This is how Charlie Chaplin did things before CGI
— Engineering (@engineeringvids) April 6, 2020
This is a wicked cool use of force perspective and matte paintings by Charlie Chaplin.
Tag: technology
Today in IP Insanity
In Italy, hospitals could not operate ventilators to treat severely ill coronvirus patients, because a crucial, and very expensive, valve was not available from the manufacturer.
A group of local tech types took a valve, and figured out how to 3D print the valve for a fraction of the cost.
They were promptly threatened with a lawsuit by the manufacturer.
We need to massively reduce the scope of IP:
Update: One of the people who helped 3D-print the valve in Brescia says that they didn’t receive a legal threat from the original manufacturer, Intersurgical, according to a new report in The Verge. Another person who helped make things happen, Massimo Temporelli, who earlier said they received legal threats for alleged patent infringement, is quoted as saying: “The group we asked for the files refused and said it was illegal”. Intersurgical also denies threatening to sue. It states that it could not supply details for the valve because of “medical manufacturing regulations”. Another news item says the official list price was not as high as the original Italian report suggested, but without giving a revised figure. Whatever the details, the episode underlines why the 3D files of these kind of devices should be made available routinely to hospitals. That would allow them print in cases of urgent need, regardless of any claimed patents, so that this kind of situation doesn’t arise at all, and lives are not put at risk. Original story follows:
Techdirt has just written about the extraordinary legal action taken against a company producing Covid-19 tests. Sadly, it’s not the only example of some individuals putting profits before people. Here’s a story from Italy, which is currently seeing more new coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world. Last Thursday, a hospital in Brescia, in the north of Italy, needed supplies of special valves in order to use breathing equipment to help keep Covid-19 patients alive in intensive care (original in Italian). The manufacturer was unable to provide them because of the demand for this particular valve. The Metro site explains what happened next:
With the help of the editor of a local newspaper Giornale di Brescia and tech expert Massimo Temporelli, doctors launched a search for a 3D printer — a devise that produces three dimensional objects from computer designs.
Word soon reached Fracassi, a pharmaceutical company boss in possession of the coveted machine. He immediately brought his device to the hospital and, in just a few hours, redesigned and then produced the missing piece.
Actually, it wasn’t quite as simple as that suggests. Business Insider Italia explains that even though the original manufacturer was unable to supply the part, it refused to share the relevant 3D file with Fracassi to help him print the valve. It even went so far as to threaten him for patent infringement if he tried to do so on his own. Since lives were at stake, he went ahead anyway, creating the 3D file from scratch. According to the Metro article, he produced an initial batch of ten, and then 100 more, all for free. Fracassi admits that his 3D-printed versions might not be very durable or re-usable. But when it’s possible to make replacements so cheaply — each 3D-printed part costs just one euro, or roughly a dollar — that isn’t a problem. At least it wouldn’t be, except for that threat of legal action, which is also why Fracassi doesn’t dare share his 3D file with other hospitals, despite their desperate need for these valves.
This sort of IP related bullsh%$ does not, as the Constitution demands, “Promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
It is an anchor dragging down our society.
Boeing is Broken
Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule is facing 61 safety issues, because those stock buybacks have to come from somewhere, I guess:
Boeing faces 61 safety fixes following last year’s botched test flight of its Starliner crew capsule, NASA said Friday.
NASA has also designated December’s aborted space station mission as a serious “high-visibility close call” that could have destroyed the capsule—twice.
In releasing the outcome of a joint investigation, NASA said it still has not decided whether to require Boeing to launch the Starliner again without a crew, or go straight to putting astronauts on board.
Douglas Loverro, NASA’s human exploration and operation chief, told reporters that Boeing must first present a plan and schedule for the 61 corrective actions. Boeing expects to have a plan in NASA’s hands by the end of this month.
Boeing needs to fire every single one of its executives.
Bobble head dolls could do a better job.
How This Works
Someone is Gaming the System
At The Markup, a news org created to do deep dives on technical news story, has found that there are significant differences in the ways that Gmail handles emails from different presidential campaigns.
The Buttigieg andYang campaigns are achieving disproportionate success in getting into the Gmail primary inbox.
The implication of this story is that Google could alter its algorithms to favor one candidate over another.
I do not think that this is a credible concern, at least not yet.
However, it is entirely possible that there are people inside Google who favor one candidate over another who would provide detailed information to the campaigns about how to game the filters.
