Blaston Reverses Facebook’s VR Ad Testing After Backlash
By: VR Focus June 22, 2021 There was quite a bit of furore in the virtual reality (VR) community at the end of last week when Facebook announced it was going to begin early testing of VR ads, starting with Resolution Games’ PvP shooter Blaston. Well, as you’d expect this didn’t go down well and sparked an […]
NATO Launches €1bn Fund to Invest in War Startups
By: Sifted June 23, 2021 NATO is planning to harness the knowhow of startups to develop its next generation of war machines. The transatlantic defence alliance has announced that it is to launch a startup accelerator programme and a €1bn investment fund focused on deeptech startups. The disruptive technologies that NATO is interested […]
Robots May Soon Be Able to Reproduce – Will This Change How We Think About Evolution?
By: Guardian June 21, 2021 From the bottom of the oceans to the skies above us, natural evolution has filled our planet with a vast and diverse array of lifeforms, with approximately 8 million species adapted to their surroundings in a myriad of ways. Yet 100 years after Karel Čapek coined the term robot, the functional […]
Pivot: Interview with Caleb Scharf on Space Exploration
By: Pivot June 15, 2021 Kara and Scott discuss how Apple unknowingly handed over phone data of two Democratic congressmen to the Trump Administration. Then, they discuss how the pay gap between workers and CEOs grew even wider during the pandemic. In Friend of Pivot, Caleb Scharf, the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University and […]
Amazon US Customers Have One Week To Opt Out Of Mass Wireless Sharing
By: The Guardian June 1, 2021 Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices. The proposal, called […]
Elon Musk Says Tesla Will No Longer Accept Bitcoin Due to Fossil Fuel Use
By: The Guardian May 13, 2021 Tesla has suspended customers’ use of bitcoin to purchase its vehicles, Elon Musk said on Wednesday, citing concerns about the use of fossil fuel for bitcoin mining. Bitcoin, the world’s biggest digital currency, fell almost 17% after the tweet to its lowest point since the beginning of March. It […]
How Apple’s AirTag Turns us Into Unwitting Spies in a Vast Surveillance Network
By: The Guardian May 17, 2020 Apple has launched the latest version of its operating system, iOS 14.5, which features the much-anticipated app tracking transparency function, bolstering the tech giant’s privacy credentials. But iOS 14.5 also introduced support for the new Apple AirTag, which risks doing the opposite. For the uninitiated, an AirTag […]
Amazon’s Ring is the Largest Civilian Surveillance Network the US Has Ever Seen
By: The Guardian May 18, 2021 In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously. Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only […]
Low-Skill Workers Aren’t a Problem to Be Fixed
By: The Atlantic April 23, 2021 Recently, I was mesmerized by a prep cook. At a strip-mall Korean restaurant, I caught a glimpse of the kitchen and stood dumbfounded for a few minutes, watching a guy slicing garnishes, expending half the energy I would if I were doing the same at home and at […]