war by trying to stop someone else from doing something. I'm an Always Trumper, and I want the president to win another term. But he's risking the U.S. economy and his re-election...

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was one of the earlier 2020 candidates to propose breaking up the largest tech companies and potentially having the government regulate them like utilities. It’s a mantra she’s repeated on the campaign trail on a regular basis. But now she’s doubling down on the message with a campaign tactic that may not make the most sense. Her team has put up a massive billboard on the subject, which isn’t all that unusual for a political campaign. It’s the location that makes it peculiar. She put it up right in Silicon Valley near many of the Big...

It’s worth noting that even in the Jetson’s future world of flying cars a driver was still required. That’s because the Jetsons lived in a world where technology may have advanced but the fundamental elements of human nature remained the same. Which is to say most humans like to be in control. Driving gives us that sense, we can’t control the other idiots on the road but we can control how we maneuver around their stupidity. And that may be why we may actually be closer to the flying car than the driverless car. Warning: the images in your rearview...

Robots have undergone impressive designs and engineering for social use, manifested in puppy-like robots with expressive, blinking eyes, to little space robots. These little pals and helpers appeal to the home-confined elderly and children. These are social robots designed to understand and respond to cues. Flip it. A research paper said, "not much research has gone into designing interactions with technology what would support behaviors of destruction and catharsis. This project focuses on objects that are designed to support negative expressions of emotion."The research project is derived from previous work that included a theoretical review of the historical and cultural...

May 8 (UPI) -- The study of a unique crystalline material, composed of aluminum and platinum atoms, has revealed a pair of electronic properties that have never been seen before. The atoms in the new materials are crystallized in a special pattern, with each row offset from the other. The pattern creates a spiral staircase of aluminum and platinum atoms. According to the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, the material's unique crystalline structure produces Rarita-Schwinger fermions in its interior and extremely long quadruple topological Fermi arcs on its surface. Rarita-Schwinger fermions are a type of...

We’re in the midst of two tectonic demographic shifts in the workplace that, at first glance, seem to be at odds with each other. We’re living longer and working longer–either by choice or necessity (it’s hard to finance a 30-year retirement with a 40-year career). The fastest-growing age demographic of employees in the workplace is 65 and older, which has experienced a 35% jump in numbers over the past half-decade. In fact, nearly half of the age-demographic increase in the number of people participating in the U.S. labor force between 2016 and 2026 is attributable to those 60 and older....

A few years ago, Marriott debuted a new app at hotels in five cities that was supposed to save housekeepers time by telling them which rooms to clean. It was a disaster. Housekeepers ended up yo-yoing between rooms on different floors, ignoring messy rooms just down the hall. If anything, the cleaners felt that the app made them less efficient, and they worried about being disciplined by their bosses for failing to finish their work on time. “A wild-goose chase” is how Rachel Gumpert, a spokeswoman for Unite Here, the labor union that represents Marriott’s housekeepers, describes the episode. Several...

My grandmother cooked in her kitchen on a wood-burning stove until, at 92 years of age, she passed away. Wood stove technology is not as simple as some people think. We may have to learn it all over again. Here is why: I recently read an online article about something called 5G and became aware that this innovation will potentially enable any large government, our own or our adversaries, to spy, hack, sabotage or otherwise wreak havoc on the entire world infrastructure of communication and security. This is not hyperbole. It is as real as nuclear bombs, and if not...

For many years the United States has regarded itself as, and been, the world’s technological leader. One can easily make a long and impressive list of seminal discoveries and inventions coming from America, from the moon landings to the internet. It was an astonishing performance. The US maintains a lead, though usually a shrinking one, in many fields. But:China has risen explosively, from being clearly a “Third World” country forty years ago to become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America. Anyone who has seen today’s China (I recently spent  two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been ...

How long have humans brewed beer? Patrick McGovern, the world's foremost historian of ancient brews, hints in Ancient Brews (2017) that this activity has been around possibly at least for 11,000 years based on vessels from Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (Turkey). How sophisticated was brewing in antiquity? Since the ancient artifact ca. 100 CE known as the "Baghdad Battery" was discovered in the 1930's, the purpose for which it was used has been a mystery. Wilhelm Koenig, a German curator of the Baghdad Museum, discovered it near Ctesiphon - the Sassanid capital and previously in the Parthian Empire around 1936...

Reports circulating the Internet said a robot named "Colossus" greatly assisted in Notre Dame's fire rescue efforts. The 1100 pound robot, created by the French company Shark Robotics, used a water cannon to shoot almost 700 gallons through the cathedral's most dangerous fire areas... Paris Fire Brigade commander Jean-Claude Gallet said Colossus "lowered temperatures" in the cathedral and "saved human lives amid the unfolding disaster."

Google has leased four office buildings in a vast north San Jose tech campus where it could employ 3,600 workers or more, and has bought a trio of old office buildings in north Mountain View for a quarter-billion dollars, marking eye-popping new expansions of the search giant’s Silicon Valley operations. The latest moves come as the search giant continues to plan for a huge San Jose complex that would dramatically expand its footprint in the Bay Area’s largest city. Google paid $250.2 million for the north Mountain View buildings, according to public documents filed on Tuesday with Santa Clara County....

The worst fears of privacy advocates were confirmed this week after a Bloomberg report noted that Amazon employs thousands of specialists to decipher private conversations picked up on different types of Echo speakers. Of course, these devices use an automated assistant named “Alexa” to respond to requests for information, to play music, to turn off the lights and perform countless other tasks. All of this interaction with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) device is supposed to make life easier, not allow for a sophisticated spying operation.  This bombshell news should alarm every one of the millions of Echo users worldwide. In a...

The speed of digital advancements is what drives our economy. Since President Donald Trump took office, America has enjoyed an economic boom, with astonishingly low unemployment numbers and record capital investments in new technology that would have once seemed like science fiction. With our smartphones and wireless data plans, more workers can telecommute today than ever before. This technology advances at lightning speed, which is why America is currently in a race with China and other countries to have a robust 5G network. This would require a massive infrastructure investment to build a network that offers previously impossible connectivity speeds...