IMHO, the two campaigns most likely to have a Google insider feeding them information would be those of Buttigieg and Yang, and it is their emails that have achieved the most success in reaching the primary email tab.
It’s called a man on the inside attack:
Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent.
These aren’t poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail’s primary inbox in a simple test.
The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits.
We found that few of the emails we’d signed up to receive —11 percent—made it to the primary inbox, the first one a user sees when opening Gmail and the one the company says is “for the mail you really, really want.”
Half of all emails landed in a tab called “promotions,” which Gmail says is for “deals, offers, and other marketing emails.” Gmail sent another 40 percent to spam.
For political causes and candidates, who get a significant amount of their donations through email, having their messages diverted into less-visible tabs or spam can have profound effects.
“The fact that Gmail has so much control over our democracy and what happens and who raises money is frightening,” said Kenneth Pennington, a consultant who worked on Beto O’Rourke’s digital campaign.
………
It’s well known that Facebook and Twitter curate which posts people see through the news feed, highlighting some while others are scarcely shown. What’s received less attention is how email has also become an algorithmically curated and monetized platform—essentially another feed—and the effect that can have. Some nonprofits and political causes said inbox curation is reducing donations and petition signatures.
Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.”
………
Google communications manager Katie Wattie said in an email that the categories “help users organize their email.”
………
The tabs also serve another purpose: ad inventory. While Gmail does not sell ads in the primary inbox, advertisers can pay for top placement in the social and promotions tabs in free accounts.
The Irony is Delicious
As a result of US sanctions, Huawei has been locked out of Google’s play store.
For most phone manufacturers, this would be something near to a death blow, but since Huawei is large enough to set up a rather competent app marketplace of its own, as well as being able to create its competent equivalents of Google’s services.
This has the effect of creating a parallel ecosystem for the Android operating system, which means that, because the OS is open source, Google is at risk of losing much of its control over Android, including its ability to spy on millions (billions?) of users.
As Huawei takes the initiative to create its own homegrown alternative to the Play Store, Google has reportedly pleaded with the White House to offer it an exemption to again work with the Chinese tech giant.
Huawei’s inclusion on the Trump administration’s Entity List has had dramatic consequences for the company’s handset business, preventing it from using Google Mobile Services (GMS) on its latest phones and tablets.
According to German wire service Deutsche Press Agentur, Android and Google Play veep Sameer Samat has confirmed that Google has applied for a licence to resume working with Huawei.
………
Huawei has said that if Google got an exemption, it would promptly update its newest phones to use Google Mobile Services.
………
That said, Huawei’s strategy has focused on hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst. These preparations have seen the firm invest over $1bn on its app ecosystem, with more than 3,000 engineers working on the AppGallery, according to a statement from the company released earlier this week.It has also made deals with Western app developers and content providers, most notably Sunday Times publisher News UK, to make its services appear less barren.
………
Huawei has also introduced the ability to download progressive web apps, dubbed “Quick Apps” by the firm, through the AppGallery, which should bump up the app availability numbers – even if they lack the sophistication of a dedicated native app.
It’s likely this that has motivated Google to take the initiative. Although losing Huawei as a customer is a significant financial body blow to Mountain View, given its enduring popularity in Europe and Asia, it would pale compared to the damage caused by a new product that starts to loosen its stranglehold on the Android sphere.
Google Mobile Services can cost as much as $40 per device, and it’s likely that many phone vendors, particularly on the cheaper end of the spectrum, would welcome a less-expensive alternative.
Complicating matters for Google, the biggest Chinese phone manufacturers (Oppo, Xiaomi and Huawei) have teamed up to simplify the process of deploying apps to their in-house stores.
With Google claiming a cool 30 per cent on all Play Store sales, this represents a huge threat to its bottom line.
I’m kind of hoping that the request for a waiver is denied, because anything that hurts Google is good for the rest of us.
Live in Obedient, Fear, Citizen
The Indiana supreme court has ruled that removing a GPS tracking device from your car is not theft, and hence cannot be used to get a warrant.
I’m not surprised that a cop would make this argument, but I am surprised that a lower court judge would accept this:
An Indiana man may beat a drug prosecution after the state’s highest court threw out a search warrant against him late last week. The search warrant was based on the idea that the man had “stolen” a GPS tracking device belonging to the government. But Indiana’s Supreme Court concluded that he’d done no such thing—and the cops should have known it.
Last November, we wrote about the case of Derek Heuring, an Indiana man the Warrick County Sheriff’s Office suspected of selling meth. Authorities got a warrant to put a GPS tracker on Heuring’s car, getting a stream of data on his location for six days. But then the data stopped.
Officers suspected Heuring had discovered and removed the tracking device. After waiting for a few more days, they got a warrant to search his home and a barn belonging to his father. They argued the disappearance of the tracking device was evidence that Heuring had stolen it.
During their search, police found the tracking device and some methamphetamine. They charged Heuring with drug-related crimes as well as theft of the GPS device.
But at trial, Heuring’s lawyers argued that the warrant to search the home and barn had been illegal. An application for a search warrant must provide probable cause to believe a crime was committed. But removing a small, unmarked object from your personal vehicle is no crime at all, Heuring’s lawyers argued. Heuring had no way of knowing what the device was or who it belonged to—and certainly no obligation to leave the device on his vehicle.
An Indiana appeals court ruled against Heuring last year. But Indiana’s Supreme Court seemed more sympathetic to Heuring’s case during oral arguments last November.
………
Last Thursday, Indiana’s highest court made it official, ruling that the search warrant that allowed police to recover Heuring’s meth was illegal. The police had no more than a hunch that Heuring had removed the device, the court said, and that wasn’t enough to get a search warrant.
This is yet another example of why you can never depend on the local constabulary to protect your civil rights.
A Feature, Not a Bug
We are now seeing indications that the 2020 census, which will go digital and online, is likely to crash and burn like the Iowa caucuses or the roll out of Obamacare.
I would argue that the failure of the census will not be a cluster-f%$# (incompetence) but a rat-f%$# (deliberate sabotage).
If the process descends into failure, it gives corrupt individuals the opportunity to manipulate the date for partisan political advantage.
The Republicans have been trying rat-f%$# the census for decades:
The stakes are high when a major civic exercise involves a large population, new technology that has not been thoroughly tested and an entire country waiting on the results.
Just ask the organizers of the Iowa caucuses, which offered a cautionary tale on the technological woes that could befall a big political event. Some observers worry that this year’s census carries the same potential for mayhem — except on an infinitely larger scale.
The U.S. Census Bureau plans to try out a lot of new technology. It’s the first once-a-decade census in which most people are being encouraged to answer questions via the internet. Later in the process, census workers who knock on the doors of homes that have not responded will use smartphones and a new mobile app to relay answers.
A government watchdog agency, the Census Bureau’s inspector general and some lawmakers have grown concerned about whether the systems are ready for prime time. Most U.S. residents can start answering the questionnaire in March.
“I must tell you, the Iowa (caucus) debacle comes to mind when I think of the census going digital,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, the congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, said this week at a hearing on the census.
Cybersecurity is another worry. Experts consider the census to be an attractive target for anyone seeking to sow chaos and undermine confidence in the U.S. government, as Russia did in the 2016 presidential election.
In a worst-case scenario, vital records could be deleted or polluted with junk data. Even a lesser assault that interfered with online data collection could erode public confidence. In 2016, a denial-of-service attack knocked Australia’s online census offline, flooding it with junk data.
Why am I thinking that there might be a Republican operative who is thinking about passing access codes to the GRU?
About F%$#ing Time
Kickstarter employees have voted to unionize.
You know, foosball tables and good food in the cafeteria does not excuse management from treating people badly.
Unionization is the only logical response:
Kickstarter employees voted to form a union with the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which represents more than 100,000 white collar workers. The final vote was 46 for the union, 37 against, a historic win for unionization efforts at tech companies.
Kickstarter workers are now the first white collar workers at a major tech company to successfully unionize in the United States, sending a message to other tech workers.
………
“I feel like the most important issues [for us] are around creating clearer policies and support for reporting workplace issues and creating clearer mechanisms for hiring and firing employees,” said RV Dougherty, a former trust and safety analyst and core organizer for Kickstarter United who quit in early February. “Right now so much depends on what team you’re on and if you have a good relationship with your manager… We also have a lot of pay disparity and folks who are doing incredible jobs but have been kept from getting promoted because they spoke their mind, which is not how Kickstarter should work.”
In the days leading up to Kickstarter vote count, Motherboard revealed that Kickstarter hired Duane Morris, a Philadelphia law firm that specializes in labor management relations and “maintaining a union-free workplace.” Kickstarter confirmed to Motherboard that it first retained the services of Duane Morris in 2018 before it knew about union organizing at the company, but would not go into detail about whether the firm had advised the company on how to defeat the union and denied any union-busting activity.
………
But in 2018, a heated disagreement broke out between employees and management about whether to leave a project called “Always Punch Nazis” on the platform, according to reporting in Slate. When Breitbart said the project violated Kickstarter’s terms of service by inciting violence, management initially planned to remove the project, but then reversed its decision after protest from employees.
Following the controversy, employees announced their intentions to unionize with OPEIU Local 153 in March 2019. And the company made it clear that it did not believe a union was right for Kickstarter.
In a letter to creators, Kickstarter’s CEO Aziz Hasan wrote in September that “The union framework is inherently adversarial.”
Yes, it;s inherently adversarial for there to be checks and balances on your behavior, Azis.
How about you have a nice cup of ……… Well, you know.
For the Love of God Why????
This is what you think it is.
With ePaper on the back
Yes, someone has actually made a working open source rotary dial cell phone:
Why a rotary cellphone? Because in a finicky, annoying, touchscreen world of hyperconnected people using phones they have no control over or understanding of, I wanted something that would be entirely mine, personal, and absolutely tactile, while also giving me an excuse for not texting.
The point isn’t to be anachronistic. It’s to show that it’s possible to have a perfectly usable phone that goes as far from having a touchscreen as I can imagine, and which in some ways may actually be more functional. More functional how?
- Real, removable antenna with an SMA connector. Receptions is excellent, and if I really want to I could always attach a directional antenna.
- When I want a phone I don’t have to navigate through menus to get to the phone “application”. That’s bullsh%$.
- If I want to call my husband, I can do so by pressing a single dedicated physical key which is dedicated to him. No menus. The point isn’t to use the rotary dial every single time I want to make a call, which would get tiresome for daily use. The people I call most often are stored, and if I have to dial a new number or do something like set the volume, then I can use the fun and satisfying-to-use rotary dial.
- Nearly instantaneous, high resolution display of signal strength and battery level. No signal metering lag, and my LED bargraph gives 10 increments of resolution instead of just 4.
- The ePaper display is bistatic, meaning it doesn’t take any energy to display a fixed message.
- When I want to change something about the phone’s behavior, I just do it.
- The power switch is an actual slide switch. No holding down a stupid button to make it turn off and not being sure it really is turning off or what.
So it’s not just a show-and-tell piece… My intent is to use it as my primary phone. It fits in a pocket; It’s reasonably compact; calling the people I most often call is faster than with my old phone, and the battery lasts almost 24 hours.
(%$ mine)
I’m not sure if this is brilliant, or demented, or both.
Quote of the Day
For all of human history, people have been able to communicate privately with each other, and we don’t think that should go away in a modern society.
People who want to structure our society to enable police at the expense of the rest of us are literally advocating for a police state.
Of Course They Did
Ajit Pai’s FCC has ignored over 21 MILLION people without broadband to justify their give aways to incumbent telcos:
The Federal Communications Commission’s broadband data dramatically underestimates the number of Americans without access to home Internet service, a new study has found. The actual number of people lacking home-broadband access is about twice as high as the FCC estimate, the study found.
The FCC has said that 21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds. But FCC data is widely known to be flawed, because it counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service. Census blocks have an average of 4,000 residents.
The real number of Americans without access to wired or fixed wireless broadband is 42.8 million, slightly more than double the FCC estimate, according to the study released yesterday. The study was conducted by BroadbandNow, a company that provides an online tool for checking broadband availability.
The free market mousketeers at the FCC are desperate to show that their policy of subsidies without accountability to the likes of Verizon, Comcast/Xfinity, Frontier, CenturyLink, AT&T, and Satan* will create a broadband utopia.
It’s bullsh%$, of course, which is why the US has the poorest performing and the most expensive internet service in the world, but this is an ideological position, not a fact based one.
The Pentagon Spends Too Much on Acronyns
Case in point, a digital autopilot based gunnery enhancer that the USAF has named Digitally Enhanced Aiming Through Control Law (Death Claw).
The concept is simple, using the flight control system to aid gunnery accuracy, but someone spent weeks coming up with this name:
A 40-year-old idea to improve strafing accuracy by transferring flight control of a manned fighter to the autopilot to aim the gun is being revived as the U.S. Air Force looks internally for innovations that can be demonstrated and delivered quickly.
An operational version of the Digitally Enhanced Aiming Through Control Law (Death Claw) system is in development less than two years after the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School conceived and performed an eight-month demonstration.
The concept is sound technically, but the name is beyond silly.
Also, I recall a similar system being tested on an F-15 in the late 1980s.
If This Is the Future, It’s a Dystopia
People are finally noticing that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future is a nightmare:
Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service fee” that replaced the previous default tip of 10 percent. The change had no impact on customers, who could be forgiven for assuming that the new fee would still go to the workers who shopped for their groceries and delivered them to their homes. “It was deceptive to customers,” Bain said. “They thought they were still tipping us, when instead it went to the company. It wasn’t being passed to us at all.”
When Bain, who lives in Palo Alto, California, became a shopper in 2016, she believed that gig work would provide her with both financial stability and schedule flexibility to take care of her young daughter. However, as independent contractors, Bain and her husband, a fellow shopper, don’t receive sick leave or holidays. And in practice, the “be your own boss” promise of the gig economy instantly vanishes the moment you take on a gig job: It is, instead, a system that relentlessly dictates your schedule. “We are controlled. We are treated like employees but without the perks,” Jennifer Cotten, a Los Angeles area–based shopper, told me. “We’re told what order to deliver in and when to go.”
The indignities of the gig economy are well established at this point, as the laissez-faire labor practices of companies like Uber, Instacart, Door Dash, and Lyft draw more critical scrutiny. Bain, Cotton, and their fellow shoppers are among the millions of precariously employed workers who rely on part-time jobs or side gigs to scrape together a living, all without the safety net of employer-based insurance.
But what is less widely acknowledged is how the gig economy interacts with other trends in California and forces unleashed by Silicon Valley—rising housing costs, choked infrastructure—to make life hell for those who live at or near the epicenter of America’s technology industry. Together, they constitute a nightmare vision of what the world would look like if it were run by our digital overlords, as they sit atop a growing underclass that does their shopping and drives their cars—all while barely able to make ends meet.
It’s not just Instacart, Door Dash, Uber and Lyft. It’s the dockless scooter companies making cities unwalkable, it’s Amazon’s conscious sales of dangerous fakes and abuse of its employees, Facebook’s continuous lying about privacy, Twitter’s sh%$ show, PayPal’s abuse of its customers, etc.
Who knew that view of the future in William Gibson’s stories would be so wildly optimistic as compared to the reality that we face?
Same Sh%$ Different Name
One of the selling points of the F-35 Lightning II is its prognostics based maintenance system.
Unfortunately, this has turned into a completely non-functional sh%$ show.
In response, Lockheed and the Pentagon have given the system a new name, and started back at square one on the software.
To quote Albert Einstein, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
The US military is dumping its Autonomous Logistics Information System (ALIS) in favour of ODIN as it tries to break with the complex past of its ailing F-35 fighter jet maintenance IT suite.
ALIS is the software suite that comes bundled with the F-35 fighter jet. A Lockheed Martin product, ALIS is intended to be a proactive maintenance suite: it tracks the health of each jet, tells supply systems when to order parts and tells maintainers what needs doing and when.
At least, that was the theory. Instead the all-encompassing suite has become so unwieldy and problem-ridden that the US armed forces are ditching it in favour of a new thing called ODIN, or Operational Data Integrated Network.
………
Far from meeting its originally envisioned role, ALIS was so bad that the US Government Accountability Office, an auditor similar to Britain’s National Audit Office, reckoned one US Air Force unit wasted 45,000 working hours per year working around ALIS’s shortcomings. In 2018, US Marine Corps station Beaufort was suffering spare part shortages of up to two years, thanks to ALIS making a hash of its spare part systems.
So, you have the same folks who made a complete dogs breakfast out of maintaining the F-35 are going to start from square one, with the same people, and make it all better.
Seriously?
Agriculture’s Amazing High Tech Future
In yet another example of why Congress should pass right to repair legislation, farmers in the Midwest are engaging in bidding wars over 40 year old tractors because they are not locked out of fixings them by the manufacturers:
Kris Folland grows corn, wheat and soybeans and raises cattle on 2,000 acres near Halma in the northwest corner of Minnesota, so his operation is far from small. But when he last bought a new tractor, he opted for an old one — a 1979 John Deere 4440.
He retrofitted it with automatic steering guided by satellite, and he and his kids can use the tractor to feed cows, plant fields and run a grain auger. The best thing? The tractor cost $18,000, compared to upward of $150,000 for a new tractor. And Folland doesn’t need a computer to repair it.
“This is still a really good tractor,” said Folland, who owns two other tractors built before 1982.
“They cost a fraction of the price, and then the operating costs are much less because they’re so much easier to fix,” he said.
Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days — and it’s not because they’re antiques.
…….
The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.
“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said.
There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor.
I’m seriously beginning to think that every innovation introduced since the Reagan administration has just been a scam.
When Barr Demands that Apple Unlock Their Phones
He claims that this is the only way for law enforcement to get into locked phones.
What this is really about is their wanting to be able to hack phones remotely, which, of course, will be used without a warrant by the US state security apparatus to do things like fight terrorism and spy on girl friends:
President Donald Trump’s bizarre friendship with his buddy Tim Cook is in trouble. With Apple once again refusing to allow the FBI to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone (two of them, actually, this time around), the president sent out a tweet the other day that said, “We are helping Apple all of the time on TRADE and so many other issues, and yet they refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers, and other violent criminal elements. They will have to step up to the plate and help our great Country.”
………
In the current situation, the two handsets that the FBI wants Apple to open belong to Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani. The latter allegedly killed three people last month at a Navy base in Pensacola, Florida during an act that is being called terrorism. Because the FBI asked Apple to unlock the phones, it appeared that companies like Cellebrite and Grayshift could not unlock any iPhones running on iOS 13. But Bloomberg reports that Cellebrite recently pushed out an update to its machines that will allow law enforcement agencies to extract and analyze information from several locked iPhone models.
………And that brings us to this question, if the FBI can open both of Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani’s iPhones without Apple, why is President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and the FBI putting pressure on Apple to unlock these phones? Perhaps it has to do with setting a precedent for the future when Apple comes up with a way to block the latest technology used by Cellebrite and Grayshift. However, the president should tread lightly here; he certainly doesn’t want to lose the “friendship” he has with the man he once called Tim Apple.
Why are they putting pressure on apple? Because Cellbrite and Grayshift’s devices require physical possession of the device, and hence a warrant.
They, and by that I mean the US state security apparatus, want to be able to spy on citizens without having to go to court.
Looks Like FCC and SpaceX are in for a World of Hurt
It appears that the FCC’s approval of the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation may have made a complete dog’s breakfast out of their review and approval process:
A battle for the sky is raging, and the heavens are losing. Upcoming mega constellations of satellites, designed to blanket Earth orbit in spacecraft beaming high-speed Internet around the world, risk filling the firmament with tens of thousands of moving points of light, forever changing our view of the cosmos. Astronomers who rely on unsullied skies for their profession and members of the general public who enjoy the natural beauty of what lies above stand to lose out. The arrival of such a large number of satellites “has the potential to change our relationship, and our connection, with the universe,” says Ruskin Hartley, executive director of the nonprofit International Dark-Sky Association. But with no binding international laws or regulations in place to protect the night sky, anyone opposing the advancement of mega constellations is surely fighting a losing battle. Right?
Wrong.
A new paper to be published later this year in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law argues that the Federal Communications Commission—the agency responsible for licensing the operation of these constellations in the U.S.—should have considered the impact these satellites would have on the night sky. In ignoring a key piece of federal environmental legislation, the FCC could be sued in a court of law—and lose—potentially halting further launches of mega constellations until a proper review is carried out.
“Astronomers are having these issues [and think] there’s nothing they can do legally,” says the paper’s author Ramon Ryan, a second-year law student at Vanderbilt University. “[But] there is this law, the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA, pronounced ‘Nee-pah’], which requires federal agencies to take a hard look at their actions. The FCC’s lack of review of these commercial satellite projects violates [NEPA], so in the most basic sense, it would be unlawful.”
Enacted in 1970, NEPA obligates all federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of any projects they approve. Such impacts cover a variety of issues, from the effects of casino barges on rivers to any project’s contributions to climate change—the latter has been a recent target of the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks. The reviews can take multiple years, producing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of pages of paperwork. Federal agencies can circumvent NEPA, however, if they are granted a “categorical exclusion” for some or all of their activities—usually by arguing that such activities do not impact the environment and thus do not require review. The FCC has had a sweeping categorical exclusion since 1986 across almost all of its activities—including its approval of space projects—despite other agencies involved in space—most notably NASA—being required to conduct NEPA reviews.
“There are other agencies that use categorical exclusions, but I don’t think there is one that’s as broad as this,” says Kevin Bell, staff counsel at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit organization that works with government whistle-blowers on environmental issues. “It is a policy that was designed for another time, before large scale space exploration.”
In light of the concerns about the impacts of satellites on the night sky, Ryan says, this categorical exclusion would be unlikely to stand up in a court of law. SpaceX alone has been licensed by the FCC to launch 12,000 satellites in its Starlink constellation in the coming years, dwarfing the current number of approximately 1,500 active satellites in orbit—and the company has plans for 30,000 more. It has already launched about 180 Starlink satellites, with another 1,500 scheduled for 2020. Following the first launch of 60 satellites in May 2019, many observers were surprised by their brightness at dawn and dusk—popular times for both astronomy and simple stargazing. “That’s the time that most people enjoy the sky,” Hartley says. “These new satellites are brighter than 99 percent of [those] in orbit at the moment. And really, that’s the root of this concern.”
In its reasoning for its categorical exclusion, the FCC states that its actions “have no significant effect on the quality of the human environment and are categorically excluded from environmental processing.” Ryan says that the FCC may have been wrong in this assessment, however. “The FCC has never performed a study showing why commercial satellites deserved to be classified as categorically excluded from review,” he says. “And the evidence shows that these satellites are having an environmental impact. If the FCC were sued over its noncompliance with NEPA, it would likely lose.”
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A key question is whether the night sky could be argued to fall under NEPA in a federal court. According to Section 1508 of the policy, there are both direct and indirect effects that can warrant NEPA review, with the latter including “aesthetic, historic, [and] cultural” ones. Ryan says that these factors could, in a court of law, be argued to apply to the night sky. “I definitely think that the night sky would fall under [that],” he says.
Considering Elon Musk’s record of “regulatory arbatrage”, and general lack of concern for the consequences of his actions, the creation of PayPal was an exercise in evading banking regulations, the FCC should have gone over his application with a fine toothed comb.
It’s Called Stock Fraud
This (paywall protected) article misses the point about “Unicorns” and private equity and similar schemes.
What is described here is not just an unrealistic valuation, it is fraudulent.
Here is how it works:
- A private company raises money from private investors, who (for example) purchase 15% of the company for $10 million, giving it a valuation of ($10M/.15=) $66 million dollars. (Remember, this is the private investor setting this value.
- The company invests in office space, hiring people, etc, and burns through money, and so needs more money.
- The same private investors invest $25million this time, the burn rate has increased, but they only get 5% of the company,giving a valuation of (25M/.05) = $500 million dollars.
- Rinse, lather, repeat.
After a few rounds, the investors own 50% of the company, and have set the valuation of the company at something like $10 billion dollars while contributing about $100 million dollars for a company has no path to profitability.
Analysts go crazy, and it goes public, and the investors pocket a $9.9 billion dollar profit off of a $100 million investment, a 9900% profit margin.
Even if this shell game fails 9 times out of 10, you still have a 1000% profit margin, and someone else is left holding the bag.
You just need enough money to flood whatever market sector the company is in, and keep the balls in the air until you sell your stake.
This is Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Blue Apron, etc.
A feature in startup investing called a liquidation preference also often gives the latest investor their money back plus a return before others, meaning the newest valuation often only applies to that investor. These preferences usually disappear after a company goes public. Pre-IPO valuations of unicorns are on average 48% higher than their fair value, according to a recent study by two professors at the University of British Columbia and Stanford University.
WeWork has had a sobering effect. But there’s a lot of capital to be deployed and hot startups can still make investors compete to give them cash. There will be more valuation illusions before reality sets in.
These are not, “Valuation illusions,” this is fraud, pure and simple.
The goal is not to invest in a profitable company, it is to foist it all off on the next chump.
I’ve Heard about Getting Back on the Horse, but This Is Ridiculous
It appears that the Boeing’s failure to properly implement automation on the 737 MAX, to the tune of 346 dead passengers, has led the Seattle (Chicago) aviation giant double down on automation in its airliners.
It’s clear that Boeing has neither the skill set nor the corporate culture to properly implement flight control automation, but they want to get rid of the pilots.
To quote Nietzsche, “It is like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.”
Boeing Co. is increasingly committed to transferring more control of aircraft from pilots to computers after two crashes exposed flaws in an automated system on its 737 MAX that overpowered aviators in the disasters.
Executives at Boeing and other makers of planes and cockpit-automation systems for some time have believed more-sophisticated systems are necessary to serve as backstops for pilots, help them assimilate information and, in some cases, provide immediate responses to imminent hazards.
Now, such changes also seek to address the fact that average pilots may not react to problems—including those tied to automation—as quickly or proficiently as designers traditionally assumed, according to former and current Boeing officials and industry executives. The view took hold after a flight-control system known as MCAS put two MAX jets into fatal nosedives within the past 14 months that together killed 346 people. “We are going to have to ultimately almost—almost—make these planes fly on their own,” then Boeing Chairman Dave Calhoun said in a CNBC interview in November. Mr. Calhoun will become the plane maker’s chief executive Jan. 13.
The first rule of being in a hole is to stop digging, something which completely escapes the finance types now running the company.
The Navy’s Quest to Eliminate Sailors is a Threat to the National Security
It turns out that the the collision between the USS John S. McCain Alnic MC in the Straits of in August 2017 was largely an artifact of the new navigation that the Navy had installed to reduce crewing.
This is not a surprise. The US Navy has aggressively attempted to reduce crewing in an attempt to free up money for the latest and (not so much) greatest tech.
For example, the 16,000 ton Zumwalts have a crew of 175, (it was originally supposed to be less than 100), and the previous 9,000 ton Burke DDGs have a crew of 350.
The Zumwalts have nonfunctional guns, have suffered repeated breakdowns, and, given the parsimonious crewing, probably has a glass jaw.
And now, the Navy’s fetish has equipped the Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which work, albeit with a lot of sailors, are crippled by the automated steering system they have installed:
Dakota Bordeaux had rarely traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.
But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.
It filled the high school graduate with pride.
“Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove a giant-ass battleship,’” said Bordeaux, 23.
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To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.
Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.
“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.
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A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”
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But a ProPublica examination shows that the Navy pursued prosecutions of the two men even as its investigators and those with the NTSB were learning that the navigation system, if it hadn’t technically malfunctioned, had played a critical role in the deadly outcome in the Pacific.
Its very design, investigators determined, left sailors dangerously vulnerable to making the kinds of operational mistakes that doomed the McCain. The Integrated Bridge and Navigation System, or IBNS, as it was known, was no technical marvel. It was a welter of buttons, gauges and software that, poorly understood and not surprisingly misused, helped guide 10 sailors to their deaths.
Despite its issues, the IBNS operated for years without major incident. Navy sailors did what they have always done: They found ways to make do with an imperfect technology.
The NTSB put it plainly: “The design of the John S McCain’s touch-screen steering and thrust control system,” the board found, “increased the likelihood of the operator errors that led to the collision.”
The Navy investigators, for their part, determined that the system’s “known vulnerabilities” and risks had not been “clearly communicated to the operators on ships with these systems.”
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In the end, though, the Navy punished its own sailors for failing to master a flawed system that they had been inadequately trained on and that the Navy itself came to admit it did not fully understand.
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The Navy has committed almost half a billion dollars to build the navigation system and install it on more than 60 destroyers by the end of the next decade — the entire fleet of the tough, stalwart warships that form the backbone of the modern Navy. Yet no one responsible for the development or deployment of the technology has faced any known consequences for the McCain disaster.
A number of current and former Navy officials remain convinced the navigation system should never have been put to use. And they worry about the Navy’s slow pace in installing a new, improved version.
“The IBNS has no place on the bridge of a U.S. destroyer,” said one former senior Navy officer with direct knowledge of the McCain accident. “It’s not designed to have the control that you need to navigate a warship.”
Seriously, our military is increasingly pursuing a path in which combat readiness is a distant second to procurement.
Also, as an aside, the article is a valuable story, but they have jammed it up with Javascript and HTML 5 animations and similar web-bling that it is difficult to read.
Whoever decided on the format needs a stern talking to.